Unlucky 13 by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro Page A

to five foot eight. Athletic. Could be Hispanic.”
    I said, “That’s a
description?
I callthat a vague generality that could fit too many people to be useful at all. But listen, Cindy. Please look at me. Let’s say you’re actually onto Morales. Thank God you didn’t confront her. Are you kidding me? She’s on the FBI’s top-ten most-wanted list. Number
five
. You know better than almost anyone how dangerous she is.”
    Cindy said, “I’m a
crime
journalist, Linds. A damned good one, as it turnsout.”
    That was indisputable. Cindy had helped me solve more than one case with her doggedness, and she had some kind of intuition that couldn’t be put down to luck. She had told me once that she was one killer story short of national acclaim. I understood what Morales meant to her.
    But that didn’t mean she should be trying to get close to her. I nodded my head in agreement and said, “I knowhow good you are. I know.”
    Cindy said, “So—may I have some coffee now? I’m not done telling you what’s going on.”

CHAPTER 37
    I KEPT MY eyes on Cindy while I brewed the coffee. She was tapping on her phone, looking as distracted as she had seemed over dinner.
    Joe came into the kitchen and I whispered to him, “She’s tracking Morales.”
    His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.
    “By herself? You gotta love her,” he said.
    “And—why?” I said dubiously.
    “She’s a lot like you.”
    “Come
on
,” I said. “You really thinkthat?”
    He grinned, gave me a swat on the behind, poured coffee for himself, and went back to his office.
    I called out, “Cindy, come get your mug.”
    She sugared and milked her java, after which we took our mugs to the living room and assumed our former positions.She swiped at her cell phone with her thumb, and just when I was ready to scream, she got up and brought her phone over to me.
    “Ijust got an e-mail with these attachments about three hours ago,” Cindy said. “Sometimes a picture is actually worth a thousand blah-blah-blahs.”
    “What am I looking at?” I asked her.
    The first photo was of three State of Wyoming Highway Patrol cars, flashers on, clumped up along the side of a highway.
    The second shot showed traffic cones across the lane and a half-dozen khaki-uniformed troopersstanding around what looked like a female body lying in the ditch off the shoulder of the road.
    “You’re saying that’s Mackie?”
    “No,” said Cindy. “Keep flipping through.”
    The next photo was a tighter shot of the corpse. I thought that I was looking at a hit-and-run, but by the fourth photo, it was clear that the victim had been shot through the left temple.
    “Who sent you these to you?” I asked.

    “Off the record,” Cindy said, “they’re from a cop friend of mine who got the pictures from an undisclosed source. There’s no ID yet on the victim. I don’t know her, Linds,” Cindy said, “but she looks familiar.”
    I looked at the close-ups of the victim. She was pretty, in her twenties, long dark hair, pale skin, slender build.
    The gunshot wound to the temple made me think that if she had beena passenger, the driver could have shot her and dumped her out of the vehicle.
    Or, if she had been driving and stopped her car for someone and rolled down her window, the person standing outside the car could have popped her, dragged her out, and stolen her car.
    Then I came to the close-ups of the victim’s hands. All of her fingers had been cut off at the first digit—and that changed everything.

    Cindy said, “Remind you of something?”
    Yes. It reminded me of Randy Fish, a sexual sadist who had used different methods to kill and torture his victims. He had cut the fingers off one of his last kills with a pair of pruning shears—while the girl was alive. He’d told me all about that.
    Randy Fish was dead. I was a witness to that.
    But his soul mate was still alive.
    Cindy said, “How couldthis be a coincidence? This murder looks to me like an homage to Randy