Her Every Fear - Peter Swanson Page 0,119

know, even though I know you were going home to get some sleep.”

“Strike that off the agenda. Tan’s been told?” Abigail Tan was the FBI agent now assigned as lead in the case.

“Yes. She’s off to get a search warrant.”

“What did she think?” James asked.

“She didn’t tell me, but she wanted me to tell you. What do you think?”

“It’s our Jack, I’m sure of it. He’s setting up Alan Cherney, I guess. I don’t know why, exactly.”

“Probably what Tan thinks, too.”

“But let’s execute the warrant, and if we find a knife, arrest Cherney. We can find out more about Jack, at least, and get something, anything—”

“Oh, gotta run, Roberta. I’ll call you right back.”

He’d rung off. James took a sip of her scotch but it was gone, and the ice tapped against her teeth. She paced the room, thinking.

Jack was getting bold, which meant he was probably about to screw up. Or that’s what she was hoping for, anyway. He was now their principal suspect, despite the fact that Corbin Dell had gone missing from his borrowed apartment in London. Corbin was involved somehow, but James did not believe he had killed Audrey Marshall. The timeline made it a very remote possibility. She believed the killer was the man who was calling himself Jack Ludovico, and she believed that he’d killed at least two women before, one on the North Shore of Massachusetts named Rachael Chess, and one in Connecticut named Linda Alcheri nearly fourteen years earlier. Both women, like Audrey Marshall, had been cut down the middle after they’d been killed. Rachael Chess had been found on a beach in New Essex, not far from where Corbin Dell’s mother had a house. James had studied the file, and Corbin’s name had come up as someone who knew the deceased, but he’d been eliminated from the inquiry since he’d been out of the country when the murder had been committed. There was no connection that James could find between Linda Alcheri, the dead girl from Connecticut, and Corbin Dell. She’d been found dead at an old Boy Scout camp outside of the city. Cause of death had been a blow to the head from a rock, but before she’d been buried she’d been cut down the face, and her clothes and some of the skin on her torso was cut away. Why had no one made a connection with the second murder in New Essex? Cause of death had been different, but the postmortem wounds were the same, or at least they were extremely similar. Now that there’d been a third murder—another woman with the exact same wounds—the FBI had arrived. James heard that some of the police were now calling the murderer the Failed Magician. He tries to cut his women in half.

Abigail Tan, despite her age (she didn’t look much older than twenty-five), seemed competent. Earlier that day, James told her what she’d found in the Alcheri files. “Two of Linda’s friends mentioned in interviews that Linda had briefly been seeing someone named Hank. They both remembered a first name, but not a second. They never found this Hank.”

“And you think this Hank is . . . ?”

“I think the person who called himself Hank back then might be calling himself Jack Ludovico now.”

“What makes you think he’s not just who he says he is, a friend trying to get some answers?”

“Then why didn’t he come to us? And why doesn’t Audrey Marshall mention him in her diary?” What James didn’t say was that she just somehow knew. Both murders involved a shadowy figure who never came forward, and she knew that that person, probably not named Hank or Jack, was the same person.

“Okay, then, if he’s the killer, then why is he hanging around? Why did he go and talk with Kate Priddy?”

“I think he’s trying to pin this murder on Corbin Dell. Audrey Marshall’s arm was bent back over her head, pointing toward Dell’s apartment. The coroner said her arm was placed in that position after death. He wants us to think it’s Corbin, so that’s why he’s hanging around. Maybe killing Rachael Chess was his first attempt at framing him, and it didn’t work.”

“Should we publish the sketch that Kate Priddy did?”

James had thought of that. “Not yet. I don’t think he lives locally, and if the sketch shows up on the front page, he’ll leave town. He’s being reckless right now, returning to the scene of the crime to talk with a neighbor. Let’s

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