Split Second

by Catherine Coulter

  “But you saved yourself,” Coop said, and patted her hand when it looked like her eyes were going to roll back in her head. “You’re going to be okay.”

  After another fifteen minutes of running her through what had happened again, asking questions every way they could phrase them, asking them again, and waving away Dr. Medelin when he came back to the room and frowned at them, they knew her bucket was empty. Lucy said, “We understand you gave an excellent description of this guy to a police artist. We’ll get back to you on that.

  “You did really good, Liz. With the lovely DNA you got for us, we’re closer to bringing this monster down.”

  “Weird thing is, like I told you, it was my mom who really saved my bacon. She’s so messed up, and now—what’s a daughter to do?”

  “Keep bailing her out, I guess,” Lucy said, and smiled down at her.

  “Nah,” Coop said. “You owe her something better. It’s time for some tough love. Send her to rehab, tell her it’s that or jail time.”

  They left Liz Rogers humming in thought. They passed Dr. Medelin coming out of a patient’s room on a dead run. A nurse, Nancy Conklin according to her name tag, said, “Poor Mark, the E.R. called a code. He’s been on call for twenty-six hours now.”

  “I didn’t know doctors still had such grueling schedules,” Lucy said.

  “He’s a first-year resident,” and Lucy supposed, that said it all.

  “He looks sleep deprived,” Coop said.

  Nurse Conklin said, nodding, “Imagine how many patients suffer from that fact. Liz Rogers now, Mark’s been hovering over her even though he knows now she’s going to be okay. I think he’s interested in her, not that he’s got a second to spare away from this place. Sometimes life’s a bummer.”

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

  CHAPTER 11

  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.”

  Savich said, “I know the profilers think she may have started late because her mother didn’t tell her the identity of her father until she was older. Let’s hope so, but we don’t know that.”

  Ollie said, “She could have killed and buried the bodies deep. But then, why is she coming out into the open now? Was there a specific trigger, like it appears there was with Bundy? Was she leading a fairly normal life until a few months ago?”

  Everyone chewed this over.

  Jack said, “I wonder if she visits her victims’ graves, like Bundy did?”

  “That’s not all Bundy did to his dead victims,” Lucy said, and shuddered.

  Savich said, “Good points. Now, MAX is working on photos. We’ll meet back here in a couple of hours.”

  Ten minutes later, Savich’s cell blasted out George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.”

  “Ben Raven here, Savich. Remember your hairy shoot-out at Shop ’n Go last week? I’ve got some news for you.”

  “You put nail screws to the guy in the hospital, Ben, made him talk?”

  “Nope, not yet. When you shot him in the shoulder, the bullet did more damage than expected. He’s still in pretty bad shape. His name is Thomas Wenkel, and the Chevy Impala is registered to him, not to the woman, an Elsa Heinz.

  “I called you because last night someone shot your Mr. Patil at the Shop ’n Go during what looks like another robbery. No witnesses, not a soul around, no one even heard the shot. Evidently he’d just turned off the lights and was locking the back door when someone simply walked up to him and shot him in the back. His wallet was missing, and the bank-deposit money bag was gone. A beat cop in Georgetown had been doing drive-bys past Shop ’n Go after the robbery attempt last week. The officer saw the store was closed, but he saw Mr. Patil’s car was still there, and investigated.

  “Mr. Patil is seventy-five years old, Savich, weighs maybe one hundred thirty pounds on a fat day. It’s hard to believe, but he survived three hours of surgery. It’s still no sure thing he’ll survive, and the doctors don’t want to commit. His condition’s listed as critical.”

  Savich said, “And you’re wondering why a robber would shoot an old man in the back when all he’d have to do is maybe tap his jaw with his fist and take the bank-deposit bag.”

  “Makes me wonder.”

  “I’m trying to remember Thomas Wenkel’s exact behavior when he had the gun aimed at Mr. Patil that Tuesday night. Was he there to kill him, and just faked robbing the store? Hard to say. Of course, there was the woman—Elsa Heinz—waiting in the car. She sure came in fast, ready to kill everyone in sight. What do you have on her, Ben?”

  “Elsa isn’t what you’d call a nice person. She’d been in and out of jail all of her adult life—robbery, hijacking, all sorts of scams. I haven’t found out how she and Wenkel got together.”

  “Okay, I’ll think about it, Ben. Do you mind if I speak to Mr. Patil when he’s cogent? Speak to his kids and his wife?”

  “He might not make it, Savich, but if he does, have at it. I can use all the help I can get on this.”

  “I have this feeling Mr. Patil will pull through. I’ll keep in touch, Ben.”

  “We can compare notes later.”

  “You’ve got a guard on Mr. Patil?”

  “Yes, I got it approved for a couple of days, at least. Officer Horne’s a young guy but smart, I’ve been told. He’ll keep the old man safe.”

  Savich hoped very much that Mr. Patil, a nice man with photos of all his grandchildren and great-grandchildren stuffing his wallet, would be ringing up beer sales again sometime soon.

