Burke Kagan surrendered to us and was seated, cuffed in front, at a three-by-six pine table in his dining area. Behind him was a wood-burning stove, alive with a fire.
I’d made the decision to tell Kagan nothing until a preliminary search of the cabin was complete.
“You wanna give me an idea of what you’re looking for?” he asked.
I glanced over from where I stood in the kitchen. “You read the search warrant?”
“I’ve seen a million search warrants, bud.” Kagan tapped his fingers nervously against each other, and the cuffs clinked on the table. He had a hyper demeanor and spoke in quick bursts. “Any of them worth their salt are over-reaching, purposely vague, and say nothing about your investigation. Am I gonna find something different if I read this one?”
I didn’t answer him, my eyes scanning the kitchen. Four empty bottles of Thirteenth Colony sour mash bourbon whiskey lined the molding below the window.
I’d assigned Richie and Suco the task of searching the place, using a methodology where each one inspected a specific area while I remained in a central zone, acting as what’s called “the finder.” As Suco and Richie located anything relevant, I made a record of it, thereby centralizing all evidence discovered to one person, who can testify in court.
Zimmer, meanwhile, stood sentinel three feet to my left, by Kagan.
I turned to the ex-agent. “You didn’t seem surprised to find armed officers at your door, Mr. Kagan. Were you expecting us?”
Kagan’s eyes shifted from the bedroom to me. “It’s a dangerous country, I guess. Armed people are everywhere.”
My brain was recording the number of times Kagan’s foot tapped the ground. I passed two hundred and sixty and kept counting.
He turned sideways on the bench and faced me. “If there’s something specific you’re looking for, I’d appreciate the courtesy. I think I’ve earned it.”
“Found something,” Suco hollered.
I walked into the bedroom. There, laid atop a wooden bench, was a seventeen-inch crossbow.
“You said to look for weapons of any kind,” Suco said. “I assume this counts.”
I examined a quiver full of arrows beside the bow. Neither Richie nor I had told Suco or Zimmer about the Helleborus. Or the questions Dr. Volus had fielded about an arrowhead as a delivery vehicle for poison.
I turned to Suco. “I need you to bag that quiver. And do so without touching any of the individual arrows. You understand?”
“Copy on that,” Suco said.
I gloved up and brought the bow out to the main area. Laid it on the dining table.
“Are you a hunter, Mr. Kagan?”
“Sometimes.”
His voice was not the same as the man who had called me at the FBI two days ago, but that was not unexpected. I had arrived in Georgia assuming the chances were fifty-fifty that Kagan was either Mad Dog or his helper.
“Do you own a mortar and pestle?” I asked.
Kagan squinted. “A mortar and pestle?” He cocked his head at me. “That’s what you want to know?”
“If there’s any ground-up poison in this cabin,” I said, “I’m giving you a chance to tell us, before anyone else gets hurt.”
“This has gone far enough,” Kagan said. He stepped toward me, and Zimmer took him by the wrist. Spun his body against the wall of the house.
“Another one,” Suco hollered.
She came out with a black case in hand. Flipping it open, I inspected a second bow. This one had a custom paint job, with camo covering everything but the bowstring.
“A Scorpyd Aculeus,” I said. “Four hundred and sixty feet per second with a draw weight of a hundred and eight pounds. The fastest crossbow on earth.”
“Lawyer!” Kagan’s voice was muffled against the white pine of the cabin’s wall. “Put me in a squad car. Lawyer. Now.”
Richie came in from the back door of the cabin, where I’d sent him to search the grounds. He glanced at the two bows, and our eyes met.
I nodded, and the detective steered Burke Kagan toward the door of the cabin, to get him into a black-and-white car. My mind ran through three scenarios. Then narrowed to two. But Richie’s eyes stayed on me.
“What is it?” he asked.
Normally, I would’ve been happy with what we’d found, but Kagan’s demeanor was off. The sarcasm when we first pounded on the door. His silence a minute earlier. And now this, him requesting to be placed in a squad car?
“Innocent people,” I said to Richie, “when accused, become defensive and angry.”
“The guilty ask incriminating questions,” Richie said in response.
Which Kagan had not done.
“Agent Camden?” Suco said.
“Let’s say you were chasing a case off the clock,” I said to the rookie. “You bring it to me, but I don’t believe in it. What do you do?”
“If I thought I was right?” Richie shrugged. “Probably keep looking into it on my own time. Until I could convince you otherwise.”
I mentally flipped through the highlights of Kagan’s employment. Six commendations in 2018. Then retired in 2019.
“Kagan’s exit interview was conducted in D.C.,” I said. “Not with his unit sup in Oklahoma City.”
“Does that mean something?”
