Fair Warning

30

On any story reported by a team there always comes the awkward decision of who writes it and who feeds the facts to the writer. Writing together never works. You can’t sit side by side at the computer. The one who writes generally controls the tone of the story and the way the information is delivered, and usually gets the lead byline too. This was my story and it was my call, but I was smart enough to know that Emily Atwater was the better writer and I was the better digger. She had a way with words that I did not. I would be the first to admit that the two books I had published were heavily edited to the point of being reorganized and rewritten. All kudos to my editors but the royalty checks still went to me.

Emily was a lean writer, a follower of the less-is-more school. Short sentences gave her stories momentum and I was not blind to this. I also knew that putting her name first in the byline would not reflect badly on me. It would look like we had equal billing because it would be in alphabetical order: Atwater and McEvoy. I told her she could write the story. She was at first floored and then thankful. I could tell she believed it was the right call. She was just surprised I had made it. I thought the moment helped me make up for some of my missteps with her lately.

This decision to put her in the writer’s chair freed me up to do more digging and to review what I had already reported.

It also gave me time to notify people who had been helpful on the story and whom I had promised to alert. Christina Portrero’s mother and Jamie Flynn’s father were high on this list.

I tried to make these notifications by phone, and the calls were more emotional than I had anticipated. Walter Flynn in Fort Worth burst into tears when I told him the FBI had now officially linked his daughter’s death to a serial killer who was still at large.

After the calls were out of the way, I started pulling together my notes and making a list of other people I needed to call for the first time or to check back with for any new information. We essentially had twenty-four hours even though we had told Rachel Walling we needed twice that. It was a journalist’s trick to always say a story would take longer to report than it really did, or would be published later than it actually would. It gave us an edge against the investigation’s being leaked and our being scooped on our own story. I wasn’t naive. Rachel was taking the story into the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. There probably wasn’t an agent in the building who didn’t have an I’ll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine deal with a reporter somewhere. I had been burned by the FBI on more than one occasion and still had the scars.

Topping the list of who I needed to find and talk to was Hammond’s unknown partner. There were emails scattered throughout the printouts from Hammond’s house that indicated that he had a partner on Dirty4 who handled the digital aspects of the dark-web venture while he handled the lab work. The partner’s email identified him only as RogueVogueDRD4 and he used a Gmail account. The same alias was listed on the DRD4 site as the administrator. Rachel had said before leaving that she was confident the FBI could run it down, but I wasn’t sure about that and didn’t want to wait for the FBI. I contemplated directly reaching out to RogueVogue in a message. And after discussing it with Emily I did just that.

I hit the send button and let it fly. It was a long shot but a shot I had to take. Next, I started organizing what I would transfer to Emily for the story. She had not started writing and I could hear her on the phone in her cubicle making calls to watchdog agencies and observers of the genetic-analytics industry for general comments on what this sort of breach could mean. Every story had to have a lead quote — a line from a credible source that summed up the outrage, or tragedy, or irony of the story. It underscored the greater implications of the report. This story was going to trade in all of those elements and we needed to come up with one quote that said it all: that no one was safe from this kind of intrusion and horror. It would give the story a deeper resonance than a basic murder story and would get it picked up by the networks and cable. Myron would be better able to place the story with one of the big media guns like the Washington Post or the New York Times.

I heard Emily briefly summarize what we had found and what we would publish. As in her writing, she had a way of keeping it short and to the point. Still, I was getting nervous listening to her. My story paranoia was kicking in. We had to be careful when we solicited these comments because every one of those experts and industry observers could turn around and tip off a reporter they had a source relationship with. The trick was to give them enough information to respond with a usable quote without giving them enough to pass to another reporter.

I tried to tune her out and go about my work, reviewing the early stages of my investigation before I knew what I had stumbled into. I thought about calling the LAPD detectives and asking if I had been cleared yet through DNA analysis and if they had made any headway on the case. But I concluded that would be a waste of time as I was persona non grata with Mattson and Sakai.

Next I thought about causesofdeath.net and realized I had not checked the website since I saw the initial flurry of responses to my query. It had been a great starting point for me in connecting the cases linked — I believed — to the Shrike, and now I checked for more.

