Fair Warning

25

I got up early but stayed in bed watching Rachel sleep, not wanting to disturb her. I pulled my laptop off the bedside table and checked emails, finding the only one of note from Emily Atwater. It had been sent late the night before, asking me where the Deep Throat documents were that I had promised to send after our call. She then suggested that I had intentionally held them back.

I quickly wrote a return email apologizing for the delay and pulled up the documents to attach. I first gave each one a quick read so their contents would be fresh in my mind when Emily called later to discuss them. As I scanned the DNA report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Lab I saw a name I recognized.

“Holy shit!”

Rachel stirred and opened her eyes. I had jumped out of bed and gone to my backpack to retrieve the notebook I had used the night before while on the call with Emily. I came back to the bed with it and quickly opened it to the page where I had written down a name. It was a match.

“What is it, Jack?” Rachel asked.

“It’s Elvis in the box,” I said.

“What?”

“Old newspaper phrase. It means the thing, the nuts, the photo everybody wants. Only this is not a photo. It’s a name.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“Look at this.”

I turned the laptop’s screen so she could see it.

“This is the DNA report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office that cleared Orton in the rape case down there. Remember, Deep Throat sent it to me? Now look down here where it says the name of the DNA tech who compared Orton’s DNA to the sample taken off the victim.”

“Okay. M. Hammond. What does it mean?”

“Marshall Hammond now works up here for LAPD’s crime lab and lives in Glendale. My partner on the story ran down the second-tier labs that have bought DNA from Orton’s lab. And this guy, Hammond, is one of them. And get this, he buys only female DNA.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you. I need my coffee.”

“No, listen, this is big. This guy Hammond cleared Orton, said the DNA was not a match. Now four years later he’s in business with him. On the FTC paperwork he says he’s researching forensic applications of DNA, but he only buys female DNA from Orton. Why only female if he’s looking at forensic applications? You see? Emily and I were already zeroed in on this guy and now I found out he was Orton’s ticket to freedom. That is no coincidence.”

I got up from the bed again and started getting dressed.

“What are you going to do?” Rachel asked.

“I’m going to go to his house and his so-called lab and check it out,” I said.

“You shouldn’t do that alone, Jack.”

“I won’t. I’ll call Emily.”

“No, take me. I want to go.”

I looked at her.

“Uh...”

“I can help you get a read on this guy if he’s there.”

I knew that she could. But bringing her directly into the story would not go over well with Emily Atwater. Or Myron Levin.

“Come on, Jack,” Rachel said. “We’ve done this before.”

I nodded.

“Then get dressed,” I said. “Let’s catch this guy before he goes to work. We can grab coffee after.”

26

Forty minutes later we were on the street Hammond had listed with the FTC as the location of his lab. It was a residential street, as Emily Atwater had determined on Google Maps.

“Let’s do a drive-by first,” I said. “Get the lay of the land a little bit.”

We cruised by a nondescript, two-story house with a two-car garage and a BMW SUV parked in the driveway.

“A little odd that the BMW is not in the garage,” Rachel said.

“At least it means somebody’s probably home,” I said.

“Wait, Jack, I think the front door was open.”

“Maybe he’s about to leave. Turning around.”

I used a neighbor’s driveway to make the maneuver and then drove back to Hammond’s house. I pulled into the driveway behind the BMW. It was a reporter’s trick. It would make it hard for Hammond to jump into his car and get away when I hit him with the hard questions.

We got out and I saw Rachel put her hand on the BMW’s front hood as she passed by it.

“Still warm,” she said.

We approached the front door, which had been partially hidden from the street by a small front porch with leafy potted plants standing sentinel on either side of the entry portal.

Rachel’s observation was quickly confirmed. The door stood a foot open. The entry room beyond it was dark.

On the frame of the door was a lighted button for a doorbell. I stepped up and pushed it and a loud solitary gong echoed through the house. We waited but no one came. Rachel pulled a sleeve down over her hand and gently pushed the door open further. She then crossed behind me as she changed her angle of view into the house. There was a small entry area with a wall directly in front of us and arched entries to hallways to the left and right.

