TWENTY-SIX

 

 

September 19th, 2016

Outside of Las Vegas, Nevada

 

“SO WHERE IS this killer and how do we run him to ground?” Annie asked.

Lott had no one idea on that question. As far as any of them knew, Paul had killed Mary May and left the country. But Lott actually doubted he would do that. He had been getting away with this for thirty years. And the way he had taunted them up on the property, someone about to run didn’t do that.

“I might be able to help a little on that,” Andor said.

Andor opened the file he had brought with him. “I got all the information from the files of the last twenty missing women and went through it. Plus part of the gang has been interviewing some of the families of the victims and possible witnesses to the abductions.”

“There were witnesses?” Annie asked.

“Not so much up close, but distant, people who heard something, thought they saw something, that sort of thing,” Andor said.

“So you found some patterns?” Lott asked. Patterns had helped them run down more cases in the past than clues. Criminals always worked in patterns and from the looks of this case, Paul and Maxwell were both creatures of schedules and patterns.

“Always a dark blue sedan around the scene,” Andor said. “No make or model, but new and luxury. One witness thought BMW, two thought Jaguar, a number of others called it a Cadillac-like sedan.”

“Any pattern to where they were abducted?” Julia asked.

“Parking lots with cameras that fed to a cloud storage and were out of order,” Andor said. “Every damn one of them.”

Annie grabbed a pen and wrote down a note. “How much do you want to bet my people can track that computer work that put those cameras out of order back to Maxwell.”

“I was hoping you could say that,” Andor said, smiling.

Lott looked at Annie as she finished writing. “Paul would have to have the parking lot scouted out ahead of time. See if your people can get the recordings of the parking lots about five days ahead. We can have a few of the gang scan through them. See if we can pinpoint the car model.”

“Good idea,” she said, continuing to write.

“And also see if the cameras were working when the killer came back to get the woman’s car from the lot,” Julia said. “Chances are they weren’t working since the killer would have to come back quickly for the car, but no way of knowing.”

Lott liked that idea and so did Annie.

“There’s more,” Andor said. “All of the last ten women’s families and friends report that the missing woman had met a benefactor of some sort. Two were looking to get funding for starting a business, two were hoping to get into modeling, four wanted to get jobs on the strip.”

“Did any of these people see this person?”

“Not a one,” Andor said. “But every woman called her Thorn. Usually Mrs. Thorn.”

“Her?” Lott asked at the exact same time as Julia.

Andor nodded. “All of them said the benefactor was a her, a woman trying to help other women in starting up careers.”

Lott just shook his head.

“Paul pretending to be his sister?” Julia asked.

All Lott could do was nod. It was a theory. Unless there was something major they were missing and there was a woman helping in all this.

Lott glanced at his daughter again. “Some of these women had to have done some research on this benefactor,” Lott said.

“Thinking the same thing,” Annie said and jotted that down as well.

“She would have to come up rich and valid,” Julia said.

“Does Maxwell have the computer skills to set all that up?” Andor asked.

“He’s very good,” Annie said, nodding. “So yes. Very likely and something my people should be able to find.”

Lott knew that was a good lead, but a dead end. “Maxwell would never set something up that would actually lead us to Paul, just in case the cover was broken.”

Silence around the table. They all knew he was right.

“Worth looking into anyway,” Annie said. “There might be a hint of truth in the fake identity.”

Lott agreed with that. Often fake identities were parts of a criminal’s real world in some way.

Julia was clearly thinking along the same lines.

“Where did this name Duane Thorn come from?” Julia asked.

“I know the answer to that,” Andor said, smiling, but not saying anything.

Lott just stared at his partner until Andor started talking.

“The deepest body under Becky Penn has been identified as a woman by the name of Carrie Thorn. She vanished a year ahead of Becky.”

“She was married?” Julia said. “Right?”

Lott looked at her, surprised.

Andor nodded and took out a wedding picture of Carrie Thorn and her husband, D. James Thorn and slid it across the table.

It was dated a few years after Paul’s sister died.

And D. James Thorn was, of course, Paul Vaughan.

Lott wasn’t surprised at that, but he was surprised at the fact that Paul had married and stayed married to his first victim for almost a year.

“So why the Thorn name?” Annie asked after staring at the picture.”

“Paul clearly wanted to honor his great-grandfather on his mother’s side. Duane James Thorn,” Andor said. “The man founded a major nudist colony in Florida in the 1920s. And wrote a number of books on free love and the expression of love among families.”

“Cult leader?” Julia asked.

“From everything I can gather on short notice, yes,” Andor said.

“I’ll have my people dig into it more,” Annie said. “It might give us a hint as to where Paul is living if he is patterning his life after his great-grandfather.”

“Good idea,” Julia said.

“Yeah, really good,” Andor said.

Finally, some of this was making sense to Lott.

Paul must have taken on the beliefs of his great-grandfather, through teachings of his family. And more than likely tried to get his first wife involved. Lott could only imagine that she objected, especially when Paul wanted her to have sex with him and Maxwell at the same time, like they used to do with Paul’s sister.

So Paul must have killed her like his sister had died and that started the entire pattern that took the lives of many women over thirty years.

So they had a solid theory on the why this was all happening and they were pretty sure they knew who the killer was.

Now they needed the where.

Where the hell was Paul Vaughan, aka Duane Thorn, hiding and holding Mary May.

And how could they get to him without spooking him and having him kill Mary May?

Lott had no idea at all where they would find answers to those questions.