by Sharon Sala
They lay motionless, holding on to the feeling and each other as long as they could. All too soon the reality of why they were in St. Louis would rear its ugly head and they would be back to chasing a killer.
The bedside phone rang.
Jo sighed.
Wade rose up on one elbow and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Tate said. “Get Jo over here ASAP. The spooks are on their way up to put that tracer in her.”
“Will do,” Wade said, and rolled out of bed.
“Get dressed, Jo. They’re on their way up with your tracking chip.”
She sat up with a groan and combed her fingers through her hair.
“Oh, great. My legs feel like rubber, and I smell like sex and syrup.”
“My kind of woman!” he said, then picked her up in his arms and kissed her soundly.
They dressed with speed and without a care for formality. Wade had to put his jeans and T-shirt back on, because the rest of his clothes were across the hall. Jo grabbed a pair of cotton slacks and a fitted tank top, and then stepped into a pair of canvas shoes.
She brushed her hair and left it hanging, and he grabbed his room key as she slipped hers in her pocket.
Just before they left, Wade slid an arm around her waist, pushed her up against the door and kissed her until she was breathless.
“That’s one for the road,” he said softly.
They exited quickly. He used his key to let them into the suite. Two strange men were standing near the table, talking to Tate. When the door opened they turned as one, eyeing the new arrivals.
The introductions Tate made were brief.
“Good morning, Jo. Meet Mr. Windom and Mr. Garcia. Gentlemen, this is Agent Jolene Luckett, the lady in question, and Agent Wade Luckett.”
Garcia and Windom nodded.
“So how does this actually work?” Jo asked. “Because I didn’t think there was anything on the market that performed well.”
“This isn’t on the market, and all you need to know is that it does the job,” Garcia said, and then smiled briefly. “I’m going to numb the back of your shoulder. It’s a bit like getting an injection, only with a much bigger needle.”
Jo shrugged. “Yesterday it was a Taser. Today it was a chip. Damn fine job I have.”
Her sarcasm broke the awkwardness of the moment and had the men laughing; all except Wade. He saw no humor in her situation. He was focused on Windom’s instructions as he put a tracking app on Wade’s phone and showed him how it worked. The program was calibrated to the frequency of the chip in her back, and as long as she was within a hundred miles of his phone, they could find her.
“Can you put that same app on my phone, as well?” Tate asked. “I would hate to think that after going to all this trouble, if Agent Luckett’s phone gets lost or broken we would have no way of finding her.”
Windom shrugged. “Just make sure you keep this among yourselves because it isn’t something we want advertised. You can thank your director for campaigning so strongly to make this happen. This particular technology is secret and ours alone, and we would hate for it to fall into the wrong hands.”
“Of course,” Tate said, and then glanced at Jo.
Whatever Garcia had done to her was over, and he had packed up his things.
“Ma’am, I sincerely hope you don’t have to put this to use,” Garcia said. “It was nice meeting all of you, and good luck on catching your killer. We’ll see ourselves out.” Then he and Windom left as quietly as they’d come in.
Wade shoved Jolene’s hair aside to look at the injection site, but all he could see was a small strip of tape.
“Why the bandage?”
Jo shrugged. “He just said leave it on for a couple of hours and then I could take it off.”
“Did it hurt?”
“A little, but not nearly as much as hitting the floor of the parking garage with my chin.”
Cameron grinned. “I’d forgotten your weird sense of humor.”
“I had almost forgotten it myself,” she admitted.
There was a knock at the door.
“That’s probably breakfast,” Tate said.
“Did you order for all of us?” Wade asked.
Tate nodded.
“Good, I’m starving,” Wade said, then looked at Jo and grinned.
She rolled her eyes. “I’m going to go shower and get dressed properly while you three eat.”
“Aren’t you hungry?” Cameron asked.
She glanced at Wade and decided not to give him away.
“If there’s fruit, you can save me some for later.”
She opened the door to let the waiter in with their food and then went back across the hall. Once inside, she eyed the chaos they’d made of the bedclothes, their dirty trays still on the table and the bedspread on the floor, and shivered deliciously, remembering the sexual high.
“Breakfast orgy. Every day should start that way.”
She set their trays outside in the hall, tossed the bedspread back on the bed and went to take her shower.
* * *
It was almost noon before the hooker’s body was found. Just like the last one, it had been left amid the rubble in one of the areas hardest hit by the tornado. Surprisingly, she was still fully clothed and had died from strangulation. And like the homeless man, her face had been all but obliterated by puncture wounds.
Wade was staring down at the body with a knot in his belly, knowing that but for the grace of God and Jo’s quick thinking she would have wound up the same way.
He looked around to see where she’d gone and saw her talking to the city employee who’d found the body, then thought about Inman taking pictures at the site in Tulsa and did a three-sixty turn, eyeing all the vehicles in the area. They were either fire department or police cars, except for the usual media frenzy cordoned off several blocks away.