“Hello?” I called loudly. “Mr. Hammond? Anybody home?”

“There’s something wrong,” Rachel whispered.

“How do you know?”

“I feel it.”

I rang the doorbell again, this time pushing it repeatedly, but only the solitary gong sounded. I looked back at Rachel.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“We go in,” Rachel said. “Something’s wrong. The car engine’s warm, the door’s open, nobody’s answering.”

“Yeah, but we’re not cops. We should call the cops.”

“I’m fine with that, if that’s how you want to play it. But say goodbye to your story if the cops lock this place down.”

I nodded. Good point. I stalled by yelling loudly into the house once more.

No one answered, no one came.

“Something’s wrong,” Rachel repeated. “We need to check it out. Maybe somebody needs help.”

This last part was said for my benefit, giving me the excuse I could use later if things went sideways once we entered.

“Okay,” I said. “Lead the way.”

She moved past me before I was finished speaking.

“Put your hands in your pockets,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“No prints.”

“Got it.”

I followed her into the hallway to the right. It led to a living room that was furnished in contemporary styles, with a Warhol print of a Volkswagen Beetle over a fireplace protected by a freestanding glass panel. There was a thick book called The Broad Collection on the table between the maroon couch and two matching chairs. There was no sign of disturbance or anything wrong. It looked like a room that never got used.

“Are we in the right house?” Rachel asked.

“Yeah, I checked the address,” I said. “Why?”

“The LAPD must pay its DNA techs a lot better than I thought.”

“Plus, buying DNA from Orange Nano can’t be cheap.”

Next we moved through a modern kitchen with an island counter that divided the space from a large TV room that looked out onto a pool. Nothing seemed amiss. Held by a magnet to the refrigerator was a color photo printed on cheap copy paper that depicted a naked woman with a ball gag in her mouth.

“Nice fridge art,” I said.

“We need to check upstairs,” Rachel said.

We found the stairs by retracing our steps and going down the other hallway. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, but only one that appeared to be in use — the bed was unmade and there were dirty clothes in a pile next to it. A quick sweep of these rooms produced no people and no sign of trouble.

We went back down the stairs. There were two closed doors at this end of the hallway. Rachel opened these with her sleeve-covered hand. The first was to a laundry room. Nothing there. The second was to the garage, and that’s where we found Hammond’s lab.

And where we found Hammond hanging from a noose fashioned from an orange industrial power cord.

“Shit,” I said.

“Don’t touch anything,” Rachel said.

“Hands in pockets. I got that.”

“Good.”

But I pulled one of my hands out of its pocket with my cell phone. I pulled up the keyboard and tapped in 9-1-1.

“What are you doing?” Rachel asked.

“Calling it in,” I said.

“No, not yet.”

“What do you mean? We need to call the police.”

“Just hold your horses for a minute. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

“We got a dead guy hanging from the crossbeam.”

“I know, I know.”

She offered nothing else as she moved in closer to the body. There was a wooden chair kicked over on its side below the body, which I assumed was that of Marshall Hammond.

The body was suspended completely motionless in front of Rachel.

“Record this,” she said.

I moved from the phone app on my cell to the camera app and started a recording.

“Recording,” I said. “Go.”

She circled completely around the body once before speaking.

“I’m assuming the car out front is his,” she said. “So we are to assume that he went somewhere, came home, and then just came in here and threw that extension cord over the beam.”

The garage had an open ceiling where there was some cross-planking for storage up above. The center support beam had been used as Hammond’s gallows.

The body was suspended about two feet above the concrete floor of the garage lab. Rachel continued to slowly move around it without touching it.

“No damage to the fingernails,” she said.

“Why would there be?” I asked.

“Second thoughts. Often people change their mind at the last second and claw at the noose. They break their fingernails.”

“Got it. I think I knew that.”

“But there is slight chafing on both wrists. I think he was bound either at the time of death or shortly before.”

