Chapter Nineteen

Shana, Cheryl, Connie and Heather were having Chinese take-out at their Greenwich Village office. While Ruthie had asked them to let the cops do their job before she and Peter went into hiding, the Greenwich Chicks were having none of it. They wanted to get to Ed Palmer before he got to the couples – or to them.

Shana, Cheryl and Connie were going through a lot of case files, but they couldn't figure out where Ed was, where he had been, or where he was going next. Heather, meanwhile, was using her computer hacking skills to try to break into NCIC. Finally, after about fifteen minutes of trying, she got in.

"Okay," she said in her lisping voice. "I got into the FBI."

"What are you looking for?" asked Connie.

"Cold cases, especially in vacation spots," replied Heather. "I can't believe Palmer is just after Ruthie and Peter. I've got a gut feeling he's done this before."

"What are you getting at?" asked Cheryl.

"Exactly what I'm saying," said Heather. "It just doesn't make sense that he'd just kill his ex-wife and a few of Rev. Camden's family's friends. Will Grayson told me that there's a whole unit of people in the CIA made up just of psychopaths and insane people. They have to be kept under control. When they get out of the grasp of their controllers, they just go on a rampage ..."

"... and betray their country," sighed Shana.

"Yeah."

Heather turned aside, took a spring roll, and bit angrily into it.

"If I could find this guy," she said, "I'd strangle him personally."

"We all would," said Connie, "but we're not soldiers of fortune."

"Don't you wish we were?"

"No," said Cheryl. "Killing people are not in our nature. It's not even our business. We're licensed private investigators, and our sole responsibility is to investigate people. If we make findings of criminality, we turn them over to the authorities and let them handle it."

"I found it," said Heather. "I knew there's a connection."

Heather started printing off one file after another, and passed one stack each to the other three women while Heather herself kept a fourth. It was unbelievable.

In several other destination places – San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami and San Juan – the police were baffled by a string of unsolved murders and rapes. The modus operandi was different in each of the murders in each city; but they all followed a strange pattern: strangulation, bludgeoning, decapitation, poisoning, and rape in broad daylight – in no particular order. Not all cities had the same MO, but all had at least one unsolved sexual assault and one unsolved murder.

"We can't be sure it's Ed Palmer, though," said Shana. "It may be just a sick coincidence."

"Look at the rape victims, well, those who lived to tell about it," said Connie, comparing her notes to those being reviewed by the other women. "Semen samples taken from them indicate their attacker had a very rare blood type: AB Positive."

"Robbie is AB Positive," said Cheryl in disbelief.

"How do you know?"

"We slept together, remember? As a rule of thumb, you don't reveal your blood type to your partner until after you've had sex with him or her."

"You're right! He is AB ," said Heather. "A couple of months back before all of this started, when they had that subway accident in the Bronx, the Red Cross needed emergency supplies of blood. So I went to a clinic, and Robbie was there too. He and Mary were in town for a few days visiting Matt and Sarah, and responded to the call. I was next to him, and I remembered them pricking his fingers since it was the first time he ever gave blood. Sure enough, both the A and B vials came up positive. Which meant he was either AB or AB -."

"But, still, about 1 or 2 of the population has AB blood," said Connie. "That narrows it down a bit, but it still doesn't mean Ed Palmer is responsible for all of these crimes."

"It's more like 3.5," replied Heather. "But he had the motive."

"What motive?" retorted Connie. "These crimes have no motive whatsoever. We're talking about a guy who's pretty much the next Charles Manson or Son of Sam."

"No, there's got to be something. Manson and Berkowitz had a very definite rhyme and reason to what they did."

Heather knew there was something else to this. But she returned to her food, as did the other women. Another fifteen minutes passed by, the silence interrupted only by the occasional crunching and slurping.

"Wait a minute," said Cheryl. "Robbie and his brothers asked for the coroner in Fort Lauderdale for the autopsy report regarding their mother's death, but they never got it. They still haven't received it after all these years. Do you think, maybe ...?"

Connie jumped up and pulled out one of the big brown file boxes marked "Ruthie/Peter – East Coast." She rummaged through it, and found a sealed manila envelope. It was marked, "Undeliverable, no such person – RETURN TO SENDER." The addressee had been scratched out, but through the faded marker Connie could clearly see it had been addressed to Robbie. Evidently, Ed Palmer had intercepted the envelope and returned it before going off on the mission where he turned traitor for good.

"Where did you get this?" asked Heather in surprise.

