“What pinkies?”

“Mr. Little took the pinkies of his victims as souvenirs. The police could never find them.”

Tuchman looked stunned. Her mouth was open and she was staring at Brad. He pushed on.

“Mr. Little says Farmer’s pinkie is in the jar, but Erickson’s pinkie isn’t. I have the pinkies, or rather Paul Baylor, a private forensic expert, has them. I didn’t know how to preserve them. I didn’t want the fingers to fall apart anymore than they have already or we won’t be able to test them for fingerprints. Mr. Baylor is a respected expert and he knows how to preserve, uh, body parts.”

“Oh. My God, Mr. Miller. What have you done? That’s tampering with evidence and I don’t know what else. How could you go off on your own like that without my permission?”

“I went down to the penitentiary on Saturday and I dug up the bodies on Sunday. I didn’t want to disturb you on a weekend when I didn’t know if Mr. Little was telling me the truth. And then when I did it…I just decided it would be better to tell you when you were well rested.”

“I don’t believe this.”

Tuchman took a deep breath and regained her composure. “Okay, here is what we are going to do. I’m going to get Richard Fuentes in here. He was a deputy district attorney and an AUSA before he joined the firm. You’re going to tell him what you’ve done and he’s going to figure out whether you or our firm have any criminal liability because of your impetuous actions. Then we’re going to give those fingers and the location of the bodies to the authorities. When that’s all done I’ll figure out what to do about you.”

Part Five.Copycat

Washington, D.C.

Chapter Twenty

“There’s a call on two,” the receptionist told Keith Evans.

“Who is it?”

“He won’t give a name. He says he has information about the Charlotte Walsh case. He asked for you.”

That didn’t carry much weight with Evans, since he was on TV whenever the Bureau felt the need to hold a press conference about the case. He was tempted to shuffle the call to someone else but the investigation was stalled and you never knew.

“Evans here. To whom am I speaking?”

“I’m not going to give my name over the phone. All you need to know is that I’m a cop and I know something that may help you with the Walsh murder.”

“A cop? Look-”

“You look. I’m taking a chance here, so we do this my way. Walk over to the Mall. Go into it between the Indian museum and the Botanical Garden.”

Evans started to say something but the line was dead.

The Mall was mobbed with tourists and Evans never spotted his caller until a man wearing a lightweight jacket and tan slacks appeared at his side. He was medium height and stocky with the beginning of a beer belly. His face was flat and pockmarked and he’d compensated for his receding black hair by growing a bushy mustache.

“Officer…?” Evans started.

“Not until I get some assurances,” the man interrupted. “Then you get my name and what I know.”

“What kind of assurances?”

“That nothing happens to me if I tell you what I know.”

“Why do you need that kind of assurance?”

“It’s nothing really bad. I just bent the rules for someone and now I find out…Look, what I did was no big deal, but it could get me in trouble on the job so I want my ass protected.”

“I can’t make any promises if I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

“Okay. I’ll give you a hypothetical. Let’s say someone who wasn’t a cop called a cop and asked this cop to trace some license plates. How bad is that?”

“Not very.”

“So, what would you do for this hypothetical cop if he could give you information that might help you in a murder case?”

“I’d promise that the Bureau wouldn’t go to his boss and I’d list him as a confidential reliable informant in my reports so I wouldn’t have to use his name.”

“What if his boss found out what he’d done?”

“You understand I have no direct influence with the D.C. cops?”

The man nodded.

“The best I can promise is that I’d go to bat for him and I’d go as high up as I could in the Bureau for backing.”

“Okay, I can live with that.”

“Do you want to tell me your name?”

“It’s Victor Perez.”

“Thanks, Victor. So, tell me why we’re meeting.”

“There’s this ex-cop I know, Andy Zipay. He’s a PI now. We used to play poker once a month. One night, we were in a big pot and I did something stupid. I had this really good hand and I flipped an IOU into the pot I couldn’t cover. So I owed him the money but I didn’t have it.”

“What’s this got to do with Charlotte Walsh?”

“That’s what I’m about to tell you. This guy could have been a prick about the money, but he cut a deal with me instead. Every once in a while he needs information he can’t get, now that he’s private, so he calls me up and I work off the debt. The night Walsh was murdered I got a call from Zipay asking me to run some license plates. There were three of them.”

Perez handed a list with the numbers to Evans and waited while the agent scanned them.

“One is for a car registered to Charlotte Walsh,” the policeman said. “The next day it’s all over the news that Walsh was murdered by the Ripper. I wasn’t going to say anything at first. Then I started thinking, what if it’s important? So I called.”

“You did the right thing.”

Perez nodded.

“You said Zipay asked you to run three plates,” Evans said.

“Yeah, one car was registered to an electrical contracting company, but the other is used by the Secret Service.”

Evans frowned. “What does the Secret Service have to do with this?”

“That’s what I asked. Andy said he didn’t know, he was asking for someone else. He sounded surprised about the Secret Service. If I had to bet I’d say he didn’t know I was going to say the Secret Service used one of the cars. Then again I’m not that great a gambler.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Andy Zipay’s office was on the third floor of an older office building that had seen better days but was still a respectable address. Keith Evans guessed that he was doing all right but hadn’t struck it rich yet. The small waiting area was manned by a plump, pleasant-looking woman in her midforties who was typing away at a word processor when Evans walked in. He flashed his ID and asked to talk to her boss.

Two minutes later, Evans was seated across the desk from Zipay, a slender man a shade over six feet, whose dark suit contrasted sharply with pale skin that looked like it rarely saw the sun. A narrow mustache separated a hooked nose from a pair of thin lips, and there was a touch of gray in his black hair. The austere suit and the mustache made Zipay look a little like the private dicks in black-and-white movies from the 1940s.

“How can I help you, Agent Evans?”

“I’m in charge of the D.C. Ripper case and you can help me by telling me why you’re interested in a car belonging to Charlotte Walsh-his latest victim-and another car that’s the property of the United States Secret Service.”

Zipay steepled his hands in front of his chin and studied the FBI agent for a moment before answering.

“If I were interested in that information it would probably be on behalf of a client. If that client was an attorney who was acting on behalf of a client I would be an agent of that attorney and prevented by the attorney-client privilege from discussing the matter.”

Evans smiled. “Andy, you may be an agent of an attorney but I checked with some friends on the D.C. police force before coming over, and they say you’re also an ex-cop on the take who was lucky to avoid some real unpleasantness. These people would be ready, willing, and able to bust your balls if they found out how you learned the Secret Service and Miss Walsh owned those cars. So don’t go all legal on me and I won’t go all legal on you.”