Chapter Thirty-Three
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
In a taxi on the way from the airfield to the Jacksonville office, I rang up Deputy Director Poulton.
“Banning was in Houston with another agent,” I said, and described the woman in the bookstore.
“Well, he rarely does one thing at a time,” Poulton said. “He was probably handling some agency business while pressing the book. Send me what you have on the agent.”
“Will do.”
“Is that all you’ve found, Camden?” Poulton asked.
I considered the pictures from the bookstore, which I’d sent to Marly an hour ago. If Frank was in charge, he’d wait until he had a digital composite of the suspect. Deliver his superiors all the information, rather than let it come in pieces.
“That’s all for now,” I said.
At the office in Jacksonville, I put my carry-on in my cube. But before I sat down, I saw an orange Post-it, stuck to my desk.
Hawks. 12 p.m.
Hawks was an indoor gun range two miles from the office. The owner, Andy, lived in the condo next door to me, and I’d brought Frank by to shoot one day.
The range had been converted from an old motel, and Andy had added a training classroom at one end to attract new customers interested in learning to shoot. When the whole team at PAR came back a month later, Andy set up a pizza oven outside the door to the classroom. That sealed the deal. The team adopted Hawks as our home away from home. A place we could eat. Shoot. Spread our case files out and brainstorm as a group. When the classroom wasn’t in use, it was PAR West. And in exchange, Frank recommended the place to local cops.
Grabbing my bag, I drove to the range and found the team in the training room, our case folders laid out among platters of meatball and pepperoni pizza. I smelled gunpowder solvent, mixed in with basil and marinara.
“ There he is,” Frank announced, closing the door between the classroom and the adjoining range.
I grabbed a chair, filling in the team on what I’d learned in Houston.
“So we’ll have a picture of this guy?” Cassie said. My partner was dressed down in a V-neck T-shirt and jeans. Her hair lay around her shoulders in dark, messy curls that contrasted with her olive skin.
“One or two hours,” I said. “In the meantime, what’ve you guys got?”
Shooter sat up, pushing aside her plate. “I was just about to run through what Richie and I found on those cameras in Rawlings.”
“Great,” I said.
Our working theory on Barry Fisher’s death was that the old man had been abducted from his brother’s home, his body brought elsewhere to be cut up. Then he was transported back in the sealed bags we’d found in the refrigerator. The cameras Shooter referred to were the ones that might have caught our killer going to and from Fisher’s brother’s home.
“Richie and I went through footage from five dozen cameras,” she said. “Two banks. One post office. But most of what we pulled was from consumer cams.”
“Ring doorbells and Nest cams,” Richie jumped in. “Better angles, but a lot of low-quality shit.”
It was the first time I’d heard Richie curse. He and Shooter were gelling.
“You found a car driving there and back four times?” I asked.
“Not exactly.” Shooter pushed the sleeves of her Duke sweatshirt back to the elbows. “So I started thinking—if I were him, would I go the same way each time?”
“No,” Cassie said.
“We started cataloging every car and truck that drove near the house four times. It became this massive database. Too many variables. Too many shots of cars.”
“Then you read Kagan’s notes about the white RV,” I said.
“Bingo.” Shooter pointed at me. “There were nine RVs in the database. Five of them white. Four were families who live in the area. And then this—”
She turned her laptop, and I squinted at a picture of something dull and silver. Stuck to the metallic object was a torn piece of paper.
“Is it a sticker?”
Shooter zoomed in, nodding. The paper was aqua colored with white writing that read “ST” and “1974.” To the left of the marks was a circle with a line coming down from it.
“It’s from an RV’s bumper,” Richie said. “Most of it was peeled off.”
I grabbed a plate and set a piece of meatball pizza on it.
“The vehicle didn’t have plates?” Frank asked. The boss had a Coke in front of him and nothing else.
“Not that we caught in the picture on camera,” Shooter said. “But RVs often have their plates higher up the back bumper. That way, they aren’t blocked by whatever the RV’s towing.”
I nodded, and Shooter continued, “We found this RV near Fisher’s brother’s house four times, Gardner. And the timing looks good. Driving toward the house at 12:23 p.m. on Monday the thirteenth. Away at 1:36. Back toward the house the next day at 9:22 a.m. Then out again at 10:50.”
