The story began with a favor Kagan had done for an ex-girlfriend.
“This was back in 2017,” he said. “Her cousin’s body was found in his truck on the side of Interstate Sixty, north of Tulsa. Do you know where that is?”
“Osage County,” I said.
“That’s right, just east of there. A town called Clarence.”
“What was her cousin’s name?” I asked, taking out my notebook.
“Dorian Pickins,” Kagan said. “The cousin was a piece of crap with a sheet two pages long, but he was family to her, and you know how that goes. She’s dating an FBI agent. Thinks we can pull any file. Get any cop to talk.”
“You coordinated with local police?”
“There were three of them,” Kagan said, the cadence of his speech as fast as Cassie’s. “Clarence is about eight hundred souls.”
“And?”
“They said Pickens ran out of gas. While he waited for a tow, he sat on the back of his truck’s open bed. Had himself a heart attack or a stroke.”
“Well, which was it?”
“In that town, there’s no autopsies going on for three-hundred-pound white dudes who eat barbecue every day.”
I nodded. “So you believed the story?”
Kagan put up his hands. “It seemed plausible enough. I did some due diligence and talked to Pickens’s friends. When I did, I found out that his dog Rufus was missing. His buddies said he always had Rufus with him, so I drove back out to where his car had died.”
“You found the dog?”
“Dead in the forest, twenty yards from the interstate. He might’ve been bit by a wild animal. Maybe ate some berries. His nostrils had dried foam in them.”
“This was when in 2017?”
“Last week of June,” he said. “And that was the end of Pickens. A year goes by. I stop dating that girl, and I forget about it. I’m doing a takedown on this smut peddler in a place called Hackell, right over the Arkansas border, and I’m in a diner after the bust. That’s when I overhear two cops talking about a guy whose car died on the side of Ten. His front hood was open, and he had a coronary.”
“When?” I asked.
“Mid-May 2018,” Kagan said. “These two cops are talking about how the world is a better place without him. I think—here’s another dead guy on the roadside. And he’s an asshole, just like Pickens. Assault charges left and right. But he had family in the mayor’s office. Every time he got arrested, the family got him kicked.”
“You drive out there?”
“And I found nothing,” he said. “Just a random arrowhead by the roadside.”
“An arrowhead?” I blinked. “Why would that even feel relevant?”
“It didn’t. Honestly, I thought it was cool looking. Tossed it in a bag in my glove box. A week or two later, I’m bored on a job, and I start a search on the computer. All I have is two guys who are shitheads, both found with heart attacks on the roadside.”
The slight similarity to how Mad Dog had targeted serial killers struck me. Could this be the place from which our killer had escalated? Had he seen himself as judge, jury, and executioner from the beginning? Did he just begin with lesser offenses than serial murder?
“How did you approximate the … shithead factor?” I asked. “When you did the search?”
“Past criminal records,” he said. “And I got two hits.”
“In addition to Pickens and the guy in Arkansas?”
“Exactly.”
“Any arrowheads?”
“None.”
“So what made the two records come up in your search?”
“Roadside heart attacks,” Kagan said. “I looked further. Both coroners noted that the men had defecated upon death.”
“That’s not uncommon in coronary infarctions.”
“Which I know,” Kagan said. “Except one of the coroners had this fit of sneezing. Then she vomited. Same thing happened to her in medical school, and she knew what it was.”
“She tested the body for poison?”
“Helleborus is violently narcotic,” Kagan said. “The dried powder has nasty purgative powers. Botanists have used as little as two grains as an enema. Or to induce vomiting. I go out to my car, grab the arrowhead, and have our lab test it. Not officially. Just a favor from a buddy.”
“It’s positive for the plant’s poison?”
Kagan nodded and leaned back. His dining area was lit with a series of light bulbs that hung down on black wires from the log ceiling. A metal wagon wheel was affixed to the wall above the couch.
“These cases,” I said. “You inspect the bodies?”
“Long gone by the time I got there,” Kagan said.
“There must’ve been photographs in the case files.”
“These are three- and four-person police departments,” Kagan said. “Not small towns, Camden. Tiny towns. No medical examiner. Mortuary employees who double as the county coroner. And guys no one cared about. In one case, there were two photos of the body. In the next, one.”
I took this in, my mind running through the data.
“If you’re wondering if the bodies had arrow holes in them, the answer is that one of them might have,” Kagan said. “The ME in Hackell described a puncture wound in the thigh that was smaller on the anterior side, with a similar wound on the posterior.”
“An entry and exit wound,” I said.
Kagan nodded. “I went to our local ME in OKC and asked her about arrow wounds. She said that if an arrow misses a bone or artery, the hole can close in on itself in as little as two days. Leaving almost no trace if you weren’t looking for it. Apparently happened in battlefields all the time in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds.”
I remembered Shooter telling me that the arrow had killed more individuals than any other weapon in history.
“But if it’s tainted with hellebore,” I said, “it doesn’t matter if it’s a through and through. The poison is in the system.”
“Bingo,” he said.
“And the other cases where there were no pictures? What about case notes?”
“In one other file,” Kagan said, “a guy had a wound, but they didn’t think much of it. He lived off the grid and worked outside. Hunted. His arms and legs were apparently all scraped up, like he’d been in the bramble.”
“So you have four roadside deaths that you suspect are tied to this plant. What do you do?”
“I go to Gene Bercini, my unit sup, and lay it out. He says to me: ‘What you got are four deaths in three jurisdictions. One in Texas. Two in Oklahoma. One in Arkansas. But you have no weapons. You have no suspects. And other than one clear poisoning, the others have natural CODs.’”
“And this isn’t your job,” I said.
“Oh, that was a whole separate conversation,” Kagan replied. “How if I had extra time to work, there were always more pedophiles to chase.”
