In the first five minutes of the drive to Rawlings, little was said.
I sat shotgun in Frank’s rented Suburban and scanned an FBI bulletin that listed recent graduates from the Academy. Directly behind me was Cassie; to her left sat the rookie and Shooter.
“Richard Neal Brancato,” I said without turning. “Do I have that right?”
“A hundred percent,” Richie said.
“You got a nickname?” Cassie asked.
“Just Richie,” he replied.
A moment of quiet.
“Not Rich?” Shooter asked.
“Nope.”
“Huh,” Frank and Shooter replied, almost in unison.
The kid looked young. Did he even shave?
“Richie’s the name of a guy you play cards with,” Shooter said.
“A guy named Richie gets you a great mortgage rate,” Frank said. “A great deal on a boat.”
Shooter flicked her eyebrows. “Richie sets you up with a girl who knows how to have a good time with—”
“What prompted you to request PAR?” I asked, turning to make eye contact.
“I studied math at Michigan,” Richie said. “Data mining. Machine learning. Predictive analytics as a basis for—”
“Cluggghhh.” Shooter made a snoring noise, as if she’d just woken from a long nap. “Whu happened?” she said. “I fell asleep. Did somebody say something?”
Cassie snorted, but I waited for Richie to finish. If anyone cared, hazing was still alive and well in the twenty-first-century FBI.
“I did a project while I was at the Academy, Agent Camden,” Richie said. “Punched in the Bureau’s coldest cases between 2016 and 2020. Looked at which ones got solved. And which agents touched them. Kind of a personnel study of how many people it took to—”
“Oh my God,” Shooter interrupted, her strawberry blond hair shaking as she talked. “Did Gardner Camden win your contest? That’s why you asked to work for him? He worked the most cold cases?”
Between smarts and physicality, few people are better balanced for our job than Shooter Harris. Still, in nearly all FBI circles, she is known as a hardass. A ballbuster. And that’s from people who like her.
“I wanted to work with all of you,” Richie said. “Not just Agent Camden.”
Smart. And a politician.
“They said I’d be placed in PAR for a month,” Richie continued. “After that, it’d be up to Agent Roberts.”
I looked to Frank, but his eyes were on the road. We were rounding the corner into a starter neighborhood that looked like it was built in the 1970s. The rental house owned by Barry Fisher’s brother had wooden siding in a baby-blue color. But more paint had fallen off the wooden planks than was on them.
A black-and-white was parked at the curb, and Frank nodded to the cop as he turned the SUV into the driveway.
“That study you did,” Shooter said to Richie, gathering her hair and tying it into a tight ponytail. “Did it take into account … other variables?”
“Sure,” Richie said. “I considered how cold the cases were. Their geography. Also, how—”
“I mean about PAR,” she said. “When you requested to work on the team, did you do any recon on us? Find out why PAR sits in a crime hot spot like Jacksonville?”
Three horizontal lines formed across Richie’s forehead.
“We’ve got a pretty superb view of the parking lot,” Shooter continued.
Richie looked to me, then back to Shooter. “I guess I didn’t ask too many questions, Agent Harris,” he said. “Then again, I’m on a murder case my second day on the job, while all my peers who requested LA or Miami are working healthcare fraud.”
Richie opened the door, and Cassie reached out a finger to Shooter’s shoulder. “Burn mark,” she said. To which Shooter nodded, smiling.
The rookie was polite, but he gave back as good as he got.
I stepped out and surveyed the house.
The angled wooden siding had been repaired with caulk instead of nailed in place. Eleven horizontal planks were tilted, off angle by four to six percent. Around the perimeter of the property, the lawn had given up its fight against crabgrass. Long strips of weeds grew wild, six and eight feet long, like knob-and-tube wiring in a 1930s attic, waiting for a fire.
“Your case,” Frank said to me.
I approached the front door. But before I grabbed the knob, I turned to the group.
“You may have assumptions,” I said. “About why we’re here. You might even be thinking that Frank’s holding something back.”
Everyone stared at the boss, but he said nothing.
“Forty-two percent of PAR’s cases come to us because some investigator got tunnel vision on day one,” I said. “Don’t be that guy. Keep an open mind.”
In my head, I knew it was the right thing to say as case lead. But I was thinking of layers, too. Of patterns. Of things that made sense—and things that didn’t.
PAR out in the field, investigating for the first time together as a team.
Me in charge, instead of Frank.
A new kid, right out of the Academy.
Too many new things layered atop each other.
Compartmentalization. It’s an advantage to the way I naturally operate. I put all these thoughts aside and grabbed the doorknob.
“Go time,” I said.