I went to the message chain I had started with the inquiry about atlanto-occipital dislocation and saw that three messages had been posted since I last checked. The first was a followup by Dr. Adhira Larkspar to her first post, in which the chief medical examiner had asked the original poster — me — to identify himself.

The warning did not stop two others from posting. A day earlier a medical examiner in Tucson, Arizona, reported that they had an AOD case with a female victim that was attributed to a motorcycle accident. The case was six months old and no other details were offered.

I copied the posting and shot it over to Emily in an email alerting her that we might have a fifth case to look into. Her response came quickly.

I didn’t respond. The latest message on the forum chain had drawn my full attention. It had been posted only twenty minutes earlier.

I was stunned by the message and read it several times before taking another breath. Obviously, the hanging in Burbank had to be Hammond, and I noted that GTO had not called it a suicide. I had no doubt that Rachel’s take on Hammond’s death had been on the money. Maybe the coroner’s office was onto it as well.

The second death was what had my full attention. A fatal fall in Northridge. Calling a death a fatal fall did not rule out the possibility of murder. I needed to get more details. Northridge was a Valley neighborhood. I called the LAPD’s Valley Bureau, identified myself as a journalist, and asked for the lieutenant. I wasn’t connected for nearly five minutes but refused to hang up, being better at waiting games than most of the people who didn’t want to talk to me.

Finally, I was connected.

“Lieutenant Harper, how can I help you?”

“Lieutenant, this is Jack McEvoy. I work at a consumer-watchdog website called FairWarning and—”

“How can I help you?”

“Okay, well, I’m looking for information on the fatal fall up in Northridge today. Like I said, we are a consumer watchdog and we pay attention to workplace injuries and accidents, et cetera. I was hoping you could tell me what happened.”

“A guy fell off the roof of a parking structure. That’s it.”

“What parking structure? Where?”

“He was in the mall up there and when he left he went to his car and then jumped or fell off the roof of the garage. We’re not sure which yet.”

“Did you identify the victim yet?”

“Yes, but we’re not putting that out. We haven’t found next of kin. You’ll have to get the name from the coroner.”

“Okay. What about age?”

“He was thirty-one, I think my guys told me.”

The same age as Hammond, I noted.

“There wasn’t a note or anything?”

“Not that we’ve found. I need to—”

“Just a couple last questions, Lieutenant. Were there any cameras that showed the fall and could shed light on what happened?”

“We do a camera canvass on these sorts of things and we haven’t found anything yet.”

“Who is the investigator assigned to this?”

“That would be Lefferts. He’s lead.”

“Thank you, L-T.”

“You got it.”

A five-minute wait for less than a minute of information. I next went to the website of the county medical examiner’s office and pulled down the staff menu. I was trying to find out who GTO might be. None of the medical examiners fit the bill, but when I looked at the list of coroner’s investigators, I zeroed in on Gonzalo Ortiz. My guess was that his middle name began with T.

Sometimes a phone was the best way to get what you needed — like when you are trying to penetrate the LAPD. But for the coroner’s office I wanted to go in person. I wanted a face-to-face with GTO because I sensed from the message on the causesofdeath board that he might be a guy who would talk. Maybe it was a long shot, but I wanted to take it. I shut down my computer and walked over to Emily’s pod. She was typing up notes from one of her calls.

“I think I found Hammond’s partner.”

She immediately stopped typing and looked up at me.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a name yet.”

“Then where is he?”

“The coroner’s office. He fell off a parking garage a couple hours ago, broke his neck. I’m going to go down there to see the investigator, see if he’ll talk.”

“You mean broke his neck like we’re seeing here?”

She pointed to her screen, meaning the whole case. I nodded.

“There’s a coroner’s investigator who I think has put two and two together. He posted to me on the message board less than an hour ago. I want to go see if he’ll talk. The LAPD won’t tell me shit.”

“But doesn’t he think you’re a coroner after the way you first posted?”

“I don’t know. The head medical examiner sort of outed me but he still posted.”

“Well, don’t dawdle. We have a lot to do.”

“Dawdle? Not my style. I’ll call you after I get there.”

31

It was my first time to the coroner’s office in at least four years. It had been a regular stop for me when I covered crime for the Times and later the Coffin. But at FairWarning death had not been my beat until now.

