“The map may not show old industrial sites that have been closed. I’ll check with the State Department and see if they have anything.”

“Don’t forget Maryland and D.C.”

Tully jotted notes on the McDonald’s brown paper sack that had held his breakfast; a sausage biscuit and hash browns. For a brief moment he tried to remember the last meal he had eaten that hadn’t come from a bag. Maybe he’d take Emma somewhere nice for lunch. No fast food. Somewhere with tablecloths.

When he turned back, O’Dell was back at the table. He looked over her shoulder at the crime scene photos she had sorted. Without looking at him, she said in almost a whisper, “We need to find them, Agent Tully. We need to find them very soon or it’ll be too late.”

He didn’t need to ask who she meant. She was talking about the McGowan woman, and also her neighbor, Rachel Endicott. Tully still wasn’t convinced either woman was missing, let alone taken by Stucky. He didn’t share his doubts with O’Dell, nor did he share with her that he had talked to Detective Manx in Newburgh Heights. With any luck Manx would find it in his stubborn, isolationist pig head to share whatever evidence he recovered from the Endicott house. Though Tully didn’t expect much. Detective Manx had told him the case was nothing more than a bored housewife running off with a telephone repairman.

He hated to think Manx might be right. Tully shook his head. What was it with married women these days? He didn’t like being reminded of Caroline for the second time that morning.

“If you are right about Tess McGowan and the Endicott woman,” Tully said, careful to keep his own doubts aside, “that means Stucky has killed two women and taken two others in a span of only one week. Are you sure Stucky could pull that off?”

“It would be tough but not impossible. He would have had to take Rachel Endicott early last Friday. Then come back to Newburgh Heights, watch Jessica deliver my pizza, lure her to the house on Archer Drive and kill her late Friday evening or early Saturday morning.”

“Doesn’t that seem like a bit much?”

“Yes,” she admitted, “but not for Stucky.”

“Then somehow he finds out that you’d be in KC. Even finds out where you’re staying. Again, he watches you, Delaney and Turner with the waitress—”

“Rita.”

“Right, Rita. That was what, Sunday night?”

“Around midnight…actually early Monday morning. If Delores Heston is correct, Tess showed the house on Archer Drive Wednesday.” She avoided Tully’s eyes. “I know it sounds like a lot, but keep in mind what he’s done in the past.”

She started sorting through the photos again. “It’s never been easy to track. Some of the bodies were found much later, long after they were reported missing. Most of them were so badly decomposed we could only guess at the time of deaths. But the spring before we caught him, we estimated that he killed two women, leaving them in Dumpsters, and that he had taken five others for his collection. That was all in the span of two or three weeks. At least that’s the time frame that the women were first discovered missing. We didn’t find those five bodies until months later, and they were all in one mass grave. The women had been tortured and killed at different intervals. There were signs that he may have even hunted down a couple of them. We found evidence that he may have used a crossbow and arrows.”

Tully recognized the photos. O’Dell had laid out a series of Poloraids that chronicled one victim’s wounds. If the photos hadn’t been marked, it would be difficult to tell that they were all the same woman. This was one of those five victims who had been found in that mass grave. The corpse was one of the rare ones found before decomposition or before animals had ravaged it. It was one of the few that was intact and whole.

“This was Helen Kreski,” O’Dell said without looking up the name. “She was one of the five. Stucky choked and stabbed her repeatedly. Her left nipple had been bitten off. Her right arm and wrist were broken. There was a puncture through her left calf with a broken arrow still intact.” O’Dell’s voice was calm, too calm, as though she had resolved herself to something beyond her control. “We found dirt in her lungs. She was still alive when he buried her.”

“Christ, this is one sick son of a bitch.”

“We need to stop him, Agent Tully. We need to do it before he crawls back into a hole someplace. Before he runs off and hides and starts playing with his new collection.”

“And we’ll do that. We just need to find out where the hell he’s hiding.” He didn’t want to notice that she had used the word stop instead of catch.

He left her side and checked his watch again.

“I need to leave around eleven. I promised my daughter we’d have lunch together.” O’Dell had moved back to the reports they had received from Ganza. She had the fingerprint analysis and was reading it over for the third time. He wondered if she had even heard him. “Hey, why don’t you join us?”

She glanced up, surprised by his invitation.

“I still think the print was left by someone who looked at the house earlier,” he said, referring to the fingerprint report and taking her off the hook if she really didn’t want to accept his invitation.

“He wiped down everything in the bathroom,” she said, “but he missed two clean and whole fingerprints. No, he wanted us to find these. He’s done it before. It was how we finally confirmed who he was.”

He watched her rub her eyes as if the memory brought on a whole new fatigue.

“At that time, we had no name, no idea who The Collector was,” she continued. “Stucky evidently thought we were taking too long to figure it out. I think he left us a print on purpose. It was so blatant, so careless, it had to be on purpose.”

“Well, if this one was on purpose, why bother to clean up the place at all? He never seemed to care before.”

“Maybe he cleaned up because he wanted to use the house again.”

“For McGowan?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. But why bother to leave us a print that doesn’t even belong to him? Just like on the Dumpster behind the pizza place and on the umbrella in Kansas City.”

O’Dell hesitated, stopping her hands from shuffling papers and looking at him as if wondering whether or not to tell him something. “Keith hasn’t been able to find a match for those prints in AFIS. But he says he’s almost certain all three sets of prints belong to the same person.”

“You’re kidding. He knows that for sure? If that’s the case, maybe these murders aren’t Stucky, after all.”

He stared at her, waiting for some kind of reaction. Her face remained impassive, just like her voice when she said, “Jessica’s murder and Rita’s in Kansas City are awfully close together. I know I just said that Stucky could pull it off, but the anal penetration with Jessica is not Stucky’s M.O. Also, she’s much younger than any of his other victims.”

“So what are you saying, O’Dell. You think this one was a copycat?”

“Or an accomplice.”

“What? That’s crazy!”

She buried her eyes in the files again. He could see she was having a difficult time with the theory herself. O’Dell was used to working and brainstorming alone. Suddenly he realized that it probably took a good deal of trust for her to share this idea with him.

“Look, I know you’re serious, but why would Stucky take on an accomplice? You have to admit, that’s out of character for any serial killer.”

In reply, O’Dell pulled out several photocopied pages that looked like magazine and newspaper articles and handed them to Tully.

“Remember Cunningham said he found the name Walker Harding, Stucky’s old business partner, on an airline manifest?”

Tully nodded and began sorting through the articles.

“Some of those go back several years,” she told him.

They were articles from Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, PC World and several other business and trade periodicals. The Forbes article included a picture. Though the grainy black-and-white copy had obliterated most of the men’s features, the two of them could have passed for brothers. Both had dark hair, narrow faces and sharp features. Tully recognized Albert Stucky’s piercing black eyes, which he knew to be void of color despite the poor reproduction. The younger man smiled while Stucky’s face remained stoic and serious.