The Scarecrow

by Michael Connelly

  “Get out of here and don’t tell anybody what happened,” she said. “If you do, we’ll know.”

  “I won’t. I promise I won’t.”

  “Go!”

  He almost slipped on the polished concrete when he turned to head toward the door. It was a long walk and his pride deserted him when he was ten feet from freedom. He ran those final steps, slid the door open and slammed it home behind him. Within five seconds we heard the motorcycle kick to life.

  “I liked that move, throwing him down on the bed like that,” I said. “I think I’ve seen that before.”

  Rachel offered a very thin smile in return and then got down to business.

  “I don’t know if he’s going to go running to the cops or not, but let’s not take too much more time here.”

  “Let’s get the hell out now.”

  “No, not yet. Look around, see what you can find out about this guy. Ten minutes and then we’re out of here. Don’t leave your fingerprints.”

  “Great. How do I do that?”

  “You’re a newspaper reporter. You have your trusty pen?”

  “Sure.”

  “Use that. Ten minutes.”

  But we didn’t need ten minutes. It quickly became clear that the place had been stripped of anything remotely personal about Freddy Stone. Using my pen to open cabinets and drawers, I found them empty or containing only generic kitchen tools and food packages. The refrigerator was almost empty. The freezer contained a couple of frozen pizzas and an empty ice tray. I checked in and under the dresser. Empty. I looked under the bed and between the mattress and box spring. There was nothing. Even the trash cans were empty.

  “Let’s go,” Rachel said.

  I looked up from checking under the bed and saw she was already to the door. Under her arm she was carrying the box that Mizzou had just dropped off. I remembered seeing the flash drives in there. Maybe the drives would hold information we needed. I hurried after her, but when I went through the open door, she was not at the car. I turned and caught a glimpse of her rounding the corner of the building and entering the alley.

  “Hey!”

  I trotted over to the alley and made the turn. She was walking with purpose down the center of the alley.

  “Rachel, where are you going?”

  “There were three trash cans in there,” she called back over her shoulder. “All of them were empty.”

  It was then that I realized she was heading toward the first of two industrial-size Dumpsters that were pushed into alcoves on opposite sides of the alley. Just as I caught up with her she handed me Freddy Stone’s box.

  “Hold this.”

  She flung the heavy steel lid up and it banged loudly against the wall behind it. I glanced down into Freddy’s box and saw that somebody, probably Mizzou, had taken his cigarettes. I doubted he would miss them.

  “You checked the kitchen cabinets, right?” Rachel asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Were there any trash can liners?”

  It took me a moment to understand.

  “Uh, yeah, yeah, a box under the sink.”

  “Black or white?”

  “Uh…”

  I closed my eyes to try to visualize what I had seen in the cabinet under the sink.

  “… black. Black with the red drawstring.”

  “Good. That narrows it down.”

  She was reaching into the Dumpster, moving things around. It was half full and smelled awful. Most of the detritus was not in bags but had been dumped in directly from waste containers. Most of it was construction debris from a repair or renovation project. The rest was rotting garbage.

  “Let’s try the other.”

  We crossed the alley to the other alcove. I put the box down on the ground and threw open the heavy lid of the Dumpster. The odor was even more stunning and at first I thought we had found Freddy Stone. I stepped back and turned away, blowing air through my mouth and nose to keep the stench away.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not him,” Rachel said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know what a rotting body smells like, and it’s worse.”

  I moved back to the Dumpster. There were several plastic trash bags in this container, many of them black and many of them torn and spilling putrid garbage.

  “Your arms are longer,” Rachel said. “Pull out the black bags.”

  “I just bought this shirt,” I said in protest as I reached in.

  I pulled out every black bag that wasn’t already torn and revealing its contents and dropped them on the ground. Rachel started opening them by tearing the plastic in such a way that the contents stayed in place inside. Like performing an autopsy on a garbage bag.

  “Do it like this and don’t mix contents from different bags,” she said.

  “Got it. What are we looking for? We don’t even know if this stuff is from Stone’s place.”

  “I know but we have to look. Maybe something will make sense.”

  The first bag I opened mostly contained the confetti of shredded documents.

  “I’ve got shreddings here.”

  Rachel looked over.

  “That could be his. There was a shredder by the workstation. Put that one aside.”

  I did as I was told and opened the next bag. This one contained what looked like basic household trash. I immediately recognized one of the empty food boxes.

  “This is him. He had the same brand of microwave pizza in the freezer.”

  Rachel looked over.

  “Good. Look for anything of a personal nature.”

  She didn’t have to tell me that but I didn’t object. I carefully moved my hands through the refuse in the torn bag. I could tell it had all come from the kitchen area. Food boxes, cans, rotting banana peels and apple cores. I realized it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There was only a microwave in the warehouse loft. It made the choices narrow and the food came in nice clean containers that could be hermetically sealed before being tossed.

