The Scarecrow

SIX: The Loneliest Road in America

At nine A.M. Wednesday I was waiting outside the locked door of the offices of Schifino & Associates on the fourth floor of an office building on Charleston near downtown Las Vegas. I was tired and slid down the wall to sit on the nicely carpeted floor. I was feeling particularly unlucky in a town that was supposed to inspire luck.

The early morning had started out well enough. After checking into the Mandalay Bay at midnight, I found myself too keyed up to sleep. I went down to the casino and turned the two hundred dollars I had brought with me into three times that amount at the roulette and blackjack tables.

The growth of my cash portfolio along with the free booze I’d drunk while gambling made sleep come easier when I returned to my room. Things took a dramatic downturn after my wake-up call came. The problem was I wasn’t supposed to have a wake-up call. The front desk was calling to tell me my Times-issued American Express card had been rejected.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I bought an airline ticket with it last night, I rented a car at McCarran and it was fine when I checked in here. Somebody ran the card.”

“Yes, sir, that is just an authorizing process. The card is not charged until six A.M. on the morning of checkout. We ran the card and it was rejected. Could you please come down and give us another card?”

“No problem. I wanted to get up now anyway so I could win some more of your money.”

Only there was a problem, because my three other credit cards didn’t work either. All were rejected and I was forced to chip back half of my winnings to get out of the hotel. Once I got to my rental car I pulled out my cell to start calling the credit-card companies one by one. Only I couldn’t make the calls because my phone was dead, and it wasn’t a matter of being in a bad cell zone. The phone was dead, service disconnected.

Annoyed and confused but undaunted, I headed to the address I had looked up for William Schifino. I still had a story to pursue.

A few minutes after nine, a woman stepped off the elevator and headed down the hallway toward me. I noticed the slight hesitation in her step when she saw me on the floor leaning against Schifino’s door. I stood up and nodded as she got closer.

“Do you work with William Schifino?” I said with a smile.

“Yes, I’m his receptionist. What can I do for you?”

“I need to speak to Mr. Schifino. I came from Los Angeles. I-”

“Do you have an appointment? Mr. Schifino sees potential clients by appointment only.”

“I don’t have an appointment but I’m not a potential client. I’m a reporter. I want to talk to Mr. Schifino about Brian Oglevy. He was convicted last year of-”

“I know who Brian Oglevy is. That case is on appeal.”

“Right, I know, I know. I have new information. I think Mr. Schifino will want to speak to me.”

She paused with her key a few inches from the lock and turned her eyes as if to size me up for the first time.

“I know he will,” I said.

“You can come in and wait. I don’t know when he’ll be in. He doesn’t have court until this afternoon.”

“Maybe you could call him.”

“Maybe.”

We entered the office and she directed me to a couch in a small waiting area. The furnishings were comfortable and seemed relatively new. I got the feeling that Schifino was an accomplished lawyer. The receptionist went behind her desk, turned on her computer and began her routine of preparing for the day.

“Are you going to call him?” I asked.

“When I get a moment. Just make yourself comfortable.”

I tried to but I didn’t like waiting around. I pulled my laptop out of my bag and turned it on.

“Do you have WiFi here?” I asked.

“We do.”

“Could I borrow it to check my e-mail? I’ll only be on a few minutes.”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

I studied her for a moment.

“Excuse me?”

“I said no. It’s a secured system and you will have to ask Mr. Schifino about that.”

“Well, could you ask him for me when you call him to tell him I am waiting here?”

“As soon as possible.”

She gave me an efficient smile and went back to her busywork. The phone buzzed and she opened an appointment book and started scheduling a meeting for a client and telling him about the credit cards they accepted for legal services rendered. It reminded me of my own current credit-card situation and I grabbed one of the magazines off the coffee table to try to avoid thinking about it.

It was called the Nevada Legal Review and it was chock-full of ads for lawyers and legal services like transcription and data storage. There were also articles about legal cases, most of them dealing with casino licensing or crimes against casinos. I was twenty minutes into a story about a legal attack on the law that kept brothels from operating in Las Vegas and Clark County when the office door opened and a man stepped in. He nodded to me and looked at the receptionist, who was still on the phone.

“Hold, please,” the receptionist said.

She pointed to me.

“Mr. Schifino, this man has no appointment. He says he’s a reporter from Los Angeles. He-”

“Brian Oglevy is innocent,” I said, cutting her off. “And I think I can prove it.”

Schifino studied me for a long moment. He had dark hair and a handsome face with an uneven tan from wearing a baseball cap. He was either a golfer or a coach. Or maybe both. His eyes were sharp and he quickly came to a decision about me.

“Then I guess you better come on back to the office,” he said.

I followed him to his office and he sat down behind a large desk while signaling me to the seat on the other side.

“You work for the Times?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good paper but in a lot of trouble these days. Financially.”

“Yeah, they all are.”

“So how did you come to the conclusion in L.A. that my guy over here is an innocent man?”

I gave him my best scoundrel’s smile.

“Well, I don’t know that for sure, but I had to get in to see you. But this is what I’ve got. I’ve got a kid over there, sitting in jail for a murder I am thinking he didn’t commit, and it seems to me that the details are a lot like the details in your Oglevy case-what details I know. Only, my case happened two weeks ago.”

“So if they are the same, my client has an obvious alibi and there might be a third party here at work.”

“Exactly.”

“All right, well, let’s see what you’ve got.”

“Well, I was hoping I could see what you’ve got too.”

“Fair enough. My client is in prison and I don’t think he’s too worried about attorney-client privilege at this point, not if my trading information might help his cause. Besides, most of what I tell you is available in court records.”

Schifino pulled his files and we began a show-me-yours-show-you-mine session. I told him what I knew about Winslow and maintained a reserved excitement as we went through the crime reports. But when we moved into side-by-side comparisons of the crime scene photos, the adrenaline kicked in and it became difficult to contain myself. Not only did the Oglevy photos completely match those from the Babbit case, but the victims looked stunningly alike.

“This is amazing!” I said. “It’s almost like the same woman.”

Both were tall brunettes with large brown eyes, bobbed noses and long-legged dancer’s bodies. Immediately I was hit with the profound sense that these women had not been selected randomly by their killer. They had been chosen. They fit some kind of mold that had made them targets.

Schifino was riding the same wave. He pointed from photo to photo, accenting the similarities in the crime scenes. Both women were suffocated with a plastic bag that was tied around the neck with a thin white cord. Each was placed naked and facing inward in the trunk of the car, and their clothes were simply dropped on top of them.

“My God… look at this,” he said. “These crimes are absolutely the same and it doesn’t take an expert to see that. I have to tell you something, Jack. When you came in here, I thought you were going to be this morning’s entertainment. A diversion. Some wild-ass reporter who shows up chasing a pipe dream. But this…”

He gestured to the side-by-side sets of photos we had laid out across the desk.

“This is my client’s freedom right here. He’s getting out!”

He was standing behind his desk, too excited to sit down.

“How did this happen?” I asked. “How did this slip through?”

“Because they were solved quickly,” Schifino said. “In each case the police were led to an obvious suspect and looked no further. They didn’t look for similars because they didn’t need to. They had their suspects and were off to the races.”

“But how did the killer know to put Sharon Oglevy’s body in her ex-husband’s trunk? How would he even know where to find the car?”

“I don’t know, but that is off point. The point here is that these two killings are of such a strikingly similar pattern that there is just no way that either Brian Oglevy or Alonzo Winslow could be responsible. The other details will fall into place when the real investigation is begun. But for now, there is no doubt in my mind that you’re exposing something huge here. I mean, how do you know that these are the only two? There could be others.”

I nodded. I hadn’t thought about that possibility. Angela Cook’s online search had only come up with the Oglevy case. But two cases make a pattern. There still could be more.

“What will you do now?” I asked.

Schifino finally sat down. He rotated back and forth in his chair while considering the question.

“I’m going to draw up and file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. This is new information that is exculpatory and we’re going to put it into open court.”

“But I’m not supposed to have those files. You can’t cite them.”

“Sure I can. What I don’t have to do is say where I got them.”

I frowned. I would be the obvious source once my story was published.

“How long will it take for you to get this into court?”

“I have to do some research but I’ll file it by the end of the week.”

“That’s going to blow this up. I don’t know if I can be ready to publish my story by then.”

Schifino held his hands out wide and shook his head.

“My client’s been up at Ely for more than a year. Do you know that the conditions are so bad at that prison that on frequent occasion death row inmates drop their appeals and volunteer to be executed, just to get out of there? Every day he is up there is a day too long.”

“I know, I know. It’s just that…”

I stopped to think about things and there was no way I could justify keeping Brian Oglevy in prison even a day longer just so I could have time to plan and write the story. Schifino was right.

“Okay, then I want to know the minute you file it,” I said. “And I want to talk to your client.”

“No problem. You get the exclusive as soon as he walks.”

“No, not then. Now. I am going to write the story that springs him and Alonzo Winslow. I want to talk to him today. How do I do it?”

“He’s in maximum security and unless you’re on the list, you won’t get in to see him.”

“You can get me in, can’t you?”

Schifino was sitting behind the aircraft carrier he called a desk. He brought a hand up to his chin, thought about the question and then nodded.

“I can get you in. I need to fax a letter up to the prison that says you are an investigator working for me and that you are entitled access to Brian. I then give you a to-whom-it-may-concern letter that you carry with you, and that identifies you as working for me. If you work for an attorney, you don’t need a state license. You carry the letter with you and show it at the gate. It will get you in.”

“Technically, I don’t work for you. My paper has rules about reporters misrepresenting themselves.”

Schifino reached into his pocket and pulled out his cash. He handed a dollar across the desk to me. I reached across the murder scene photos to take it.

“There,” he said. “I just paid you a dollar. You work for me.”

That didn’t really cut it but I wasn’t too worried about it, considering my employment situation.

“I guess that will work,” I said. “How far is Ely?”

“Depending on your driving, it’s three to four hours north of here. It’s in the middle of nowhere and they call the road going up there the loneliest road in America. I don’t know if it’s because it leads to the prison or if it’s the landscape you cross, but it’s not called that without good reason. They have an airport. You could take a sand jumper up there.”

I assumed that a sand jumper was the same as a puddle jumper, a small prop plane. I shook my head. I had written too many stories about little planes going down. I didn’t fly in them unless I absolutely had to.

“I’ll drive. Write the letters. And I’m going to need copies of everything in your files.”

“I’ll work on the letters and get Agnes to start making copies. I’ll need copies of what you have for the habeas petition. We can say that’s what my dollar bought.”

I nodded and thought, Yeah, put officious Agnes to work for me. I would like that.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“Shoot.”

“Before I came in here and showed you all of this, did you think Brian Oglevy was guilty?”

Schifino cocked his head back as he thought it over.

“Not for publication?”

I shrugged. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was what I’d take.

“If that’s the only way you’ll answer.”

“Okay, for publication I can tell you that I knew Brian was innocent from day one. There was just no way he could’ve committed this horrible crime.”

“And not for publication?”

“I thought he was guilty as sin. It was the only way I could live with losing the case.”

After stopping at a 7-Eleven and buying a throwaway phone with a hundred minutes of call time on it, I headed north through the desert on Highway 93 toward Ely State Prison.

Highway 93 took me past Nellis Air Force Base and then connected with 50 North. It wasn’t too long before I began to see why it was known as the loneliest road in America. The empty desert ruled the horizon in every direction. Hard, chiseled mountain ranges, barren of any vegetation, rose and fell away as I drove. The only signs of civilization were the two-lane blacktop and the power lines carried over the ranges by iron stick figures that looked like they were giants from another planet.

The first calls I made with my new phone were to the credit-card companies, demanding to know why my cards were not working. With each call I got the same answer: I had reported the card stolen the night before, thereby temporarily canceling use of the account. I had gone online, answered all security questions correctly and reported the card stolen.

It didn’t matter that I told them I hadn’t reported the cards stolen. Someone else had, and that someone had known my account numbers as well as my home address, birth date, mother’s maiden name and Social Security number. I demanded that the accounts be reopened and the service reps gladly complied. The only catch was that new credit cards with new numbers had to be issued and sent to my home. That would take days and in the meantime I had no credit. I was being fucked with on a level I had never experienced before.

