At 2 a.m. I awoke. Showered and got in the car. Drove to the office. The building was quiet as I worked.
I laid out every part of the Tignon case from 2013 on the ground at the far end of the conference room. Atop the table, I placed Kagan’s files, broken into the eight sections from my cube.
By 2:50 a.m., I had used all one hundred and twenty-two Post-its I had found between Frank’s desk, Cassie’s, and Shooter’s. My own cube was a mess from earlier, and I avoided it.
Inside the conference room, I covered every inch of the window with a different color. Pink for a detail from Tignon’s, Fisher’s, or Lazarian’s original cases. Blue for anything in Kagan’s files. And yellow for the new murders in the last week. The deaths of the serial killers.
Evidence and questions surrounded me, and I exhaled. Then I opened the folder on Agent Lisa Yang, who had been at the bookstore in Houston.
Yang was thirty years old and attractive, with shoulder-length dark hair and wide eyes. She had done her undergraduate degree at Yale, before moving to Iowa to get a master’s. She had been with the Bureau for six years, with one field assignment in the Philadelphia office before returning to a research role in D.C. Eighteen months ago, she had checked out Barry Fisher’s file, but not Tignon’s or Lazarian’s.
I moved back to the conference room and started digging for details.
By 3:30 a.m. I had removed all but four of the Post-its from the window. I peeled off two of them and got in my car. Drove over to the Deerwood neighborhood in southeast Jacksonville and found a ranch-style home with strips of red brick and a covered front patio.
I knocked on the door, and eventually Frank opened up. He wore boxers and a white V-neck. The guy looked perfect, even while he slept.
Except he had a Heckler and Kotch .45 in his right hand.
“My God, Gardner. I could’ve shot you,” he said. “Get in here.”
I held still outside the front door. “I don’t want to bother you too much.”
“That’s why you’re banging at my door at four a.m.?”
“Four twenty-nine,” I said without looking down at my phone. “Listen. Frank. I started from scratch. Every piece of data. Recheck. Brainstorm. Cross-reference—”
Frank held up his left hand, palm out, as if to say stop. He turned on the porch light, which he’d left off until then. Some security experts claimed that lights on at night only helped burglars.
“You’re in shock, Gardner,” he said. “Go home, right now. That’s an order.”
“Cross-reference,” I continued. “Take the Post-its off the window. Classic approach—whatever’s left up—no matter how unlikely—”
“This is a response to trauma,” Frank interrupted.
“No matter how unlikely,” I kept up, “has to be something we missed or didn’t understand.”
Frank popped the magazine from his weapon and cleared the slide. He placed the gun on a cherrywood side table by the door. The look on his face was pity.
“She would’ve wanted this,” I said. And Frank understood that I was referring to my mother. “Me working now. While the case is hot. In the least, she would have expected it.”
He hung his head, and I waited.
“I’m not promising anything,” he said. “But I need coffee if we’re gonna talk. Get in here.”
I followed Frank across the entryway and into the kitchen. He turned on the lights. I had picked Frank up twice from this house but had never been inside. The place was spotless.
The kitchen overlooked a koi pond in the back with a decorative wooden bridge. The counters were black granite, the cabinets a light oak. Off the kitchen, I could see a great room with a wall-to-wall fireplace. Cardboard boxes were piled against the wall.
Frank opened a drawer and took out a box of coffee filters. Found it empty.
“Son of a gun.” He tossed the box into the trash.
I pulled out the two Post-its I’d brought with me. Both were yellow, which represented the words of Mad Dog or a piece of evidence found in the last week.
Frank leaned back against the counter. He’d given up on making coffee.
I stuck one of the yellow Post-its to his fridge.
“Fat old angler.” Frank read the words on it aloud. “Okay…?”
“Mad Dog said that to me when he called. He described Tignon that way.”
“So?”
“You saw Tignon’s body from the autopsy. Would you call him fat?”
“It’s early, Gardner,” he said.
I glared at Frank.
“He could stand to lose twenty pounds,” he said. “Not my definition of fat, but some people are more discriminating.”
