By evening, ten news vans had set up shop near the mouth of Goshen Avenue.
Shooter walked down to a taco truck near Wilshire Boulevard for food. As I moved out to our van on the street, I saw her returning, a cardboard box under one arm and a six-pack of Coke under the other.
I opened the door to the van, and Shooter got in first. Cassie was there, along with Frank.
Shooter flipped the top off the box, and I counted eight tacos, each covered in lettuce and cheese. Grease marks marred the cardboard, and tortilla chips were crammed all around the food.
I looked for somewhere to sit, and Shooter smiled at me. “I’ll go over here,” she said. “You can sit next to your partner.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “Sit wherever you want, Gardner.”
“All right.” I plopped down. “We got a lot of media out there. Let’s talk through this. Did anyone go door-to-door yet, canvas to check what neighbors saw?”
Shooter grabbed a taco and held it over a napkin. “Two guys from the LA office did,” she said, a piece of pork falling onto the floor. “Nothing from the neighbors. The attack was late, Gardner. One a.m.–ish.”
“They found something, though,” Frank said. “The clasp on the back gate was sheared clean off.”
“So the door to the back parking,” I said, pointing in that direction. “It closes, but doesn’t lock?”
“Presumably Mad Dog got into the garage that way,” Frank said. “From there, he’s down the steps from the apartment and doesn’t pass any other neighbors’ units.”
I nodded. The van we’d borrowed was a surveillance unit, and it had a small counter for a laptop and other equipment. I pulled my chair closer to the counter and grabbed a taco.
“Wait, can we back up?” Cassie said. “I’m still on questions from New Mexico and Dallas.”
“Of course,” I said. It was a good point, especially considering we hadn’t met as a group since Rawlings.
“Should I get Richie on the phone?” Shooter asked.
I eyed Cassie. We’d left the rookie in New Mexico. “No, let’s have him keep working,” I said. “Can you speak for him?”
“Sure, no problem.” Shooter took a bite of her taco and pointed in my direction. “Richie did great work on the cameras in Rawlings. There were only five or ten professional cams. So he went door-to-door. Got footage from about fifty neighbors’ cameras. Rings. Nest cams. It’s a lot to go through and nothing conclusive yet, but we’ll get there.”
“Good,” I said. I turned to Cassie and Frank. “You never told me about the breakfast with Fisher’s brother. What happened?”
Frank undid the third button down on his dress shirt and tucked his tie into the space. “A whole lot of nothin’,” he said, getting ready to eat without spilling on himself. “The brother told us how he toured some fella around his rental house, just like he said to Cassie.”
“Description?” I asked.
“Generic,” Cassie said. “White guy, brown hair, twenties or thirties.”
I turned to Shooter. “And Merlin? What did we learn from the priest?”
“Apparently some guy came into his church a month ago. Donated some money. Said he was friends with a prisoner in Otero. His friend was sick, and he asked the priest to see him.”
“Fisher was this imprisoned friend of the guy who donated?” I asked.
“Or so he claimed.” Shooter nodded. “This mystery donor told Reverend Merlin that his buddy in Otero was ready to make amends. Apologize for what he’d done.”
“And the description of the guy who donated?” I asked.
“White, Merlin said. Brown or black hair.”
I looked around the van. “Really?” I said. “Everyone is white with brown hair?”
“I pushed him.” Shooter put up her hands. “That’s all he remembers.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “When the priest went to the prison?”
“Well, at first Merlin didn’t want to give anything up,” Shooter said. “Confidentiality and all. Eventually Merlin tells me how he took a bus to the prison. Went through all of Otero’s check-in procedures, only to come up with nothing. He met with Fisher. And Fisher told him to buzz off.”
“And that’s the end of it?”
“Not exactly,” Shooter said. “Merlin got a phone call two days later. Same guy who donated. Says he’s gonna give more money. But he wants to know if Merlin was able to make it out to the prison and meet with his buddy. Merlin tells the guy he did, but sorry, your friend wasn’t ready to talk.”
Frank crossed his legs, and I noticed how shiny his Italian loafers were. I glanced at my own dress shoes. I had bought the first ones in the store that fit, a process that seemed efficient at the time.
“I hunted down the number that called into the church to follow up,” Shooter said. “Burner. No other calls from it.”
Fascinating, I thought. Mad Dog had anticipated us tracing the call and covered his tracks.
Frank popped open a can of Coke and drank. He eyed the food, but took just a single chip. Dipped it in green salsa and ate it.
I grabbed my second beef taco. Wrapped it in two napkins and laid it in front of me.
“What about the cameras on the property in Texas?” I asked Shooter, wondering if Mad Dog had covered his tracks there, too. “The ones the old lady, Dolores, told us about. Did we catch any images on them?”