"Broward County Coroner," said Connie. "I've been following this case personally for years, out of friendship to the Camdens. Apparently, they made subsequent attempts to deliver this to Robbie, but they too were intercepted. So they held on to it until something else came up. Two days ago, on a hunch, I asked them for it. So they delivered it and – I don't know – I must have put it in Ruthie's file by accident."

"Except we now know for sure that Ed Palmer was behind this," said Cheryl.

"I've been reluctant to open it, because I thought Robbie and his bros deserved the first chance to read this. But since we've got nothing to lose ..."

Connie carefully removed the gum backing of the top of the envelope, and gingerly removed the report. It was a horrifying site. There was a naked fifty-something woman, tied to her bed by her arms and legs with yachting rope, and sadistically cut in numerous parts of her body with a razor blade. She was smothered unconscious by a very large dose of Halon – a fire retardant. She had next been brutally raped, while unaware, by a man with AB blood. And the cause of death – overdoses of potassium chloride and sodium thiopental.

"Wait a minute," said Heather. "Aren't those the drugs they use in lethal injections?"

"You got it," said Connie. "And according to this, Mrs. Palmer was injected with precisely the amount of barbiturates they use in executions in the State of Florida."

"And what was Mrs. Palmer's job in the early 1980s, years before Florida changed its method of execution from the electric chair to lethal injection?" asked Cheryl.

"Deputy Chief Electrician of the Florida prison system," said Shana. "She and her boss were in charge of making sure the electric chair worked without torturing the people it killed. It rarely did, so she went around other states who had adopted drugging as their method of execution, in the hopes of lobbying her state to change its method. Not that that particular means also has its problems – but still, she would have known the exact amount of drugs needed to ensure death."

"As would, oddly enough, Ed Palmer," added Heather, "since he is – was – a hired gun for the CIA. She would have told him the amounts needed during pillow talk. Years later, he'd used that information to murder her."

"But the cause of death was listed as cancer," said Connie. "How was this kept from Robbie?"

"Actually, Mrs. Palmer was in remission at the time of her death," said Heather. "When he identified the body, everything except her face was covered; and he insisted on a closed coffin. He never asked the cause of death at the time, he was in too much grief. When he was able to cope better, he asked for the report, which is when all the funny business started."

"That doesn't mean Ed Palmer is our guy," warned Connie.

"Oh, yes it does," said Shana. She pulled up the medical report regarding the rapes of the women in the other cities who had escaped by the skin of their teeth. Literally, since on the way to the hospital, they all had had heart attacks, caused by trace amounts of ...

"... Potassium chloride." Heather shook her head.

"And, for what it's worth, Shelby Connor says she was smothered by a fire retardant as she fought off being slashed with a stiletto."

"So it all fits," said Cheryl. "Do we tell the cops what we know?"

"No," said Connie. "We're going to use our smarts, locate Peter and Ruthie ourselves, and warn them."

"They're in hiding," said Shana. "We'll never find them."

"If you were on the run from the law, where's the one place you'd want to be – where the cops couldn't get you no matter what they tried?"

"A house or building that's right on an international border," said Heather quickly. "The cops in one country couldn't fire because they'd violate the other country's sovereignty. If you're the suspect and you cross the border, that other country has to go through the extradition process which can go on for years."

"And under the treaty that the United States and Canada has," added Connie, "Canada can withhold extradition until they assurances from the Americans they'll take the death penalty off the table. Meantime, he lives in Canada, living off their social welfare system."

"Any suggestions where we should look, Connie?" asked Cheryl.

"I can only think of three places that would fit the description Heather's come up with. Portal, on the Saskatchewan/Montana line; Forest City, on the New Brunswick/Maine line ... no, they're too obvious. The Mounties would get their man without breaking a sweat. No, there's only other place in North America that fits the mold. A town that existed long before the border was settled in the 1840s."

"Derby Line, Vermont; and Rock Island, Quebec."

Faster than one could say "New York Minute," the four women ran out the door, into Connie's convertible, and made the long drive up to their destination. It didn't take long for them for their hunch to be confirmed; for inside a 200 year old house that straddled the border, three men and three women were tied up to each other in a circle. The women were on the American side, the men on the Canadian. A man laughing sadistically was holding them at the point of a syringe stuffed with lethal injection barbiturates. Outside, riot squads, one from each country, had surrounded the manor.

"Okay," said Ed Palmer, "I'm going to make you all three of you battle axes grieving pregnant widows. So, who's the first husband to die?"