“Thanks for letting me pop in like this,” Meg said. “I hate to interrupt your shift.”
“Not a problem,” Webb said. “The chief knows we’ve been involved in this investigation. As long as it doesn’t interfere with an active call, he doesn’t object. If the alarms go off—”
“Hawk and I will get out of the way and we’ll pick this up later. Let’s get to it before that happens. I noticed something tonight while I was reviewing the pictures of the scenes. I started with the Massaponax hospital, and I took note of the graffiti this time around.”
“There’s always graffiti,” Smaill said. “Remember, it’s what we do. How we mark a site as explored.”
“I haven’t seen you do it.”
“Definitely isn’t something I’m going to do at a crime scene. And, by and large, I’m not that competitive about it, though I do carry a can of spray paint in my bag. I occasionally leave my initials if I’m in a place where it’s clear I haven’t followed in the footsteps of two hundred other guys. I am also not artistic, so my mark isn’t anything impressive. Some of the guys are pretty creative.”
“Yes, they are.” She pulled her laptop from the bag, opened it on the table, and woke it up. “Like this symbol, for example.” She turned the laptop around so the men could see the image better. “This was on the garage door in the furnace room, near the coal bin where we found Donna Parker.”
Webb’s expression didn’t change as he studied the drawing, but Smaill leaned in to stare at it, his eyes narrowed, his shoulders tensed.
“Do you recognize it?” Meg asked.
“I think . . . I . . .” Smaill slouched back in his chair. “Maybe. I can’t be sure.”
“I want you to think about it. Because when I saw it at this site, I realized it looked familiar, but it would be familiar only to me, because I was the only one on the rooftop at the Bowie Meat Packing Plant.” She brought up the photo of the roof and smokestack of the plant. “This was on the roof near where Bahni Devar was found alive.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Webb said. “He’s leaving a signature?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Chuck?”
He shook his head, his eyes still fixed on the image as if he couldn’t look away. “No, not a signature. Look at the paint. It’s weathered. It’s been there for some time.”
Meg turned the laptop toward her to look for herself. “I didn’t even see that part of it. I was just focusing on the symbol itself. But you’re right, that’s not fresh paint. Definitely not made that day.”
“You need to be careful here, though.” Smaill finally looked up, his eyes full of caution. “Some guys mark every place they go, so this could be someone unrelated who’s been at both sites. Could also be months ago and he hasn’t been back. This is circumstantial at best.”
“I agree. But then I looked through the other sites.” She met Smaill’s eyes. “That same mark is at every one.” She showed them the photos of furnace B at Bethlehem Steel and at the top of the stairway on the upper level of the cell block. “I know it could still be unrelated, but the more places it shows up the smaller that possibility gets.”
“Good eye,” Webb said. “I was at three of those four sites with you, and I missed it every time.”
“I think we need to give ourselves a break at the Montgomery jail. We were purposely keeping our flashlights down or off and navigating by moonlight. We never would have seen it. Also, you were in rescue mode.”
“Rescue mode?”
“It’s like me in search mode. You’re trained to do that job. I’ve seen you turn it on like flipping a switch. You go from relaxed to focused, intense, and intent on only one task. That’s how it should be when a life is on the line. But sometimes when you have blinders on like that, you miss a detail like a paint splotch on the wall.” She looked down at the photo. “And sometimes you catch it after the fact, when that focus is gone.”
“Can I take a closer look?” Smaill asked.
Meg slid the laptop toward him and watched as he flipped from picture to picture, zooming in and studying each one in contemplative silence. Finally, he pushed it away and sat with arms crossed, his brow furrowed, and his lips a thin line.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“That I might have seen it before. In other sites, or in photos posted in one of the online forums. I’m not sure where, though. I need to think about it. I can go through my own photos and see if I can find it. I can also go back through the forums. Can you send me those shots?”
“I’ll do it right now.” Meg hot spotted her phone, connected her laptop to it, and sent him the photos attached to an email. “Just remember, those are crime scene photos and can’t be shared. If you need to post one or ask any of your urbex connections if they’ve seen the mark, I need to get permission from Agent Moore before we take that step. I don’t think she’ll say no, but we have to keep everything documented and transparent.”
“Understood.”
“Do you think you can find the guy based on this bug?” Webb asked.
Smaill wobbled his head back and forth in an uncertain gesture. “If I’m lucky I might be able to narrow it down to a screen name in a forum. I think it’s really unlikely I’ll be able to find someone who can give me the guy’s real name, but I guess you never know.”
Meg closed the lid of her laptop. “We need to be careful here. If this evidence gets us anywhere close to him, we can’t let him rabbit because of it. This can’t warn him that we’re onto him.”
“Yeah, that would be bad. Maybe I can come up with something for you. I’ll certainly have better luck than you would. If a stranger came onto the forums looking for information, everyone would shut down. Remember, those of us who do urbex are usually breaking the law by trespassing on every outing. We don’t take kindly to strangers looking for more information than how to get started.”
“So you’ll be a proxy for Meg,” Webb said.
“Yup. They’ve known me for years and won’t be suspicious of my questions. And I know some of the guys personally. Let me see if I can shake this case loose for you.”