I next called my bank in Los Angeles and found a variation on the same scheme, but with a deeper impact. The good news was that my debit card still worked. The bad news was that there was no money in my savings and checking account to draw from. The night before, I had used the online banking service to combine all my money in the checking account and then did a debit transfer of the full amount to the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the form of a general donation. I was now broke. But the Make-A-Wish Foundation sure liked me.

I disconnected the call and screamed as loud as I could in the car. What was happening? There were stories in the paper all the time about stolen identities. But this time the victim was me and I was having trouble believing it.

At eleven I called the city desk and learned that the intrusion and destruction had moved up yet another notch. I got hold of Alan Prendergast and his voice was tight with nervous energy. I knew from experience that this made him repeat things.

“Where are you, where are you? We’ve got the ministers’ thing and I can’t find anybody.”

“I told you, I’m in Vegas. Where’s-”

“Vegas! Vegas? What are you doing in Vegas?”

“Didn’t you get my message? I sent you an e-mail yesterday before I left.”

“Didn’t get it. Yesterday you just disappeared, but I don’t care. I care about today. I care about right now. Tell me you are at the airport, Jack, and that you’ll be back in L.A. in an hour.”

“Actually, I’m not at the airport and I’m technically not in Vegas anymore. I’m on the loneliest road in America heading to the middle of nowhere. What are the ministers doing?”

“What else? They’re staging a big fucking rally in Rodia Gardens to protest the LAPD and the story is about to go national. But I’ve got you in Vegas and I haven’t heard from Cook. What are you doing there, Jack? What are you doing?”

“I told you in the e-mail you haven’t read. The story is-”

“I check e-mail regularly,” Prendergast said curtly. “I’ve got no e-mail from you. No e-mail.”

I was about to tell him he was wrong but thought about my credit cards. If somebody was able to crash my credit and wipe out my bank accounts, then maybe they crashed my e-mail as well.

“Listen, Prendo, something is going on. My credit cards are dead, my phone’s dead and now you’re telling me my e-mail never made it. Something is not right here. I-”

“For the last time, Jack. What are you doing in Nevada?”

I blew out my breath and looked out the side window. I saw the hardscrabble landscape that hadn’t changed in all the time mankind had ruled the planet, and which would remain unchanged long after mankind was gone.

“The story on Alonzo Winslow has changed,” I said. “I found out he didn’t do it.”

“He didn’t do it? He didn’t do it? You mean the murder of that girl? What are you talking about, Jack?”

“Yeah, the girl. He didn’t do it. He’s innocent, Alan, and I can prove it.”

“He confessed, Jack. I read it in your story.”

“Yeah, because that’s what the cops said. But I read the so-called confession and all he confessed to was stealing her car and her money. He didn’t know her body was in the trunk when he stole it.”

“Jack…”

“Listen, Prendo, I connected the murder to another murder in Vegas. It was the same thing. A woman strangled and put in a trunk. She was a dancer, too. There’s a guy in prison here for that one and he didn’t do it either. I’m heading up to see him right now. I’m going to have to report and write this all by Thursday. We have to go with it on Friday because that’s when it’s going to come out of the bag.”

There was a long silence.

“Prendo? You there?”

“I’m here, Jack. We need to talk about this.”

“I thought we were. Where is Angela? She should handle the ministers. She’s on the beat today.”

“If I knew where Angela was, I would have her going with a photographer to Rodia Gardens. She hasn’t come in yet. She told me last night before she went home that she would stop by Parker Center and make the morning rounds before coming in. Only, she hasn’t come in.”

“She’s probably out running down Denise Babbit. Did you call her?”

“Of course I called her. I called her. I’ve left messages but she hasn’t called in. She probably thinks you are here and is ignoring my calls.”

“Well, look, Prendo, this is bigger than Preacher Treacher’s rally, okay? Put a GA on that. This is huge. There’s a killer out there who has flown completely below the radar of the cops and the FBI and everybody else. There’s a lawyer here in Vegas who is going to file a motion by Friday that exposes the whole thing. We’ve got to beat him and everybody else to the punch. I’m going to go talk to this guy in prison and then head back. I don’t know when I’ll get in. It’ll be a long drive back to Vegas before I can catch the plane. Luckily, I think my return is still good. I bought it before somebody canceled my credit cards.”

Again I was met with silence.

“Prendo?”

“Look, Jack,” he said, a calmness in his voice for the first time in the conversation. “We both know the situation and what is going on here. You’re not going to be able to change anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About the layoff. If you think you can come up with a story that’s going to save your job, I don’t think that’s going to work.”

Now I was silent as the anger welled up in my throat.

“Jack, you there? You there?”

“Yeah, I’m here, Prendo, and my only response is, Fuck you. I’m not concocting this story, man. This is happening! And I’m out here in the middle of nowhere and am not sure who is screwing with me or why.”

“Okay, okay, Jack. Calm down. Just calm it down, okay? I am not suggesting that you-”

“The fuck you’re not! You more than suggested it. You just said it.”

“Look, I’m not going to respond if you are going to direct that sort of language at me. Can we talk in a civil manner, please? A civil manner.”

“You know, Prendo, I’ve got other calls to make. If you don’t want the story or you think this is a made-up story, then I’ll find somebody who will print it, okay? The last thing I expected was for my own ace to try to cut me off at the knees while I’m out here with my ass in the wind.”

“No, Jack, it’s not like that.”

“I think it is, Prendo. So fuck you, man. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up the phone and nearly threw it out the window. But then I remembered I didn’t have the replacement cash to spare. I drove in silence for a few minutes so I could compose myself. I had one more call to make and I wanted to sound cool and calm when I made it.

I looked out the windows and studied the bluish gray mountains. I found them to be beautiful in a primitive and stark way. They had been stepped and broken by glaciers ten million years before but they had survived and would reach forever toward the sun.

I pulled my inoperable phone from my pocket and opened up the contacts list. I got the number for the FBI in Los Angeles and punched it into the throwaway. When the main operator answered I asked to speak to Agent Rachel Walling. I was transferred and it took a while to go through, but once it rang it was answered immediately.

“Intelligence,” a male voice said.

“Let me speak to Rachel.”

I said it as calmly as possible. I didn’t ask for Agent Rachel Walling this time, because I didn’t want to be asked who I was and possibly give her the opportunity to deflect my call. My hope was that I sounded like an agent and my call would be put through.

“Agent Walling.”

It was her. It had been a few years since I had heard her voice over the phone but there was no doubt.

“Hello? This is Walling, can I help you?”

“Rachel, it’s me. Jack.”

Now it was her turn to be caught in silence.

“How are you doing?”

“Why are you calling me, Jack? We agreed that it would be better that we not talk.”

“I know… but I need your help. I’m in trouble, Rachel.”

“And you’re expecting me to help you? What kind of trouble?”

A passing car blew past me going a hundred, at least, and making me feel like I was standing still.

“It’s sort of a long story. I’m in Nevada. In the desert. I’m chasing a story and there’s a killer out there nobody knows about. I need somebody to believe me and to help me.”

“Jack, I’m the wrong person and you know it. I can’t help you. And I’m in the middle of something here. I have to go.”

“Rachel, don’t hang up! Please…”

She didn’t answer at first, but she didn’t hang up. I waited.

“Jack… you sound frazzled. What is going on with you?”

“I don’t know. Somebody’s messing with me. My phone, my e-mail, my bank accounts-I’m driving through the middle of the desert and I don’t even have a credit card that works.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Ely, to talk to somebody.”

“The prison?”

“That’s right.”

“What, somebody called you up and said he was innocent and you come running, hoping to prove the real cops are wrong again?”

“No, nothing like that. Look, Rachel, this guy is strangling women and stuffing them into the trunks of cars. He does horrible things to them and he’s been getting away with it for at least two years.”

“Jack, I’ve read your stories about the girl in the trunk. It was a gangbanger and he confessed.”

I got an unexpected thrill from knowing she was reading my stories. But it wasn’t helping me to convince her.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper, Rachel. I’m getting to the truth now and I need someone-somebody in authority-to step in and-”

“You know I’m not in Behavioral anymore. Why call me?”

“Because I can trust you.”

That brought a long moment of silence. I refused to break first.

“How can you say that?” she finally said. “We haven’t seen each other in a long, long time.”

“Doesn’t matter. After what we went through back then, I’ll always trust you, Rachel. And I know you could help me now… and maybe make up for some things yourself.”

She scoffed at that.

“What are you talking about? No-wait, don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter. Please don’t call me again, Jack. The bottom line is, I can’t help you. So good luck and be careful. Be safe.”

She hung up the phone.

I held it to my ear for nearly a minute after she was gone. I guess I was hoping that she’d change her mind, pick up the phone and call me back. But that didn’t happen and after a while I dropped the phone into the cup holder between the seats. I had no more calls to make.

Up ahead the car that had passed me disappeared over the next ridgeline. I felt like I had been left all alone on the surface of the moon.

As with most people who pass through the gates of Ely State Prison, my luck did not change for the better upon arrival at my destination. I was allowed in through the attorney/investigator entrance. I clutched the introduction letter William Schifino had written for me and showed it to the watch captain. I was placed in a holding room and waited for twenty minutes for Brian Oglevy to be delivered to me. But when the door opened, it was the watch captain who entered. No Brian Oglevy.

“Mr. McEvoy,” the captain said, pronouncing my name wrong. “I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to do this today.”

I suddenly thought that I had been exposed as a fraud. That they knew I was a reporter working on a story and not an investigator for a defense attorney.

“What do you mean? It was all set up. I have the letter from the lawyer. You saw it. He also faxed you a letter saying I was coming.”

“Yeah, we got the fax and I was prepared to carry through but the man you want to see is unavailable at this time. You come back tomorrow and you can have your visit.”

I shook my head angrily. All of the problems of the day were about to boil over and this prison captain was going to get burned.

“Look, I just drove four hours from Vegas to do this interview. You’re telling me to turn around and go back and then do the whole thing again tomorrow? I’m not go-”

“I’m not telling you to go back to Vegas. I was you, I’d just go into town and stay at the Hotel Nevada. It ain’t a bad place. They got a gaming hall and a hoppin’ bar on most nights. You put up there and get back in here tomorrow morning and I’ll have your man all ready for you. I can promise you that.”

I shook my head, feeling impotent about everything. I had no choice here.

“Nine o’clock,” I said. “And you’ll be here?”

“I’ll be here to personally set it up.”

“Can you tell me why I can’t see him today?”

“No, I can’t. It’s a security issue.”

I shook my head in frustration one final time.

“Thank you, Captain. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“We’ll be here.”

After getting back to my rental, I plugged the Hotel Nevada in Ely into the GPS and followed instructions until I got there in thirty minutes. I pulled the car into the parking lot and emptied my pockets before deciding to go in. I had $248 in cash. I knew I had to budget at least $75 for gas to get back to the airport in Vegas. I could eat cheap until I got home but would need another $40 for the cab ride from the airport to my house. So I calculated I had about a hundred bucks for the hotel. Looking up at its tired six floors, I figured that wasn’t going to be a problem. I got out, grabbed my carry-on bag and went inside.

I took a forty-five-dollar-a-night room on the fourth floor. The room was neat and clean and the bed was reasonably comfortable. It was only four P.M., too early to put the remainder of my fortune toward alcohol. So I pulled out my throwaway phone and started eating into my minutes. I first called Angela Cook, trying both her cell and desk line and getting no answer on either. I left the same message twice, then swallowed my pride and called Alan Prendergast back. I apologized for my outburst earlier and my use of foul language. I tried to calmly explain what was happening and the pressure I was feeling. He responded monosyllabically and said he had a meeting to go to. I told him I would get him a budget line for the revised story if I could get online and he told me not to rush.

“Prendo, we’ve got to get this into Friday’s paper or everybody else will have it.”

“Look, I talked about this in the news meeting. We want to move cautiously. We’ve got you running around in the desert. We haven’t even heard from Angela and, frankly, we’re getting worried. She should have checked in. So what I want you to do is get back here as soon as you can and then we will all sit down and see what we’ve got.”

