The Poet (28 page)

The next page contained the suicide notes, all the quotes from Poe’s poems that I had found and written down the night before.

“This is where the cases irrefutably come together,” Doran said. “Our Poet likes Edgar Allan Poe. We don’t know why yet, but it’s something we’ll be working on here at Quantico while you people go traveling. I am going to defer to Brad for a moment to have him tell you a little about this.”

The agent sitting directly next to Doran stood up and took up the lead. I flipped to the front page of the package and found an Agent Bradley Hazelton listed. Brass and Brad. What a team, I thought. Hazelton, a gangly man with acne-scarred cheeks, poked his glasses back on his nose before speaking.

“Um, what we’ve got here are that the six quotes in these cases-that’s including the Baltimore case-come from three of Poe’s poems as well as his own last reported words. We are looking at these to determine if we can get some kind of common fix on what the poems were about and how they may relate to this offender. We’re looking for anything there. It seems pretty clear that this is where the offender’s playing with us and where he is taking the risk. I don’t think we’d be here today or Mr. McEvoy would have found a connection among these cases if our guy didn’t decide to quote Edgar Allan Poe. So, then, these poems are his signature. We’ll be trying to find out why he chose Poe as opposed to, say, Walt Whitman but I-“

“I’ll tell you why,” said an agent sitting at the far end of the table. “Poe was a morbid asshole and so is our guy.”

A few people laughed.

“Uh, yes, probably that’s correct in a general sense,” Hazelton said, oblivious that the comment was made to lighten everyone up. “Nevertheless, Brass and I will be working on this and if you have any ideas, I’d like to hear them. As for right now, a couple of things to throw out. Poe is credited with being the father of detective fiction with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which is basically a mystery story. So we may have an offender out there who is looking at this as some kind of mystery puzzle. He simply likes to taunt us with his own sort of mystery, by using Poe’s words as clues. Also, I’ve started reading through some of the established criticism and analysis of Poe’s work and found something interesting. One of the poems that our guy used is called ‘The Haunted Palace.’ This poem was contained within a short story called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ I’m sure you’ve all heard of it or read it. Anyway, the standard analysis of this poem is that while at face value it serves as a description of the house of Usher, it is also a disguised or subconscious description of the story’s focal character, Roderick Usher. And that name, you know if you were at last night’s briefing, came up in the death of victim number six. I’m sorry, that’s Sean McEvoy. He’s not just a number.”

He looked over at me and nodded and I nodded back.

“The description in the poem… hold on.” Hazelton was looking through his notes, then found what he needed, pushed his glasses back again and continued. “Okay, we’ve got, ‘Banners yellow, glorious, golden; / On its roof did float and flow,’ and then later on we have, ‘Along the ramparts plumed and pallid.’ Okay, and then a few lines later we have mention of ‘two luminous windows’ blah, blah, blah. Anyway, what this translates to as far as a description goes is that of a reclusive white male with blond hair, perhaps long or curly blond hair, and eyeglasses. There’s your start on the physical profile.”

There was a roll of laughter through the room and Hazelton seemed to take it personally.

“It’s in the books,” he protested. “I’m serious and I think it’s a place to start.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said a voice from the outer rim. A man stood up so he’d have the attention of the whole room. He was older than most of the other agents and carried the no-nonsense air of a veteran. “What are we talking about here? Yellow banners flowing-what is this shit? This Poe stuff is great, it’ll probably help that kid over there sell a lot of papers, but nothing’s convinced me in the last twenty hours that I’ve been here that there’s some mope out there on the street who somehow some way got the drop on five, six veteran dicks and put their own weapons in their mouths. I’m having a hard time seeing it, is what I’m saying. Whaddaya got on that?”

There was a hum of agreeing comments and nods in the room. I heard someone call the agent who had started the ball rolling “Smitty” and I saw a Chuck Smith listed on the front page of the pocket. He was heading to Dallas.

Brass Doran stood up to address the issue.

“We know that’s the rub,” she said. “Methodology is what we are least prepared to discuss at this point. But the Poe correlation is definitive in my judgment and Bob agrees. So what’s our alternative? Do we say this is impossible and drop it? No, we act as if other lives may be at stake because they may very well be. The questions you have will, hopefully, be answered as we go. But I agree it is something we need to be considering and it is always healthy to be skeptical. It’s a question of control. How does the Poet get control of these men?

She turned her head and scanned the room. Smitty was silent now.

“Brass,” Backus said. “Let’s go on to the first victims.”

“Okay, folks, next page.”

The page we turned to contained information on the murders that had obsessed the detectives the Poet killed. These were called secondary victims on the report, even though in each city they had actually died first. I noticed that once again the sheet was not up to date. Polly Amherst, the woman whose murder had obsessed John McCafferty in Baltimore, had not yet made the list.

SECONDARY VICTIMOLOGY-PRELIMINARY

1. Gabriel Ortiz, Sarasota, FL student HM, DOB 6-1-82, DOD 2-14-92

Ligature strangulation, molestation (kapok fiber)

2. Robert Smathers, Chicago student BM, DOB 8-11-81, DOD 8-15-93

Manual strangulation, mutilation antemortem

3. Althea Granadine, Dallas student BF, DOB 10-10-84, DOD 1-4-94

Multiple stabbing, chest, mutilation antemortem

4. Manuela Cortez, Albuquerque, NM housekeeper HF, DOB 4-11-46, DOD 8-16-94

Multiple blunt force, mutilation postmortem (kapok fiber)

5. Theresa Lofton, Denver, CO student, day care employee WF, DOB 7-4-75, DOD 12-16-94

Ligature strangulation, mutilation postmortem (kapok fiber)

“Okay, once again we are missing one,” Doran said. “Baltimore. I understand the case was not a child, but a teacher. Polly Amherst. Ligature strangulation and postmortem mutilation.”