“The job of a unit sup is kind of like a handler in the spy business,” I told him.
“Trust goes both ways.” Richie responded. “You don’t let me look into that case after hours—it means you don’t think much of my judgment on other cases during the day.”
I nodded at Richie. “Kagan was a smart-ass when we got here. Then jittery. Then misunderstood. Now he’s silent?”
Richie waited but said nothing.
“Have you ever read a transcript of a disgruntled employee?” I asked.
“No,” Richie said.
“Well, they’re disgruntled because they’re still emotionally invested. The two things are necessarily tied together.”
I thought of my transfer to El Paso. Of what didn’t show up in my own personnel file.
I walked out to the porch. Kagan stood with Detective Suco. Zimmer was moving his squad car over from the staging area.
“Change of plans,” I said. “Detective Suco, please bring Mr. Kagan back inside.”
Suco nodded, steering Kagan back toward the cabin.
“You didn’t give me my phone call yet, pal,” Kagan said. “Everyone heard me ask for a lawyer. This could shoot any case you got to shit.”
Curious.
Kagan couldn’t turn it off. Thinking like an agent.
“You haven’t been arrested yet, Mr. Kagan,” I said. “That’s when your right to a phone call begins. You know that.”
He flicked his eyebrows at me. “And the handcuffs?”
“Take them off,” I said to Suco. “Mr. Kagan and I need to have a chat.”
She uncuffed him, and Kagan massaged his wrists. Richie passed me and made eye contact. I hope you’re right, he mouthed.
I closed the door behind him, leaving me alone with the suspect in his own cabin.
Was he a disgruntled fed? Or Mad Dog’s helper?
“Have you ever heard of the Kalahari San people?” I asked.
Kagan shook his head, sitting down at his dining table.
“They collect the entrails of an African beetle called Diamphidia nigroornata. The larvae contain a toxin that’s poisonous. The tribe uses bone-tipped arrows coated in that poison to hunt.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Hunting someone with beetle larva?”
I shook my head. “The San tribe is twenty thousand years old, Mr. Kagan. As anthropologists studied them, they speculated that they didn’t just hunt animals that way. Humans were killed, too. This means that poisoning by arrow is one of the oldest forms of murder by weapon. Much older, incidentally, than the Odyssey, whose author we assume died in 701 BC.”
Kagan’s eyes got large as I referenced Homer.
“You found something,” I said. “And no one would listen.”
Kagan shifted in his chair. “And you’re what?” he asked. “My pal? You’re gonna make everything okay?”
“You worked in the Bureau long enough to know that’s not going to happen,” I said. “But you also worked there long enough to know that you can get pulled into something. And you are definitely getting pulled into something.”
Kagan blew air out through his nose. He moved over to the sink and poured himself a cup of water.
“You found a pattern,” I said.
“One no one cared about. I’m guessing someone important has been shot with an arrow? Helleborus foetidus on the tip? Some congressman?” He hesitated. “Hell, the president maybe?”
I evaluated how odd his statement was, relative to the crimes at hand.
“Several men are dead,” I said. “But none by arrow.” I focused on the phrasing that followed, knowing I had not yet cleared Kagan. “Three men of disrepute.”
“Disrepute?” Again he snorted, turning. But something about the word caught his attention.
“If you want me to trust you, you need to show me the file,” I said.
“What file?”
I stared at Burke Kagan without flinching. He knew Mad Dog. But not in the way I’d assumed two hours ago. Not as a partner.
“The one you keep here somewhere. You open it up at night and wonder.”
Kagan glared at me, but there was pain under that look.
He glanced out the window at the flashing lights from the squad car. And I knew I was right. He had some lead on our killer. Something he’d investigated. Some file no one knew about.
Mad Dog had been feeding us evidence. Paper in a victim’s mouth. A bug in a heart valve. It was a game to him, and the details meant something we hadn’t yet figured out.
But Burke Kagan existed on his own track. Cassie and Frank hadn’t found any files he worked on that connected to our case. So if Kagan was investigating something off the clock that was tied to these murders, it was new evidence that no one knew about.
Including Mad Dog. Especially Mad Dog.
If the evidence had to do with a Helleborus, it might be the first slipup that Mad Dog had made, feeding us this bug and leaf, not knowing another agent had been looking into it already.
Which could crack our case wide open.
“Please,” I said to Kagan.
He glanced out the window at the squad cars, then back at me. “I want this place cleaned up and my bows put back. No bullshit about them being evidence in some crime when they’re not.”
“Done,” I said.
“And when you catch this son of a bitch, I want to be credited in the win.”
“You’ll be on the podium,” I said. “Right next to me.”
“Okay,” he said. And he began to tell me a story.