Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

I pulled out every black bag that wasn’t already torn and revealing its contents and dropped them on the ground. Rachel started opening them by tearing the plastic in such a way that the contents stayed in place inside. Like performing an autopsy on a garbage bag.

“Do it like this and don’t mix contents from different bags,” she said.

“Got it. What are we looking for? We don’t even know if this stuff is from Stone’s place.”

“I know but we have to look. Maybe something will make sense.”

The first bag I opened mostly contained the confetti of shredded documents.

“I’ve got shreddings here.”

Rachel looked over.

“That could be his. There was a shredder by the workstation. Put that one aside.”

I did as I was told and opened the next bag. This one contained what looked like basic household trash. I immediately recognized one of the empty food boxes.

“This is him. He had the same brand of microwave pizza in the freezer.”

Rachel looked over.

“Good. Look for anything of a personal nature.”

She didn’t have to tell me that but I didn’t object. I carefully moved my hands through the refuse in the torn bag. I could tell it had all come from the kitchen area. Food boxes, cans, rotting banana peels and apple cores. I realized it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There was only a microwave in the warehouse loft. It made the choices narrow and the food came in nice clean containers that could be hermetically sealed before being tossed.

At the bottom of the bag was a newspaper. I carefully pulled it out, thinking the date of the edition might help us narrow down when the bag had been tossed into the Dumpster. It was folded into quarters in the way a traveler might carry it. It was the previous Wednesday’s edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal . That was the day I had been in Vegas.

I unfolded it and noticed the face of a man in a photograph on the front page had been doodled on in black marker. Someone had awarded the man sunglasses and a set of devil’s horns and the requisite pointy beard. There was also a coffee ring on the photo. The ring partially obscured a name written with the same marker.

“I’ve got a Vegas paper with a name written here.”

Rachel looked up immediately from the bag she had her hands in.

“What name?”

“It’s blurred by a coffee ring. It’s Georgette something. Begins with a B and ends M-A-N.”

I held the paper up and angled it so she could see the front page. She studied it for a second and I saw recognition fire in her eyes. She stood up.

“This is it. You found it.”

“Found what?”

“He’s our guy. Remember, I told you about the e-mail to the prison in Ely that got Oglevy put in lockdown? It was from the warden’s secretary to the warden.”

“Yeah.”

“Her name is Georgette Brockman.”

Still crouched on my haunches next to the open bag, I stared up at Rachel as I put it all together. There was only one reason Freddy Stone would have that name written on a Las Vegas newspaper in his warehouse. He had trailed me to Vegas and knew I was going up to Ely to talk to Oglevy. He was the one who wanted to isolate me in the middle of nowhere. He was Sideburns. He was the Unsub.

Rachel took the newspaper from me. Her conclusions were the same as mine.

“He was in Nevada trailing you. He got her name and wrote it down while he was hacking the prison system’s database. This is the link, Jack. You did it!”

I got up and approached her.

“ We did it, Rachel. But what do we do now?”

She lowered the paper to her side and I saw a sad realization play on her face.

“I don’t think we should be touching anything else here. We need to back off and call in the bureau. They have to take it from here.”

Equipmentwise, the FBI always seemed ready for anything. Within an hour of Rachel’s calling the local field office, we were placed in separate interrogation rooms in a nondescript vehicle the size of a bus. It was parked outside the warehouse where Freddy Stone had lived. We were being questioned by agents inside while other agents on the outside were in the warehouse and the nearby alley, looking for further signs of Stone’s involvement in the trunk murders as well as his current whereabouts.

Of course, the FBI didn’t call them interrogation rooms and would have objected to my calling the converted mobile home the Guantánamo Express . They called it a mobile witness interview unit.

My room was a windowless cube about ten feet by ten feet and my interrogator was an agent named John Bantam. This was a misnomer because Bantam was so big he seemed to fill the whole room. He paced back and forth in front of me, regularly slapping his leg with the legal pad he carried in a way I think was designed to make me think that my head could be its next destination.

Bantam grilled me for an hour about how I had made the connection to Western Data and all the moves Rachel and I had made after that. All the way, I took the advice Rachel gave me right before the federal troops showed up:

Do not lie. Lying to a federal agent is a crime. Once you commit it, they have you. Do not lie about anything.

So I told the truth, but not the whole truth. I answered only the questions put to me and offered no detail that was not specifically asked for. Bantam seemed frustrated the whole time, annoyed with not being able to ask the right question. A sheen of sweat was forming on his black skin. I thought maybe he was the embodiment of the whole bureau’s frustration with the fact that a newspaper reporter had made a connection they had missed. Either way, he was not happy with me. The session went from a cordial interview to a tense interrogation and it seemed to go on and on.

Finally, I hit my limit and stood up from the folding chair I had been seated in. Even with me standing, Bantam still had six inches on me.

“Look, I told you all I know. I have a story to go write.”

“Sit down. We’re not finished.”

“This was a voluntary interview. You don’t tell me when it’s finished. I’ve answered every one of your questions and now you’re just repeating yourself, trying to see if I get crossed up. It’s not going to happen because I only told you the truth. Now, can I go or not?”

“I could arrest you right now for breaking and entering and impersonating a federal agent.”

“Well, if you are going to make things up, I guess you could arrest me for all kinds of things. But I didn’t break and enter. I followed someone into the warehouse when we saw him enter and thought he might be committing a crime. And I did not impersonate a federal agent. That kid might have thought we were agents but neither of us said or did anything that even remotely indicated that.”

“Sit down. We’re not done.”

“I think we are.”

Bantam slapped the pad against his leg and turned his back to me. He walked to the door and then turned back.

“We need you to hold your story,” he said.

I nodded. Now we were finally down to it.

“This is what this was all about? The interrogation? The intimidation?”

“It wasn’t an interrogation. Believe me, you’d know it if it were.”

“Whatever. I can’t hold the story. It’s a major break in a major case.

Besides, splashing Stone’s face across the media might help you catch him.”

Bantam shook his head.

“Not yet. We need twenty-four hours to assess what we’ve got here and at the other locations. We want to do that before he knows we’re onto him. Splashing his face across the media will be fine after that.”

I sat back down on the folding chair as I thought about the possibilities. I was supposed to discuss any deal not to publish with my editors but I was beyond all of that now. This was my last story and I was going to call my own shots.