“An agent from the Dallas office scrubbed that video, Gardner,” she said, pulling back her hair and tying it out of the way. “The guy who talked to Dolores was a bona fide real estate investor. Went to grammar school with Beverly Polis, just like he told the old lady.”
So Mad Dog hadn’t gone to the Polis summer home. Which meant he’d already known where Tignon was. He’d found him some other way.
Cassie laid a soft taco out flat on a napkin and used a plastic fork to pick at the pork pieces. “You think Mad Dog was looking for an apology?” she asked. “Via the priest?”
“An apology?” I shook my head. “No, you send a priest, you’re looking for a confession.”
I thought of the calls the journalist at USA Today had received. The call I’d received. Mad Dog was careful in covering his tracks, but he was also being provocative. Taking chances.
“Odd A-F, if you ask me,” Cassie said. “Someone expecting a serial killer to say sorry. After thirty years.”
Frank nodded. “Makes you think this guy who donated money—he wanted to be absolutely sure of something.”
“Yeah,” Cassie said. “Like Fisher’s lack of remorse.”
We talked for twenty minutes more, covering the HBO writer and the daughter of the old victim, both of whom had visited Barry Fisher. I’d followed up on the CHP officer who’d found the cell phone Mad Dog had called me from. None of the three panned out with new information.
Frank stepped out for a call, and we took the opportunity to polish off the remaining food in the cardboard box. But all I could think about was how careful Mad Dog was.
When the boss came back, his tie was untucked and his jacket back on. “The press have a picture,” he said.
“Of Lazarian?” I asked.
“Strung up in the bathtub,” Frank said.
My mind ran through a half dozen possibilities. Had a cop leaked it? Someone from the medical examiner’s office? Or had it come from the killer?
“We’ve been called for in person, Gardner,” he said to me.
“D.C.?”
“Quantico,” he said, and added that we’d make a report first thing in the morning to the director of the FBI.
An hour later, Frank and I settled into two big seats in the back of a Gulfstream at Van Nuys airport northwest of LA. I’d put Shooter in charge of LA and asked Cassie to keep after the crimes in Texas and New Mexico.
Frank took out his yellow pad, and I flipped open my laptop. I waited until we were in the air and the cabin steward had left us before speaking.
“I don’t believe Richie is involved,” I said. “But he checked out both files. Tignon and Fisher.”
“That’s why Cassie was buzzing him with questions in New Mexico,” Frank said. He squinted at me. “Gardner, Richie was in Fisher’s brother’s house when the suspect called you. He was in New Mexico during the LA murder.”
“True,” I said. “But he had to be checked.”
“And you’re satisfied?” Frank asked.
I hesitated. “His files are sealed, Frank. Even Marly can’t see his background prior to the Bureau. And he’s got no social media.”
Frank’s brow wrinkled. “Has Cassie made it through every other agent?”
“No,” I said. “She estimates she’ll have a name in the next one hundred and twenty minutes.”
“Good,” Frank said. “So what can I help with?”
I kept an open items list. Normally I made this in my head. But since I was the lead, I had memorialized the list on my laptop.
“There are two things,” I said. “First, Tignon’s autopsy.”
I showed Frank pictures of what looked like an n and a g on the scrap of paper that Dr. Abrieu had pulled from Tignon’s throat.
“What do you make of those?” he asked.
“Well, letter and word frequency is a science, but two letters doesn’t give us much to go on,” I said. “Samuel Morse, when developing Morse Code, had to figure out the most commonly used letters so he could assign the simplest codes to them. He used printer’s type.”
“If I’m supposed to be following you—”
“The letter n appears in 6.6544 percent of words,” I said. “The letter g in 2.4705 percent. You can use simple math to combine those, but what you’re going to arrive at is a percentage and no information. And that’s before you include proper nouns, abbreviations, acronyms—”
“So you have nothing?”
“If we had a list of suspects,” I said. “I could perform analysis. Work backwards from the names. Make educated guesses at what is being spelled. Or where the paper might have come from. Right now all I have is that a killer is hiding clues on a body. Which is different than leaving a clue on a body. The five to zero on Tignon’s chest, for instance, was not hidden.”
Frank took off his gray jacket, patting down the wrinkles in the pink long-sleeve shirt he wore underneath. “You’re making that distinction why?” he asked.
“Because it’s possible we haven’t found other clues.”
“What else did you get from the autopsy?”
“The doctor thought the cuts were the work of a hunter.”
“A game hunter?”
“The same,” I said.
“So what’s your biggest question on Tignon? You know that case better than anyone.”
“Tignon got away clean seven years ago, Frank. Saul and I—we were sure he was dead. And no one fooled us.”
“Except him.”
