Franklin saw the movement, then realizing it was the Director, quickly said, “Excuse me, sir.”
People began scribbling on pads and scraps of paper, asking each other about the different names of the retailers who sold the Pensacola cigarettes.
“W-H-Y something?” a female agent proposed, working from her seat at the Serial Criminal Profiling Section terminal.
“‘W,’ Wilkens Pharmacy. ‘H,’ the Heart and Soul Bar, ‘Y’ for the vending machine at the YWCA. What was the other one?”
“Davidson’s, the grocery,” someone said.
Franklin, standing now, listened. He said, “And then add an ‘O,’ he must have planted one in somewhere that begins with the letter ‘O,’ only no one smoked it.”
“Yet,” the Director said and turned to an agent. “Eddie, get on the phone. Let Pensacola PX know there may be a live pack out there in some establishment whose name begins with the letter ‘O!’ Then put a summary of what just transpired on the hot line. ASAP. I’m not happy about releasing the details, but we may save a life.”
Everyone in the room doodled on pieces of paper for the next minute until the agent who suggested “W-H-Y something” sent a chill up the spines of everyone in the room.
“I think I have it,” she said hesitantly. “At first I thought it could have been an interrogative—‘WHY DO?’ But I’m afraid that’s not it. I think it’s in this order. Heart and Soul, then the ‘O,’ Wilkens, Davidson’s, and then the YMCA. This guy, whoever he is, he’s greeting us. He’s saying ‘HOWDY.’”
“Howdy?” Franklin asked almost inaudibly. His brow furrowed like he was trying to remember something. Then he rose from his chair, slowly, like a time-lapse film clip of a daffodil sprouting. “Howdy?” he repeated slowly. “Howdy? Like in hello?”
No one answered him.
To the Deputy Director with twenty-three years of experience, the one-word salutation sounded like a message from a madman indulging a freshly whetted appetite.
29
Association of Tobacco Marketers
New York
At Franklin’s directive, a special agent in Washington called W. Nicholas Pratt and told him what the FBI had learned about the Pensacola incidents. At the end of the conversation, the agent was to inquire about the status of the search for the Midas Project files.
From Pratt’s perspective, the Pensacola incidents were good news. The FBI had reason to believe that none of the tainted cigarettes were Old Carolina products, though that left the question of why Pratt himself was being targeted by the maniac.
“We’re almost there,” Pratt said to the agent’s question about the files. Then he hung up.
Pratt called Bill McGarry in New York. McGarry served, at Pratt’s whim, as the executive director of the industry’s effective trade and lobbying group, the ATM, the Association of Tobacco Marketers.
“We have a serious, serious problem, Billy,” Pratt said. “You’ve got to call the others. The FedEx thing was bad enough, but at least it was self-contained. People only had to avoid cigarettes that were delivered. Now with the Pensacola deal, we’re going to have the FDA or the ATF or some other agency pulling cigarettes off the shelves. In Pensacola, the guy used brands from four different manufacturers. I was left out this time. That is no accident. The guy’s showing us he’ll target whoever he wants. Plus, my common stock is off another two points.”
Someone entered McGarry’s office, interrupting him. “Not now!” he said. Then, back to Pratt. “Okay, I’m sorry, Nick. Go on.”
“Anyway, my damage control man here thinks we can get a recall restricted to Pensacola itself, maybe the county, or at worst, northwestern Florida. And possibly for just a few days. I want you to call the other CEOs. Organize an invisible meeting. And I mean invisible. We can’t have the public, and especially this lunatic, seeing us circling the wagons. If any of the others give you any friction about attending, tell them it’s my idea. Tell them to fantasize about a nationwide product recall across all brand lines. They’ll show.”
“I imagine they will, Nick,” McGarry said.
30
Pensacola, Florida
Two senior FBI agents boarded a United commuter flight in Washington and landed a little after 2:30 in Pensacola. They were met at the airport by Special Agent Lewis from the FBI’s Pensacola Resident Agency office. An unmarked Florida Highway Patrol car and trooper sat in the Authorized Vehicles Only lane waiting for them.
“The FBI doesn’t have access to its own vehicles in Florida?” one of the men from FBI Headquarters asked.
“Yes sir, but my van is being used as surveillance on another job,” Agent Lewis said. “The corporal here has kindly offered to escort us today.”
Twenty minutes later, the four men pulled up to the prefab three-bedroom house on Avelina Court. Two unmarked cars blocked the entrance to the driveway. Just beyond them, flowers and framed photographs marked a spot on the asphalt. The news crews had been kept back half a block under some thin crime-scene pretext.
Earlier that morning, Jack Stein, fifty-five, a chain-link fence installer, had lived there with his family. By 11:00 a.m., he was dead.
Stein, the first known HOWDY victim, had purchased a pack of Kools after supervising a tricky fence installation at an under-construction residential development in Sunaville. Local police had learned Stein’s wife and two daughters had been hounding him for years about smoking. He had ignored their pleas to quit. Instead he promised he would quit smoking inside the house.
For weeks, he had faithfully kept his word, standing with one hand in his pants pocket, smoking openly in the driveway.
