What was she thinking about?
There was a knock on the darkroom door, and Rich " called out, "Don't open it!"
"Daddy?"
"Just a minute!" He smiled at-Sue. "Anna."
"Well, I think that's about all I can absorb for now anyway. Anything else would be overload. I'd probably forget what I just learned."
"Good enough then. You ready to try developing your new roll , .
"I may still have to ask questions."
"That's why I'm here."
"Daddy!
"Coming," Rich said. He quickly scanned the darkroom to make sure no light-sensitive film or photo paper was exposed, then opened the door.
Sue stepped out, blinking against the brightness, and saw Anna smiling up at her. "Hi, Sue."
"Hi there." She felt so guilty that she was unable to look into the little girl's face. Nothing had happened, she'd done nothing wrong, but she had the strange feeling that her sophomoric thoughts had somehow been readily apparent to Rich. She glanced back at him, but he was smiling at his daughter and not looking at her at all.
"Did you bring me any fortune cookies?" Anna asked. Sue looked down at the girl, and this time she could meet her eyes. "I forgot. But I'll bring some tomorrow."
"Okay," Anna said. She smiled up at Sue. "I like you better than Mr.
Fredricks."
"Anna!" Rich said.
Sue laughed. Feeling better, she walked across the newsroom to her desk. She sat down, opened her notebook, took out a blank piece of paper, and started working on. her article.
"There's a fax for you, Agent Rossiter."
"Thanks." Gregory Rossiter looked up from the computer screen and forced himself to smile at the intern, a skinny, goofy kid with too-big teeth and too-big ears who would never make agent no matter how hard he tried or how many extra hours he put in.
Some people just didn't have a clue.
He turned back to the information on his screen, moved the cursor to the file number of the next batch of unsolveds, and called up the first case. He scanned the MOD, didn't see what he was looking for, scrolled to the next case.
Three cases later, he found a match.
He pressed the Print key and a hard copy of the information on the screen rolled out of the laser printer attached to his terminal.
Five minutes later, the intern returned. "Agent Rossiter?" The kid shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot.
"What is it now?
" " Chief Engles told me to tell you to pick up your fax."
The intern remained in place, unsure of what to do next.
"Leave," Rossiter ordered.
The kid beat a hasty retreat.
Rossiter scowled at his screen. Not only had he been banished to this sinus-sufferers' retirement community that they dared to call a state, but he'd been placed under the command of Frederick Engles, perhaps the most inept administrator he had ever met.
An FBI agent with the name of a Marxist.
That should have said something right there.
Rossiter leaned back in his chair, swiveled slightly to the left, and looked out of the tinted window at the skyline of Phoenix. Outside the federal building, the sky, as always, was blue, clear, and cloudless.
Even the weather got on his nerves he. He rolled across his cubicle and tore the long sheet of paper from his printer, folding the continuous form along the perforations into pages. He scanned the information again. Six unsolved murders in Roswell, New Mexico, in June, 1984. Cause of death: exsanguination with unusual circumstances.
Fifteen deaths in Denver, 1970. Exsanguination. Three murders in Broken Bow, Montana, 1969. Ten in Stewart, Wyoming, 1965. Eight in Cheyenne, 1953. Two in Reno, 1946. Waco, Plains, Mount Juliet; 1937,
1922, 1919.
The MOs and MODs were identical or nearly so in every case, and all were unsolved. The pattern was clear, obvious. Even a rookie could have spotted it. Rossiter looked up at his screen, at the details of the sixth Roswell murder. He shook his head slowly. This wasn't possible, was it? A connection between crimes that had not been noticed before? A pattern that had not been picked up by any computer program or agent-analyst? He stared at the amber display. Perhaps it had been noticed somewhere at some time by somebody, but the sheer amount of time involved had led them to discount any possible relationship.
He was not so willing to write off any such possibility, no matter how farfetched.
The question remained, was there a legitimate link between these murders, or were the similarities merely co incidental? It was highly unlikely that they had been committed by the same individual. Such a person, even if he had been a teenager at the time of the Mount Juliet killings, would have to be nearly a hundred years old now. Maybe the murders were the work of some sort of cult or coven that pased on its ritual practices from generation to generation.
Or the work of a vampire............ That was the thought in the back of his mind, and it was hard even for him to keep completely away from it. The appearance of the victims, the fact that the Bureau's experts still had not been able to determine how the physical draining of bodily fluids had been accomplished, the complete lack of witnesses or clues---all of this had the feel of some cartoonish movie or pulp novel, and it was difficult not to think about the case in those terms.
He didn't believe that there was anything supernatural here. But he did think that the Rio Verde murders and these other killings were connected.
Rossiter glanced around the edge of his cubicle at Engles's office. The regs said that he was supposed to in form his supervisor at this point, present his facts and ideas in both oral and written form.
But he was not sure he wanted to do that.
Engies was a top-of-the-line, grade-A, number one peckerhead, a softheaded, fat-assed bureaucrat who wouldn't know a crime if it came up and bit him in the crotch. He hadn't left his office for anything more urgent than a trip to McDonald's since J. Edgar Hoover had hung it up, and he certainly didn't have enough ambition to actively pursue a course of action on this. Serial killings or not, Engles's tendency would be to sit, wait everything out, let the locals figure out a solution.
Not him, though. Not Gregory Rossiter.
He had ambition to spare, and if he played his cards right, if he solved this case and successfully tied it to other unsolved cases in other states, this could be his ticket to D.C." his ticket out of Phoenix.
His ticket back to the real world. : The intern came back in, smiling nervously at Rossiter. "Chief Engles told me to tell you to pick up your fax nOW."
Rossiter grinned, but there was no humor in it. "Tell him to..." He trailed off, shook his head. "Never mind. I'm coming." He placed the printout in the top drawer of his desk and turned down the intensity light on his screen.
No, he wouldn't talk to Engles. :
Regs or no regs, this one he would keep to himself for a while.
Sue wanted to talk to her grandmother following dinaer, but immediately after eating the old woman silently left the table and disappeared into her bedroom.
"Is Grandmother feeling all right?" Sue asked.
John shrugged.
Neither of her parents answered. " Sue finished her rice. "
In the restaurant, both she and John cleared tables, cleaned, did dishes, but at home such chores were woman's work, and after dinner John followed his father out to the living room to watch TV while she stayed to help her mother. She would have objected to this sort of blatant sexism long ago, but this was really the only time she ever got a chance to talk to her mother one-on-one, and she acquiesced to this unfair division of labor for that reason alone. The truth was, she felt closer to her mother at these times than she did at any other. Doing dishes, working in the kitchen, they were no longer mother and daughter but coworkers, equals. Their roles here were clearly defined washer and dryer, alternating and they could talk more freely than they could otherwise, the animosity which sometimes marked their relationship in the presence of others absent.