James Swain - The King Tides

“There’s more.”

“Lay it on me.”

He pointed at the next line on the page. It said FUNDING. “You told me something interesting yesterday that I didn’t know. You said that every six months, the FBI reviews its active investigations and decides which should be continued and which should be put on the back burner. These investigations are also reviewed by the Justice Department. If an investigation has stalled, the funding usually stops.”

“Correct,” she said. “My bosses prioritize investigations based upon forward progress. If there isn’t any, the money dries up.”

“You also said that for the past seven years, your investigation into the Hanover killers has hit a wall every six months, and that you were just about ready to lose funding when another envelope of photographs landed on your desk, which led to the investigation being continued.”

“Correct again. The photos usually showed up a week or two before the review process would begin.”

“How many times did this happen?”

“Fourteen. If the killers hold true to form, the bureau will receive a new envelope of photos from a pharmacy in Fort Lauderdale in the next week or so.”

“That can’t be a coincidence.”

She shook her head, not understanding.

“The photographs showing up every six months was a ploy by the killers to keep your investigation going so they could torture you.”

“Where’s your proof?”

“My proof is that it worked, and it did torture you.”

“But how would they know about the review process?”

“I asked myself the same question. How could the killers know about the review process or how funding worked in the FBI? I did an exhaustive search on the internet and couldn’t find a single mention of it anywhere. The information simply isn’t available.”

“So how did they know?”

“They work for the bureau as field agents. Or I should say ‘worked.’ I’m pretty sure they’re semiretired now.”

Daniels rocked back on the couch and gave him a condescending look. “That’s ridiculous, Jon. The vetting process to become an FBI agent includes a battery of psychological exams that are meant to weed out people with mental disorders, which our killers certainly have. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“No, I’m not. And I can prove it.”

“You can prove these are FBI agents?”

“Yes. You may even know them.”

Her expression bordered on hostile. She had become blinded to the clues. It happened to even the best investigators when they spent too long working a case.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Eighteen months before the killings at Dartmouth, two girls were kidnapped and murdered in Bedford, New Hampshire, which isn’t that far from Dartmouth,” he said. “There were a number of similarities between those killings and the Dartmouth killings. The victims were teenagers who were abducted coming home from work. Their bodies were also dumped in fields.”

“I’m well aware of the Bedford murders and the parallels to the Dartmouth killings,” she said. “On their face, they appeared to have been committed by the same killers. Only that couldn’t have happened, because the man responsible for the Bedford killings was a house painter named Clyde Bessemer, and he was caught before the Dartmouth killings started. He’s serving a life sentence.”

“I know,” he said. “I read it online.”

“Then what’s your point?”

Lancaster reached into his shirt pocket and removed a square of paper, which he carefully unfolded. It was a twenty-two-year-old newspaper article from the Bedford Bulletin that he’d printed off the internet on the laser printer in his study. Its headline screamed BEDFORD MURDERS SOLVED! KILLER CAPTURED. Beneath the headline was a mug shot of a man in his forties with a handlebar mustache and the hardened eyes of a killer. The caption identified him as Clyde Bessemer of Bedford.

“This article from the Bedford Bulletin said that a pair of FBI agents broke the case,” he said. “Their names were Special Agents Don Mates and Troy Holloway, and they worked as field agents out of the FBI’s Bedford field office. These two guys are your killers.”

“That’s utterly ridiculous,” she said.

“No, it’s not. Their office was an hour-and-ten-minute drive from Dartmouth. As field agents, they could come and go as they pleased and not arouse suspicion. They used the Bedford killings as a blueprint for the Dartmouth killings. After your escape, they decided to rein it in. Then you were promoted to run the Violent Crimes Against Children unit, which I’m guessing was announced internally. Is that right?”

“It was announced on the FBI’s intranet, which is only available to staff,” she said.

“That explains it. Seeing that you were promoted infuriated Mates and Holloway. You were the one that got away. So they decided to pay you back.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” she asked.

“No, I just think you missed them.”

“The FBI didn’t miss Mates and Holloway, and neither did I,” she said, unable to hide the indignation in her voice. “The bureau recognized that there were parallels between the Bedford killings and the Dartmouth killings right away. Two agents that worked the Dartmouth case interviewed Mates and Holloway to see if they could shed any light on who the killers might be. It didn’t lead to anything.”

“Mates and Holloway had time to get their stories down and fooled your agents during the interview.”

“Be quiet and let me finish. When I graduated from the academy, I got my hands on the interview with Mates and Holloway, and I studied it. There was nothing there. But I still wanted to look them in the face, and make sure they weren’t the killers. If either one of them had a discolored right eye, I’d know it was them.”

“Your gut was telling you something.”

“Would you please let me finish? I couldn’t just demand an interview since they’d already been cleared. So I bided my time. Three years after my promotion, my team busted a child-trafficking ring working out of Boston. When the bust was over, I decided to take my shot, and I called Mates and told him I was in the area, and would he and Holloway be willing to meet with me? I explained that I’d gotten a firsthand look at the Dartmouth killers, and was hoping it might jar a memory or two. Mates was pleasant over the phone and said he’d talk to Holloway. He called me back an hour later, and said yes. So I drove up to Bedford.”

“You actually met with them. Wow.”

“Are you insinuating that I made a mistake?”

“They could have killed you.”

“Damn it, Jon, it’s not Mates and Holloway. They took me out to lunch to a really nice place, and we sat at a corner booth and discussed the two cases. I was as close to them as I am to you right now. Neither Mates nor Holloway has a discolored eye.”

“Mates has a discolored eye. He got injured playing lacrosse in high school.”

Daniels acted like she might slap him. “Haven’t you heard a word I just said? It’s not them.”

“You’re wrong. It is them. Mates either had surgery to fix his eye, or he’s now wearing contact lenses that hide the discoloration. He probably did this right after you escaped from him and Holloway in the woods in Dartmouth.”

“You think they fooled me?”

“Afraid so.”

“Prove it.”

He again used his cell phone to get on the internet. Earlier, he’d found Mates’s Facebook page, and learned that the special agent had grown up in the town of Montague in western Massachusetts. Working off the assumption that Mates had attended the local high school, he’d done a yearbook search using a site called e-Yearbook, which he’d used before to hunt down suspects. It had taken a while, but he’d eventually found Don Mates’s photograph and profile in the class of 1988’s yearbook. Mates had been captain of the lacrosse team in his senior year, and Lancaster now pulled the team photo up, and used his thumb and forefinger to enlarge it. He passed the cell phone to her.