I could have gotten angry all over again about the way I was being treated but something more pressing had come through from him. Angela.

“You’ve gotten no message from her all day?”

“Not a one. I sent a reporter to her apartment to see if she was there but there was no answer. We don’t know where she is.”

“This ever happen with her before?”

“She’s called in sick a few times very late in the day. Probably hung over or something. But at least she called in. Not this time, though.”

“Well, listen. If anybody hears from her, let me know, okay?”

“You got it, Jack.”

“Okay, Prendo. We’ll talk when I get back.”

“Got dimes?” Prendergast asked by way of a peace offering.

“A few,” I said. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

I closed the phone and thought about Angela being missing in action. I started wondering if everything was connected. My credit cards, nobody hearing from Angela. It seemed like a stretch because I couldn’t see where anything linked up.

I looked around my forty-five-dollar room. There was a little pamphlet on the side table that said the hotel was more than seventy-five years old and at one time was the tallest building in all of Nevada. That was back when copper mining had made Ely a boomtown and nobody had ever heard of Las Vegas. Those days were long past.

I booted up my laptop and used the hotel’s free WiFi to try to sign into my e-mail account. But my password was not accepted after three tries and I was locked out. No doubt whoever had canceled my credit cards and my cellular phone service had also changed my password.

“This is crazy,” I said out loud.

Unable to make outside contact, I concentrated on the internal. I opened a file on the laptop and pulled out my hard-copy notes. I started writing a narrative summarizing the moves of the day. It took me well over an hour to complete the project but when I was done I had thirty solid inches of story. And it was good story. Maybe my best in years.

After reading it over and making some editing improvements, I realized that the work had made me hungry. So I counted my money once again and left the room, making sure the door was locked behind me. I walked through the gaming hall and into a bar by the dollar slots. I ordered a beer and a steak sandwich and sat at a corner table with an open view of the mechanical money takers.

Looking around, I saw that the place had an aura of second-rate desperation, and the idea of another twelve hours there depressed me. But I wasn’t looking at a lot of choices. I was stuck and was going to stay stuck until the morning.

I checked my cash stash again and decided I had enough for another beer and a roll of quarters for the cheap slots. I set up in a row near the lobby entrance and started feeding my money into an electronic poker machine. I lost my first seven hands before hitting on a full house. I followed that with a flush and a straight. Pretty soon I was thinking about being able to afford a third beer.

Another gambler took a seat two machines over from me. I barely noticed him until he decided he liked the comfort of conversation while he lost his money.

“You here for the pussy?” he asked cheerily.

I looked over at him. He was about thirty and had large muttonchop sideburns. He wore a dusty cowboy hat over dirty blond hair, leather driving gloves and mirrored sunglasses, even though we were inside.

“Excuse me?”

“Supposed to be a couple brothels outside of town. I was wondering which one’s got the best-looking pussy. I just blew in on a stretch from Salt Lake.”

“I wouldn’t know, man.”

I went back to my machine and tried to concentrate on what to hold and what to drop. I had the ace, three, four and nine of spades along with the ace of hearts. Do I go for the flush or stay conservative, take the pair and hope for a third ace or another pair?

“Birds in hand, man,” said Sideburns.

I looked over at him and he nodded as if to say no charge for the sage advice. I could see the reflection of my screen in his mirrored glasses. All I needed was somebody coaching me on quarter poker. I held the spades, dropped the ace of hearts and hit the draw button. The machine god delivered. I got the jack of spades and a seven-to-one payoff on the flush. Too bad I was only betting quarters.

I hit the cash-out button and listened as a whopping fourteen dollars in quarters dropped into the tin tray. I scooped it into a plastic change cup and got up, leaving Sideburns behind.

I took my quarters to the cage and asked to cash out. I no longer had an appetite for gambling with small change. I was going to invest my winnings in two more beers and take them back to my room. There was more writing I could be doing, as well as preparing for the next morning’s interview. I was going to talk to a man who’d been in prison for more than a year for a murder I was convinced he hadn’t committed. It was going to be a wonderful day, the goddamn start of every journalist’s dream to free an innocent man from an unjust imprisonment.

While waiting for the elevator in the lobby I carried the bottles down by my side in case I was breaking some sort of house rule. I stepped in, pushed the button and moved to the back corner. The doors started to come together but then a gloved hand poked in and hit the infrared beam and the doors reopened.

My pal Sideburns stepped in. He raised a finger to push a button but then pulled it back.

“Hey, we’ve got the same floor,” he said.

“Wonderful,” I said.

He went to the opposite corner. I knew he was going to say something and there was no place for me to go. I just waited for it and I wasn’t disappointed.

“Hey, buddy, I didn’t mean to mess up your mojo down there. My ex-wife used to say I talked too much. Maybe that’s why she’s my ex-wife.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I have to get some work done anyway.”

“So you’re here on work, huh? What kind of business would take you to this godforsaken part of the world?”

Here we go again, I thought. The elevator was moving so slowly that it would’ve been faster taking the stairs.

“I have an appointment tomorrow at the prison.”

“Gotcha. You a lawyer for one of them guys?”

“No. Journalist.”

“Hmm, a writer, huh? Well, good luck. At least you’ll get to go home after, not like them other fellas in there.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”

I moved toward the door as we reached the fourth floor, a clear signal that I was finished with the conversation and wanted to get to my room. The elevator stopped moving and it seemed an interminable amount of time before the doors finally began to open.

“Have a good night,” I said.

I stepped quickly out of the elevator and to the left. My room was the third door down.

“You, too, partner,” Sideburns called after me.

I had to switch the two beer bottles to my other hand to get my room key out. As I stood in front of the door, pulling it out of my pocket, I saw Sideburns coming down the hallway toward me. I turned and looked to my right. There were only three more rooms going down and then the exit to the stairwell. I had a bad feeling that this guy would eventually come knocking on my door during the night, wanting to go down for a beer or out to get some pussy. The first thing I planned to do was pack up, call the desk and change my room. He didn’t know my name and wouldn’t be able to find me.

I finally got the key into the lock and pushed the door open. I looked back at Sideburns and gave him a final nod. His face broke into a strange smile as he got closer.

“Hi, Jack,” a voice said from inside my room.

I abruptly turned to see a woman getting up from the chair by the window in my room. And I immediately recognized her as Rachel Walling. She had an all-business look on her face. I felt the presence of Sideburns go by my back on his way to his room.

“Rachel?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Why don’t you come in and close the door?”

Still stunned by the surprise, I did as instructed. I closed the door behind me. From out in the hallway I heard another door close loudly. Sideburns had entered his room.

Cautiously, I stepped farther into my room.

“How’d you get in here?”

“Just sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Twelve years earlier I’d had a short, intense and, some would say, improper relationship with Rachel Walling. While I had seen photos of her in the papers a few years ago when she helped the LAPD run down and kill a wanted man in Echo Park, I had not been in her presence since we had sat in a hearing room nearly a decade earlier. Still, not many days went by in those ten years that I didn’t think about her. She was one reason-perhaps the biggest reason-that I have always considered that time the high point of my life.

She showed little wear and tear from the years that had passed, even though I knew it had been a tough time. She paid for her relationship with me with a five-year stint in a one-person office in South Dakota. She went from profiling and chasing serial killers to investigating bar stabbings on Indian reservations.

But she had climbed out of that pit and had been posted in L.A. for the past five years, working for some sort of a secretive intelligence unit. I had called her when I’d found out, gotten through to her but been rebuffed. Since then I had kept tabs on her, when I could, from afar. And now she was standing in front of me in my hotel room in the middle of nowhere. It was strange, sometimes, how life worked out.

My surprise over her appearance aside, I couldn’t stop staring and smiling at her. She maintained the professional front, but I could see her eyes holding on me. It wasn’t very often you got to be this close to a former lover of so long ago.

“Who was that you were with?” she asked. “Are you with a photographer on this story?”

I turned and looked back at the doorway.

“No, I’m by myself. And I don’t know who that was. Just some guy who’d been talking to me downstairs in the gambling hall. He went to his room.”

She abruptly walked past me, opened the door and looked both ways in the hall before coming back into the room and closing the door.

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really talking to him.”

“Which room is he in?”

“I don’t know that either. What’s going on? How come you’re in my room?”

I pointed to the bed. My laptop was open and my printouts of notes, the copies of the case files I had gotten from Schifino and Meyer as well as the printouts from Angela Cook’s online search were fanned across it. The only thing missing from the spread was the transcript of the Winslow interrogation, and that was only because it had been too heavy to take with me.

I hadn’t left it all on the bed like that.

“And were you going through my stuff? Rachel, I asked you for help. I didn’t ask you to break into my room and-”

“Look, just sit down, would you?”

The room had only one chair, the one she had been waiting in. I sat on the bed, closing my laptop sullenly and gathering the paperwork into one stack. She remained standing.

“Okay, I showed my creds and asked the manager to let me in. I told him your safety might be in jeopardy.”

I shook my head in confusion.

“What are you talking about? Nobody even knows I’m here.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You told me you were going to the prison up here. Who else did you tell? Who else knows?”

“I don’t know. I told my editor and there’s a lawyer down in Vegas who knows. That’s it.”

She nodded.

“William Schifino. Yes, I talked to him.”

“You talked to him? Why? What is going on here, Rachel?”

She nodded again, but this time not in agreement. She nodded because she knew she had to tell me what was going on, even if it was against the FBI creed. She pulled the chair over to the middle of the room and sat down facing me.

“Okay, when you called me today, you weren’t making the most sense, Jack. I guess you are a better writer than a teller of stories. Anyway, of all that you told me, the part that stuck with me was what you said about your credit cards and bank accounts and your phone and e-mail. I know I told you I couldn’t help you but after I hung up, I started thinking about that and I got concerned.”

“Why?”

“Because you were looking at all of that like it was an inconvenience. Like a big coincidence, that it just happened to be going on while you were on the road working on this unrelated story about this supposed killer.”

“There’s nothing supposed about this guy. But are you saying it could be related? I thought about this but there’s no way. The guy I am trying to chase down would have no idea that I’m even out here and on to him.”

“Don’t be so sure about that, Jack. It is a classic hunting tactic. Separate and isolate your target and then move in for the kill. In today’s society, separating and isolating someone would entail getting them away from their comfort zone-the environment they know-and then eliminating their ability to connect. Cell phone, Internet, credit cards, money.”

She ticked them off on her fingers.

“But how could this guy know about me? I didn’t even know about him until last night. Look, Rachel, it’s great to see you and I hope you stick around tonight. I want you to be here, but I’m not getting this. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the concern-in fact, how did you get here so damn quick?”

“I took an FBI jet to Nellis and had them jump me up here in a chopper.”

“Jesus! Why didn’t you just call me back?”

“Because I couldn’t. When you called me, it was transferred to the off-site location where I work. There’s no caller ID on those transfers. I didn’t have your number and I knew you were probably on a throw-away line.”

“So what’s the bureau brass going to say when they find out you dropped everything and hopped on a plane to save me? Didn’t you learn anything in South Dakota?”

She waved the concern away. Something about the gesture reminded me of our first meeting. It happened to have also been in a hotel room. She had driven my face down hard into the bed and then handcuffed and arrested me. It wasn’t love at first sight.

“There’s an inmate in Ely that has been on my interview list for four months,” she said. “Officially, I came to interview him.”

“You mean like he’s a terrorist? Is that what your unit does?”

“Jack, I can’t talk to you about that side of my work. But I can tell you how easy it was to find you and why I know I wasn’t the only one tracking you.”

She froze me with that word. Tracking. It conjured bad things in my imagination.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.”

“When you called me today you told me you were going to Ely and I knew that had to be to interview a prisoner. So when I got concerned and decided to do something about it, I called Ely and asked if you were there and I was told you just left. I spoke to a Captain Henry there and he said your interview was put off until tomorrow morning. He said he recommended you go into town and stay at the Nevada.”

“Yeah, Captain Henry. I was dealing with him.”

“Yeah, well, I asked him why your interview was postponed and he told me that your guy, Brian Oglevy, was in lockdown because there was a threat against him.”

