The Way You Look Tonight by Richard Madeley Page B

shoulders.
    ‘Good luck, Stella. We’ll be thinking of you every day. Come home safe to us.’
    A few moments later, the government car was taking her away from the house on Bancroft and the Rockfairs were dwindling into the distance, still waving to her. Her passenger window seemed to be
locked shut so she flapped her hand as best she could behind the car’s oddly thick rear window.
    The Oldsmobile pulled smoothly round the corner and Stella settled slowly back into her seat.
    All at once, she felt utterly alone.
    What on earth had she allowed herself to be dragged into?

17
    He was puzzled. He had to admit it.
    He’d expected the newspapers to reveal the technique he was using to take the girls. The nails, the chloroform.
    The cops must have worked it out by now. They would have found the peaches’ abandoned cars – he hadn’t bothered to hide them, even if there had been the time – and
everything would have been obvious. Number two would have strongly suggested how he was taking them; number three would have confirmed it beyond a doubt.
    But after the fourth – which one headline had labelled:
‘INFAMY IN ISLAMORADA’
(he’d liked that; it sounded classy) – there was still no mention of how
he was grabbing them; what one puffed-up senior cop had called the ‘modus operandi’.
    He’d picked up a
Keys Courier AND
a
Miami Herald
on the way in to work this morning and sure enough, number four was front-page news in both, but even though he
combed through the main articles, and a feature piece inside the
Courier
headlined
‘PSYCHO SICKO’
– which was plain dumb, not to mention insulting – there
was squat diddly about how he picked the peaches from their trees.
    That bothered him.
    He signed in at the office, grabbed the keys for his usual cab from the duty pegboard, and went outside again to the pound.
    He wasn’t sure where to start his shift today. The supervisor left that kind of stuff up to the boys to decide. He was sorely tempted to drive south to upmarket Cheeca Lodge in
Islamorada itself. That way he could swing right by the spot he’d been watching from the diner’s window yesterday.
    He decided against it. His waitress was giving him some mighty funny looks by the time he left – he’d been at the same table for nearly three hours, watching the increasingly
frantic comings and goings outside – and the cops might now have set up a checkpoint where the dirt road peeled off Route 1. Not that that bothered him, at least not now, at this early stage.
But it was going to be a long game and he didn’t want his face to stick in a watchful cop’s mind as the guy who always seemed to be hanging around the scene of the crime. That was how
you got yourself caught, if you were stupid.
    And so was sticking to the same . . . what was it that jackass had called it? Oh yeah, ‘modus operandi’. That was going to have to change sometime soon.
    He’d still kill them in exactly the same way, obviously. He’d got that down to a fine art, now, and anyway he enjoyed it way too much to want to change a single damned
thing.
    But he’d have to start working on a new trick to catch them. The investigation was obviously holding back the nails thing from the papers so they could lay a trap for him. Christ, they
must think he was born yesterday.
    It didn’t matter either way. He’d work out a neat little plan B and leave them as flat-footed as before.
    He selected Drive on the long lever that poked out of the old dash, and pulled out on to the Overseas Highway, turning north for once. Maybe he’d drive all the way to Key Biscayne,
where there was increasingly serious money these days.
    And serious money meant perfect peaches.

18
    Massachusetts had been oven-hot when Stella flew out of Boston that same afternoon. But the wave of liquid heat that poured into the cabin of her scheduled flight to Miami when
its doors opened soon after landing overwhelmed her.
    She had never known humidity like it.