Rossi gave him a look. “You’re kidding, right? I write about originals—Gacy, Speck, Bundy, Kotchman—true innovators in their chosen field. No writer, no reader, is interested in just another copycat.”
Dryden lurched forward. “I am not a copycat! I ama true original!”
Leaning back in his chair, Rossi said, “Hey, I don’t want to make you feel bad. Take some pride if you want to. But don’t kid a kidder—Danny boy, you didn’t even make double figures.”
“ Twelve!A goddamn dozen!” The little eyes had grown big. “Count ’em! Two in Chicago Heights, two in Wauconda, one each in Chinatown, one in Des Plaines, one in Aurora, three at the university, and the Kotchman kill who should be dead”—he checked the clock on the wall—“any time now.”
That only added up to eleven, but Rossi didn’t have the luxury of going down that road—he had a missing man to find.
“Yeah,” Rossi said, “he probably wouldhave been dead pretty soon… if we hadn’t found him already. And two of the nursing students you just wounded. Gonna be fine.”
Dryden eyes grew tiny again. “You didn’t find him.”
“What?”
“You couldn’t have found him. I was too careful. Always a step ahead of you chumps.”
“Right, right,” Rossi said, picking up the folder. “Like you were so far ahead of us at the Speck house. That’s why you’re here now, because you were always one up on a chump like me.”
Dryden’s mouth opened but no words came out.
Rossi got up, stepped back from the table, allowing the folder to slip from his grasp, as if accidentally, the pictures sliding out of the folder and onto the table. The fake one Reid had devised, at Rossi’s direction, was a blurry shot that showed a middle-aged man who looked vaguely like Herman Kotchman’s abusive stepfather. This man was strapped to a gurney, covered in blankets, his head just barely visible as he was loaded into an ambulance.
“Excuse,” Rossi said, gathering up the photos and stuffing them back into the folder.
He had given Dryden only a second or two to glimpse the picture, but Rossi knew that was enough. The killer’s fallen face said they’d made a sale: Dryden seemed convinced they’d rescued his premature burial victim.
“How the hell…” Dryden began. The little eyes burned in their sockets. “It took me fucking weeksto find just the right farm!”
“Either we’re not as dumb as you think we are,” Rossi said. “Or you’re not as smart…”
Forehead clenched, Dryden sat forward. “Let me see the photo again.”
Rossi hesitated.
“Ha! I knew it—you dummied the thing, didn’t you? Photoshop bullshit!”
Rossi took the photo from the folder and handed it to Dryden, who studied it. The photographer only needed a moment.
“I was right,” Dryden said, and laughed. “You didn’t even get the goddamn state right on the ambulance’s license plate, let alone the town.”
“Good to know,” Rossi said. “In fact, you’ve just told me everything I need to find the guy.”
“Yeah, right.”
Rossi leaned in. “If you’ll pardon me, Danny, I’m going to go help my team prove whether the chump here is me… or you.”
“If you dofind him?” Dryden said with a sneer. “He’ll be dead.”
“I don’t think so,” Rossi said. “And after we save him, you’ll get to see him again, alive and well and on the witness stand.”
Dryden had nothing to say to that.
Rossi went out and met the rest of the team in the corridor.
Hotchner asked, “What just happened?”
Rossi half smiled. “We got the answer.”
Hands on hips, frowning, Morgan asked, “How do you figure that?”
“Victim’s in Indiana.”
Hotchner squinted at Rossi, as if trying to bring him into focus. “And how do you arrive at that?”
But it was Reid who answered: “Because the ambulance had Illinois plates.”
Morgan’s eyes widened. “You figure because the ambulance had Illinois plates, and this whack job said that was the wrong state, the vic is in Indiana?”
“Yeah,” Rossi said with a shrug. “Don’t you?”
Shrugging back, Morgan said, “How the hell should I know?”
“You really should know,” Rossi said, “because you interviewed his wife. Has her husband been gone overnight?”
“No,” Prentiss said. “She said he worked all night once back in April—and that was the night he killed Andrews and Mendoza.”
Rossi asked, “What was the latest he got home?”
Hotchner thought for just a moment. “In the last few weeks,” he said, “the latest Dryden got in was about two thirty a.m., according to his wife.”
“All right,” Rossi said. “Now, has Garcia looked into missing middle-aged men in the area?”
Hotchner nodded. “Three disappearances reported in the last two weeks. One’s turned up already, and another is a husband who apparently left his wife for his secretary.”
Prentiss said, “The third one was a businessman, Grant Shuler, in from Atlanta. Associates he was calling on reported him missing on July twenty-ninth. They say they dropped him off at his motel the night before, just after ten p.m., and haven’t seen him since.”
“All right,” Rossi said. “Our time span is between ten p.m. and two thirty a.m. Our search grid will be an area that Dryden could drive to and back from in the allotted time.”
“He’s on to something,” Hotchner said. “Let’s get back to the office.”
Forty minutes later, in the field office’s conference room, they huddled over a map of the area.
Rossi said, “Even if Dryden had everything ready at the site—plywood coffin waiting in its hole— and with no traffic at all, it’s over an hour to get to Indiana from Shuler’s motel, and the better part of another to get home from the border. If we figure a minimum of a half hour at the grave site, that only leaves him an hour each way into the state. How far is that?”
Reid drew a circle that included an area bordered by extreme southern Michigan on the north, South Bend on the east, south to Fair Oaks, and Illinois on the west.
Morgan’s eyebrows were up. “That’s still a lot of ground.”
“Don’t forget,” Hotchner said, “he’s imitating Kotchman.”
“Get Garcia,” Rossi said, nodding. “We need a little magic.”
Prentiss made a video connection via her laptop.
“Garcia,” Rossi said. “Match anything you can between Indiana and Modesto, California. Highways, town names, county names, anything that might resonate.”
Garcia asked, “How soon do you need it?”
“Yesterday.”
“No problem.”
On the little flat screen, she turned away and fingers danced gracefully over the keys of her keyboard. She was back in less than five minutes, but looking glum.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Anything even close?” Rossi asked, determined to keep any desperation out of his voice. Had he gottentoo cocky and cost Grant Shuler his life?
“There’s a Highway 120 near Modesto,” Garcia said, “and a Highway 20 in the area of Indiana you’re looking at. Best I can come up with.”
“Good job,” Rossi told her, happy to have a straw to grasp at.
The genie on the screen asked, “What now?”
“We’re looking for vacant farms for sale along Highway 20.”
Prentiss asked, “Why farms along Highway 20?”
“Kotchman lived on a farm,” Reid said. “Dryden has been trying to re-create the crimes in as much detail as possible.”
Rossi said, “He’ll have found a vacant farm. Shuler will be in the backyard.”
“I wish we had more,” Hotchner said.
“It’s what we’ve got.”
Reid seemed more confident: “No, it all makes sense—let’s go with it.”
That was when Garcia piped in to say, “There’s three vacant farms on Highway 20 within your search grid.”
Hotchner leaned in. “Give us addresses and directions.”
Prentiss went with Hotchner in a Tahoe, Reid with the two detectives in an unmarked, while Morgan and Rossi in another SUV went to the third farm. Using their cell phones, they stayed in constant communication. Morgan and Rossi had the farm farthest away.