“What threat?”

“Hold on, I’m getting to it. The warden got an e-mail today with a message that said the AB was planning to hit Oglevy today. So as a precaution they put him in lockdown.”

“Oh, come on, they took that seriously? The Aryan Brotherhood? Don’t they threaten everybody who isn’t a member? Isn’t Oglevy a Jewish name, too?”

“They took it seriously because the e-mail came from the warden’s own secretary. Only she didn’t write it. It was written anonymously by someone who had gained access to her state prison systems account. A hacker. It could have been someone inside or someone from the outside. It didn’t matter. They took it as a legitimate warning because of the way it was delivered. They put Oglevy in lockdown, you didn’t get to see him and you were sent to spend the night here. Alone, in unfamiliar surroundings.”

“Okay, what else? This is still a stretch.”

She was beginning to convince me but I was acting skeptical to get her to tell me more.

“I asked Captain Henry if anybody else had called and asked about you. He said the lawyer you were working for, William Schifino, called to check on you and he was told the same thing, that the interview was delayed and you were probably spending the night at the Nevada.”

“Okay.”

“I called William Schifino. He said he never made that call.”

I stared at her for a long moment as a cold finger went down my spine.

“I asked Schifino if anyone besides me had called about you and he told me he had gotten one call earlier. It was from someone who said he was your editor-used the name Prendergast-and that he was worried about you and wanted to know if you had come to see Schifino. Schifino said you had come by and that you were on your way up to the prison in Ely.”

I knew my editor could not have made that call because when I had called Prendergast, he had not gotten my e-mail and had no idea I had gone to Las Vegas. Rachel was right. Someone had been tracking me and doing a good job of it.

My mind flashed on thoughts of Sideburns and riding up in the elevator with him, then of him following me down the hallway to my room.

What if he hadn’t heard Rachel’s voice? Would he have walked on by or would he have pushed in behind me?

Rachel got up and walked over to the room’s phone. She dialed the operator and asked for the manager. She was on hold for a few moments before her call was taken.

“Yes, it’s Agent Walling. I’m still in room four ten and I’ve located Mr. McEvoy and he’s safe. I am now wondering if you can tell me if there are any guests in the next three rooms going down the hall. I think that would be four eleven, twelve and thirteen.”

She waited and listened and then thanked the manager.

“One last question,” she said. “There is a door marked exit at the end of the hall. I’m assuming those are stairs. Where do they go?”

She listened, thanked him again and then hung up.

“There’s nobody registered in those rooms. The stairs go down to the parking lot.”

“You think that guy with the sideburns was him?”

She sat back down.

“Possibly.”

I thought about his wraparound sunglasses, the driving gloves and the cowboy hat. The bushy sideburns covered most of the rest of his face and drew the eye away from any other distinguishing features. I realized that if I had to describe the man who had followed me, I would only be able to remember the hat, hair, gloves, sunglasses and sideburns-the throwaway or changeable features of a disguise.

“Jesus! I can’t believe how stupid I was. How? How did this guy find out about me and then actually find me? We’re talking about less than twenty-four hours and he’s sitting next to me at the slots.”

“Let’s go down and you show me what machine he was at. We might be able to pull prints.”

I shook my head.

“Forget it. He was wearing driving gloves. In fact, even the ceiling cameras down there won’t help you. He was wearing a cowboy hat, sunglasses-his whole getup was a disguise.”

“We’ll pull the video anyway. Maybe there will be something that will help us.”

“I doubt it.”

I shook my head again, more to myself than to Rachel.

“He got right next to me.”

“That trick with the prison secretary’s e-mail shows he has a certain skill set. I think it would be wise to consider your e-mail accounts to be breached at this point.”

“But that doesn’t explain how he knew about me in the first place. In order for him to breach my e-mail, he had to know about me.”

I slapped the bed in annoyance and nodded my head.

“Okay, I don’t know how he knew about me, but I did send e-mails last night. To both my editor and my partner on the story, telling them that the story was changing and that I was following a lead to Vegas. I talked to my editor today and he said he never got it.”

Rachel nodded knowingly.

“Destroying outgoing communications. That would fall under isolation of the target. Did your partner get his?”

“It’s a her and I don’t know if she got it because she’s not answering her phone or her e-mail and she didn’t-”

I stopped in my verbal tracks and looked at Rachel.

“What?”

“She didn’t show up for work today. She didn’t call in and nobody could reach her. They even sent somebody to her apartment but they got no answer.”

Rachel abruptly stood up.

“We’ve got to go back to L.A., Jack. The chopper’s waiting.”

“What about my interview? And you said you were going to pull the video from downstairs.”

“What about your partner? The interview and video can wait till later.”

Embarrassed, I nodded and got off the bed. It was time to go.

I had no idea where Angela Cook lived. I told Rachel what I did know about her, including her odd fixation with the Poet case, and that I’d heard she had a blog but had never read it. Rachel transmitted all the information to an agent in L.A. before we boarded the military chopper and headed south toward Nellis Air Force Base.

On the flight there we wore headsets, which cut down on the engine noise but didn’t allow for conversation that wasn’t in sign language. Rachel took my files and spent the hour with them. I watched her making comparisons between the crime scene and autopsy reports of Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy. She worked with a look of complete concentration on her face and took notes on a legal pad she’d pulled out of her own bag. She spent a lot of time looking at the horrible photos of the dead women, taken both at the crime scene and on the autopsy table.

For the most part I sat in my straight-back seat and racked my brain, trying to put together an explanation for how all of this could have happened so fast. More specifically, how this killer could have started hunting me when I had barely started hunting him. By the time we landed at Nellis, I thought I had something and was waiting for the opportunity to tell Rachel.

We immediately transferred to a waiting jet on which we were the only passengers. We sat across from each other, and the pilot informed Rachel that there was a call holding for her on the onboard telephone. We strapped in, she picked up the phone and the jet immediately started taxiing out to the runway. On the overhead the pilot told us we would be on the ground in L.A. in an hour. Nothing like the power and might of the federal government, I thought. This was the way to travel-except for one thing. It was a small plane and I didn’t fly small planes.

Rachel mostly listened to her caller, then asked a few questions and finally hung up.

“Angela Cook was not at her home,” she said. “They can’t find her.”

I didn’t respond. A sharp stab of fear and dread for Angela worked its way up under my ribs. This didn’t ease any as the jet took off, rising at a steeper angle than I was used to with commercial airliners. I almost tore the armrest off with my fingernails. After we were safely up I finally spoke.

“Rachel, I think I know how this guy could’ve found us so quickly-Angela, at least.”

“Tell me.”

“No, you first. Tell me what you found in the files.”

“Jack, don’t be so petty. This has become a little bit larger than a newspaper story.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t go first. It’s also larger than the FBI’s penchant for taking information but not giving anything back in return.”

She shook off the barb.

“Fine, I’ll start. But first let me commend you, Jack. From what I have read about these cases, I would say there is absolutely no doubt that they are connected by a single killer. The same man is responsible for both. But he escaped notice because in each case an alternate suspect came to light quickly and the local authorities proceeded with blinders on. In each case, they had their man from the beginning and didn’t look into other possibilities. Except of course in the Babbit case, their man was a boy.”

I leaned forward, beaming with confidence after her compliment.

“And he never confessed like they put out to the press,” I said. “I have the transcript back at my office. Nine-hour interrogation and the kid never confessed. He said he stole her car and her money, but the body was already in the trunk. He never said he killed her.”

Rachel nodded.

“I assumed that. So what I was doing with the material you have here was profiling the two killings. Looking for a signature.”

“The signature’s obvious. He likes strangling women with plastic bags.”

“Technically they weren’t strangled. They were asphyxiated. Suffocated. There’s a difference.”

“Okay.”

“There is something very familiar about the use of the plastic bag and the cord around the neck, but I was actually looking for something a little less obvious than the surface signature. I was also looking for connections or similarities between the women. If we find what connects them we’ll find the killer.”

“They were both strippers.”

“That’s part of it but a little broad. And, technically, one was a stripper and one was an exotic performer. There is a slight difference.”

“Whatever. They both showed their naked bodies off for a living. Is that the only connection you found?”

“Well, as you must have noticed, they were very similar in physical makeup. In fact, the difference in weight was only three pounds and the difference in height was half an inch. Facial structure and hair was also alike. A victim’s body type is a key component in terms of what makes them chosen. An opportunistic killer takes what comes along. But when you see two victims like this with exactly the same body type, it tells us this is a predator who is patient, who chooses.”

It looked like she had more to say but stopped. I waited but she didn’t continue.

“What?” I said. “You know more than you’re saying.”

She dropped the hesitation.

“When I was in Behavioral it was in the early days. The profilers often sat around and talked about the correlation between the predators we hunted and the predators in the wild. You’d be surprised how similar a serial killer can be to a leopard or a jackal. And the same could be said for victims. In fact, when it came to body types we often assigned victims animal types. These two women we would have called giraffes. They were tall and long-legged. Our predator has a taste for giraffes.”

I wanted to write some of this down to use later but I was afraid that any obvious recording of her interpretation of the files would cause her to shut down the exposition. So I tried not to even move.

“There’s something else,” she said. “At this point this is purely conjecture on my part. But both autopsies ascribe marks on each of the victims’ legs to ligature. I think that might be wrong.”

“Why?”

“Let me show you something.”

I finally moved. We were in seats that faced each other. I unbuckled and moved to the seat next to her. She went through the files and pulled several of the copies of photos from the crime scenes and the autopsies.

“Okay, you see the marks left above and below the knees here and here and here?”

“Yeah, like they were tied up.”

“Not quite.”

She used a clear polished fingernail to trace the markings on the victims as she explained.

“The marks are too symmetrical to be from traditional bindings. Plus, if these were ligature marks we would see them around the ankles. If you were going to tie someone up to control them or to prevent escape, you would tie their ankles. Yet we have no ligature marks in these areas. The wrists, yes, but not on the ankles.”

She was right. I just hadn’t seen it until she explained it.

“So what made those marks on the legs?”

“Well, I can’t say for sure, but when I was in Behavioral, we came upon new paraphilias on almost every case. We started categorizing them.”

“You’re talking about sexual perversions?”

“Well, we didn’t call them that.”

“Why, you had to be politically correct around serial killers?”

“It may be very nuanced, but there is a difference between being perverted and abnormal. We call the behaviors paraphilias.”

“Okay, and these marks, they’re part of a paraphilia?”

“They could be. I think they are marks left by straps.”

“Straps from what?”

“Leg braces.”

I almost laughed.

“You’ve got to be kidding. People get off on leg braces?”

Rachel nodded.

“It even has a name. It’s called abasiophilia. A psychosexual fascination with leg braces. Yes, people get off on it. There are even websites and chat rooms dedicated to it. They call them irons and calipers. Women who wear braces are sometimes called iron maidens.”

I was reminded by how thoroughly intoxicating Rachel’s skill as a profiler had been when we were chasing the Poet. She had been dead-on about the case in many ways. Damn near prescient. And I had been captivated by her ability to take small pieces of information and obscure details and then draw telling conclusions. She was doing it again and I was along for the ride.

“And you had a case with this?”

“Yes, we had a case in Louisiana. A man abducted a woman off a bus bench and held her for a week in a fishing shack out in a bayou. She managed to escape and make her way through the swamp. She was lucky because the four women he grabbed before her didn’t escape. We found their partial remains in the swamp.”

“And it was a basophilia case?”

“Abasiophilia,” she corrected. “Yes, the woman who escaped told us the subject made her wear leg braces that strapped around the legs and had side irons and joints running from her ankles to her hips and several leather straps.”

“This is so creepy,” I said. “Not that there is anything like a normal serial killer, but leg braces? Where does an addiction like this come from?”

“It’s unknown. But most paraphilias are embedded in early childhood. A paraphilia is like a recipe for an individual’s sexual fulfillment. It’s what they need to get off. Why someone would need to wear leg braces or have their partner wear them is anybody’s guess, but it starts young. That is a given.”

