They found Hauser at his desk, the computer screens turned into a bank of old photos and newspaper clippings. He had pictures loaded up on three of them, two of which Jackie recognized. They were the old newspaper clippings Laurel had showed her earlier. He spun around in his chair to greet them when Jackie knocked once.
“Hey! How are Chicago’s loveliest agents today?” He gave them a devilish smile.
Jackie thrust her hands into her pockets. “Hungry.”
“Got half a chicken-salad sandwich here you can have,” he said, and when it got no response, the grin faded, and he continued. “Okay, sourpuss, look here. This is some weird-ass shit I’ve found. These are the two clippings you’ve already seen, the first from 1970, the other from 1934.” He wheeled his chair over by the screens and pointed. “You can see the similarities in them, might even say they look like the same guy.”
“They’re thirty-six years apart though,” Jackie said. She had a sinking feeling she already knew where Hauser was heading with this.
“Yeah, I know. How could it be the same guy, right?” He pointed at the next screen. “Here’s another photo, thirty-six years before those.”
It was a yearbook photo from Princeton University. The name listed beneath it was Nicholas Rembrandt. The image looked slightly younger than Nick Anderson, but not by much. The skin was smoother, without the crinkle in the corners of his eyes, and he wore small, round glasses, just enough to cover the eye, but the bright glaze on them was still evident, even in a black-and-white photo.
Jackie leaned over and scanned the page. “Hauser, this pic is one hundred and eight years old.”
He grinned with the evil glee of a thirteen-year-old who has uncovered his dad’s secret stash of porn. “Yeah, pretty freaky, huh?”
“You telling me it’s the same guy? Please tell me you aren’t.”
Hauser nodded. “Had Platt take the scans and analyze them. ’Puter is ninety-eight point seven percent sure the guy in all these photos is the same guy. It is statistically impossible that relatives could look that closely alike.”
“Great.”
“Oh, it gets better,” he said, chuckling. He switched the third screen over to another picture. “Look at this one.”
Laurel leaned in with her to get a close look. “Sheriff Nicholas R. Anderson and family. Is this the real guy here?”
“So says the great god of circuitry,” he said.
Jackie glanced at the article, which spoke of welcoming the new sheriff to the area and looking forward to his services and ability to keep the area protected. It was from some place in Wyoming Jackie had never heard of before. They looked like a typical Old West family: father, two teen sons, a young daughter, wife, and someone who looked to be a grandmother. “This is impossible, Hauser.”
“You’d think.”
“It’s him,” Laurel added, sounding far more sure of herself than Jackie wanted.
“Laur?” Jackie said skeptically. “This would make Nick Anderson, like…”
“One hundred seventy-six years old,” Hauser replied.
“There has to be some other reason for this.” Jackie’s mind could not wrap around the implications. There were none that fit her view of the world. It just didn’t work.
Hauser laughed. “Told you it was creepy. The guy should be dead.”
She looked over at Laurel and remembered what she had said about holding his hand. The guy had felt like he was dead. Laurel was still studying the photos, looking back and forth between them. “What about her?” She pointed at the image of what looked like Shelby Fontaine.
He shrugged. “Don’t know. Haven’t run her. You want me to?”
Laurel nodded. “Yes, please.”
“Laur?” Jackie said again. “What are you thinking here?” She was going to have to put some trust in her opinion on this because she could make no sense of it.
After a few seconds, Laurel finally stood up straight. “Not sure yet. I think I need to go talk with someone about this.”
“Someone?”
“A witch friend of mine,” she said with a faint smile.
“Cool,” Hauser said.
Jackie frowned at him. Witches. This case was going in completely the wrong direction. “Wish we could just arrest the prick.”
They both snickered at her. Hauser turned back and pulled up the information he had been working on. “You’re such a ballbuster, Jack. Glad I’m not married to you.”
Laurel slapped him on top of the head. “Be nice.”
“Anything else, Hauser?” Jackie snapped back.
“Yeah. Another couple news articles during that same year as the Princeton pic. Seems our crotchety old man was involved in another serial murder case. Five people killed, and he could never be tied to it, but was a person of interest apparently.”
Now that was interesting. “And the first one?”
“No murder case, but his career came to an end a few months after that photo was taken. Big shoot-out with some local outlaw. His family was killed, and he quit.”
“Interesting,” Jackie said. “There are five family members in the photo here.”
Hauser shrugged, smiling. “Very interesting.”
Five. They were all fives. “All these things are thirty-six years apart?”
“Freaky, isn’t it? Like some bizarre repeating murder spree.”
Laurel tugged absently at her ponytail. “I wonder what significance the thirty-six years has?”
“Oh,” Hauser answered, “that might be a simple one. Anderson was thirty-six years old when his family was killed.”
“How old were the family members?” Jackie wondered.
“Um, give me a sec and I’ll see if I can find out.” He began clicking through screens with his mouse faster than Jackie could read what he was pulling up.
“You don’t suppose,” Laurel said, finger twirling at her ponytail, “that Anderson or someone related to him is repeating the death of his family?”
The thought had just occurred to Jackie as well. “It’s awfully suspicious, if you ask me.”
“Here we go,” Hauser cut in. “Boys were twelve and fifteen, girl was eight, wife thirty-one, and Anderson’s grandmother seventy-five.”
“Twelve,” Jackie and Laurel said together.
Jackie poked Hauser in the shoulder. “Run the other cases. I want as many of the vic’s ages that you can find.”
She felt her mind beginning to spin in helpless futility. The scenario they were considering was insanity. “Okay, this is more than I can digest. I want to get a tail on Anderson and Fontaine. Hauser, can we prove these are all the same guy? A judge would laugh this out of court.”
“Haven’t turned up any kind of paper trail yet to prove anything. We’ll keep digging. This stuff has been easy to find so far. He’s not going far out of his way to hide his past, just altering things a bit so nobody makes any obvious connections.”
“Well, who would believe that shit?” Jackie shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”
He laughed. “I know. It’s like he’s cloning himself, or… or he’s a fucking vampire! That would be so cool.”
Jackie shook her head. “Shut up, Hauser. This is about as far from cool as it gets. Laur, we need to get Gamble on organizing tails, see if Belgerman will okay a phone tap. There has to be some way to get Anderson to implicate himself or whomever it is he knows is doing this.”
“Why not just ask him?” Laurel offered. “Show him what we have? Maybe he’ll see the game is up and cave in.”
“He’s too cool for that. If it’s someone else, he doesn’t want us to know, for some reason. We need something to entice or threaten him with. He needs to want to talk.”
“Most killers want to talk,” Laurel said.
“Did you get the impression he wanted to? Or that he was baiting us to find out what a genius he is?”
“No, which is why I’m leaning toward some other killer he doesn’t want to talk about.”
“Exactly. So how do we sucker him into blabbing or leading us to the real culprit?”
Laurel shrugged. “We have a stolen penny, and we have information about his past.”
“The penny.” Jackie walked to the doorway. “Hauser, send everything you’ve found by five today. I want to go over everything we’ve got tonight.” She motioned to Laurel. “Come on. I’m so hungry I can’t think, and we need a plan.”