“What do you think?” Tate asked as he walked up behind Wade.
Wade turned around. “I think the fucker has lost what was left of his sanity.”
“He’s really rubbing our noses in it, which is what this is all about,” Tate said. “I also think he’s losing focus on his original quest, because none of this is triggered by natural disasters anymore. It’s becoming more about one-upping us rather than getting back at the authorities in general.”
Cameron was a short distance away on a phone call, and as soon as he finished, he joined them.
Tate eyed the frown on Cameron’s face. “Everything okay?”
He sighed. “More or less. That was Laura. They were going to send her down here to help set up some new shelters, but I told her not to come. The last thing we need is for him to see her here again, catch on to the fact that we’re a couple and target her next.”
“Was she upset?” Wade asked.
“Let’s just say she didn’t argue.”
The trio shifted their gaze to Jo.
“She’s one tough lady,” Tate said.
Cameron’s eyes narrowed angrily. “Since we have a new body, he’s obviously still in the area, so why haven’t we gotten a hit on his truck?”
Wade shrugged. “He’s good at changing license plates to stay under the radar, so he’s probably changed vehicles, as well.”
“It’s this endless money supply that keeps him moving. If we could only get a handle on where it is and cut it off, it might bring him out in the open,” Tate said.
“Jo says he’s got to have at least one alias besides the Bill Carter name he used back in Louisiana, but she can’t find anything,” Wade said.
“Remember, he was in that mental hospital for over a year after he had his nervous breakdown,” Tate said. “That gave him all kinds of time to plan for extenuating circumstance
s.”
“For a crazy man, he’s crazy smart,” Cameron said.
“The scariest ones usually are,” Wade said. “So, are we done here?”
Tate nodded. “There’s nothing more we can do until we get the autopsy report and see if anything new turns up. Chief Sawyer is sending some of his men out to talk to some of the working girls…see if any of them went missing last night. The victim’s clothes are noticeable, and there’s an odd snake ring on her left hand that someone might recognize. It would help us to get an ID. So far we have two unidentified victims. He feels something needs to stay hidden, so I think the mutilation is to hide their identities from us, since his is no longer unknown. It has to make him nervous, losing his anonymity.”
“We can analyze the man six ways to Sunday, but it’s still not helping us find him. I’m going to tell Jo we’re ready to go,” Wade muttered, and strode off to where she was standing.
“We’re done here for now, anyway,” Tate said, and headed back to their vehicle.
* * *
Gunner had been panhandling on a street corner when the first cop car went by. He’d watched them park and get out with a handful of pictures, and ducked his head and walked the other way. They were always looking for runaways down here. When would they get it through their heads that the young kids didn’t hang out with people like him? Most of them were holed up in some flophouse getting high or had already been picked up by some pimp. They weren’t walking the streets scrounging for food and a dry place to sleep.
Now it was late evening. He was on his way back to the warehouse when he heard that they’d found a woman’s body, and he immediately thought of the man in the van who’d picked up Proud Mary. He wondered if it was her. He knew he could go to the police station and look at the pictures to find out, but he didn’t want to get involved.
Once he reached the warehouse, he went in through a back entrance rather than the front, just in case someone was lying in wait for his arrival, then went up the stairs to the second floor. After a quick look around, he crawled into his packing crate with a half-eaten sandwich and some bruised fruit he’d picked out of a Dumpster behind a restaurant, and ate. He didn’t let himself think about where the food had been, only that it was filling the perennial hole in his gut.
It was long after dark when he heard the sound of shuffling footsteps down below, and then someone coming up the stairs. He told himself maybe it was Teacher, finally coming back from wherever he’d been. But then he heard a grunt, a belch and a groan, and knew whoever it was, he was most likely drunk, which left Teacher out.
“Anybody up here?” someone shouted.
“Yeah!” Gunner yelled out.
“I jus’ wanna place to sleep. Won’t bother no one.”
“Who is it?” Gunner asked.
“It’s me, Fish.”
Gunner relaxed. “Gunner here.”
“Oh…hi, Gunner. Damn shame about Proud Mary, ain’t it?”
“I haven’t heard. What happened to her?”
“They found her body over on the other side of town, close to where they found the other one the night before. Someone said her face had been all cut up so she couldn’t be identified, but the cops were showing pictures of the body, and one of Little Reggie’s girls recognized her ring.”
“Shit,” Gunner said. He lay there for a few minutes, thinking about Teacher and feeling guilty for not checking on him. “Did you see Teacher around today?”
But Fish was already snoring, passed out on the floor.
Gunner took the old chair cushion that was his pillow, rolled it up under his neck and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t get past his guilt over ignoring what he’d seen. Maybe tomorrow, if he saw those cops back on the street, he wouldn’t run away.
* * *
After spending half a day at the library, Hershel was lying low in his new motel room tonight. Without the cover of a thunderstorm, he couldn’t safely find a new victim and dump the body without the danger of being seen.
