Fair Warning - Jack McEvoy Series 03 (2020)

by Connelly, Michael

  “I think Myron might have had a tear in his eye when I said goodbye today,” I said.

  “Ah, I’ll miss Myron,” Rachel said.

  “We’ll see him again, and he agreed to come on the podcast to give updates on the Shrike stuff. It’ll plug the website.”

  “That’s good.”

  I finished my martini and Elle was quick with another. Rachel and I small-talked while I worked the level down on it. I noticed she had not re-upped her own drink and had even ordered a glass of water. She kept looking down the bar at the man sitting alone at the other end.

  I had my elbows on the bar and now rubbed my hands together, pushing my fingers back. As my internal alcohol level was rising, my courage was dissipating. I was deciding to let my suspicion go for another night—like the ninety-nine before it.

  “Are you having second thoughts?” Rachel asked.

  “No, not at all,” I said. “Why?”

  “Observation: you’re wringing your hands. And you just seem … I don’t know. Pensive? Preoccupied? Off.”

  “Well … I have to ask you something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while.”

  “Sure. What?”

  “That night at the Greyhound when you were acting like a source and giving me and Emily all that stuff about Vogel and describing the surveillance photo you saw …”

  “I wasn’t acting. I was your source, Jack. What’s your question?”

  “That was a setup, wasn’t it? You and the FBI—that guy Metz—you wanted us to lead the Shrike to Vogel. So you told us—”

  “What are you talking about, Jack?”

  “I’ve just gotta say it. It’s what I’ve been thinking. Just tell me. I can handle it. It was probably your allegiance to the people who kicked you out. Was it some kind of a deal to get back in, or—”

  “Jack, shut the fuck up before you once again ruin something good.”

  “Really, I’m the one who will ruin it? You did this thing with them and I’m the one who ruins everything? That makes—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now. And stop drinking.”

  “What are you talking about? I can drink. I can walk home if I’ve had too much, but I’m not even close to that now. I want you to tell me if that was a setup with you and the FBI.”

  “I told you, it wasn’t. And listen, we have a problem here.”

  “I know. You should have told me. I would’ve—”

  “No, I’m not talking about that. We have a problem right here.”

  Her voice had dropped to an urgent whisper.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Just play along,” she said.

  She turned and kissed me on the cheek and then put an arm around my neck and nuzzled in close. Public displays of affection were a rarity with her. I knew something was up. She was either going to bizarre lengths to distract me from my question or there was something terribly wrong.

  “That guy across the bar,” she whispered in my ear. “Be casual about it.”

  I reached forward for my drink and took a glance down the bar to the man sitting by himself. Nothing about him had seemed suspicious to me. He had a cocktail glass in front of him that was half filled with ice and clear liquid. There was a slice of lime in the glass as well.

  I turned my stool so I was facing Rachel. We had our hands on each other.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “He came in right after me and he’s still nursing his first drink,” she said.

  “Well, maybe he’s pacing himself. You’re on your first, too.”

  “That’s only because of him. He’s been kind of watching us without watching us. Watching me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he has not looked over here once since he got here. But he’s using the mirrors.”

  There was a large mirror that ran behind the bar and another on the ceiling above it. I could see the man in question in both of them so that meant he could see us.

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “And look at his shoulders.”

  I checked: his shoulders were large and the biceps and neck thick. In the days since the Shrike had come to light, the FBI was pursuing a theory that he was an ex-convict who had built up his body in prison and possibly perfected his neck-breaking move there as well. The investigation had zeroed in on the unsolved murder of an inmate at the Florida State Prison in Starke whose body was found stuffed behind an industrial washing machine in the laundry. His neck was broken so severely that the cause of death was listed as internal decapitation.

  The case was never solved. Several convicts worked in the prison laundry or had access to it, but the surveillance cameras were fogged over by steam released by the dryers—a problem that had been noted by staff repeatedly but never addressed.

  For more than a month the bureau had been looking at video from prison-yard cameras and running down data on every convict who worked in the laundry or could have had access to it on the day of the murder. Agent Metz had told me he was sure that the Shrike had killed the inmate. The murder had occurred four years earlier, well before the Shrike killings began, and it fit the pattern attributed to the Shrike starting in Florida.

  “Okay,” I said. “But wait a minute.”

  I pulled my phone and went into the photo archive. I still had a photo of the artist composite of the Shrike. I opened it and tilted the screen to Rachel.

  “Doesn’t really look like him,” I said.

  “I don’t put a lot of trust in composites,” she said.

  “What about Gwyneth saying it was a good match?”

  “She was emotional. She wanted it to be a match.”

  “The Unabomber composite was right on.”

  “One in a million. Plus the Shrike’s composite has been on every TV channel in the country. He would have changed his look. That’s a big thing with incels. Plastic surgery. Plus he’s the right age: mid-thirties.”

  I nodded.

  “So then what do we do?” I asked.

  “Well, first, we act like we don’t know he’s there,” Rachel said. “And I’ll see if I can get Metz involved.”

