Kristin and Kati Lisk's grandfather has waited five long years for police to find the man who killed his only granddaughters.

"We can wait a few more days," Bill Showalter said yesterday. "We've learned to be strong."

Showalter said his daughter and son-in-law, Patti and Ron Lisk, are trying to go on with their daily lives while they wait for DNA tests to prove whether Richard Marc Evonitz is the man who stole their children.

Evonitz, 38, shot himself to death Friday after a 100-mph chase through Sarasota, Fla. He was wanted in the gunpoint kidnapping and rape of a 15-year-old girl in Richland County, S.C., who escaped when her abductor fell asleep.

Evonitz lived in Spotsylvania when 16-year-old Sofia Silva was killed in 1996 and 15-year-old Kristin Lisk and her 12-year-old sister, Kati, were slain in 1997.

Investigators have sent his DNA and other evidence to the FBI in hopes of tying him to those slayings but say it may be weeks before they get a definitive answer.

"We're waiting and we're hoping," Showalter said.

The feeling is the same at the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office.

"We're on pins and needles," Sheriff Ron Knight said yesterday. "I'm vibrating inside, but you don't want to express it. If the bottom falls out, like it has a thousand times before, we'll still have to go back at it again."

Evonitz's father, Joseph Evonitz of Arlington, said he's angry his son has been named a suspect before evidence has been tested.

"Why is my son being tried in the newspapers? There's no evidence right now that he was guilty of any of this," Evonitz said before slamming down the phone yesterday afternoon.

Spotsylvania resident Charles Pickett, an agent who has worked for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for 18 years, made the phone call Wednesday that prompted members of the Lisk-Silva Task Force to fly to South Carolina.

"I think I've found your boy," was the message Pickett left on Spotsylvania sheriff's Maj. Howard Smith's voice mail. That led to a quick return call from Smith, who leads the Lisk-Silva Task Force.