Chapter 10

“Let me guess. ‘Bonnie,’ is it?” Taylor said.

“We can go with that name for now. I have to say, you are about the most persistent cop I’ve ever dealt with. I was sure you’d run out of steam well before now.”

“I don’t run out of steam.”

“I can tell. As fun as it is to watch you fumble around, I think it’s time you stopped looking for me.”

“Or what? You’re going to shoot me like you did my partner?”

“You’re smarter than that, John. I know you figured out that I didn’t aim for your partner, and I’m betting you figured out I went out of my way to not kill him.”

“Have me all figured out?”

“I’ve done my research, although with you it isn’t that hard. You do like to get your name in the paper.”

“I wouldn’t say I like it,” Taylor said.

“No, I guess you don’t, although, for someone who hates it, you sure do put yourself into the position of having it happen a lot.”

“I guess. So why didn’t you kill my partner and me when you had a chance, if us being on your tail bothers you that much?”

“Call it practicality. I don’t kill someone unless I’m being paid to do it. Heck, I made sure I didn’t even permanently injure him. It was a clean shot and he should recover in a few months. That being said, my policy of no killing for free has its limits. I can’t have you digging into my life like this.”

“You’ve done a good job of covering up your tracks. So what? Your next stop is getting rid of poor old Mrs. Beacham.”

“I’d never hurt her,” the woman said, her even, unemotional tone finally breaking.

It wasn’t shocking or surprising to find a cold-blooded hit woman could also be sentimental, but it did add a piece of information to the slowly developing picture he was building of her.

“So you draw the line at old women, but not senile old men?”

“I wouldn’t weep too hard over Randazzo. Before he became the harmless old man who barely remembered his name, he was just about the most ruthless man I’d ever met, and I spend most of my time with ruthless men. Did you know he had a brother and when he was just about to branch off, he was the one who pulled the trigger when the family decided his brother was a liability? He invited his brother over for dinner, had a full meal with him, and shot him while they ate dessert. Trust me, that bullet had been coming for him a long time before I fired it.”

“Fine, you’re a bringer of justice, fighting for the little guy.”

“I didn’t call you to trade barbs and I couldn’t care less what you think about me.”

“Then why did you call me? Just to tell me to stop trying to find out who you are? Did you really think that was going to work?”

“I called to give you a chance. I don’t like killing people I’m not getting paid to kill, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do it.”

“Then I guess it’s time to find out how good of a shot you really are,” Taylor said, hanging up.

Setting his phone on the table in front of him, Taylor sat there, considering. The call itself was interesting, since it made absolutely no sense. Even if he assumed the ‘I don’t like to kill people I’m not being paid to kill’ thing was true, and he doubted someone like her would draw that kind of line, it didn’t follow that she’d call to warn him off her trail.

Clearly, he was getting somewhere, but if that really was a problem for her, then it gave her more reason to come for him, not less, and warning someone you planned to assassinate that you were going to assassinate them was a pretty bad strategy. It’s possible she hoped that he’d make a mistake and make himself vulnerable, except there was no reason for her to need him to make a mistake for that.

They’d had no warning when she’d shot Randazzo. She could have just as easily shot him as the old man, and there would have been nothing he could have done about it. She’d probably been watching him at Mrs. Beacham’s house and there were plenty of opportunities to shoot him coming or going from the house. It was incredibly hard to keep someone from being sniped and the only real defense was to always stay under cover or to use counter snipers, hoping to take the sniper out before he could get a shot off.

That’s why they’d taken Finney out through the garage. That’s why the guy she killed in Vegas hardly ever went outside. She’d shown with that kill that she could get to someone who took precautions. She could have taken Taylor out dozens of times since this whole thing started. Sure, maybe she was only concerned about his chasing her now that he was getting close, but why call and warn him?

If she was hoping to throw him off her scent, it did the exact opposite. He knew a lot more about her now than before she’d called. Nearly everything about her so far had been conjecture. He now had confirmation she existed, for starters. Sure, someone shot Randazzo, but he now had proof that she’d done it to keep Taylor from finding out who she was. She’d also proven that she was the one after Finney, since she’d also confirmed that she’d been watching him, which only made sense if it started with his current case.

She’d also proven that she was a woman. All they’d had so far were the ramblings of an old man. Worst of all, for her, was that the call confirmed that she was the ‘Bonnie’ who had stayed with Mrs. Beacham. Knowing that she existed and even that she was a woman was backed up by facts, but believing that she was Mrs. Beacham’s boarder, and the boarder of the other two addresses from Internet Crimes, had been an assumption from which he was trying to build other assumptions.

