“I’m getting to that.” From his briefcase Daniel pulled Simon’s pictures and told the others the version of the story he and Chase had agreed upon the night before.

“Daniel had surrendered the pictures to the police up in Philly,” Chase said. “The detective on the case up there was good enough to have them scanned and e-mailed to us first thing this morning. The originals are being couriered down.”

Daniel felt bad about Vito Ciccotelli jumping through the hoop of scanning and e-mailing the photos, but he’d been completely honest with Vito last night when he’d called him. Vito had offered to scan the pictures himself. Daniel hadn’t needed to ask.

Vito had rejected any offer of thanks, saying Daniel had given him something more precious-he’d helped Vito save his girlfriend Sophie’s life. Daniel thought of Alex and understood how Vito viewed the saving of his Sophie as the all-trumping act.

Ed shook his head. “Okay. So Simon had these pictures, including one of Alicia Tremaine and another of the waitress who was killed last night, Sheila Cunningham.”

“Yes. Alex was able to identify four of the others. One is dead, suicide. The others we have to match to girls from the local schools. That’s why I want the yearbooks.”

Ed blew out a breath. “You know how to shake things up, Vartanian.”

“I sure don’t mean to,” Daniel murmured. “What else do we have?”

Hatton rubbed his beard absently. “That nun from the shelter. Sister Anne.”

Daniel’s stomach turned over. “Please don’t tell me she’s dead.”

“She’s not dead,” Hatton said. “But she’s close. The uniforms who went to check on her last night didn’t find her at the shelter and she didn’t answer her door at home. They didn’t get the message that this woman’s life might be in danger, only that you were looking for her. They didn’t go in her apartment last night.”

“And this morning?” Daniel asked grimly.

“When I called I impressed on them the importance of this matter.” Hatton’s voice was still calm, but his eyes were not. “They busted open the door and found her. She’d been beaten badly. Looks like somebody came through her window. She was taken to County about an hour ago. They told me she’s unconscious, but that’s all I know.”

“Does Alex know?” Daniel asked.

“Not yet. I thought you might want to tell her.”

Daniel nodded, dreading it. “I’ll tell her. What about the hairdresser, Desmond?”

“He’s fine. He’d had no visits, phone calls, no problems.”

“At least I don’t have to give her two pieces of bad news.”

“So…” Chase drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Our only witness to anything is one four-year-old girl who won’t talk.”

“Hope’s with McCrady and the forensic artist now,” Daniel said.

“She talked,” Hatton said. “One word anyway. She called me ‘Pa-paw.’ Apparently he has a beard like mine.”

Daniel frowned. “Then Bailey did find him.”

“Does McCrady know this?” Chase demanded.

“Yep.” Hatton looked at Daniel. “There’s also something about a magic wand.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Chase muttered.

“Chase,” Daniel said, exasperated. “What about a magic wand?” he asked Hatton.

“Miss Fallon said that the two times they’d said ‘magic wand’ Hope stopped what she was doing and looked afraid. Neither Miss Fallon knew what it meant. I think we should look for Bailey’s father. I can scour the streets if you want. I pulled Craig Crighton’s last driver’s license photo. It’s fifteen years old, but it’s all we’ve got.”

“He hasn’t got his license renewed in fifteen years?” Daniel asked.

“It expired two years after Alicia died,” Hatton told him. “You want me to track him?”

“Yeah. Thanks. What else?”

“What about our tree-climbing Woolf?” Koenig asked.

Daniel shook his head. “I’ve checked all the devices we have warrants for to see when he got the call about Gemma, but there have been no new calls. What I want to know is how he got the story on Rhett Porter.”

“The car salesman whose car ran off the road last night,” Chase said. “Connected?”

“This wreck happened down off of US-19, more than seventy miles from Dutton. Nobody saw Porter go off the road. It was reported by a motorist who passed by after the car was already incinerated and the fire was mostly burned out.”

“How did anybody know it was Porter?” Ed asked, looking at the picture on the front page of the Dutton Review. “I can’t imagine there would have been much body left.”

“They haven’t actually identified the body yet,” Daniel answered. “They’re hoping to use dental records. But Porter was a car salesman and he drove test models using his magnetic dealer plates. His plate flew off the car as it was rolling down the embankment and that’s how he was identified.”

“So how did Woolf know?” Chase asked, and Daniel shook his head in disgust.

“Don’t know yet. According to what Woolf told me this morning when I yanked his sorry ass out of that tree, Porter’s wife said he’d been upset the last week. And everybody knew the Lincoln that rolled was the model Porter drove. But as for how Woolf arrived on the scene just in time to snap this picture… Woolf refused to reveal his source and unless he communicated in a way we’re tracking, we got nothin’.”

“So other than the fact that Rhett Porter lived in Dutton, was upset, and the Woolf connection, what else is there to connect him to these three murders?” Chase asked.

“He went to school with Wade Crighton and Simon. Alex remembers him being Wade’s friend. And he was the oldest brother of the two boys that found Alicia’s body.”

Chase groaned. “Daniel.”

Daniel shrugged. “I’m just sayin’ the facts. Plus, don’t discount the fact that Jim Woolf was there at the crash site. I asked the field office down in Pike County to keep tabs on the investigation. I want every inch of that car examined. I’d also like a full-time tail on Jim Woolf. He hasn’t done anything I can arrest him for yet, but I know he will.”

Daniel drew a breath, not liking what he had to say next. “And once Leigh gets the yearbooks, we need to figure out who else went to school with Wade, Simon, and Porter. The rapists in Simon’s pictures could all be guys from Dutton.”

“Somebody’s nervous,” Hatton said in his quiet way. “They got sloppy when they tried to run Miss Fallon down. It looks like they may have done a better job with Porter.”

“Looks like.” Daniel turned to Ed. “Bailey’s house and the pizza parlor. Anything?”

“We didn’t find any more at Bailey’s, certainly nothing to point to where Hope was when she saw Bailey taken. We have matched Bailey’s blood type to the blood we found soaked into the ground. We took some hair we found in a brush in the bathroom. We’ll do a PCR, but I’m pretty sure it’s Bailey’s blood.”

“And the pizza parlor?”

“We took prints off the gunman and we’re running them through AFIS today. We’ll also want to get the officer who chased that car that tried to hit Alex yesterday,” Ed added. “See if he can make a positive ID on either the car or the shooter.”

“I can take that,” Koenig said.

Daniel noted all their next steps in his notebook. “Thanks. I’m going to interview the rape victims from thirteen years ago. I’ll want a female agent to go with me.”

“Take Talia Scott,” Chase said. “She’s good at that kind of interview.”

Daniel nodded. “Will do. Once Leigh gets the yearbooks from Bryson Academy, have her get me the list of every woman who went to school with Janet, Claudia, and Gemma. We need to figure out why the killer picked them to re-enact Alicia’s murder. Maybe one of the classmates can help us tie them to Alicia or the other victims.”

“We should warn them, too,” Ed said, “if they haven’t already taken precautions.”

“I’ll take care of warning them,” Chase said. “We’ll have to clear the communication through channels. We don’t want to start a panic and we don’t have the manpower to give all the potential victims police protection.”