At Community General, Mark, Jesse, Steve, and Amanda met to compare notes. Steve reported that they had identified the car that had nearly hit him in the club parking lot as belonging to a man named Tommy Callander. The police were currently looking for him, but so far hadn't found him.
"You think he's the killer?" Jesse asked.
"It's possible," Steve replied. "He's had a couple of run-ins with Vice before: he beat up one girlfriend a while back, and he's been picked up for stalking another one who broke up with him."
"Any history of sending threatening letters to the women he stalked?" inquired Amanda. Steve shook his head.
"No, and we have nothing to tie him to the ones Terri received."
"Did you get any identifiable fingerprints off Terri's mailbox?" asked Mark.
"Nothing useful. There were Terri's of course, and we identified the mailcarrier's prints. There were a couple of stray prints, but people are always leaving fliers in mailboxes, so that doesn't mean much. We compared Callander's prints to what we had, but we didn't get a match. And the letter and envelop only had Terri's prints on them. And so far, we haven't turned up any neighbors who saw anybody putting something in the mailbox."
"How about the hair?" Amanda asked. "Did it match the one on Pete's jacket? And could it be Callander's?"
"We haven't got the DNA report back yet," Steve said. "And we don't have anything of Callander's yet to compare it to. Color-wise, there's nothing that says it can't be his – his hair's a sort of nondescript shade of brown."
"You know, there's something nagging at me that I just can't put my finger on," Mark said thoughtfully. "Something I heard or saw when I was at the club…"
"Something Terri said?" asked Steve curiously.
"I'm not sure," Mark replied. "I think it was when I was talking to Tina." He shook his head in frustration. "I just can't remember what it was." As he was trying to pin down the elusive memory, Steve's cell phone rang.
"Sloan," he answered. He listened for a moment. "Great. What've you got?" A pause, and Steve's face took on a look of satisfaction. "Okay," he started to say, then stopped abruptly. "Wait a minute – say that again?" Mark and the others exchanged puzzled glances as they saw the double take Steve had done. They watched as he thanked the person on the other end and hung up, turning to face them with a bemused expression.
"What is it, Steve?" Mark asked.
"That was the lab – they got the results of the DNA test on the hair from the anonymous letter envelope."
"And?" prompted Jesse.
"And they said, and I quote, 'it's definitely from the same woman'," replied Steve.
"Woman?" repeated Jesse in surprise. The friends exchanged blank looks. "Does that mean the murderer's a woman? Or aren't the hairs from the murderer after all?"
"There's nothing in the autopsy report that would rule out a woman as the killer," said Amanda thoughtfully.
"And the fact that the hair was caught in the envelope of the anonymous letter certainly seems to point to the woman as the letter writer," added Mark.
"And since the hair matches the one on Pete's jacket, it still links the murderer and the letter writer," said Steve. "So now we're looking at the possibility that the person who sent those letters to Terri and killed Pete is not a man, but a woman."
"So who does that leave us with?" asked Jesse.
"There's Karen," said Mark. "She has brown hair."
"I thought she and Terri were supposed to be good friends," said Amanda. "Why would she send those letters to her and kill Pete?"
"Tina indicated that Karen had shown signs of interest in Pete herself; she said she thought Karen was getting jealous of Terri," Mark replied.
"Jealous enough to kill?" questioned Steve.
Mark shrugged. "It's hard to say. She certainly wouldn't want to show it if she was." He thought for a moment. "For that matter, Tina sounded more than a bit jealous of Terri herself." He suppressed a sudden smile as he remembered that Steve had been a factor in that jealousy.
"Great. Maybe I should just go down to the club and start collecting hair samples from all the dancers," Steve muttered in frustration. "And where does Callander fit in with all this?"
"What if the letter writer and the murderer aren't the same after all?" suggested Jesse. The others looked at him in surprise. "If the letter writer is one of the dancers at the club, then it's always possible that Pete got the hairs on his jacket there, not from the murderer," he explained.
"Which means Callendar could still be the killer," Steve pointed out.
Mark grimaced in frustration. "I just wish I could remember what it was that I heard at the club!"
"In any event," said Steve, "it looks like things are definitely pointing to someone at the club being involved in this somehow. I think I'll go down there and poke around some more. And I'll give Terri a ride home to make sure she gets there all right." He nodded to the others and left.
Chapter 9At the Tulip Club, Steve talked to the waitresses and dancers again, trying to get a feel for who among them might harbor a grudge against Terri. Since there was now the possibility that the letter writer, at least, was a woman, he also wanted to see if he could pin down their movements during the time when the last letter had been put in Terri's mailbox. Bearing in mind the information he'd gotten from his father, he decided to focus on Tina and Karen. Neither of them had alibis for the time when Pete had been killed; but since that had been around 1:00 in the morning, the fact that they both claimed to be asleep was hardly unreasonable. It was also impossible to rule out the possibility that one of them had placed the anonymous letter in Terri's mailbox, since there was no certainty about when the letter had actually been planted. He was still trying to get some sense of just how jealous Karen might be, when Terri finished her routine and came over to see him.
"How come you were asking Karen all those questions?" she asked him.
Steve looked back at her gravely. "We've gotten a little more information on whoever's writing those letters," he told her, trying to think of a way to break the news that the writer might actually be one of her friends. "We have reason to think it might be a woman."
Terri looked at him blankly. "A woman? Why would a woman write me letters like those?"
"It's possible that it might be someone who was jealous of your relationship with Pete," Steve explained as gently as he could. Terri stared at him for a moment before she realized where this was heading.
"And you think Karen might have sent them?" she asked incredulously. "That's crazy! Karen's been my dearest friend for years!"
"I understand she was pretty interested in Pete herself," Steve said.
"Who told you that?" demanded Terri angrily. "I'll bet it was Tina! She's always spreading malicious gossip about people!"
"What about Tina?" asked Steve. "Does she have any reason to be particularly jealous of you? Or hold a grudge against you?"
"Oh, this is ridiculous," Terri said, looking upset. "Do you really think somebody here at the club is doing all this?"
"Well, it's a possibility," Steve replied. "We've got to look into it."
"What makes you think a woman wrote those letters?"
"We found a brown hair stuck to the flap of the envelope you gave me," Steve said. "We ran a DNA analysis and discovered that it's a woman's hair. It also matched a couple of hairs that were found on Pete's jacket. It's possible that Pete could have picked up the hairs here at the club."
He saw that Terri was really perturbed by this idea. "This is such a nightmare," she said. "I'm beginning to feel like I'm not safe anywhere; that I can't trust anybody!"
"Look, if you're done here for the night, why don't I take you home," Steve suggested. "I'll make sure everything's secure there, and you can relax."
Terri hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "Let me just go get my things," she said. Steve watched her go back to the changing area, unaware that he was the target of thoughts nearby: He's getting too close…we'll have to do something about him…
