Cole snuck down the stairs and into the garage of the home he shared with Frau Newhouse. He figured his stealth was improving since she didn’t wake up and try to talk him into staying for breakfast. Then again, it could be the fact that it was just after four a.m. It had only been three hours since he’d slipped into his warm bed. Now, he wore sweatpants over his swim trunks and an old Marquette sweatshirt under his winter coat. He carried his suit, shirt, and tie for the day, along with a gym bag.
He hung his suit up in the backseat of his car and threw the gym bag in beside it. He settled into the driver seat and fired up the Charger, backing out and heading for the YMCA. During a major case his sleep, diet, and exercise were all catch-as-catch can. His stomach rumbled, but he almost never ate breakfast. No three squares for him. His eating habits were more like a wolf’s or a big cat’s. He might not eat on a schedule, but when he did stop to eat, he didn’t hold back. It might not be “dietitian recommended,” but it worked for him.
His sleep was more haphazard when he was in the middle of a big case. He could get by on a couple hours’ a night for several weeks on end, seemingly no worse for wear. But when a big case ended, he crashed. Then he slept most of forty-eight hours straight, waking to go to the bathroom and maybe get a drink. Now he craved exercise, and not the fast-paced running and biking he’d done the night before. He turned into the underground parking lot of the downtown Y and found a space near the door. He grabbed his clothes and bag, punched in the electronic code at the employee entrance, and let himself into the building.
At four fifteen a.m., Cole had the massive structure to himself. Management liked having him around and let him have the run of the building. He paid his dues and made a nice annual donation on top of it, and he made good use of his “before-and-after-hours” access on days like today.
In the dim safety light, he headed straight for the sauna after stowing his suit and gear. He wanted to feel the dry heat and the closed-in feel of the small wooden confines. The cavernous building’s thermostat was set at fifty-five degrees in the off hours and would automatically kick up to sixty-eight degrees at five-thirty a.m. Cole was a little chilly in his swimming suit and he savored the wall of heat as he opened the sauna door. He shut the thick wooden door behind him and it closed with a shhhhhh. He sat on a bench in the softly lit room and it brought back memories of being in the confessional years ago. It made him wonder if he should press Father Wagner harder. The killer could have confessed the murders to the priest and he would be unable to share that with anyone according to the laws of the Catholic Church. At least that’s how Cole remembered it. He had begun to trust and even like Father Wagner, but he made a mental note to ask the priest about it directly to see how he reacted.
He rinsed off in the shower before slipping into the Olympic size lap pool. He lifted his head and leaned back, drifting for a moment. The massive round clock on the north end of the pool read four thirty-five. The sun was still almost three hours from rising as he shook out his arms and shoulders and adjusted his goggles.
He began a steady crawl toward the deep end of the pool. The slap of his cupped hands knifing the water and the splash of his feet were rhythmic white noise easy to ignore yet soothing at the same time. The pool area was lit by murky overhead lights, and the pool itself by oval lights that ringed the water’s edge and shimmered a foot or so below the surface.
He reached the deep end and pushed off with his feet back in the opposite direction. If his goggles didn’t leak in the first length, the seal would be okay for the next sixty-nine he planned to churn out. Seventy lengths, or thirty-five laps, put him over the two-mile mark and brought him to a level of exhaustion or weariness that stripped away his normal thought process. The monotony of the swim, the rhythm of his strokes, the cadence of the splashing…all had a way of allowing his mind to wander and to shift focus at the same time. Like a good athlete letting the game come to him, he pulled through the water waiting for the answers to find him.
He made four strokes for every breath he took, eating up the laps. His mind finally felt almost anesthetized as he counted off the laps, navigating by the painted line on the pool bottom. His eyes stared at the thick line, seeing and unseeing. He sifted through key chunks and tiny fragments of the case while he pulled himself through the water.
The first crime scene came into view, with Smith’s body heaved over the snowbank. The second scene followed, with the pool of blood spreading out from under Dr. Martin, thick and sticky. He saw the rifles, the cigarette butts, and the deer blood. He tried to picture the killer, short and thick. He couldn’t help but see his old friend, Fwam Vang, but he forced that image away. He was halfway through his sixty-eighth lap when he first noticed boot prints faintly on the pool’s bottom. The Y must have completed maintenance on the pool recently. Maybe they drained the pool and scrubbed the bottom, Cole thought, probably with some kind of strong bleach or cleaner. In the dim lighting, the prints of the worker’s boots were barely visible. Still, the prints crowded out Cole’s other thoughts, as he started on his last two laps. He tried to pick up the tread pattern, but couldn’t make it out in any detail. He reached, kicked, and breathed and tried to focus. He sensed the importance of the moment and tried to slow his breathing, to relax, and let a conclusion come to him. The prints were narrow, so much so that they must be pulled over a bare or stocking foot.
He touched the wall after his final lap, took a deep breath, and sank slowly to rest on the pool’s bottom in just three feet of water. They had matched the boot prints found at the second murder scene to a pair of L. L. Bean’s Snow Boots in a woman’s size seven. The treads matched exactly. The Bureau had checked every other style that L.L. Bean made and no other boot matched the tread. So, what had they missed? Still sitting on the bottom of the pool’s shallow end, Cole surveyed the boot prints once more. He imagined the guy who cleaned an empty pool wore rubber boots without liners…and an idea came to him. What if the killer took out the big felt liners before pulling on the PAC boots?
He stood, his lungs drawing in air, water streaming down his chest and arms. He thought about it more, absently moving toward the ladder and out of the pool. He got into the shower and cranked on the hot water. If the killer wore those L.L. Bean Snow Boots without the liners they would provide little more protection from the cold than the liner-less boots the pool cleaner had worn. And it was cold the night of the Martin murder. The temperature was close to zero. If the killer wore those boots without the liners, Cole reasoned, his feet might freeze but he would leave a boot print in the snow that would be several sizes smaller than his real boot size. Maybe they should be looking for a guy who was a little taller and quite a bit thinner.
It felt right. It wouldn’t be practical to wear PAC boots without the heavy liners in the winter, especially if you might need to stay still for an hour or more in freezing weather before taking your shot. But that’s exactly why the shooter would have done it, to throw off the FBI and others trying to stop him. That was the one constant in this case; everything the killer did was designed to send his hunters away from him.
Cole excitedly toweled himself dry and dressed. He checked his phone for messages as he shut his locker. Michele had texted him minutes before.
I have another email from the killer.