Michael Connelly - The Poet

I felt the eyes on me again and I sat frozen with my notebook and pen in hand, as if I had been caught at a crime scene with blood on my hands.

"If he's not going to write, how come he's got the notebook out?"

I looked toward the familiar voice and saw it was the sharp-faced man from Walling's office who had asked the question.

"He needs to take notes, so that when he does write he has the facts," Walling said, unexpectedly coming to my defense.

"That'll be the day one of them reports the facts," the agent threw back at her.

"Gordon, let's not make Mr. McEvoy uncomfortable," Backus said, smiling. "I trust he will do a good job. The special agent in charge trusts that he will. And, in fact, he has done an excellent job up until now so we are going to give him both the benefit of the doubt and our cooperation."

I watched the one called Gordon shake his head in dismay, his face darkening. At least I was getting clues right away about whom to steer clear of. The next came when the woman with the handouts passed by me without giving me anything.

"This will be our last group meeting," Backus said. "Tomorrow most of us separate and the OC for this investigation will move to Denver, site of the latest case. Rachel will remain case agent and coordinator. Brass and Brad will stay here to do the collating and all that good stuff. I want hard-copy reports from all agents by eighteen hundred eastern to Denver and Quantico every day. For now use the fax of the Denver field office. The number should be on the printout you just received. We'll set up our own lines and we'll get those numbers to you as soon as we do. Now, let's go over what we've got. It's very important that we're all on the same wavelength. I don't want anything to slip through the cracks on this one. We've had enough of that already."

"We better not screw up," Gordon said sarcastically. "We've also got the press watching us."

A few people laughed but Backus cut it off.

"All right, all right, Gordon, you've made your disagreement loud and clear. I'm going to yield to Brass for a few minutes and she'll go over what we've got so far."

A woman across the table from Backus cleared her throat. She spread three pages of what looked like computer printouts in front of her on the table and stood up.

"Okay," she said. "We have six dead detectives in six states. We also have six unsolved homicides that the detectives had been working individually at the time of their own death. The bottom line is we don't feel comfortable yet making a firm commitment to whether we have one or two offenders out there-or possibly even more, though this seems unlikely. Our hunch, however, is that we are dealing with one but at the moment I don't have a lot backing that up. What we do feel comfortable with is that the deaths of the six detectives are certainly linked and therefore most likely the work of one hand. For the moment our emphasis is on this offender. The one we are calling the Poet. Beyond that, we only have the theory of linkage to the other cases. We'll talk about them first. First, let's start with the detectives. Take a look at the first PVR in your package for a few seconds and then I'll point out some things."

I looked at everyone studying the handout and felt annoyed at being left out. I decided that after the meeting I would talk to Backus about it. I looked over at Gordon and saw him looking at me. He winked at me and then turned his face to the reports in front of him. I then saw Walling get up and come around the table to my side of the room. She handed me a copy of the printout. I nodded my thanks but she had already headed back to her spot. I noticed that as she walked back she glanced at Gordon and their eyes locked in a long stare.

I looked at the pages in my hands. The first sheet was just an organizational structure with the names of the agents involved and their assignments. There were also the phone and fax numbers for the field offices in Denver, Baltimore, Tampa, Chicago, Dallas and Albuquerque. I ran my eyes down the list of agents and found only one Gordon. Gordon Thorson. I saw that his assignment simply read "Quantico-Go."

Next I looked for Brass on the list and guessed easily enough that she was Brasilia Doran, assigned on the sheet as "victim coordinator/profiling." Other assignments to agents were listed. There were handwriting and cryptology assignments but most were just noted as cities of assignment followed by a victim's name. Apparently two BSS agents would go to each city where the Poet had been to coordinate investigations of those cases with agents from the city's field office and local police.

I turned the page to the next sheet, which was the one everybody else was reading.

PRELIMINARY VICTIMOLOGY REPORT-THE POET, BSS95-17

VICT #

1. Clifford Beltran, Sarasota County Sheriff's Dept., homicide.

WM, DOB 3-14-34, DOD 4-1-92

Weapon: S amp;W 12 gauge shotgun one shot-head POD: residence. No witness

2. John Brooks, Chicago Police Dept., homicide, Area 3.

BM, DOB 7-1-54, DOD 10-30-93

Weapon: service, Glock 19 two shots, one impact-head POD: residence. No witness

3. Garland Petry, Dallas Police Dept., homicide.

WM, DOB 11-11-51, DOD 3-28-94

Weapon: service, Beretta 38 two shots, two impacts-chest and head POD: residence, No witness

4. Morris Kotite, Albuquerque Police Dept., homicide.

HM, DOB 9-14-56, DOD 9-24-94

Weapon: service, S amp;W 38 two shots, one impact-head POD: residence. No witness

5. Sean McEvoy, Denver Police Dept., homicide.

WM, DOB 5-21-61, DOD 2-10-95

Weapon: service, S amp;W 38 one shot-head 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."