Fair Game

faster if he knew where he was going. “As the crow flies” directions had some serious issues in a day of fences and roads. Especially when he was pretty sure that he could figure out exactly where she was before they left the condo. He hadn’t wasted his time today. “Why don’t you let the rest of them back in and join me at my computer?”
    He needed the moment it would take Isaac to assemble the others. Charles was shaking, and dominant enough not to want anyone to see. She was alive. It would be enough for the moment.
    He sat down at the table and found that his computer had finished the task he’d set for it. He heard them file in but he didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to risk meeting anyone’s eye unexpectedly until he had Anna safe.
    “Anna is a nut for police procedurals,” he told them as he resized a window so he could see if he’d made any progress. “This morning she observed that serial killers often like to insinuate themselves into the investigations. I initially dismissed it—because you would have noticed something like that after this many years, right?”
    “We looked,” Goldstein said. “There was no sign of anything.”
    His script had done its job and he was in through the firewalls—it always was good to have friends on the inside. He could talk and hack at the same time, and maybe it would keep the feds from figuring out where he was. It would probably help that none of them had worked for the IRS—and that the back door he’d gotten in through was low on graphics and high on code.
    “I decided that maybe the initial killer, the old one, maybe he wasn’t that kind of psycho. But the new guy might be—the mysterious third man. So I went back ten years. And I ran a list of the names of everyone involved in the case for all those years. There were two people who showed up more than three times.”
    “Iassure you, I am not a serial killer,” said Goldstein dryly.
    “I was pretty sure it wasn’t you,” Charles agreed. “You want to catch him so badly I can smell it. So I took a look at the other guy first.”
    Goldstein drew in a sharp breath. “You can’t be serious.”
    Goldstein had been involved in a number of the investigations, and he would know who else had been there with him.
    “Someone was present for six of the last ten years,” Charles continued. “Giving an interview to the newspaper or the TV news. Helping out at the call center. Assigned as liaison to someone—and once I lucked out and found his photo on the front page paper of where one of the bodies turned up. I was able to confirm that he has been in the right town at the right time for nine of the last ten years in a job that usually moves people around. The other year, when he was assigned halfway across the country, he was on a mysterious vacation at the time of the killings. So I went looking into his background. Called in a few favors. Hacked a few databases. Called a couple of police officers and a retired minister.”
    “Who is it?” asked Beauclaire, an eager bite to his voice.
    Charles hit a button and a photo of Cantrip’s poster boy came up on half his screen, leaving him to file through records on the other. “According to a former nanny, the good senator was obsessed that his son be a manly man—Texas-style. And when the six-year-old Les Heuter was discovered playing with his mother’s makeup, he was bundled up and sent to spend some manly time with the senator’s older brother, the Vietnam War vet and avid hunter Travis Heuter, who lived and still lives in Vermont. Travis Heuter also has houses and properties in a number of the cities where the Big Game Hunter’s killing sprees have taken place, as well as a good dozen in places that haven’t had killings. In the few places our killer has been active and Travis Heuter doesn’t own property, his family owns property or one of his three companies has condos or apartments. He’s a little bit crazy, is Travis, so the Heuter family doesn’t lethim appear at public functions or on TV because he might not be politically correct in his views.”
    “Heuter.” Goldstein spoke with the barest shadow of Brother Wolf’s desire to destroy the killer in his voice.
    “A senator’s son. This is going to be a nightmare of political pressures,” Leslie said. “My boss is going to love it.”
    Charles couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not—probably because she didn’t know, either.
    “And the nail on the coffin