“It looks that way, yes,” Simpson said. “My partner confirmed it. We appreciate your calling it in.”
“All right, then,” I said.
I turned to head to the Jeep. Rachel did as well.
“I remember who you are now,” Simpson said.
I turned back to him.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I remember who you are now,” he repeated. “I read about the Scarecrow a few years back. Or maybe it was one of those Dateline shows. Hell of a story.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Rachel and I got into the Jeep and drove away.
“That guy didn’t believe a word I said to him,” I said.
“Well, he may get a second shot at you,” Rachel said.
“What do you mean?”
“First, his partner is an idiot for signing off on that as suicide. But the coroner will probably set them straight and it may change to a murder case. They’ll come back to us then.”
That added a layer of dread to the moment. I looked down and saw that Rachel had the printouts on her lap. I remembered glancing back at her in the Jeep while I was being interviewed and seeing her eyes down. She had been reading.
“Anything good in there?” I asked.
“I think so,” Rachel said. “I think the picture is getting clear. But I need to keep reading. Let’s go get that coffee you promised me.”
28
I sat in the conference room with Myron Levin and Emily Atwater. Through the window to the newsroom I could see Rachel sitting at my pod and waiting to be called in. She had asked to use my computer so I knew she was still digging, even as I was attempting to keep her involved in the story. I thought it best that I explain things to Myron and Emily before Rachel came into the meeting.
“If you’ve read my books or know anything about me, you know who Rachel is,” I said. “She has helped me on the biggest stories of my career. She put herself on the line and protected me when I was at the Velvet Coffin, and it cost her her job as an FBI agent.”
“I think it also got the Coffin shut down,” Myron said.
“That’s a bit of an oversimplification but, yeah, that happened then too,” I said. “She had nothing to do with that.”
“And you want to bring her in on the story,” Emily said. “Our story.”
“When you hear what she has, you will see we have no choice,” I said. “And remember, it was my story before it was our story.”
“Oh, wow, a day doesn’t go by that you don’t throw that in my face, does it?” Emily responded.
“Emily,” Myron said, trying to keep the peace.
“No, it’s true,” she said. “I’ve made some major gains on this story but he wants to take what I bring and go off on his own with it.”
“No, I don’t,” I insisted. “It’s still our story. Like I said, Rachel isn’t going to write it. She’s not part of the byline. She’s a source, Emily. She has information about Marshall Hammond that we need to have.”
“Why can’t we get it direct from Marshall Hammond ourselves?” Emily asked. “I mean, I was under the impression that we actually were reporters.”
“We can’t because he’s dead,” I said. “He got murdered this morning … and Rachel and I found the body.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Emily said.
“What?” Myron exclaimed.
“If we had gotten to his place a little earlier we probably would have run into the killer ourselves,” I said.
“Way to bury the lede,” Myron said. “Why didn’t you tell me this from the start?”
“Because I’m telling you now so you will understand why Rachel is so important to this. Let us tell you what happened and then she’ll explain what she’s found out and where we’re at.”
“Go get her,” Myron said. “Bring her in.”
I got up, left the room, and walked to my pod.
“Okay, Rachel, they’re ready,” I said. “Let’s just go in and tell them what we’ve got.”
“That’s the plan.”
She stood up and started gathering the papers she had spread out on the desk. She carried the paperwork under my open laptop, an indication she had something on the screen she planned to show us.
“You found something?” I asked.
“I found a lot,” she said. “I just feel like I should be presenting this to the police or the bureau, not the editor of a website.”
“I told you, not yet,” I said. “Once we publish, you can give it to whoever you want.”
I turned and looked at her as I opened the door to the conference room.
“Showtime,” I whispered.
Myron had moved to a chair next to Emily on one side of the table. Rachel and I sat across from them.
“This is Rachel Walling,” I said. “Rachel, this is Myron Levin and Emily Atwater. So let’s start with what happened this morning.”
I proceeded to tell them how I had stumbled across the connection between William Orton and Marshall Hammond, and how we had gone to Hammond’s home and found him hanging from the crossbeam in his garage lab.
“And it’s a suicide?” Myron asked.
“Well, it was pretty clear the police think that,” I said. “But Rachel thinks otherwise.”
“His neck was broken,” Rachel said. “But I estimated that his drop was no more than a foot. He was not a large or heavy man. I don’t think that kind of drop breaks the neck, and since that is the recurring circumstance in the cases you’re looking at here, I would term the death suspicious at the very least.”
“Did you share this with the police when they said it was suicide?” Myron asked.
“No,” I said. “They weren’t interested in what we thought.”
I looked at Rachel. I wanted to move on from the details of the death. She got the message.
“His broken neck is not the only reason to be suspicious,” she said.
“What else is there?” Myron asked.
“Documents recovered from the lab reveal—”
“‘Recovered’? What exactly does that mean?”
