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phone. “You home yet?” he asked when she answered.
    “On my way. The plane circled LaGuardia for an hour before it finally landed. How’s it going there? Did you find anything?”
    “Yeah. The Tip-Top Inn has him staying there when it went down.”
    “Okay. We now know he had opportunity. Did you go to the high school?”
    “I’m there now. I found the tree. It’s just like Sanders described.”
    “How about that,” Dani said. “We may just have an innocent client, after all.”

C HAPTER
    9
    D ani had spent the last four hours searching the trial transcript for any description of a tattoo on the victim, or any mention of an oak tree with those initials carved in it. There was none. The testimony was replete with descriptions of the location of the body—in the woods behind the high school, about fifty feet in, at the base of a large oak tree. But no one testified about the initials. Sanders couldn’t have known unless he’d been there.
    Before she called Ed Whiting again, she needed to touch base with Frank Lesco, the attorney who’d originally approached the state attorney with news of Sanders’s confession. She dialed his number and was put through to him right away.
    “I assume you’re calling about young Winston,” he said when he answered the phone.
    Dani was surprised to hear him referred to as young. After all, he’d been in prison for seven years and was now twenty-six, hardly a child. Still, she supposed, in the Melton hierarchy, he was young—and, most important, the only heir to his father’s fortune.
    “I am. I wanted to speak to you directly about your dealings with Ed Whiting on this matter.”
    “Frankly, I was flummoxed by his refusal to reopen the case. I know the family has donated heavily to the governor’s campaigns, and we gave Whiting the perfect reason to set aside the verdict without it seeming to be favoritism.”
    Maybe that was it, Dani thought. Maybe because the governor received donations from the Melton family, he wanted Whiting to take a harder line to prove he wasn’t being bought by them. Still, their wealth shouldn’t deprive them of justice. “What can you tell me about Whiting?”
    “A political hack. That’s why it surprised me he didn’t want to bow down to the Meltons.”
    “Do you think he has anything personal going on with the family? Any reason why he’d want to hurt them?”
    “Nope. Just wanted to take the easy way out. And that’s to let sleeping dogs lie.” He paused for a moment. “Or play dead,” he continued, then chuckled.
    Dani thanked him, then hung up. She considered phoning Whiting to discuss the new evidence, but after speaking to Lesco, she decided to hold off. Tommy had corroborated two facts Sanders gave to demonstrate he’d been truthful with them. Assuming Sanders was right about the tattoo, that made three. With most state attorneys, that would be enough to take another look at the case. But she figured she had one more shot with Whiting, and she wanted to make sure she had enough ammunition to be persuasive.
    She pulled out her notes from the interview with Sanders. He claimed to have murdered nine other women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He’d given them the names of the victims and described his attacks. It was time to provide the families of those women the answers they’d been seeking for years, and at the same time, lock up the veracity of Sanders’s story.

    As usual, Tommy called on his resources cultivated during his ten years as an FBI agent. Although he’d left the service many years ago, in order to spend more time with his wife and five children, there remained a strong bond of loyalty among the agents who had worked together. Some were still active; others retired. Those who had retired, like him, often took jobs elsewhere. They were scattered across the United States. It was rare that Tommy didn’t have someone to call on when he needed