“He re-created Robyn Naismith’s death scene?”
“Yes.”
“What do you suppose his fantasy is now?”
“Being hunted.”
“By us?”
“By people like us. I’m afraid he might imagine that he is smarter than everybody else and no one can stop him. He fantasizes about games he can play and murders he might commit that would reinforce these images he entertains. And for him, fantasy is not a substitute for action but a preparation for it.”
“Donahue could not have orchestrated releasing a monster like this, altering records, or anything else without help,” I said.
“No. I’m sure he got key people to cooperate, like someone at State Police headquarters, maybe a records person with the city and even the Bureau. People can be bought if you have something on them. And they can be bought with cash.”
“Like Susan.”
“I don’t think Susan was the key person. I’m more inclined to suspect that Ben Stevens was. He’s out in the bars. Drinks, parties. Did you know he’s into a little recreational coke when he can get it?”
“Nothing would surprise me anymore.”
“I’ve got a few guys who have been asking a lot of questions. Your administrator has a life-style he can’t afford. And when you screw with drugs, you end up screwing with bad people. Stevens’s vices would have made him an easy mark for a dirtbag like Donahue. Donahue probably had one of his henchmen make a point of running into Stevens in a bar and they start talking. Next thing, Stevens has just been offered a way to make some pretty decent change.”
“What way, exactly?”
“My guess is to make sure Waddell wasn’t printed at the morgue, and to make sure the photograph of his bloody thumbprint disappeared from Archives. That was probably just the beginning.”
“And he enlisted Susan.”
“Who wasn’t willing but had major financial problems of her own.”
“So who do you think was making the payoffs?”
“They were probably handled by the same person who originally made Stevens’s acquaintance and sucked him into this. One of Donahue’s guys, maybe one of his guards.”
I remembered the guard named Roberts who had given Marino and me the tour. I remembered how cold his eyes were.
“Saying the contact is a guard,” I said, “then who was this guard meeting with? Susan or Stevens?”
“My guess is with Stevens. Stevens wasn’t going to trust Susan with a lot of cash. He’s going to want to shave his share off the top because dishonest people believe everybody is dishonest.”
“He meets the contact and gets the cash,” I said. “Then Ben would meet with Susan to give her a cut?”
“That’s probably what the scenario was Christmas Day when she left her parents’ house ostensibly to visit a friend. She was going to meet Stevens, only the killer got to her first.”
I thought of the cologne I smelled on her collar and her scarf, and I remembered Stevens’s demeanor when I’d confronted him in his office the night I was looking through his desk.
“No,” I said. “That’s not how it went.”
Wesley just looked at me.
“Stevens has several qualities that would set Susan up for what happened,” I said. “He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. And he’s a coward. When things get hot, he’s not going to stick his neck out. His first impulse is to let someone else take the fall.”
“Like he’s doing in your case by badmouthing you and stealing files.”
“A perfect example,” I said.
“Susan deposited the thirty-five hundred dollars in early December, a couple of weeks before Jennifer Deighton’s death.”
“That’s right.”
“All right, Kay. Let’s go back a bit. Susan or Stevens or both of them tried to break into your computer days after Waddell’s execution. We’ve speculated that they were looking for something in the autopsy report that Susan could not have observed firsthand during the post.”
“The envelope he wanted buried with him.”
“I’m still stumped over that. The codes on the receipts do not confirm what we’d speculated about earlier – that the restaurants and tollbooths are located between Richmond and Mecklenburg, and that the receipts were from the transport that brought Waddell from Mecklenburg to Richmond fifteen days prior to his execution. Though the dates on the receipts are consistent with the time frame, the locations are not. The codes come back to the stretch of I-95 between here and Petersburg.”