CHAPTER 28
Viewing Hole: An eye-level, rectangular hole cut into the boards surrounding a construction site so curious passersby can see what’s happening inside.
Monday, November 19, 10:27 AM
Forensic Canine Unit, J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington, DC
Kate’s message to the team came through Craig:
1 PM in the fourth-floor conference room. Bring the map.
Meg looked up at Craig as he stood between her desk and Brian’s. “What do you think that means?”
“Besides the obvious? Not sure. I find it hard to believe with the time difference and the international red tape that she’s received information from the Indian authorities about the tontine investor list, so she must have a lead on something else. Maybe some information that will reduce the potential list of twenty-three down to a smaller victim pool.”
“We should map the known victims as well.” Brian leaned back in his chair, his fingers linked over his abdomen. “We only put the original twenty-three unknown potentials on it. But if we’re going to make a new list of everyone involved in this case, then we need to add in our known victims.”
“We should also add the three possible past cases. Until we know or can prove otherwise, they’re a part of this case,” said Meg. “That pushes the possible victim pool up to thirty.”
“I’ll leave that to you two.” Craig looked at his watch. “There’s no way Scott and Lauren are going to be back today.”
“They’re still tracking those abducted children in South Carolina?”
“Yes. It will be good news if they have it wrapped up today, but I think that might be a miracle. It’s probably more likely going to be a couple of days, so we’ll update them when they return. In the meantime, move the map from my office and have it up in the conference room with the known victims added by one o’clock
. I’ll meet you down there.”
Monday, November 19, 1:05 PM
Fourth-floor conference room, J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington, DC
Craig rushed into the conference room, glancing from side to side, his shoulders sagging with relief as he realized only his teams were in attendance.
“She’s not here yet,” Brian said from where he sat at the table with his feet propped on the empty chair beside him. Lacey and Hawk curled up companionably behind it.
Meg smacked him lightly on the shoulder. “Way to state the obvious.”
“Hey, maybe she’d just stepped out.”
“She texted me saying she was running a few minutes late. I expect her any time.”
As if on cue, the door opened, just narrowly missing Craig still standing near the entrance. Kate sidled in, her arms full. “Oh, sorry. On the run because I’m late again.”
“I just got here myself.” Craig pulled out a chair opposite Meg and Brian and sat down. “Lauren and Scott send their regrets. They’re off-site on an active search. I’ll update them when they’re back.”
“Sounds good.” Kate took the chair beside him, setting a folder and a covered coffee cup on the table in front of her. She took a deep breath and then let it out, her shoulders falling low on the exhale.
“Been that kind of day?” Meg asked.
“It really has. But it’s been good, as you’ll see.” She craned her head to see the map tacked to the wall. “Great, you brought it with you. If I’d known it would just be us, we could have done this in Craig’s office, but in case we had everyone, I wanted to make sure we had enough room.” She opened the folder and pulled the first document off the top of the pile, brandishing it in the air. “Because the Indian authorities came through for us. This is the list of the Kalidasa Life Insurance Company tontine annuity fund investors.”
Brian’s feet fell off the chair with a thump. “No way. How did you manage that so quickly?”
“I got lucky right off the bat, contacting an investigator on Thursday after our meeting at the Post. Last thing at night for us, first thing in the morning for him, and I stayed up for a while making sure he had all the information he needed. We played email tag for a few days going through the weekend—each of us emailing the other in the middle of the night their time and returning the email in the middle of the night for the other. But it got the job done. He got me the list early this morning our time. Guess who’s on it?”
Meg squelched the urge to whisk the sheets out of Kate’s hands for instant access to the information. “Our four victims.”
Kate leveled an index finger at her with one eye closed as if she was training her sights on Meg. “You got it. Plus the victim Mr. McCord remembered and the two Craig found.”
“Out of how many in total?”
“When the fund started in the year 2000 there were originally forty-five investors. Once the fund got off the ground, it was closed to incoming investors and the number stayed constant for a few years. Then some of the older ones died out of the fund.”
“Had the fund taken off by then?” asked Craig.
“It had, so even if they were only in the fund for three or four years, they still got a nice return. Of course, not as nice as those who stayed on through the Indian tech boom years.”
Finally, Meg thought, we can go on the offensive on this case. “Now the real question. Who’s left as a likely target?”
“We need to run them down to make sure they’re still with us at this point, but as far as the fund administrators know, there are nine living investors still in the fund.” Kate flipped to a list of names on the second page.
Meg could see from across the table that some of the names had a bracketed “deceased” beside them. “They can’t know about the recent victims in our case yet.”
“No, they don’t. So Donna Parker, Warren Roth, Bahni Devar, and Vikram Pillai are all included in this list.”
Meg rose to stand in front of the map. “Which missing or deceased persons on this map aren’t on the list? If they aren’t included, we should remove them to see what the real distribution looks like. And you can add the ‘deceased’ tag to anyone on the list they don’t know about yet.”
“I’ll do that. Read them to me one by one.”
One name at a time, they reviewed the list of thirty missing or deceased possible victims.
