Kiss the Girls and Make Them Cry(71)
“De omnibus dubitandum,” Rigler stated.
“All is to be doubted,” Gina replied.
“I’m impressed,” Rigler said.
“I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, mandatory two years of Latin.”
“That phrase was told to me by an old detective who helped train me. If you’re going to have an investigator’s mind-set, you have to enter the scene with an open mind. If you don’t, you’ll only find stuff to support your preconceived notion. It looks like that’s what happened here. They rugged it.”
“Rugged it?” Gina asked.
“The police came in believing this was a suicide, found ample evidence to support that, and anything that didn’t fit was swept under the rug.”
“There’s got to be something. The bathrobe and undergarments. Might there be DNA evidence they can follow up on?” Gina asked.
“Possibly,” Rigler answered. “But that’s expensive and time-consuming. The cops on the Durham force do a good job. But remember, this did not appear to be a crime scene. It was an apparent suicide. It’s been about four months.”
“I want to speak to the family,” Gina said quietly.
“I can help you with that,” Smith said as he began typing on his laptop. A few seconds later the printer ejected a sheet of paper that he handed to Gina. “This is the contract with the funeral home in Nebraska. It includes the family contact information.”
Rigler insisted on driving Gina back to the hotel.
“I’m sorry to make you work so hard on your first day as a grandfather,” Gina said.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Rigler said while reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a cigar with a little pink ribbon tied at the end. “Do you like cigars?”
“No,” Gina laughed. “But I’ll take one for my dad if that’s okay.”
“Absolutely,” he said, handing it to her.
“If you were at the hospital all night, you must be exhausted.”
Rigler smiled. “No big deal. I’ll catch up on sleep tonight. I love what I do. It’s like solving puzzles. It’s a challenge to figure out how all the pieces of a case fit together.”
Without naming REL News, Gina gave him a more detailed account of her investigation into Cathy Ryan’s death than she had shared at the funeral home. She told him about the email that had suggested she look into Paula’s death. He listened intently before responding.
“As I said earlier, Gina, I’m going to try to get the PD to take a fresh look at the Stephenson case. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime I want to give you some advice. Be careful. If you’re right about the two victims, and I think you are, the killer is smart and has access to resources. Stephenson would have been easy to track down and kill. As to the Ryan girl, he found out when she was vacationing outside the country, where she was staying, and what activities she was doing, before making his move. You don’t look like the type to commit suicide, but I don’t want to find out that you’ve become the victim of a tragic accident.”
77
Michael Carter spent the balance of the afternoon at his computer trying to learn as much as he could about Gina Kane. Wikipedia gave references to the fraternity branding iron story and several other pieces she had written for Empire Review. He had originally intended to quickly scan through the fraternity article. Captivated, he had carefully read all twenty-nine pages. In addition to being an excellent writer, she was a formidable investigator.
In the section about her education he noted her undergraduate years were at Boston College. The late Cathy Ryan had gone to BC and would have been on campus two of the years Kane was there. Coincidence? Maybe not.
He went to the CBS website and pulled up the 60 Minutes interview she had done. If Kane had been nervous, it didn’t show. She exuded confidence as she answered Scott Pelley’s questions.
He had overcome his initial reluctance to call his friend at the credit rating agency. Spying on the records of private citizens is not that big of a deal, he thought. But doing it to a reporter ups the ante. They’ll all scream bloody murder and go hunting for scalps if word of this leaks out. The answer was to make sure there were no leaks.
The email he was waiting for arrived with attachments. He printed out the last several months of Gina Kane’s MasterCard and American Express records. Almost all of the activity was on the MasterCard. Using a yellow Hi-Liter, he began to go through the transactions.
She’s quite the traveler, he thought, as he came across numerous charges related to a trip to Nepal. I wonder who she went with, he asked himself.
“Oh God,” he said aloud as he put a line through the airline reservation from JFK to Aruba. Any possibility that was a coincidence was nixed when he saw that Kane had stayed at the same hotel as Ryan.
The trip to Naples could be relevant or maybe not. He made a note to try to find out where Cathy Ryan’s family was from, or more precisely, where her parents were living now.
Carter reviewed to the end of the statement. Either Kane had not used her credit card over the last two weeks, which was unlikely considering that she used it at Starbucks almost every day, or his friend had sent him the previous monthly bill without updating the record to the present. He fired off an email requesting the extra information. Knowing his “friend,” Carter was certain he would charge again for going into the system and conducting another search.