Catherine Coulter: Split Second

Coop thought of Medelin’s exhausted face and didn’t hold out much hope for him.

Hoover Building

Thursday afternoon

Savich handed a folder to each agent seated around the CAU conference, and walked back to the head of the table. He looked at each of them in turn, pausing at Lucy and Coop. “I have to say that what you have in front of you is about as unexpected as discovering that smoking cigarettes led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. As you know, Liz Rogers scraped her nails down our Black Beret’s face. We’ve been waiting for the forensic genetics people to finish their DNA testing. They’ve turned around with the fastest prep and analysis time I’ve seen for DNA typing, and we’ve run the results against our national database.” He paused for effect, and every agent at that table sat forward.

“The closest match is Ted Bundy’s DNA.”

Savich saw disbelief, astonishment, shaking heads, and heard snorts, gasps, and comments like “That’s just plain crazy” and “You’re making that up, Savich, to make sure we’re on our toes.”

Savich raised his hands, palms flat. “This isn’t a joke. Incredible as it seems, Ted Bundy’s DNA is the closest match.”

Coop said, “ The Ted Bundy? You’re not putting us on?”

Savich smiled. “Yes, it’s the Ted Bundy.”

Coop sat forward in his chair. “But he’s dead, Savich, electrocuted. Late eighties, wasn’t it?”

Ruth said, “Yeah, he was electrocuted in Florida in 1989 for his last murder. He had more than ten years of appeals before they pulled the plug on him.”

Jack Crowne, who studied serial killers, said, “He eventually confessed to more than thirty murders, but no one believes the number was that low. He was forty-two when he was electrocuted. They have his DNA profile?”

Savich said, “They typed him and entered him in the database, in case we found any more of his crime scenes after he died.”

“So how can it be his DNA?” Dane Carver said, and smacked his forehead. “Well, hot diggity, it’s an illegitimate son, right, Savich? Carrying on his daddy’s fine work?”

“Nope.”

Jack said, “But—no, you’re kidding us, right?”

Lucy was staring at him, nearly en pointe.

Savich smiled at them. “It’s no son. She’s a woman. The statistical analysis they gave us shows she’s almost certainly a first-degree relative, a mother or a sister or daughter. Given our perp’s age, she’s almost certainly his daughter.”

Sherlock said, “Just a bit of background. Bundy had a girlfriend he met while enrolled at the University of Washington in 1967. She dumped him after she graduated, said he was too immature for her, and went home to California. Bundy looked her up in 1973, and showed her the new, improved package—law school, good attitude, the serious dedicated professional. He courted her, proposed marriage, but then two weeks later, shortly after New Year’s 1974, he dumped her. No one knows why, but a couple of weeks later, he started his murder spree in Washington State.

“Obviously, something significant went down, but no one knows what it was. Regardless, it was the trigger.

“At that same time he was also dating a secretary. That lasted six years. There were other women as well, though we don’t have many names. As you know, Bundy was quite good-looking and he could charm a lizard off a sunny rock. So it makes sense he would have had relationships with women. And one of these women birthed a daughter he never acknowledged. Or maybe she never told him she was pregnant. Again, we don’t know.”

Dane said slowly, “But maybe her mom told our killer who her monster of a daddy was, and the daughter realized Bundy’s madness was flowing in her veins. Blood calling to blood, I guess you could say.”

Lucy said, “Sherlock, when did Bundy go to jail for the last time?”

Sherlock shuffled through her notes. “He was apprehended February fifteenth, 1978, and remained in prison until his execution in 1989.”

Lucy said, “Okay, that would make our Black Beret a minimum of thirty-three years old. Everybody thought he looked early thirties or late twenties, so this is in the ballpark.”

Coop had a dark eyebrow up a good inch. “This is weird. Here I was, eating my sesame-seed bagel this morning, never thinking that during the course of this fine day I’d be dealing with Ted Bundy’s daughter. I wonder why she is masquerading as a man?”

“Good question,” Ruth said. “Maybe she’d rather be her father’s son? More importance?”

Coop said, “Maybe being a guy makes her more like her father?”

Lucy leaned forward, leaned her chin on her folded hands. “I sure hope we’ll have the opportunity to ask her when we get her.”

Savich said, “Okay. Now, those of you who are familiar with Bundy know he had another daughter, this one born in the eighties during conjugal visits with his wife—yeah, the court let him marry—a former coworker. However, we’ve excluded her as being our Black Beret, because she has a very different body type and she is currently residing in Florence, Italy, and hasn’t been back to the States in five years. So it’s a daughter we know absolutely nothing about.”

Ruth thought of her new husband and laughed. “I can’t wait to tell Dix. He probably knows more than you do, Jack, since he was into Bundy’s case big-time. He’s going to freak. I bet he’s going to call you, Dillon, beg to be in on the case.”

Savich knew Dix Noble, sheriff of Maestro, Virginia, very well. “Dix is a smart man, Ruth. Maybe it’d be good to have his brain at work on this. I’ll give him a call.”

Sherlock said, “As I said, we don’t know who her mom was or is. We don’t know anything else about her.”

“We do know she started killing in San Francisco eight months ago, and so I put MAX to work using Liz Rogers’s description of him to the police artist. I got a call this morning from Police Chief Edmund Kreymer. He’s plastering the sketch all over Philadelphia. He also sent the sketch to San Francisco and Chicago, and every other large-city cop shop in the country. This sketch is in your packet, along with the sketch the police artist in Cleveland put together.

“You’ll see a lot of similarities, but Liz Rogers’s description is the best, since she was up close and personal with Bundy’s daughter for a good long while. I think she really nailed him, well, her. If you compare the Philadelphia police sketch with photos of Ted Bundy, you’ll see there’s more than a slight resemblance.

“Now, we could get lucky and identify her from the sketch. MAX is scanning all the photos we can access from records in San Francisco. If she was raised in the Bay Area, maybe he’ll find her in a high-school yearbook or a juvie record.

“Shirley put together some of the info we have about Bundy in your folders with links to a good deal more, as well as the profilers’ rundown on Bundy’s daughter. Get back to me with anything you think would be helpful.

“There’s no way Bundy’s daughter can remain in Philadelphia unless she does a thorough makeover. And she’s got a scratch on her face to hide. Liz Rogers thought she scratched her good, but she was nearly unconscious at the time.”

Jack asked, “You really think she’ll get back into skirts?”

Lucy said, “Why not? She’s a killer, and that’s what she does, so how is she going to do it without being caught and executed like Daddy was? I’m thinking maybe she’ll go female but keep the arty look.”

Coop was tapping his pen on the conference table. “It seems to me if she’s following in her daddy’s bloody ways, she must have killed before age thirty-three.”