“Speaking of the victims list,” Craig said, “from your list of twenty-three individuals of which ten were burials, you were going to request exhumations for tox screen testing. Were you successful?”
“I was, for all of them. I haven’t got results for any so far, but it’s a little soon. Oh, and while we’re on the subject of tox screens, I have the results for Donna Parker.”
“Difethialone?”
“Difethialone, so we’re consistent there. Still waiting on Bahni Devar’s results. Give me the next name.”
One at a time, flags were removed from the map. Then a flag pair remained in place. Then another. Until nine pairs remained.
Meg stepped back to study the map. Instead of being spread from coastal New Hampshire to Illinois, there was now a concentration of flags in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. “That’s all seven of our known or suspected victims, plus two more. It looks like the rest of the original twenty-three suspicious deaths or disappearances are unrelated to this case.”
“We need to update Rutherford with this information, but if he was here, he’d be happier with this spread,” Craig pointed out. “It’s a smaller geographic area—six contiguous states instead of ten—which could be driven in a matter of hours rather than nearly a whole day.”
“Not to mention that now instead of a four-year period of killings, we’re down to just over six months for the deaths on which we have full information. Also notice how spread out the first kills are, at least for those we know the date or an approximate date. First came the victims we suspect are part of the case. Norman Stanley disappeared on April eleventh. Iniya Pearson was reported missing from her retirement home on June twenty-fifth. Kathir Nadar disappeared sometime during June or July but was discovered on September nineteenth. Then we get into the recent disappearances with known dates. October fifth. Then October twenty-sixth, November fifth—unsuccessful, but it still counts—and then November ninth.”
“Is he devolving?” Brian mused. “Or something else is artificially speeding up his time line?”
“Maybe whoever is ordering the hits is getting greedy and impatient that the process is taking so long.” Kate underlined two names on the investor list. “As you noted, we have two more victims, one that the fund administrators listed as deceased and one they still thought was alive.”
“And if they thought nine investors remained alive, then we actually only have five remaining. And if you take Mrs. Devar out of the mix, as the killer is certainly trying to do, then we only have four left.”
“Out of those four, one is likely safe because he or she is the one calling the shots,” Brian hypothesized. “So that leaves three targets.”
“Which is where things get sticky.” Kate set down her coffee cup. “Four investors are left, one who intends to receive the entire fund simply by being the last man or woman standing. We don’t know which one that is, so my gut instinct is to protect all four of them. But if we inform them of their risk—”
“You’re informing the person who hired the killer that we’re onto him and his motive, and he’ll stop the killings cold,” Craig finished for her.
“That’s it. We can’t tell them to be cautious because in doing so, we risk terminating our own case. Maybe then the one person hoping to collect the money doesn’t succeed, but if we can’t link the killings to anyone, we don’t find justice for the existing victims.”
“What about putting protection on them without their knowledge?” Meg stepped over Hawk, where he stretched out dozing on the floor, and took her seat again. “Tricky
for sure, but at the pace we’re going right now, hopefully it wouldn’t be for more than a few weeks. We know the suspect isn’t one of the investors, simply because of his age, but if we can find him, we can find which of the investors hired him to do his dirty work. We need to arrest them both for either premeditated murder or conspiracy to commit murder.”
“Not that the older investor will likely do much jail time at his or her age, but I’d really like to see it, anyway. As would the victims’ families. I think assigning protective details will be our best way to protect the investors without raising suspicions. It wouldn’t be foolproof by any means, but it will be preferable to letting them fend for themselves.”
“What do we know about these four new names?” Craig looked at the map on the wall. “Maybe we should be adding those as well?”
“That’s a good idea.” Meg pushed back from the table again.
Brian stopped her with a hand on her arm. “I got it.” He crossed to the map. “Give me the first location.”
They went through them, one at a time.
Lukesh Baldwin, Newark, New Jersey.
Simona Kavarai, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Mani Ramachandaran, Dover, Delaware.
Peter Stevenson, Blacksburg, Virginia.
Brian stood staring at the altered map, his hands on his hips. “If that’s all of them, then we’re still within the same geographic boundaries.”
“If McCord is right about the way they recruited investors—through Indian diaspora cultural associations—then this is what I’d expect. They probably worked with a limited number of specific associations until they got as many investors as they needed, which is why everyone is in a relatively limited geographic area. If anyone has moved, they haven’t gone too far. Not to the West Coast or anything. Kate, if you have no objections, I’d like to give these names to McCord so he can continue his research.”
Kate nodded her assent. “As long as he does nothing, absolutely nothing, to give them a heads-up that they may be in danger, then I’m fine with it. He’s deep in this case already and has proved his discretion. We’ll investigate from our end as well, since this is brand-new information and we don’t know anything about them yet. I’m going to get more information on the living arrangements of these individuals. Do they live on their own, with family, or in retirement or nursing homes? Then I’m going to arrange for protection right away. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch the suspect in the act of trying to grab one of them. I don’t think we’ll need to protect them for long, though. Considering our sped-up time line, and the fact that we’re now nine days since the last killing, I suspect he’s going to strike again soon.”
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