“What about your sick coroner?”
“Yeah, Gene thought that was hilarious. A sneezing fit by a doctor in one state and a piece of stone I found a month after a natural death in another.”
“You figure out what the victims had in common?”
“The answer was nothing,” Kagan said. “Except they were all shitheads. So I reverse engineered it. If this killer is motivated to take out shitheads—how does he learn these people are, in fact, shitheads?”
“Smart,” I said.
“I looked at newspaper articles they were in, stupid things they wrote online. Crimes they got charged for. One guy stole five hundred bucks from his church. The other crimes were violent, but not prosecuted. There’s some record of their misdeeds, in newspapers and the like. But nothing to tie to a killer … I ran dry.”
“No leads?”
“None. Until one night I noticed something,” Kagan said. “The cities the deaths happen in and what’s going on at the time. There’s a seasonality. Artisan craft fairs, gun shows, hunting shows. Kind of a circuit in that area.”
“The arrowhead,” I said.
He nodded. “Survivalists make them from anything. Cans, glass, old spoons. But old-school arrowhead design … it’s a real specific process.”
“Flint knapping,” I said, referring to the classic trade of shaping a piece of flint, obsidian, or quartzite into an arrowhead.
Kagan’s eyes widened. “Exactly. So I’m bringing this piece around to these fairs. And a couple guys tell me—they know of this hunter. He travels in a white RV and sits outside half the night, chipping away with a two-inch piece of PVC filled with copper. Apparently he could make what’s called a perfect hundred-degree hertzian cone.”
“And that’s what yours is?” I asked. “The one from the roadside?”
Kagan nodded.
“They give you an ID on this guy?”
“Brown hair. Midtwenties. They told me he was from Texas.”
“Based on what?”
“He wore a blue and red striped hat with a pump jack on it. Reddish outline.”
Houston had lost their football team in 1996. “A throwback Houston Oilers hat?”
“From what they say, more like an actual vintage one.”
“You go back to your boss with all this?”
“Don’t even get me started,” he said. “It was a waste of time.”
“So what then?”
“I bought some bows. Went to each roadside location and started testing.”
“You mean testing where a shot could’ve been taken from?”
“Oh yeah,” he said.
“And you think what? That this arrowhead guy is disabling their cars so they go dead or run out of gas, then shooting his victims in a leg or an arm? They seize up, and he comes down from the hill, collects the arrows?”
“That was my working theory.”
It seemed like a lot of work for one man.
“Maybe the arrowhead I found,” Kagan said, “fell out of his pocket. Or it came loose from the arrow’s shaft and he couldn’t find it. Anyway, at this point, the season was starting back up. The craft circuit. I was excited.”
He got up and refilled his water. “I got to two fairs,” he continued. “One in Fawn City and the other in Deggville. No flint knapper. No white RV. No roadside deaths.”
He finished the water in one gulp, his back to me.
“What happened?” I asked.
As he turned, his demeanor changed. The hyperactivity was gone. For some reason, the shift made me think of my mother. Her lessons about empathy. About noticing suffering.
“Mr. Kagan,” I said. “If there’s anything I can help with, I will try.”
His eyes moved down to the table, and he spoke at a slower pace. “I’m focused on this arrowhead case at night,” he said softly. “Traveling weekends. I missed something.”
“Missed something how?”
“A case I was on for the Bureau.” He looked past me. “We were chasing a guy, but I was focused on this damn fair in Tulsa.” His voice shook. “This monster abducted twin eight-year-olds. He gave them Borax mixed with grape juice.”
It made sense now, why Kagan’s exit interview was done by corporate, instead of his own unit. His own colleagues didn’t want anything to do with him.
He returned his gaze to me. “Bercini let me leave quietly. But my time with the FBI was over. I moved back in with my mom for a while. Then came here.”
I eyed the line of sour mash bottles along the kitchen window. Thirteenth Colony was a boutique distillery south of Atlanta. That bourbon was 105 proof and smooth.
He came here … and drank.
Kagan pursed his lips and turned away from me, holding back tears. “The Bureau was my whole life,” he said. “I never got married. No kids.”
He turned back to face me. “I could’ve arrested this son of a bitch pedophile if I was focused on my job. But I was off in Tulsa chasing a ghost. A ghost no one gave a shit about. Who was killing a bunch of people who were horrible anyway.”
He walked over to a cabinet. Opened it. Inside was a manila file three inches thick. He laid it down in front of me.
His white whale, hidden away still, just like I thought.
Kagan wiped at his eyes. “Find Arrowhead,” he said. “Prove I’m not crazy.”
On the front of the folder, Kagan had hand-drawn a Helleborus plant, carefully shaded its leaves with marker. Was it possible that he’d been chasing the same suspect as us, back in Mad Dog’s warm-up years, before he took on serial killers?
And if so, why had Mad Dog fed us this plant and bug? Was it arrogance? Or did it mean something?
Standing up, I opened the door, wanting to get some fresh air inside the room. Richie and Suco were standing ten feet from the porch, talking in the dark.
I considered Shooter and her knowledge of weaponry. Under that smart-ass veneer was an expert in traditional firearms, even recreational gear, like bows. She would know how someone could taint an arrow, what distance they would have to shoot it from, the ways it could pierce the skin and become toxic.
I turned back to Kagan. “You know we have to hold you until we confirm this?”
He nodded, but didn’t speak. Richie and Suco made their way inside.
“Detective,” I said to Suco. “Can someone stay here? Consider it a temporary house arrest while agents in Quantico make some calls?”
“Of course,” she said.
Kagan remained seated. Since he’d brought up the dead children, his entire posture had changed. His shoulders slumped like a man who’d been beaten.