She looked around and saw a cardboard dispenser that held rubber gloves, most likely used by Hammond during DNA processing. She put on one glove and then used that hand to right the chair that had been knocked over during the hanging. She stepped up onto it so she could get a closer view of the noose and the dead man’s neck. She studied it for a long moment before telling me to put on gloves from the dispenser.

“Uh, why?”

“Because I want you to steady the chair.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, Jack.”

I put my phone down on a table, then put on the gloves. I came back to the chair and held it steady as Rachel stepped up onto the armrests so she could get a downward view of the noose and the knot behind the dead man’s head.

“This doesn’t work,” she said.

“You want me to look around for a ladder?” I asked.

“No, I’m not talking about that. I think his neck is broken and that doesn’t really work.”

“What do you mean doesn’t work? I thought that’s what happens when you hang yourself.”

“No, not often with suicide by hanging.”

She put her ungloved hand on the top of my head to steady herself as she climbed off the arms of the chair. She stepped down off the chair, turned it on its side, and positioned it as it had been when we entered the garage.

“You need a big drop to break the neck. Most hanging suicides basically die from strangulation. It was the execution hangings back in the day where you’d get the broken neck. Because you drop through a trap door, fall ten or fifteen feet, and then the impact snaps the neck, causing instant death. You ever heard that phrase Build my gallows high? I think it was a book or a movie or something. Whoever said that wanted to get it over with quick.”

I raised my hand, pointing at the dead man.

“Okay, then how did he get a broken neck?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I think he was dead first and then hung up like that to make it look like a suicide.”

“So somebody broke his neck and then hoisted...”

It hit me then: Somebody broke his neck just like the four AOD victims.

“Oh, man,” I said. “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know but there has to be something in this lab that helps explain things. Look around. We have to hurry.”

We searched but found nothing. There was a desktop computer but it was thumbprint protected. There were no hard files or lab books. Two whiteboards mounted on the walls had been erased. It became pretty clear that whoever had hung Hammond from the rafters — if the dead man was Hammond — had made sure that whatever the lab tech was doing with the female DNA he bought from Orange Nano was wiped clean as well.

There was a refrigerator that had racks of test tubes presumably holding DNA samples. I pulled one tube out of its slot and read the printing on the tape over the rubber seal at the top.

“This stuff is from GT23,” I said. “Says it right here on the tube.”

“Not a surprise,” Rachel said.

“There’s nothing else here,” I said. “Just a dead guy and that’s it.”

“We still have the rest of the house to check,” Rachel said.

“We don’t have time. We have to get out of here. Whoever did this probably spent all night searching the place. Whatever was here is gone and probably so is my story.”

“It’s not about your story anymore, Jack. This is bigger than your story. Check the printer.”

She pointed behind me. I turned and went to the printer in the corner. The tray was empty.

“Nothing here,” I said.

“We can print the last job,” Rachel said.

She stepped over and looked at the printer. Still wearing a single glove, she pressed the menu button on the printer’s control screen.

“Little-known fact,” she said. “Almost all modern printers print from memory. You send the job from your computer, it goes into printer-buffer memory, and then it starts to print. It means the last job is in memory until a new job comes in.”

She clicked on the “Device Options” tab and chose the “Print Memory” option. The machine immediately started humming and was soon printing pages.

We both stood there watching. The last job was a big one. Many pages were sliding into the tray.

“The question is who printed this,” Rachel said. “This guy or his killer?”

Finally the printing stopped. There were at least fifty pages in the tray. I made no move to grab the stack.

“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked. “Take the printouts.”

“No, I need you to take them,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a reporter. I can’t just come into some dead guy’s house and take printouts from his computer. But you can. You don’t have to live by the same standards I do.”

“Either way it’s a criminal act and that trumps your journalistic ethics.”

“Maybe. But just the same, you can take the pages and then give them to me as my source. Then I can use them — stolen or not — in a story.”

“You mean like we did before and it cost me my job?”

“Look, can you just take the pages, and we can talk about this later? I want to either call the police or get the hell out of here.”

“All right, all right, but this buys me into the case.”

She scooped the thick sheaf of documents out of the tray.

