Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
Seven years ago, a woman named Daisy Carabelle had been abducted from a parking lot near The Beachcomber in Sandstone, Florida, where she worked as a bartender. Daisy was twenty-six, with no boyfriend or ties to the community. By the next morning, her body was found in a stolen Chevy Astro van on the side of Highway 60.
Seventeen days later, another woman was killed, and a day after that, a third.
The FBI pairs young with old. And in March of 2013, my partner Saul was three months from retirement when we were invited in by local police. And so the case was mine to lead: my first time in charge at the FBI.
We arrived in Sandstone on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday night, we had narrowed our suspect pool to one man: Ross Tignon, the man who owned that stolen Astro van. As I interviewed Tignon, I’d found a thread that local police had missed in their initial questioning, and I kept pulling. By late that night, I woke a judge up, got an arrest warrant signed, and called in support from SWAT.
But as we arrived at Tignon’s house, the place was engulfed in flames, and we were lucky to get his wife Beverly out.
The next day the case was over, and the result deemed a success. A serial killer was dead, all without the expense of a trial.
Or so it seemed.
I glanced at Ross Tignon’s body on the kitchen floor. Then stared into the sink, two feet away. A hard plastic container bore the words “Magic Bullet,” the remains of something blended visible inside.
“What are you thinking?” Cassie asked.
“Soft food,” I said, recalling a detail that helped us identify the body in the fire in 2013. “Cass, check if the victim is missing teeth. A molar on each side.”
Cassie crouched by the body. She reached a gloved hand into Tignon’s mouth and scuttled around. Lifted out a pair of partial dentures.
Below where the dentures had been—on each side of the victim’s mouth—was a black gap toward the back.
“Savage,” Cassie exclaimed. It was an expression she used in three different ways, more often than not to describe the craziness of her twenties. Her “savage days,” as she called them. But today, I knew to interpret the word more literally.
The body in the 2013 fire had been charred beyond all recognition, the skull bashed in from a fallen beam. But we had found a pair of molars, loose at the rear of the mouth. An FBI forensic odontologist had extracted DNA from their pulp and verified that the molars had come from Tignon.
“So he yanked out his own teeth back then?” Cassie said.
“Then hid them in a stranger’s mouth,” I replied.
When one thing is not as it seems, look for more.
I stared at a small mark between the numbers 5 and 0 on Tignon’s chest. A cut? A sharp but tiny slice?
Using a gloved finger, I pressed on the area. A bead of pus bubbled up through the hole, forming a small dot between the numbers. Blood may have come earlier, but now the body was drained of nearly every liquid.
“Five-oh,” Cassie said. “Like cops?”
I took out my phone. Frank had sent us here because I was the lead on the case seven years ago. The FBI wanted someone to visually verify if this was Tignon.
But these days I work for a unit in the FBI called PAR, for Patterns and Recognition. There are four of us in the group, and we are brought onto cases only after others in law enforcement have hit an impasse.
Our job is to identify peculiarities in cases that have stalled. To solve puzzles and highlight new theories. Then we hand the cases off, either to a team in Virginia or to a field office. We do not travel. And we do not interact with local law enforcement or the public. Making this morning’s trip unusual.
I brought up the messaging app on my phone to text Frank.
It’s Tignon
I hesitated, staring at the 5.0 on his chest, my mind itching at some thread that I couldn’t grab. Something was wrong with this scene. I felt it. But I kept typing.
Back from the dead. And now dead again.
What do you want us to do?