These matched the rough estimates we’d made for Mad Dog’s four trips. Two to get the body and cut it up. Two to bring it back in bags and then leave for LA.
“There’s more,” Richie said.
A piece of strawberry blond hair fell into Shooter’s eyes, and she swiped it away. “The sticker read ‘ST’ and ‘1974,’” she said. “So we thought—”
“Established 1974,” Frank said.
“Exactly,” Richie said. He nodded at Shooter. “Agent Harris made some doodles to see what the other part of the sticker might be.”
“The part that peeled off by the circle and line?” I said.
“I started thinking that the line was a hiking cane,” Shooter said. “And the circle a stick-figure fist. Kinda like an old school graphic, you know?”
I stared at the markings. It was possible. Anything was possible.
“I researched hiking areas and national preserves founded in 1974,” she continued.
“There must be dozens,” I said. “The Leopold report came out in what?”
“Nineteen sixty-three,” Cassie said.
“That laid the basis for wildlife management,” I said. “National park growth.”
“The Endangered Species Act passed in seventy-three,” Cassie added.
“Sure, sure.” Shooter looked from me to Cassie. “You two know all that bookish stuff and could go on for days. But you don’t hunt or trap.”
I stopped talking and focused on Shooter. “You’ve been there,” I said.
She clicked forward on her laptop. On the screen was a picture of a T-shirt design from the 1980s. It read BIG THICKET NATIONAL PRESERVE . Below was an illustration of a hiker, made of bubble-like shapes, the fist holding a walking stick. Under the design it read EST. 1974 .
“I hunted with some friends five years ago,” Shooter said. “It’s ninety minutes from Houston.”
I stared through the glass window that looked in on the adjoining range area. “You shoot white-tailed deer there?”
“With a bow and arrow. Dressed them out in the field, just like that medical examiner described.”
This was more than a piece of the puzzle about Mad Dog. More than where he liked to hunt. “If this is his vehicle, Jo, it’s our first nexus between Mad Dog and Arrowhead. Them being one and the same.”
“It also makes three times we’ve tied these cases back to Houston,” Richie said. “The Oilers hat Arrowhead wore. The bookstore. And an RV, camping in a park two hours from the city.”
In the next range over from ours, we heard a boom noise replacing a pop. Someone had switched from pistol to rifle.
“One more thing,” Shooter said. “I called the park service. Those stickers haven’t been sold in almost twenty years.”
Frank squinted. “So if he’s in his twenties,” he said, “these other crimes that Agent Kagan uncovered a few years ago—how old was he then?”
“Late teens,” Cassie said.
“So the RV was passed to him as an adult? Or he bought it used?”
“Either theory works,” Shooter said. “He could’ve grown up in the area. His family camped there as a kid.”
“In that case, the vehicle is old,” Cassie said. “You got a make?”
“Quantico is crunching data based on the length of the bumper,” Shooter said. “So far they say it’s a class A. Thirty footer. Probably late nineties. Once they narrow that to two or three makes, they’ll go through DMV databases, starting in Houston.”
I finished my pizza and wiped sauce from my mouth.
“So our killer lives in Houston, and Tignon lived in Dallas. There’s five hundred and fifty miles between them. How did one find the other?”
No one said anything.
I got up. Grabbed a glass and filled it with ice from a bucket on the side table.
“I don’t have the answer to that,” Cassie said, watching me, “but I’ve got something related.”
“Related to Tignon?”
“It actually comes from using books.” She looked at Shooter. “Being bookish and all.”
Shooter tipped an invisible hat at Cassie to proceed.
“We still don’t know how Tignon was located years later in Texas, amirite?”
“Correct,” I said.
“I don’t want to bore anyone to death, but suffice it to say that I’ve spent the day doing tax research. Anyone know what a ten–thirty-one is?”
“Property tax exchange,” I said. “Ten–thirty-one is the section of the IRS code.”
“Of course you’d know that.” Cassie smiled. “Well, I followed a ten–thirty-one exchange in Beverly Polis’s tax return. Worked backwards to a man named Credence Polis.”
“Who’s Credence Polis?” Richie asked. The rookie was wearing a golf shirt and slacks. Between him and Cassie, I wondered if I’d missed the email about casual day.
“Beverly Polis’s grandfather,” Cassie said. “And, as it turns out, the man who founded Ashland, Texas. Owned half the lakefront. Watersports. Bait shop. Grandpa Credence was like this OG fisherman slash real estate mogul.” Cassie turned to me. “Now, you said Tignon was a big fisherman, amirite?”