“It’s not a case,” I said. “It’s a story.”

“I told you, it’s more than that now,” she said. “And I’m totally in.”

“Fine. Split or call it in?”

“Your car’s been sitting out there for at least a half hour. It was most likely seen by a neighbor and if not, there are probably cameras on every house. Too risky. I say we secure the documents and call it in.”

“And we tell them everything?”

“We don’t know everything. This is going to be Burbank PD, not L.A., so they won’t connect the dots to the other murders. Not at first. I think you run your original cover story about researching DNA data protections and say you followed the bouncing ball to this guy and this lab and here you are.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m your girlfriend and I just came along for the ride.”

“Really? My girlfriend?”

“We can discuss that later too. We need to find a place to hide the printouts. If they’re good, they’ll search your car.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I would if it was my call.”

“Yeah, but you’re better than everybody. I have so many files and other junk in the back of my Jeep they won’t know what it is if they look.”

“Suit yourself.”

She handed me the stack of documents.

“Then, as your source,” she said, “I am officially giving these to you.”

I took the stack.

“Thank you, source,” I said.

“But that means they’re mine and I want them back,” she said.

27

After camouflaging the printouts in the paperwork debris that monopolized the back seat of my Jeep, I dialed 9-1-1 on my cell and reported finding the body to the Burbank Police. Ten minutes later a patrol car arrived followed by a rescue ambulance. I left Rachel in the Jeep and got out. After showing my driver’s license and press pass to an officer named Kenyon, I assured him that the RA and its EMTs were not necessary.

“They respond on all death calls,” Kenyon said. “Just in case. Did you go inside the house?”

“Yes, I told the dispatcher that,” I said. “The door was open and something seemed wrong. I called out, rang the doorbell, nobody answered. So I went in, looked around, continued to call out Hammond’s name, and eventually found the body.”

“Who is Hammond?”

“Marshall Hammond. He lives here. Or lived here. You have to ID the body, of course, but I’m pretty sure that’s him.”

“What about the woman in the Jeep? Did she go in?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to have to talk to her.”

“I know. She knows.”

“We’ll let the detectives handle that.”

“What detectives?”

“They also roll on all death cases.”

“How long you think I’ll have to wait?”

“They’ll be here any minute. Let’s run down your story. Why were you here?”

I gave him the clean version: I was working on a story on the security of DNA samples submitted to genetic-analysis companies and it led me to want to talk to Marshall Hammond because he ran a private lab and also had a foot in law enforcement. This was not a lie. It just wasn’t a full explanation. Kenyon wrote down some notes while I spoke. I glanced back at the Jeep casually to see if Rachel could see me talking to him. Rachel had her eyes down like she was reading something.

An unmarked police car arrived on scene and two men in suits emerged. The detectives. They spoke briefly to each other and then one headed toward the front door of the house while the other came toward me. He was mid-forties, white, with a military bearing. He introduced himself as Detective Simpson, no first name. He told Kenyon that he would take it from here and to file his paperwork on the call before EOW — which I was pretty sure meant end of watch. He waited for Kenyon to walk away before addressing me.

“Jack McEvoy — why do I know that name?” he asked.

“Not sure,” I said. “I haven’t done much in Burbank before.”

“It’ll come to me. Why don’t we start with you telling me what brought you here today to discover this body inside the house.”

“I just told Officer Kenyon all of that.”

“I know, and now you have to tell me.”

I gave him the exact same story, but Simpson stopped the narrative often to ask detailed questions about what I did and what I saw. I believed I handled it well but there was a reason he was a detective and Kenyon was a patrol officer. Simpson knew what to ask and soon I found myself lying to the police. Not a good thing for a reporter — or anybody, for that matter.

“Did you take anything from the house?” he asked.

“No, why would I do that?” I said.

“You tell me. This story you say you’re working on, were you looking at any sort of impropriety involving Marshall Hammond?”

“I don’t think I have to reveal all the details of the story, but I want to cooperate. So I’ll tell you the answer is no. I knew very little about Hammond other than that he was a second-tier buyer of DNA samples and data and that made him of interest to me.”

