Free Fatally Bound by Roger Stelljes Page A

was little if any cover, certainly not enough if you were to have to wait a significant amount of time for Donahue to come home. “If he took her out here, he’s pretty exposed,” Mac stated. “There are houses on both sides. Were the neighbors on both sides home that night?”
    “They were. Nobody heard or saw anything, but it was dark when she arrived home; she’d been at a bar fairly late with friends,” Delmonico reported. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t or couldn’t have taken her out here.”
    “No, but I think it is unlikely,” Wire replied.
    “How about taking her in the garage?” Gesch inquired.
    “That’s an even worse problem, if you ask me,” Mac answered, looking between the garage and house. “He’d have had to take her in the garage and then get her into the house. That would be more likely to be noticed than if, for example, he either took her in the garage or came up behind her when she was unlocking the back door. However, to do that he would have had to have been lying in wait out here and I don’t see a good spot to do that.”
    “So you’re thinking he was inside waiting for her?” Wire asked McRyan.
    “It’s an educated guess,” Mac answered. “It makes the most sense. There is no security system for him to defeat. He just needed to get in the house and wait.”
    “So how did he get inside ahead of her?” Gesch asked.
    “Maybe he had a key,” Mac answered.
    “We thought about that,” Delmonico stated. “We didn’t find one anywhere around the house.”
    “You wouldn’t if he kept it,” Wire stated. “Did you find a key holder perhaps? People stash one outside their house sometimes.”
    “That occurred to us as well but we never found one. We asked her family and friends and they weren’t aware of one.”
    Mac crossed his arms and thought about it a little more. “Your profile on this guy says he’s mission oriented, right?”
    The FBI agents nodded.
    “And we don’t know what the mission is yet, because we don’t know what ties these women together.”
    “Right,” Gesch said.
    “But as a mission-oriented killer, if that’s what he is, he’s a planner, right? On a mission you prepare. This killer is a schemer.”
    “Meaning?” Gesch asked.
    “He hunted Hannah Donahue, stalked her and knew exactly when to strike, when she would be most vulnerable and he would be least vulnerable. He followed her for, I bet, at least two weeks before he took her. In those two weeks he watched her every move and somewhere along the line he found some way into the house.”
    “So what are you thinking, McRyan?” Delmonico asked.
    “We need to go back through the last two weeks of her life, we need to reinterview all of her coworkers, friends, family, anyone she intersected with and see if anything pops.”
    “We’ve done all that already,” Gesch answered skeptically. “We’ve had agents meet with these people. We used Wente’s local detectives here in Dover. Nothing hit and we,” he pointed to Delmonico, “I don’t know that we can spend the time on that; we have to run this thing.”
    “I know you don’t, and I don’t think you should. Wire and I should,” Mac answered.
    “We’ll run a parallel investigation,” Dara added. “We’ll go back through the case and work it backwards, while you’re continuing to go forward.”
    “Exactly,” Mac jumped back in. “Look, Agent Gesch, this is what we excel at. I think he had a key to get in. He got it somewhere in the last couple of weeks, I’d even bet in the last few days before she was killed. Somebody knows something, they may not even know they know it, but they do. Maybe the right person hasn’t been talked to yet. Maybe they haven’t been asked the right question yet. Maybe we don’t even know the right question to ask—yet.”
    Gesch, Delmonico and Wente were about to object. Mac held his hands up, “I don’t mean to suggest people weren’t doing their jobs. They were. Everyone is trying to