He began to give me things, and I got to feel comfortable with it. That’s how it works. By the time I began to understand what was really going on, I was in too far. . .
I worked for him directly at first. Then not so much. For the past year and a half, I worked for this other man . . . Mark Chandler, who basically took over what I’d been doing . . . I got the impression he was kind of like the no. 2 man in the organization. . .
What was Trumble like? Smart, but manipulative. Kind of a genius, that’s what I thought at first. Everyone did. There was something about him, his eyes, the way he looked at you, that stays with you. And some of the things he told you got inside your head and you couldn’t get them out. Made you look at the world differently. Made you look at authority differently. It was weird. Scary weird. . .
I just got to feel very uncomfortable about the whole thing . . . because once you’re in at a certain level, it’s like you can’t just walk away from him. That’s the thing. Like, you had to act a certain way, sign nondisclosure agreements, not contact family members . . . And, of course, the majority of the people who worked for him were women. I think he enjoyed having that power over women. Half of them looked like Playboy bunnies from the 1960s to me . . . But they were smart. He was able to pick women who had a good work ethic . . . But the other thing was, I felt that deep down he really just wanted to be normal. . .
The elephant in the room, as far as I was concerned, was that you couldn’t ever just walk away. Sometimes people disappeared, and you weren’t supposed to ask about them or mention their names ever again or whatever . . . But I did once. There was this woman Beth-Anne Childester. I had worked with her, we’d sort of gotten to be friends. I still don’t know what really happened . . . But I know he has these security people. And some of them are, like, pretty scary . . . I always kind of felt they represented the other side of him in a way. Like an alter ego or something?
They’ve begun to shut down some of the offices, yeah. And there’ve been stories going around that he’s out of it half the time, paranoid, blaming people for shit they never did . . . There are a lot of stories. I never saw him, though, the last year. But you hear things. . .
Noticing a shadow, Hunter looked up and saw Ben Shipman. He was standing inside her doorway holding a file folder.
Chapter 47
“HEY. HAVE A few minutes?”
“Sure.” She slipped the transcript back into the envelope. “How you feeling?”
“Feeling,” he repeated, as if he didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Come on in. Please.”
Ship crossed the room with his endearing, somewhat clunky walk. He stood by her desk, feet spaced evenly, like a pupil about to recite a speech.
“I know you’ve been sort of avoiding me,” he began, watching her wide-eyed. “And I can’t really say as I blame you.”
Hunter frowned, not getting it. For the past two days Ship had been missing in action, out sick one day, working from home today. “No,” she said. “It’s just been busy.”
“And I know what you’re probably thinking.” His eyelids fluttered. “So I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” She glanced at the clock.
“I told the sheriff and state’s attorney about the Psalms.” Shipman’s face reddened, accentuating his freckles. “I’m sorry. I gave them background information about our investigation. And showed them the interview logs.”
Hunter was deeply surprised. “Why?”
“They asked me,” he said, bowing his head. “I should’ve told you about it, but I didn’t. The sheriff sort of wanted me not to say anything. I kept wanting to, but it just never felt like the right time.”
She nodded. Still loyal to the old guard. It was okay. In fact, it was a little touching that it mattered so much to him. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“I guess because I feel bad.”
“Okay. Thanks,” she said.
His face seemed to recalibrate. “But there’s something else, too,” he said, and Hunter could see that what he had come here to tell her was in the file folder. “I went back through the evidence these past couple of days. From the very beginning of the case? And I found a couple of things—some pretty significant things, actually—that we missed. Which makes me think the sheriff—or someone—may have messed with evidence.”
She nodded to the chair. Shipman remained standing.
“Remember how we talked before about planting evidence?” he said. “Whether the sheriff would do something like that?” Hunter nodded. She saw the hard resolve in his eyes. “I don’t think it’s about what they planted. I think it’s about what they left out. Here . . .” He opened the folder and pulled out unevenly stapled sheaves of paper. He laid them side by side in front of her like solitaire piles, showing a sense of order that didn’t come natural to Ben Shipman. “This is the trace, fiber, and biological report that you were given last Tuesday, okay? And these are the preliminary evidence logs from the police techs at the church. They’re not quite a match.”
Hunter looked, wondering what he was getting at. It was true she hadn’t seen the preliminary documents, only what had been processed into an evidence report. That was the procedure the state police and sheriff’s office followed for county crime scene investigations, despite the change of law for homicide cases. “Three discrepancies,” Ship said. “There was a small amount of DNA on Kwan Park’s body and a couple strands of hair on her clothing that didn’t make it into the evidence report. And also, a fingerprint out at the Oyster Creek cabin.”
“Why was that evidence left out?” she asked.
Shipman shrugged. “Procedure. State CSI has always worked with the sheriff to prepare the evidence report. That’s how they process it. In this case, it looks like they just neglected to log in certain pieces of evidence. When we submitted the first round of evidence for our meeting on Penn Street,” he said, meaning the medical examiner’s office in Baltimore, “for whatever reason the DNA and hair strands were left out. The fingerprint wasn’t logged in anywhere. I found out about it through one of the techs who was on the scene.”