The death complex, as I termed it, was on Mission Road near the County — USC Medical Center in Boyle Heights. The two medical centers — one for the dead, the other for the living — were attached by a long tunnel that once facilitated the movement of bodies from one side to the other. The original office sat close to the street, a forbidding brick structure that was nearly a hundred years old and now was mostly used as a souvenir shop and for meeting rooms. They did big business selling toe tags, coroner’s blankets, and other morbid items to the tourist trade.

Behind the old structure was the new modern structure with clean lines and soothing beige tones. There was a glass-doored entrance that I used to get to the reception desk. I asked for Investigator Gonzalo Ortiz. The receptionist asked what my visit was in reference to.

“Uh, the police told me to talk to the coroner’s office to get information about a death,” I said. “It happened today up in the Valley.”

It was a carefully crafted answer that did not contain a falsehood but didn’t exactly tell the whole truth. I hoped that the answer plus my somber demeanor would lead her to believe I was there as next of kin to someone awaiting autopsy. I didn’t want her calling back to the investigations department and announcing that a reporter was in the lobby. If GTO refused to talk to me, I wanted him to tell me so to my face.

The receptionist asked my name and then made a call. She spoke briefly to someone and then looked up at me.

“What’s the name of the deceased?” she asked.

Now I was cornered. But I had an out. Burbank was considered part of the Valley so I could still answer without lying.

“Marshall Hammond.”

The receptionist repeated the name and then listened. She hung up without another word.

“He’s in a meeting and will be out as soon as it ends,” she said. “There is a family room down that hall to the right.”

She pointed behind me.

“Okay, thanks.”

I walked down the hall, hoping there would be no one in the “family” room, but had no such luck. This was Los Angeles, where more than ten million people lived. And died. Some unexpectedly, some by accident, and some by murder. I knew that the county coroner’s office had a whole fleet of pale blue vans with racks in the back for making multiple-body pickups. There was not a chance the family room would ever be empty.

In fact, the place was almost full with small groups of grieving people huddled in silence or in tears, probably hoping there had been a mistake and it wasn’t their loved one they had been asked to come identify or to arrange for transfer and burial.

I didn’t mind skirting the truth with the receptionist but here I felt like an intruder, an impostor they assumed was among them in loss and grief. I had been in their place once, with my brother, and I had knocked on the doors of homes where loved ones had been taken by violence, but something about this room was sacred. I felt awful and thought about making a U-turn and just waiting for Gonzalo Ortiz in the hallway outside the door. But instead I took the first seat near the door. The last thing I wanted was to interact with someone in the throes of their own pain hoping to assuage mine with a smile of understanding. That would be like stealing.

The wait felt like an hour as I listened to murmured pleas, and one woman began to wail. But the truth was that no more than five minutes after my arrival I was rescued from the family room when a Latino man in his fifties, dark-skinned with a salt-and-pepper mustache, stepped in and asked if I was Mr. McEvoy. I was up and out of my seat faster than I could say yes. I led him out into the hallway and then hesitated when I realized he had to lead.

“Let’s take a shortcut,” he said.

He waved me down the hall in the opposite direction from Reception. I followed.

“Are you Investigator Ortiz?” I asked.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “And I have a private meeting room set up.”

I decided to wait till we got to the private room before explaining who I was and what I wanted. Ortiz used a card key to swipe the lock on a door marked authorized personnel only, and we were admitted to the pathology wing of the complex. I knew this because of the odor that engulfed me as we entered. It was the smell of death cut with industrial-strength disinfectant, a sweet and decidedly sour smell that I knew would stay in my nasal passages long after I left the premises. It prompted me to remember the last time I had been in this place. It was four years earlier, when the chief medical examiner had gone public with complaints about health and safety issues in the complex coupled with budgetary issues that affected staffing and crippled service. He reported autopsies being backed up by fifty bodies at a time and toxicology testing taking months instead of weeks. It was a move to persuade the county commissioners to give him the budget he had requested, but it only resulted in the chief’s being forced out of his job.

I doubted much had changed since then and was thinking of bringing up the issue with Ortiz as a way of breaking the ice when I informed him I was a journalist. I could mention the stories I wrote about the deficiencies for the Velvet Coffin in hopes that it would help convince him to talk to me about the atlanto-occipital-dislocation cases.

