I make it into the hallway and head down toward the “war room,” a converted conference room, minus the long table, where eight research analysts are working on our case. They came in this morning at seven and have been doing full workups on the people we stopped at the roadblock, a total of more than five hundred white adult men.
I am woozy, my reactions fuzzy. I hear animated discussion, then laughter—laughter—and I quicken my pace toward the war room.
Inside, one of the two male RAs is standing, doing something comical, an imitation of a goofy dance move or something. When he sees me, when the room becomes aware of me, everyone stops smiling and silence lingers awkwardly in the air. I look at each of them, these seven new RAs plus Sophie Talamas, as I enter the room. I feel like some humorless parent interrupting a slumber party, a teacher walking in on a rambunctious classroom, and I hate it, but it doesn’t stop me from going off.
“The man we’re after,” I say slowly, my voice trembling, “scalps victims while they’re still alive. You get that, right? He burns the flesh off their bodies—while they’re still alive. Stop me when I’ve said something funny!”
All eyes have dropped to the floor. Sophie says, “Just blowing off some steam, Emmy. Everyone’s working hard.”
“Everyone’s not working hard enough,” I reply. “He’s in here,” I say, pointing to one of the laptop computers. “Somewhere in all this data, in some cross-reference we haven’t done yet, in some database, on some blog or social media or website, is our subject. It’s up to us to find him, people. You all in this room. He’s not going to leave a fingerprint for one of our superstar special agents to find. He’s not going to drop his wallet at the crime scene or trip and break his leg on the way out of a house he torches. He’s not going to be spotted by some nosy neighbor. It’s not going to be the field agents who find him. It’s going to be us, the people in this room, the RAs. So screw your heads on and give me your A game, people, because this asshole just slipped away from us for another week!”
I storm out of the room and head for the elevator, needing a shower and something to eat before I continue. It isn’t until I’m out in the fresh air that I realize my car keys are back up in my office.
64
WHEN I return to my office, Sophie Talamas is in there, holding my keys. “I think you forgot these,” she says.
I snatch them from her.
“You had no right to say that to us, Emmy. These people are killing themselves for you. They’re the most underpaid people in the entire Bureau, yet they’re working fifteen-hour days, they’re here at seven in the morning on a Sunday—”
“Hey, you know what, Sophie?” I throw up my hands. “You want a nine-to-five job, go work at Seven-Eleven or something. We’re trying to catch a monster. It sometimes requires a little extra effort.”
“I think we’re clear on that.”
“Are you? That’s great.” I head for the door.
“We’re not finished,” Sophie says.
I stop and turn. “What did you say?”
Sophie, with her silky hair pulled up fashionably casual, her skinny jeans and pretty knit blouse, her perfectly etched features, is fuming. When someone this attractive gets mad, her face doesn’t turn ugly, exactly—it’s more like her features become highlighted, her eyes a little shinier and her cheeks glowing more prominently. “We have a problem, don’t we, Emmy? You and I.”
I take a breath and hold out my hand. “Just do your job, Sophie, and—”
“I’m doing my job. I’m working as hard as anyone. But what’s our problem? You’ve given me nothing but dirty looks since the day I arrived.”
“I need you focused,” I say. “I need you to focus on this case and nothing else.”
“I’m not sleeping with him, Emmy.”
I draw back, knocked on my heels by the comment. Sophie folds her arms and doesn’t speak, letting those words linger between us. There is so much to say and think about what she’s just said, none of it good. The fact that she acknowledges the issue at all means I’ve done something—body language, facial expression, something—to make it an issue, at least in her eyes. The fact that she is comfortable enough with Books that she feels entitled to make such an announcement. The fact that she thinks I need to hear this from her, that we’re even talking about this when there’s a vicious sociopath at large—
“I’m not,” she says again. “Books has been very good to me, very supportive. We’re friends, for sure. But that’s all it is.”
And then, I can’t deny the small pang of relief that I feel, that I instantly sequester, because that’s what I’m best at, right? Steeling myself, shutting down. My feelings for Books (to the extent they exist, some residual feeling, some primitive sexual attraction, nothing more) don’t matter, because I can put them aside to focus on this investigation. My sense of loss for Marta doesn’t matter, because I can put that aside, too. I click on any such feelings and drag them into my mental trash bin where they belong.
I’m a girl standing in a tornado, pretending like it isn’t even windy, like I can compartmentalize every emotion, switch off my heart and divert every ounce of my energy into my brain, that I can be the girl who’s all about the data, all about the clues, all about the puzzle, and forget about anything that makes me human.
I’ll have time to be human later. Later is one of my favorite words.
“Do your job,” I whisper to Sophie. “That’s all I care about.”
65
I SPEND most of the afternoon in the war room, watching over the other RAs, checking their work, flagging anything that looks promising, though little of it does. There is some residual tension from my blowup earlier in the day, but it gradually subsides as we focus on the work at hand. At six o’clock, somebody mentions dinner, and we put in for some pizzas. I wander down to Books’s office, where our fearless leader has been taking calls from the various agents in the field since he returned from the northeast a couple of hours ago.
