“The red string of Fate,” she repeats faintly, when she has recovered her voice. “Is that Vietnamese?”
He corrects her cheerfully. “Chinese, but hey—we can’t separate our myths from theirs any more. That’s what a thousand years of political and cultural domination will do. Anyway, we keep the good ones. And this is a good one.” He leans back against the railing, looking out at people drifting on the pier. Singles, couples, families. “Two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of time, place or circumstances. The cord can stretch, it can tangle, but it will never break. You’re always in that person’s orbit.”
He shrugs, philosophically. “How do you think I ended up with the Bear?” He means Stotlemyre. “Red string. Had to be.”
Singh ponders, while Lam adds, “Supposedly with each passing year the threads grow tighter, bringing us closer to those people whose lives are destined to intertwine with ours in some way.”
It is an extravagantly romantic notion. With all the charm of most extravagantly romantic notions. She feels it in her own life, with Epps. They have often marveled together at how unlikely it is that they would find each other. Born oceans and continents apart, in communities and to parents who could not have been more different. Hers, upper-class Indian engineers and entrepreneurs. His, a drug-addicted teenage mother and struggling teenage father.
And yet here they are.
But what if…
It is so intimate she does not dare say it aloud. But what if Lam is right?
She has no doubt that love binds Roarke and Lindstrom. A tragic, impossible love—yet love it is.
Even more, are they not working together, in some cosmic sense?
And if such a string connects Roarke and Cara, how many other times might their paths have crossed?
How many other cases?
And suddenly she sees it. As if the whole country is spread out before her like the map in her Portland hotel.
Criss-crossed with hundreds of red threads.
PART TWO
Chapter 17
Portland - present
Singh and Snyder
Singh arrives at Agent Snyder’s house in a morning shrouded with fog. She has been up most of the night combing law enforcement databases, and is anxious to question him.
To that end, she carries a box full of pastries she has bought from a bakery across the street from her hotel. It is a ruse on her part. She wants a coffee break this morning, as soon as she can engineer it.
She balances the box as she punches in the security code for the door.
The house is quiet as she enters the hall. She steps to the archway of the living room…
And freezes, looking out at chaos.
Someone has torn through the boxes. Files are spread everywhere. Some are dumped out entirely.
She bites back the impulse to call out to Agent Snyder. Her sense is too strong that there is something else, someone else, at work here.
She sets the bakery box noiselessly down on an end table.
She has no weapon. She scans the room, and her eyes light on the fireplace, the rack of implements there: coal shovel, hearth broom, and poker. She moves on the balls of her feet to the fireplace to slip the poker from the stand.
A step comes from the inner hallway….
Her hand tightens around the poker handle…
Snyder appears in the archway of the hall, leveling his service weapon at her. Singh’s heart nearly leaps out of her chest. “Agent Snyder!”
A stricken look crosses Snyder’s face. Instantly he lowers the Glock. “Forgive me. Forgive me.”
She is so agitated she has to stop herself from crying out. “Agent Snyder, what is happening? What are you not telling me?”
He looks devastated. He steps back to a side table, slides open a drawer to put the Glock away, and closes it with finality. He stands facing away from her, then turns to her in chagrin.
“I should have told you before.” He looks around at the scattered files. “Someone’s been in the house.”
As disturbing as the truth is, she is relieved to hear him speak it aloud.
He turns helplessly in the room. “No valuables have been taken. I’ve found no sign of anyone. Just the files ransacked and left… like this. As if whoever it is wants me to see.”
Singh is chilled. “But this has happened twice since I have been here. Have you called the police?”
He looks mortified. “I haven’t. It was foolish of me. Pride. I was hoping to make sense of it by determining which files the intruder is after…”
Despite her distress, Singh feels a prickling of empathy. Of course his own reputation as an investigator has factored into his decision-making. He will have been feeling, and fighting, the inevitable loss of power that aging is.
“And have you?” she asks.
He gestures to the disorder. “Because of the extent and seeming randomness of the ransacking, it took me some time to determine what had gone missing. Which almost certainly was the intruder’s intent. But there has been a file stolen. The file on a case I consulted on in January. Just my handwritten notes.”
Singh feels an electric thrill of danger.
“I’d been troubled about this particular case before the intrusions. A few months ago, before you and I began this work together, I was called up to consult on a murder in Idaho.” His face shadows. “A child killing. A five-year old boy, abducted and savaged by a predator, left in the woods.”
Singh sits abruptly on a sofa. She is gripped by the familiar numb anger. Monsters. There are monsters.
“Local law enforcement was getting nowhere and they asked for an evaluation. I took Matthew up with me in January.”
Singh looks up, startled. She has heard nothing of this. “I did not know he had done that.”
An ambiguous look crosses Agent Snyder’s face. “I understand he wasn’t in very close touch with the office that month. The Lindstrom case was—conflicting.”
As Singh knows, “conflicting” is a mild word for what the Lindstrom case has been for Roarke.
And not just for Roarke…
“Matthew had just taken his leave of absence after… well, let’s call it what it was. He suffered a breakdown after Cara Lindstrom’s release from prison and disappearance.