“Tignon’s Levi’s were on the tray at his autopsy,” I said. “Thirty-six, thirty-two. I remember thinking he must’ve lost a hundred and twenty pounds during the seven years since we thought he’d died.”
Frank pointed at the Post-it, half following me. “The old Tignon,” he said. “That’s who he’s talking about.”
I nodded. “And let me ask you this. Would you even call him an angler?”
He squinted. “Uh—since he was fishing with human liver, I’d say that’s a big yes.”
“First off, that was a detail that only the FBI and the boat captain knew,” I said. “Now, sure, he could’ve seen that in our files. But consider this…”
I took out the other Post-it and stuck it next to the first. It read “Ashland: no rod or reel.”
“Richie went through the inventory of Tignon’s garage in Ashland,” I explained. “Or should I say, Bob Breckinridge’s garage. There was no fishing equipment.”
Frank scrunched up his face.
“The rookie was looking to see if Tignon was active again in Texas. In case there were victims with the same MO as back in Florida. Blond girls cut up, Tignon fishing with their livers. All this under his new name, Bob Breckinridge.”
“Right,” Frank said. “Except out west, he had no gear. So why would Mad Dog call him that?”
“There’s only one answer.” I tapped at the Post-it. “Mad Dog knew Tignon, Frank. Back in twenty thirteen in Florida. When I knew him.”
Frank’s eyebrows pitched upward. “You got proof of that?”
I held up my index finger, beckoning him to hold on.
“That’s not all,” I said. “There was a flaw in Cassie’s logic yesterday. About the property exchange.”
“The ten–thirty-one?”
“She found out how Tignon got to Ashland,” I said. “But how did Mad Dog find Tignon?”
“He got into our files. Using the director’s login.”
“Except none of that information was in our files. Cassie worked backwards from Beverly Polis’s tax returns, and from the name Bob Breckenridge. But that was a name we only knew after Tignon died. She started with the answer.”
Frank nodded now, getting it.
“There’s only one possibility,” I said. “Mad Dog knew Tignon before Tignon left Florida. He knew Tignon before Tignon faked his death. Back when he was setting up that partnership. ’Cause after that moment, there was no way to find him.”
Frank looked back at the Post-its.
“So?”
“How many seminars have you and I attended on the factors that influence killers?” I asked.
“Too many,” Frank said.
“How a killer needs a warm-up act.”
“Needs practice,” Frank said, nodding.
“The theories,” I continued. “Biological. Self-conflict. Functionalism. The elements that turn something on in these men. The way they first practice on animals. How they need—”
“Permission,” Frank cut in. His jaw had loosened. “Oh my God, Gardner.” He shook his head. “Your witness in twenty thirteen.”
I nodded, thinking of the overnight drive I’d taken to Alabama to find the man on the boat trip whom Tignon had confided in. To whom Tignon had bragged about fishing with the girls’ livers.
“Tignon didn’t ‘disappear’ my witness all those years ago,” I said. “He inspired him.”
“Your witness back then is Mad Dog,” Frank said. “He was the other man on the boat.”
“And at some point on that trip, Tignon told Mad Dog about Ashland. About his father-in-law owning half that lake. That’s how Mad Dog knew where to look for him years later. Why he called him a fat old angler. That isn’t just some description from years ago. It’s a description from that boat trip.”
Frank opened his fridge and took out a sixteen-ounce bottle of Dr Pepper. Flipping it open, he took a long drag. He was processing what I had said. How Mad Dog could have been shaped by Tignon.
“You wanna go back to Alabama,” he said.
“I do.”
“But you went whole hog there years ago, looking for that witness. Came up with jack.”
“True,” I said. “But maybe I missed something.”
“You?” Frank raised an eyebrow.
He studied me. Was the look on his face pity? Was the look on mine desperation?
“Craig Poulton stood there while you destroyed the office,” Frank said. “He told me, Camden’s off of work until a doctor says different.”
“Then don’t tell him.”
Frank glanced upstairs, considering it. “Give me twenty minutes,” he said. “To get dressed and tell the wife. In the meantime, for the love of God—go get us coffee.”