The Poet (27 page)

“Okay, Jack, we’re not questioning your motives here,” Backus said, his hands raised in a calming gesture. “We seem to have gotten into an adversarial stance and I don’t want that. Why don’t you clearly tell me what you want. I’m sure we are going to work this out right here. Before the coffee even gets cold.”

“It’s simple,” I said quickly. “Put me on the investigation. Complete access as an observer. I won’t write a word until we either get the son of a bitch or give up.”

“That’s blackmail,” Walling said.

“No, it’s the agreement I’m offering to make,” I responded. “It’s actually a concession because I have the story now. Having to sit on it is against my instincts and against what I do.”

I looked at Backus. Walling was angry but I knew it didn’t matter. Backus would make the call.

“I don’t think we can do that, Jack,” he finally said. “It’s against bureau regulations to bring somebody in like that. It could be dangerous to you as well.”

“I don’t care about that. Any of it. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it. Call whoever you’ve got to call. But that’s the deal.”

Backus pulled his cup in front of him and looked down into the still steaming blackness. He hadn’t even sipped it.

“This proposal is well above my level of authority,” he said. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

“When?”

“I’ll make the call right now.”

“What about the status conference?”

“They can’t start without me. Why don’t both of you wait here. This shouldn’t take long.”

Backus stood up and carefully slid his chair into the table.

“Just so we’re clear,” I said before he turned away, “if allowed into this as an observer, with two exceptions I will not write about the case until we have an arrest or you determine it is fruitless and focus your primary efforts on other cases.”

“What are the exceptions?” Backus asked.

“One is if you ask me to write about it. There may come a time that you’ll want to flush this guy out with a story. I’ll write it then. The other exception is if the story leaks. If this shows up in any other paper or on TV, all bets are off. Immediately. If I even get wind that somebody else is about to break it, I’ll break it myself first. This is my goddamn story.”

Backus looked at me and nodded.

“I won’t be long.”

After he left, Walling looked at me and quietly said, “If that had been me, I would have called your bluff.”

“That was no bluff,” I said. “That was for real.”

“If that’s true, that you’d trade catching the guy who killed your brother for a story, then that makes me feel very sad for you. I’m going to get more coffee.”

She got up then and left me. As I watched her walk back to the concession counter my mind wandered over what she had said and then came to rest on the lines by Poe that I had read the night before and that would not leave my memory.

I dwelt alone In a world of moan And my soul was a stagnant tide

22

When I entered the conference room with Backus and Walling, there were few seats in the room without agents in them. The status meeting was set up with agents sitting around the long table and then an outside layer of sitters on chairs lining the walls. Backus pointed to a chair on the outer rim and signaled me to sit. He and Walling then went to the two remaining slots at the center of the table. The chairs had apparently been exclusively reserved for them. I felt a lot of eyes on me as the stranger but I reached down to the floor and fiddled with my computer satchel, acting like I was looking for something so I did not have to meet any of their stares.

Backus had taken the deal. Or rather, whoever he had called had taken the deal. I was along for the ride, with Agent Walling assigned to baby-sit-as she called it. I had written out and signed an agreement stating that I would not write about the investigation until its fruition or disbanding, or in the event of the occurrence of either of the exceptions I had mentioned earlier. I had asked Backus about a photographer joining me and he said that wasn’t part of the deal. But he did agree to consider specific requests for photography. It was the best I could do for Glenn.

After Backus and Walling were settled in their seats and interest in me lagged, I looked about. There were a dozen other men and three women in the room, including Walling. Most of the men were in shirtsleeves and appeared to have been at whatever they were doing for a while. There were a lot of Styrofoam cups, a lot of paperwork on laps and on the table. A woman was making her way around the room handing out a sheaf of papers to each agent. I noticed one of the agents was the sharp-faced man I had encountered in Walling’s office and then had seen again in the cafeteria. When Walling had gone to refill her coffee cup, I had seen him get up from his meal and go to the food counters to talk to her. I couldn’t hear what was said but I could tell she had dismissed him and he didn’t seem too happy about it.

“Okay, people,” Backus said. “Let’s get this going if we can. It’s been a long day and they’re probably only going to get longer from here.”

The murmur of conversation abruptly halted. As smoothly as possible I reached down to my computer bag and slid out a notebook. I opened it to a fresh page and got ready to take notes.

“First of all, a short announcement,” Backus said. “The new man you see seated against the wall is Jack McEvoy. He is a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News and he plans to be with us until this is over. It is his fine work that resulted in this task force being formed. He discovered our Poet. He has agreed not to write about our investigation until we have the offender in custody. I want all of you to extend him every courtesy. He has the special agent in charge’s blessing to be here.”

I felt the eyes on me again and I sat frozen with my notebook and pen in hand, as if I had been caught at a crime scene with blood on my hands.

“If he’s not going to write, how come he’s got the notebook out?”

I looked toward the familiar voice and saw it was the sharp-faced man from Walling’s office who had asked the question.

“He needs to take notes, so that when he does write he has the facts,” Walling said, unexpectedly coming to my defense.

“That’ll be the day one of them reports the facts,” the agent threw back at her.

“Gordon, let’s not make Mr. McEvoy uncomfortable,” Backus said, smiling. “I trust he will do a good job. The special agent in charge trusts that he will. And, in fact, he has done an excellent job up until now so we are going to give him both the benefit of the doubt and our cooperation.”

I watched the one called Gordon shake his head in dismay, his face darkening. At least I was getting clues right away about whom to steer clear of. The next came when the woman with the handouts passed by me without giving me anything.

