Cruel Intent

CHAPTER 7

Working four ten-hour days gave Peter Winter a lot of time off-three whole days he could devote to other things and to his other life. He tried to get in at least two rounds of golf a week, not because he liked the game all that much but because it was expected. Besides, playing golf was good cover. The rest of his free time went to Singleatheart. Sometimes he went prowling on the site for the hell of it, checking to see if any of the newly arrived profiles suited his particular fancies. Now that he was in the market for a new playmate, his search had taken on greater urgency.

Peter’s private system automatically captured all incoming profiles and credit-card info and sent him those bits of information. Each week he made it his business to go over all of it in detail. You never could tell when something might prove useful for creating yet another virtual man or woman, as he had with the lovely and now departed Susan Callison. As far as Peter Winter was concerned, having a never-ending supply of virtual identities at the ready was essential.

Most of the time he used a stolen identity only once or twice before shedding it the same way a molting snake discards its skin. As long as he was careful to keep any resulting bills under five hundred dollars, no one paid much attention-not the cops and not the banks, either. The banks quietly wrote off any and all disputed bills, mostly because they didn’t want to let on that their supposedly secure systems were being breached.

At Hertz, Peter had used a phony credit card belonging to Matt Morrison to rent the vehicle he had driven to Sedona. He had done so in hopes of adding another possible suspect to the investigative mix into Morgan’s death. Now that the damage was done, he wouldn’t use it again; he ran the card itself through his shredder.

So far the only major exception to Peter’s use-it-and-lose-it identity philosophy was Ma

The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Peter. He owed much of his good fortune to Rita-poor, dear departed Rita, who had stupidly refused to give him a divorce-or at least the divorce he had wanted. She had told him once that the only way he would get rid of her was over her dead body, which was exactly how he had done it-by making sure Rita was dead.

Their hike up Camelback Mountain had been part of a carefully orchestrated reconciliation after a period of marital turbulence. There had been no witnesses when Rita fell several hundred feet to her death. She had been so surprised when Peter had turned on her with a drawn weapon in his hand that she’d leaped backward and fallen all on her own. He’d made sure there was no one around to say Rita hadn’t tripped and fallen exactly the way her grieving husband claimed she had.

Had Peter carried a big insurance policy on Rita, things might have been different. That would have given him a motive. As it was, after a fairly cursory investigation, Rita’s death was declared an accident. That was done over the objections of Rita’s mother, who insisted Peter had killed her daughter. The mother-in-law couldn’t prove it, however, and neither could anyone else.

Rita had been gone for ten years now. Peter’s friends at work kept telling him that he needed to get over her and move on. They kept trying to fix him up with someone else, but Peter wasn’t interested in another wife. In fact, he was hung up on something else entirely.

Peter had liked how he felt as he watched Rita go tumbling helplessly down the steep hillside, flopping like a limp rag doll as she flew from one boulder to the next. He had exulted in hearing her fading screams as they melted into the far distance, and he had known right then that he would kill again when the first opportunity presented itself-even if he didn’t know exactly how or when.

In contemplating this new compulsion, and before taking any action, Peter had become a student of murders. He searched out as many cases as he could find and sorted out who got away with it, who didn’t, and all the hows and whys in between. As he researched his newly chosen field, Peter was struck by one recurring theme: how many stupid killers, mostly men lacking in imagination, killed first one wife or girlfriend and then another in exactly the same way. Later, once the hapless killers were caught, they were always astonished that some detective or other happened to pick up on the obvious similarities between cases.

Peter Winter was a doctor. That meant he was smarter than the average bear to begin with. Determined not to make the same kinds of fatal errors, he realized there was no need to kill his own cheating wife when he could always murder someone else’s.

Peter had earned his way through school by being a geek. Putting his well-honed technical skills to work, he set about creating Singleatheart. In doing so, he discovered that the world was full of women just like Rita, all of them admitted cheaters and all available for the taking. Their numbers alone had been an amazing wake-up call. It turned out they were everywhere. As Peter sca

Peter had covered his tracks by working through websites based in Russia. When it became apparent that he’d need a U.S.-based server farm, he had chosen one in Deadwood, South Dakota, for three reasons. For starters, the name appealed to him. Deadwood had a certain ring to it, and that was how he liked to think of cheating women in general-as so much deadwood. He also liked the fact that Deadwood was a hell of a long way from his home and respectable lifestyle in Phoenix, or from Ma

Third, the server’s South Dakota location was attractive for economic, moneygrubbing reasons. With gold mining not exactly booming at the moment, local city and state officials had enacted a series of changes designed to attract and keep new businesses. The resulting tax savings meant that the IP server Ma

Securing Singleatheart’s business had been carried out by one of Ma

On that particular Wednesday morning, Peter turned to his computer with no inkling that something was amiss, not until he went scrolling through the credit-card information from that week’s server-farm data dump. What jumped out at him from the very first listing of the day wasn’t the person’s name, Alison Reynolds, but part of her address-Sedona. The place where Peter had driven on Monday morning. Where he’d used a hammer to beat Morgan Forester’s pretty little face to a bloodied pulp. Where he’d managed to leave the murder weapon in the back of the victim’s husband’s pickup truck.