Disheartened and anxious, Melanie trudged back to her office to find Detective Pauline Estrada still there, on the telephone, with a worried look on her face.
“I’m on endless hold,” Pauline announced, “but have I got news for you.”
“I’ve got news, too. Bad news. We lost the bail hearing.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. The judge let Welch out on home confinement. He has to wear an ankle bracelet. That’s the thing that Martha Stewart bragged on national television that she knew how to take off.”
“Don’t get upset.”
“Don’t get upset? Pauline, if I’m lucky, when he breaks out of his apartment, a little bell will sound in an office somewhere, so that when they fish my body out of the East River, some bureaucrat will go, ‘Oh, that’s what that noise was.’”
“Not that this is going to make you feel any better,” Pauline said, “but Welch isn’t the only guy you should be worrying about.”
“Why do you say that?”
“While you were gone, a couple of agents stopped by to deliver copies of a file from your search yesterday,” Pauline said.
“Agents Waterman and Mills?”
“Sounds right. Anyway, I was sitting here with nothing better to do, and I knew the file was about Welch, so I sneaked a peek. Hope that was okay.”
“An extra pair of eyes in a case like this is a blessing, Pauline. What’d you find out?” Melanie asked.
“Nothing you wouldn’t have found yourself the second you read my file on the Tulsa boys’-home arson. The man convicted for the Cheryl Driscoll murder, do you remember his name?”
“Sure. Edward Allen Harvey. I was thinking I should fly out to California and interview him. Ha, in all my spare time.”
Pauline pointed at the telephone she held against his ear. “I’m on hold with Pelican Bay right now.”
“Pelican Bay?”
“The maximum security facility in Northern California where Harvey was doing a fifteen-to-life bid.”
“Was?” Melanie asked, with a sinking feeling.
“Harvey was released four weeks ago. Fifteen years doesn’t equal fifteen years when you subtract out good time and so forth.”
“Where is he now?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. They’re supposed to know. He was convicted of a sex crime. Second-degree murder and sexual assault. That means he was required to register as a sex offender and give notice of his address.”
“Did he?”
Pauline shrugged and gestured hopelessly at the phone.
“Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?” Melanie asked.
“Because you have good instincts,” Pauline said. “The second I saw Harvey’s name, I made the connection. Edward Allen Harvey was one of the delinquents who absconded after the arson at the boys’ home. The news accounts said that he was the biggest troublemaker in the place, too, the one they suspected of killing the boy and setting the fire.”
“Harvey had two rape convictions before he was ever arrested on the Driscoll murder,” Melanie said. “And we have signature mutilations in the two murders. Carving a nasty word on the victim’s stomach is a highly unusual move. We’re looking at the same killer. Or killers. I knew that as soon as I read about the Driscoll case. The only difference is, I was thinking it was Welch. But maybe it was Welch and Harvey together.”
Pauline held up her finger and sat up straighter in her chair. “Here we go! Yes, hello, I’m still here…Huh, really?…What do you normally do in a case like that?…. I see. Well, pardon my French, but that sucks.”
Pauline fell silent while the person on the other end of the line spoke at some length. She took a few notes. At one point, Melanie caught her eye, and Pauline shook her head and made a disappointed face. Finally, she hung up.
“Well?” Melanie asked.
“In the wind. They don’t have the first fricking clue where he is. But here’s something interesting. You know who visited Harvey in jail the weekend before he was released?” Pauline asked.
“Who?’
“Suzanne Shepard. She must have tracked down the Driscoll case somehow, and come to the same conclusion you did, that Welch was in on it. So she went all the way to California to interview Harvey.”
“All she accomplished was attracting their attention. She dug her own grave.” Melanie picked up the group photo from the boys’ home, which had been lying on her desk. “Which one is Harvey?” she asked.
“Top row, far left.”
Melanie looked at the boy in the picture, who was big and blond and moon-faced, and the hair all over her body stood on end. “I’ve seen him before!” she said.
Pauline gasped. “Oh my God! Where?”
Melanie smacked herself on the forehead. “Shit. I don’t know, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”