“Do you think the guy from your case back then could be-”

“No, the man who committed those murders in Louisiana was put to death. I witnessed it. And right up to the end, he never spoke a word to us about any of it.”

“Well, I guess that gives him a perfect alibi for this.”

I smiled but she didn’t smile back. I moved on.

“These braces, are they hard to find?”

“They are bought and sold over the Internet every day. They can be expensive, with all kinds of gadgetry and straps. Next time you’re on Google, plug in abasiophilia and see what you get. We’re talking about the dark side of the Internet, Jack. It’s the great meeting house, where people of like interests come together. You may think your secret desires make you a freak, and then you get on the Internet and find community and acceptance.”

As she said it I realized there was a story in this. Something separate from the trunk murders case. Maybe even a book. I put the idea aside for later and went back to the case at hand.

“So what do you think the killer does? He makes them put on leg braces and then he rapes them? Does the suffocation mean anything?”

“Every detail means something, Jack. You just need to know how to read it. The scene he creates reflects his paraphilia. More than likely this is not about killing the women. It’s about creating a psychosexual scene that fulfills a fantasy. The women are killed afterward because he is simply finished with them and he can’t have the threat of them living to tell about him. My guess is that he may even apologize to them when he pulls the bag over their head.”

“They both were dancers. Do you think he made them dance or something?”

“Again, it’s all conjecture at this point, but that could be part of it, yes. But my guess is that it’s about body type. Giraffes. Dancers by trade have thin muscular legs. If that is what he wanted, then he would look at dancers.”

I thought about the hours the two women spent with their killer. The stretch of hours between abduction and time of death. What happened during those hours? No matter what the answer, it added up to a horrible and terrifying end.

“You said something before about the bag being familiar somehow. Do you remember how?”

Rachel thought for a moment before answering.

“No, there’s just something about it. Some familiarity. Probably from another case but I can’t place it yet.”

“Will you put all of this through VICAP?”

“As soon as I get the chance.”

The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a computer data bank of the details of thousands of crimes. It could be used to find crimes of similar nature when the details of a new crime were entered.

“There’s something else that should be noted about the killer’s program,” Rachel said. “In both cases he left the bag and neck ligature in place on the victims but the limb constraints-whether braces or not-were removed.”

“Right. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know but it could mean a number of things. The women are obviously constrained in some way during their captivity. Whether it is through braces or otherwise, those are removed but the bag stays in place. This could be part of a statement, part of his signature. It might have a meaning we are not aware of yet.”

I nodded. I was impressed by her take.

“How long has it been since you worked in Behavioral Sciences?”

Rachel smiled but then I saw that what I had meant to be a compliment had made her wistful.

“A long time,” she said.

“Typical bureau politics and bullshit,” I said. “Take someone who is damn good at something and put them somewhere else.”

I needed to get her back on focus and away from the memory that her relationship with me had cost her the position she was best suited for.

“You think if we ever capture this guy we’ll be able to figure him out?”

“You never figure any of them out, Jack. You get hints, that’s all. The guy in Louisiana was raised in an orphanage in the fifties. There were a lot of kids in there who had contracted polio. A lot of them wore leg braces. Why that became the thing that got him off as an adult and led him down the road to serial murder is anybody’s guess. A lot of other boys were raised in that orphanage, and they didn’t become serial killers. Why one does is ultimately just guesswork.”

I turned and looked out the window. We were over the desert between L.A. and Vegas. There was only darkness out there.

“I guess it’s a sick world down there,” I said.

“It can be,” Rachel said.

We flew in silence for a few moments before I turned back to her.

“Are there any other connections between them?”

“I made a list of similarities as well as a list of dissimilar aspects of the cases. I want to study everything further, but for now the leg braces are the most significant to me. After that, you have the physical pattern of the women and the means of death. But there’s got to be a connection somewhere. A link between these two women.”

“We find it and we find him.”

“That’s right. And now it’s your turn, Jack. What did you put together?”

I nodded and quickly composed my thoughts.

“Well, there was something that wasn’t in the stuff Angela had found on the Internet. She only told me about it because there wasn’t anything to print out. She said that she found the Las Vegas stories and some of the old L.A. stories when she did an online search with the phrase trunk murder, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well, she told me that she also got a hit on a website called trunk murder dot com, but that when she went to it, there was nothing there. She clicked a button to enter and there was a sign that said it was under construction. So I was thinking, because you said this guy’s skill set included being able to do things on the Internet, that maybe-”

“Of course! It could have been an IP trap. He would be alert for anybody fishing around on the Internet for intel on trunk murders. He could then trace the IP back and find out who was looking. That would have led him to Angela and then to you.”

The jet started its descent, again at an angle that was much steeper than anything I had experienced on a commercial flight. I realized I was digging my fingernails into the armrest again.

“And he probably got a big thrill when he saw your name,” Rachel said.

I looked at her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your pedigree, Jack. You were the reporter who chased down the Poet. You wrote the book on it. Mr. Big Bestseller. You were on Larry King. These serial guys pay attention to all of that. They read these books. No, actually, they study these books.”

“That’s great to know. Maybe I can sign a copy of the book to him.”

“I’ll make a bet with you. When we get this guy, we’ll find a copy of your book in his possessions somewhere.”

“I hope not.”

“And I’ll make you another bet. Before we get this guy, he will make direct contact with you. He’ll call or e-mail or get to you in some way.”

“Why? Why would he risk it?”

“Because once it’s clear to him that he’s in the open-that we know about him-he will reach out for attention. They always do. They always make that mistake.”

“No bets, Rachel.”

The idea that I had or would somehow feed the warped psychology of this guy or anyone else wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about.

“I guess I don’t blame you,” Rachel said, picking up on my discomfort.

“But I appreciate that you said ‘when we get this guy’ instead of ‘if we get this guy.’ ”

She nodded.

“Oh, don’t worry, Jack. We’re going to get this guy.”

I turned and looked back out the window. I could see the carpet of lights as we crossed from the desert into civilization again. Civilization as we know it. There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren’t enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.

We landed at Van Nuys Airport and got into the car Rachel had left there earlier. She checked in by phone to see if there was anything new on Angela Cook and was told there wasn’t. She hung up and looked over at me.

“Where’s your car? At LAX?”

“No, I took a cab. It’s at home. In the garage.”

I don’t think any line so basic could have sounded so ominous. In the garage. I gave Rachel my address and we headed off.

It was almost midnight and traffic on the freeway was light. We took the 101 across the bottom of the San Fernando Valley and then down through the Cahuenga Pass. Rachel exited on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and headed west.

My house was on Curson a block south of Sunset. It was a nice neighborhood full of mostly small houses built for middle-class families that had long since been priced out of the neighborhood. I had a two-bedroom Craftsman with a separate single-car garage in the back. The backyard was so small, even a Chihuahua would have felt cramped. I had bought the place twelve years earlier with money from the sale of my book on the Poet. I split every check I got from the deal with my brother’s widow to help her raise and educate their daughter. It had been a while since I had seen a royalty check and even longer since I had seen my niece, but I had the house and the kid’s education to show for that time in my life. When I had gotten divorced, my wife made no claim on the house, since I had already owned it, and now I had only three years of mortgage payments before it was mine free and clear.

Rachel pulled in and drove down the driveway to the rear of the property. She parked but left the car’s lights on. They shone brightly on the closed garage door. We got out and approached slowly, like bomb techs moving toward a man in a dynamite vest.

“I never lock it,” I said. “I never keep anything in it worth stealing except for the car itself.”

“Then, do you lock the car?”

“No. Most of the time I forget.”

“What about this time?”

“I think I forgot.”

It was a pull-up garage door. I reached down and raised it and we stepped in. An automatic light went on above and we stared at the trunk of my BMW. I already had the key ready. I pushed the button and we heard the fump of the trunk lock releasing.

Rachel stepped forward without hesitation and raised the trunk lid.

Except for a bag of clothes I’d been meaning to drop at the Salvation Army, the trunk was empty.

Rachel had been holding her breath. I heard her slowly releasing it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought for sure…”

She slammed the trunk closed angrily.

“What, you’re upset that she’s not in there?” I asked.

“No, Jack, I’m upset because I’m being manipulated. He had me thinking in a certain way and that was my mistake. It won’t happen again. Come on, let’s check the house to be sure.”

Rachel went back and turned her lights off and then we went through the back door and into the kitchen. The house smelled musty but it always did when it was closed up. It didn’t help that there were overly ripe bananas in the fruit bowl on the counter. I led the way through, turning lights on as we went. The place looked unchanged from the way I had left it. Reasonably neat but with too many stacks of newspapers on tables and the floor next to the living room couch.

“Nice place,” Rachel said.

We checked the guest room, which I used as an office, and found nothing unusual. While Rachel moved on to the master bedroom I swung behind the desk and booted up my desktop computer. I had Internet access but still couldn’t get into my Times e-mail account. My password was rejected. I angrily shut down the computer and left the office, catching up to Rachel in my bedroom. The bed had been left unmade because I wasn’t expecting visitors. It was stuffy and I went to open a window while Rachel checked the closet.

“Why don’t you have this on a wall somewhere, Jack?” she asked.

I turned. She had discovered the framed print of the full-page ad that had run for my book in the New York Times. It had been in the closet for two years.

“It used to be in the office, but after ten years with nothing else to follow, it sort of started mocking me. So I put it in there.”

She nodded and stepped into the bathroom. I held my breath, not knowing what kind of sanitary condition it was in. I heard the shower curtain being slid open, then Rachel stepped back out into the bedroom.

“You ought to clean your bathtub, Jack. Who are all the women?”

“What?”

She pointed to the bureau, where there was a row of framed photos on little easels. I pointed as I went down the line.

“Niece, sister-in-law, mother, ex-wife.”

Rachel raised her eyebrows.

“ Ex-wife? You were able to get over me, then.”

She smiled and I smiled back.

“It didn’t last long. She was a reporter. When I first came to the Times we shared the cop beat. One thing led to another and we got married. Then it sort of went away. It had been a mistake. She works in the Washington bureau now and we’re still friends.”

I wanted to say more but something made me resist. Rachel turned and headed back to the hallway. I followed her into the living room. We stood there, looking at each other.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I’ll have to think on it. I should probably let you get some sleep. Are you going to be all right here?”

“Sure, why not? Besides, I’ve got a gun.”

“You have a gun? Jack, what are you doing with a gun?”

“How come the people with guns always question why citizens have guns? I got it after the Poet, you know?”

She nodded. She understood.

“Well, then, if you’re okay, I’ll leave you here with your gun and call you in the morning. Maybe one of us will have a new idea about Angela by then.”

I nodded and knew that, Angela aside, it was one of those moments. I could reach out for what I wanted or I could let it go like I had a long time before.

“What if I don’t want you to leave?” I asked.

She looked at me without speaking.

“What if I’ve never gotten over you?” I asked.

Her eyes dropped to the floor.

“Jack… ten years is a lifetime. We’re different people now.”

“Are we?”

She looked back at me and we held each other’s eyes for a long moment. I then stepped in close, put my hand on the back of her neck and pulled her into a long, hard kiss that she did not fight or push away from.

Her phone dropped out of her hand and clunked to the floor. We grabbed at each other in some sort of emotional desperation. There was nothing gentle about it. It was about wanting, craving. Nothing loving, yet it was all about love and the reckless willingness to cross the line for the sake of intimacy with another human being.

“Let’s go back to the bedroom,” I whispered against her cheek.

She smiled into my next kiss, then we somehow managed to get to my bedroom without taking our hands off one another. We urgently pulled our clothes off and made love on the bed. It was over before I could think about what we were doing and what it might mean. We then lay side by side on our backs, the knuckles of my left hand gently caressing her breast. Both of us breathing in long, deep strides.

“Uh-oh,” she finally said.

I smiled.

“You are so fired,” I said.

And she smiled, too.

“What about you? The Times has to have some kind of rule about sleeping with the enemy, doesn’t it?”

“What are you talking about, ‘the enemy’? Besides, they laid me off last week. I’ve got one more week there and then I’m history.”

She suddenly was up on her side and looking down at me with concerned eyes.

“What?”