But as it turned out, I wasn’t going to have to tell him I was a journalist or worry about breaking the ice. It had already been broken. Ortiz led me to a door marked meeting room b. He knocked once and opened the door, holding his arm out to usher me in first. As I entered I saw a rectangular table with six chairs in the middle of the room. Sitting at the far end of the table were Detectives Mattson and Sakai.

I probably revealed my surprise with a slight hesitation in my step but then I regained speed and entered the room. I did my best to recover with a half-smile.

“Well, well, LAPD’s finest,” I said.

“Have a seat, Jack,” Mattson said.

He hadn’t bothered intentionally mispronouncing my last name. I took that as a sign that maybe he had learned something from the stunt he had pulled arresting me. My surprise slipped into bafflement. Were they following me? How did they know I was coming to the coroner’s office?

I took a chair directly across from Mattson, and Ortiz took the seat beside me. I put my backpack on the floor next to me. There was a momentary pause as we all stared at one another. I decided to start out incendiary and see what it got me.

“You guys here to arrest me again?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Mattson said. “Let’s put that behind us. Let’s try to help each other here.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s different.”

“Are you the one who made the post on causesofdeath?” Ortiz said.

I nodded.

“Yeah, that was me,” I said. “And I guess you’re GTO.”

“That’s right,” Ortiz said.

“Jack, I admit it, you put this thing together,” Mattson said. “That’s why I think we can help each—”

“Last we spoke, I was a murder suspect,” I said. “Now you want to work together.”

“Jack, you’re cleared,” Mattson said. “The DNA was clean.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” I said.

“You did know,” Mattson said. “You knew all along. I didn’t think you were waiting for me.”

“How about this: Did you tell Christina Portrero’s friend that I wasn’t the creep you told her I was?” I said.

“It’s at the top of my list,” Mattson said.

I shook my head.

“Look, Mr. McEvoy,” Sakai said, pronouncing my name perfectly. “We can sit here and potshot each other about mistakes made in the past. Or we can work together. You get your story and we get the guy out there who is killing people.”

I looked at Sakai. He was obviously assigned the role of peacemaker — the man who was above all the skirmishes with only the truth in his sights.

“Whatever,” I said. “You’re about to get bigfooted by the FBI. You’ll be turning this over by tomorrow morning.”

Mattson looked stunned.

“Jesus Christ, you went to the bureau with this?” he exclaimed.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I asked. “I went to you people and you put me in jail.”

“Look, can I just say something?” Ortiz said, holding his hands up in a calming gesture. “We really need—”

“No,” Mattson said. “Who did you go to over there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Another person I’m working on this

with went there while I went here.”

“Call them off,” Mattson said. “It’s not their case.”

“It’s not your case either,” I said. “There are killings from here to Florida and up the coast to Santa Barbara.”

“See? I told you he was the one who connected all of this,” Ortiz said, looking at Mattson.

“So why am I here?” I asked. “You want to know what I know? Then it’s got to be an even trade and it’s got to be ironclad exclusive or I am out of here. I’ll take my chances with the FBI.”

Nobody said anything. After a few seconds I started to get up.

“Okay, then,” I said.

“Just hold your horses,” Mattson said. “Sit down and let’s cool down. Let’s not forget that there’s a sick fuck out there killing people.”

“Yeah, let’s not,” I said.

Mattson turned slightly to check with his partner. Some sort of nonverbal message was communicated, then he looked back at me.

“All right, we trade,” he said. “Info for info, intel for intel.”

“Fine,” I said. “You first.”

Mattson spread his hands.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“How’d you get here?” I asked. “Were you following me?”

“I invited them,” Ortiz said. “I saw the post.”

“Coincidence, Jack,” Mattson said. “We were here, meeting with Gonzo, when you showed up.”

“Tell me why,” I said.

“Simple,” Mattson said. “Gonzo started looking around after your post and started connecting cases, same as you. He knew Sakai and I had Portrero, so when two of these AOD cases came up in one day he called us and said they might all be connected. Here we are.”

I realized that I was light-years ahead of them on the investigation. I could share some of what I knew and blow their minds — and still keep some details for myself and my story. I also had the printouts from Hammond’s lab that I had to be careful about revealing.

“Your turn,” Mattson said.

“Not yet,” I said. “You haven’t told me anything I don’t already know.”

“Then what do you want?” Mattson said.

“The guy who fell off the parking garage today, who is he?” I asked.

