Baltimore 03 - Did You Miss Me?

the number is twenty-six until we prove differently.’
    ‘I’ve been communicating with the Pittsburgh field office’s CSU,’ Brodie said. ‘They began going through the personal effects of the victims yesterday afternoon. So far they’ve collected over a dozen driver’s licenses from girls living in five different states. Once the body retrieval begins, they’ll do DNA analysis for identification.’
    ‘Deacon called earlier,’ Joseph said. ‘Ciccotelli’s wife and her team started GPR mapping the area behind Beckett’s cabin before at dawn. She estimates it’ll take her several days at least, so no retrievals or DNA analyses can start until then. Kerr and McManus both emailed me that their switchboards are going crazy with families of missing teenage girls. Hundreds of parents hoping they can get some resolution one way or the other.’
    ‘It’ll be more,’ Daphne predicted sadly. ‘When the story breaks that his first victim was killed twenty-seven years ago, Pittsburgh will be inundated with cold cases.’
    Joseph shook his head, the thought of it overwhelming. ‘I can’t even imagine. All right, what about—’
    ‘Wait,’ Grayson said. ‘I have some names to add to the fatality list. I checked out your old tutor, Joy Howard. She died in a car accident shortly after she stopped working with you.’
    ‘Which was right before Ford was born,’ Daphne said with a frown. ‘I got a new tutor when I started back to school a few months later.’
    Grayson passed a photograph down the table to her. ‘Do you know this woman?’
    Daphne’s eyes widened. ‘This is Claudia Baker.’
    ‘I was afraid of that,’ Grayson said. ‘She’s actually Claudia Howard. She’s Joy’s sister. Died in the same car accident.’
    ‘Hal,’ Daphne whispered. ‘Dammit. I guess my tutor getting the flu the week I talked to the FBI impostor wasn’t coincidence either.’
    ‘No,’ Grayson said. ‘I guess Hal couldn’t depend on them to stay quiet.’
    ‘I’d also like to check into the circumstances of Jane Lynch’s death,’ Joseph said. ‘I know you were just trying to get Doug agitated yesterday, Daphne.’ The memory of which still turned his gut to water. ‘But I think Hal’s killing his wife is a possibility.’
    ‘Besides,’ Bo added, ‘any more crimes we can dig up on Hal, the more leverage the ATF team has to get him to flip on the Russian. The warrants we got to search Hal’s properties turned up a sizable cache of illegal weapons yesterday. They were hidden among legitimate antiques he’d imported. Now our warehouse smells like lemon oil.’
    Daphne frowned. ‘Lemon oil?’
    ‘Some smugglers think that strong odors like coffee or lemon oil will throw off the dog’s ability to scent,’ Bo explained. ‘It doesn’t, of course. Why?’
    Daphne closed her eyes briefly. ‘Hal has smelled like lemon oil for as long as I can remember. I never suspected a thing.’
    ‘He had two sets of books,’ Bo said. ‘He’s been distributing drugs for decades. Looks like he started on the weapons more recently. I’m sorry, Daphne. He did it so well, and so far from where he lived, nobody suspected.’
    She nodded once, wearily. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘I talked with Cole Lynch yesterday,’ JD said. ‘I’d arrived at Doug’s house with the sheriff’s department and we were looking for Pamela and found the bomb shelter Doug used for his hideout.’
    ‘A bomb shelter?’ Bo asked.
    ‘Regulation Cold War model,’ JD said. ‘Once Cole got there and showed us where Doug had hidden Pamela, he told us that his mother had died there in the shelter. We think Doug meant to bring you back there, Daphne. I found a CD player in a small cell-like room. The CD inside would periodically say “Did you miss me?” He wanted to make you crazy. Cole wasn’t sure about your connection, but he told us that Doug hated Hal not only because he cheated on his mother, but because he sent Doug to deal drugs for him and then let him go to prison when he got caught. Matthew, the middle brother with an MBA who cooked the books, told him that Doug had set Hal up to look like he’d stolen rifles from the mob.’
    ‘Payback’s a bitch,’ Bo said. ‘Those stolen rifles were what Doug sold to the Millhouses.’
    ‘Which was why we were led to Odum’s houses,’ Daphne said. ‘Doug wanted the Russians to believe Hal was skimming and making money on the side. So, was he trying to get Hal killed but they killed his