He’d left San Francisco and was staying in Pismo Beach. I called him there and—applied some emotional blackmail to get him to come up to Idaho to assist me on the consult.”
Singh is unnerved. It is true that Roarke had been off the grid for the entire month of January. But he had filled the team in on his investigation in the Coachella Valley, following fourteen-year old Cara’s trail from sixteen years ago, to find a vicious serial rapist still operating in the present. Roarke had never once mentioned a side trip to Idaho.
Snyder continues. “There was an aspect of the case that bore some similarity to a case that Matthew and I worked years ago. An older case. In Seattle… and here in Portland.”
The file. The file he had tried to hide from her.
“The Street Hunter killings,” she says, with absolute certainty.
He looks at her. “Of course you would be familiar with those murders.”
Singh is instantly on edge. “The case in Idaho reminds you of the Street Hunter?”
“There are significant differences.” He pauses, then admits, “And very troubling similarities.”
“And those notes are in the file that is missing?” she asks tensely.
“I’m afraid so.”
Singh’s senses are buzzing. This is the undercurrent of urgency she has been sensing all along. “Agent Snyder, we must get to the bottom of whatever has been happening here.”
“Yes. I know.” He looks up, with determination. “It’s time for me to tell you everything.” He looks out the glass doors to the deck, where the fog swirls through the trees, a cold and murky presence. Suddenly he looks haggard. “But there is so much. I don’t know where to start.”
“Start with whatever you are thinking,” she urges.
“Yes,” he says. “You’re right.” She can see him relax, regain focus. He moves away from the doors, into the room. “You asked me, last week, how I met Matthew. I’m afraid I went off on a tangent. But I’m convinced now, it started there. It was a militia case.” Agent Snyder pauses, and is quiet for a long time. Singh does not know what to think. And then he turns back to her. “Sorry. I was thinking—that all the signs were there, all along. The rise of this violent subculture of conspiracy and apocalypse. Paranoid men arming themselves, collecting into groups that feed on each other’s obsession and racism and misogyny. Spreading their toxicity through the internet… and amassing more armaments.” Singh can feel the force of his regret. “If we had been paying more attention to the militias. What we might have prevented…”
He passes a hand over his forehead. “Yes. The case. It was 2005, and we were investigating a militia group in Richmond. One member, specifically.”
Singh’s entire body is electrified by one word.
Richmond.
Chapter 18
Quantico, Virginia - June 2005
Matt
It was like driving into the landscape of a dream.
Matt sat on the edge of his seat, staring out the window of the taxi at the wooded obstacle course made famous in the eerie opening of The Silence of the Lambs. The FBI Academy, five hundred forty-seven acres within the Marine Corps base, about forty miles out of D.C. The campus he’d read so many descriptions of, that he’d studied so intently on obscure videos he’d searched out on a new internet site called YouTube.
The last two weeks had been a whirlwind.
That night at Bishop Peak, Sheriff’s deputies had taken Matt into custody and removed Tracy Collier from the park to a hospital.
And Marcus Bannon, a drifter with a history of sexual assault, was arrested as he tried to flee the area.
Bannon had been holding Tracy in an old power facility hut outside the nature reserve, where he’d been squatting for several weeks. He’d left in her in the hut while he went out for some still unknown reason, and that remarkable little girl had bitten through the duct tape Bannon had bound her with, punched out the glass of the one window, and crawled out.
In her disorientation and panic she’d stumbled into the reserve, and it was on her frantic climb up the hill that Matt had found her—at the same time that Bannon returned to the shed to find the window broken and blood on the glass where she’d crawled out.
Bannon pursued her and Matt on the hill, but was spooked by the timely arrival of the deputies. He’d panicked and made a run for it. A patrol car noticed his erratic driving, clocked the description of the vehicle given by witnesses to Tracy’s abduction, and gave pursuit. So not long after Matt was lying face down and cuffed in the dirt, Bannon was arrested and booked.
And Tracy was returned to the arms of her overjoyed and grateful grandmother.
Alive. But not unharmed.
And Matt? He was a local hero. For a week, he was interviewed on the radio, in state news.
And Quantico called, offering him the internship.
Matt had no idea if they’d booted someone else off it, or created another spot for him, or if he’d always been in the running. He knew he should be excited regardless of the hows and whys. But there was a nagging doubt consuming him. He felt like an impostor.
And he couldn’t push through the fog of depression that had surrounded him since Tracy’s rescue.
He took his finals at Cal Poly, packed his bags, and arrived at the FBI complex in Virginia on that sweltering June day.
The taxi dropped him off at the dorm that would be home to the interns for the eight weeks of the program. At the registration desk in the lobby Matt was allotted a room and a roommate, Ed Chen, a Korean-American engineering major from MIT who’d already been assigned to the forensics lab.
In their room, Matt dressed in a new suit, impeccable shirt and tie and dress shoes—graduation presents from his parents. Then he and Ed joined the other dressed-to-the-nines interns for orientation, walking through the doors of the lecture hall under the engraved words:
FIDELITY BRAVERY INTEGRITY
The words felt like fire in Matt’s chest.
