SPECIAL AGENT CORRIE Swanson stood before a mirror in the ladies’ room on the second floor of the Albuquerque FBI building, examining herself with a critical eye. Her hair was combed more carefully than usual, and she’d put on her best business attire before coming to work. She had even refrained from eating her usual lunch salad, to ensure no stray piece of green got stuck between her teeth. She wore no makeup except a light application of lipstick, but even that got the once-over, the dab of a Kleenex here and there.
She was aware of a combination of excitement and nervousness. As part of her probationary training, she was required to take part in what was known around the field office as the Firing Squad—the weekly meeting in which new agents debriefed their FTO and colleagues on the status of whatever case they were investigating. Normally, Corrie had found this to be a pretty straightforward exercise—this cold case examined and shelved; that cold case examined and shelved.
But not today. Today she was going out on a limb.
She glanced at her watch: five minutes to two. Game time. Leaving the bathroom, she returned to the office and—stopping by her desk to pick up a stack of files—navigated through the cubicles to Conference Room B, with its lingering odor of pizza that never seemed to go completely away. It was a large room, with a table that held at least a dozen people. There were computers for digital slide shows and videos, and a seventy-five-inch smart touchboard for interactive demonstrations, but they were rarely used for meetings such as this. Only Bob Wantaugh, the GS-11 douchebag, had employed the interactive whiteboard, in a spectacularly unedifying update the week before on his pet case: something involving extortion, money laundering, and perhaps human trafficking along what he was calling an “underground railroad” between Albuquerque and Ciudad Juárez, just over the Mexican border. His evidence was colorful but highly circumstantial, and after last week’s presentation even the normally patient Agent Morwood suggested Wantaugh might want to cut down on his diet of Robert Ludlum novels.
Corrie entered the conference room and took a seat. She waited as the handful of other new agents—Supervisory Special Agent Morwood’s flock—arranged themselves around the room. To her consternation, she saw that a couple of senior agents had parked themselves at the far end of the table. Higher-ups sitting in on a Firing Squad was a common enough occurrence; she just wished these two had picked some other week for their evaluation.
Last in was Morwood, carrying the usual cup of coffee. He shut the door with his free hand, then took a seat at the head of the table. He had no notebook, tablet, or other writing instrument with him.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” he said. “This tribunal is now in session, the Honorable Hale Morwood presiding. All would-be crime fighters and upholders of the American way present and accounted for, I see? Good.” His perpetually sleepy eyes surveyed the room. “Swanson. Why don’t you start?”
Corrie almost jumped in her seat. Morwood never picked her first—her litany of cold cases usually came last. She’d expected more time to mentally prepare herself.
“Me?” she asked, realizing as she said it how stupid it sounded.
“You. Please: enlighten us with your forensic expertise.”
He would say that. Corrie cleared her throat, shuffled through her papers. There was a cough from across the table: Bob Wantaugh, his blond ducktail shaking faintly with displeasure. He’d become used to going first.
“Patience, Agent Wantaugh. We’ll get to the latest, ah, chapter in your saga soon enough.” Morwood looked back at Corrie. “Go ahead.”
Corrie cleared her throat again. Only she and Morwood knew the specific details about the case she’d been investigating. Even Morwood didn’t know all of it. She fervently wished he didn’t have to hear it for the first time in front of all these others.
“As I mentioned in last week’s meeting,” she said, “I investigated a crime scene at a cemetery in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, about eighty miles northeast of here. The cemetery—Pigeon’s Ranch—is a national historic site commemorating a Civil War battlefield, which is why this is a federal case. Upon arrival I found an unearthed grave, containing the iron coffin of a Florence Parkin Regis, who had died in 1862. Her remains were partially disinterred. Lying on top of the coffin was the body of Frank Serban, age fifty-four, of Denver. He had no identification and was later ID’d from prints. He’d been shot twice in the back of the head, execution style, the night before. No evidence of this shooting was found at the scene save for the bullets, which evidently had been fired from a silenced weapon. Serban had a long history of petty crimes.”
As she heard herself talk, Corrie realized she’d been over this ground the week before. When she was nervous she tended to overexplain. She made a conscious effort to pick up the pace.
