Page 92 of Three Girls Gone
Amanda shook her head. “Usually the opposite, but he’s right. Wilcox isn’t going to make it easy for us to find him.”
“You sound like you’re defeated.”
“Then you don’t know me as well as I thought,” Amanda pushed back.
Katherine lifted her hands. “I apologize. It’s just after all this time the guy was right there, and I had no idea. He slipped right through.”
“Does this guy have a vehicle registered to him? A local address?” Amanda asked Trent.
“He just shows an NYC address. No vehicles tied to him,”he told her. “Current place of employment listed as the NYC venue.”
“Which is clearly out of date,” Katherine said. “I just told you that Wilcox was fired last fall. Another thing that stuck out to me was the boss described him as quiet around her. But he wasn’t quiet with interns.”
“So he is comfortable around people he sees as his equal,” Trent said. “He could have a problem with authority.”
“I thought the same, but his boss couldn’t say one way or the other.”
“We unravel that mystery, we might gain some insight into why this monster targets little girls,” Amanda said. “Do you know why he was fired?”
“All I was told was his incompetence got to be too much,” Katherine said. “But in response to the other thing you said… about why he targets girls. Statistically, the answer to that would go back to his childhood. Who hurt him? What did he suffer so that he thinks what he does is justifiable?”
Amanda looked at her friend. She’d had years to process Julie’s loss and consider the type of person who killed her. And while Katherine’s words suggested empathy, they had rolled off her tongue with a bitter malice.
“Well, if his termination was the proverbial straw,” Trent inserted, “I see how losing his job, combined with Katherine circling back to the venue, could have gotten his attention.”
“Thing is, though, he supposedly only popped by the party,” Katherine said.
“You can’t be doubting his guilt now. That’s what his former boss told you. She probably didn’t even pay him any attention,” Amanda said. “Same may apply to everyone else based on what I’ve heard. It sounds like this guy lives rather under the radar.”
“Which might be why he gets a thrill from crashing parties and pretending to be someone he isn’t,” Trent said.
“And he might have been fueled to do this more after he gotaway with doing so at the Gilberts’ party. After…” Amanda left the rest of that unsaid out of mercy for Katherine.
“He got a thrill from hurting Julie,” Katherine said, going right there.
“All right, priority one is finding this guy. Figuring out any properties he has connected to him and getting out there.” Amanda refused to give up. She wouldn’t fail Eloise like she had Hailey.
“As I said, only one address in NYC,” Trent said. “It looks like it’s an apartment.”
“Probably is,” Katherine said. “The Big Apple isn’t a cheap place to live, and someone who worked as an assistant wouldn’t have much money.”
“He must have low self-esteem to stick around that long in an entry-level job,” Trent said.
“And putting up with Leslie Gallagher. She strikes me as a real bully,” Katherine said.
Amanda was squirreling away all this information as it provided a glimpse into Marshall Wilcox. But she was hungry for more. “We need to find out as much as possible about Wilcox. His background, his upbringing, anything that might give us insight into why he’d victimize children. We also need to get someone out to his apartment and see what they can find out from his neighbors or friends. For all we know Wilcox is commuting back and forth, but I think he must be holding the girls somewhere nearby. Someone might be able to point us in the right direction.” It niggled that they didn’t have the scene of Hailey Tanner’s murder, but Amanda would guess once they tracked Wilcox, they’d have that. It was the waiting game that was painful.
“I’ll call Detective Fitz.” Katherine already had her phone in her hand. “He can handle everything you just mentioned in New York, Amanda. Hopefully, we’ll find something we can use.” Within seconds, she was talking into her phone. Atleast there wouldn’t be a delay caused from waiting for a call back.
Amanda turned to Trent. “While Detective Fitz is busy with that…”
“We’ll look into car rentals and Wilcox’s credit history,” he finished.
“Yes, but waiting on the financials to look for charges from a rental company will take time.”
“Which we don’t have. We could call around to some rental companies,” Trent suggested. “Though for this to benefit us, he would have needed to use his real name.”
“At least we know he likes to use Wilson as an alias.” She wasn’t going to consider he might have a few to pull from. After all, Hailey’s nanny told them he enjoyed pretending to be someone else. Another indicator he wasn’t happy in his personal life. Not that this was surprising considering what he did to feel powerful.
