Free Fatally Bound by Roger Stelljes Page B

find this guy. And maybe we’ll fail too. However, I think Dara and I are looking at asking some different questions. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Sometimes when you go back a second time you stumble onto something that was missed the first time around.”
    Gesch looked to Delmonico, who nodded and then looked over to Detective Wente, who asked: “So what do you need?”
    • • • •
    It was time to start again.
    Hannah Donahue was punished for her sins, just like the others. Having done it, he got away, laid low for a few days and now he felt it was safe for him to come out again and start scouting. With three down, he could actually see the finish line now. Once the final blow was delivered and his mission was complete, he would once again disappear.
    His next target was prospering greatly, making a name for herself, a rising star and someone that people recognized. That made her both a more intriguing, and in many ways, a more dangerous target for him.
    She pulled out from her parking garage in her little sports car and raced down the street, clearly happy in the success she was experiencing, a star on the rise.
    He dropped the gear shift for the pickup truck, fell in three vehicles behind and followed, his wrist draped casually over the steering wheel.
    The hunt always started this way, just loosely following his target around from a safe distance, looking to get a feel for the rhythm of her life. What time did she get up in the morning, what was her daily schedule, who did she see, did she have a significant other to complicate matters, were there any regular places she went at specifically scheduled times and, most importantly, was she on guard.
    In doing all this he’d find the ideal time and place.
    He would plan it down to every last detail.

CHAPTER SIX
“There are some issues men are not equipped to handle.”
    S o far, they were getting nowhere.
    Mac eighty-sixed another Styrofoam coffee cup into the wastebasket and just stared at it, on top of three others he put in the garbage. There had been two days of Styrofoam coffee cups, stale donuts and fast food to go along with countless interviews and stacks of documents. So far, there was nothing to show for their efforts.
    The plan was to go back through, as best they could, every stop of Hannah Donahue’s life for the last two weeks. In fact, after they started they went back as far as eighteen days as Donahue had been out of town for five days over a school break and the second victim was killed in the middle of her time away. So from the day Hannah Donahue returned to Dover, they’d started piecing together every component of her life.
    On three whiteboards in a conference room at the Dover Police Department, every minute detail of her life that could be accounted for was logged and noted. For two days Mac and Wire, with the occasional assistance of Detective Wente, methodically worked their way through Hannah Donahue’s life.
    The first step had been to go to the family home outside of Wilmington, an hour to the north of Dover, to meet with her family. Delaware, and the city of Wilmington in particular, was a financial center for the world because of the state’s finance and banking laws. It was an oddity that Mac first learned of in law school when he took business organizations and learned of the whole line of Delaware law that applied to business transactions. It was why so many corporations were incorporated in Delaware, to take advantage of the Delaware law.
    William Donahue made his fortune in the banking industry that was the life blood of Wilmington. Over the years his banking work necessitated spending many hours in Washington, working to massage the nation’s finance and tax laws. It gave him access to the nation’s power brokers which craved his dollars and robust connections to more of it. That access, that money, that power was why Mac and Wire were here.
    “I see my threat got through to the president,” Donahue said non-boastfully.