The credit card issue had been one of her biggest challenges. Anne resolved the problem by developing a list of merchants to whom she paid a modest sum to run the clients’ credit card charges through on their accounts. Some of her clients used PayPal, but others didn’t like it, as the service sometimes sent out e-mails to update information, and their spouses had access to their computers and e-mail. The companies she solicited to run the credit cards through on their account were independently owned car washes, gas stations, dry cleaners, small markets, or liquor stores. She even had several health food stores. Nothing related to the Alibi Connection would ever show up on a client’s credit card and the expenditures wouldn’t appear even slightly suspicious. Women were the worst when it came to running up credit card charges. They were so worried about covering a spending spree, they wouldn’t dare ask their husband about charging what appeared to be necessities.
In the beginning, potential customers had been worried about blackmail. She had assuaged their fears by telling them that the club was operated strictly by members who had just as much to lose. This wasn’t true, of course. She doubted if she would turn a profit if she placed her business in the hands of liars and adulterous men. She had a number of employees, most of them working out of their homes. This was the best way, as she never had to meet them.
Each member went under a pseudonym, and she told them she kept no master client list. In most instances, a statement like that would be preposterous. Leaving a lot of paper floating around was too risky, though, since some of her clients ended up as her victims. She did have all the other clients’ names and credit card numbers stored in an online computer database. How could she run a business without keeping some kind of records? Men believed what they wanted to believe.
The services her company provided were extensive. One that was very popular was the “rescue” alibi. Say a man was having dinner with his in-laws when his favorite football team was playing. Either that or he wanted to sneak away for a few hours to have sex with his mistress. A call would come in wherever he was stuck at the time, saying they urgently needed him at work. She recommended the client make certain the wife or whoever he was trying to fool answered the phone. Her employees used a VoIP (voice-over-Internet protocol) system and she had designed a program that would display the name of the company where the client was employed.
Another alibi that had been a great success was the two-or three-day business conference or training seminar. The Alibi Connection would provide the client with a detailed itinerary of his trip, a certificate of completion, hotel and rental car receipts, basically anything he needed to establish definitive proof of his whereabouts during the time in question.
She considered it immoral to take money from her victims. Then she would be killing for personal gain. She knew if she was ever captured—and she didn’t fool herself, it would happen eventually—no one would care if she’d stolen or not. Regardless, she had to live up to her own standards. All she was doing was cleaning house, taking out the garbage that people left lying around in their yards.
Why didn’t she kill criminals? She let the police take care of them, and judges like Lily Forrester. Vile criminals such as gang members blew each other away. Dope dealers were scum, but Anne didn’t have a mind to kill them.
When Anne stepped out of the stall, she was wearing her shoulder-length brunette wig and a sheer sleeveless white cotton dress. Most women didn’t realize how turned on a man got by a woman wearing a dress. Underneath she was wearing a push-up bra and a pair of T-back panties that were already riding up into the crack of her ass. Now that she’d seen Lily up close, she had gone light on the makeup. Bryce had seen her on three occasions, all of them inside a bar. Some men could only get turned on if she looked and acted like a whore. Thinking of her that way lightened their guilt somehow, as if it weren’t cheating if the woman was a prostitute. Bryce was different. He fucked other women because he knew Lily was too good for him. In that respect, he was right.
Anne walked straight to the curb and hailed a cab, jumping in and pulling out her cell phone. Her rental car was waiting for her at the Venetian Hotel. Bryce would have no trouble deciding whether or not he should answer the call, since he’d purchased his “fun phone” as instructed by the Alibi Connection. “Bryce?”
“Anne?”
Bryce knew her as Anne Hall. She liked the Anne Bradley identity too much to use it with men she might end up killing. Also, Lily knew her by that name. “My flight was delayed,” she lied. “Are we still meeting at the Aladdin?”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding disappointed. “When will you be here?”
“I should be there in an hour, depending on the traffic. Can’t wait to see you, baby. We’re going to have a great time. Just think, three whole days to play.”
She ended the call and leaned back in the seat, her heart pounding in excitement. Lily would be much better off without this jackass. And who would she rely on when her husband never returned from his business trip? Lily’s friends all had jobs, but she had all the time in the world to console her. If she could finally connect with another human being who didn’t want to abuse her, abandon her, or have sex with her, the urge to kill might finally leave her.
QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
As soon as she placed the cassette tape in an evidence envelope, marked it urgent, and shipped it off to the lab, Mary began working at her computer.
Her degree was in biology, one of the fields the Bureau had been eager to recruit from. She’d been able to use some of her knowledge on the counterfeit drug matter, as well as in building a case against a company that continued to manufacture and distribute faulty delivery systems used to implant stents in cardiac patients.
