I found Murder by the Book on the corner of Bissonnet and Morningside in Houston, just southwest of the city center. The mystery bookstore’s signage was in the shape of a novel, opened up and turned sideways, running the length of the storefront.
Inside, a register sat behind a curved wooden counter eight feet from the front door. An attractive woman with shoulder-length red hair asked if I was looking for something in particular.
“The owner,” I said, glancing around the store before settling on her again. I had perused the staff photos on the website. “Are you Mc-Kenna Jordan?”
“In the flesh.” She smiled.
I showed her my badge. “Is there a place we can speak privately?”
Jordan led me toward the back of the store, and we stepped behind a curtained area. The same hardcover filled two library-style rolling book racks. Little slips of paper protruded from the inside covers of each book; the front featured a silhouette of a man, set against a fiery sunset. The book’s title, The Evil Men Do, was designed into the silhouette.
I fished out my copy of Banning’s book. “This is about William Banning,” I said. “The director of the FBI.”
“Sure.” She smiled. “We had a great event here with Bill.”
“A suspect in a case attended the director’s event at your store,” I said. “Received a signed book from him.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Is Bill all right?”
From somewhere in the back of the store, a dog barked.
“He’s fine,” I said. “Do you oversee these events?”
“John and I were traveling for business that day. One of our sales associates, Freddie, covered Bill’s night. I can find him if you’d like?”
I nodded, and she moved into the stockroom.
While she was gone, I wandered over to the far side of the store. An open space held thirty chairs, set up in six neat rows. To the left was a card table covered in black fabric.
“You the feeb?” a voice asked.
I spun around to see a short white man in his forties with curly brown hair and a green cardigan. Under it, he wore a denim shirt and an olive clip-on tie.
“Gardner Camden,” I said.
The man seemed to be waiting for more, so I badged him. “Special Agent. FBI.”
“Freddie Fanda.” He put out his hand. “Specialist. Crime fiction.”
“Director William Banning held a book event here on December seventeenth,” I said. “I understand you oversaw it.”
“Yeah, good guy, Bill.” Freddie nodded. His right hand drifted down and adjusted his tie. “Personally, I’m not opposed to a domestic spy organization.” His blue eyes glistened. “Just wanna throw that out there.”
His delivery was odd, the words coming out in seemingly unplanned spurts.
“The FBI is not a domestic spy organization,” I said.
“Of course not.” He winked at me.
“Can you walk me through the night Director Banning was here?”
“It was pretty straightforward,” Freddie said. “Bill got here at around half past six. Our usual event coordinator, John, was gone, so this was my time to shine.” He touched his face nervously. “You know—press the flesh with the big names.” He put out his hand again. “Freddie Fanda. Murder is my specialty.”
I didn’t shake it.
“Do authors come alone?” I asked. “Or does someone from the publisher accompany them?”
“Coupla the older successful ladies come with an escort,” he said. “Your Patricia Cornwell types.”
“And Banning?”
“He flew solo.” Freddie shrugged, then added, like a humblebrag, “Guess technically I was his wingman.”
I waited for more, and Freddie moved out of his daydream. “I got him a water,” he said. “Then he signed about a hundred preorders. Fifteen minutes later, the event started.”
I pointed at the table with the black cloth. “The authors sit there?”
Freddie nodded. “Bill read two or three pages. Then the audience asked questions.”
“How big was the crowd that night?” I asked, getting to the crux of why I was there. “Were these chairs all full?”
Freddie grunted, smiling. “Well, it wasn’t like Michael Connelly Day when they’re shoulder to shoulder, you know?”
“Banning’s crowd was much smaller?”
“Everything on this side of the store is on wheels, Agent Camden. So if it’s Daniel Silva or MC, it’s like ‘everything must go!’” Freddie made a noise as if pushing furniture across the store. “Like a Black Friday Sale, you know?”
“And Banning?”
“Bill was from Houston and was the head of the FBI, so … it was a draw. Maybe fifty in attendance. McKenna said you think one of them is your suspect?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“How about you feed me some deets.” Freddie leaned in, using his hands as he spoke. “You help me. I help you. A little collab, like the kids say?”
I squinted at him. “Is there something you know, Freddie, that you’re not sharing with me?”
“No no no.” He shook his head, a nervous smile forming. “You’re not following me. All we do here is read…”
I squinted, and he enunciated his words. “About. Murder.” He flicked his eyebrows. “Savvy now? We’re kinda murder experts … like you.”
“Right,” I said, my eyes scanning the balance of the place. “There are no cameras in the store?”
“We record the back entrance. Store exterior. Mostly for car theft.”
I wondered about receipts from that night. “The people who get books signed,” I said. “Are they required to buy the book here?”
“They’re supposed to,” Freddie said. “Once in a while a guest sneaks into line with a book they got off Amazon.”
If I was right about Mad Dog, he would pay in cash. Still, to be safe, I could have Richie go through the receipts from December seventeenth.
“What about pictures?” I asked. “Publicity? Social media?”
“Oh yeah,” Freddie said. “I mean, I took some, but it’s kind of John’s thing and he was gone, so I didn’t post. I didn’t want to step on his toes. He can be particular.”
I waited, but Freddie just stared at me.
“Freddie,” I said. “Can I look at the pictures?”
“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” He pulled a phone from his pocket. Began paging backward. “Did you wanna see Michael Connelly Day?”
“No,” I said. “I do not.”
Freddie kept paging along, stopping and smiling. “This is a good one.” He showed me a selfie of him in a pink shirt. Atop it, he wore a black apron with the words “the husband did it.”
Before I could complain, he paged one more over, and I saw Banning. He wore a collared blue shirt and a sport coat. The shot was taken over someone’s shoulder in a crowd. Like Freddie had mentioned, all the chairs were full.