“That was his passion,” I said.
“I started thinking—what would I do if I faked my own death? Go somewhere familiar. Far from Florida, maybe. Someplace I could practice my favorite hobby.”
Shooter squinted at her. “What is your favorite hobby?”
Cassie didn’t answer. “So I followed Grandpa Credence’s money,” she said. “How it flowed out to his grandkids like Beverly. And their spouses, like Ross Tignon.”
“You found a trust in Bob Breckinridge’s name,” I said.
“I did. But this may surprise you, Gardner. It was filed back in twenty thirteen. In January, specifically.”
This smarted. January was two months before Saul and I found that burned body. Tignon had planned his move west before we’d even met him.
“The trust purchased a condominium in Dallas,” Cassie said. “Tignon lived there for five years, presumably with Beverly. Then he bought in Ashland. After he stranded his wife at that hospital.”
I dropped into my chair, pouring a Coke into my glass. Something was off, but I couldn’t find the right string to pull.
I turned to Richie. “Did you find any crimes in Texas? Similar to Tignon’s MO back in twenty thirteen?”
“One,” Richie said. “Six months ago, in a place called Menet. Twenty-three-year-old blond woman. Her body washed up on the riverbank. Liver was gone, but locals figured the fish got it.”
“And Menet is where?”
“Fifteen minutes from Ashland,” Richie said. “But only five if you’ve got a boat.”
Perhaps Tignon had returned to his old ways after his wife died. But he was smarter now. Dumped his victims in the water.
Was this how Mad Dog had found him?
My eyes moved to Frank’s. “Do you have something, boss?”
“I do.” He rose and stood behind his chair. “It’s interesting that you and Cassie mentioned Aldo Leopold and the national park movement. People think of Leopold as a conservationist, but he was also a hunter. And a writer. Let me read you a quote.”
Frank leaned down to his computer. “‘A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than a mob of onlookers.’”
“Oh my God,” Cassie said. “He said that to Gardner. My acts are dictated by my own conscience .”
“That may be his mission statement,” Frank said. “He’s a hunter, ridding the world of bad people. But I was more focused on the second part of the quote. Him not worrying about a mob of onlookers. See, after LA, I thought Mad Dog wanted press. But everything he leaked out wasn’t pointing at what he did.”
“It was pointing at us,” I said. “Our mistakes.”
Frank nodded. “Then Richie said something to me on the way here today.” He pointed at the rookie. “Tell them.”
“I just said to Frank, a paper in Tignon’s mouth? An insect in Fisher’s heart?” Richie shrugged. “Those aren’t clues. They’re archeology. You put a normal team at the FBI on this, and you find those three months from now.”
“A normal team,” I repeated.
“Well.” Richie smiled. “I just joined and all. And I get that you guys all got booted here ’cause you screwed up somewhere else, but… Listen, the way I see it, PAR is like a team of superheroes, all with different strengths. No one else would’ve gotten this far, this fast.”
“You think Mad Dog’s got a bigger agenda,” I said. “That these were the breadcrumbs someone was supposed to discover later, after he completed some endgame.”
“Does that sound too lofty?” Richie asked.
“Not for this guy,” Frank said.
“He’s also gone silent,” Cassie said. “By tonight, it’ll be three days without a kill. Almost four days since he’s logged into Banning’s account.”
My phone dinged, and a picture came through. The digital composite, based on the bookstore photo: a Caucasian man, estimated at twenty-five years old, with wavy brown hair.
“Well. If this guy attended Banning’s book launch”—I passed the phone around—“then he’s most likely from Houston. We know what he hunts. And we might know what he drives.”
I looked to Shooter. “Jo, what’s our realistic timeline on that RV? I imagine in a state like Texas—”
“There’s thousands,” she said. “Right now, we’re searching digitally. We can knock on doors, too, but either way… three days.”
Three days was an eternity on a case like this.
“And we won’t go out to the public,” Richie asked. “Why?”
“We’ve got a blind spot,” I said.
The rookie looked around for an explanation, and Frank obliged.
“Motive, kid. We have no idea why, and we have no idea why now.”
These were the two big questions about Mad Dog. Why this mission? And what started him on it?
