Smooth Operator by Clifford L. Linedecker

Author:Clifford L. Linedecker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466874862
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Seven

THE CHASE

EVERYWHERE THE FAST-MOVING fugitive went, grief, shock, and loss were left behind him.

In Southern California, Sandra Gallagher’s friends and family said their final good-byes to the woman who had dreamed of one day becoming a country music star. A few miles away at McRed’s, Rein Keener was trying to deal with a profoundly heightened sense of her own mortality. The redheaded bartender was deeply shaken after her narrow escape from the homicidal madman.

Maria Gyore returned to California from Hungary and walked into a nightmare. If what police were saying was true, the brutal lover she fled halfway around the world to get away from had turned on other women in her absence, strangling and slashing the life out of them.

In Jackson, Linda Price’s family gathered with their friend, Kevin Smith, at the apartment on Rainey Road after police completed their crime scene investigation, and began removing the treasures she’d so lovingly decorated it with. The doll collection, china cabinet, family pictures, and Harley-Davidson mementos were distributed among family members to become cherished keepsakes of the woman whose ghastly death left such a gaping hole in their lives.

Linda’s private little love nest was drenched in gloom, as if the footprints of all the homicide detectives, evidence technicians, and coroners’ assistants who had walked through it still lingered invisibly on the floors. After the family was through, cleaners moved in to vacuum the floor, scrub down the bathtub that had held the body, and tidy up so that no visible traces remained of the woman who died there—or of her blond Rhett Butler.

In Florida, after pathologists completed their autopsy on the body of Tina Marie Cribbs, she was cremated. She was so dreadfully mutilated by her killer that cremation seemed to be the best thing to do. Her friends attended a memorial service at the local VFW hall, then took the urn with her ashes back to the Showtown USA. They set the urn on a table and had a drink in her memory.

Most of Tina’s friends agreed during the extended toasts that her good nature permitted her to be lured to her death. She had no romantic interest in her suspected killer, but was merely doing a favor for a friendly stranger. If they were correct, she made the same fatal mistake that doomed Sandra Gallagher more than 2,000 miles across the country only five weeks earlier when she left a barroom to drop a stranger off at his home.

Cindy Torgerson, one of the group of friends drinking with Tina at the Showtown USA, told a newspaper reporter of the chilling brush the group of women had with the suspected killer. “He was picking us out like oranges,” she said and shuddered. Tina, with the orange highlights in her hair, was the one he plucked.

In Bossier City, Andy Sutton’s thirty-one-year-old brother, Willie Jiles, spoke to reporters through a haze of anger and shock. He said he hoped his sister’s killer would be returned to Louisiana, a state with the death penalty.

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