“Burke Kagan,” Richie read from the business card.
Below the special agent’s name was the address of the Oklahoma City field office.
I took out my phone and shot a picture of the card. I texted it to Frank and excused myself, leaving Richie with Volus.
“Who’s Burke Kagan?” Frank grunted when he answered.
I explained to him the nature of Agent Kagan’s questions to Dr. Volus. And suggested that Kagan could be Mad Dog.
I heard Frank typing. “Okay,” he said. “Here he is.”
My phone dinged, and I glanced down at it. An official FBI photo showed a white man with brown hair and a face the shape of an egg.
“He’s retired,” Frank said.
Kagan looked young. Too young to be retired.
“Cassie needs to go through every case Kagan investigated,” I said. “Find some connection to Tignon, Fisher, or Lazarian.”
“I’ll get her on it. What can I do?”
“She takes the cases. You take the man. Where he came from. Where he is now. Why he left the Bureau. And Frank,” I said, “let’s keep this quiet. No one outside of PAR.”
“Ten-four,” he said.
When I returned to the greenhouse, Volus was talking with Richie about seasonality and the Helleborus. I held up my phone, showing him the picture of Burke Kagan.
“That’s the guy,” Volus said. “So it’s cool, then? That I talked to him?”
“Agent Kagan’s questions about the plant,” I said, motioning at the first petri dish. “Were they focused more on its toxicity to humans? Or the bow and arrow as a delivery vehicle?”
“The bow and arrow,” Volus said. “He asked about the Odyssey. Whether it was factually accurate.”
Was it possible Mad Dog had been homeschooled? Fiction as textbook? In that case, “The Paddock and the Mouse” could have been an intro course. The Odyssey, the advanced class.
“So this poison that Odysseus got from the Helleborus,” Richie said.
“It was used by the Gauls,” Volus replied. “Put in arrows.”
“Not just that.” I pointed out. “Toxins like Helleborus had other uses. For instance, to poison the well water of cities under siege.”
I stopped, processing what I’d just said.
If Mad Dog’s goal was to punish criminals more harshly than the justice system had, he could poison the water of a prison. Take out many at once, versus one killer at a time. Perhaps this was Mad Dog’s connection to the poison. It was not something in the past. It was a future plan.
“Is the poison difficult to extract?” Richie was asking Volus.
“Not if you know how to recognize the plant and its seeds,” the doctor said. “And not if you know how to grind them up. I mean, I’m not vouching for everything in Homer. One-eyed giants and all. But poison is poison. A mortar, pestle, and some hard work—you’re ready to kill.”