After a welcome speech by the Deputy Director, during which he referred to the Bureau as a “family” no less than four times, the interns were escorted on a tour of the facilities, ending at Hogan’s Alley—the ten-acre urban landscape built specifically for simulations like hostage scenarios, bomb threats and criminal investigations.
But in the midst of his fellow interns’ excitement, Matt was gripped by a growing unease. Every other intern he met already seemed to have a specific unit assignment. But no one had told him exactly what he was supposed to be doing here.
That first night in his dorm room he lay awake for most of the night, unaccustomed to having a roommate again and anxious about his seeming lack of place in the structure. The angst he’d been feeling for weeks deepened into fear. Fear that he wasn’t worthy. Fear that he hadn’t merely failed, but had fucked up beyond redemption.
On day two he was assigned to the Visual Investigative Analysis Unit. It was another stab in the heart. He’d hoped for a place on the Tactical Squad. Again he had the nagging feeling that the powers that be were just trying to create a place for him at the last minute. Not because he’d done anything real to deserve it, but just for show.
He dutifully attended the orientation on matrix analysis, link analysis, and visual investigative analysis. He was tasked with reading and reviewing huge stacks of case reports filed by operatives in the field, along with open source news reports gathered from the internet. The job: to search for linkages.
A small, mean voice in his head whispered that it was grunt work. He ignored it. If this was what he was going to do all summer, he would make it count. He threw himself into the process, trying to shake off his funk. It was all about looking for the larger plot or narrative. Finding the connections between seemingly random facts. Finding individuals connected to a case who repeatedly crossed paths. Catching the overlaps in time or location.
Then on the third day, his life changed forever.
He emerged from his six am shower and found a scribbled note from Ed informing him he’d had a call from administration.
Report to Conference Room D - Snyder wants to see you.
For a moment Matt’s heart skipped a beat.
Snyder?
Chuck Snyder was one of the original Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI, the living definition of “profiler.” At least, he was what anyone who knew anything thought about when they heard the word.
Matt forced himself to check his excitement.
He knew Snyder didn’t work at Quantico anymore. His beat was the Pacific Northwest, in the field office in Portland. Surely it wasn’t that Snyder.
But when Matt walked into the conference room, the man himself was seated at the table, a file spread out in front of him.
Matt knew him from photos. He was younger than Matt had imagined. No, that wasn’t true. He was stronger. Matt could see he was tall even though the agent was seated, and there was a rough male energy there that Matt had already come to expect in the law enforcement professionals around him. But with Snyder, there was something more ancient and mythic, something like a Viking about him.
“Matthew Roarke,” Snyder said. And there was a long and excruciating moment of silence while the veteran agent looked him over. It was a feeling like being in a doctor’s office.
Matt felt a thrill of anticipation… and immediately an attack of nerves.
What the hell is this?
Snyder reached for the file in front of him. “This is a remarkable story.” On top of the file was a newspaper article that Matt recognized instantly. It was one of the recounts of his “rescue” of Tracy Collier.
Matt had to struggle not to look pained. Apparently he didn’t succeed. The older man pi
cked up immediately on his discomfort.
“You don’t agree?” Snyder asked.
Matt knew he was supposed to say something like, I was just doing the job, or It’s an honor to serve.
Instead he burst out angrily, “I didn’t do anything. She did it. She bit through the tape on her hands and punched out the glass of the window and hauled herself up out of that hut. But she broke her ankle dropping out of the window and she got stuck in the valley there. I heard her calling and I went down and I brought her out.” His mouth was dry and he had to swallow to finish. “That’s it.”
Snyder chuckled, tossed the article back on the table. “You’re right. You didn’t do much at all. Dumb luck.”
Matt bristled, but answered tightly, “Yeah.”
The agent sat back in his chair, studying him. It went on beyond anything comfortable, but Matt was damned if he was going to show it. He stood without moving, without blinking. Finally Snyder spoke.
“But you were there.”
“Not fast enough,” Matt said, before he could stop himself.
The agent gave him a level look. “Because Bannon raped her, you mean?”
Matt didn’t want to talk about this. He’d never wanted to talk about it. But the words came anyway, low, angry, resentful. “If I’d just kept looking. If I hadn’t gone back down the trail to check in. I would’ve gotten there sooner…”
“And you feel guilty because you think she’s damaged.” Agent Snyder’s voice was suddenly sharp. “That’s your privilege speaking. Nothing really bad has ever happened to you.”
Matt felt his face flush with anger.
“You’re going to learn that many, many women and girls have had the same experience, and worse. Boys and men, too.” Snyder fixed a level gaze on Matt’s face. “Rape doesn’t make anyone ‘less than.’ Except the rapist.”
Matt felt as if he’d been struck upside the head. “I wasn’t thinking of it—like that,” he admitted.
“I know you weren’t. No one wants to talk about rape.” Snyder indicated the file. “Tracy’s case was barely covered in national news. If she’d been killed, or gotten away completely unscathed, every news source would still be talking about it.”
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