Frank told us that agents from the Dallas office would arrive to take over, so we focused on the four primary considerations in solving a homicide: preserving the scene, inspecting the body, securing evidence, and identifying persons of interest.
By 10:30 p.m., two Bureau investigators and a coroner’s assistant had shown up. We handed off the body and said goodbye to Deputy Hollings.
“You two wanna grab a drink on the way out of town?” he asked. “Talk a little shop?”
“No,” I said, answering quickly.
Cassie jumped in, her eyes on me. “We have somewhere to be.”
“Next time we’re in Ashland, though,” I said, forcing my lips into a smile.
“Rain check for next time.” Hollings pointed at me.
Outside, Cassie and I got in our rental and headed northwest for thirty miles. To Woodrell, Texas. Population 12,100.
I parked in a visitor’s lot beside a brown three-story building downtown, but left the car running.
“You sure you don’t mind waiting?”
Cassie shook her head, her wavy brown hair loose around her shoulders. “TikTok.” She held up her phone.
In the lobby, a man in his fifties looked up from a security desk. His face settled into a gentle smile.
“Agent Camden.”
The man was Black and wore a gray uniform with two red angled bars on each shoulder. More white hair was in his sideburns than the last time I’d visited.
I pulled a carton of Marlboro Reds from my work bag. Placed it onto his desk.
“You’re a class act,” he said.
I glanced around the empty nursing home. A pair of couches faced an interior garden that let in natural light during the day.
Talk about regular things.
“Your wife is well?” I said. “Glenda?”
“Glenda is just fine.” He waved his hand. “Go on now. Visiting hours don’t apply to you.”
I took the stairs to the third floor and emerged into a carpeted hallway. Opened the door to number 302.
My mother looked up. Her adjustable bed was in TV mode, her body upright.
“Well, for crying in a bucket,” she said, using a remote to flick off the TV. “I would’ve put on makeup.”
“For your son?” I smiled. “C’mon, Mom. I was in the area.”
My mother rolled her steel-blue eyes. She was tall like me, but her hair, once dyed weekly by a stylist in Charleston, had gone bright white. “You were just passing through Texas?”
My mother has a South Carolina accent. It is different than the drawl you hear in Georgia or Alabama, formed by a mixture of dialects—African and European—all jumbled together.
“You come unexpected, baby, and I know something bad happened around here. Sit down. Tell Momma about your case.”
“It’s not my case,” I said.
My mother scowled. She wore a black V-neck made from the same material as hospital scrubs, along with what she called “beach trousers.” Which were loose-fitting white pants with a shoestring for a tie.
“Sweetie, I know you got pictures on that phone of yours.”
“The pictures are too bloody, Mom.”
“For me?”
My mother was a psychiatrist for twenty years. And not just any shrink. Before she’d retired and moved west, she was on retainer with the Charleston Police Department. There, she consulted on dozens of investigations, including a particularly infamous strangler case where a man had been abducting prostitutes from the First Ward and killing them out in rural areas.
“One photo,” she begged.
I bit at my lip. Didn’t fathers and sons who were lawyers discuss the complexities of interesting legal cases?
“Stop thinking all the time, Gardy,” my mom said. “Just act.”
Gardy. No one else called me that.
Pulling out my phone, I showed her the two photos I’d received from Deputy Hollings.
My mother stared at the carvings on Ross Tignon’s chest. In the last year, the skin around her jaw had become puffy and wrinkled.
She studied the mark between the numbers that looked like a period. “Five-oh?” she said. “Like cops?” The same question Cassie had asked.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to get my mother worked up.
“Would you consider that a reference to yourself?” she asked. “Or just local guys?”
“I think most people lump all of us together,” I said. “Call us all five-oh. Plus, there’s a dot, Mom.” I motioned at the photo.
“Ah, a dot,” my mother repeated, her eyes sparkling. “Well, there’s a spice called five-point-oh, Gardy. A great rub.”
“There are cars called five-point-oh,” I said. “The Mustang, for instance.”
My mom and I had played these games since I was a kid. The back-and-forth volley of the mind. The riddles.
“Dolby sound,” my mother said. “They used to call that five-point-oh.”
“There was a Google Chrome extension called five-point-oh.”
“A Midwest rock band,” my mother countered. “Late nineties. They went by the name Five Pointe O.”
I had three other five-points-ohs lined up, but I caught myself and smiled. “You win, Mom.”
A vertical indent had formed between my mother’s forehead and her nose. “Of course it could be a dash, Gardy,” she said.
I leaned over the phone, surprised I had not noticed this. Five-dash-oh meant something completely different.
“The score of the baseball game,” I said, remembering Ross Tignon’s alibi for that first murder, the killing of Daisy Carabelle. Tignon claimed he’d driven to a Marlins spring training game in Jupiter, Florida, seventy-three miles from Sandstone. A game that ended in a score of five to nothing.
There were few cameras in the team’s spring facility back then, and Tignon had provided his ticket to the game. He reported that he’d made the journey in his wife’s car, not his Astro van, which had been called in as stolen that night.