  What were the chances of another random robbery in that neighborhood if the first shooting really was a robbery? And only one week later? Savich thought about coincidence. And he thought about death, always hovering close, and whoever knew when it would tap you on the shoulder?

  It wasn’t a second robbery; he knew it.

  CHAPTER 12

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  Thursday evening

  Lucy fit her grandmother’s beautifully carved key into the front door. It was a dark, cold night, winter making an early call, nearly midnight. She was tired and sad, and every couple of seconds she thought of her father and wanted to weep. At least she’d managed to get back to all her friends during the day, telling them she needed more time to herself, and moving herself into her grandmother’s house was good for her. Did they believe her? She hoped so.

  She, Coop, Jack, Dane, and Ruth had visited The Swarm, a bar not too far from the Hoover Building that catered to federal cops, and they’d talked about Bundy and speculated endlessly about his daughter—who she was, who her mother was, what it was about her terrifying father that could help with the case. So far, she hadn’t tortured any of her victims, and there were other huge departures from Bundy Senior. The most important question was: Had she killed when she was younger? Dane had called Inspector Vincent Delion of the San Francisco PD, a homicide detective he knew personally, to see if they had any unsolveds, going back, say, fifteen years, that could possibly be her work.

  Savich had told Lucy not to come in again until Friday afternoon. He said he wanted her to finish her moving, but what he really wanted was to give her more time on her own. All right, then, she could sleep in, and that meant she didn’t need to go to bed yet. She wanted to keep going through every scrap of paper in her grandmother’s study. Twenty-two years before, she wondered, had it been her grandfather’s study? She couldn’t remember.

  At times she was tempted to convince herself that she’d misinterpreted what her father had said when he was dying, that it was a hallucination or a nightmare of some kind, and not a son witnessing his own father’s murder, by his own mother, but she’d known instantly it was the truth. Had he kept it a secret until the last moments of his life, when that long-ago horror had blasted into his mind? Would he ever have told her? She didn’t think so, despite the fact she was a cop, and maybe that was why—she was a cop. If he had told her, she would have had to decide whether to act on it, come what may. No, if he’d had final control of his mind, he’d have gone to his grave protecting his mother. And maybe himself? Had he agreed to keep quiet because he believed his mother was somehow justified in killing his father? Had her grandfather done something despicable? And did anyone else know? Her Uncle Alan, perhaps.

  Lucy brewed herself some strong tea, swallowed two aspirin, a good way to prevent a hangover for her, and walked to the study, a large, high-ceilinged room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering three walls. The fourth wall was a huge sliding door that opened onto a small enclosed garden where her grandmother had placed a small round table w
ith a bright red umbrella, and a single cushioned chair. Lucy remembered she’d spent a good deal of time sitting beneath that red umbrella on nice days, simply sitting there alone, reading there sometimes, enjoying the beautiful flowers. It seemed very strange, somehow not right, that all of this was to be hers now, as her father’s only heir.

  She looked at the large desk. Three unexplored drawers to go, then she’d check again for any secret drawers or hidden spaces. The next drawers were filled with papers in neatly tabbed folders, just like the other drawers, but these tab names were very different from the banks, utilities, charities, and the like that had filled the others. No, these folder tabs read H. G. Wells, Tetra Time—whatever that was—and names of people she’d never heard of who turned out to be psychics, mystics, and science-fiction writers.

  Lucy thumbed through the Tetra Time folder. It seemed her grandmother had culled a huge number of publications and books, from the conventional to the wild fringe, and thrown them all into these files. It was a surprise. Her grandmother had never spoken to her about an interest in such strange things. It didn’t seem like her, not her self-contained, serene grandmother. Were you a secret Trekkie, Grandmother?

  Get a move on, time’s a-wasting. She couldn’t find anything that gave a clue about why her grandmother had murdered her husband.

  Lucy pulled open the last big drawer. On top was a thick folder, untabbed, filled with articles about ancient types of magic that supposedly affected the passage of time itself. Magic? Time? Where had her grandmother found these things? She leafed through folders about people bending spoons, about speaking to a loved one on the other side, interviews with people who’d seen the famous white light before returning from the brink. She quickly looked through more folders about extraterrestrials, alien abductions, experiences with ghosts, hair-raising tales of all kinds. She wondered if her grandmother was losing it at the end. She thought of her father and wondered if he’d seen the white light before he’d died. Lucy shook herself. She remembered the old movie Ghost with Patrick Swayze and felt gooseflesh rise on her arms. She remembered now that her grandmother had spoken to her once about psychic sorts of things. She had asked Lucy if she ever felt the slightest hint of anything unusual. “Like what?” Lucy had asked. And her grandmother had said, “Maybe seeing unusual sorts of things about the future?” Did she ever know what people were thinking before they said it? Lucy had thought it nothing more than a game, and after she’d said no, there’d been no more unusual conversations with her grandmother, so she’d forgotten about it.