“Except him,” I repeated. “So that’s what confounds me about Tignon. If we concede that somehow Mad Dog has access to the FBI servers … or is an employee in the Bureau … the Bureau didn’t know that Tignon was alive.”
Frank sat back and loosened his tie. “Every case has mysteries.”
“To some people, maybe,” I said.
Frank shook his head at me. At my arrogance.
“You mentioned two things,” he said. “On your open items list.”
“The other one,” I said. “It’s a word from the killer’s call to me. Paddock.”
“He said that referring to a game of chess, right?”
I nodded. “The word means an enclosure or a small field. So maybe the latter could refer metaphorically to a chess board.”
“Like the field of play,” Frank said.
“But etymologically speaking, there’s no precedent for it in the English language.”
The plane hit a pocket of rough air, and a memory came to mind. Shooter and I on the plane to Dallas. Are you going to ask Frank? she’d said. About the rumor that PAR was closing.
“What is it?” Frank said.
I was a straightforward person by nature. Unable to be any other way. But for some reason, I was avoiding speaking to Frank about this topic.
“How are we doing, incidentally?” I asked.
“Who?”
“PAR,” I said. “We’re heading to see the director of the FBI. Is he … happy with us?”
“PAR has done nothing but fulfill its mission, Gardner. Don’t worry about that.”
I took this in, nodding.
“You got a specific idea on paddock?” Frank asked. “You said etymologically speaking—”
“I do.” I nodded. “In certain Middle Scots, paddock doesn’t mean field. It means frog. The most famous use that survives is in the story ‘The Paddock and the Mouse.’ And Mad Dog called me ‘little mouse.’”
“Like Aesop’s,” Frank said. “‘The Frog and the Mouse’?”
“Similar,” I said. “But Aesop was all action and no philosophy. A mouse wanted to cross a river. A frog obliged by offering a ride on his back, all the while knowing he was going to drown the mouse once he got him out in the open water. But when they’re in the river, a hawk sees them fighting, comes down, and kills them both. The lesson is simple. Those who try to harm others get harmed themselves.”
“Like our serial killers,” Frank said.
“Yes,” I said. “Except it’s not that way in ‘The Paddock and the Mouse.’ In the Scots poem, the two animals discuss in advance that the drowning may occur. How the frog looks deceptive. The discussion is about the difference between appearing virtuous and being virtuous. Then the two animals cross the river tied together, but the paddock betrays the mouse and in comes the bird. Same ending.”
“I hope we’re the bird,” Frank said.
“This story may have been formative to him, Frank. He could have heard it as a child and be using it to communicate a message.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Frank said. “The FBI appears virtuous to him, but in fact we’re not?”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “Mad Dog exercises real vengeance for victims. He is virtuous.”
“So what’s the message?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But there’s something more complex we’re not seeing.”
“You said that before. Some endgame he’s got in mind?”
“Likely. What I know for sure is that Mad Dog is not your garden variety sociopath, and this is not Killer 101. Anyone who thinks so is not reading these details right.”
Frank nodded. “I guess that’s irrelevant if we can’t find him.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And we can’t find him until we figure out how he’s accessing our information.”
“Well, hopefully in the next one hundred and twenty minutes, Cassie’ll—”
“Eighty-six now,” I corrected him.
Frank shook his head and smiled. “In the next eighty-six minutes, Cassie will tell us.”
“When we land,” I asked, “do we go directly to the meeting with Director Banning?”
“When the big man wants to talk, yeah. Why?”
“I was thinking: what if we ignore what the director wants? If Cassie can’t tell us who logged in, we go to the EAD for Tech. Stay there until Marly or Cassie lets us know who checked out Tignon, Lazarian, and Fisher’s files.”
Frank looked at me like I was crazy. “You know who we’re meeting with, right?”
“William Banning, director of the FBI,” I said. “And Craig Poulton, deputy director.”
“Sure,” Frank said. “But do you know anything about them?”
“Poulton is fifty-three. A UVA grad. He originally worked in—”
“Stop,” Frank said. “There’s the facts, Gardner. And then there’s the color.”
I used the controls to push my seat back. “So what’s the color?”
“Director Banning retired. Out of the Bureau. Then the president of the United States personally plucked him to come back in.”
“So he’s well connected.”
“‘Well connected’ is a guy who gets you in the back door of a great club. The president has to go through the DOJ to have a two-minute chat with a fed. Any fed, even the top one. The president flew to Banning’s ranch outside of Houston. They did it with a handshake.”
“Okay,” I said. “And Poulton?”
The plane shimmied for a moment. “He’s more of a mystery to most people.”
“You don’t know him?”
“Oh, I know him well,” Frank said. “I’m talking about his rise to power. No ‘wow’ moments. No splashy cases. I worked in the same building years ago in D.C. He had this reputation for working late. Word was, the man didn’t sleep. Went eighteen hours a day.”
