“On the basis of what information?”
“Marlie,” he wanted to say, but he didn’t. He contented himself with replying, “He never left an area so soon before. We’re going with his established pattern.”
“The mayor wants to know, and so do I, just what you’re doing with your time. If there is no evidence, just what in hell are you doing?”
Dane’s face had taken on a stony look. Trammell saw the signs of an incipient loss of temper and stepped in. “We’ve received lists of names from the utility companies on new customers for the past year, and we’re working our way down the list, investigating all the men on it. With the profile the FBI gave us, we’ll be able to narrow it down to a few possibilities.”
Chief Champlin was from the old school. He didn’t like Trammell’s slick sophistication, his money, his snappy clothes, or his exotic looks. He did, however, respect the political ties that Trammell had in the city, courtesy of that same money. He growled a reply along the lines of “They’d better come up with something soon, or else,” and left Bonness’s office.
Bonness sighed and pulled out a handkerchief to blot his forehead. “Shit. Anything on those names we’re running?”
“Nothing that sets off any alarms, but we still have a lot of names to go.”
“Okay. Let me know the minute you hear bells.”
“Will do.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dane said between his teeth as they returned to their desks.
“Calm down, partner. He doesn’t know what we know, because we can’t tell him about Marlie. I don’t think he’d understand.”
“Bonness was right.” Cold fury was still in Dane’s voice and eyes. “These bastards won’t be satisfied until another woman is killed.”
Janes made good use of his time at night. He found a secure place to leave his car, he checked out the situation with the neighbor’s dogs. There were two, but one of them tended to bark at everything, and the other, across the street, would join him. The barking usually elicited no more than a few irritable “Shut ups.”
Marilyn Elrod was a party girl. She was out hitting the bars almost every night, which may have been the reason Mr. Elrod was no longer living there. So far, though, she hadn’t brought anyone home with her. Her active night life gave him plenty of opportunity to make sure things were perfect.
Her night life also gave him a means of getting into the house. Thick shrubbery grew all along the house, right up to the garage. She had a habit of backing into the garage, so she could just drive right out whenever she left; since she was facing ahead, it was child’s play for him to slip from his hiding place in the shrubbery into the garage, before the automatic door closed. She never looked back.
The door leading from the garage into the utility room wasn’t wired into the security system, though the door from outside into the garage was. It was locked, but locks weren’t a problem for him. It was another skill he had taught himself, with the aid of a mail-order locksmithing course that he had taken under an alias, just as a precaution. Another little detail he had foreseen and taken care of.
The first time he entered the house he had simply walked around and familiarized himself with it. He kept himself calm, not letting anticipation trick him into acting before he was really ready, as he had the last time.
The second time, he explored more. He opened her closets and went through her clothes, deciding that her taste seemed frozen in the eighties singles-bar style. She spent a fortune on makeup, he noticed, prowling through her bathroom vanity.
He satisfied himself that there were no guns in the house. Guns could be a big problem.
Then, humming to himself, he explored the kitchen. She wasn’t much on cooking; the refrigerator held mostly microwave stuff. But she had catered to the fashion of having a large rack of butcher’s knives standing on the shiny black countertop, something he had counted on. Since she cooked so little, it wasn’t likely that she would miss a knife. He examined each knife, tsking at the dulled edges on the stainless steel blades. Most women no longer had any pride in the domestic skills, which he deplored. If she had kept her knives in good condition, he wouldn’t have to take the slight but admitted risk of removing one of them so he could put a proper edge on it.
All in all, he severely disapproved of Marilyn Elrod.
“Come to the house for dinner with Grace and me tonight,” Trammell said on Friday.
Dane leaned back in his chair. He was so sick of the damn lists on his desk that he wanted to cram them all into the trash. He never would have believed that so many people had moved into the Orlando area in the past year. What really pissed him off was that they weren’t turning up a damn thing. He was glad the weekend had come, though he and Trammell were on call.
“It’s Friday,” he reminded Trammell.
“So? You have to eat on Fridays the same as any other day, don’t you?”
“Marlie gets pretty tense on Fridays.”
“Then it will do her good to take her mind off things. If she has a vision, she can have it just as well at my house as at hers.”
“Okay, let me call her.”
Marlie advanced the same arguments that he had, and he gave her the same answers Trammell had given him. She really didn’t need much convincing, because she had spent the week dreading the approaching weekend. Dinner with Trammell and Grace would be a welcome distraction.
She had spent a few of her lunch hours shopping this past week, and for the first time wore one of her new outfits that evening. Trammell had said to dress casually, and she did, but the slim, white cotton pants and sleeveless white vest were very fetching, if she did say so herself. Dane shared the opinion. When she came out of the bedroom, his gaze settled on her bare shoulders and the deep vee of the neckline. “Are you wearing a bra?” he asked in a strained voice.