“Forensic work by myself and the Crime Scene Unit ascertained that Serban had probably unearthed the coffin himself. The top portion of Regis’s remains was removed, the coffin closed, and Serban was shot and left on the coffin lid. Presumably this was a job for hire and he was eliminated as a potential witness.”
So far, so good. Here, Corrie knew, was where it got a little dicey.
“Not all the forensic evidence gathered at the site has been analyzed, but little of value has yet turned up, and it probably will not, beyond the two 9mm rounds. This appears to have been a clean and professional operation. However, when I started widening the parameters of my search, I came across something suggestive. In an effort to link this crime with others of a similar MO, I discovered that in two other cases, graves had been robbed with only the top portion of a corpse removed. One of those was a recently deceased mobster in Joliet, Illinois, named Carmine Scarabone. His grave had been desecrated, the coffin partially removed and his headstone vandalized. The other corpse belonged to Alexander Parkin, who had died in Nelson, New Hampshire, in 1911.”
She glanced at her papers. “In pursuing this MO, I widened the scope of my search. I found that six months ago in Paris, the grave of Thomas Parkin, an American who died in France during the Second World War, had also been disturbed. In that case only the skull was taken. But when I looked more closely, I realized there was an unexpected connection among all three cases.”
Here she paused and looked around. She was both gratified and made anxious to see she had the room’s undivided attention.
“Florence Regis, née Parkin; Alexander Parkin; and Thomas Parkin obviously shared a common surname. I checked census records and a genealogical database, and discovered that, in fact, all three shared a common ancestor as well.”
“What genealogical database might that be?” Morwood asked. “Is this some FBI asset I’m not aware of?”
Corrie paused. She hadn’t mentioned this part to Morwood before. “Uh, no. It’s Ancestry.com, sir.”
The two senior agents in the back exchanged glances. Morwood looked at her in disbelief. “You consulted Ancestry.com?”
Wantaugh tittered.
“I took advantage of it as a tool, a stepping-stone. I know it wouldn’t be admissible as evidence in court, sir.”
She glanced around again. The faces looking back at her were now waiting for the punch line.
“Three days ago, I learned that one Rosalie Parkin, twenty-seven and unmarried, a lawyer in Scottsdale, Arizona, had gone missing. With Agent Morwood’s approval, I went to Scottsdale, liaised with the local police, and examined her apartment. While there was no sign of a struggle, there was a very large amount of blood on the premises. The type matched Rosalie Parkin’s.”
“Any eyewitnesses?” somebody asked.
Corrie’s thoughts flitted briefly to Rosalie’s brother. “No. But the police are now treating it as a criminal missing persons case.”
She paused.
“Go ahead,” Morwood said. “Tell them the rest.”
“I checked, and the missing woman is related to the other three Parkins.”
“Checked on Ancestry.com?” Wantaugh asked.
Corrie decided to ignore this. “They are all descendants from a single line.”
“What about the incident in Joliet?” another junior asked. “The mobster?”
“Unrelated. The individual was not a Parkin relation, and the vandalism was most likely the result of the individual having been a CI.”
“What is your operating hypothesis?” Morwood asked.
“That there is a party or parties out there with a special interest in this particular family line.”
“What kind of interest?” Morwood prompted. This was his modus operandi—pushing and prodding, looking for holes in theories or gaps in investigative method.
“Maybe it’s a descendant,” Wantaugh offered. “With a peculiar collecting hobby.” There was faint laughter in response to this equally faint witticism.
One of the two senior agents shifted in his chair. “If this woman was abducted because of her relation to the disinterred,” he said, “why the sudden change in MO?”
This was the question Corrie had been asking herself, and the one she dreaded. “I don’t have an answer to that yet.”
“Kidnapping is dangerous and risky,” the senior agent continued. “And far more serious than grave robbing.”
“I agree,” Corrie said. “So is homicide—as in the execution of Serban.”
“Beyond the Parkin connection,” Morwood asked, “what other evidence do you have to connect these cases?”
“None yet, sir.”
“And no doubt you’ve contacted other Parkins, living and directly related, to see if they know anything about this—with negative results?”
That had proven time consuming. “Correct as well.”
“And you’ve checked to see how many other Parkins still lie in their graves, undisturbed?”
That had proven even more time consuming. “Yes. There aren’t many—the family line is thin.”