“I believe the killer spent time in Hammond’s lab either before or after he killed him. He hacked the desktop that contained records of much of the lab’s work. He printed out the records. But the printer memory kept the last fifty-three pages he printed. I printed those pages and that’s what I’ve been studying. We now have a good amount of documentation from the lab.”
“You stole it?”
“I took it. If that was stealing, then I would argue that I stole it from the killer. He was the one who printed it.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know for sure that that’s what happened. You can’t do that.”
I knew going into the meeting that this would be the place where ethical questions clashed with potentially the best and most important story of my career.
“Myron, you need to know what we’ve been able to learn from the printout,” I said.
“No, I don’t,” Myron said. “I can’t let my reporters steal documents, no matter how important they are to the story.”
“Your reporter didn’t steal them,” I said. “I got them from a source. Her.”
I pointed to Rachel.
“That doesn’t work,” Myron said.
“It worked for the New York Times when they published the Pentagon Papers,” I said. “They were stolen documents given to the Times by a source.”
“That was the Pentagon Papers,” Myron said. “We’re talking about a totally different kind of story.”
“Not if you ask me,” I said.
I knew it was a weak rejoinder. I gave it another shot.
“Look, we have a duty to report on this,” I said. “The documents reveal that there is a killer out there using DNA to identify and acquire victims. Unsuspecting women who thought their DNA and identities were safe. This has never been seen before and the public needs to know.”
That created a moment of silence, until Emily bailed me o
ut.
“I agree,” she said. “The transfer of the documents is clean. She’s a source and we need to go public with what she knows—even if she came into possession of the documents in … an unsavory way.”
I looked at her and nodded, even though unsavory was not the word I would have used.
“I’m not agreeing to anything yet,” Myron said. “But let’s hear or see what you’ve got.”
I turned and nodded to Rachel.
“I haven’t even gotten through everything in the printouts,” Rachel said. “But there is a lot there. First off, Hammond was a very angry man. In fact, he was an incel. Does everybody know what that is?”
“Involuntarily celibate,” Emily said. “Women haters. Real creeps.”
Rachel nodded.
“He was part of a network, and that anger and that hate led him to create this,” Rachel said.
She turned my laptop so it was facing Emily and Myron. She reached around the screen so she could manipulate the keyboard. On the screen was a red log-in page.
Dirty4
The page had fields for entering a username and password.
“Based on what I read in the pages I was able to figure out Hammond’s keywords,” Rachel said. “His online name was The Hammer—that was easy—and for the password I started feeding keywords from an online incel glossary into the log-in. His password was Lubitz.”
“‘You bitch’?” Emily asked.
“No, Lubitz,” Rachel said. “It’s the name of a hero in the incel movement. A German airline pilot who intentionally crashed a plane he said was full of sluts and slayers.”
“Slayers?” Myron said.
“What incels call normal men who have normal sex lives. They hate them almost as much as they hate women. Anyway, there is a whole vocabulary within the incel movement, most of it misogynistic, and it’s traded in online forums like Dirty4.”
Rachel typed in Hammond’s username and password and entered the site.
“We’re in the dark web here,” she said. “And this is an invitation-only site that identifies women with a specific genetic pattern called DRD4, or dirty four.”
“What is it?” Myron said. “What does it determine?”
“It is a genetic sequence generally believed to be associated with addictive and risky behaviors,” Rachel said. “Sex addiction being among them.”
“Hammond was buying only female DNA from Orange Nano,” Emily said. “He must have been identifying women with DRD4 in his lab. Women who had sent their DNA into GT23, never realizing it would be sold down the line to someone like him.”
“Exactly,” Rachel said.
“But wasn’t it anonymous?” Myron asked.
“It was supposed to be,” Rachel said. “But once samples were identified as having the DRD4 sequence, he had some means of reversing the anonymity. He was able to identify the women and put their identities, details, and locations on the Dirty4 website. Some of the profiles have cell numbers, home addresses, photos—everything. He sold them to his customers, who could search for women by location. If you are one of these creeps in Dallas then you search for women in Dallas.”
“And then what?” Myron asked. “They go out and find these women? I don’t—”
“Exactly,” I said. “Christine Portrero complained to her friend that she met some creepy guy in a bar and he knew things about her he shouldn’t have known. She thought she was being digitally stalked.”
“Dirty4 gave its members an edge,” Rachel said. “The women identified through DNA analysis by Hammond had the genetic makeup believed to be linked to promiscuity, as well as drug use, alcohol abuse, and other risky behaviors.”
“Easy marks,” Emily said. “He was telling his customers exactly who they were and where to find them. And one of those customers is a killer.”
“Exactly,” Rachel said.
“And we think that same customer is the one who killed Hammond,” I added.
“It appears from the printouts that Hammond had a partner in this,” Rachel said. “And they somehow became aware that women listed on the Dirty4 site were dying—were being killed. I think they looked at their subscriber base and figured out that there was at least one who had bought and downloaded the details of all the dead women. All of this is conjecture at the moment, but I think they warned him or told him to stop.”