I gestured toward the house.

“I mean, the guy ran a DNA lab out of his garage,” I said. “That was pretty curious to me.”

Simpson did what all good detectives do: he asked his questions in a nonlinear fashion so the conversation was disjointed and seemed to be all over the place. But in reality, he was trying to keep me from relaxing. He wanted to see if I might slip up or contradict myself in my answers.

“What about your sidepiece?” he asked.

“‘Sidepiece’?” I said.

“The woman in your car. What’s she doing here?”

“Well, she’s a private detective who helps me with my work sometimes. She’s also sort of my girlfriend.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, you know, I’m... not sure about things, but it doesn’t have anything—”

“What did you take from the house?”

“I told you, nothing. We found the body and then I called the police. That’s it.”

“‘We’ found the body? So your girlfriend went in with you from the start?”

“Yes, I said that.”

“No, you indicated you called her in after finding the body.”

“If I did that, I was wrong. We went in together.”

“Okay, why don’t you stay right here and I’ll go talk to her.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

“Mind if I look around in your vehicle?”

“No, go ahead if you have to.”

“So, you are giving me permission to search your vehicle?”

“You said ‘look around.’ That’s fine. If searching means impounding it, then no. I need my car to get around.”

“Why would we want to impound it?”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing in there. You’re really making me regret calling you guys. You do the right thing and you get this.”

“What is ‘this’?”

“The third degree. I didn’t do anything wrong here. You haven’t even been in the house and you’re acting like I did something wrong.”

“Just stay here while I go talk to your ‘sort of’ girlfriend.”

“See, that’s what I mean. Your tone is bullshit.”

“Sir, when we are finished here, I’ll explain how you can make a complaint to the department about my tone.”

“I don’t want to make a complaint. I just want to finish here so I can go back to work.”

He left me there and I stood on the street watching him interview Rachel, who had stepped out of the Jeep. They were too far away for me to hear the exchange and confirm that she was telling him the same story I had. But my pulse kicked up a notch when I saw she was holding the stack of printouts from Hammond’s lab in her hand while talking to Simpson. At one point she even gestured toward the house with the stack and I had to wonder if she was telling the detective where she had found the paperwork.

But the conversation between Simpson and Rachel ended when the other detective came out the front door of the house and signaled his partner over for a huddle. Simpson broke away from Rachel and spoke to his partner in hushed tones. I nonchalantly walked over to Rachel.

“What the hell, Rachel? Are you going to just give that stuff to them?”

“No, but I could tell you were going to give him permission to search the car. I have certain protections for my clients, so I was prepared to say it was work material I had with me and not part of any search they might conduct. Luckily, he never asked.”

I was not convinced it was the best way to protect the cache of paperwork from the lab.

“We need to get out of here,” I said.

“Well, we’re going to find out right now if we can,” she said.

I turned and saw Simpson walking toward us. I was ready for him to say that the case was now a murder investigation, that my vehicle would be impounded, and that Rachel and I would be taken to the station for further questioning.

But he didn’t.

“Okay, folks, we appreciate the cooperation,” Simpson said. “We have your contact information and will be in touch should we need anything else.”

“So, we can go?” I asked.

“You can go,” Simpson said.

“What about the body?” Rachel asked. “Is it suicide?”

“It looks that way, yes,” Simpson said. “My partner confirmed it. We appreciate your calling it in.”

“All right, then,” I said.

I turned to head to the Jeep. Rachel did as well.

“I remember who you are now,” Simpson said.

I turned back to him.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“I remember who you are now,” he repeated. “I read about the Scarecrow a few years back. Or maybe it was one of those Dateline shows. Hell of a story.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Rachel and I got into the Jeep and drove away.

“That guy didn’t believe a word I said to him,” I said.

“Well, he may get a second shot at you,” Rachel said.

“What do you mean?”

“First, his partner is an idiot for signing off on that as suicide. But the coroner will probably set them straight and it may change to a murder case. They’ll come back to us then.”