“Shit,” he says, as I walk in, shaking his head. There is background noise, video from some source, maybe his smartphone.
Books looks like hell, having spent all night in a helicopter over the Rhode Island–Connecticut border. His eyes are red and unfocused, his hair matted. His face is drawn and unshaven.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing.” He waves a hand. “My Chiefs got spanked for the second week in a row. C. J. Spiller, the Bills’ running back, for Christ’s sake, ran through our line like we’re a bunch of high-schoolers.” He lets out a sigh. “And Romeo’s a defensive coach.”
I drop into a chair opposite him. “Books, you do understand that I have no idea who C. J. Spillman or Romeo are.”
“Spiller,” he corrects me. “C. J. Spiller is the—”
“And you also realize that I don’t care.”
Books shakes his smartphone. “We’re oh and two now, and it feels like we’re light-years from the division title we won—”
“Books, what is it with men and football? I mean, it’s like an addiction with you.”
“Me and millions of others.”
“I know,” I agree. “My dad was like that, too. He’d sit in front of the television all day on Sunday and watch games. We had to work church around it, because we all knew what his real religion was.”
And then something happens. The clouds separate. My heart begins to race.
“Football is the ultimate . . .” Books is waxing philosophical but I’m no longer listening. I pop to my feet, which in my current state is not a good idea, and nearly fall over as I rush out of Books’s office and into my own.
I jump on my computer and bang out a solid hour of research, my body overheated, my pulse reeling, my hands trembling so hard that I can barely type. When I’m done, I have a U.S. map with a lot of markers.
Books is on the phone with an agent when I walk back in. He shakes his head quizzically and finishes his conversation before he looks carefully over the p
aper I’ve given him.
“Those are the kill sites,” I say with a child’s overblown pride. “The different cities during his autumn travels. Labor Day to year’s end, last year.”
“Okay, those are the orange stars, two kills a week, each week a different part of the country. But what are the black stars between the two orange ones in each location?”
“The black stars,” I say, “are professional football stadiums.”
Books looks at the map another moment; then his head pops up and he looks at me like I’ve just discovered another planet.
“He never kills on Sunday,” I say.
“Oh, Jesus.” Books brings a hand to his mouth. “Labor Day to New Year’s. That’s…the NFL season.”
“He’s not traveling on business,” I say. “He’s going to pro football games.”
66
“LAST YEAR’S autumn kill spree,” I begin. “September eighth, two thousand eleven—the first known kill, in Atlantic Beach, Florida. September ninth, the second kill in Lakeside, Florida. And what’s right between them? EverBank Field, the home of the Jacksonville Jaguars, where the Jags hosted the Tennessee Titans that Sunday, September eleventh.”
I look over at Books, the one who told me to refer to Jacksonville’s football team as the “Jags,” to give me street cred with the rest of the predominantly male team. We’re video-conferencing with the entire task force.
“Who won the game?” someone asks. There’s always a comedian in every bunch.
“The Jags, sixteen to fourteen,” I answer, another nod from Books. “The following week, two more kill sites: September sixteen in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and September seventeen in Monroe, North Carolina. And the next day, he took in the Carolina–Green Bay game at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte.”
“A different stadium every week,” says Books. “And no patterns to the teams, either. It’s not like he followed the Colts or the Bears or anyone around the country. There’s no pattern we’ve discerned from the locations he selected. Good teams, bad teams, evenly matched games versus lopsided ones—there’s no pattern to them.”
“Except that he stayed away from the Midwest,” I add. “Because the Midwest is his stomping ground for the off-season.”
“He never went to the same stadium twice?” someone asks.
“Not last year, no. This year, the season’s just begun. In the first week of the NFL season, he killed that couple in Nebraska and then a man outside Denver, which means he would have gone to the Broncos-Steelers game in Denver that Sunday. And just this week—the second week of the season—he killed in New Britain, Connecticut, and in Providence, Rhode Island. We figured he would then speed home to the Midwest, and his only means of exit was Interstate Ninety-five, heading south-southwest through Connecticut, so we roadblocked it.” I use my pointer along I-95, heading in the opposite direction. “But he didn’t go home on Saturday night. He took I-Ninety-five north into Massachusetts. He went to the New England Patriots game today in Foxboro.”
I don’t make eye contact with Books. When he and I were working this all out, and we realized that we had totally pegged our subject last night, but that we blocked I-95 in the wrong direction, I couldn’t speak for a good ten minutes.
We had him. We were so close. We had him down to the freakin’ highway on which he was traveling. And still, he evaded us. And now two more people will die agonizing deaths this coming week.
Books, probably sensing my despair, jumps in. “But the point is, he didn’t visit Denver’s or New England’s stadium last year. Which means, he seems to be on a path to keep going to a new stadium—one he’s never visited—every week until he’s visited them all.”
“So let’s assume that,” I say. “Let’s assume his next trip will be to a stadium he didn’t visit last year. Let’s further assume it won’t be a midwestern stadium, because it’s his backyard. So that removes the Chicago Bears, the Indianapolis Colts, the Saint Louis Rams, and the Kansas City Chiefs. Bottom line, there are four stadiums we don’t think he’ll visit, plus the two that he already has.”