She waited a beat in case people were writing notes.

“We are still in the process of having files and data faxed in on these cases,” she continued. “This was just put together for the meeting. But, preliminarily, what we are looking at as far as these secondary cases go is a commonality involving children. Three victims were children, two worked directly with children and the last one, Manuela Cortez, was a housekeeper who was abducted and murdered at some point while going to the school her employer’s children attended to walk them home. The extrapolation is that the intended targets in this chain were children but in half the cases perhaps something went wrong, the stalking pattern was somehow interrupted by the adult victims, and they were eliminated.”

“What is to be made from the mutilation?” an agent on the outer rim asked. “Some of it’s post and with the kids … it wasn’t.”

“We’re not sure, but a guess at this time is that it might be part of his cloaking. By using different methodology and pathology he has been able to camouflage himself. On this page these cases may look similar but the more complete the analysis the more different they are. It is as if six different men with differing pathologies killed these victims. In fact, all the cases were submitted on VICAP questionnaires by the local agencies but none drew matches to the others. Remember, the questionnaire is now up to eighteen pages.

“Bottom line, I think this offender’s read up on us. I think he knew how to do things differently enough with each of these victims so that our trusty computer never scored a match. The only mistake he made was the kapok fibers. That is how we have him.”

An agent on the outer rim raised his hand and Doran nodded at him.

“If there were three incidents of kapok fiber being recovered, why didn’t we get a match on the VICAP computer if all cases were entered like you said?”

“Human error. In the first case, the Ortiz boy, kapok was indigenous to the area and dismissed. It wasn’t put on the questionnaire. In the Albuquerque case, the fibers were not identified as kapok, the survey was not updated. An oversight. We missed the match. We only got that from the field office today. Only in the Denver case was the kapok seen as significant enough to include on the VICAP request.”

There was a groan from several of the agents and I felt my own heart sink a bit. The possibility of confirming that there was a serial killer at work as early as the Albuquerque case had been missed. What if it hadn’t been missed, I wondered. Maybe Sean would be alive.

“That brings us to the big question,” Doran said. “How many killers have we got? One who does the first string and another who does the detectives? Or just one? One who does them all. For the moment, based primarily on the logistical improbabilities associated with two killers, we are pursuing a theory of linkage. Our assumption is that in each city the two deaths are linked.”

“What’s the pathology?” Smitty asked.

“We’re only guessing now. The obvious one is that he sees killing the detective as a way of covering his tracks, ensuring his escape. But we have another theory as well. That is that the first homicide was committed by the offender in order to draw a homicide detective into the frame. In other words, the first kill is bait, presented in such a horrific fashion as to attract a homicide detective’s obsession. We are assuming that the Poet then stalked each one of these officers and learned their habits and routines. That enabled him to get close and carry out the eventual murder without detection.”

This silenced the room. I got the feeling that many of the agents, though surely veterans of numerous investigations of serial killings, had never before encountered a predator like the one they were calling the Poet.

“Of course,” Brass said, “all we have is theory for the time being …”

Backus stood up.

“Thank you, Brass,” he said, then addressing the room added, “Quickly now, because I want to do some profiling and get this wrapped up, Gordon, you had something for us.”

“Yes, real quick,” Thorson said, standing up and moving to an easel with a large drawing pad on it. “The map in your package is outdated because of the Baltimore connection. So if I can have your attention up here for a moment.”

He quickly drew the outline of the United States with a thick black marker. Then, with a red marker, he began to draw the Poet’s trail. Starting in Florida, which he had drawn proportionately small compared to the rest of the country, the line went up to Baltimore then over to Chicago then down to Dallas then up to Albuquerque and finally up further to Denver. He picked up the black marker again and wrote the dates of the killings in each of the cities.

“It’s pretty self-explanatory,” Thorson said. “Our man is heading west and he’s obviously pissed off at homicide cops about something.”

He raised his hand and waved it over the western half of the country he had drawn.

“We’ll look for the next hits out here unless we get lucky and get him first.”

Looking at the terminus of the red line Thorson had drawn gave me a strange feeling about what was ahead. Where was the Poet? Who was next?

“Why don’t we just let him get to California, so he can be among his own kind? End of problem.”

Everyone laughed at the joke from one of the agents seated in the outer rim. The humor emboldened Hazelton.

“Hey, Gordo,” he said, reaching back to the easel and tapping a pencil on the small rendering of Florida. “I hope this map wasn’t some kind of Freudian slip on your part.”

That brought the loudest laughter of the meeting and Thorson’s face reddened, though he smiled at the joke at his expense. I saw Rachel Walling’s face light up with delight.

“Very funny, Hazel,” Thorson loudly retorted. “Why don’t you go back to analyzing the poems. You’re good at that.”

The laughter dried up quickly and I suspected that Thorson had taunted Hazelton with a barb that was more personal than witty.

“Okay, if I can continue,” Thorson said, “FYI, tonight we’ll be alerting all the FOs, particularly in the West, to be on watch for something like this. It would help us a lot if we could get an early notice on the next one and get our lab into one of the scenes. We’ll have a go team ready. But right now we are relying on the locals for everything. Bob?”

Backus cleared his throat to continue the discussion.

“If nobody has anything else, we come to profiling. What can we say about this offender? I would like to put something on the alert Gordon sends out.”

Then came a procession of throw-out observations, a lot of them free-form non sequiturs, some of them even bringing laughter. I could see there was a lot of camaraderie among the agents. There was also some strife, as exhibited by the play between Thorson and Walling and then Thorson and Hazelton. Nevertheless, I got the feeling that these people had sat around the table in this room doing this before. Sadly, many times before.