“Gonzo?” Mattson prompted.

“Guy’s name is Sanford Tolan,” Ortiz said. “Thirty-one years old, lived in North Hollywood and worked at a liquor store.”

That was not what I was expecting.

“A liquor store?” I asked. “Where?”

“Up in Sunland off Sherman Way,” Ortiz said.

“How does that fit with Hammond?” I asked.

“As far as we can tell, it doesn’t,” Mattson said.

“So, you’re saying it’s a coincidence?” I asked. “The two deaths are unrelated?”

“No, we’re not saying that,” Mattson countered. “Not yet. We’re just getting into this thing.”

He looked at Ortiz as if throwing the ball to him.

“Autopsy has not been scheduled yet,” Ortiz said. “But the preliminary notes from the field indicate he was already dead when he fell.”

“How can they tell that?” I asked.

“We have witnesses,” Ortiz said. “He didn’t yell and he didn’t attempt to break his fall — which we would have seen in the injuries. Plus, you don’t see AOD in falls like this. A broken neck is common, but not AOD. There is no twisting of the neck in a fall like that.”

“You said he worked in a liquor store,” I said. “You mean, like behind the counter?”

“Correct,” Ortiz said.

“What else do you know?” I pressed.

“We know he had a criminal record,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz looked at Mattson as if for permission.

“The whole deal’s off if you hold back on me,” I said.

Mattson nodded.

“He was a pedophile,” Ortiz said. “Did four years in Corcoran for raping his stepson.”

Again, the information didn’t fit. I was expecting an Internet cipher, some sort of expert who handled the dark-web part of Dirty4. A woman-hating incel. Pedophile was not part of the profile that was emerging.

“Okay,” Mattson said. “Now it’s your turn to give. Tell us something we don’t know, Jack.”

I nodded and to buy some time I reached down to my backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out the notebook in which I had written the facts of the story. I flipped through the pages for show and then looked up at Mattson.

“The man you’re looking for calls himself the Shrike,” I said.

32

I sat in my Jeep in the parking lot of the coroner’s office and made calls. I didn’t want to be driving during these conversations. I also wanted to watch for Mattson and Sakai. They had stayed behind with Ortiz after our meeting and I was curious to see how long it would be before they left. I didn’t know what I would get from that but I wanted to know anyway.

The first call was to Emily Atwater to check on her status.

“I’ve started writing,” she reported. “So far so good. We’ve got a lot so I’m playing with the balance. What to move up, what to move down. As you know, Myron doesn’t like sidebars. So it’s got to be one story and follow-ups in the days after. What about you?”

“I was wrong about the second case being Hammond’s partner,” I said. “They think the Shrike might have made a mistake and killed the wrong guy. So we have to keep looking for him.”

“‘They’?”

“Yeah, the police were here. Mattson and Sakai. With the help of a smart coroner’s investigator they’ve put the cases together.”

“Shit.”

“Well, I made a deal with them. Traded information on the basis of exclusivity.”

“Can we trust them?”

“Not at all. I don’t trust them and I don’t trust the FBI not to leak. So I held back. I gave them Dirty4 but didn’t mention GT23 or Orange Nano or Hammond’s connection to the Orton case. I think they have a lot of catching up to do before we have to worry about them leaking.”

I saw a man and woman leaving the coroner’s office, arms wrapped around each other, heads down. I recognized them from the family room earlier. The man had tears on his face. The woman didn’t. She was supporting him more than he was supporting her. She walked him to the passenger side of a car and helped him get in before going around to get in behind the wheel. I saw a man in another car watching them as well.

“Jack, you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do they think the Shrike killed the wrong guy?”

“Because he was the wrong profile. Guy worked in a liquor store and was a convicted pedophile. Not the right fit. We are just guessing here but they think the Shrike tried to lure RogueVogue to a meeting at the Northridge Mall and somehow thought this guy — his name was Sanford Tolan — was RogueVogue. Tolan was there by himself, probably sitting around watching children in the mall. The Shrike followed him out to his car, broke his neck, and threw him over the edge.”

“That’s horrible. Do you think the Shrike knows he made a mistake?”

“You mean like he realized this is not the right guy but killed him anyway? Maybe. Hard to say. The whole idea of setting up the meeting is a guess.”

