Survival Clause, стр. 33
Rafe leaned back on the uncomfortable chair. I guess Grimaldi had picked them so people wouldn’t linger long. “Any luck?”
Grimaldi updated him on Frankie Matlock and Mr. Jurgensson. “Laura Lee didn’t take Latin, and there’s nothing to indicate she was the student he misbehaved with. But there’s no reason she couldn’t be, either. They were there the same year.”
Rafe nodded. “Even if she was, that don’t mean nothing. She could have, like you said, misbehaved with a teacher when she was sixteen, and gotten killed when she was thirty-three, and there’s no connection.”
“Of course,” Grimaldi said. “What’s new on your end?”
“Yung’s a pain in the—” He glanced at me and changed what he’d been about to say to, “butt.”
“It was probably disappointing to her when you turned out to be a hero and not a criminal,” I said.
He grinned in my direction. “Not so much a hero. But I’m sure she was looking forward to catching me red-handed. Too bad.”
“Did she give you a hard time?” Grimaldi wanted to know, not that there was much she could do about it if Agent Yung was. Yung didn’t work for Grimaldi and wouldn’t be open to taking orders or suggestions from that quarter.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle. She tried to get something going with Bob—him being a good old Southern boy and all—but he wasn’t having it.”
I hid a smile. No, acting the hotshot FBI agent with the sheriff wouldn’t have won her many points. He isn’t a Southern bumpkin and wouldn’t have agreed to play one for her. He is a gentleman, though, so I imagined he’d probably been more pleasant than perhaps she deserved.
“Once we got that straightened out,” Rafe added, “she consented to give us all a presentation of the case as a whole, from Victim One down through the line. She presented the FBI profile—”
Grimaldi arched her brows, and he shook his head. “Nothing we didn’t expect. Most likely male, most likely white, most likely between fifty and fifty-five, but could be younger or older by a decade or more. Most likely a long haul trucker, but don’t disregard other folks who move up and down the interstate—”
“Who else moves up and down the interstate?” I injected, and they both glanced at me. Down in the car seat, Carrie kept gurgling and trying to chew on her toes. I deduced she’d probably start asking for food soon. She was getting pretty close to the age when we could start feeding her solids—or semi-solids—and that would help her stay full longer, and would keep me from having to nurse every couple hours around the clock.
“Bus drivers,” Rafe said, and Grimaldi added, “But it’s hard to find the time to murder women when you’ve got a schedule and a bus full of passengers to get somewhere on time.”
Rafe nodded. “Could just be somebody who lives in Mobile but has family in Ann Arbor, and a couple times a year he makes the trek to see his grandma.”
Could be. The murders were infrequent enough that that wasn’t a bad idea. “How do we find him if that’s the case?”
Grimaldi made a face. “It’s harder. But if that’s the case, he’s someone who’d stand out at a truck stop, so someone might have noticed him.”
Maybe.
She turned to Rafe. “Any luck on the surveillance videos?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Rafe told her. “One of Bob’s guys has been over every second of the video, for several hours before the body was discovered, and there’s nothing to see. Just the usual trucks coming and going. No passenger cars going past the camera. But if this guy routinely drives this route, he’d most likely know where the cameras are located, and be able to avoid them.”
Grimaldi sighed.
“We’re trying to trace as many of the trucks as we can,” Rafe added. “Most are marked with a company name on the cab or the cargo. Bob’s got a couple deputies on it, and Yung offered some FBI grunts if we need more help.”
Grimaldi nodded. “But if this guy is a truck driver, and he’s familiar with the truck stop, he’d make sure he wasn’t caught on camera.”
“The camera’s hard to avoid if you’re driving an eighteen-wheeler,” Rafe answered. “A small passenger car, you can maybe skim underneath. But not a full size truck. If he was there—and he was—we most likely have footage of him.”
“So now all we—” Grimaldi caught herself, “all you have to do, is identify all the trucks and all the drivers, and then determine which of them had the opportunity—over the past sixteen years—to commit eighteen murders.”
“If it was easy,” Rafe said, “everybody’d be doing it.”
That got a smile, at any rate. But I got the impression that Grimaldi was feeling overwhelmed with the task she had set herself.
“Where do we start tomorrow morning?” I asked, to take her mind off the enormity of the job and put it back on the individual steps we, and Rafe, and Agent Yung and Sheriff Satterfield, would have to take, to figure out who the killer was, and catch him.
She shook herself, more of a mental shake than a physical one. “You want to come with me?”
“I thought we were a team,” I said. “You, me, and Carrie.”
She smiled. It was faint, but there. “I’ll come pick you up. Nine?”
Nine would be fine. It was a Saturday, but with the current case, and Agent Yung in town snapping the whip, I was sure Rafe would have to work. Without Grimaldi, I’d just be sitting there by myself all day.
“Anything you need me to do overnight? Anyone I need to talk to?”
She hesitated. “I can do it myself…”
“But?”
“If Laura Lee was thirty-three sixteen years ago, and left high school fifteen years before that, she’d be around fifty now. A little too young for your mother—”
“My mother grew up in Georgia, anyway,”