When questioned, Tignon had described every play in intricate detail. The bounce of every ball. Every base stolen and error made in the third through seventh innings, right at the time of Daisy Carabelle’s death. By the end of the interview, only two possibilities emerged: One, he was innocent. Or two, he had an eidetic memory, just like mine. I suspected he had left the baseball game early, driven home, and abducted Daisy. Then he listened to the play-by-play on the radio in his van as he cut her up. After all, the man didn’t own a TV. Didn’t have a DVR to record the game.
I glanced down at my phone and saw that my mother had swiped to the next photo.
“So he’s lying on his back,” she said. “Where?”
“In his kitchen.”
“Was he drugged?”
“The agents will get that information from toxicology,” I said. “But we noted an injection mark on his neck.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Myself and my partner,” I said. “Cassie Pardo.”
My mother put the phone down. “Tell me you didn’t leave her in the car, Gardy.”
“No,” I said. “I mean—she had stuff to do. TikTok.”
My mother’s squint was skeptical. But she let it go.
“So the injection mark,” she continued.
But I was stuck back on her question. Should I go get Cassie? Bring her up here?
I pointed at an area on my own neck, below my right ear, where we’d noticed the needle mark. “There were minor defensive wounds, Mom. I suspect Tignon was alive when he was cut up.”
“So someone drugs the guy,” she said. “Maybe with a paralytic. He becomes disoriented and falls over. Catches himself with his hand and his face.”
“Precisely.”
“Then your suspect cuts him open. Why? How?”
“And who?” I asked. “We don’t know, Mom. He was presumed dead seven years ago. The house was bought under a false name.”
My mother’s forearm twitched with a muscle spasm, and I recalled a lecture from her doctor about blood pressure and stress. “We don’t need to worry though, Mom. It’s not our case anymore. It’s not my job to be out in the field.”
My mother started coughing. A plastic pitcher stood on a counter near the door, and I poured her a glass of water. As she wrestled with her posture, I began opening wardrobes, looking for a pillow to prop her up. In the second closet, I found an oversized one in a clean pillowcase. Turning, I started toward the bed.
“Oh, what a surprise,” she said.
“You didn’t know there were pillows in there?”
“My Gardy is here,” she announced, as if I’d just arrived. “Were you in the area?”
I froze. Thought of a quote I’d read about fools and hope.
Because I had been caught thinking that the problem was gone. It’s a good day again. Her mind is clear. Then, quick as a lightning flash, the day was like so many others when I’d visited recently.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, with a concrete smile.
And suddenly all I could think of was that smell of death. Because as much as I rarely felt fear, if this disease could attack my mom … if she, who was once brilliant and still had spells of it, could lose all her thoughts in a flash, then it could happen to any of us. It could happen to me.
“You’re in the area because of a case,” my mother said. “Tell me about it.”
I hesitated.
Two people in the world can make my heart sink. My mother is one. The other is seven and a half years old and lives with her grandmother in Miami. I visit on the weekends.
“No, Mom,” I lied. “No case. Just a social call.”
My phone pulsed as I said this, and I found a text chain with four other people on it. An agent on my team named Jo Harris had texted:
Who’s point on the new investigation?
Then an answer from Frank.
Gardner takes the lead on this and all related cases unless I say different
Related cases? I had only been off email for an hour.
Pouring myself a drink of water, I opened my message app and typed.
Is there another body?
The response came from a number without a contact name attached. Someone Frank had added to the text chain.
Rawlings, New Mexico
A message from Frank appeared next.
You guys studied Barry Fisher at the Academy, right?
Barry Fisher was a killer. He had served thirty-one years for multiple murders back in the nineties, before being paroled this week as an old man. There had been news coverage of him leaving prison in Otero, New Mexico, twenty-four hours ago. He was frail and connected to an oxygen tank.
Fisher’s body was found in Rawlings, NM
I put my fingers to the phone.
Cassie and I were headed home. Are we regrouping at the office in the morning?
Frank responded quickly.
Negative. Head to New Mexico. I’ll send you an address.
I blinked. This morning Frank had sent us to a crime halfway across the country. Now he was telling me I would head to New Mexico and oversee a multicase investigation, a first for me at PAR.
I began typing.
Seal Fisher’s place. Don’t let anyone in or out. Our people included. A local doctor in Texas contaminated Tignon’s body. Cassie and I will need an hour for travel. And a jet at DFW Corporate.
I put my phone away and turned back to my mother. She had fallen asleep, and I switched off the light by her bed.
When you realize as a child that you are not like others, you are faced with a choice. Instead of leaning more into who I was, my mother encouraged me to iterate into someone better, even if I could only make minute changes.
I kissed her on the forehead and turned. Headed out.
When I got to the car, Cassie was not on TikTok. The dome light was illuminated, and she was reading Tignon’s file again.
“Fisher and Tignon,” she said as I put the rental in reverse. “That’s big-time.”
I nodded, thinking about the two men. They had operated in different decades and in different states. Ages apart, really.
But even though they were unrelated to each other, there was a pattern.
A serial killer was murdering serial killers.