POD: car. No witness
The first thing I noticed was that they didn’t have McCafferty on the list yet. He’d be number two. I then realized that the eyes of many of those in the room were falling on me again as people read the last name and apparently realized who I was. I kept my eyes on the page in front of me, staring at the notes under my brother’s name. His life had been reduced to short descriptions and dates. Brasilia Doran finally rescued me from the moment.
“Okay, FYI, these were printed up before the sixth case was confirmed,” she said. “If you want to put it on your sheet now, it will be between Beltran and Brooks. The name is John McCafferty, a homicide detective with the Baltimore Police Department. We’ll get more details later. Anyway, as you can see, not a lot of things are consistent through these cases. The weapons used differ, places of death differ, and we have three whites, one black and one Hispanic as victims. . . The additional case, McCafferty is a white male, forty-seven years old.
“But there are limited common denominators to the physical scene and evidence. Each victim was a male homicide detective who was killed by a fatal head shot and there were no eyewitnesses to these shootings. From there we get into the two key commonalities that we want to exploit. We have a reference to Edgar Allan Poe in each case. That’s one. The second key is that each victim was believed by his colleagues to have been obsessive about a particular homicide case—two of them to the point that they had sought counseling.
“If you turn to the next page. . .”
The sound of pages turning whispered through the room. I could feel a grim fascination settling over everyone. It was a surreal moment for me. I felt like maybe a screenwriter does when he finally sees his movie on the screen. Before, all of this was something hidden in my notebooks and computer and head as part of the far realm of possibility. But here was a room crowded with investigators openly talking about, looking at printouts, confirming the existence of this horror.
The next page contained the suicide notes, all the quotes from Poe’s poems that I had found and written down the night before.
“This is where the cases irrefutably come together,” Doran said. “Our Poet likes Edgar Allan Poe. We don’t know why yet, but it’s something we’ll be working on here at Quantico while you people go traveling. I am going to defer to Brad for a moment to have him tell you a little about this.”
The agent sitting directly next to Doran stood up and took up the lead. I flipped to the front page of the package and found an Agent Bradley Hazelton listed. Brass and Brad. What a team, I thought. Hazelton, a gangly man with acne-scarred cheeks, poked his glasses back on his nose before speaking.
“Um, what we’ve got here are that the six quotes in these cases—that’s including the Baltimore case—come from three of Poe’s poems as well as his own last reported words. We are looking at these to determine if we can get some kind of common fix on what the poems were about and how they may relate to this offender. We’re looking for anything there. It seems pretty clear that this is where the offender’s playing with us and where he is taking the risk. I don’t think we’d be here today or Mr. McEvoy would have found a connection among these cases if our guy didn’t decide to quote Edgar Allan Poe. So, then, these poems are his signature. We’ll be trying to find out why he chose Poe as opposed to, say, Walt Whitman but I—”
“I’ll tell you why,” said an agent sitting at the far end of the table. “Poe was a morbid asshole and so is our guy.”
A few people laughed.
“Uh, yes, probably that’s correct in a general sense,” Hazelton said, oblivious that the comment was made to lighten everyone up. “Nevertheless, Brass and I will be working on this and if you have any ideas, I’d like to hear them. As for right now, a couple of things to throw out. Poe is credited with being the father of detective fiction with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which is basically a mystery story. So we may have an offender out there who is looking at this as some kind of mystery puzzle. He simply likes to taunt us with his own sort of mystery, by using Poe’s words as clues. Also, I’ve started reading through some of the established criticism and analysis of Poe’s work and found something interesting. One of the poems that our guy used is called ‘The Haunted Palace.’ This poem was contained within a short story called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ I’m sure you’ve all heard of it or read it. Anyway, the standard analysis of this poem is that while at face value it serves as a description of the house of Usher, it is also a disguised or subconscious description of the story’s focal character, Roderick Usher. And that name, you know if you were at last night’s briefing, came up in the death of victim number six. I’m sorry, that’s Sean McEvoy. He’s not just a number.”
He looked over at me and nodded and I nodded back.
“The description in the poem. . . hold on.” Hazelton was looking through his notes, then found what he needed, pushed his glasses back again and continued. “Okay, we’ve got, ‘Banners yellow, glorious, golden; / On its roof did float and flow,’ and then later on we have, ‘Along the ramparts plumed and pallid.’ Okay, and then a few lines later we have mention of ‘two luminous windows’ blah, blah, blah. Anyway, what this translates to as far as a description goes is that of a reclusive white male with blond hair, perhaps long or curly blond hair, and eyeglasses. There’s your start on the physical profile.”
There was a roll of laughter through the room and Hazelton seemed to take it personally.
“It’s in the books,” he protested. “I’m serious and I think it’s a place to start.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said a voice from the outer rim. A man stood up so he’d have the attention of the whole room. He was older than most of the other agents and carried the no-nonsense air of a veteran. “What are we talking about here? Yellow banners flowing—what is this shit? This Poe stuff is great, it’ll probably help that kid over there sell a lot of papers, but nothing’s convinced me in the last twenty hours that I’ve been here that there’s some mope out there on the street who somehow some way got the drop on five, six veteran dicks and put their own weapons in their mouths. I’m having a hard time seeing it, is what I’m saying. Whaddaya got on that?”
There was a hum of agreeing comments and nods in the room. I heard someone call the agent who had started the ball rolling “Smitty” and I saw a Chuck Smith listed on the front page of the pocket. He was heading to Dallas.
Brass Doran stood up to address the issue.
“We know that’s the rub,” she said. “Methodology is what we are least prepared to discuss at this point. But the Poe correlation is definitive in my judgment and Bob agrees. So what’s our alternative? Do we say this is impossible and drop it? No, we act as if other lives may be at stake because they may very well be. The questions you have will, hopefully, be answered as we go. But I agree it is something we need to be considering and it is always healthy to be skeptical. It’s a question of control. How does the Poet get control of these men?
She turned her head and scanned the room. Smitty was silent now.