Free The Chessman by Jeffrey B. Burton

more of a cold case for nearly three years now.”
    “Well, Agent Cady, I don’t imagine the Glover strangling remains a cold case any longer.”
    “No, sir.” Cady realized the AD had read the file. “Originally, the detectives investigating the Sarah Glover slaying believed she’d been kidnapped and raped repeatedly by the same UNSUB. However, lab results now indicate that the semen taken from her vagina and anus matches DNA from the Zalentine brothers.”
    “Which one, Alain or Adrien?”
    “Quite likely both, sir.” Cady looked down at his notes in front of him. “When a single fertilized egg splits in two, the two embryos develop into identical—or monozygotic—twins. Since these twins come from the same egg and sperm, they have shared DNA, their genetic makeup is a match, thus indistinguishable to a
standard
DNA analysis. In some cases they use fingerprints to tell identical twins apart.”
    “That so?”
    “Yes, sir, and here’s where it gets interesting. Sarah Glover’s body was found by a trucker hauling plasma screens to Frederick. He got off 270 to check a tire, got that sorted out, then ducked behind the tree line to take a leak and noticed a pale hand sticking up out of the dirt. Said he made a mess of himself sprinting back to the truck for his phone. At that point Sarah Glover had been missing for three weeks. She’d been hitchhiking to Catonsville to catch some grunge band in concert and hadn’t been heard from since.” Cady pointed at the Cambridge investigator and continued, “Detective Sears and I have created a Glover-Zalentine timeline. It’s labeled A-7 in your packet. We believe the Zalentine twins panicked. They’d badly botched a shallow grave, caught the story about Glover’s body being found when it broke in the news and, that very next day, traded in their three-month old Mercedes-Benz CL600 for a Ferrari 575 M Maranello.”
    Cady felt his cell phone vibrate in his front pocket, knew it was his wife Laura calling about tonight’s plans, and knew he would disappoint her once again.
    “Glover had been in the Mercedes?”
    “The CL600 was the only sports car the Zalentines owned that had
sufficient
trunk space. They’d probably seen enough CSI episodes to know how screwed they were if they’d transported Sarah Glover in the trunk to the burial spot off 270. Then, the day after trading in the Mercedes, the twins are on an Airbus to France.”
    “They knew they messed up so they put an ocean between themselves and the investigation,” Detective Sears said.
    “Exactly,” Cady replied. “The twins follow the news of the investigation over the Internet from some five-star in Paris. The management company at the Dorchester Towers held their mail. The woman in the Dorchester office mentioned that the only time she’d ever spoken in-depth with the Zalentines was that month they were in Paris, when they kept calling her every other day to remind her about the mail. Of course they were feeling her out, trying to see if anyone had been poking around their home front. Phone records indicate that they kept calling their own answering services during that timeframe, checking daily to see if any police investigators were trying to contact them.”
    “After about five weeks of seeing and hearing nothing,” Detective Sears said, picking up the narration, “they wiped the sweat off their brows and returned home. Probably peeked around every corner before stepping back into the Dorchester Towers. After another couple of weeks pass, they get an idea, something a little brighter to
facilitate
their new hobby. A sailboat.”
    “That’s how they got rid of the other five, isn’t it, the ones that haven’t been found?” Agent Preston asked quietly.
    Cady nodded his head. “A-12 in your packet is a list of the items found aboard their boat,
The She-Killer
.”
    “Brazen name.”
    “Yes, it is,” Cady responded. “Note on A-12 the barbell weights. Also note the forty feet of