It was Friday, July 31. Two weeks before the deadline.

Geoghegan went to the address in Tampa where Mozelle Smith was waiting. Smith was not in the friendliest of moods. She didn't want to be interviewed by Geoghegan or anybody else. If anything, she wanted him to answer a few questions. After weeks of trying to get the task force's attention, she wasn't sure she should give him the original of the contract. What if they lost it? Hadn't they already misplaced the first fax that had been sent over?

Geoghegan did his best to reassure her. But Smith wanted something more. Before she gave him the contract, she demanded that he sign a piece of paper acknowledging that he was taking custody of the document. She had a notary public -- a friend of her daughter's -- standing by, ready to notarize the piece of paper.

Being on the receiving end of all this was not exactly standard procedure. But what was Geoghegan supposed to do? He signed the paper, watched the notary stamp it and got out of there.

Contract in hand, he drove back to St. Petersburg, across the sparkling waters where Jo and the girls had died.

***

Years later, Moore would think about Jo Ann Steffey and Mozelle Smith and shake his head.

He acknowledges that the tip from the women and their families should have been pursued more quickly. But at the time, he says, the task force was swamped with tips, many of them from people who were sure they had found the killer. Among all the other handwriting samples flowing into the office, the contract with Oba Chandler's writing was overlooked.

"The handwriting thing did get misplaced. It was in a stack about this high," says Moore, holding his hand about 6 inches above the table in front of him. "Nobody seems to understand how difficult it was to manage this massive amount of paperwork."

But on that summer day in 1992, when Geoghegan returned to the office with the contract, things moved quickly.

Moore and Geoghegan looked back and forth between the contract and the directions on the brochure. They appeared to be written by the same person, but it was hard to be sure. The contract, it turned out, was not the original. It was the customer's copy, the copy from underneath the original, and the writing was faint.

Still, the resemblance appeared strong -- strong enough that the task force had a new suspect and a new focus.

Moore and the others scrambled to learn more about this Oba Chandler. They ran his name in every computer they could think of and quickly discovered that he was 45 years old and living with his wife and daughter across the state in Port Orange, near Daytona Beach.

They learned that Chandler's old house was on Dalton Avenue, not far from the McDonald's on N Dale Mabry, and only 2 miles from the boat ramp where Jo and the girls had disappeared. At the time, state records showed, he had owned a 21-foot Bayliner boat, with a blue exterior and white interior. At the time, he was also the registered owner of a dark blue Jeep Cherokee. Furthermore, he had a long criminal record and had been charged with everything from kidnapping to burglary to armed robbery to counterfeiting.

DALTON AVENUE: By the time he became a suspect, Oba Chandler had moved away from the house in Tampa where he lived at the time of the murders.

All of these facts were encouraging. But the investigators did not dare get their hopes up too high; they had been dashed so often before.

Then Marilyn Johnson spoke up.

Johnson was a soft-spoken, older woman, a grandmother who sometimes doted on the other members of the task force. She worked as an office assistant, typing information into the HOLMES computer. She was not a detective, but Moore had encouraged everyone to toss out ideas. So one day, at the end of a meeting on the new suspect, Johnson raised her hand.

"Yes, Marilyn," said Moore.

"I don't know if you noticed it or not," she said. "But this guy looks just like the composite."

MOMENT OF REVELATION: Marilyn Johnson, seated here at her desk in the squad room, raised her hand at the end of a task force meeting and made the observation that told the detectives they had finally found the killer.

Moore's mouth dropped open.

In all the rush, and in all the checking, no one else had thought to make this simplest comparison.

They had a photo of Chandler, given to them by probation officials. And when Moore looked at it and then at the composite drawing, he saw it, plain as day.

"You're right, Marilyn," he said. "You're right."

They had found him.

After three years of back-breaking investigation, Moore was convinced they had the man they were looking for.

Now all they had to do was prove it.

***

One more thing.

As the investigation raced forward, energized by these discoveries, Marilyn Johnson pointed out something else. Typing files into the computer, she remembered a fact -- one fact out of the tens of thousands of stray facts that had been logged over the years -- that had escaped everyone else's memory. The man who had raped the Canadian woman, Johnson pointed out, had told the victim he owned an aluminum company.

Just like Chandler.

That was how they came up with the code name. As they turned their attention to their prey, the members of the task force tried to keep his real name out of their conversations and even their reports. They didn't want to be paranoid, but they had no desire for the word to get out and for Chandler to learn they were on his trail.

So they called him by a different name. A name that played off his line of work. A name that was perfect for someone who they suspected had no heart.

They called him the Tin Man.

THE MATCH: The composite drawing from the Madeira Beach rape and Oba Chandler's photo.

Chapter 5: Silver Bullet

The suspect vanishes, right under the noses of the investigators.