“Yeah, I’m a victim of the Internet. I got downsized and they gave me two weeks to train Angela and clear out.”

“Oh, my God, that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t come up.”

“Why you?”

“Because I have a big salary and Angela doesn’t.”

“That’s so stupid.”

“You don’t have to convince me. But that’s how the newspaper business is run these days. It’s the same everywhere.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, probably sit in that office and write the novel I’ve been talking about for fifteen years. I think the bigger question is what are we going to do now, Rachel?”

She averted her eyes and started rubbing my chest.

“I hope this wasn’t a one-time thing,” I said. “I don’t want it to be.”

She didn’t respond for a long time.

“Me, neither,” she finally said.

But that was all.

“What are you thinking?” I asked. “You always seem to go off to dwell on something.”

She looked at me with a half smile.

“What, you’re the profiler now?”

“No, I just want to know what you’re thinking about.”

“To be honest, I was thinking about something a man I was with a couple years ago said. We’d, uh, had a relationship and it wasn’t going to… work. I had my own hang-ups and I knew he was still holding out for his ex-wife, even though she was ten thousand miles away. When we talked about it, he told me about the ‘ single-bullet theory.’ You know what that is?”

“You mean like with the assassination of Kennedy?”

She mock-punched me in the chest with a fist.

“No, I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody’s got one person out there. One bullet. And if you’re lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you’re shot through the heart, then there’s nobody else. No matter what happens-death, divorce, infidelity, whatever-nobody else can ever come close. That’s the single-bullet theory.”

She nodded. She believed it.

“What are you saying, that he was your bullet?”

She shook her head.

“No, I’m saying he wasn’t. He was too late. You see, I’d already been shot by someone else. Someone before him.”

I looked at her for a long moment, then pulled her down into a kiss. After a few moments she pulled back.

“But I should go. We should think about this and everything else.”

“Just stay here. Sleep with me. We’ll get up early tomorrow and both get to work on time.”

“No, I have to go home now or my husband will worry.”

I sat up like a bolt. She started laughing and slipped off the bed. She began getting dressed.

“That wasn’t funny,” I said.

“I think it was,” she insisted.

I climbed off the bed and started getting dressed, too. She kept laughing in a punch-drunk sort of way. Eventually, I was laughing too. I pulled my pants and shirt on first and then started hunting around the bed for my shoes and socks. I found them all except for one sock. I finally got down on my knees and looked for it under the end of the bed.

And that was when the laughter stopped.

Angela Cook’s dead eyes stared at me from under the bed. I involuntarily propelled myself back on the carpet, smashing my back into the bureau and making the lamp on it wobble and then fall to the floor with a crash.

“Jack?” Rachel yelled.

I pointed.

“Angela’s under the bed!”

Rachel came quickly around to me. She was only wearing her black panties and white blouse. She got down to look.

“Oh, my God!”

“I thought you checked under the bed!” I said excitedly. “When I came in the room I thought you’d already looked.”

“I thought you did while I was checking out the closet.”

She got on her hands and knees and looked up and down the under-side of the bed for a long moment before turning to look back at me.

“She looks like she’s been dead about a day. Suffocation with a plastic bag. She’s naked and completely wrapped in a clear plastic sheet. Like she’s ready to be transported. Or maybe it was to contain the smell of decay. The scene is quite diff-”

“Rachel, please, I knew her. Can you please not analyze everything right now?”

I leaned my head back against the bureau and looked up at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry, Jack. For her and you.”

“Can you tell, did he torture her or just…?”

“I can’t tell. But we need to call the LAPD.”

“I know.”

“This is what we’ll say. We’ll say I brought you home, we searched the place and we found her. The rest we leave out. Okay?”

“Fine. Okay. Whatever you say.”

“I have to get dressed.”

She stood up and I realized the woman I had just made love to had completely disappeared. She was all bureau now. She finished getting dressed, then bent over to study the top of the bed at a side angle. I watched her start to pick hairs off the pillows so they couldn’t be collected by the crime scene team that would soon descend on my house. The whole time I didn’t move. I could still see Angela’s face from where I sat and I had to adjust myself to the reality of the situation.

I barely knew Angela and probably didn’t even like her too much but she was far too young and had far too much life ahead to suddenly be dead. I had seen a lot of dead bodies in my time and I had written about a lot of murders, including the killing of my own brother. But I don’t think anything I had ever seen or written about before affected me like seeing Angela Cook’s face behind that plastic bag. Her head was tilted back, so that if she’d been standing she would’ve been looking upward at me. Her eyes were open and frightened, almost glowing at me from the darkness under the bed. It seemed as though she were disappearing into that darkness, being pulled down into it and looking up at the last light. And it was then that she had made one last desperate push for life. Her mouth was open in a final, terrible scream.

I felt like I was somehow intruding on something sacred by even looking at her.

“This isn’t going to work,” Rachel said. “We have to get rid of the sheets and pillows.”

I looked up at her. She started pulling the sheets off the bed and gathering them into a ball.

“Can’t we just tell them what happened? That we didn’t find her until after we-”

“Think, Jack. I admit something like that and I am the butt of every joke in the squad room for the next ten years. Not only that, I lose my job. I’m sorry but I don’t want that. We do it this way and they’ll just think the killer took the sheets.”

She balled everything up together.

“Well, maybe there’s evidence from the guy on the sheets.”

“That’s unlikely. He’s too careful and he’s never left anything before. If there was any evidence on these sheets he would have taken them himself. I doubt she was even killed on this bed. She was just wrapped up and hidden underneath it-for you to find.”

She said it so matter-of-factly. There was probably nothing in this world that surprised her or horrified her any longer.

“Come on, Jack. We have to move.”

She left the room, carrying the bedsheets and the pillows. I slowly got up then, found my missing sock behind a chair and carried my socks and shoes out to the living room. I was putting them on when I heard the back door close. Rachel came in empty-handed and I assumed she had stashed the pillows and sheets in the trunk of her car.

She picked her phone up off the floor. But instead of making a call she started pacing, head down and deep in thought.

“What are you doing?” I finally said. “Are you going to call?”

“Yes, I’m going to call. But before it turns crazy, I’m trying to figure out what he was doing. What was this guy’s plan here?”

“It’s obvious. He was going to pin Angela’s murder on me, but it was a stupid plan because it wasn’t going to work. I went to Vegas and I can prove it. The time of death will show I couldn’t have done this to Angela and that I was set up.”

Rachel shook her head.

“With suffocation it is very difficult to pinpoint exact time of death. Narrowing it to even a two-hour window could still put you in the picture.”

“So you’re saying my being on a plane or in Vegas is no alibi?”

“Not if they can’t pinpoint time of death to exactly when you were on that plane or already in Vegas. I think our guy is smart enough to realize that. It was part of his plan.”

I slowly nodded and felt a terrible fear start to rise in me. I realized I could end up like Alonzo Winslow and Brian Oglevy.

“But don’t worry, Jack. I won’t let them put you in jail.”

She finally raised her phone and made a call. I listened to her speak briefly to someone who was probably a supervisor. She didn’t say anything about me or the case or Nevada. She just said she had been involved in the discovery of a homicide and would shortly be interacting with the LAPD.

Next she called the LAPD, identified herself, gave my address and asked for a homicide team. She then gave her cell phone number and ended the call. She looked at me.

“What about you? If you need to call someone you better do it now. Once the detectives arrive they’re probably not going to let you use your phone.”

“Right.”

I pulled out my throwaway and called the city desk at the Times. I checked my watch and saw it was well past one. The paper had long been put to bed but I needed to inform someone of what was happening.

The night editor was an old veteran named Esteban Samuel. He was a survivor, having worked for the Times for nearly forty years and having avoided all the shake-ups and purges and changes of regime. He did it largely by keeping his head down and staying out of the way. He didn’t come to work until six P.M. each day and that was usually after the corporate cutters and editorial axmen like Kramer had gone home. Out of sight, out of mind. It worked.

“Sam, it’s Jack McEvoy.”

“Jack Mack! How you doing?”

“Not so well. I’ve got some bad news. Angela Cook has been murdered. An FBI agent and I just found her. I know the morning edition is closed but you might want to call whoever needs to be called or at least leave it on the overnote.”

The overnote was a list of notes, ideas and incomplete stories that Samuel put together at the end of his shift and then left for the morning editor.

“Oh, my God! How terrible! That poor, poor girl.”

“Yes, it’s awful.”

“What happened?”

“It’s related to the story we were working on. But I don’t know a whole lot. We’re waiting on the LAPD to show up now.”

“Where are you? Where did this happen?”

I knew he would get around to asking that.

“My house, Sam. I don’t know how much you know, but I went to Las Vegas last night and Angela went missing today. I came back tonight and an FBI agent escorted me home and we searched the house. We found her body under the bed.”

The whole thing sounded insane as I said it.

“Are you under arrest, Jack?” Samuel asked, his confusion clear in his voice.

“No, no. The killer is trying to set me up but the FBI knows what’s going on. Angela and I were onto this guy and somehow he found out. He killed Angela and then he tried to get me in Nevada but the FBI was there. Anyway, all of this will be in the story I write tomorrow. I’ll be in as soon as I clear this scene and I will write it for Friday’s paper. Okay? Make sure they know that.”

“Got it, Jack. I’ll make some calls and you stay in touch.”

If I can, I thought. I gave him the number of my throwaway and ended the call. Rachel was still pacing.

“That didn’t sound very convincing,” she said.

I shook my head.

“I know. I realized I sounded like a nut job as I was saying it. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Rachel. Nobody’s going to believe me.”

“They will, Jack. And I think I know what he was trying to do. It’s all coming together now.”

“Then, tell me. The cops will be here any second.”

Rachel finally sat down, taking the chair across the coffee table from me. She leaned forward to tell her story.

“You have to look at it from his point of view and then make some assumptions about his skills and location.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, he’s close. Our first two known victims were in L.A. and Las Vegas. Angela’s murder and his attempt to get to you were in L.A. and a remote part of Nevada. So my guess is that he lives in or is close to one of these places. He was able to react quickly and in a matter of hours get to both you and Angela.”

I nodded. It sounded right to me.

“Next, his technical skill. We know from his e-mail to the prison warden and from how he was able to attack you on multiple levels that his tech skill is quite high. So if we assume that he was able to breach your e-mail account, then we can also assume that he breached the entire L.A. Times data system. If he had free rein inside, then he would have been able to access home addresses for both you and Angela, right?”

“Sure. That information has got to be in there.”

“What about you being laid off? Would there be any e-mail or a data trail involving that?”

I nodded.

“I got a ton of e-mails about it. From friends, people at other papers, everywhere. I told a few people by e-mail, too. But what would it have to do with any of this?”

She nodded as though she was way ahead of me and my answer fit perfectly with what she already knew.

“Okay, so then what do we know? We know that somehow Angela or possibly you hit a trip wire and alerted him to your investigation.”

“Trunk murder dot com.”

“I will have it checked out as soon as I can. Maybe that was it and maybe it wasn’t. But somehow our guy was alerted. His response was to invade the Los Angeles Times and try to find out what you two were up to. We don’t know what Angela put in her e-mails but we know that you put your plan to go to Las Vegas last night into an e-mail. I am betting that our guy read it and a lot of your other e-mails and keyed his plan off of it.”

“We keep saying ‘our guy.’ We need a name for him.”

“In the bureau we would call him an unknown subject until we knew exactly who we were dealing with. An Unsub.”

I got up and looked through the curtains on the front window. The street was dark out there. No cops yet. I walked over to a wall switch and turned on the outside lights.

“Okay, Unsub, then,” I said. “What do you mean he keyed his plan off of my plan?”

“He needed to neutralize the threat. He knew that there was a good chance you had not confirmed your suspicions or talked to the authorities yet. Being a reporter, you would keep the story to yourself. This worked in his favor. But he still had to move quickly. He knew Angela was in L.A. and you were going to Vegas. I think he started in L.A., somehow grabbed Angela, and then killed her and set you up for it.”

I sat back down.

“Yeah, that’s obvious.”