“Okay.”
“Except Layla stayed in Texas my first year in D.C.,” Frank continued, referring to his wife. “So I’d burn the midnight oil myself, you know? Nowhere to go except back to the rental apartment to watch TV. And you know what?”
“What?”
“My office was near Poulton’s, and I’ll tell ya, he didn’t work late more than once a week. But he’d send emails at eleven p.m. Two a.m. Four.”
“So he was scheduling his emails?” I said. “Automatically?”
“This was years ago. Back then, you couldn’t do that with emails. I think he was waking up and hitting SEND. You know what they say—‘perception is reality.’”
I took this in. Frank’s familiarity with both men was an advantage in the conversation we were about to have.
The flight steward came over and told us she would be serving a meal of steak or salmon.
“What would you gentlemen like to drink with dinner?” she asked.
“No food for me,” I said. “Just two bottled waters. The caps still on and sealed.”
The woman offered an odd smile at this detail.
“You gotta eat, Gardner.” Frank turned to the woman. “Salmon for him. Salmon for me. And two Cokes.”
She left then. Five minutes later, she returned with our food.
I devoured the salmon and rice, thinking of my family. Of Camila on the farm with the emus and ponies. Of Rosa, arriving yesterday afternoon after visiting Anna in prison. Would she be able to tolerate a stay at a dusty ranch, far from her busy Miami life?
I felt fatigue coming and closed my eyes.
You need rest, Gardy. My mother’s voice sounded in my mind. You cannot function without rest.
A black fuzziness shrouded my vision, and I inhaled. Exhaled. Faded into sleep.
The blackness faded, and a bright patio came into view. I stood at a hostess station, carrying a baby carrier. I looked down. Saw a six-month-old Camila.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked.
I glanced up. Behind me, I could hear the sounds of the boardwalk. A place called Muffin that Anna and I used to walk to.
“We’ve been waiting forty-two minutes and sixteen seconds for a table,” I said.
The woman smiled at me. “Yeah, it’s busy right now.”
My voice remained calm, as always. “In the last nine minutes, five groups have been seated that arrived after us.”
“Well, we only have so many tables and servers. It may not appear complicated, but—”
“You have six open four-tops,” I said. “Three two-tops. Four tables of six. Five booths that can fit three to four people, depending on their size and weight.”
“Hey,” a voice said.
I looked to my right. Anna stood there, back from the bathroom. “What are you doing, handsome?” she asked.
Anna had this ability to break my focus. Sometimes she would run a finger along my face, and I could not concentrate for minutes.
Me, distracted. A strange power.
“There is a question of fairness,” I said, directing my comment at the hostess.
Anna turned to the woman. “We’ll be over here, and we appreciate anything you can do. C’mon, family,” she added in a singsong voice to me and Camila.
She steered us away from the hostess, and Camila made a farting noise. Anna took the baby carrier and placed it on a seat. Then she moved her face close to mine, our noses touching. “Your mind is wonderful and precise, my love.”
Over Anna’s shoulder, I could see the hostess motioning at us. Talking with her boss.
“Look at me,” Anna said. “You say that crazy detailed stuff to me next time, okay? Your ability to be perfect. Your need for details. That’s not for others. I claim it all for myself. It’s mine to explore. Entiendes?”
“Sí,” I said. Yes. I understood.
“Gardner?” the hostess announced. The name I’d put in for our table.
“Gardner,” I heard again.
It was Frank. I opened my eyes. The sun was cresting the horizon, and the Gulfstream was touching down on a private airstrip in Stafford, Virginia.
I thought of Anna. Of how she’d made me feel right with myself. With my quirks. And what I’d done to her in return.
“It was like rigor mortis set in,” Frank was saying. “You were out cold. I thought Mad Dog got you in your sleep.”
He stood up, steadying himself by holding on to the seatback in front of him. “This case is getting press, Gardner. Lotta media trucks in LA. Not sure if you noticed.”
“There were ten,” I said. “The local channels, plus two foreign language media and two nationals.”
He smiled at me. “After a case goes high-profile like this, a task force is typically assigned.”
Frank was talking about handing off our work to another team. To someone more polished.
“It’s not that leadership at the Bureau cares any more about Fisher or Tignon or Lazarian,” he said. “As far as they’re concerned, good riddance to bad rubbish.”
I wondered if they’d used this expression to Frank before they let PAR have the case three days ago.
“But they do care if a vigilante is doing our job,” he continued. “They’ll care if someone’s got access to our servers. And they care a lot about bad press. They don’t want some crime junkie podcaster solving this before we can.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“If we’re getting moved off the case,” he said, “remember to keep it classy. Yes sir. No sir. Goes a long way.”
I put on my blazer. “Yes sir.”