Criss Cross

Chapter 33

Less than thirty hours after I spoke to Rawlins, John Sampson was driving us down a winding backcountry road in western Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, not far from the village of Graves Mill. I had an iPad in my lap and was studying an OnX Maps app that showed the land on both sides of the road, the property boundaries, and the names of the properties’ owners.

We’d gone past a couple of new subdivisions before entering farmland interrupted by fingers of timber spilling out of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“Beautiful country,” Sampson said.

“Perfect place for a troll to build his troll hole.”

“Mahoney said he calls it an anthill.”

“I read the reports. Sounds more troll than ant to me. His property line is coming up in a mile.”

“Left or right?” Sampson said.

“Right side for three miles and west all the way to Shenandoah National Park. It’s a big piece. Seven hundred and fifty-some acres.”

“He’s got the money to do whatever he wants.”

“And get away with it,” I said.

It was the money, almost thirty million by some estimates, that had brought the landowner to our attention. Or at least, the money was part of what made him stand out for us. Or what helped us sift him out from the others.

Not long ago, it had felt like our investigation had ground to a halt. Then I’d gotten that call from Keith Karl Rawlins.

When I got to Quantico, the FBI contractor asked me if I’d done a behavioral profile of M. The question surprised me because, strangely, I had not, even though creating those kinds of profiles was what I had done at the FBI.

Why hadn’t I considered doing a profile before?

Before I could come up with an answer, Rawlins proposed writing an algorithm designed to sift for the kind of person M most likely was, based on my behavioral assessment. But he added that he didn’t want me to do the assessment the way I normally did.

Instead, the computer wizard asked me, John, and Ned to create a string of search words that described our suspect in as much detail as possible. We did, starting with wealthy.

Given the scope of what we believed M had been involved in, including tracking down and killing the human traffickers, the three of us agreed that he had to be rich. But why would he ask for ransom for Mrs. Jenkins? We couldn’t answer that but left the wealthy filter in there nonetheless. Cold-blooded was another term we wrote down, along with forward-thinking and amoral.

We came up with a total of thirty-seven distinctive traits that summed up our understanding of M. I have to admit that much of what Rawlins did with those words afterward went right over my head. But his digital sieves began to sift, and eight hours later he had a list of fourteen possible candidates.

We’d narrowed it down to the five who lived within a day’s drive of one of the murder scenes. Two of those we discarded almost immediately; they were old men and in jail for prior heinous crimes. The third and fourth men were only mildly interesting.

But the fifth man? The more we dug into his past, the more he looked like the jackpot suspect we’d been searching for.