That shaky a foundation could have led Taylor to abandon this line of thinking if he started to hit too many roadblocks. Now that he knew it was solid, he’d be more tenacious than ever. If she’d researched him, like she seemed to have, and she was as good as he thought she was, then she should have figured that out.

All of which made the call that more confusing.

Taylor put a pin in that line of thinking. It was definitely something to chew on, but he didn’t have enough information to explain it, and just sitting around thinking about it wasn’t going to move the case along.

What he did have was a strong confirmation that he was on the right track, which meant visiting Ronald Reagan High School. Unfortunately, the visit to the school was less helpful than he’d hoped.

The timeline for ‘Bonnie’ to graduate high school would have been between twenty and twenty-five years before, which left a total of two people in the building who would have worked in the school at the time she went there. Neither could remember anyone matching ‘Bonnie’s’ description, or rather, they remembered too many people matching that description, which wasn’t a surprise. Mrs. Beacham had been very helpful, but without some kind of distinguishing mark, it was hard to give a good enough description to make one student stand out among five-plus years of kids seen decades ago.

The yearbooks were equally unhelpful. Angular-faced, dark-haired girls appeared dozens of times in each yearbook, with well over a hundred people over the five years meeting the rough description. Taylor was sure once he started looking up these people, he’d be able to whittle that number down, based on the few things he knew about her, but that wasn’t going to be enough to make it a manageable number, especially since he couldn’t use things like death to rule out people.

Taylor already knew she wasn’t living this life under her real name, so she very well could have faked her own death to keep someone from doing exactly what he was trying to do now. That meant he’d have to spend just as much time chasing down dead students that matched the description as living ones, just to confirm they were, in fact, dead.

This was all doable, but it would mean calling Joe Solomon and bringing in a bunch of agents to do the leg work. Aside from his abiding dislike for working inside the lines the Bureau liked to draw, Taylor was concerned that might make ‘Bonnie’ decide this job was too much and disappear. Right now, she knew he was looking for her, which meant either she didn’t think he’d find her, or thought the payoff of him leading her to Finney was worth the risk.

Once he brought in other agents, he might lose his chance to catch her, leaving Finney hanging in the wind for someone else, or even ‘Bonnie’ being more patient and out waiting him. Taylor had a few more things he could do on his own. If that didn’t work, he’d have to bring in some help to run down all these people, assuming he could convince Joe to go along with it. Taylor thought his reasoning for being here was sound, but Solomon didn’t believe in hunches and intuitive investigating. If he couldn’t be shown a solid piece of evidence for a lead, he tended to discount it.

He talked to the admin people at the school and when they balked at giving out the personal information of the man who’d been principal when ‘Bonnie’ would have gone there he pointed out how much more of a disruption they’d have if he had to come back with other agents. If anyone knew who she was, that was his best bet. As Taylor understood things from Kara, these days, vice-principals did all the work with students, but when Taylor was a kid, any trouble kids would end up in the principal’s office, who’d get to know the problem students well. Taylor was betting that someone who started murdering people for money as a young adult would probably have disciplinary issues as a teenager, above and beyond the issues normal teenagers had, of course.

Irving Clark, the former principal, was in his late seventies and unfortunately not as sharp as Mrs. Beacham. He wasn’t as far gone as the senior Randazzo, but it took almost five minutes of the phone call for Clark to understand who Taylor was and why he was calling. It might have been easier in person, but like a lot of retired senior citizens from the Northeast, he’d headed south to spend his retirement in the much warmer conditions in Florida, meaning the best Taylor could do was a phone call.

“Which student did you want to ask about again?” the old man asked when he finally understood Taylor was asking about a former student.

“I don’t know her name, unfortunately. I’m pretty sure she went to Ronald Reagan sometime in the late nineties. She would have had dark hark and a very angular face, with high, well-defined cheekbones. She would have been, unusual. You might remember her as a bad kid, but she wouldn’t have been a problem student in your office all the time either. Her teachers would have remembered her as very cold and calculating. She didn’t show a lot of emotion, although she could be very violent when pushed. She probably only had one or two incidents with other kids, probably early in her high school life, when she was challenged, and she would have reacted very violently, probably significantly out of proportion to what happened. Teachers would remember her being unemotional even after these events. She might have ended up with the school counselor several times over the years out of fear of some kind of abuse, caused by a difficulty with making friends and a complete lack of any visibly strong emotion. She might have been impulsive and would lie regularly. She might have gotten into trouble using threats of violence, usually graphic threats, to control other students.”