Stein’s wife thought the display had been designed to elicit some guilt from any family member who happened past the large kitchen and living room windows that looked out onto the lawn and driveway. The first evening that Stein’s own home had become one large no-smoking section, his family made him a dinner of steamed lobster and sautéed asparagus, his favorites, as a show of support.
The corporal stayed in his vehicle, and the three FBI agents walked up to the house, pausing briefly to look at the spot where Stein had died.
Lewis knocked on the front door of the residence. A young woman answered, dressed in shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The men identified themselves, and she immediately began talking.
“Daddy died right there where we set those flowers in the driveway,” his daughter Donna said, tears building, pointing over the agents’ shoulders. “If we hadn’t a hassled him so bad, he might have taken sick right inside, where we could have called 911. I think me and Mom and Mary are as guilty as the man who did it to my dad.”
“But you couldn’t have helped your father—you weren’t home at the time. That’s what we understand,” Agent Lewis said.
En route from the airport, Lewis had shown the other agents the crime-scene Polaroids and the initial incident reports. Stein’s face and extremities had turned cobalt blue, and he died with his mouth open, gasping for air.
“Cyanide does that. You can breathe air in, but your lungs don’t absorb any oxygen,” the corporal had said on the way over. “Did you ever watch a fish flop around in the bottom of a boat trying to breathe?”
“Well, it might have turned out different if we would have left him alone,” the teenager said. “Is smoking really that much of a crime?”
Lewis asked Donna if she could think of any reason why someone would want to hurt her father.
“I don’t know anything that I haven’t already told other detectives.”
“Donna, sometimes you can know something that doesn’t pop up in your head right away,” one of the men from Washington said. “Like when you have a dream and forget about it until something happens during the day that reminds you.”
“That’s why we want you to call us, anytime, even in the middle of the night, any day of the week, if some
thing does remind you of something you think may help us. You just call my number here, collect.” The agent took a card from his inside jacket pocket.
“Okay, I’ll put this with my collection,” she said, reading the card and running her finger over the gold-embossed FBI seal. “Can I tell you something about my daddy?”
Lewis nodded.
The wet in Donna’s eyes ran in rivulets down her cheeks.
“My daddy couldn’t read anything harder than a stop sign. But when me and Mary were little, he wouldn’t let one night pass that he didn’t read us a storybook. He did it just by looking at the pictures and making up words to go with them.”
Back in the car, the corporal asked the FBI agents if they learned anything they didn’t already know. His intent, most likely, was to determine if the two men from Washington succeeded in finding anything his own organization had missed.
“I think we are beginning to see that these murders are random. No pattern, just a lunatic with a chip on his shoulder.”
The corporal said, “Yeah, if there was anything to get, we’d a got it first time around. In a case like this, everything gets quadruple-checked.”
Most cops love to rub it in to the FBI when they get a chance.
31
FBI Headquarters
Franklin ordered a surveillance team to observe the pay phone in Seacrest at the site where the first call originated. Getting lucky there would be a thousand-to-one shot. Chances were slight that the subject would use the same telephone for the second call, but missing him if he did, Franklin knew, would be unjustifiable.
If the caller was not the actual perpetrator, but instead a malicious prankster, then he could conceivably be naive enough to think that it would be safe to call from the same place. Or, if the man who called was in fact the subject but was deranged or delusional, he might arrive at the conclusion that the FBI did not know where the call originated, and he might use the same telephone again. Most psychopaths, however, are paranoid. Neither scenario was very likely.
“Still can’t locate Sorken,” an agent informed Franklin.
“Well that’s nice,” Franklin said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Try the locals.”
Dr. Myron Sorken, a forensic psychologist widely published in the field of linguistics and dialects and on the staff of the psychiatric board at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, could not be reached at his office or his home in Columbia, Maryland. Franklin had wanted him present for the first call. Now Franklin wanted him to hear the tape of the call and to hear the second call, if it came. Once, Sorken had successfully listened through a kidnapper’s feigned southern accent and directed investigators to focus on suspects whose early language development had been in the Great Lakes region. One of a score of suspects in the case had attended elementary school in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and that suspect turned out to be Mr. Right.
The FBI asked the Columbia police to find Sorken. Two city detectives worked quickly and located him at the Rosewood Golf and Country Club not far from his residence. Sorken was sped by the detectives to a service station near the Beltway where he jumped into a waiting FBI sedan for the rest of the trip to FBIHQ.
Others, experts in product tampering, serial murder, schizophrenia, and other disciplines, were being contacted and rushed to the ERC as rapidly as possible. Franklin wanted to have a big congregation on hand at four o’clock. He realized there wasn’t much that could be done with such short notice. Various special agents briefed the invitees as they arrived. Many experts had not yet been located, but Sorken was the one Franklin desperately wanted.
At 3:35 p.m., Franklin and the Director entered the room to join the group of nearly forty FBI agents, staffers, and consultants. They stood at the head of the room, stern-faced and greeting no one. Franklin saw Rhoads at the edge of the room, keeping his own counsel but watching the others carefully.
