The Judge's List (The Whistler #2)(46)

Two hours later she pulled off the expressway at Greenville, Alabama, and dropped off her poem at the city post office. It would be collected Monday and trucked to Montgomery where it would be postmarked and sent back south to Pensacola. Bannick should have it by the following Wednesday, Thursday at the latest.

She took the backroads home to Mobile and enjoyed the drive. She listened to jazz on Sirius and kept checking her smile in the mirror. The first two of her letters had been mailed. She had found the courage to confront the killer, or at least set in motion his endgame. The hunting phase was over, and for that she was elated. Now she moved into the next phase, still unnamed. Her work was not over, by any means, but the heavy lifting had been done, all twenty-two years of it.

Now Lacy had the case, and she would eventually bring in the state police, maybe the FBI. And Bannick would never know who stalked him.



* * *



—

Late that night she was reading a novel, sipping her second glass of wine, and fighting the temptation to go online and dig more. Her phone pinged with an email arriving on one of her secure accounts. It was KL, or Kenny Lee, and he asked if she was awake. She was suddenly weary of sleuthing and just wanted to be left alone, but he was an old friend, one she would never meet.

She wrote back: Hey there. How’s life?


Living the dream. Got a new death-by-rope out of Missouri, case is four months old, looks similar.



As always, Jeri grimaced at the news of another murder, and, as always, she jumped to the conclusion that it was Bannick. But she’d had enough and didn’t want to spend more money and waste more energy. How similar?


No photos yet, no description of the rope. But no suspects and nothing from the scene.



She reminded herself that three hundred people a year were murdered by strangulation and about 60 percent of those cases were eventually solved. That left 120 cold cases, far too many to blame on one man.

Let me sleep on it. In other words, don’t start your clock at $200 an hour. Kenny Lee had led her to four of Bannick’s victims and she had paid him enough.


Sweet dreams.



Still snowing up there? She mailed him cash payments to a post office box in Camden, Maine. She assumed he lived somewhere around there.


As we speak. What’s your body count now?


Eight. Seven by the rope and Dunwoody.


It’s time for help. Gotta stop this guy. I have contacts.


So do I. Things are moving.


Okay.





20


The task force gathered in its workroom late Monday morning and compared notes. Twenty days into the assessment period and they had little to show for their efforts. Lacy recounted for Sadelle’s benefit their trip to Marathon, but the poor lady was either half asleep or stoned from her pain meds.

Darren, though, had some interesting news. Sipping his high-end coffee, he said, “So I had a chat with a Mr. Larry Toscano, partner in the Miami firm of Paine & Steinholtz, which has descended all these many years from Paine & Grubber, the old firm where Bannick spent the summer of 1989 as an intern. Toscano at first was reluctant to get involved, but when I explained that the BJC does possess subpoena powers in certain cases and that, if necessary, we would raid their offices and start snatching files, which of course is a joke with our limited staff, but anyway the bluff worked and Toscano fell in line. He found the records in short order and confirmed that Bannick did indeed work there the summer before his last year of law school. He said the kid’s file was clean and he did good work, got high marks from his supervisor and such, but was not offered an associate’s position. I pressed Toscano for more details and he had to go back to the file. Seems as if there were twenty-seven interns that summer, from a variety of law schools, and that everyone but Bannick received an offer of employment. Twenty-one accepted. I asked why Bannick got stiffed if his file was clean and, of course, Toscano had no clue. At the time, Perry Kronke was one of two managing partners and was in charge of their summer intern program. Toscano said there is a copy of a letter in the file from Kronke to Bannick in which no job was offered. He sent me a copy of the entire file, again after I mentioned a subpoena. There’s not much to it, but it does prove what we already knew—that their paths crossed in 1989.”

Sadelle sucked in some air and growled, “And tell me again. How did Betty Roe know about this connection?”

Lacy said, “She says in her complaint that she found a former partner of the big firm, a guy same age as Bannick, and he was in the intern class of 1989. Thus he knew Bannick well, maybe still does for all we know. Says he really wanted the job and took the rejection hard.”

Sadelle said, “Added it to his list. Take a name now, kick an ass years later.”

“Something like that. Twenty-plus years.”

“Sure hope I haven’t done anything to upset him. But I’m more than half dead anyway.”

“Enough of that.”

“You’ll outlive all of us,” Darren said.

“Wanna bet?”

“How do I collect if I win?”

“Good point.”

Lacy closed the file and looked at her task force. “So, folks, where exactly are we now? We know that Bannick knew two of the victims, which was alleged by Betty in her complaint. As I’ve said, she has given me documentation, off the record so far, of five more murders involving five more victims who had the misfortune of angering Judge Bannick somewhere along the way. Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about those.”