“Do you have any leads beyond the Parkin connection?”
“Not beyond, sir.”
Morwood took a sip of coffee, a sure sign he was preparing to pass the floor to another agent.
“There is one thing.” Here it was—the other part Morwood didn’t know about.
The supervisory special agent raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
“I spread my net pretty wide. And in the course of doing so, I flagged some information that—well, seemed to me of interest.”
Morwood put down his coffee. “Agent Swanson, surprise me.”
“Any archaeological excavations on federal land require extensive paperwork. Several months ago, the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute in New Mexico submitted paperwork proposing an excavation of a campsite of the Donner Party.”
She looked around the table, to be greeted by blank faces.
“The Donner Party. They were the pioneers whose wagon train got snowbound for an entire winter in the Sierra Nevada, in 1847. Many of the survivors resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.”
Now some of the faces registered recognition.
She continued more quickly. “One of the party who died that winter was Albert Parkin. It turns out this Albert Parkin is the direct common ancestor of all four Parkins in our case. The Santa Fe Archaeological Institute is currently searching for that campsite and intends to excavate it.”
Morwood was, indeed, now looking surprised—and not in a good way. “And?”
“I spoke to the president of the Institute, a Dr. Fugit. This is a legitimate organization and the excavation is approved by both the feds and the state of California.”
“I ask again: and?”
“Well, sir, this means that, if they’re successful, yet another set of Parkin remains might be excavated—legally this time. It seems like a strange coincidence that should be investigated.”
“I see,” said Morwood. “And let me guess. You want to go out to the Sierra Nevada, track down this archaeological expedition, and in one way or another make their lives miserable.”
“That—” Corrie began, but decided not to finish.
There was a brief silence around the table. Out of the corner of her eye, Corrie could see Wantaugh smirking.
Morwood sighed. “Let me remind you, Agent Swanson, what you were tasked with: discovering who killed that gravedigger at Pigeon’s Ranch.”
“And that’s what I’m doing, sir,” Corrie replied. She felt herself growing hot under the collar.
“You have already taken a trip to Arizona in pursuit of this theory. And accessed unapproved civilian databases to further your investigation. What you are suggesting would take several days, at the least. On what can only be called the thinnest of leads.”
“With respect, sir, Albert Parkin is the common link. The ancestor of them all. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that, out of nowhere, Parkins are being dug up all over the world?”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, Swanson—but I believe you’ve fallen into a rookie trap.”
“Which is?”
“You’ve let the case lead you, rather than leading the case. It’s a common problem among first- and second-year agents, nothing to be ashamed of.”
Corrie, tense in her seat, balled her fists below the table. Nothing made her angrier than being patronized. Well, except some jackass sexually harassing her—which had been a problem at the Academy.
Morwood’s voice was quiet, even gentle, but the words cut her like a knife. “This is a good object lesson, and one that everybody in this room either has learned or will learn soon enough. Focus on the case at hand, and don’t chase after every circumstantial lead.” He looked pointedly at her. “Ask yourself: what could this Albert Parkin, who died in 1847 in the mountains of California, possibly have to do with the homicide of Frank Serban in a Civil War cemetery almost two centuries later? Albert Parkin’s remains haven’t even been found yet. And you yourself said this excavation is being conducted by a highly accredited organization with all the required permits—nothing like nighttime grave robbing.”
He took a deep breath. Corrie could see he was about to draw the lesson for everyone in the room.
“There’s an insidious danger we all face in our job today: computers are too good at giving us information. We at the FBI are faced with an overwhelming deluge of data. It becomes difficult to determine which leads are valuable and which are just coincidence…or wishful thinking.”
He paused to let this sink in.
“And so what I’d suggest for your next action steps, Agent Swanson, is to continue the good work you’ve been doing. Continue the investigation into the Serban homicide. And while you’re doing that, keep an eye—a distant eye—on this Parkin family connection. Watch for any other incidents involving the family line. Wait and see if that expedition in California ever finds the remains of Albert Parkin.”
He gave Corrie a smile of encouragement along with an approving nod, but she could see the no in his eyes as well.
Morwood then took a hearty gulp of coffee and turned to Wantaugh. “All right, Agent,” he said. “We’re now ready for the next chapter in this thriller of yours.”