The Director tapped the microphone. “Being called in like this without notice is a terrible inconvenience, I know. We are grateful you could make it,” the Director said without introducing himself. “The FBI appreciates your presence, and so does the president of the United States, with whom I just spoke. He asked me to thank you personally for interrupting your lives to help save others. That’s a quote. But enough of the preamble. Let me get out of everyone’s way. Most of you who have worked with us before know Deputy Director Oak Franklin.”
The Director moved back. Franklin stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Good afternoon. We are calling this investigation CYCIG, as in cyanide cigarettes. The individual whom we believe is responsible for the hundreds of tampering deaths thought he would give us a call this afternoon. Our preliminary profile of him can be found on your information sheets. I spoke with him myself, by telephone, less than two hours ago.”
A murmur rolled through the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this man, again if it is him and we think it is, is a cold, casual killer. He spoke to me as if he were ordering a pizza. He was calm and flippant. This case presents numerous complications for us, and one of the most frustrating aspects is that the subject has a practically limitless window of opportunity. About fifty million packs of cigarettes are smoked every day, day in and day out, in this country. That’s approximately one billion cigarettes daily.
“The problem is this, it would be almost impossible to apprehend a litterer who did not want to be caught. And by dropping a pack of sodium-cyanide-injected cigarettes here and there, this subject is not doing much more than littering. All he has to do is be patient and cautious. An apprehension during the actual commission of the crime, unless we get extremely fortunate, is remote. We’re going to have to take this one by figuring out who he is. That’s why you have been called here.”
The Director nodded in agreement behind Franklin.
“What we hope to get from you are your subjective observations for the purpose of enhancing our SCRIPS profile of him. For those of you haven’t helped us before, SCRIPS is our new artificial intelligence Serial Criminal Profiling System. Anything you can contribute about age, mental status, educational background, regional clues from voice and language, all are incalculably valuable.
“Don’t be bashful about wild guesses, intuitive feelings, gut reactions. We want, we need, them all. Candidly, we are all hoping his stated agenda, ‘to save lives,’ is the setup for an extortion attempt against the tobacco industry. At least then we could look forward to an eventual point of contact. Without that, we will have to rely on our Investigative Support Unit, the Behavioral Science Section, supported by the SCRIPS system, and what you, our consultants, can contribute.”
A multiline telephone and headset sat in front of everyone present. Another dozen or so telephones were at the far end of the table.
Franklin glanced at his watch. “We have about twenty minutes until four o’clock, the time the subject said he would call. In the first call, he spoke in a gruff voice, probably contrived. Some of you have already heard the tape of that call. As far as we can determine, the subject didn’t attempt any other voice modification. He called from a public coin telephone in a Mr. Turkey at 11 Lightwood Street in Seacrest, Florida. The telephones are in an alcove between the street and the dining area. Restaurant employees pay little attention to people on public phones, and not surprisingly, none of them specifically recall seeing anyone use the phones. We have a team on the scene now, just in case.”
Franklin looked around the room. “What we’d like you to do is this. You will all remain here in this room with headsets on. The subject told us he wants to speak to Thomas Rhoads, a security official for Old Carolina, headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina.” Franklin introduced Rhoads with a quick nod. “Mr. Rhoads is a former Philadelphia Police officer and had some media attention due to his work there. Following retirement, he spent three years working as a security consultant for Old Carolina. Ironically, it is that public
ity that may have led the subject to target the company. There’s also the possibility that he and Mr. Rhoads may know each other.
“Rhoads will take the call in Lab C on this floor. That’s down the hall. You can feel free to speak among yourselves. Any urgent ideas, notes, or questions you have during the call should be written down as quickly as possible. Staffers will be in the room with you. Hold your pad up in the air, and someone will bring your comment or question in to me immediately, though it’s not likely the caller will stay on the line long enough for us to evaluate your ideas and use them. In the first call, he hung up after seventy-two seconds elapsed. We hope he planned on no more than sixty seconds but let himself get carried away. That tells us he may not be in complete control of himself. That’s better than being up against someone with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker.”
Franklin sipped from a cup and cleared his throat again.
“Any questions?”
32
Fifty yards away in Lab C, Behavioral Science Assistant Section Chief Juan Estevez advised Franklin and Rhoads on strategy for the expected call.
“The best thing to do is to go with your gut, Oak. These are just general guidelines,” Estevez said. “Picking up the telephone the instant it’s transferred to you demonstrates a posture of urgent attentiveness. I don’t think we want to be that servile. Especially with a guy like this. Waiting for two or three rings communicates a concerned but casual interest. Answering in the four- or five-ring range suggests a nonplussed attitude about the caller’s status. Not a good idea. I recommend you pick her up on the third ring.”
Franklin, listening to Estevez and doodling on a notepad, wrote the numeral “3.” He drew a series of concentric circles around it until no more could fit on the page.
Rhoads peered over at Franklin’s pad. “Feeling a bit boxed in, Deputy Director?”
Franklin frowned, his brown face growing darker. He dropped the notepad on Estevez’s desk.
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