  She pulled out her phone and opened the camera app. She held the phone out as though she was taking a selfie. We leaned close and smiled at the screen as she took a photo of the man at the other end of the bar.

  She studied the shot for a moment.

  “One more,” she said.

  We smiled and she snapped another photo, this time zooming the focus in closer on his face. Luckily Elle was leaning into a conversation with the couple in the middle so Rachel got an unobstructed shot.

  I leaned over to see what she got and fake-laughed as if she had taken a bad photo.

  “Delete it,” I said. “I look like shit.”

  “No, I love it,” she said.

  Rachel was editing the real shot, expanding it as much as possible without clarity decay and then saving it. When she was finished she texted it to Agent Metz with this message.

  This guy is watching us. I think it’s him. How do we handle?

  We pretended to chat while we waited for a reply.

  “How would he know to follow you here?” I asked.

  “That’s easy,” Rachel said. “I’ve been in your stories as well as the podcast. He could have followed me from my office. I came straight here after locking up.”

  That seemed plausible.

  “But this flies in the face of the profile,” I said. “The bureau’s profilers all said he was not vengeance motivated. The story is already out. Why risk coming back to do something to us? It’s behavior he hasn’t shown before.”

  “I don’t know, Jack,” Rachel said. “Maybe it’s something else. You’ve made a lot of generalized statements about him on the podcast. Maybe you got him mad.”

  Her phone’s screen lit up with a return text from Metz.

  What’s your 20? I’ll send Agent Amin out in a Lyft.
See if he follows and we’ll lead him into a horseshoe.

  Rachel sent back a text with the address and asked for an ETA on the Lyft car. Metz replied that it would be forty minutes.

  “Okay, so we have to order another round and then act like neither one of us can drive,” Rachel said. “We fake a request for a Lyft and then get in the car with Amin.”

  “What’s a horseshoe?” I asked.

  “They’ll set up a car trap. We drive in, he follows us, they close the horseshoe behind him, and he’s got nowhere to go.”

  “Have you ever done a horseshoe trap before?”

  “Me? No. But I’m sure they have.”

  “Let’s hope it works.”

  42

  Forty minutes later we were in the back of the FBI’s Lyft minivan with Agent Amin behind the wheel. He pulled away from Mistral and headed west on Ventura Boulevard.

  “What’s the plan?” Rachel asked.

  “We have the horseshoe set up,” Amin said. “We just have to see if you have a follower.”

  “Did Metz get a bird up?”

  “Yes, but he had to wait until it was free from another op. It’s on the way.”

  “And how many cars do we have?”

  “Four including the Lyft.”

  “That’s not enough. He may spot the surveillance and bug out.”

  “It’s what we could do on short notice.”

  “Where’s the horseshoe?”

  “Tyrone Avenue on the north side of the 101. It dead-ends at the river and it’s only five minutes away.”

  I saw Rachel nod in the darkness of the car. It did little to balance the anxiety she was exuding.

  At Van Nuys Boulevard, we turned north. I could see the 101 overpass just a few blocks ahead.

  Rachel pulled her phone and made a call. I only heard her side of it.

  “Matt, are you running this op?”

  I knew then that she had called Metz.

  “Did he leave the restaurant?”

  She listened and her next question seemed to confirm that the man at the bar had followed us when we left.

  “Where’s the airship?”

  She shook her head while listening. She wasn’t happy with his answer.

  “Yes, I hope so.”

  She disconnected the call but the tone of her last words indicated she thought Metz was handling it wrong.

  We crossed under the freeway and then took an immediate turn east on Riverside Drive. Four blocks later, Amin put on his right turn signal as we approached Tyrone.

  Amin was monitoring radio traffic on an earpiece. He got an instruction and passed it on to us.

  “All right, he’s behind us,” he said. “We are going down to the dead end and stopping. You two stay in the van. No matter what, you stay in the van. That understood?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Understood,” Rachel said.

  We made the turn. The street was lined on both sides with parked cars and only dimly lit. There were single-family homes on both sides of the street. A block ahead I could see the twenty-foot wall of the raised freeway. The tops of cars and trucks were crossing up there left to right, heading west and out of the city.

  “This is residential and it’s too dark,” Rachel said. “Who picked this street?”

  “It was the best we could do on short notice,” Amin said. “It’ll work.”

  I turned to look out the back window and saw headlights sweep across the roadway as a car slowly made the turn and followed us onto Tyrone.

  “There he is,” I said.

  Rachel glanced back and then forward, obviously better versed in this maneuver than I was.

  “Where’s the cutoff?” she asked.

  “Coming up,” Amin said.

  I scanned through all the windows, wondering what the cutoff meant. Just as we passed an opening on our right I saw the lights of a car backed into a driveway flash on. The car then lurched into the street behind us and stopped dead in front of the tail car, creating a barrier between us and the tail. I watched it all through the back window. Simultaneously, another car pulled from a driveway behind the tail car, boxing it in.

  I saw agents tumble out of the two passenger-side doors of the first car and take cover behind the front of it. I assumed the same happened with the car on the other side of the box.