“Why?” Hunter asked.
“What they’ll say with the fingerprint is it’s not relevant to the investigation. Hundreds of people had been in that cottage, right? Who aren’t relevant to this crime.”
“Which is probably true.”
“Yeah. Except in this case, it is relevant,” Ship said. “We’ve run the prints and come back with a hit for one on the national databases. Still waiting on the DNA and hair.”
“Really.”
“Yes. The fingerprint at Oyster Creek belongs to a man named Kirby Moss.”
He began to pull loose papers from his file folder, placing them on top of one another before Hunter had a chance to see what they were. “Kirby Moss was arrested thirteen years ago in Connecticut for assault with a deadly weapon and attempted second-degree murder. Both charges dropped for lack of evidence.
“Here’s why it’s interesting: They also found a fingerprint at Jackson Pynne’s town house on Sunday, inside the boots, that appear to be a match.”
“With Kirby Moss?”
“That’s right.”
“Holy crap,” Hunter said. “That’s interesting.”
Kirby. Kirby was one of the names Jackson Pynne had mentioned. One of the “security guys.”
Shipman’s freckled face watched her expectantly.
“And the hairs and DNA were left out of the evidence log that was forwarded to the task force, you’re saying?” Hunter asked.
“Yep.”
She played it forward in her thoughts, wondering if this could lead to obstruction charges against the sheriff, or if it would just be seen as incompetence.
“Here’s more of what I found on Kirby Moss,” Ship added, ha
nding her the last, stapled report.
Hunter motioned again for Ship to sit. This time he did. She leaned back and paged through the document for several minutes, realizing that Fischer must’ve had a hand in this, too, maybe more than a hand.
Kirby Moss had served in the U.S. Army in the mid-1990s. For the past eleven years he’d worked as a private security consultant. In his mug shot, he wore a crew cut, had startled, saucerlike eyes. What caught Hunter’s attention was something several pages in—something that may have seemed incidental to Fischer and Shipman. Moss had been employed for about two years by a Florida firm called Private Excelsior Security Consultants. A corporate statement from nine years earlier showed that the company’s CEO was an R. Gilbert Rankin.
Did that complete the circle? Could Gilbert Rankin be Gilly? Trumble’s “enforcer”?
The Violent Man. Big guy. Icy eyes.
Possible.
“Does Stamps know anything about this yet?”
Shipman shook his head. “Uh-uh. No one knows.”
Hunter felt the adrenaline pouring into her blood, knowing that this missed evidence could change the case. If Rankin was the head of security for Trumble, then they might be able to establish a link now between Trumble and the killings. And, in the process, exonerate Jackson Pynne.
Why would the sheriff have suppressed this evidence, though? She paged back through the report. Would he really have been so reckless? It seemed unlikely. Except—if he’d always gotten away with controlling the evidence-processing, he may have become conditioned to believe he could do whatever he wanted; it was a common enough human failing. And at the time, he’d already decided that Robby Fallow was the perpetrator.
“Great,” Hunter said, closing the report. “But we need to shift gears now. I’d like you and Fisch to drop everything else. I’m less interested in Kirby Moss than I am in Gilbert Rankin. I think that’s Moss’s employer. I think that’s where we need to focus next.” She glanced at the clock. “We’ve got four hours.”
“Oh,” he said, still staring at her. “Really?”
“Yes. I’m not sure yet, but I have a feeling the DNA’s going to come back as a match with his. I think Gil Rankin might be our man.”
Shipman blinked at her several times. “Which man?”
Hunter just looked at him.
“Oh,” he said. “Ten-four.”
Chapter 48
WENDELL STAMPS’S BROAD, pale face held its sober neutrality as Hunter walked into his carpeted office. This time the Wait had been eleven minutes.
“Have you got something?” he said, unruffled as always.
“I think I do.” Hunter sat, and opened her folder on his immaculate desk. Data reports, bios, information the three of them had put together over the past four hours. “New evidence,” she said. “Evidence missed earlier.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I don’t fault anyone but myself for this,” she said. “When several agencies are involved in collecting and logging evidence, sometimes there’s confusion and mistakes are made. It shouldn’t happen, but occasionally it does. I’d like to think that we’ll learn from this and in the future streamline the evidence-collection process to avoid this sort of thing. But I take full responsibility for it.”
“Is it relevant?”
“Relevant? Yes.”
“Okay.” He leaned forward, a way of indicating interest. Hunter showed him the report on the fingerprints at the murder scene and at Jackson Pynne’s garage, identified now as belonging to Kirby Moss, and the still unidentified DNA found on Kwan Park’s body and the hairs on her clothing. And then she told him about the connection between Moss and Gilbert Rankin.
When she finished, Stamps leaned back in his executive chair, still expressionless. “And you’re saying a procedural mistake is going to jeopardize the outcome of this case?”
“No, sir, I’m not. I’m saying evidence was suppressed. Evidence that, in my opinion, points to a different perpetrator.”
“Suppressed how?”
