“If you say so.”
“And we’ll get some other stuff too. Like maybe ground beef and potatoes.”
“Sure.”
They bought the supplies they needed. As they cooked the simple dinner together, Alice kept glancing at Jonah.
“What?”
“I’m still coming to grips with how everything’s changed.
“Yeah.” His face clouded, and she knew where his thoughts had leaped.
We’re not going to lose each other, she said.
She knew it might not be true. And that gave their lovemaking later an edge of desperation.
In the morning, Jonah checked on Teddy’s progress, then said to Alice, “I should set up the hunt for the bodies.”
“Can I help?”
“It’s probably going to be a tedious process. Let me show you how to get into the Web, and you can prowl around on your own for a while. Don’t get onto any porn sites—or you’re likely to pick up a computer virus.”
“I guess you’d better explain that.”
After setting Alice up with his laptop, and giving her his cell number in case she ran into any problems, Jonah went to find Grant at the Decorah medical facility.
His friend looked up as he came in the door.
Jonah took a seat next to him at the front desk. “I suppose you know Alice and I are going to go back and try to save Hayward’s other victims—by eliminating the sick bastard as he’s scooping up the first woman.”
“Frank told me. And he said you might need some help from me.”
“Yeah. I’ve got Teddy working on trying to identify the victims through accounts of women whose bodies were never found. But we need more than that—like DNA evidence.”
“They didn’t have DNA evidence back in the fifties and sixties.”
“No. But they had DNA we can use. You know; like all those ads on TV for finding your ancestry?”
Grant nodded.
“Well, if we get samples, we may be able to narrow down the victims better.”
Grant gave Jonah a direct look. “You’re thinking about going back to the estate and digging up the bodies.”
“First we have to find them. We need to get a cadaver dog.”
“And its handler. Which brings up the point that we can’t just waltz in there and start poking around. Not with that local cop on the alert.”
“We’ve got two choices. We can sneak in at night. Or we can string out the line we gave Officer Cooper.” Jonah was thinking it through as he continued to speak. “But he was pretty pissy about our being there. If we asked for permission, we’d probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to search for the bodies and dig them up. That would take time. And we might never get permission.”
“You have time. You could spend years on research.”
“No, Alice and I are scared shitless, wondering if we’re gonna screw up the timeline so we never meet.”
Grant gave his friend a sympathetic look. “Right. I wasn’t thinking. I guess we have to go in at night and risk getting ourselves and a dog handler arrested.”
“Uh huh.”