“Sam, it’s Jack McEvoy.”
“Jack Mack! How you doing?”
“Not so well. I’ve got some bad news. Angela Cook has been murdered. An FBI agent and I just found her. I know the morning edition is closed but you might want to call whoever needs to be called or at least leave it on the overnote.”
The overnote was a list of notes, ideas and incomplete stories that Samuel put together at the end of his shift and then left for the morning editor.
“Oh, my God! How terrible! That poor, poor girl.”
“Yes, it’s awful.”
“What happened?”
“It’s related to the story we were working on. But I don’t know a whole lot. We’re waiting on the LAPD to show up now.”
“Where are you? Where did this happen?”
I knew he would get around to asking that.
“My house, Sam. I don’t know how much you know, but I went to Las Vegas last night and Angela went missing today. I came back tonight and an FBI agent escorted me home and we searched the house. We found her body under the bed.”
The whole thing sounded insane as I said it.
“Are you under arrest, Jack?” Samuel asked, his confusion clear in his voice.
“No, no. The killer is trying to set me up but the FBI knows what’s going on. Angela and I were onto this guy and somehow he found out. He killed Angela and then he tried to get me in Nevada but the FBI was there. Anyway, all of this will be in the story I write tomorrow. I’ll be in as soon as I clear this scene and I will write it for Friday’s paper. Okay? Make sure they know that.”
“Got it, Jack. I’ll make some calls and you stay in touch.”
If I can, I thought. I gave him the number of my throwaway and ended the call. Rachel was still pacing.
“That didn’t sound very convincing,” she said.
I shook my head.
“I know. I realized I sounded like a nut job as I was saying it. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Rachel. Nobody’s going to believe me.”
“They will, Jack. And I think I know what he was trying to do. It’s all coming together now.”
“Then, tell me. The cops will be here any second.”
Rachel finally sat down, taking the chair across the coffee table from me. She leaned forward to tell her story.
“You have to look at it from his point of view and then make some assumptions about his skills and location.”
“Okay.”
“First of all, he’s close. Our first two known victims were in L.A. and Las Vegas. Angela’s murder and his attempt to get to you were in L.A. and a remote part of Nevada. So my guess is that he lives in or is close to one of these places. He was able to react quickly and in a matter of hours get to both you and Angela.”
I nodded. It sounded right to me.
“Next, his technical skill. We know from his e-mail to the prison warden and from how he was able to attack you on multiple levels that his tech skill is quite high. So if we assume that he was able to breach your e-mail account, then we can also assume that he breached the entire L.A. Times data system. If he had free rein inside, then he would have been able to access home addresses for both you and Angela, right?”
“Sure. That information has got to be in there.”
“What about you being laid off? Would there be any e-mail or a data trail involving that?”
I nodded.
“I got a ton of e-mails about it. From friends, people at other papers, everywhere. I told a few people by e-mail, too. But what would it have to do with any of this?”
She nodded as though she was way ahead of me and my answer fit perfectly with what she already knew.
“Okay, so then what do we know? We know that somehow Angela or possibly you hit a trip wire and alerted him to your investigation.”
“Trunk murder dot com.”
“I will have it checked out as soon as I can. Maybe that was it and maybe it wasn’t. But somehow our guy was alerted. His response was to invade the Los Angeles Times and try to find out what you two were up to. We don’t know what Angela put in her e-mails but we know that you put your plan to go to Las Vegas last night into an e-mail. I am betting that our guy read it and a lot of your other e-mails and keyed his plan off of it.”
“We keep saying ‘our guy.’ We need a name for him.”
“In the bureau we would call him an unknown subject until we knew exactly who we were dealing with. An Unsub.”
I got up and looked through the curtains on the front window. The street was dark out there. No cops yet. I walked over to a wall switch and turned on the outside lights.
“Okay, Unsub, then,” I said. “What do you mean he keyed his plan off of my plan?”
“He needed to neutralize the threat. He knew that there was a good chance you had not confirmed your suspicions or talked to the authorities yet. Being a reporter, you would keep the story to yourself. This worked in his favor. But he still had to move quickly. He knew Angela was in L.A. and you were going to Vegas. I think he started in L.A., somehow grabbed Angela, and then killed her and set you up for it.”
I sat back down.
“Yeah, that’s obvious.”
“He then focused his attention on you. He went to Vegas, probably driving through the night or flying out this morning, and tracked you to Ely. It would not have been hard to do. I think he was the man who followed you in the hallway at the hotel. He was going to make his move against you in your room. He stopped when he heard my voice and that has sort of puzzled me until now.”
“Why?”
“Well, why did he abort the plan? Just because he heard you had company? This guy isn’t shy about killing people. What would it matter to him if he had to kill you and the woman he heard in your room?”
“So then, why did he abort?”
“Because the plan wasn’t to murder you and whoever you were with. The plan was for you to kill yourself.”
“Come on.”
“Think about it. It would be the best way for him to avoid detection. If you end up murdered in a hotel room in Ely, there is going to be an investigation that would lead to all of this unraveling. But if you were a suicide in a hotel room in Ely, then the investigation would go in a completely different direction.”
I thought about this for a few moments and saw where she was going with it.
“Reporter gets laid off, has the indignity of having to train his own replacement, and has few prospects for another job,” I said, reciting a litany of true facts. “He gets depressed and suicidal. Concocts a story about a serial killer running around two states as cover, then abducts and murders his young replacement. He then gives all his money to charity, cancels his credit cards and runs off to the middle of nowhere, where he kills himself in a hotel room.”
She was nodding the whole time I was running it down.
“What’s missing?” I asked. “How was he going to kill me and make it look like suicide?”
“You’d been drinking, right? You came into the room with two bottles of beer. I remember that.”
“Yeah, I’d only had two before that.”
“But it would help sell the scene. Empty bottles strewn around the hotel room. Cluttered room, cluttered mind, that sort of thing.”