“I don’t know. It was apparently removed or left out of the evidence log on Tuesday before the reports were submitted to the task force. The fingerprint belongs to Kirby Moss. We know that. And we believe Moss worked for a security consultant named Gil Rankin.
“The reason that’s significant,” she went on, “is because Kwan Park worked for the same organization that Gil Rankin worked for. So, they’re all connected.”
His eyes narrowed and he glanced for several minutes through the reports that Fischer and Shipman had prepared. Finally, he looked up.
“And you have evidence that this Gil Rankin was involved? Because I don’t see anything here.”
“Not yet, but we will,” Hunter said. “I suspect the DNA on Kwan Park will come back as his. But it’s also significant, you understand, because the other three victims—I know you don’t want to make them part of your case, but I think you’re going to have to now—also worked for the same organization. August Trumble’s organization. That’s what ties these killings together. So I don’t see how we can’t make them part of the case.”
“But I don’t see that here.”
“No. But you will,” Hunter said. “We’re working on it.”
Stamps frowned. “But Jackson Pynne’s DNA was at the crime scenes here and in Virginia. And possibly in West Virginia,” he said. “And this man’s fingerprint was in his town house. So you’re saying Pynne did this in collaboration with these other two men?”
“No, the opposite,” Hunter said. “His DNA was planted, as I said earlier, by these men. The boots, two cigarette butts, a plastic soda cup. That’s what we have on Jackson Pynne. That’s what you’re basing your case on. Sir, we can’t go forward with charges against Mr. Pynne.”
Stamps’s face remained stoically blank, as if he were thinking about something else, even though Hunter suspected he was beginning to sense the case was crumbling.
His eyes went to the clock on the wall. Hunter looked, too.
“Is the FBI aware of this?”
“Not yet.”
He nodded, as if that meant something. “Who is this man, Ralph Gilbert Rankin?”
“Gil Rankin.” She handed him a two-page fact sheet that Fischer had prepared, the last document in her folder. “He’s a former police detective from New Jersey. He retired after allegations that he had planted evidence in a drug case and roughed up a potential witness in another case. No charges were filed in either incident, although there were internal investigations. He later worked security for Exxon for two years. He runs a very high-end security consulting firm now, called Private Excelsior Security Consultants, based in South Florida. From what we’re told, his main client—probably now his only client—is August Trumble’s organization.”
“But you don’t have any evidence confirming that?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
“Huh.” The state’s attorney nodded. He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed his temples. “But so—what are you thinking? I mean, motivewise. Can you tell me that again?”
“Jackson Pynne didn’t do this, sir. I believe Gil Rankin did, on orders from August Trumble. And I think they’ve come here now to silence Pynne, thinking he knows more than he does. And then tie this up in a bow and go home. Except things haven’t worked out quite the way they expected.”
As Stamps continued watching her with his impassive expression, Hunter began to entertain a wild idea: what if the state’s attorney was in on this, too, in some way? Stamps was evasive by nature, far cleverer and more deceptive than the sheriff, but every bit as much a protector of the old order. And he’d had issues with Jackson Pynne years earlier, too. What if Trumble’s organization was paying him to see that things went a certain way?
“Go on,” he said.
“There’s no more, sir.”
> “Okay.” He glanced at the reports on his desk. “Then let me review these and give it some thought. Can I hold onto these?”
“Yes. Those are your copies.”
“Thank you, Hunter. I appreciate your efforts.”
She felt a charge as she walked out past Connie Elgar and back down the long corridor to her office at the other end of the building. The play of sunlight in the glass arcs of the hallway, the luminance of the clouds, took on a sudden magnificence. The details of the investigation had just rearranged themselves into something that resembled a final form. This was the championship now, and nothing else mattered to Hunter—not next season, not the rest of her life. She had a real opponent at last, a single target—and a clear sense of what had happened. It was one of the best feelings she knew.
She whipped out of the parking lot that afternoon onto empty blacktop and drove west, speeding toward the Methodist church. But then she remembered the threats against Luke and his wife and slowed down, deciding it was best not to go there.
HUNTER WORKED INTO the night, determined to learn all that she could about Gil Rankin. She’d brought two cans of Red Bull and her iPod to the office so she could blast Maroon 5 and Ani DeFranco to periodically recharge her energies.
Pulling together a profile of Rankin wasn’t easy, though. There was almost no information about him for the past ten years, other than an address in Miami, Florida, and his listing with Private Excelsior Security Consultants. The only photo was twelve years old. She sensed he’d been deliberately sheltered working for Trumble. According to Pynne, Rankin had hurt people and raped women. But he had no criminal record. Hunter also wondered if maybe he wanted out of Trumble’s organization now. Maybe that’s what this was—an elaborate breakout on Rankin’s part?
Fischer and Shipman stayed late in their respective offices, like separate tenants, still combing through surveillance tapes and running data searches. Three other state homicide investigators from out of the region were pitching in as well, reviewing tapes. It was busywork again, but it wasn’t strictly a Tidewater County case anymore, despite what the sheriff and prosecutor thought.
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