He’d been at the library on one of their public computers all afternoon trying to find a man he’d once known named Conrad Taliaferro, whom Hershel had called Connie. They’d been on the same floor in the mental hospital.
Unlike Hershel, who’d walked in on his own and had been free to walk out the same way, Connie had been committed by relatives after a lengthy court battle, and could only be dismissed after being cleared by a court-appointed examiner. But that didn’t suit Connie, and one day he told Hershel that he was going to be leaving soon, then hacked into the hospital computers, issued his own dismissal papers and waited for the doctor to come tell him he was free to go. He’d packed his bags, winked once at Hershel as he was leaving the building, and then walked out into the sunlight and disappeared.
Hershel remembered how time and again Connie had talked about wanting to live in the Florida Keys. He’d done a Google search on him and checked the online White Pages looking for a Conrad Taliaferro anywhere in Florida, but to no avail.
Before any more time passed, Hershel needed to find a way to get his money transferred out of the New Orleans bank without alerting the police that it was gone, and if anyone could pull that off, it would be Connie.
He finally went to bed, frustrated by his lack of progress, and decided to go back tomorrow and do some more research. He was almost asleep when he thought maybe the reason he couldn’t find Conrad was because he was no longer alive. Tomorrow he would expand his research to death certificates and see what popped up.
* * *
For the FBI team, getting the identity of the second victim so quickly was the first positive thing that had happened since they’d come to St. Louis. She had been a prostitute who went by the name of Proud Mary. It took a little digging, but they soon learned her real name was Janet Good, originally from Dayton, Ohio, the missing wife of a man named Elton Good, who’d been publicly accused of her murder over fifteen years earlier. Even though the police hadn’t had enough evidence to take him to trial, he’d been shunned by friends, family and neighbors for all those years. Proud Mary’s death had absolved Elton Good of any wrongdoing and put an end to any lingering questions as to what had happened to his wife. He’d even gone so far as to offer to bury her once the police were through with her body.
Wade had been riding a high all day from the pure joy of having Jolene back in his life. And there was the added relief of knowing that if she suddenly disappeared, they had a way to find her.
Jo was back on the computer, trying to link the Bill Carter alias to any of Inman’s financial records. If she could find a money link between Hershel and Bill, then she might be able to find a link from Bill to another alias. They all knew there had never been a hit on his flagged New Orleans bank account, so he had to have money, a lot of money, somewhere else.
The team came back to the suite late in the afternoon and found her still working. She had notes spread out all over the table, along with three empty water bottles and a half-finished can of Diet Dr Pepper. She’d started a sandwich at lunch and abandoned it after two or three bites, and then forgot it was even there.
Wade leaned down and kissed the back of her neck, then whispered in her ear, “Are you going to eat that?”
She blinked, then leaned back and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Wade asked as he picked up the sandwich, smelled it and then took a big bite.
“The sweet nothing you just whispered in my ear has nothing to do with me and everything to do with your stomach.”
He grinned, leaned down and whispered in her ear again, then delighted in the deep flush that rose up her cheeks.
Cameron grinned. “What did you say that time?”
“It had nothing to do with food,” Jo said, and punched Wade on the arm.
This time they all laughed, which lightened the mood consider
ably.
“How’s it going?” Tate asked, eyeing the stack of notes she’d been making.
“It’s not. Either Hershel Inman is a freaking genius at hiding his tracks, or I’ve clearly taken one too many knocks on my head.”
“It’s been said before, but it bears repeating. The man had a long time to plan his revenge. There’s no telling how many false trails he’s laid,” Wade said.
“Well, it’s making me crazy,” Jo said. “I’ve never run into so many dead ends. The only way anyone can hide assets this completely is by creating complete identities. I’m talking Social Security numbers, fake birth certificates, driver’s licenses, health and car insurance in other names, ATM cards—a complete background. And it takes a lot of money to set up accounts in multiple names in different parts of the country. Someone remind me, what the heck did Hershel Inman do for a living before he retired?”
“He was a steelworker in his youth,” Wade said, still working on Jo’s sandwich.
“And he worked for the railroad at one time, too,” Cameron said.
“He was a plumber when he retired,” Tate added.
Jo rolled her eyes. “No wonder he has money. Plumbers charge big bucks just to unclog a sink. Anyway, I made sure the flag was still on his New Orleans account. Money keeps going in, but none is going out. There’s a lot in there, too. Something close to $475,000—about half of which came from insurance on the house he lost in Katrina. Then he has monthly direct deposits from Social Security and two retirement funds.”
Wade tossed a piece of wilted lettuce into the trash, went to get a cold bottle of water and unscrewed the cap. “We found out last year after he was finally identified as the Stormchaser, that his wife had inherited a pretty big sum of money from her parents some years before, and that he’d withdrawn it six months before he began killing, along with more money from another account that his banker said he’d called a vacation fund.”
Jo sighed. “See, even then he was setting up money he could access under other names. I need another piece of the puzzle before I can go any further.”
