Free Hothouse Orchid by Stuart Woods

bunch of palmetto. We might not have found her without the dog.”
    “What does it tell us,” Holly said, “that the murderer dumped one body down the road but took the other out to sea?”
    “The question occurred to me,” Hurd said, “and I don’t have an answer.”
    “It doesn’t make any sense,” Jimmy said.
    “Maybe after he had taken one body down to the boat, he thought it was too risky to take the other, so he drove it down the road,” Holly suggested.
    “And how did he control the two of them?” Hurd asked.
    “What was the cause of death?” Holly asked.
    “I just heard from the ME,” Hurd said. “A twenty-two slug to the back of the head.”
    “Was the body naked, like the other one?”
    “Yes, but there was no evidence of rape.”
    “He liked the other one better,” Holly said, “and he managed them with the gun.”
    “Why did he take her hand?”
    “As a souvenir,” she replied. “He tossed it in the trunk, then apparently forgot about it.”
    Hurd winced. “How could anybody forget a thing like that?”

16
    H olly waved goodbye to the two men and went back inside her house. She stood at the sliding glass doors, looking out at the ocean, thinking. Then she went to her newly constructed office, tapped in the code to unlock the door and sat down at the Agency computer.
    She entered her passwords through three levels of security, and then she logged on to the National Criminal Database, which combined the FBI and a network of local law enforcement, and typed in “James Morris Bruno, Jr.” The computer thought about it, then reported the messages, “No criminal convictions as an adult. No arrests as an adult.”
    Holly thought about that. As an adult? She hadn’t seen that before. Bruno might have a juvenile record, but if so, it wouldn’t be part of a national database; in fact, it probably would be sealed. Where did Bruno grow up? She racked her brain. She had known all sorts of things about him when she had worked for him, but that had been years ago, and anyway she had worked at forgetting everything about him.
    New Jersey, she finally remembered, but what city? She couldn’t remember. She went to the state of New Jersey website and, after working her way through multiple levels, she found it: Juvenile Criminal Records. She typed in Bruno’s name again, and the message came up: “Record sealed by the court.”
    So, he did have a juvenile record. She wrote down the URL, then minimized the website and returned to the Agency site. Giving her password again, she entered a subsite called Unlocksmith, which demanded her authority for entry. The system had already identified her by her password, but it wanted a higher authority. She knew Lance Cabot’s entry code, even though she was not supposed to, and she entered that, followed by the URL of the juvenile case files.
    After a few seconds, she was greeted with the message: “This site is available only to authorized personnel. Any attempt to enter without proper authority is punishable by up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.” There would be a record that somebody had visited the site, but the New Jersey authorities would never be able to trace it back to the Agency, because Unlocksmith entries were self-obscuring. Any attempt to backtrack would be met with gobbledygook.
    She typed in Bruno’s name once more, and there was his record in all its glory: two assault-on-minor charges, one male, one female, and one conviction for statutory rape. She examined all three case files. The assault-on-minor charges consisted of one incident of schoolyard bullying that had put a younger boy in the hospital for two days and one incident of sexual assault on a twelve-year-old girl when Bruno had been fourteen—a harbinger of things to come.
    The statutory rape charge had come when Bruno was sixteen and the girl thirteen. The initial charge was rape, but the girl had testified that her participation had been consensual, and, with the