Mary had caught the tail end of the last case, which the Bureau had been investigating for approximately six years. Despite rumors of complications and deaths, the company continued to ship the defective product. In conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Bureau’s investigation covered thousands of technical documents and witnesses in three countries.
Another reason the FBI was aggressively recruiting agents with scientific backgrounds was the fear that a foreign entity might one day employ the use of chemical or biological weapons on U.S. soil.
Before her father’s death, she had pulled down big bucks working for a pharmaceutical company in Los Angeles. Although she’d worshipped her father, and was willing to follow him into law enforcement, Harold Stevens wouldn’t hear of it. She was too smart, her father used to say, and he refused to have his daughter risk her life in such a dangerous and underpaid occupation.
When the LAPD failed to capture her father’s killer, Mary had quit her job and tracked him down herself, all without leaving her apartment. Her technical and computer skills were exceptional. If a person knew enough to be able to manipulate the Internet, she could find just about anyone.
Her first step now was to search for a newspaper article about a child being left on a highway. She didn’t find anything, although she was appalled at the number of children who went missing every year, many of them never found. Deciding to focus on the unsolved homicides, she found two cases that interested her. A man’s dismembered body had been discovered in a shallow grave outside of Las Vegas. The Las Vegas PD took six months to make a positive ID, as the head and hands had been severed from the body.
She started to move on to the next case, since it was extremely rare for a female killer to dismember her victim. She placed her head in her hands as Adams’s statement that she might spend the rest of her career on this case began to sink in. In a fairly small area like Ventura, catching a killer wasn’t that difficult, unless the killer skipped town or killed a complete stranger. One of the reasons serial killers were so hard to apprehend was they generally had no ties to their victims. Of course, the other possibility was human error.
Bulldog McIntyre walked into her office, a smirk on his chiseled face. “You can’t be frustrated already. It’s only been a few
hours. Wait until you spend ten years trying to crack a case.”
“I know, I know,” Mary told him, leaning back in her chair and spinning it around. Stopping it abruptly with the old-lady black pumps she’d worn to appease the higher-ups in the Bureau, she placed her palms on top of her desk. “My profile may be wrong. The UNSUB could be a man.”
“No shit.”
“You know,” she responded, pissed, “if you guys would stop riding me, I might be able to accomplish something here.”
“Hang in there, ace,” he said before leaving.
She tapped her mouse and scrolled through more particulars about the Vegas case. The victim, Howard Goldstein, had been married, with two young children. He owned a chain of successful restaurants in San Francisco. Goldstein’s wife told police her husband had traveled to San Diego to check out the possibility of opening a restaurant there. She spoke to him on his cell phone several times and he never mentioned going to Las Vegas. He’d allegedly been staying at the Hyatt Hotel in La Jolla, a city near San Diego. Mrs. Goldstein had called and left a message for him on the phone in his room. When he didn’t return on the scheduled date and stopped answering his cell phone, the wife filed a report with the San Diego PD.
Mary dialed the number on the police report. After being transferred numerous times, she was connected with a detective. “You’re playing in the wrong field,” Patrick Cummings told her, smacking what sounded like a wad of gum. “All we did was file a missing person report. Vegas found the body. Call them.”
Sensing he was about to hang up, she blurted out, “This may be part of a larger picture.”
“Really? Got yourself a serial killer, huh? Are you one of Adams’s people?”
Christ, Mary thought, her heart thumping in her chest. She took a deep breath, then said calmly, “It’s nothing like that. We’re investigating a string of robberies.”
“You guys think Goldstein’s a robber? Shit, he was a millionaire several times over. Not only that, he was like fifty-something and too fat to make a getaway. Guess he ate too many pastrami sandwiches.”
“I didn’t say anything about him being a suspect,” Mary said, a tinge of annoyance making its way into her voice. “Your report indicates Goldstein told his wife he would be staying at the Hyatt in La Jolla. When your officer checked, the Hyatt said no one of that name had been registered during the times in question.”
“Look,” Cummings said. “Goldstein told the old lady he was going on a business trip. Shopping around for a spot to open another restaurant or something. Not only were there no records of him staying at the Hyatt in La Jolla, we checked every hotel and motel within a fifty-mile radius and didn’t find anything. They found the body in Vegas, so it’s obvious he lied to his wife and went there to gamble. This is a pretty common scenario, if you know what I mean.”
“I appreciate your cooperation, Detective Cummings,” Mary said, thinking the call had been a waste of time.
“Hey,” he said. “I don’t know if this has any connection to your robberies, but I remember one thing that was odd. Goldstein’s wife insisted that she’d spoken to the hotel operator and was transferred to her husband’s room at the Hyatt. Hold on.” He began speaking aside to someone. “Track down that damn witness. His name is Frankie something.” He returned to their conversation. “Sorry about that, Stevens. It’s a madhouse around here. Okay, where was I?”