“What about the FBI? Have you heard from Rachel?”

“My next call. I wanted to check in with you first.”

“All right, then I’m going to get back to it. Let me know what you know.”

“You got it.”

Before calling Rachel I pulled up my email account to check for new messages. My pulse jumped when I saw I had received a reply from RogueVogue to the message I had sent earlier.

I checked the time on the message and saw that it was sent well after the lifeless body of Sanford Tolan had dropped from the fourth floor of the mall parking garage. It was further proof that the Shrike had killed the wrong man. The message was short and simple and most of all innocent. No acknowledgment, no admission, just tell me more.

I considered how to answer in a way that would not scare him off: I can safeguard you... I can tell your story... I can be your go-between...

I decided on a direct approach that laid the reality of his situation on the line. Looking up every few seconds or so to check for the detectives, I composed an email that I hoped would lead RogueVogue to trust me with his story and safety.

I read it twice and typed my cell number at the bottom before sending it. My hope was that RogueVogue would read and react to it right away.

I checked the parking lot and the front of the coroner’s office once more but saw no sign of the LAPD detectives. I realized that they might have parked over at USC Medical Center and taken the tunnel through to the coroner’s office. I may have missed them. But I decided to call Rachel while maintaining my vigil. She answered in a whisper.

“Jack, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I was just checking in. Did you meet with anybody yet?”

“Yes, we’re in the middle of it. I just stepped out to take the call.”

“And?”

“Well, they’re working on it. They’re looking for other cases and trying to run down Hammond’s partner. I should have something on that soon.”

“There might be a case in Tucson. But more importantly at the moment, there was another killing today here in L.A. I thought it was Hammond’s partner but it’s not. It looks like a mistake. Like the Shrike thought it was Hammond’s partner.”

“How did you find that out?”

I filled her in on how a check of the causesofdeath website led me to the coroner’s office. I told her that the bureau now had competition in the form of the LAPD connecting the same cases the FairWarning team had. I suggested that maybe the FBI should join forces with the LAPD rather than have the agencies run parallel investigations.

“I’ll suggest it but don’t hold your breath,” Rachel said. “That never worked well when I was here and I doubt attitudes have changed much.”

“Well, it won’t look that great when the story comes out and it says they’re running different investigations,” I said.

“Jack, that’s another thing.”

“What is?”

“They don’t want you to publish yet.”

“Jesus, I knew it would come to that. You can tell them to forget it. It’s our story. We brought it to them as a courtesy. We’re going with it.”

“They feel — and I agree — that it would be better if this guy doesn’t know they’re coming. You go with the story, he’ll probably drop from sight and then we’ll never get him.”

“‘We’? You’re back with them now?”

“You know what I mean. As soon as this guy knows we’re on to him he’ll disappear and change his pattern.”

“And if we don’t publish and warn the public about this guy, he just goes on killing until maybe he is caught.”

“I know that’s the argument but—”

“He killed two people today alone. And this was him covering his tracks. He must already know that something is up, that people are on to him.”

“But not the FBI, Jack.”

“Look, I’ll talk to Myron and Emily about it but I will vote to publish. The world needs to know this guy is out there and what he’s doing and how these victims are identified and stalked.”

“And you have to make sure you don’t get scooped.”

“Look, I’m not denying that. I’m a reporter and this is my story, and yes, I want to be sure I’m first out with it. But now with both the FBI and LAPD aware of it, it’s only a matter of time before some asshole leaks it to some reporter he’s trying to leverage. That alone makes me want to publish, but the more important reason is to alert the public to the very dangerous thing going on out there.”

“Okay, Jack, I’ll tell them. How long can I say they have before it goes out?”

I looked through the windshield and saw Mattson and Sakai walking along the sidewalk that fronted the parking lot. I put my phone on speaker so I could use it to take a photo of them. Myron liked to put photos into the body of long stories as visual breaks. As long as they were somehow connected to the story, that was all that mattered.

The detectives went down either side of an unmarked car and got in.

“A day,” I said. “We’ll try to get it out by tomorrow night.”

“Can’t you push it back at least twenty-four hours, Jack? There is not much they can do by tomorrow night.”

“What if he kills somebody on that extra day? You want that on you, Rachel? I don’t.”

I got the call-waiting buzz in my ear and looked at my phone’s screen. An Unknown Caller was reaching out to me.

