“Wow. Grayson knew to go to a range to screw up your test?”
“He’s an ex-federal marshal. He knows what he’s doing. Think about it. He wore a mask, got rid of the body, got rid of the weapon, destroyed our gun residue test—and he hired Hester Crimstein. Do you see what I’m up against?”
“I do.”
“We know Grayson dumped the body somewhere on the route, but there are a lot of hours unaccounted for, and that area has plenty of empty acreage.”
“And you won’t get the manpower to cover it?”
“Like I said, this isn’t a girl gone missing. This is the corpse of a pedophile. And if Grayson planned it well enough—which, so far, seems to be the case—he might have dug a hole before he even killed Mercer. We might never find the body.”
Wendy looked off, shook her head.
“What?”
“I was his patsy. Grayson tried to get me on his side. When he couldn’t, he just followed me—and I led him right to Mercer.”
“Not your fault.”
“Doesn’t matter if it is or it isn’t. I don’t like being used like that.”
Walker said nothing.
“It’s a crap ending,” Wendy said.
“Some would say it’s pretty tidy.”
“How so?”
“The pedophile escapes our legal system but not justice. It’s almost biblical when you think about it.”
Wendy shook her head. “It feels wrong.”
“What part?”
She kept it to herself. But the answer was, all of it. Like maybe Mercer’s ex had a point. Like maybe something about this whole thing stank right from the get-go. Like maybe from the get-go she should have trusted her woman’s intuition or her gut or whatever the hell you want to call it.
Suddenly it felt as though she’d helped kill an innocent man.
“Just find him,” Wendy said. “Whatever he was, you owe him that.”
“I’ll try. But understand, this case will never be a priority.”
CHAPTER 10
BUT WALKER was tragically wrong about that.
Wendy wouldn’t learn about the horrible discovery until the next day when it became “breaking news” on all the media outlets. With Pops and Charlie both sleeping in and Jenna’s comment about Princeton ringing in her head, Wendy had decided to start her own investigation. First stop: Phil Turnball, Dan Mercer’s college roommate. It was time, she thought, to dig seriously into Dan’s past. There seemed no place better to start.
But at the exact same time that Wendy entered a Starbucks in Englewood, New Jersey, two law enforcement officials, Sussex County sheriff Walker and his rookie deputy, Tom Stanton, were twenty-five miles away, in Newark, searching room 204 at the dubiously dubbed Freddy’s Deluxe Luxury Suites. Total fleabag. Freddy must have had some sense of humor, Walker thought, insomuch as the no-tell managed to be none of the three things—deluxe, luxury, or suites—listed in the moniker.
Walker had worked diligently trying to track down the last two weeks in the life of Dan Mercer. The clues were few. Using his cell phone, Dan Mercer had called only three people: his lawyer, Flair Hickory; his ex-wife, Jenna Wheeler; and yesterday, the reporter Wendy Tynes. Flair had never asked his client where he was staying—the less he knew, the better. Jenna didn’t know. Wendy, well, she wasn’t in contact with him until yesterday.
Still the trail wasn’t hard to follow. Dan Mercer had been hiding, yes, but according to both his lawyer and his ex, it was from threats from overly “concerned” citizens and quasi-vigilantes, not law enforcement. No one wanted a predator in the neighborhood. So he moved from hotel to hotel, usually paying with cash he had picked up from a nearby ATM. Because of the impending trial, Mercer couldn’t leave the state.
Sixteen days ago, he had checked into a Motel 6 in Wildwood. From there, he had stayed three days at the Court Manor Inn in Fort Lee followed by the Fair Motel in Ramsey, and as of yesterday, Mercer had been at Freddy’s Deluxe Luxury Suites in downtown Newark, room 204.
The window looked out over a shelter nicknamed the Resort (as in Last Resort) where Dan Mercer had worked. Interesting place to end up. The manager hadn’t seen Mercer in two days, but then, as the manager explained, clients didn’t come here to be noticed.
“Let’s see what we can find,” Walker said.
Stanton nodded. “Okay.”
Walker said, “Mind if I ask you something?”
“Nope.”
“No other cop wanted to work with me on this one. They figure, good riddance to a scumbag.”
Stanton nodded. “Yet I volunteered.”
“Right.”
“And you want to know why.”
“Right.”
Stanton closed the top drawer, opened the second one. “Maybe I’m new, maybe I’ll get more jaded. But the law cleared this guy. Period, the end. If you don’t like that, change the law. We in law enforcement need to be impartial referees. If the speed limit is fifty-five miles per hour, then you ticket a guy going fifty-six. If you think, nah, don’t ticket until he’s going sixty-five, then change the law to sixty-five. And it works the other way too. Following the rules, the judge freed Dan Mercer. If you don’t like that, change the law. Don’t bend the rules. Legally change them.”
Walker smiled. “You are new.”
Stanton shrugged, still searching through the clothes. “I guess there’s a bit more to it.”
“I thought there might be. Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“I have an older brother named Pete. Great guy, terrific athlete. He was on the Buffalo Bills practice squad for two years out of school. Tight end.”
“Okay.”
“So Pete’s up at camp at the start of his third season. This is his year, he thinks. He’s been lifting and working out like a madman, and he has a real shot of getting on the roster. He’s twenty-six years old and he’s up in Buffalo. He goes out one night and meets this girl at a Bennigan’s. You know. The chain restaurant?”
“I know it.”
“Okay, so Pete orders wings, and this smoldering chick saunters over and asks if she can have one. He says sure. She makes a spectacle of herself eating it. You know what I mean? Using lots of tongue and she’s wearing this scoop top that’s begging for an ogling. I mean, she’s a total hottie. They start flirting. She sits down. One thing leads to another—and Pete takes her back to his place and gives her what for.”