A sound awoke me.
My feet were propped up on the bed, but I was not in it. I had been sleeping in the hotel armchair in a T-shirt and boxers.
Though the window, the horizon was just turning orange—above it, a purplish gray. On the bedside table, my phone was blipping.
FaceTime. “Camila” the screen read. Below the words, a picture of my daughter from last year’s birthday party.
I hit the button, and the screen flickered to life. My seven-year-old appeared, dressed in a purple short-sleeve shirt with a butterfly on the front.
“Morning, Daddy,” she said. Camila was in her room, holding a clear plastic cup filled with Cheerios and milk.
“Good morning, Camila.”
I hadn’t told her that I wasn’t in Florida, where it was almost 8 a.m.
“You look tired, Daddy,” she said.
Camila’s skin was a shade darker than olive, and black ringlets flowed around her oval face.
“You curled your hair again,” I said.
Camila smiled, her brown eyes huge.
About six months ago, I’d bought my daughter a curling machine she’d seen in a video on her iPad. The machine sucked her hair in and held it inside while it heated and curled the strands into spirals.
“Nana helped me,” she said. “You like it?”
“It’s not getting caught in the machine anymore?”
“Only once,” she said.
“Well, like I showed you, you have to be very cool when that happens and not yank at it. Are you being cool?”
“Like a cucumber,” she said, repeating back what I’d told her the last time I was in Miami. “I listen for the click, and it lets go of the hair.”
Camila had spoken early. Learned to read early.
I looked at the time. It was 7:44 a.m. in Miami.
“You ready for school?”
“Nana said to be listo in five minutes, but I’m dressed early,” she said. “I was thinking about this weekend. My friend Sophie told me the carousel in the mall is working again.”
I had requested Friday off, and I already had a flight booked from Jacksonville to Miami to see my daughter. But that was before the murders.
“I need to talk to your grandma about that,” I said.
Camila powered ahead, playing with her spoon as she spoke. “Nana said she’s getting up at four in the morning tomorrow to go see Mommy. Or she might leave tonight instead.”
Her grandmother, Rosa, was visiting my ex, Anna, in the Florida Women’s Reception Center in Ocala, a prison northwest of Orlando.
On the screen, Camila gave me her best stern look. “Are you not coming, Daddy? Because we were going to read the book about magic together.”
“I realize that,” I said. “But you know how my job gets.”
“I know,” she said. “I just miss you.” She lifted her eyebrows, then squinted. “Daddy, that doesn’t look like your bedroom behind you.”
“You’ve got a sharp eye, honey,” I said. “I’m in New Mexico right now.”
I placed my phone against a pillow and stared at Camila. “I’m gonna try and find a way to get there this weekend,” I said. “I promise.”
I hesitated then. Was this true?
An indent formed between my daughter’s eyebrows. “New Mexico? Daddy, did you make the big boys club?”
Camila had been asking over the past two years: What would it take for me to move to Miami? For us to live together? At one point I’d explained that I’d made mistakes at my job. That I was stuck in Jacksonville in the “little boys club,” as I’d called it, while other agents in the “bigger boys club” got to travel around the country. Those agents could pick where they wanted to live. They could make the choice to live in Miami and work out of the local office. Use that as a hub from which to travel.
“Well, we don’t call it that, Camila. That’s something I said when you were six.”
She scrunched up her forehead. “The large agents club?” she tried instead.
“Camila,” I said.
“How long have you been in New Mexico?”
“A day,” I replied.
“You were at home before that?”
“I was in Texas before that. But—”
“The gigantically important association of investigators!” Camila yelled.
I do not smile often, but my daughter has an infectious energy. She is also funny in ways that I could not dream of being.
“I’ll talk to Nana,” she said, her mood lifted.
“Camila,” I said. “I will talk to your grandma, okay? In fact, why don’t you put Nana on right now so I can—”
“Gotta go!”
“Camila,” I said. “I have to solve the case before the big boys would even consider—”
The phone made a beeping noise. And she was gone.
I immediately rang up Rosa. But the call went to voicemail, so I wrote a text, letting her know I might not be able to fly in to get Camila. Then I showered and dressed. It was early, and I had to assemble everyone’s reports into one consolidated summary for the director of the FBI. A report that covered any public safety or press concerns from the case.
By eight thirty, I had been typing for ninety minutes. I heard a knock and opened my door to find Frank outside.
“Good,” he said. “You’re up.”
Frank wore a dark blue suit with a gray vest and a light blue tie. “I checked with a friend at Social Security on Beverly Tignon.”
The wife of Ross.
“Her social security check gets mailed to an address north of Dallas,” Frank continued. “All the information was under her maiden name, Beverly Polis.”
Tignon’s wife was still alive. This was likely how Ross Tignon had been located in Ashland. Our killer must have spoken with her. Gotten Tignon’s address.
“I was thinking of flying there,” Frank said.
“No,” I replied. “I should be the one to interview her. Saul and I had time with the wife years ago.”
