Secret of the Seventh Son Read Online Free PDF

FROM HELL , but soon capitulated and started blaring Doomsday all over the front page.
    According to Nancy, the postcards did not have common fingerprints; the sender probably used fiber-free, possibly latex utility gloves. There were a few nonvictim, nonrelated prints on a couple of the cards, and cooperating FBI field offices were in the process of working up postal workers in the Las Vegas to New York delivery chain. The postcards themselves were plain white three-by-fives available in thousands of retail outlets. They were printed on an HP Photosmart ink-jet printer, one of tens of thousands in circulation, fed in twice to print each side. The font was from the standard Microsoft Word pull-down menu. The ink-drawn coffin outlines were probably all done by the same hand using a black Pentel pen, ultrafine point, one of millions in circulation. The stamps were all the same, forty-one-cent American flag designs, one of hundreds of millions in circulation, the backs peel-and-stick, DNA free. The six cards were mailed on May 18 and cleared through the central USPS processing center in Las Vegas.
    "So the guy would have had plenty of time to fly from Vegas to New York but it would have been a stretch for him to drive or take a train," Will interjected. He caught her by surprise since she wasn't sure he'd been listening. "Have you gotten passenger lists for all direct and connecting flights from Vegas arriving at LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark between the eighteenth and twenty-first?"
    She looked up from her notebook. "I asked John if we should do that! He told me it wasn't worth the trouble because someone could have mailed them for the killer."
    Will honked at a Camry going too slowly for his liking, then aggressively passed on the right when it didn't yield. He couldn't mask his sarcasm. "Surprise! Mueller was wrong. Serial killers almost never have accomplices. Sometimes they'll kill in pairs, like the D.C. snipers or the Phoenix shooters, but that's rare as hell. Getting logistical support to set up the crimes? That'd be a first. These guys are lone wolves."
    She was scribbling.
    "What are you doing?" he asked.
    "Taking notes on what you said."
    Christ, this isn't school, he thought. "Since your pen is uncapped, take this down too," he said caustically. "In case the killer did do a cross-country dash, check for speeding tickets along major routes."
    She nodded, then asked cautiously, "Do you want to hear more?"
    "I'm listening."
    It boiled down to this: the victims, four males and two females, ranged in age from eighteen to eighty-two. Three were in Manhattan, one each in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Today's would be the first in the Bronx. All the M.O.'s were the same. The victim receives a postcard with a date one or two days in the future, each with a coffin drawn on the back, and winds up being killed on the exact date. Two stabbings, one shooting, one made to look like a heroin overdose, one crushed by a car that jumped the sidewalk in a hit and run, and one thrown out a window.
    "And what did Mueller say about that?" Will asked.
    "He thought the killer was trying to throw us off by not sticking to one pattern."
    "And what do you think?"
    "I think it's unusual. It's not what's in the textbooks."
    He imagined her criminology texts, passages compulsively highlighted with yellow markers, neat marginalia, tiny lettering. "How about the victim profiles?" he asked. "Any links?"
    The victims appeared to be unconnected. The computational guys in Washington were doing a multidatabase matrix analysis looking for common denominators, a supercomputer version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but so far no hits.
    "Sexual assaults?"
    She flipped pages. "Just one, a thirty-two-year-old Hispanic woman, Consuela Pilar Lopez, in Staten Island. She was raped and stabbed to death."
    "After we finish up in the Bronx, I want to start there."
    "Why?"
    "You can tell a lot about a killer by the way he treats a lady."
    They were on the