That added a layer of dread to the moment. I looked down and saw that Rachel had the printouts on her lap. I remembered glancing back at her in the Jeep while I was being interviewed and seeing her eyes down. She had been reading.

“Anything good in there?” I asked.

“I think so,” Rachel said. “I think the picture is getting clear. But I need to keep reading. Let’s go get that coffee you promised me.”

28

I sat in the conference room with Myron Levin and Emily Atwater. Through the window to the newsroom I could see Rachel sitting at my pod and waiting to be called in. She had asked to use my computer so I knew she was still digging, even as I was attempting to keep her involved in the story. I thought it best that I explain things to Myron and Emily before Rachel came into the meeting.

“If you’ve read my books or know anything about me, you know who Rachel is,” I said. “She has helped me on the biggest stories of my career. She put herself on the line and protected me when I was at the Velvet Coffin, and it cost her her job as an FBI agent.”

“I think it also got the Coffin shut down,” Myron said.

“That’s a bit of an oversimplification but, yeah, that happened then too,” I said. “She had nothing to do with that.”

“And you want to bring her in on the story,” Emily said. “Our story.”

“When you hear what she has, you will see we have no choice,” I said. “And remember, it was my story before it was our story.”

“Oh, wow, a day doesn’t go by that you don’t throw that in my face, does it?” Emily responded.

“Emily,” Myron said, trying to keep the peace.

“No, it’s true,” she said. “I’ve made some major gains on this story but he wants to take what I bring and go off on his own with it.”

“No, I don’t,” I insisted. “It’s still our story. Like I said, Rachel isn’t going to write it. She’s not part of the byline. She’s a source, Emily. She has information about Marshall Hammond that we need to have.”

“Why can’t we get it direct from Marshall Hammond ourselves?” Emily asked. “I mean, I was under the impression that we actually were reporters.”

“We can’t because he’s dead,” I said. “He got murdered this morning... and Rachel and I found the body.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Emily said.

“What?” Myron exclaimed.

“If we had gotten to his place a little earlier we probably would have run into the killer ourselves,” I said.

“Way to bury the lede,” Myron said. “Why didn’t you tell me this from the start?”

“Because I’m telling you now so you will understand why Rachel is so important to this. Let us tell you what happened and then she’ll explain what she’s found out and where we’re at.”

“Go get her,” Myron said. “Bring her in.”

I got up, left the room, and walked to my pod.

“Okay, Rachel, they’re ready,” I said. “Let’s just go in and tell them what we’ve got.”

“That’s the plan.”

She stood up and started gathering the papers she had spread out on the desk. She carried the paperwork under my open laptop, an indication she had something on the screen she planned to show us.

“You found something?” I asked.

“I found a lot,” she said. “I just feel like I should be presenting this to the police or the bureau, not the editor of a website.”

“I told you, not yet,” I said. “Once we publish, you can give it to whoever you want.”

I turned and looked at her as I opened the door to the conference room.

“Showtime,” I whispered.

Myron had moved to a chair next to Emily on one side of the table. Rachel and I sat across from them.

“This is Rachel Walling,” I said. “Rachel, this is Myron Levin and Emily Atwater. So let’s start with what happened this morning.”

I proceeded to tell them how I had stumbled across the connection between William Orton and Marshall Hammond, and how we had gone to Hammond’s home and found him hanging from the crossbeam in his garage lab.

“And it’s a suicide?” Myron asked.

“Well, it was pretty clear the police think that,” I said. “But Rachel thinks otherwise.”

“His neck was broken,” Rachel said. “But I estimated that his drop was no more than a foot. He was not a large or heavy man. I don’t think that kind of drop breaks the neck, and since that is the recurring circumstance in the cases you’re looking at here, I would term the death suspicious at the very least.”

“Did you share this with the police when they said it was suicide?” Myron asked.

“No,” I said. “They weren’t interested in what we thought.”

I looked at Rachel. I wanted to move on from the details of the death. She got the message.

“His broken neck is not the only reason to be suspicious,” she said.

“What else is there?” Myron asked.