Frank nodded slowly. A role reversal—me telling him the next steps.
The autopsy of Tignon would also be ready today in the Dallas field office, and I wanted to be there for it.
“Why don’t you go to breakfast with Cassie?” I said. “Chat up Fisher’s brother, see what he remembers about the visitor he toured through the house.”
“You’ll head to Texas, then?” Frank asked.
“With Shooter,” I said.
He left, and I packed up my paperwork. Threw clothes into my carry-on. When I was ready, I saw a text had come in from Cassie, asking to see me before I left.
When she opened her hotel room door, she was dressed in a tan pantsuit with an aqua blouse.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “I tried on this bracelet.” She held up her hand, “but now it’s giving … frivolous vibes.”
I examined her wrist. “I’m not the best person to offer advice on—”
Cassie laughed. “I’m not looking for an opinion, Gardner. I need help getting it off. Come in a sec, will ya?”
I followed her over to the kitchenette, and she sat down on one of the barstools, holding up her wrist. I studied the bracelet.
“When’s your flight to Dallas?” she asked.
“In two hours,” I said, carefully unclasping a piece of metal that was hooked around the edge of the adjoining piece. “But we have to drive to the El Paso airport first.”
“Well, I wanted to tell you something,” she said.
I stopped working and looked at her, our faces close.
“This is a good color on you, bee-tee-dubs,” Cassie said. “This shirt.”
I glanced down at it. I had four of these shirts, all identical.
“That’s not what I wanted to tell you,” she continued. “I haven’t gotten through all those names yet. The agents who checked out both Tignon’s and Fisher’s files.”
“I didn’t expect you would,” I said. “I imagine there are hundreds.”
“There’s a lot,” she said. “But here’s the thing.”
She hesitated, and I waited. Behind Cassie, her suitcase was packed, her running shoes sitting atop it. Cassie was a marathoner, and she did five miles every morning.
“Someone we know?” I asked.
“Richie.”
“Our Richie? He checked out both files?”
“I dunno if he’s our Richie yet, but yeah. I’m not surprised about the file on Fisher. I told you, a lot of the NATs study it, and he did, two months ago at the Academy. But Tignon?”
“When?”
“Ten days ago.”
I finished unhooking the bracelet, stood up, and handed it to her.
“Did he mention he was familiar with the file?” Cassie asked.
“No,” I said.
“Well, you wanted to know,” she said. “Now you do.”
I nodded. “And you’re doing more than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with who checked out the files?”
“Of course,” Cassie said. “I’ve been looking at timing. What home office they’re from. I’ve got eight parameters I’m considering.”
In very difficult cases—the type PAR inherits—math is essential as a forensics tool, and Cassie is our expert. I have seen her re-create a scene, measure the distance to a victim, and use a tangent formula to determine the correct height of the shooter. All in her head.
My phone buzzed. Shooter was ready downstairs.
“I need to go,” I said.
“Of course.”
I rolled my bag out into the hallway and moved toward the elevator. As I took it down five floors, I considered the finding about Richie.
His research on the Tignon case could’ve been part of the personnel study he mentioned. Then again, he’d told us that he’d worked backward from solved cases. The three murders involving Tignon were closed, but technically unsolved.
And then there was Richie’s tone last night as we cleaned up the food. His actions in picking PAR. Both were incongruous with my expectations of a rookie.
When I’d given Cassie the assignment, I’d estimated she would narrow her pool to two dozen hits. That, eventually, there would be three or four names of people we knew on it. But one on our own team?
I texted Cassie to keep an eye on the rookie as Shooter and I boarded the plane in El Paso. Keep him busy, I messaged. She wrote back a minute later.
Donezo.
As I settled into my seat, I closed my eyes, thinking of other things. My life. My career. My daughter.
I had been with PAR for four years, and lately I wondered if my job was going anywhere. Last Friday, Shooter and I had been in the elevator when we overheard a guy talking on his cell. “Oh, those guys are getting shut down,” he’d said. “You can pull their salaries from that worksheet.”
The elevator door opened on 2, and he stepped off. The budgeting floor.
As the doors closed, Shooter flicked her eyebrows at me, waiting for possible gossip on which group was getting the axe. But as it closed, we heard three more words: The Head Cases.
We’d been called this moniker a lot, but rarely to our faces. Like most FBI nicknames, it was half insult, half compliment. After all, we did have good “heads for a case.” We had the ability to synthesize. To see things others couldn’t. To connect disparate elements into one unified story.
But the name meant other things, too. That we were oddballs. Rejects. Nutsos. Not my words. But words I’d heard used to describe us.
I reclined my chair as the plane topped ten thousand feet.
If things were changing for PAR, did I care? I had been wondering how long I could keep this up, flying from Jacksonville to Miami to see Camila on weekends. My daughter’s grandmother was fifty-nine and raising Camila largely without complaint, especially given everything that had happened.
The heart attack Saul had after Anna was arrested was the first of two. The second one, a week later, killed him.
And the family put the blame squarely on me.