“Goldstein’s wife.”
“After Vegas contacted us for DNA, thinking the unidentified torso they had on ice might be Goldstein, I went out myself and spoke to the wife. Laura Goldstein’s a knockout, by the way. Only a rich guy could get a piece of ass this sweet. Anyway, she pulls out her husband’s travel itinerary, advising that she used the phone numbers listed there to call him. When I dialed the number for the Hyatt, some woman answered, claiming she’d had the number for over a year. To get the wife off our back, we verified it with the phone company. Must have been a typo.”
“Who did she call, then?”
“Shit, how do I know? Maybe she misplaced his itinerary and got the number for the Hyatt from information.”
“But you just told me he wasn’t registered at the Hyatt.”
“True,” he said as if he’d just put it together. “The Vegas PD didn’t find a room registered to him in their city, either. They decided Goldstein must have stayed with friends or flown in and out on the same day.”
“What about the airlines?”
“I have to execute a search warrant in ten minutes,” he shot out. “Get in touch with the Vegas authorities.”
Before Mary could say anything more, the phone went dead.
FOURTEEN
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
Bryce was perched on top of a barstool at the Aladdin Hotel, gulping Maker’s Mark bourbon as if it were water. He didn’t really care if he fucked Anne or not. All he wanted was someone around to call an ambulance if he drank himself into a coma.
Lily had been all over him lately. Didn’t she realize that the more she pushed him, the more he rebelled? In the same way she ruled in the courtroom, his wife had come out of nowhere and declared that he was an alcoholic. He’d been drinking since high school and had never had a problem. Every day he got up and went to work, handled his accounts, and battled the 405 freeway during rush hour. What gave her the right to tell him how he should live his life?
Lying to Lily had been difficult, though, even if the alibi club Anne had turned him on to made it highly unlikely that she would find out the truth. He generally indulged his appetite for other women during the day while Lily was at work. He had scores of established accounts, which he milked year after year. There was an abundance of young talent to solicit new business, and in the digital world, creating new advertising campaigns was a snap.
Since Bryce was buddies with the VP of the company, he could pretty much do whatever he wanted. Business had been slow the past month, so he had covered the trip by saying he was going to fly to a few cities and entertain some of his major clients. He’d already checked with his secretary an hour ago and the office was dead. To make certain someone from one from his major accounts didn’t call looking for him while he was in Las Vegas, he’d made cursory calls to them earlier in the week.
Everyone knew how it worked. Perks were perks. If the business was too far away for him to wine and dine his major accounts on a regular basis, he would simply cut them a check from his expense account.
Spending three days with another woman was a big step. “Hit me again,” he said to the bartender, sliding his empty glass forward.
A bleached blonde, obviously a prostitute, was eyeing him from the other side of the bar. Getting blotto in the middle of the day made him look like he’d dropped his wad at the tables. Being with a pro was short and sweet, but it didn’t ring any bells for him. He liked the game and the anticipation. Once he got it, the excitement was gone.
To be fair to Lily, he never should have gotten married.
He would have been perfectly content with his bachelor life if his father hadn’t constantly harped on him to get married and have a family. Several times, he’d even accused him of being gay. That was a laugh, he thought. But a guy who’d been chained to a woman’s memory his entire life couldn’t appreciate what it was like to be single. He missed his old apartment, right down the street from his office and within walking distance of all the best restaurants and clubs. Now he spent the majority of his day cooped up in a damn car. Sure Lily didn’t understand. She could get to work in fifteen minutes, then she sat on her ass all day while everyone bowed down and worshipped her.
He guzzled down the new drink, dropping a twenty for the bartender. When was this chick going to show up? If she didn’t get here fast, he’d be under the table. Maybe the three-day fling wasn’t that bad. If he was too tanked to nail her one day, he could catch her the next. Every guy had an erection in the morning, even boozers like himself.
Why had he insisted
that Lily have sex with him last night? Then he remembered. A pal had told him a woman’s suspicions were dulled for a few days after the hubby or boyfriend banged her. Having sex with their husbands was a chore, something they could cross off their “to do” list. Romance flew out the window once a guy realized his wife considered having sex with him in the same light as cleaning out the refrigerator or rearranging her closet.
He liked Anne because she was as horny and uninhibited as most men. She’d bucked and moaned in the back of his car the other night after he’d told her he had booked his ticket to Vegas. She didn’t mind him taking care of her, but she refused to fuck him or even give him a blow job. Of course, he wouldn’t be here today if she had. Once he got a piece, he wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble to get it again. That is, unless the chick was fantastic.
The Cheater Page 14
