Survival Clause, стр. 46
I rocked the baby and let the dog out and gave her a treat, and was just about to feed Carrie and put her down for a nap when the phone rang. “It’s me,” Grimaldi said. Unnecessarily, since I have her number plugged into my phone, and it comes up when she calls.
“What can I do for you?” I whisked off the wet diaper with one hand and reached for a wipe with the other.
“I want to go talk to the Drimmels.”
It took me a second to place the reference. “Laura Lee’s parents?”
Grimaldi nodded. Or at least she made a nodding sort of sound. “M-hm. They live in Sunnyside.”
A neighborhood on the southwest side of Columbia, full of winding roads and trees and large lots with mid-century ranches and split-levels.
“Let me guess,” I said, wrapping a diaper around my daughters hips and fastening the sticky straps, “you got Frankie Matlock’s prison record, and he could have committed the murders.”
“Your friend Ms. Durbin exaggerated a smidgeon when she said he was in and out of trouble all the time,” Grimaldi said. “But he’s done a few stints behind bars. None of them long enough to stop him from killing eighteen women and dumping their bodies.”
“I guess he’s still in the area?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Grimaldi said, “he’s someone else who doesn’t pay taxes, but I figure the Drimmels can tell us that.”
Maybe so. Or maybe not. If they’d lost contact with their deceased daughter’s husband, he could be anywhere.
“They had custody of the kids,” Grimaldi said. “Still do of the youngest, since he isn’t eighteen yet. I’m hoping Frankie stayed in touch with them, and they can tell us where he is. Do you want to come?”
“Of course I want to come. Just let me get Carrie fed, and then she can take her afternoon nap in the car today.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen,” Grimaldi said, and hung up. The implication was that I’d better be ready at that point, whether Carrie had finished eating or not.
She refused to let me drive again, of course, so we had to move the car seat back into the SUV. That done, I crawled into the passenger seat and Grimaldi arranged herself behind the wheel, while in the back seat, Carrie sucked on her pacifier as her lids got heavy. By the time we were halfway to Sunnyside, she was sleeping.
By then, Grimaldi and I were deep in a conversation about Frankie Matlock and his various deeds and misdeeds.
“The first time he went to prison was the time when Laura Lee was killed,” Grimaldi said, as she zoomed up the highway in the direction of Columbia. “Eight months for check kiting. He was in prison while Laura Lee was killed, so we know he wasn’t responsible for that, but he got out in time to kill the second woman. Her name was Julie Green, and she was picked up and dropped in Kentucky.”
“So outside of the jurisdiction of Maury County,” where Laura Lee’s murder had been investigated as a single crime, if it hadn’t gone cold already, “and also not the same jurisdiction as the third victim.”
Who happened to be Grimaldi’s mother. I remembered it a second too late to bite my tongue.
She shook her head. “Nobody had made that connection yet then. That didn’t happen until a year or two later.”
Right.
“Frankie Matlock was out of prison when my mother was killed,” Grimaldi added. “I don’t know if anyone’s tried to put him in Kentucky at the time of Julie Green’s murder, or in Indiana at the time of my mother’s, but we’re going to attempt to do that today.”
“That’s a long time ago. Might be hard for anyone to remember dates and times so many years later.”
Grimaldi nodded. “We’re going to give it a shot, though. He wasn’t in prison, so we know that much. And if we can put him somewhere else, somewhere that isn’t Kentucky or Indiana, we can eliminate him.”
“You’re absolutely sure we’re talking about one killer and not several?”
“I’m not absolutely sure of anything,” Grimaldi said, steering the SUV up the street. “We know, from the numerals, that all eighteen victims are part of the same series. Whoever killed them, whether one or more killers, had to be aware of the others. The numbers—numerals—are chronological. And the victims are all the same type. So my first guess is a single perpetrator. That’s what the FBI’s profile says, too. Someone who likes to work alone.”
“So Laura Lee…”
“Was either the first victim of the same killer, or killed by someone else.” Grimaldi turned the SUV in the direction of the signs for Damascus. It looked like we’d be approaching Sunnyside from the south instead of through Columbia. “It’s possible that the origin kill was made by one person, and it was a trigger for someone else, who went on to kill the other seventeen.”
“Like Frankie. If some random trucker killed Laura Lee, and Frankie, when he got out of prison, killed the others.”
“That’s one theory,” Grimaldi said.
“What about DNA?” This was an uncomfortable subject when one of the victims was her mother. “You said they were raped and strangled. There must have been DNA on someone. After eighteen victims, surely he must have left a hair or a drop of sweat or semen or spit, on at least one of them.”
“There’s too much DNA,” Grimaldi said flatly. “A lot of these women turned tricks. Several of them hadn’t showered between the last time they worked and when they were killed.”
“No overlapping DNA? The same DNA found on more than one victim?”
“There’s been a few instances of that.” She turned off the main road into one of the meandering lanes that cut through Sunnyside. The yards immediately became bigger with the houses sitting farther back from the street. “One set, on three different women,