“He then focused his attention on you. He went to Vegas, probably driving through the night or flying out this morning, and tracked you to Ely. It would not have been hard to do. I think he was the man who followed you in the hallway at the hotel. He was going to make his move against you in your room. He stopped when he heard my voice and that has sort of puzzled me until now.”

“Why?”

“Well, why did he abort the plan? Just because he heard you had company? This guy isn’t shy about killing people. What would it matter to him if he had to kill you and the woman he heard in your room?”

“So then, why did he abort?”

“Because the plan wasn’t to murder you and whoever you were with. The plan was for you to kill yourself.”

“Come on.”

“Think about it. It would be the best way for him to avoid detection. If you end up murdered in a hotel room in Ely, there is going to be an investigation that would lead to all of this unraveling. But if you were a suicide in a hotel room in Ely, then the investigation would go in a completely different direction.”

I thought about this for a few moments and saw where she was going with it.

“Reporter gets laid off, has the indignity of having to train his own replacement, and has few prospects for another job,” I said, reciting a litany of true facts. “He gets depressed and suicidal. Concocts a story about a serial killer running around two states as cover, then abducts and murders his young replacement. He then gives all his money to charity, cancels his credit cards and runs off to the middle of nowhere, where he kills himself in a hotel room.”

She was nodding the whole time I was running it down.

“What’s missing?” I asked. “How was he going to kill me and make it look like suicide?”

“You’d been drinking, right? You came into the room with two bottles of beer. I remember that.”

“Yeah, I’d only had two before that.”

“But it would help sell the scene. Empty bottles strewn around the hotel room. Cluttered room, cluttered mind, that sort of thing.”

“But beer wouldn’t kill me. How was he going to do it?”

“You already gave the answer earlier, Jack. You said you had a gun.”

Bang. It all came together. I stood up and headed toward my bedroom. I’d bought a.45 caliber Colt Government Series 70 twelve years earlier, after my encounter with the Poet. He was still out there at the time and I wanted some protection in case he came calling on me. I kept the weapon in a drawer next to my bed and only took it out once a year to go to the range.

Rachel followed me into the bedroom and watched me slide open the drawer. The gun was gone.

I turned back to Rachel.

“You saved my life, you know that? No doubt about that now.”

“I’m glad.”

“How would he know I owned a gun?”

“Is it registered?”

“Yes, but what, now you’re saying he can hack into the ATF computers? This is getting far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“Actually, no. If he tapped the prison computer, I don’t see why he couldn’t get into the gun registry. And that may be only one place where he could have gotten it. Back during the period when you bought it, you were interviewed by everybody from Larry King to the National Enquirer. Did you ever put it out there that you owned a gun?”

I shook my head.

“Unbelievable. I did. I said it in a few interviews. I was hoping the word would get out and it would deter a surprise visit from the Poet.”

“There you go.”

“But for the record, I never did an interview with the Enquirer. They did a story on me and the Poet without my cooperation.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, this guy now isn’t as smart as we think. There was one big flaw in his plan.”

“What was that?”

“I flew to Vegas. All baggage is screened. I never would have gotten the gun there.”

She nodded.

“Maybe not. But I think it is a widely accepted fact that the scanning process is not one hundred percent perfect. It would probably bother the investigators in Ely but not enough to make them change their conclusion. There are always loose ends in any investigation.”

“Can we go back out to the living room?”

Rachel headed out of the room and I followed, taking a glance back at the bed as I went through the door. In the living room, I dropped down on the couch. A lot had happened in the last thirty-six hours. I was getting fatigued but knew there would be no rest for the weary for a long time.

“I thought of something else. Schifino.”

“The lawyer in Vegas? What about him?”

“I went to him first and he knew everything. He could put the lie to my suicide.”

Rachel considered this for a moment and then nodded.

“That could’ve put him in danger. Maybe the plan was to kill you and then double back to Vegas and take him out, too. Then, when the chance was missed with you, there was no reason to hit Schifino. I’ll have the field office in Vegas make contact, anyway, and see about protection.”

“Are you going to have them go up to Ely and pull the video from the casino where I sat with this guy?”

“I’ll do that, too.”

Rachel’s phone rang and she answered immediately.

“It’s just me and the homeowner,” she said. “Jack McEvoy. He’s a reporter for the Times. The victim here was a reporter as well.”

She listened for a moment and said, “We’re coming out now.”

She closed the phone and told me the police were out front.

“They’ll feel more comfortable if we come out to meet them.”

We walked to the front door and Rachel opened it.

“Keep your hands in sight,” Rachel said to me.

She walked out, holding her credentials high. There were two patrol cars and a detective cruiser in the street out front. Four uniformed officers and two detectives were waiting on the driveway. The uniformed officers pointed their flashlights at us.

When we got closer I recognized the two detectives from Hollywood Division. They held their guns down at their sides and looked ready to use them if I gave them the right reason.

I didn’t.

I didn’t get to the Times until shortly before noon on Thursday. The place was bustling with activity. A lot of reporters and editors were moving about the newsroom like bees in a hive. I knew it was all because of Angela and what had happened. It’s not every day that you come to work and find out your colleague has been brutally murdered.

And that another colleague is somehow involved.

Dorothy Fowler, the city editor, was the first to spot me as I came in from the stairwell. She jumped from her desk at the raft and came directly toward me.

“Jack, my office, please.”

She changed directions and headed to the wall of glass. I followed, knowing every eye in the newsroom was on me once again. No longer because I was the one that got pink-slipped by the axman. They watched me now because I was the one who might have gotten Angela Cook killed.

We entered her small office and she told me to close the door. I did as instructed and then took the seat directly across the desk from her.

“What happened with the police?” she asked.

No howyadoin’, are you all right or sorry about Angela. Right down to business and I liked it that way.

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “I spent about eight hours being questioned. First by the LAPD and the FBI, then the Santa Monica detectives joined in. They gave me a break for about an hour and then I had to tell the whole story again to the Las Vegas police, who flew in just to talk to me. After that, they let me go but wouldn’t let me go back to my house because it’s still an active crime scene. So I had them take me to the Kyoto Grand, where I checked into a room-and put it on the Times’ tab, since I don’t have a working credit card-took a shower and then walked over here.”

The Kyoto was a block away and the Times used it to put up out-of-town reporters, new hires and job candidates when needed.

“That’s fine,” Fowler said. “What did you tell the police?”

“Basically, I told them what I tried to tell Prendo yesterday. I uncovered a killer out there who murdered Denise Babbit and a woman in Las Vegas named Sharon Oglevy. Somehow, either Angela or I hit a trip wire somewhere and alerted this guy that we were onto him. He then took steps to eliminate the threat. That included killing Angela first and going to Nevada to try to get me. But I was lucky. While I was unable to convince Prendo yesterday, I had convinced an FBI agent that all of this was legit, and she met me in Nevada to talk about it. Her presence kept the killer away from me. If she hadn’t believed me and met with me, you’d be putting together stories about how I killed Angela and went off to the desert to kill myself. That’s what the Unsub’s plan was.”

“Unsub?”

“Unknown subject. That’s what the bureau is calling him.”

Fowler shook her head in stunned disbelief.

“This is an amazing story. Do the police agree with it?”

“You mean, do they believe me? They let me go, didn’t they?”

Her face colored in embarrassment.

“It’s just hard for me to get my head around it, Jack. Nothing like this has ever happened in this newsroom.”

“Actually, the cops probably wouldn’t have believed it if it had just come from me. But I was with that FBI agent most of yesterday. We think we actually saw the guy in Nevada. And she was with me when I got home. She found Angela’s body when we were searching the house. She backed me up on everything with the cops. And that’s probably why I’m not talking to you through Plexiglas.”

Mention of Angela’s body brought a morbid pause to the conversation.

“It’s just horrible,” Fowler said.

“Yes. She was a sweet kid. I don’t even want to think about what her last hours were like.”

“How was she killed, Jack? Like the girl in the trunk?”

“Pretty much. It looked that way to me but I guess they won’t know everything till the autopsy.”

Fowler nodded somberly.

“How are they handling the investigation now, do you know?”

“They were putting together a task force with L.A., Las Vegas and Santa Monica contributing detectives and the FBI taking part as well. I think they are going to run it out of Parker Center.”

“Can we get that confirmed so we can put it in one of the stories?”

“Yeah, I’ll confirm it. I’m probably the only reporter they’ll take a call from. How many inches are you giving me for the story?”

“Uh, Jack, that was one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach.

“I’m writing the main story, right?”

“We’re going to go big with this. Main and sidebar on the front going to a double-truck inside. For once, we have a lot of space.”

Double-truck meant two full inside pages. It was a lot of space but it took one of the paper’s own reporters getting murdered to get it.

Dorothy continued the plan.

“Jerry Spencer is already on the ground in Las Vegas and Jill Meyerson is on her way up to Ely State Prison to try to talk to Brian Oglevy. In L.A., we’ve got GoGo Gonzmart writing the sidebar, which will be on Angela, and Teri Sparks down in South L.A. working on a piece on the kid charged with the Babbit murder. We have art on Angela and are looking for more.”

“Is Alonzo Winslow getting out of juvy jail today?”

“We’re not sure yet. Hopefully, it will take another day and we’ll have that to run with tomorrow.”

Even without Winslow getting out, they were going big. Sending Metro reporters out across the west and putting multiple writers on it locally was something I had not seen done by the Times since the fires ravaged the state the year before. It was exciting to be part of it, but not so exciting when considering what caused it.

“All right,” I said. “I have stuff to contribute to almost all of those stories and I’ll still pull together and write the main.”

Dorothy nodded, hesitated and then dropped the bomb.

“Larry Bernard is writing the main, Jack.”

I reacted swiftly and loudly.

“What the fuck are you talking about? This is my story, Dorothy! Actually, me and Angela’s story.”

Dorothy looked up over my shoulder and out to the newsroom. I suspected that my outburst had been heard through the glass. I didn’t care.

“Jack, calm down and watch your language. I’m not going to let you talk to me the way you talked to Prendo yesterday.”

I tried to pace my breathing and speak calmly.

“Okay, I apologize for the language. To you and Prendo. But you can’t take this story away from me. It’s my story. I started it, I’m writing it.”

“Jack, you can’t write it and you know it. You are the story. I need to get you with Larry so he can interview you and then write the story. The switchboard’s taken more than thirty messages from reporters wanting to interview you, including the New York Times, Katie Couric, even Craig Ferguson from the Late Late Show.”

“ Ferguson ’s not a reporter.”

“Doesn’t matter. The point is, you are the story, Jack. That’s a fact. Now, we certainly need your help and your knowledge of everything related, but we can’t let the subject of a major breaking story also write it. You were in police custody for eight hours today. What you told them is the basis of their investigation. How are you going to write about that? Are you going to interview yourself? Write it in first person?”

She paused to let me answer but I didn’t.

“That’s right,” she continued. “Not going to happen. You can’t do this, and I know you understand that.”

I leaned forward and put my face in my hands. I knew she was right. I’d known it before I even entered the newsroom.

“This was supposed to be my big exit. Get that kid out of jail and go out in a blaze of glory. Put the big three-oh on my career.”

“You’re still going to get credit. There is no way the story can be anything but about you. Katie Couric, the Late Late Show-I’d say that’s going out in a blaze of glory.”

“I wanted to write it, not tell it to somebody else.”

“Look, let’s get this done today and then we can talk about doing a first-person piece when the dust settles. I promise you, you will get to write something about all of this at some point.”

I finally sat back up and looked at her. For the first time I noticed the photo taped to the wall behind her. It was a still shot from The Wizard of Oz that showed Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road with the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow. Beneath the characters someone had printed in Magic Marker:

YOU’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE, DOROTHY

I had forgotten that Dorothy Fowler had come to the paper from the Wichita Eagle.

“All right, if you promise me that story.”

“I promise, Jack.”

“Okay. I’ll tell Larry what I know.”

I still felt defeated.

“Before you do, I need to make sure of one last thing,” Dorothy said. “Are you comfortable going on the record with another reporter? Do you want to consult a lawyer first or anything like that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jack, I want to make sure you’re protected. It’s an ongoing investigation. I don’t want something you say in the paper to be possibly used by the police to hurt you later.”