“Okay, what does that leave?” someone asks, a woman.
“There are thirty-two NFL teams and thirty-one stadiums, because the Jets and Giants share one,” I say. “So, thirty-one is the number. He visited seventeen stadiums last year and two more this year. That’s nineteen. Then disregard the four midwestern teams and that’s twenty-three that are off his list. That leaves eight more stadiums, folks. Eight more stadiums.”
“And of those eight remaining teams, only five have home games this week,” Books chimes in. “The Oakland Raiders, Dallas Cowboys, Cleveland Browns, Washington Redskins, and Seattle Seahawks.”
“The Seahawks are a Monday night game, so we think we can rule out Seattle. He’s going to one of the other four areas this coming week,” I say.
“So what do we do?” asks one of the agents on the video feed. “Send out a general alert to be on the lookout for an average-looking white male with no distinguishing characteristics, who might have made an appointment with you, or who might show up at your door unannounced?”
He’s right. That’s the problem. We don’t have a good image of the man, and we don’t know his m.o. very well, either. He scheduled an appointment with Curtis Valentine in Champaign, Illinois, but we don’t know how he got to the others. What can we tell people? What kind of an alert can we send?
“We’ll put all local law enforcement on alert for any residential fire, with a quick turnaround to us, just like we did in the northeast this week,” Books says. “And once we know his first kill of next week, we’ll know where he is, and which football game he’s attending.”
We have to wait for him to kill again, in other words. It’s as depressing as it sounds. But it’s our only lead thus far.
“And once we know that,” says one of the agents, “we’ll be able to narrow him down to one of eighty thousand people watching a ball game.”
“True,” Books concedes. “We have to think about how to handle that crowd. But we’re fairly confident that whichever location he chooses, he will be inside a football stadium for three hours this coming Sunday. Now we’ll have to decide what to do with that window of time.”
It will be tricky, but we’ll have to come up with something. For that short period of time, we’ll have our subject in a steel box. We have to make sure he doesn’t get out.
67
* * *
“Graham Session”
Recording # 15
September 17, 2012
* * *
I started by watching her tonight. I watched her tonight in the most revealing of ways—that is, when she didn’t know I was watching her. I slipped into the bar, you see; surely you appreciate by now my abilities to move about undetected. When I met her at this bar last week, Mary had mentioned that she worked here, and it was my good fortune that she happens to be a bartender, so she was relatively stationary while I lurked in the corner, watching her from a distance.
I watched her when business was light, the dinner hour, as I ate the basic pub food and then opened a laptop computer as an excuse to linger. I watched her when business picked up for the Monday Night Football game. I watched her when people were rude to her and when people flirted with her. I watched her when she had moments to herself and when she interacted with the manager and other staff.
And then I slipped into the bathroom so I could remove my baseball cap and glasses and pull down the collar on my jacket. When I reappeared in the bar, crowded enough to provide me cover, I made my way to the bar as if I had just arrived. I will admit to a stirring of butterflies in my stomach. Yes, my friends, I was nervous.
I took a stool at the bar and waited my turn like any other patron. I decided I would act surprised to see her, as if I was just coming to this bar like I did last week and didn’t expect to see her here. Would I pretend not to remember her name? Would I struggle a moment, snap my fingers, and say, “Mary…right?”
When she approached me, with a soft smile playing on her face, all of my deliberative functions ceased to operate. Her dark hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, but a few curls had sprung loose. Her eyes squinted, showing crow’s-feet at the corners. The lighting was poor, casting her eyes a shade darker than I recalled last time I saw her up close.
“Well, Graham,” she said, “I was beginning to think you were going to ignore me all night.”
She did it again! She put me on my heels before I even said hello. Last time, she caught me recording my thoughts while pretending it was a phone, the first person who’s ever figured out my ruse. This time, she knew I was lurking in the back of the bar, not necessarily in disguise but certainly obscuring my features.
And she remembered my name!
So then it was incumbent on me to come up with something witty, yes? Something clever, perhaps self-deprecating—that would typically be my trademark. A quick comeback of biting sarcasm, delivered with a deadpan expression. Something to keep up my end of the conversation.
But before I realized it, my mouth was moving and words were coming out. I said, “I was nervous about seeing you.”
Friends, I must tell you, time stopped for me just then. I wanted to reach into the air and snatch those words back. My entire soul was laid bare at that moment. What have I done? I thought, in those few beats of time, those few torturous breaths of oxygen. How can I take it back? Will she think I’m pathetic?
And this is what happened next: she broke eye contact with me, the corners of her mouth lifting slightly higher. She worked a rag across the bartop. And she said to me, “Well, Graham, that’s about the sweetest thing you could say to a girl.”
Do you remember what that feels like? That moment when there is a…a connection between you and someone else? That flutter in your chest when you realize you’ve crossed that small bridge, that there is at least some mutuality of feeling?
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