Brenda Novak - The Perfect Murder

“He’s a murderer, Ms. Burke. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”

Jane was afraid her inexperience was showing. “What did you mean on the phone, when you mentioned roommates?” she asked.

“Last night Mary gave me the password to her e-mail account and I posed as her while chatting with ‘Wesley.’ I wanted to press him for his location, or get him to identify himself as Malcolm. He didn’t do either, but he seemed more distracted than usual and blamed two roommates.”

The phone interrupted. Jane ignored its ringing because she knew one of the volunteers would pick up. “And?”

“He mentioned they were girls, as opposed to women. He even said they were sisters.”

Excitement and hope shot through Jane. “My kidnap victims.”

“Possibly.”

“He talked as if they were still alive?”

“Yes.”

Jane had no idea what shape they’d be in but, given the odds, this was welcome news. “So if Wesley Boss is Malcolm Turner, and Malcolm’s such a racist, why did he take them? Why these two? Why not two white girls?”

“I’m guessing it was a crime of opportunity.”

“Earlier you said he was having trouble with them.”

“He made it sound that way.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“He didn’t specify. But if he has these girls with him, it would certainly explain why he’s been so reluctant to see Mary.”

Crossing her legs, Jane toyed with a ballpoint pen. “She’s willing to meet with him?”

“I’ll be the one doing that.”

“Oh, right. Of course.”

The intercom buzzed. “Jane?” It was Lisa, the volunteer who’d shown Sebastian into the room.

Jane hit the button that would let her respond. “Yes?”

“Detective Willis on line one.”

“Thank you.” Standing, because she had too much energy to remain seated, no matter how much more relaxed it made her seem, she picked up line one. “David?”

“Jane, I’ve only got a second. I’m on my way to perform a search. But I had someone else get the address associated with Wesley Boss’s P.O. box. Are you ready?”

Her eyes connected with Sebastian’s; then she grabbed a piece of paper from the holder on her desk. “Ready.”

He rattled off an address in Ione, a small town in Amador County about forty-five minutes away.

“Got it,” she said.

“I’ve already called the sheriff’s department. A deputy will join you there, but I’m betting he’s closer than you are, so you’d better hurry.”

“I understand. Thanks for letting me know.” She hung up and grabbed her purse from under the desk. “We’ve got to go,” she said.

Sebastian came to his feet. “You know where he is?”

“I have an address. What we’ll find when we get there is anyone’s guess.”

Could it really be over? After all the time he’d spent searching?

Sebastian almost didn’t dare hope. But as he drove Jane Burke to Ione-her car didn’t have GPS and he hadn’t yet sacrificed his Lexus-he called to share the news with Mary. He doubted he’d be able to reach her this early. She was at the hospital working in admissions until four. But he could leave a message she might get on her break. With those flowers showing up at her house this morning, he wanted to alleviate her fears as soon as possible.

The voice-mail recording he’d expected came on. He waited for the beep. “Mary, this is Sebastian. I think we have him. Don’t worry about anything, okay? I’ll be back in touch when I know more.”

As he hung up, he felt Jane watching him and glanced over. He wasn’t quite sure what to think of her. She seemed like such a contradiction. She dressed like a typical professional, in conservative business casual, but her hair-dark at the roots and jagged and bleached on the ends-was anything but conservative. Her low-pitched, raspy voice suggested she smoked and yet she was obviously in great physical shape. Then there were the tattoos. She had one on her breast. The V of her sweater came up too high for him to see what it was, but when she moved, he occasionally glimpsed the edge of it. The other was the word survivor written on the curve between the thumb and finger on her left hand.

The fact that she was working at a victims’ charity led him to believe that tattoo had nothing to do with being a fan of the popular reality show.

What had she been through?

The scar on her neck, noticeable when she turned her head, posed some frightening possibilities…

“You really think we’ll find Malcolm Turner?” she asked, shifting her gaze to a point outside the car, as if uncomfortable with his perusal.

“If this is the right Wesley Boss, I do.” Sebastian signaled so he could make a left onto Jackson Road. They were heading toward a string of historic gold-rush towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Since coming to Sacramento, Sebastian had studied the whole area. According to what he’d read, Ione wasn’t a mining town, but it had been a staging and agricultural center for the mining towns around it.

Jane braced herself with a hand against the door as he took the corner a little too fast. “DNA evidence is pretty reliable.”

“I know. Malcolm’s certainly been able to rely on it.” He passed the vehicle in front of him. They’d only left the office fifteen minutes ago, but his impatience made the drive seem interminable. “He was a cop. He knew the men who’d be taking the samples, how they’d go about it, where they’d store them after they were collected, where they’d be tested.”

“You think he traded them out or something?”

When she stated it that way, it sounded far-fetched, even to him. But stranger things had happened. He’d once read about a UCI professor who found that DNA evidence as evaluated by a certain police lab had resulted in a young man’s wrongful conviction of rape. Sloppiness, sample corruption, dishonesty, human error, overstatement of the odds-all of it could potentially “prove” the wrong thing. “He could have. They were bone-marrow samples. But it might not have been necessary to go that far. He had half a mil to buy the help he needed.”

She whistled softly. “I can see why the police might not have bought your accusations. If what you say is true, they have a bigger problem than one bad cop.”

“Definitely not a possibility they want to consider. I would’ve been happy just to convince them to take a new sample. But by the time I realized something wasn’t right, it was too late. Malcolm’s family had already cremated the remains of whoever was in that car.”

“Do you have any idea who that person was?”

“No.”

“No one else in the area suddenly went missing.”

“No. I’m guessing it was a homeless person or a corpse he dug up. Or he paid off some mortician who had a body awaiting cremation.” That was part of the reason the police were so convinced by the DNA match. There’d been no corresponding missing-persons report or disturbance of a cemetery plot-at least, that had come to their attention. They hadn’t bothered to look very carefully. Sebastian had tried, but he’d come up empty.

“So what tipped you off?” she asked. “How’d you figure it out?”

The Prius ahead of them was traveling more slowly than Sebastian would’ve liked, but it was only a two-lane highway and traffic streaming in the opposite direction wouldn’t let him pass at the moment. “There were too many unanswered questions.”

“Such as?”

“Why didn’t he shoot himself? He used his firearm to kill Emily and Colton. He could easily have turned it on himself and ended his life right there in the house with them. Instead, he ran his car off a steep embankment, after which it burst into flames.”