“Nope.”
Jack said, “But—no, you’re kidding us, right?”
Lucy was staring at him, nearly en pointe.
Savich smiled at them. “It’s no son. She’s a woman. The statistical analysis they gave us shows she’s almost certainly a first-degree relative, a mother or a sister or daughter. Given our perp’s age, she’s almost certainly his daughter.”
Sherlock said, “Just a bit of background. Bundy had a girlfriend he met while enrolled at the University of Washington in 1967. She dumped him after she graduated, said he was too immature for her, and went home to California. Bundy looked her up in 1973, and showed her the new, improved package—law school, good attitude, the serious dedicated professional. He courted her, proposed marriage, but then two weeks later, shortly after New Year’s 1974, he dumped her. No one knows why, but a couple of weeks later, he started his murder spree in Washington State.
“Obviously, something significant went down, but no one knows what it was. Regardless, it was the trigger.
“At that same time he was also dating a secretary. That lasted six years. There were other women as well, though we don’t have many names. As you know, Bundy was quite good-looking and he could charm a lizard off a sunny rock. So it makes sense he would have had relationships with women. And one of these women birthed a daughter he never acknowledged. Or maybe she never told him she was pregnant. Again, we don’t know.”
Dane said slowly, “But maybe her mom told our killer who her monster of a daddy was, and the daughter realized Bundy’s madness was flowing in her veins. Blood calling to blood, I guess you could say.”
Lucy said, “Sherlock, when did Bundy go to jail for the last time?”
Sherlock shuffled through her notes. “He was apprehended February fifteenth, 1978, and remained in prison until his execution in 1989.”
Lucy said, “Okay, that would make our Black Beret a minimum of thirty-three years old. Everybody thought he looked early thirties or late twenties, so this is in the ballpark.”
Coop had a dark eyebrow up a good inch. “This is weird. Here I was, eating my sesame-seed bagel this morning, never thinking that during the course of this fine day I’d be dealing with Ted Bundy’s daughter. I wonder why she is masquerading as a man?”
“Good question,” Ruth said. “Maybe she’d rather be her father’s son? More importance?”
Coop said, “Maybe being a guy makes her more like her father?”
Lucy leaned forward, leaned her chin on her folded hands. “I sure hope we’ll have the opportunity to ask her when we get her.”
Savich said, “Okay. Now, those of you who are familiar with Bundy know he had another daughter, this one born in the eighties during conjugal visits with his wife—yeah, the court let him marry—a former coworker. However, we’ve excluded her as being our Black Beret, because she has a very different body type and she is currently residing in Florence, Italy, and hasn’t been back to the States in five years. So it’s a daughter we know absolutely nothing about.”
Ruth thought of her new husband and laughed. “I can’t wait to tell Dix. He probably knows more than you do, Jack, since he was into Bundy’s case big-time. He’s going to freak. I bet he’s going to call you, Dillon, beg to be in on the case.”
Savich knew Dix Noble, sheriff of Maestro, Virginia, very well. “Dix is a smart man, Ruth. Maybe it’d be good to have his brain at work on this. I’ll give him a call.”
Sherlock said, “As I said, we don’t know who her mom was or is. We don’t know anything else about her.”
“We do know she started killing in San Francisco eight months ago, and so I put MAX to work using Liz Rogers’s description of him to the police artist. I got a call this morning from Police Chief Edmund Kreymer. He’s plastering the sketch all over Philadelphia. He also sent the sketch to San Francisco and Chicago, and every other large-city cop shop in the country. This sketch is in your packet, along with the sketch the police artist in Cleveland put together.
“You’ll see a lot of similarities, but Liz Rogers’s description is the best, since she was up close and personal with Bundy’s daughter for a good long while. I think she really nailed him, well, her. If you compare the Philadelphia police sketch with photos of Ted Bundy, you’ll see there’s more than a slight resemblance.
“Now, we could get lucky and identify her from the sketch. MAX is scanning all the photos we can access from records in San Francisco. If she was raised in the Bay Area, maybe he’ll find her in a high-school yearbook or a juvie record.