“Rachel, I’ve got a call I have to take,” I said quickly. “It might be him.”

“Who?” Rachel said.

“RogueVogue. I’ll call you back.”

“Jack—”

I disconnected and accepted the other call.

“This is Jack McEvoy.”

Nothing. Just an open line. I watched Mattson and Sakai drive out of the parking lot and turn right on Mission Road.

“Hello? This is Jack.”

“You sent me a message...”

The voice came through a digital modulator that turned it into the voice of a robot.

“Yes... I did. You’re in danger. I would like to help you.”

“How can you help me?”

I quietly unzipped my backpack and grabbed a notebook and pen so I could write his words down.

“For one thing, I can get your side of the story out. When this thing hits, there are going to be victims and villains. You want to get your story out there before other people put it out there for you. People who don’t know you.”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. I’m a writer. I track killers. I’m tracking the Shrike.”

“How do you know about him?”

“He killed someone I knew. He got her name and details from Dirty4.”

There was a silence and I began to think I’d lost him. I wanted to persuade him to talk. But I wasn’t willing to dance around what he and Hammond had wrought with their scheme. As far as I was concerned, RogueVogue was firmly on the villain side of the ledger. He was not as culpable as the Shrike but pretty damn close.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

I wrote the line down verbatim before responding. I knew it would go high up in the story.

“What was supposed to happen?”

“We... it was just supposed to make money. We saw a niche.”

“What was that niche?”

“You know, helping guys... some guys have trouble meeting girls. It wasn’t that different from Tinder and some of those others.”

“Except the women whose profiles you were selling didn’t know, right?”

I said it in a non-accusatory tone but it brought silence. I threw a softball question out before I lost him.

“How did you and Marshall Hammond meet?”

After a pause he answered.

“College roommates.”

“Where was that?”

“UC–Irvine.”

A little piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“You knew William Orton there?”

“Marshall did.”

I threw a curveball at him. A possibility that had been growing in the back of my mind.

“Is he the Shrike?”

“No.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know. What happened to Marshall?”

“The Shrike broke his neck, then tried to make it look like he hanged himself in his home lab. How do you know Orton is not the Shrike? Do you know who the Shrike is?”

“I figured it out.”

I wrote it down. I knew my next words to him might be the most important part of the conversation.

“Okay, listen. There is a way for you to help your situation — if you want to.”

“How?”

“Tell me who the Shrike is. The FBI needs to stop him.”

“The FBI?”

I immediately realized I had misspoken. He didn’t know that this had come to the attention of the FBI. I sensed that I had to keep him on the phone by going in another direction. I blurted out a question.

“How do you think the Shrike found Marshall?”

There was a pause but then he finally spoke again.

“He made contact.”

“Who did? Marshall?”

“Yes. We knew about the ones who died. Clients told us that we had — that some of our profiles were... defunct. Marshall looked into it. He checked the downloads and found the link between them. It was him. Marshall reached out. He told him he had to stop.”

That was all the explanation he gave, but again it helped me put more pieces of the story together.

“And that’s how the Shrike found him? He traced the contact?”

“Somehow. We took precautions but somehow he found him.”

“‘We’?”

“We agreed to send the note. Marshall sent it.”

“Let’s go back to Orton. Marshall fixed his case, right? The DNA.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

“Then Orton owed him. He gave you the DNA.”

“I told you, I—”

“Okay, okay, forget it. What about the Shrike? You said you know who he is. Give me a name. You do that and you won’t be a villain in this. You’ll be somebody trying to stop it. Like you said, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“And then you give the name to the FBI?”

“I can or you can. Doesn’t matter as long as you are the one who gives it.”

“I’ll think about that. It’s all I have.”

I guessed he meant that the Shrike’s ID was all he had to trade in exchange for not being prosecuted.

“Well, don’t think too long,” I said. “If you found it, the FBI will eventually find it and then you’ve got nothing to give.”

He didn’t respond. I realized I was asking for the Shrike’s ID when I didn’t even have my source’s real name.

“What about you? Can you give me your name so I know who I’m talking to?”

“Rogue.”

“No, your real name. You know my name — why don’t you tell me yours?”

I waited. Then I heard the connection go dead.

“Hello?”

He was gone.

“Shit.”

The interview was over.