Of course, there was only one big black pickup truck. There could only be one big black pickup truck.
The call was picked up, and Gregor prepared himself to hear Rhonda Alvarez’s standard canned message. Instead, a very soft female voice with a back-of-the-throat nasal Ohio twang said, “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Alvarez speaking.”
“Oh,” Gregor Demarkian said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting to actually get you. This is Gregor Demarkian. I—”
“I know who you are, Mr. Demarkian. Everybody knows who you are. The man who started the Behavioral Sciences Unit.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. “That was a long time ago. I don’t do work like that anymore.”
“You don’t work on serial killers?”
“Not if I can help it. They’re enormously depressing and enormously trite.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s always the same story,” Gregor said. “Haven’t you noticed that? A true serial killer, what we mean when we say a serial killer—not some woman who’s murdered her last four husbands for the insurance money, but the guys with signatures and sexual sadism. They all have the same story. Over and over and over again. You start on one of those cases and you know the beginning, the middle, and the end. The only thing you don’t know is the particular kink, and the kinks are all essentially boring, just gross. If you see what I mean.”
“Oh,” Rhonda Alvarez said. She obviously did not see what he meant. She cleared her throat. “Kurt Delano said you wanted to know about the Chester Morton case. There isn’t much to know, not really. I mean, we did run a couple of checks, but we didn’t find much. And that was about it.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “One of those cases where it took a while to accept that a missing person might be more than a missing person. Except that in this case, your instincts were right. He was just a missing person.”
“A grown man can go missing if he wants to,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “If he doesn’t leave a lot of debts behind, or abandon a family, and if he isn’t wanted by the police—well, there’s nothing illegal about him just taking off. There’s nothing illegal about it even if he does abandon a family. Adults get to decide where they want to be.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “I totally agree with you. At the moment, however, the man showed up and was no longer missing, but was also no longer alive. And I’m sitting not fifty yards from two more bodies, each of them shot at least three times. So I’d really like to know anything you can tell me, and I’d really appreciate it if you could run a check for me.”
“A personal check.”
“That’s the kind.”
“On who?”
“On Chester Morton. Except he wouldn’t have been calling himself that. The name isn’t going to be much use. I may have something better than a name in half an hour or so. I’m pretty sure we just found his truck.”
“Ah,” Rhonda Alvarez said.
“It had the two bodies in it,” Gregor said.
“But Chester Morton couldn’t have killed them, because he’s dead. He’s been dead for, what?”
“Close to a month, I think. Did you ever check out any of those leads the Morton family gave you?”
“Just a minute.” There was a great rustling of papers in the background and the sound of a door being opened and shut. Then Rhonda Alvarez said, “Here it is. I was looking at this yesterday because I knew you were going to call. We don’t seem to have a contact from the Morton family here—well, no, wait a minute. There was a contact about a month and a half ago. But they didn’t contact us. We contacted them. Because of the television show.”
“I heard there was a television show.”
“Disappeared. It’s pretty new. All about missing persons. Anyway, somebody from their staff called here, we talked to them, then we did a little looking on our own. Then we called the Morton family and talked to them. The only contact we had before that was with a police officer down there, a Howard Andro—”
“Androcoelho,” Gregor said. “He made the initial call? Twelve years ago?”
There was more rustling of papers. “No,” she said. “At the very beginning, the first call we got, was from a Marianne Glew. After that, it was Howard Whatshisname. It looks like they were partners.”
“They were.”
“It also looks like they weren’t taking it very seriously at the time,” Rhonda Alvarez said. “The general line seems to have been that they all thought the guy had done a bunk, but the family was frantic and they had to check it out. There were some inconsistencies, though.”