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For half an hour they looked over the letters. Altman finally divided them into two piles. One, he explained, was of letters from fans who were, as Carter had said, "intense." These notes were eerie, nonsensical, angry, or disturbingly personal ("Come to see us in Sioux City if your in town and the wife and me will treat you to our special full body massage out side on the deck behind our trailer.")
"Ick," said Josh Randall.
Yep, definitely icky, Altman thought, but he set that pile aside and explained that they were the discards. "Those're your typical wackos and I don't think they're half dangerous. It's the other ones I'm worried about." He nodded at the second pile. "They're reasonable and calm and cautious… just like the strangler. See, he's an organized offender. Calculating and smart. He's not going to give anything away by ranting. If he has any questions, he's going to ask them politely and carefully – he'll want some detail but not too much; that'd arouse suspicion."
Altman gathered up this stack – about ten letters – placed them in an evidence envelope, and handed them to the young detective. "Over to the county lab, stat."
A man stuck his head in the door. Bob Fletcher. The even-keeled sergeant introduced himself to Carter. "We never met, but I spoke to you on the phone last year about the case."
"I remember." They shook hands.
Fletcher nodded at Altman, smiling ruefully. "He's a better cop than me. I never thought that the killer might've tried to write you."
The sergeant, it turned out, had contacted Carter not about fan mail but to ask if the author had based the story on any previous true crimes, thinking there might be a co
The sergeant's eyes took in the stack of letters. "Any luck?" he asked.
"We'll have to see what the lab finds." Altman then nodded toward the author. "But I have to say that Mr. Carter here's been a huge help. We'd be stymied for sure, it wasn't for him."
Appraising Carter carefully, Fletcher said, "I have to admit I never got a chance to read your book, but I always wanted to meet you. An honest-to-God famous author. Don't think I've ever shook one's hand before."
Carter gave an embarrassed laugh. "Not very famous, to look at my sales figures."
"Well, all I know is my girlfriend read your book and she said it was the best thriller she'd read in years."
Carter said, "I appreciate that. Is she around town? I could autograph her copy."
"Oh," Fletcher said. "Well, we're not going out anymore. She left the area. But thanks for the offer." He headed back to Robbery.
There was now nothing to do but wait for the lab results to come back, so Wallace suggested coffee at Starbucks. The men wandered down the street, ordered, and sat sipping the drinks as Wallace pumped Carter for information about breaking into fiction writing, and Altman simply enjoyed the feel of the hot sun on his face.
The men's recess ended abruptly, though, fifteen minutes later when Altman's phone rang.
"Detective," came the enthusiastic voice of his youthful assistant, "we've got a match! The handwriting in one of Mr. Carter's fan letters matches the notes in the book. The ink's the same, too; there were markers in it."
The detective said, "Please tell me there's a name and address on the letter."
"You bet there is. Howard Desmond's his name. And his place is over in Warwick." A small town fifteen minutes from the sites of both of the Greenville Strangler's attacks.
The detective told his assistant to pull together as much information on Desmond as he could. He snapped the phone shut and, gri
But, as it turned out, they didn't have him at all.
Single, forty-two-year-old Howard Desmond, a veterinary technician, had skipped town six months before, leaving in a huge hurry. One day in April he'd called his landlord and a
Altman spoke to the vet in whose clinic Desmond had worked, and the doctor's report was similar to the landlord's. In April, Desmond had called and quit his job, effective immediately, saying only that he was moving to Oregon to take care of his elderly grandmother. He never called back with a forwarding address for his last check, as he said he would.
The vet described Desmond as quiet, and affectionate to the animals in his care, but with little patience for people.
Altman contacted the authorities in Oregon and found no record of any Howard Desmond in the DMV files or on the property or income-tax rolls. A bit more digging revealed that all of Desmond's grandparents – his parents, too – had died years before; the story about the move to Oregon was apparently a complete lie.
The few relatives the detective could track down confirmed that he'd just disappeared, and they didn't know where he might be. They echoed his boss's assessment, describing the man as intelligent but a recluse, one who – significantly – loved to read and often lost himself in novels, appropriately for a killer who took his homicidal inspiration from a book.
"What'd his letter to Andy say?" Wallace asked.
With an okaying nod from Altman, Randall handed it to the reporter, who then summarized out loud. "He asks how Mr. Carter did the research for his book. What were the sources he used? How did he learn about the most efficient way a murderer would kill someone? And he's curious about the mental makeup of a killer. Why did some people find it easy to kill while others couldn't possibly hurt anyone?"
Altman shook his head. "No clue as to where he might've gone. We'll get his name into NCIC and ViCAP but, hell, he could be anywhere. South America, Europe, Singapore…"
Since Bob Fletcher's Robbery division would've handled the vandalism at the Greenville library's Three Pines branch, which they now knew Desmond was responsible for, Altman sent Randall to ask the sergeant if he'd found any leads that would be helpful.
The other men found themselves staring at Desmond's fan letter as if it were a corpse at a wake, silence surrounding them, trying to guess where the killer might've gone.
Altman glanced up and noticed that Andy Carter was frowning as he gazed at a large map of Greenville County up on the wall. The author nodded to himself slowly and then said, "Had a thought"
"Go on."
"Desmond rented his place, right?"
"Yep."
"Well, he had a decent job, he wasn't a youngster, and he was single. He had to've had some money. Why would he rent? Houses aren't that expensive in Greenville."
Altman shrugged. "I don't know. What do you make of that?"
"My wife and I used to go up to the Adirondacks in the summer. We looked into buying a place awhile ago but we couldn't afford to own two houses. So we ended up renting."
The detective nodded. "So you're thinking that one reason a man would rent his main residence was if he owned a house somewhere else. A summer house or something."
"Just a thought."
"But you checked the county registrar; he didn't own any property," Wallace pointed out to Altman.
"But we didn't check other counties," the detective replied. "A vacation place might not be nearby." He grabbed his phone.
And in less than five minutes they had their answer.
Howard Desmond did indeed own a house elsewhere – on the shore of Lake Muskegon, sixty miles from Greenville, tucked away into the backwater, piney wilderness.