“Documents recovered from the lab reveal—”

“‘Recovered’? What exactly does that mean?”

“I believe the killer spent time in Hammond’s lab either before or after he killed him. He hacked the desktop that contained records of much of the lab’s work. He printed out the records. But the printer memory kept the last fifty-three pages he printed. I printed those pages and that’s what I’ve been studying. We now have a good amount of documentation from the lab.”

“You stole it?”

“I took it. If that was stealing, then I would argue that I stole it from the killer. He was the one who printed it.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know for sure that that’s what happened. You can’t do that.”

I knew going into the meeting that this would be the place where ethical questions clashed with potentially the best and most important story of my career.

“Myron, you need to know what we’ve been able to learn from the printout,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” Myron said. “I can’t let my reporters steal documents, no matter how important they are to the story.”

“Your reporter didn’t steal them,” I said. “I got them from a source. Her.”

I pointed to Rachel.

“That doesn’t work,” Myron said.

“It worked for the New York Times when they published the Pentagon Papers,” I said. “They were stolen documents given to the Times by a source.”

“That was the Pentagon Papers,” Myron said. “We’re talking about a totally different kind of story.”

“Not if you ask me,” I said.

I knew it was a weak rejoinder. I gave it another shot.

“Look, we have a duty to report on this,” I said. “The documents reveal that there is a killer out there using DNA to identify and acquire victims. Unsuspecting women who thought their DNA and identities were safe. This has never been seen before and the public needs to know.”

That created a moment of silence, until Emily bailed me out.

“I agree,” she said. “The transfer of the documents is clean. She’s a source and we need to go public with what she knows — even if she came into possession of the documents in... an unsavory way.”

I looked at her and nodded, even though unsavory was not the word I would have used.

“I’m not agreeing to anything yet,” Myron said. “But let’s hear or see what you’ve got.”

I turned and nodded to Rachel.

“I haven’t even gotten through everything in the printouts,” Rachel said. “But there is a lot there. First off, Hammond was a very angry man. In fact, he was an incel. Does everybody know what that is?”

“Involuntarily celibate,” Emily said. “Women haters. Real creeps.”

Rachel nodded.

“He was part of a network, and that anger and that hate led him to create this,” Rachel said.

She turned my laptop so it was facing Emily and Myron. She reached around the screen so she could manipulate the keyboard. On the screen was a red log-in page.

The page had fields for entering a username and password.

“Based on what I read in the pages I was able to figure out Hammond’s keywords,” Rachel said. “His online name was The Hammer — that was easy — and for the password I started feeding keywords from an online incel glossary into the log-in. His password was Lubitz.”

“‘You bitch’?” Emily asked.

“No, Lubitz,” Rachel said. “It’s the name of a hero in the incel movement. A German airline pilot who intentionally crashed a plane he said was full of sluts and slayers.”

“Slayers?” Myron said.

“What incels call normal men who have normal sex lives. They hate them almost as much as they hate women. Anyway, there is a whole vocabulary within the incel movement, most of it misogynistic, and it’s traded in online forums like Dirty4.”

Rachel typed in Hammond’s username and password and entered the site.

“We’re in the dark web here,” she said. “And this is an invitation-only site that identifies women with a specific genetic pattern called DRD4, or dirty four.”

“What is it?” Myron said. “What does it determine?”

“It is a genetic sequence generally believed to be associated with addictive and risky behaviors,” Rachel said. “Sex addiction being among them.”

“Hammond was buying only female DNA from Orange Nano,” Emily said. “He must have been identifying women with DRD4 in his lab. Women who had sent their DNA into GT23, never realizing it would be sold down the line to someone like him.”

“Exactly,” Rachel said.

“But wasn’t it anonymous?” Myron asked.

“It was supposed to be,” Rachel said. “But once samples were identified as having the DRD4 sequence, he had some means of reversing the anonymity. He was able to identify the women and put their identities, details, and locations on the Dirty4 website. Some of the profiles have cell numbers, home addresses, photos — everything. He sold them to his customers, who could search for women by location. If you are one of these creeps in Dallas then you search for women in Dallas.”