“This will be our last group meeting,” Backus said. “Tomorrow most of us separate and the OC for this investigation will move to Denver, site of the latest case. Rachel will remain case agent and coordinator. Brass and Brad will stay here to do the collating and all that good stuff. I want hard-copy reports from all agents by eighteen hundred eastern to Denver and Quantico every day. For now use the fax of the Denver field office. The number should be on the printout you just received. We’ll set up our own lines and we’ll get those numbers to you as soon as we do. Now, let’s go over what we’ve got. It’s very important that we’re all on the same wavelength. I don’t want anything to slip through the cracks on this one. We’ve had enough of that already.”

“We better not screw up,” Gordon said sarcastically. “We’ve also got the press watching us.”

A few people laughed but Backus cut it off.

“All right, all right, Gordon, you’ve made your disagreement loud and clear. I’m going to yield to Brass for a few minutes and she’ll go over what we’ve got so far.”

A woman across the table from Backus cleared her throat. She spread three pages of what looked like computer printouts in front of her on the table and stood up.

“Okay,” she said. “We have six dead detectives in six states. We also have six unsolved homicides that the detectives had been working individually at the time of their own death. The bottom line is we don’t feel comfortable yet making a firm commitment to whether we have one or two offenders out there-or possibly even more, though this seems unlikely. Our hunch, however, is that we are dealing with one but at the moment I don’t have a lot backing that up. What we do feel comfortable with is that the deaths of the six detectives are certainly linked and therefore most likely the work of one hand. For the moment our emphasis is on this offender. The one we are calling the Poet. Beyond that, we only have the theory of linkage to the other cases. We’ll talk about them first. First, let’s start with the detectives. Take a look at the first PVR in your package for a few seconds and then I’ll point out some things.”

I looked at everyone studying the handout and felt annoyed at being left out. I decided that after the meeting I would talk to Backus about it. I looked over at Gordon and saw him looking at me. He winked at me and then turned his face to the reports in front of him. I then saw Walling get up and come around the table to my side of the room. She handed me a copy of the printout. I nodded my thanks but she had already headed back to her spot. I noticed that as she walked back she glanced at Gordon and their eyes locked in a long stare.

I looked at the pages in my hands. The first sheet was just an organizational structure with the names of the agents involved and their assignments. There were also the phone and fax numbers for the field offices in Denver, Baltimore, Tampa, Chicago, Dallas and Albuquerque. I ran my eyes down the list of agents and found only one Gordon. Gordon Thorson. I saw that his assignment simply read “Quantico-Go.”

Next I looked for Brass on the list and guessed easily enough that she was Brasilia Doran, assigned on the sheet as “victim coordinator/profiling.” Other assignments to agents were listed. There were handwriting and cryptology assignments but most were just noted as cities of assignment followed by a victim’s name. Apparently two BSS agents would go to each city where the Poet had been to coordinate investigations of those cases with agents from the city’s field office and local police.

I turned the page to the next sheet, which was the one everybody else was reading.

PRELIMINARY VICTIMOLOGY REPORT-THE POET, BSS95-17

VICT #

1. Clifford Beltran, Sarasota County Sheriff’s Dept., homicide.

WM, DOB 3-14-34, DOD 4-1-92

Weapon: S&W 12 gauge shotgun one shot-head POD: residence. No witness

2. John Brooks, Chicago Police Dept., homicide, Area 3.

BM, DOB 7-1-54, DOD 10-30-93

Weapon: service, Glock 19 two shots, one impact-head POD: residence. No witness

3. Garland Petry, Dallas Police Dept., homicide.

WM, DOB 11-11-51, DOD 3-28-94

Weapon: service, Beretta 38 two shots, two impacts-chest and head POD: residence, No witness

4. Morris Kotite, Albuquerque Police Dept., homicide.

HM, DOB 9-14-56, DOD 9-24-94

Weapon: service, S&W 38 two shots, one impact-head POD: residence. No witness

5. Sean McEvoy, Denver Police Dept., homicide.

WM, DOB 5-21-61, DOD 2-10-95

Weapon: service, S&W 38 one shot-head POD: car. No witness The first thing I noticed was that they didn’t have McCafferty on the list yet. He’d be number two. I then realized that the eyes of many of those in the room were falling on me again as people read the last name and apparently realized who I was. I kept my eyes on the page in front of me, staring at the notes under my brother’s name. His life had been reduced to short descriptions and dates. Brasilia Doran finally rescued me from the moment.

“Okay, FYI, these were printed up before the sixth case was confirmed,” she said. “If you want to put it on your sheet now, it will be between Beltran and Brooks. The name is John McCafferty, a homicide detective with the Baltimore Police Department. We’ll get more details later. Anyway, as you can see, not a lot of things are consistent through these cases. The weapons used differ, places of death differ, and we have three whites, one black and one Hispanic as victims … The additional case, McCafferty is a white male, forty-seven years old.

“But there are limited common denominators to the physical scene and evidence. Each victim was a male homicide detective who was killed by a fatal head shot and there were no eyewitnesses to these shootings. From there we get into the two key commonalities that we want to exploit. We have a reference to Edgar Allan Poe in each case. That’s one. The second key is that each victim was believed by his colleagues to have been obsessive about a particular homicide case-two of them to the point that they had sought counseling.

“If you turn to the next page …”

The sound of pages turning whispered through the room. I could feel a grim fascination settling over everyone. It was a surreal moment for me. I felt like maybe a screenwriter does when he finally sees his movie on the screen. Before, all of this was something hidden in my notebooks and computer and head as part of the far realm of possibility. But here was a room crowded with investigators openly talking about, looking at printouts, confirming the existence of this horror.