Chapters (48)
- also by patricia cornwell
- title page
- copyright
- dedication
- contents
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- two nights later
- credits
She isn’t going to talk about Toby in front of Machado. She’s got something to tell me.
“Slants differently, and you can see where the person hesitated,” she says. “Thinking it instead of doing it, and the line is slightly crooked, the shaft is. Plus, her t has a high cross bar and the other doesn’t. Her a is well formed, and the other’s not. Her n looks more like a w, and the tops are pointed, and the other’s rounded.” She shows us as she describes it, adding, “Just my thoughts. I’m not an expert.”
“You ever testify in court about this stuff?” Machado can’t take his eyes off her.
“I never testify in court about anything.”
“I don’t get it. You’d be great in court.”
“They can’t stipulate me.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t answer. Lucy was fired by law enforcement. She’s a hacker. A shrewd attorney would destroy her on the witness stand.
“What’s going on?” I say to her, since she’s the one who has been texting, saying she needs to see me.
“When you’re done?” It’s her way of telling me that Sil Machado needs to leave.
thirty
thirty
LUCY EXPLAINS THAT PEGGY STANTON IS CONNECTED TO the paleontologist missing in Alberta, Canada.
The fake Twitter page used to dupe Marino was set up by the same person who e-mailed the video clip of the jetboat on the Wapiti River, my niece says. The footage was recorded on Emma Shubert’s iPhone around the time she vanished thousands of miles northwest of here.
“The Twitter account with the handle Pretty Please was opened August twenty-fifth, and Twitter verified it by e-mail sent to BLiDedwood.” Lucy spells the username. “The avatar is a photo of Yvette Vickers when she was in her heyday in the fifties.”
I reply I don’t know who that is, as I look around the space my niece is in.
“A B-list actress Marino wouldn’t be familiar with. I wasn’t, either. I had to use facial-recognition software to figure it out,” Lucy says. “She’s believed to have died of natural causes in 2010, was dead the better part of a year before her body was discovered in her run-down Los Angeles home. She was mummified.”
“It’s probably not a coincidence that she was picked for the avatar.” I think of what Benton said.
A serial killer. Someone older. He targets mature women who represent someone powerful he’s obsessed with destroying.
“All Marino’s going to see when he gets the first tweet from Peggy Lynn Stanton is a picture of a beautiful sexy woman,” Lucy is saying. “Someone who describes herself as into things old with character and she doesn’t mind keeping score because hers is impressive.”