84: “I’ve been through that same box about a dozen times, the accounting records of the crazy and deranged,” a voice said.
Poole looked up from the stack of spreadsheets at the woman standing in the doorway. She wore a pink cap and a purple scarf draped over an unzipped heavy jacket. He had seen her before.
“May I come in?” she asked.
He leaned back in the chair and nodded, then rubbed his temples. The pain at the back of his head had worked around to the front and sides. “What can I do for you?”
She crossed the room and reached out a hand. “We’ve never been formally introduced. Detective Clair Norton. I was on the 4MK Task Force with Detectives Porter and Nash before you and your team stepped in and stole the case from us.”
Poole took her hand. “Special Agent Frank Poole.”
“I already know that. Did you miss the part where I said I was a detective?”
He didn’t need this right now. “What can I do for you, Detective?”
“I need you to come across the hall.”
“To the war room? Porter said I’m not allowed in the war room. He and that other guy made it very clear the last time I was in there.”
“Thanks to you and your friends, Sam has been given a little time off. While he’s gone, I’m in charge over there,” she said.
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Someone dropped your chocolate into our peanut butter.”
Poole followed Detective Clair Norton across the hall to the war room. The tension was thick as he entered. Tired eyes were on him. He nodded at Detective Nash as he pulled up a chair at the conference table. Nash was the only person he recognized of the three people already seated.
“Frank,” Nash muttered, giving him a weak wave.
Clair introduced him to the two others at the table. “This is Sophie Rodriguez with Missing Children, and the disheveled mess over there in the corner is Edwin Klozowski. He heads our Information Technology Division.”
“Call me Kloz,” Klozowski stood and offered his hand across the table.
“No sucking up to the feds,” Clair said.
Klozowski withdrew his hand and returned to his chair. “Right.”
“What happened to your head?” Nash asked. “You’re all banged up.”
Poole told them about the houses on Forty-First, Diener, and Bishop.
Nash and Clair exchanged a look. Clair was first to speak. “I’m so sorry.”
Poole nodded once.
“Are they going to let you continue working the case?” Nash asked.
Poole shrugged. “Nobody has said they’re not. Not yet, anyway. The Chicago office is short-staffed as is. Most agents are working a recent terror threat that came in. They might bring someone else in, but for now I’m all they’ve got with BAU experience. Nobody knows this case better than me.” He looked around the room. “Except maybe all of you.”
“And Sam,” Klozowski said quietly. “He knows the case better than any of us.”
Poole said, “I’ve tried to reach him, several times. I’m just getting voice mail on his phone.”
Again, Nash and Clair exchanged a look. “Nash and I just came from his apartment. We found his cell phone sitting on a table in his living room, switched off, and his favorite chair was overturned, lying on its side.”
“Do you think Bishop got to him?”
“No. We think he left on his own. His suitcase was gone. We think he went somewhere,” Clair said.
“Someplace he didn’t want us to know about,” Nash added.
“Where would he go?”
Nobody had an answer to that.
“Could he be working with Bishop? Helping him somehow?”
“No way,” Nash said.
Clair folded her arms. “Not a chance.”
Poole studied their faces. “What do you know about Bishop’s diary?”
The room grew quiet again. Looks passed among the group, but they said nothing.
Poole blew out a breath and stood, turned toward the door. “I don’t have time for this.”
Nash unfolded his arms, set both palms on the table. His eyes swung from Clair to Klozowski. “Wait, Frank. Please sit.”
Poole lowered himself back into the chair. “You know where it is, don’t you?”
Clair looked to Nash. Nash said, “Sam held it back.”
“From Evidence?”
“From the press. Checking the diary into Evidence would be no different from sending it to the newspapers. It would leak. Something like that would most definitely leak.”
“So he withheld evidence? All of you let him do that?”
“Sam held the book back. I knew he had it, only Sam and me, nobody else.” Nash turned his hands over, looked at his palms.
“Where is the diary now?”
“Sam hid it under the La-Z-Boy in his living room, the overturned chair we found.”
“So Sam has it with him? Wherever he is?”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody made a copy?”
“We didn’t want any copies.”
Poole let all of this sink in, then turned to Clair. “Is this why you brought me over here? To come clean?”
Klozowski let out a soft laugh. “Oh boy, icing and cake and all that.”
“What does that mean?”
“There’s more,” Clair said. She pulled an eight-by-ten photo from a manila folder on the table and slid it over to him.
Poole picked up the picture. It was a photograph of a boy, frozen beneath layers of ice, in the cab of a pickup truck.
Clair stood up and retrieved another picture from the whiteboard at the front of the room. She set it down in front of Poole. This one showed a close-up of a windshield, taken from a traffic camera.
“That’s Bishop,” Poole stated flatly.
“It’s the same truck,” Clair told him. “That truck was also caught on a security camera at Jackson Park three weeks ago. Our unsub used it to tow a water tank into the park, then used water from the tank to help conceal the body of Ella Reynolds beneath the surface of the lagoon. The tank was stolen from Tanks A Lot, an aquarium store downtown. Libby McInley, the sister of Bishop’s fifth victim, applied for a job at Tanks A Lot. She worked there for one day. I think she was only there long enough to scope the place out for Bishop. Somehow, they’re working together. They were working together.”
Poole stared at both photographs. “When did you learn all of this?”
“In the past few hours,” Clair told him. “All of it.”
“Do you have an ID on the boy?”
“Not yet. The body went downtown. They’re working on it.”
“Are you aware of what happened to Libby McInley? How we found her?” Poole asked.
“We saw the report.”
“You saw the report,” Poole muttered. He still couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Libby McInley. Now Agent Diener too. Bishop’s face when he opened that door.
You’re not Sam Porter.
A smile on his face.
Poole looked at the whiteboards at the front of the room, at the girls’ images staring back at him. Then he turned back to the people sitting around the conference table, their eyes on him. “Porter said these cases weren’t tied to Bishop.”
“Sam was wrong.”
“Withholding evidence, holding back that diary, in what is now a federal case, could not only cost you your badges but land some of you in jail. That diary could be key, and now we don’t have it. We don’t know where it is.”
“They had nothing to do with it. That’s on me and Sam,” Nash repeated.
The room dropped into silence again, filling with nervous energy thick enough to crackle.
Clair’s eyes met Nash’s across the table. Both turned away. Sophie’s gaze was locked on the small screen of her phone, although it didn’t look like she was actually reading anything, just unwilling to face the others.
After nearly a full minute, Poole stood. “Wait here.”
He left them sitting at the table.
Behind him, Klozowski muttered, “We’re so fucked.”
Poole returned a moment later with one of the whiteboards from the FBI room across the hall. He slid it beside the others at the front of the room, then started back across the hall.
“You’re not gonna report us?” Klozowski called after him.
“Right now, we’re going to work the case.”
Clair let out the breath she had been holding.