“I hear you. Let me know when you get back to the office.”
Danni accompanied Hannah to school that morning. They went right to the principal’s office where they waited an hour to see the principal, an elderly black woman named Mrs. Demps. Danni went into the office alone but not until she had one of the office ladies swear she would not let Hannah out of her sight for any reason.
“Not even to go to the bathroom.”
“Not even to go to the bathroom,” the woman repeated.
Inside the principal’s office, Danni revealed her plan.
“I don’t know if you know this or not,” Danni began, “but I’m a homicide detective with the Oakville Police Department. Yesterday the man who is killing these young coeds threatened my daughter directly. I have to take her out of school, and I have to take her out of this area and reenroll her somewhere else under a different name. I will need to take all her records with me.”
“That may take a few hours.”
“We have some packing to do, and I have some calls to make. I can come back in three hours.”
“Make it two,” Mrs. Demps said. “We’ll have the records ready for you.”
Danni had already called Mike’s cousin, Eleanor, who lived in a suburb of Denver. The two women had become friends during the marriage and had maintained that friendship after the divorce. Eleanor had two kids of her own. Her son, Tim, was fourteen and her daughter, Patricia, was twelve.
“Eleanor, I have a big favor to ask of you,” Danni began. “You are kind of off the radar in the sense that few people knew that we were friends and nobody knows that we are still, including Mike.” Danni then told her what had happened recently.
After picking up the records at school, Danni and Hannah took a very circuitous route to Tampa, making sure they were not followed. Late that afternoon they boarded a plane for Denver. During the drive to Tampa and the flight to Colorado, Danni drilled Hannah on the details of her new life.
“You can’t get close to anybody, honey, except Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Charley and Tim and Patricia. You are still going to be Hannah, but your last name is going to be Olson like Tim and Patricia. Do you understand?”
“Why, Mommy? And when am I going to see you?”
It was a process but Hannah was starting to get it by the time they landed. Eleanor was waiting at the airport. Danni spent the next morning making copies of Hannah’s school records, then altering the copies, then copying the altered documents until they looked as good as the originals. Early that afternoon she and Eleanor met with the principal of Parker Elementary School. Danni told the woman the whole story.
“Hannah can’t live with me while this maniac is free and she needs to go to school. I have her records here which show her name as Olson and show that she is a fourth-grade student.”
“I need to check with the school board before I can approve this,” the principal said.
“You can’t,” Danni replied. “I don’t want you to know. I don’t want anybody to know. If you can’t take my daughter under these conditions, then she’s not going to go to school while this madman is loose. I’ll sign whatever waiver you need just as long as you don’t show it to anybody until this is over.” She didn’t say what “over” meant, but they all knew there were several possibilities.
The principal, Mrs. Hoffman, thought about it for a long time.
“The child needs to go to school,” she said finally. “And nobody can fault us for doing what we’re doing under the circumstances.”
Danni was on a plane home that night. Every nerve in her body was on edge. Every fiber within her wanted to be with her daughter in Denver. Finally, she started to feel just a speck of what Stacey Kincaid’s parents and all those other victims’ parents had felt when they heard the news that their daughters were gone. My little girl is still alive, Danni thought.
We’ve got to find this bastard.
Chapter Eight
Danni didn’t get good news when she walked into the morning meeting on Wednesday.
“We’ve got another body,” Captain Jeffries told the group although most of them knew already. “A junior at the university; they found her on the north side of town. She’d been lying dead in her apartment for three days. Throat was cut. Can you imagine that? She was living in