“And then what?” Myron asked. “They go out and find these women? I don’t—”

“Exactly,” I said. “Christine Portrero complained to her friend that she met some creepy guy in a bar and he knew things about her he shouldn’t have known. She thought she was being digitally stalked.”

“Dirty4 gave its members an edge,” Rachel said. “The women identified through DNA analysis by Hammond had the genetic makeup believed to be linked to promiscuity, as well as drug use, alcohol abuse, and other risky behaviors.”

“Easy marks,” Emily said. “He was telling his customers exactly who they were and where to find them. And one of those customers is a killer.”

“Exactly,” Rachel said.

“And we think that same customer is the one who killed Hammond,” I added.

“It appears from the printouts that Hammond had a partner in this,” Rachel said. “And they somehow became aware that women listed on the Dirty4 site were dying — were being killed. I think they looked at their subscriber base and figured out that there was at least one who had bought and downloaded the details of all the dead women. All of this is conjecture at the moment, but I think they warned him or told him to stop.”

“And that’s what got Hammond killed?” Myron asked.

“Possibly,” Rachel said.

“Who was the customer?” Myron asked.

“The Shrike,” Rachel said.

“What?” Myron asked.

“It’s the dark web,” Rachel said. “People use alternate names, IDs. If you are going to download names off a site like this, you don’t give your real name and you don’t pay with a credit card. You use an alias and you trade in cryptocurrency. The customer they identified as having downloaded the names of all four of the dead women went by the alias ‘the Shrike.’”

“Any idea what it means?” Myron asked.

“It’s a bird,” Emily said. “My father was a birder. I remember him talking about shrikes.”

Rachel nodded.

“I looked it up,” she said. “It silently stalks and attacks from behind, gripping its victim’s neck in its beak and viciously snapping it. It is considered one of nature’s most formidable predators.”

“All the women had broken necks,” Myron said. “And this guy Hammond.”

“And there’s something else,” Rachel said. “We think he may have hacked Hammond’s computer or made him open it before he was murdered. He then started printing. We repeated the last job he sent to the printer. It was a file that had the IDs of all the women.”

“How many names?” Myron asked.

“I didn’t count,” Rachel said. “But it looks like a hundred or so.” “Did you check to see if the four victims we know about are on the printout?” I asked.

“I did but they’re not on there,” Rachel said. “They could have been removed when it was determined they were dead.”

“So he kills Hammond and gets away with what?” Myron asked. “A hundred names of potential victims?”

That brought a long pause to the discussion.

“Why would he print the names if he’s already a customer and can access the same names through the site?” Myron asked.

“I think he’s probably anticipating that the site is going to get closed down,” Rachel said. “He may know about Jack and Emily or he might think law enforcement is closing in.”

“That puts a clock on things,” Emily said. “We can’t sit on this and put those women at risk. We have to publish.”

“We don’t even have the whole story yet,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rachel said. “You people write your story while I take it to the bureau.”

“No,” I said. “I told you that had to—”

“And I agreed,” Rachel said. “But that was before I saw what was in the printouts. I have to go to the bureau and the bureau has to go to the police. This killer has all the names. They have to be protected. We can’t wait.”

“She’s right,” Myron said.

“It works, Jack,” Emily said. “We can say the FBI is investigating, give the story immediate credibility. The FBI gets us past go.”

I realized all three of them were right and that I had just come off rather badly, putting the story ahead of the safety of dozens of women. I saw the disappointment in both Rachel’s and Emily’s eyes.

“Okay,” I said. “But two things. We make it clear to the bureau, the cops, any agency involved that they can do what they need to do but no press conferences or announcements until after we publish.”

“How long will that be?” Rachel asked.

I looked at Myron and said the first number that popped into my head.

“Forty-eight hours,” I said.

Rachel thought about it and nodded.

“I can try to make that work,” she said. “Realistically, it will probably take them that long to confirm what we give them.”

“Myron, you good with that?” I asked. “Emily?”

They both nodded their approval and I looked at Rachel.

“We’re good,” I said.