  Amin kept driving, putting more distance between us and the takedown operation.

  “Stop here!” Rachel yelled. “Stop!”

  Ignoring Rachel, Amin started to bring the van to a slow stop as we reached the terminus of the street at a fence that enclosed the concrete aqueduct known as the Los Angeles River. Rachel was reaching for the release on the side door before he brought it to a halt.

  “Stay in the van,” Amin said. “Stay in the van!”

  “Bullshit,” Rachel said. “If it’s him, I want to see this.”

  She jumped out the door.

  “Goddamn it,” Amin said.

  He jumped out next and pointed through his open door at me. “You stay right there,” he said.

  He headed off after Rachel up the street. I waited a beat before deciding that I wasn’t going to miss this either.

  “Fuck that.”

  I climbed through the door Rachel had left open. Looking around, I saw Rachel up near the blockade. Amin was right behind her. I moved over to the right sidewalk and started up the street behind the cover of the cars parked along the curb.

  The horseshoe was now lit by headlights and the spotlight of a helicopter that had swung in from over the freeway. I heard the shouts of men in the street up ahead, rising in urgency.

  Then I heard one word clearly and repeated by many voices. “Gun!”

  A volley of shots immediately followed. Too many to separate and count. All within five, maybe ten seconds. I instinctively ducked behind the line of cars on the curb but kept moving up the street.

  The gunfire ended and I straightened up and kept moving, my eyes scanning now for Rachel to make sure she was safe. I didn’t see her anywhere.

  After an eerie silence the shouting started again and I heard the all-clear signal.

  When I got to the box I cut between two cars and into the light from above.

  The man from the bar was faceup on the ground next to the open door of an old Toyota. I saw gunshot wounds on his left hand and arm, his chest and neck. He was dead, his eyes open and vacantly staring up at the helicopter above. An agent in an FBI raid jacket was standing eight feet away, his feet spread on either side of a chrome-plated pistol lying on the ground.

  When he turned slightly I saw it was the agent I had met after Roger Vogel had been run over by the Shrike. Metz.

  And he saw me.

  “Hey, McEvoy!” he yelled. “Get back! Get the fuck back!”

  I raised my hands wide to show innocence. Metz signaled to another agent standing nearby.

  “Get him back to the van,” he ordered.

  The agent moved toward me. He grabbed me by the arm, but I jerked free and looked at Metz.

  “Metz, you gotta be kidding!” I yelled.

  The agent moved in to grab me more aggressively. Metz left his position over the gun and moved toward me, holding his hand up to stop the agent.

  “I’ll handle it,” Metz said. “Watch the weapon.”

  The agent changed direction and Metz came up to me. He did not touch me but spread his hands as if to block my view of the man on the ground behind him.

  “Jack, look, you can’t be here,” he said. “This is a crime scene.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Rachel?”

  “Rachel, I don’t know. But Jack, you gotta move back. Let us do our job here and then we’ll talk.”

  “He pulled a gun?”

  “Jack …”

  “Was it him? The Shrike didn’t use a gun.”

  “Jack, listen to me. We are not talking about this right now. Let us work the scene and then we’ll talk. Get back on the sidewalk now or we are
going to have a problem. You’ve been warned.”

  “I’m media. I have a right to be here.”

  “You do, but not in the middle of the fucking crime scene. I’m really losing my patience with—”

  “Jack—”

  We both turned. Rachel was standing between two parked cars behind me.

  “Rachel, get him out now or bail him out later,” Metz said.

  “Jack, come on,” she said.

  She waved me to her. I looked back at the dead man on the ground and then turned and walked toward her. She moved between the two cars and up onto the sidewalk. I followed.

  “Did you see the shooting?” I asked.

  “I just saw him go down,” she said.

  “He had a gun. That’s not—”

  “I know. We’ll get answers but we have to back off and let them do their thing.”

  “This is crazy. Twenty minutes ago, the guy was sitting there in the bar right across from us. Now he’s dead. I just realized, I’ve got to call Myron. I’ve got to tell him we have one more story to do.”

  “Let’s just wait on that, Jack. Let them do their work and then let’s see what Metz says.”

  “All right, all right.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. And then I spoke without thinking about the content or consequences of what I said.

  “I’m going to ask him about that day, too. Metz. See if he denies it was a setup.”

  Rachel turned and looked at me. She didn’t say anything at first. She just slowly shook her head.

  “You idiot,” she said. “You did it again.”

  THE LAST STORY

  FBI Kills Armed Man in “Shrike” Takedown

  By Myron Levin

  An Ohio man stalking an investigator on the Shrike serial killer case was cut down in a volley of FBI gunfire in Sherman Oaks last night when he drew a weapon and pointed it at agents who had cornered him, federal authorities said.

  Robinson Felder, 35, of Dayton, was killed at 8:30 p.m. on Tyrone Avenue just north of the 101 Freeway. Agent Matthew Metz said Felder had been following Rachel Walling, a private investigator who had played a pivotal role three months ago in revealing the killing spree of a murder suspect known as the Shrike.