I considered fidelity. Of testing one fact I already knew.
Frank’s buddy had told him that Banning had struggled to answer questions about the book, but had talked at length about specific cases.
“Mr. Banning,” I said to Freddie. “Was he able to answer all the questions asked of him?”
“Oh yeah, he did great,” Freddie said. “I mean, there was a guy kinda monopolizing the Q and A. We get that sometimes. He kept circling back to the same question. Like, ‘Why did these cases make it into the book and not others?’ The author’s friend finally jumped in. Answered a few of those.”
The author’s friend. That had to be the retired Bureau guy Frank knew. Banning must’ve known him, too.
“This friend was an older man,” I confirmed. “A retired agent?”
“It was an agent all right, but not old,” Freddie said. “And not a he.”
I blinked.
“A woman?”
“Yeah. I spoke with her after,” Freddie said. “She mentioned she was staying at the same hotel as Banning. I assumed they had business in town.”
I described Olivia, his assistant, but Freddie told me the woman was younger and Asian American. “Can I take a look?” I said, pointing at Freddie’s phone.
He handed it over, and I swiped right. On the screen, I saw Banning motioning at the crowd, as if calling on someone.
“The man asking those questions,” I said. “Can you recognize him in any of the audience pictures?”
Freddie looked over my shoulder, using his finger to move back and forth while I held the phone. He made a ticking noise as he worked, t-t-t-t-t, like a processor cranking through data.
“Him,” he said finally.
The man stood in the autograph line, his head turned away from the camera. From his jaw and neckline, I estimated that he was in his twenties. He had freckled skin and brown wavy hair. The rest of the crowd looked older, fifties and sixties.
“In the Q and A, he was asking about Sam Little,” Freddie said. “Do you know who that is?”
Samuel Little was one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. Also one of the least celebrated, in terms of publicity.
“Of course.”
“There was a back-and-forth about interstate killers,” Freddie said. “Their absence in Bill’s book.”
Banning’s book covered the early history of the FBI. The big cases. Samuel Little had evaded capture by crossing nineteen state lines. Which Kagan’s arrowhead killer had done as well.
“The FBI agent,” I said to Freddie. “Is she in any of these photos?”
Freddie found her, and I stared at the picture. It was no one I knew. I paged to the next photo and saw the brown-haired man talking to this female agent. Again, the camera angle was from behind them. The next picture showed her grabbing a laptop.
“You think this man is your suspect?” he asked.
“I’m not ruling it out. Did you post these photos anywhere, Freddie?”
“Not really,” he said.
I glanced up. “Freddie?”
“I didn’t post anything, but this woman who was here…”
“The agent?”
“Different woman,” he said. “She comes to the big author visits and puts up videos online. Has a fancy thing for her iPhone with a gyroscope. I didn’t realize I was supposed to tell her to buzz off. We don’t allow people to record in the store.”
“But she recorded?” I confirmed.
“Yeah,” Freddie said. “I screwed up.”
Freddie pulled up the woman’s website on my phone, and I watched her video. It was set to a piece of music, but amateurish and unedited. There were no good shots of the brown-haired man, but the 360-degree spin-around included the moment when the female agent took out her laptop. The agent punched in a code, and a program opened.
Was this how Mad Dog had gained access to the FBI servers? By playing back a fan’s video in slow motion?
I remembered a seminar I’d attended in Miami. The topic was human intelligence, and the keynote speaker had recounted fourteen incidents in which companies spent in excess of ten million dollars on security, only to be penetrated by a human talking too much. Telling secrets in public. Or leaving their password on a Post-it.
But the possibility opened up more questions than answers. One, wouldn’t Mad Dog have gotten into this other agent’s account, not Banning’s? Two, his first kill had been Tignon. There was no information on the FBI server on Tignon, anyway. We’d thought he was dead.
Freddie’s voice broke into my thoughts. When I looked up, he was paging through his photos again. He zoomed in on one of them.
“You know how I told you I could help?” he said. “Collaborate? And you gave me that look? Same one as you’re giving me now.”
Freddie pointed across the store to a shelf marked AMERICAN AUTHORS. Above it was a framed painting of a woman, draped in a red sheet and holding a revolver. “That shelf is exactly six feet tall. And here’s your guy standing by it.” Freddie motioned at the picture on his phone. “He’s turned away, but I’d say he’s five foot ten and a half.”
Walking over to the shelf, I lined it up with my own height. Freddie was right.
“Thanks, Freddie,” I said, my voice tepid.
“You’re not seeing it all.” Freddie pointed toward the ceiling. A tiny round mirror, five inches in diameter, was clipped to the top of a bookcase. “I said we didn’t have cameras, but we use other measures to prevent shoplifting.”
I glanced at Freddie’s phone again. In the upper corner of the photo, a visible slice of the store mirror contained part of a face.
“Don’t you have software that can take a piece of that picture?” Freddie asked. “Fill in the rest?”
“Yes,” I said. We had tools at Quantico to extrapolate a composite of Mad Dog’s face from the features visible in the reflected mirror.
I turned to Freddie.
Just because you have all the information, Gardy, doesn’t mean you have all the answers.
“Freddie Fanda,” I said, putting out my hand to shake. “Murder expert.”
He adjusted his cardigan and blushed. “Just don’t tell everyone I did it for the man. I have a reputation to uphold.”
I gave Freddie my email address and watched as he sent me each photograph in the highest resolution possible.
After three sequential serial killer murders, it had been sixty hours with no new crimes. Mad Dog was out there, waiting.
But he didn’t know what we’d learned from Burke Kagan and Freddie Fanda.
He didn’t know that in a few hours, we’d have a picture of him.