Earl added quickly, “A ton of confidence, Lacy. You are by far the most experienced.”
Judith said, “The salary is not bad.”
“It’s not about money,” Lacy said. The salary was $95,000 a year, a nice improvement over her current $70,000. She had never really thought about the director’s salary, at least not in a covetous way. But it was indeed a substantial raise.
Earl said, “You can restructure the place any way you want. Hire or fire, we don’t care. But the ship is sinking and we need stability.”
Lacy asked, “How do you plan to shore up the budget, as you say? This year the legislature cut it again, down to one-point-nine million. Four years ago BJC got two-point-three million. Peanuts compared to a sixty-billion-dollar state government, but we were created by the same legislature and given our orders.”
Judith smiled and said, “We’re tired of the cuts too, Lacy, and we’re going after the legislature. Let us worry about that. You run the agency and we’ll find the money.”
Lacy’s judgment was suddenly clouded with thoughts of Jeri Crosby. What if her suspicions were true? What if the killings continued? As director, interim or not, Lacy would have the authority to do whatever she wanted with Jeri’s complaint.
And she thought about the money, the not insignificant raise. She rather liked the idea of restructuring the office, getting rid of some dead weight and finding younger talent. She thought of her weekend with Allie and the reality that they had not made any progress in planning their future, so a dramatic change in scenery was unlikely, at least anytime soon.
The four smiled at her and waited, as if desperate for the right answer. Lacy kept her frown and said, “Give me twenty-four hours.”
13
In stalking Ross Bannick, she had learned to work with one crucial assumption: he was a killer with great patience. He had waited five years to kill her father, nine to kill the reporter, twenty-two to kill Kronke, and approximately fourteen to kill his scoutmaster. Finding the point at which his path crossed with that of Lanny Verno, if it happened at all, would require the usual painstaking and dogged digging through a mountain of public records that stretched back for years, even decades.
She was a tenured professor who lectured three days a week and kept somewhat regular office hours. The book she was writing was years past due. She managed to work just enough to satisfy her dean and her students, but she was far too occupied with crime to excel as a teacher like her father. She was divorced and attractive but had no time to even think about romance. Her daughter was doing fine with her graduate studies at Michigan, and they chatted or emailed every other day. Jeri had almost no other diversions from her real calling, her pursuit. She worked hours each night and early into the mornings chasing leads, pursuing wild theories, hitting dead-ends, and burning enormous amounts of time. “I’m wasting my life,” she said over and over in her loneliness.
* * *
—
Jeri guessed that, as an itinerant house painter, Verno didn’t bother to vote, but nonetheless she dug through the registration records for Chavez, Escambia, and Santa Rosa Counties. She found two Lanny L. Vernos. One was too old, the other was dead. Vehicle registration found another one, but he was still alive.
The online locators, both the free and the pricey, found five Lanny Vernos in the Florida Panhandle. The obvious problem was that Jeri had no idea, and no way to know, when her Lanny Verno had ever lived in the area, and, if so, when he moved on. He was definitely not living there when he was murdered. According to the bare-bones police report Kenny Lee obtained from the FBI clearinghouse, Verno’s female companion said they had “been together” for less than two years and lived in a trailer near Biloxi.
If he had a history with women then perhaps he had been through divorce court. Jeri spent hours online digging through those Florida records and found nothing helpful. If he had children scattered around then maybe he’d had support problems, but the court records yielded nothing. As a veteran sleuth with over twenty years of experience, she knew how precarious family and youth court records were. So much of the useful information was sealed for privacy reasons.
If he had spent his life as a house painter, then the odds were decent that he’d been in trouble with the police.
There were no felony convictions for Lanny Verno, at least not in Florida, and he had been involved in no civil litigation. Fortunately, though, the Pensacola City police department had digitized its records a decade earlier, and in the process had memorialized thirty years’ worth of arrests and old court dockets somewhere deep in the cloud. At two thirty in the morning, as she sipped another diet cola, no caffeine, she found a simple entry for the arrest of one Lanny L. Verno in April of 2001. The alleged crime was attempted assault with a weapon. He posted $500 bond and bailed out. She began cross-checking the arrest with the court docket and found another entry. On June 11, 2001, Verno was found not guilty in Pensacola city court. Case dismissed.