I stood up but maintained composure and control.

“In other words, you don’t believe any of this. You believe what he was hoping you would believe. That I killed her in some sort of psychotic breakdown over getting fired.”

“No, Jack. I believe you. I just want you protected. And who is he that you’re talking about?”

I pointed out the glass toward the newsroom.

“Who do you think? The guy! The Unsub! The killer who took Angela and the others.”

“Okay, okay. I understand. I’m sorry I brought up the legal aspects of this. Let me get you with Larry in the conference room so you can have some privacy, okay?”

She stood up and rushed by me to leave the office and look for Larry Bernard. I stepped out and surveyed the newsroom. My eyes eventually came to Angela’s empty cubicle. I walked over and saw that someone had placed a bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane diagonally across her desk. Immediately I was struck by the clear plastic wrapping around the flowers and it reminded me of the bag that had been used to suffocate her. Once again I saw Angela’s face disappearing into the darkness beneath the bed.

“Excuse me, Jack?”

I almost jumped. I turned and saw it was Emily Gomez-Gonzmart. She was one of the best reporters on the Metro staff. Always hustling, always going after a story.

“Hey, GoGo.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt but I’m putting together the story on Angela and wondered if I could get a little help from you. And maybe a quote I could use.”

She was holding a pen and reporter’s notebook. I went with the quote first.

“Uh, yeah, but I didn’t really know her,” I said. “I was just getting to know her, but from what I saw I could tell she was going to be a great reporter. She had the right mix of curiosity and drive and determination that a good reporter needs. She is going to be missed. Who knows what stories she would have written and what people she could have helped with those stories?”

I gave GoGo a moment to finish writing.

“How’s that?”

“Good, Jack, thanks. Anybody you can suggest I talk to over in the cop shop?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know. She had just started and I don’t think she had made an impression on anybody yet. I heard she had a blog. Have you looked at that?”

“Yeah, I’ve got the blog and it’s got some contacts on it. I talked to a Professor Foley back at the University of Florida and a few others. I should be fine there. I was just looking for somebody local and outside the paper who might have something to say about her more recently.”

“Well, she wrote a story on Monday about the cold case squad popping somebody for a twenty-year-old murder. Maybe somebody over there could say something. Try Rick Jackson or Tim Marcia. Those are the guys she spoke to. Also, Richard Bengston. Try him.”

She wrote the names down.

“Thanks, I’ll check it out.”

“Good luck. I’ll be around if you need me.”

She left me then and I turned back to Angela’s desk and looked again at the flowers. The glorification of Angela Cook was in high gear now and I was part of it with that quote I had just given GoGo.

Call me Mr. Cynical, but I couldn’t help wondering if the bouquet of carnations and daisies was somebody’s legitimate show of mourning, or if the whole thing had been staged for a photo that would be put in the next morning’s edition.

An hour later I was sitting with Larry Bernard in the conference room normally reserved for news meetings. We had my files spread across the big table and were going step by step through the moves I had made on the story. Bernard had brought his A game. He was diligent about understanding my decisions and acute in his questions. I could tell he was excited about being the lead writer on a story that would go out across the country, if not around the world. Larry and I went back a long ways-we had worked together at the Rocky in Denver. If anybody got to run with my story, I was begrudgingly glad it was him.

It was important to Larry to get official confirmation from the police or FBI on the things I was telling him. So to his side he had a legal pad on which he wrote a series of questions he would later take to the authorities before writing his story. Because of that need to get to the task force before writing, Bernard was all business with me. There was very little small talk and I liked that. I didn’t have any small talk left.

My throwaway phone buzzed in my pocket for the second time in fifteen minutes. The first time, I hadn’t bothered to pull it out and I let it go to message. Larry and I had been in the middle of a key point of discussion and I didn’t want the intrusion. But whoever called hadn’t left a message, because I didn’t get a follow-up voice-mail buzz.

Now the phone was buzzing again and this time I pulled it out to check the caller ID. The screen showed only a number but I readily recognized it because I had called it a few times in the past couple of days. It was Angela Cook’s cell number. The number I had called after hearing that she was missing.

“Larry, I’ll be right back.”

I got up from the table and left the conference room while clicking on to the call. I headed toward my cubicle.

“Hello?”

“Is this Jack?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“This is your friend, Jack. From Ely.”

I knew exactly who it was. There was that same empty-desert twang in his voice. Sideburns. I sat down at my desk and leaned forward to help insulate the conversation from any nearby ears.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To see how you’re doing,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I’m doing fine, no thanks to you. In the hallway at the Nevada, why’d you stop? Instead of sticking with the plan, you just walked on by.”

I thought I heard a low chuckle on the line.

“You had company and I wasn’t expecting that, Jack. Who was she, your girlfriend?”

“Something like that. And she messed up your plan, right? You wanted to make it look like suicide.”

Another chuckle.

“I can see you are very smart,” he said. “Or are you just telling me what they’ve told you?”

“They?”

“Don’t be silly, Jack. I know what’s going on. The cat’s out of the bag. There are a lot of stories being written for tomorrow’s paper. But none of them with your name on it, Jack. What’s up with that?”

That told me he was still floating around inside the Times’ data system. I wondered if it would help the task force run him down.

“You there, Jack?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“And it looks like you have no name for me yet, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t you all going to give me a name? We all get names, you know. The Yorkshire Ripper. The Hillside Strangler. The Poet. You know about that one, right?”

“Yeah, we’re giving you a name. We’re calling you the Iron Maiden. How do you like that?”

This time I heard no chuckle in the silence that followed.

“Are you still there, Iron Maiden?”

“You should be careful, Jack. I could always try again, you know.”

I laughed at him.

“Hey, I’m not hiding. I’m right here. Try again, if you’ve got the balls.”

He was silent, so I laid it on thicker.

“Killing these defenseless women, that takes a lot of balls, doesn’t it?”

The chuckle was back.

“You’re very transparent, Jack. Are you working off a script?”

“I don’t need a script.”

“Well, I know what you’re doing. Talking with a lot of bluster and bravado to bait the trap. Hoping I’ll come to L.A. and go for you. Meantime, you have the FBI and the LAPD watching and ready to jump in and catch the monster just in the nick of time. Is that it, Jack?”

“If that’s what you think.”

“Well, it won’t work that way. I’m a patient man, Jack. Time will pass, maybe even years will go by, and then I promise we’ll meet again face-to-face. No disguise. I’ll return your gun then.”

His low chuckle came again and I got the impression that wherever he was calling from, he was trying to keep his voice and laugh down and not draw attention. I didn’t know if it was an office or a public space but he was keeping himself contained. I was sure of it.

“Speaking of the gun, how was that going to be explained? You know, that I flew to Vegas but then somehow had my gun and killed myself with it? Seems like a flaw in the plan, doesn’t it?”

He outright laughed this time.

“Jack, you are not in possession of all the facts yet, are you? When you are, then you will understand how flawless the plan was. My one mistake was the girl in the room. I didn’t see that coming.”

Neither did I but I wasn’t saying so.

“Then I guess it wasn’t so flawless, was it?”

“I can make up for it.”

“Look, I’m having a busy day here. Why are you calling me?”

“I told you, to see how you are. To make your acquaintance. We’re now going to be linked forever, aren’t we?”

“Well, while I’ve got you on the line, can I ask you a few questions for the story we’re putting together?”

“I don’t think so, Jack. This is between you and me, not your readers.”

“You know, you’re right. The truth is, I wouldn’t give you the space. You think I’m going to let you try to explain your sick fucking world in my newspaper?”

A dark silence followed.

“You,” he finally said, his voice tight with anger. “You should respect me.”

Now I laughed.

“Respect you? How about, Fuck you. You took a young girl who had nothing but-”

He interrupted me by making a noise like a muffled cough.

“Did you hear that, Jack? Do you know what that was?”

I didn’t respond and then he made the sound again. Muffled, one syllable, quick. Then he did it a third time.

“Okay, I give up,” I said.

“That was her, saying your name through plastic when there was no air left.”

He laughed. I said nothing.

“You know what I tell them, Jack? I say, ‘Breathe deep and it will all be over a lot faster.’ ”

He laughed again, long and hard, and made sure I heard it all before abruptly hanging up. I sat there for a long time with the phone still pressed against my ear.

“Sssst.”

I looked up. It was Larry Bernard looking over the sound wall of my cubicle. He thought I was still on the line.

“How much longer?” he whispered.

I took the phone from my ear and covered the mouthpiece with my palm.

“A few more minutes. I’ll come right back in.”

“Okay. I’m going to go take a leak.”

He left me then and I immediately called Rachel. The call was answered after four rings.

“Jack, I can’t talk,” she said by way of a greeting.

“You would’ve won the bet.”

“What bet?”

“He just called me. The Unsub. He has Angela’s cell phone.”

“What did he say?”

“Not a lot. I think he was trying to find out who you are.”

“What do you mean? How would he know about me?”

“He doesn’t. He was trying to find out who the woman in the room back in Ely was. You spoiled everything by being there and he’s curious.”

“Look, Jack, whatever he said, you can’t quote him in the paper. That sort of thing feeds the fire. If he gets hooked on headlines, then he’s going to speed up his cycle. He could start killing for headlines.”

“Don’t worry. Nobody here knows he called me and I’m not writing the story, so he’s not going in it. I’ll save it for when I do write the story. I’ll save it for the book.”

It was the first time I had mentioned the possibility of getting a book out of this. But now it seemed entirely plausible. One way or another I was going to write this story.

“Did you record it?” Rachel asked.

“No, because I wasn’t expecting it.”

“We need to get your phone. We’ll be able to ping the call and get the originating tower. It will get us close to where he’s at. At least where he was when he made the call.”

“It sounded like he was someplace where he had to speak quietly or it would attract attention. Like an office or something. He also made one slip.”

“What was that?”

“I tried to bait him, to get him mad, and-”

“Jack, are you crazy? What are you doing?”

“I didn’t want to be intimidated by him. So I went after him, only he thought I was working off a script given to me by you guys. He thought I was intentionally baiting him into coming after me. That’s when he slipped. He said I was baiting him into coming to L.A. That’s how he said it. Coming to L.A. So he’s somewhere outside of L.A. ”

“That’s good, Jack. But he could have been playing you. Intentionally saying that because he actually is in L.A. That’s why I wish it was taped. So we could have it analyzed.”

I hadn’t thought of the reverse play.

“Well, sorry, no tape. There’s one other thing, too.”

“What is it?”

She seemed so short and to the point, I wondered if our conversation was being listened to.

“He’s either still hacking into the computer system over here or he left some kind of spy program on it.”

“At the Times? Why do you say that?”

“He knew about the story budget for tomorrow. He knew I wasn’t writing any of the stories.”

“That sounds like something we might be able to trace,” she said excitedly.

“Yeah, well, good luck getting the Times to cooperate. And besides, if this guy’s as smart as you’re saying, he knows what he just told me and he knows the bug he planted is either untraceable or he’ll just shut it down and zip it up.”

“It’s still worth a try. I will get somebody in our media office to make an approach to the Times. It’s worth the shot.”

I nodded.

“You never know. It could usher in a whole new era of media and law enforcement cooperation. Sort of like you and me, Rachel, but bigger.”

I smiled and hoped she was smiling too.

“You are such an optimist, Jack. Speaking of cooperation, can I send somebody over for your phone now?”

“Yes, but what about sending yourself?”

“I can’t. I’m in the middle of something here. I told you.”

I didn’t know how to read that.

“Are you in trouble, Rachel?”

“I don’t know yet, but I have to go.”

“Well, are you on the task force? Are they letting you work the case?”

“For now, yes.”

“Okay, well, that’s good.”

“Yes.”

We made arrangements for me to meet the agent she would send for the phone outside the door of the globe lobby in a half hour. It was then time for both of us to go back to work.

“Hang in there, Rachel,” I said.

She was silent for a moment and then said, “You too, Jack.”

We hung up then. And somehow, with all that had transpired in the last thirty-six hours, with what had happened to Angela and my having just been threatened by a serial killer, a part of me felt happy and hopeful.

I had a feeling, though, that it wasn’t going to last.