“If we drive him out,” Frank continued, “we might be sending him on another murder spree.”
Richie nodded, but I could tell he had something to say.
“Go ahead, Richie,” I said.
“Nah.”
“No one’s gonna beg you, rook,” Shooter said. “If you’ve got something, let’s hear it.”
“There was this work,” Richie said slowly. “I was doing it before the Academy. And during. Took me three summers, going through data from the Bureau.”
“This was the same study where you looked at Tignon?” I asked.
“Not just Tignon. I looked at every major case in Bureau history. When I was done, an analyst at Quantico took the project to some think tank. They’ve been building it out ever since.”
I studied the rookie. Was this why his file was sealed? Had he developed some methodology the FBI deemed valuable?
“Let’s hear about it,” Frank said.
“It’s a new approach to profiling,” Richie said. “Instead of looking at killers as organized or disorganized and developing likely traits of the offender, it studies the connection between each offense and the offender.”
“That approach has been used overseas,” I said. “I’m familiar.”
“Sure,” Richie replied. “But mine was different. It focused on one criterion only—the offender’s view of morality.”
I hesitated, thinking of the intersection of justice and morality, both of which Mad Dog seemed obsessed with.
“Someone like Tignon,” Richie said. “It predicted he would run. That’s why I was studying that case. My model failed for him.”
Except it hadn’t failed. Richie was right. Tignon did run. We just didn’t know about it.
“Have you taken our profile on Mad Dog?” Shooter asked. “Plugged it in?”
Richie nodded, but didn’t speak.
“Do we need a drumroll?” Frank asked.
Richie sat up. Fumbled with his computer. Apparently he wasn’t expecting us to take him seriously. He got something open and stared at the screen.
“Well. A guy like this is not trying to bring justice to an unjust world,” Richie said. “He’s more pragmatic than that. At his core, he’s actually moralistic.”
So what? I thought.
“Okay?” I said.
“So when he leaks information to the media,” Richie continued, “he focuses on punishment and fairness, versus bragging about him being the author of that punishment.”
“This is all in Frank’s profile,” I said.
“Sure,” Richie said. “But here’s something different. Mad Dog thinks PAR is compassionate to his cause. We solve puzzles. We correct wrongs. He thinks we’re like him. But not just… kinda like him. When he wrote ‘partner’ on that bathroom wall in LA, I don’t believe he was being sarcastic.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“He thinks he was covering for you, Agent Camden,” Richie said. “For you getting to LA so late.”
I bit at my lip, my mind running through something.
“You got an idea?” Frank asked.
“Maybe we don’t need to know Mad Dog’s motive,” I said. “Maybe we just need the right recipe. One part—driving him into the light. One part—telling him he’s not one of us. And the last part…”
“What?” Cassie asked.
I thought of how quickly Mad Dog had become weary with me on the phone. Of Richie’s theory that he was leaving breadcrumbs for some other team to find later.
“Rage,” I said.
“The last part is rage?” Shooter asked.
“At how stupid we all are,” I said. “The stories that have been running—the media wants to talk about incompetence, right?”
“That’s what they’re reporting,” Frank said.
“So we tell them a different story. The FBI never gives up. You call them ‘cold cases.’ We just call them cases. We bring Kagan’s files into the mix. Tell them we’ve made a connection. These serial killer murders were a travesty, but now we’re close to solving three unsolved murders from years ago. And these other people—they were innocent. Not like Tignon. Not like Fisher.”
“You’re talking Arrowhead’s victims?” Cassie said. “The people Kagan found?”
“I get it,” Frank said. “We dress up these old victims as heroes, and Mad Dog moves from vigilante to murderer.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, nodding, “we feed the press some evidence. Information that’ll drive him into the light. The sketch. The RV. The connection to Houston.”
“And the rage?” Cassie asked.
“We make it clear he’s not one of us. And the reason: he’s unqualified. He’s dumb. Reckless. Unethical.” I hesitated. Turned to Richie. “What does your model say he’ll do then? Will he run like Tignon?”
“No,” Richie said. “He’ll reach out to us. Real angry, too. See, he’s on a course of action he planned a while ago, Agent Camden. A course he doesn’t want to get off.”
“Like a program?” I said.
“Exactly,” Richie replied. “And this? This will disrupt his worldview. He’ll have only one choice. To lash out.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s when we catch him.”