  At the bottom of the bag was a newspaper. I carefully pulled it out, thinking the date of the edition might help us narrow down when the bag had been tossed into the Dumpster. It was folded into quarters in the way a traveler might carry it. It was the previous Wednesday’s edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. That was the day I had been in Vegas.

  I unfolded it and noticed the face of a man in a photograph on the front page had been doodled on in black marker. Someone had awarded the man sunglasses and a set of devil’s horns and the requisite pointy beard. There was also a coffee ring on the photo. The ring partially obscured a name written with the same marker.

  “I’ve got a Vegas paper with a name written here.”

  Rachel looked up immediately from the bag she had her hands in.

  “What name?”

  “It’s blurred by a coffee ring. It’s Georgette something. Begins with a B and ends M-A-N.”

  I held the paper up and angled it so she could see the front page. She studied it for a second and I saw recognition fire in her eyes. She stood up.

  “This is it. You found it.”

  “Found what?”

  “He’s our guy. Remember, I told you about the e-mail to the prison in Ely that got Oglevy put in lockdown? It was from the warden’s secretary to the warden.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Her name is Georgette Brockman.”

  Still crouched on my haunches next to the open bag, I stared up at Rachel as I put it all together. There was only one reason Freddy Stone would have that name written on a Las Vegas newspaper in his warehouse. He had trailed me to Vegas and knew I was going up to Ely to talk to Oglevy. He was the one who wanted to isolate me in the middle of nowhere. He was Sideburns. He was the Unsub.

  Rachel took the newspaper from me. Her conclusions were the same as mine.

  “He was in Nevada trailing you. He got her name and wrote it down while he was hacking the prison system’s database. This is the link, Jack. You did it!”
r />   I got up and approached her.

  “We did it, Rachel. But what do we do now?”

  She lowered the paper to her side and I saw a sad realization play on her face.

  “I don’t think we should be touching anything else here. We need to back off and call in the bureau. They have to take it from here.”

  Equipmentwise, the FBI always seemed ready for anything. Within an hour of Rachel’s calling the local field office, we were placed in separate interrogation rooms in a nondescript vehicle the size of a bus. It was parked outside the warehouse where Freddy Stone had lived. We were being questioned by agents inside while other agents on the outside were in the warehouse and the nearby alley, looking for further signs of Stone’s involvement in the trunk murders as well as his current whereabouts.

  Of course, the FBI didn’t call them interrogation rooms and would have objected to my calling the converted mobile home the Guantánamo Express. They called it a mobile witness interview unit.

  My room was a windowless cube about ten feet by ten feet and my interrogator was an agent named John Bantam. This was a misnomer because Bantam was so big he seemed to fill the whole room. He paced back and forth in front of me, regularly slapping his leg with the legal pad he carried in a way I think was designed to make me think that my head could be its next destination.

  Bantam grilled me for an hour about how I had made the connection to Western Data and all the moves Rachel and I had made after that. All the way, I took the advice Rachel gave me right before the federal troops showed up:

  Do not lie. Lying to a federal agent is a crime. Once you commit it, they have you. Do not lie about anything.

  So I told the truth, but not the whole truth. I answered only the questions put to me and offered no detail that was not specifically asked for. Bantam seemed frustrated the whole time, annoyed with not being able to ask the right question. A sheen of sweat was forming on his black skin. I thought maybe he was the embodiment of the whole bureau’s frustration with the fact that a newspaper reporter had made a connection they had missed. Either way, he was not happy with me. The session went from a cordial interview to a tense interrogation and it seemed to go on and on.

  Finally, I hit my limit and stood up from the folding chair I had been seated in. Even with me standing, Bantam still had six inches on me.

  “Look, I told you all I know. I have a story to go write.”

  “Sit down. We’re not finished.”

  “This was a voluntary interview. You don’t tell me when it’s finished. I’ve answered every one of your questions and now you’re just repeating yourself, trying to see if I get crossed up. It’s not going to happen because I only told you the truth. Now, can I go or not?”

  “I could arrest you right now for breaking and entering and impersonating a federal agent.”

  “Well, if you are going to make things up, I guess you could arrest me for all kinds of things. But I didn’t break and enter. I followed someone into the warehouse when we saw him enter and thought he might be committing a crime. And I did not impersonate a federal agent. That kid might have thought we were agents but neither of us said or did anything that even remotely indicated that.”

  “Sit down. We’re not done.”

  “I think we are.”

  Bantam slapped the pad against his leg and turned his back to me. He walked to the door and then turned back.

  “We need you to hold your story,” he said.

  I nodded. Now we were finally down to it.

  “This is what this was all about? The interrogation? The intimidation?”

  “It wasn’t an interrogation. Believe me, you’d know it if it were.”

  “Whatever. I can’t hold the story. It’s a major break in a major case.

  Besides, splashing Stone’s face across the media might help you catch him.”

  Bantam shook his head.

  “Not yet. We need twenty-four hours to assess what we’ve got here and at the other locations. We want to do that before he knows we’re onto him. Splashing his face across the media will be fine after that.”