“And that’s what got Hammond killed?” Myron asked.
“Possibly,” Rachel said.
“Who was the customer?” Myron asked.
“The Shrike,” Rachel said.
“What?” Myron asked.
“It’s the dark web,” Rachel said. “People use alternate names, IDs. If you are going to download names off a site like this, you don’t give your real name and you don’t pay with a credit card. You use an alias and you trade in cryptocurrency. The customer they identified as having downloaded the names of all four of the dead women went by the alias ‘the Shrike.’”
“Any idea what it means?” Myron asked.
“It’s a bird,” Emily said. “My father was a birder. I remember him talking about shrikes.”
Rachel nodded.
“I looked it up,” she said. “It silently stalks and attacks from behind, gripping its victim’s neck in its beak and viciously snapping it. It is considered one of nature’s most formidable predators.”
“All the women had broken necks,” Myron said. “And this guy Hammond.”
“And there’s something else,” Rachel said. “We think he may have hacked Hammond’s computer or made him open it before he was murdered. He then started printing. We repeated the last job he sent to the printer. It was a file that had the IDs of all the women.”
“How many names?” Myron asked.
“I didn’t count,” Rachel said. “But it looks like a hundred or so.” “Did you check to see if the four victims we know about are on the printout?” I asked.
“I did but they’re not on there,” Rachel said. “They could have been removed when it was determined they were dead.”
“So he kills Hammond and gets away with what?” Myron asked. “A hundred names of potential victims?”
That brought a long pause to the discussion.
“Why would he print the names if he’s already a customer and can access the same names through the site?” Myron asked.
“I think he’s probably anticipating that the site is going to get closed down,” Rachel said. “He may know about Jack and Emily or he might think law enforcement is closing in.”
“That puts a clock on things,” Emily said. “We can’t sit on this and put those women at risk. We have to publish.”
“We don’t even have the whole story yet,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Rachel said. “You people write your story while I take it to the bureau.”
“No,” I said. “I told you that had to—”
“And I agreed,” Rachel said. “But that was before I saw what was in the printouts. I have to go to the bureau and the bureau has to go to the police. This killer has all the names. They have to be protected. We can’t wait.”
“She’s right,” Myron said.
“It works, Jack,” Emily said. “We can say the FBI is investigating, give the story immediate credibility. The FBI gets us past go.”
I realized all three of them were right and that I had just come off rather badly, putting the story ahead of the safety of dozens of women. I saw the disappointment in both Rachel’s and Emily’s eyes.
“Okay,” I said. “But two things. We make it clear to the bureau, the cops, any agency involved that they can do what they need to do but no press conferences or announcements until after we publish.”
“How long will that be?” Rachel asked.
I looked at Myron and said the first number that popped into my head.
“Forty-eight hours,” I said.
Rachel thought about it and nodded.
“I can try to make that work,” she said. “Realis
tically, it will probably take them that long to confirm what we give them.”
“Myron, you good with that?” I asked. “Emily?”
They both nodded their approval and I looked at Rachel.
“We’re good,” I said.
THE SHRIKE
29
He waited on the food-court level at a table against the railing. It gave him a view directly down onto the second-level stores on the north side of the mall. There was a circular banquette designed as a spot for husbands to sit while waiting for their wives to shop. He did not know what Vogel looked like. Hammond’s partner had managed to keep his images and locations off the web. Kudos for that. But the hacker was of a type. The man who called himself the Shrike hoped to be able to identify him among the weekday shoppers in the mall.
The Shrike had picked the spot, putting out the mall location with the excuse that he—as Hammond—already planned to be there. It wasn’t the best location for what he intended but he didn’t want to raise any suspicions in Vogel. The priority was to get him to come.
He had a full tray of takeout food in front of him as camouflage. On the chair across the table from him was a shopping bag containing two gift-wrapped boxes that were empty. He was making a high-risk move and blending in was key.
He didn’t touch any of the food because after he ordered it he thought it all smelled disgusting. He also thought it might draw attention to him if someone noticed he was wearing gloves. So he kept his hands down in his lap.
He checked below and saw that a woman was now seated on the banquette. She was watching one of the children in the nearby Kiddie Korner playground. No sign of anyone who might be Vogel.
“Can I clear anything here?”
He turned to see a table cleaner standing at his side.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m still working on it.”
He waited until the cleaner walked away before checking down below. Now the woman was gone and a man had taken her place. He looked like he was in his early thirties. He had on jeans and a lightweight sweater. He seemed to be checking his surroundings in a casual but purposeful way. He wore sunglasses inside and that was the final giveaway. It was Vogel. He was a bit early but that was okay. It meant he might grow tired of waiting sooner and would leave when he believed the rendezvous was not happening.
Fair Warning - Jack McEvoy Series 03 (2020) Page 19