  I sat back down on the folding chair as I thought about the possibilities. I was supposed to discuss any deal not to publish with my editors but I was beyond all of that now. This was my last story and I was going to call my own shots.

  Bantam took a chair that was leaning on the wall, unfolded it and sat down for the first time during the session. He positioned himself directly in front of me.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost four o’clock. The editors in Los Angeles were about to go into the daily meeting and set the next day’s front page.

  “This is what I am willing to do,” I said. “Today is Tuesday. I hold the story and write it tomorrow for Thursday’s paper. We keep it off the website so it won’t get picked up by the wire services until early Thursday morning and won’t start making waves on TV until after that.”

  I looked at my watch again.

  “That would give you a solid thirty-six hours, at least.”

  Bantam nodded.

  “Okay. I think that will work.”

  He made a move to get up.

  “Wait a minute, that’s not all. And, this is what I want in return. I obviously want exclusivity. I made this break and so the story is mine. No leaks and no press conferences until after my story hits the front of the Times.”

  “That’s no problem. We’ll—”

  “I’m not finished. There’s more. I want access. I want to be in the loop. I want to know what is going on. I want to be embedded.”

  He smirked and shook his head.

  “We don’t do embedded. You want to be embedded, then go to Iraq. We don’t take citizens, especially reporters, inside investigations. It could be dangerous and it complicates things. And, legally, it could compromise a prosecution.”

  “Then, we don’t have a deal and I need to call my editor right now.”

  I reached into my pocket for my cell phone. It was a dramatic move I hoped would force the issue.

  “All right, wait,” Bantam said. “I can’t make this call. Sit tight and I’ll get back to you.”

  He stood up and left the room, closing the door. I got up and checked the knob. As I had guessed, the door was locked. I pulled my phone and checked the screen. It said no service. The soundproofing of the cube probably knocked down service, and Bantam had probably known it all along.

  I spent another hour sitting on the hard folding chair, occasionally getting up to knock loudly on the door or to pace in the tiny room the way Bantam had. The abandonment started to work on me. I kept checking my watch or opening my phone, even though I knew there was no service and that wasn’t going to change. At one point I decided to test my paranoid theory that I was being watched and listened to the whole time I was in the room. I opened my phone and walked the corners like a man reading a Geiger counter. In the third corner I acted like I had found service and started through the motions of making a call and talking excitedly to my editor, telling him I was ready to dictate a major breaking story on the identity of the trunk killer.

  But Bantam didn’t come rushing in and it only proved one of two possibilities. That the room wasn’t wired for sight and sound, or that the agents outside watching me knew my cell service was blocked and I couldn’t possibly have made the call I had just pretended to make.

  Finally, at 5:15 the door opened. But it wasn’t Bantam who entered. It was Rachel. I stood up. My eyes probably showed my surprise but my tongue held in check.

  “Sit down, Jack,” Rachel said.

  I hesitated but then sat back down.

  Rachel took the other seat and sat down in front of me. I looked at her and pointed to the ceiling, raising my eyebrows in question.

  “Yes, we’re being recorded,” Rachel said. “Audio and visual. But you can speak freely, Jack.”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, something tells me you’ve put on weight since I last saw you. Like maybe a badge and a gun?�
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  She nodded.

  “I actually don’t have the badge or gun yet but they’re on their way.”

  “Don’t tell me, you found Osama bin Laden in Griffith Park?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you were reinstated.”

  “Technically, my resignation had not been signed off on yet. The slow pace of bureaucracy, you know? I got lucky. I was allowed to withdraw it.”

  I leaned forward and whispered.

  “What about the jet?”

  “You don’t have to whisper. The jet is no longer an issue.”

  “I hope you got it in writing.”

  “I got what I needed.”

  I nodded. I knew the score. She had used what leverage she had to make a deal.

  “So let me guess, they want it to read that an agent identified Freddy Stone as the Unsub, not someone they had just run out of the bureau.”

  She nodded.

  “Something like that. I am now assigned to dealing with you. They’re not going to let you inside the tape, Jack. It’s a recipe for disaster. You remember what happened with the Poet.”

  “That was then and this is now.”

  “It’s still not going to happen.”

  “Look, can we get out of this cube? Can we just take a walk where there are no hidden cameras or microphones?”

  “Sure, let’s walk.”

  She stood up and went to the door. She knocked with a two-and-one pattern and the door was opened immediately. As we stepped into the narrow hallway that led to the front of the bus and the exit, I noticed Bantam was behind the door. I knocked the two-and-one pattern on it.

  “If only I had known the combo,” I said. “I could’ve been out of here an hour ago.”

  He found no humor in my comment. I turned away and followed Rachel out of the bus. Outside I could see that the warehouse and the alley were still nests of bureau activity. Several agents and technicians were moving about, collecting evidence, taking measurements and photos, writing notes on clipboards.

  “All these people, have they found anything we didn’t find?”

  She smiled slyly.