Michael Connelly - The Poet

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.

"Brass," Backus said. "Let's go on to the first victims."

"Okay, folks, next page."

The page we turned to contained information on the murders that had obsessed the detectives the Poet killed. These were called secondary victims on the report, even though in each city they had actually died first. I noticed that once again the sheet was not up to date. Polly Amherst, the woman whose murder had obsessed John McCafferty in Baltimore, had not yet made the list.

SECONDARY VICTIMOLOGY-PRELIMINARY

1. Gabriel Ortiz, Sarasota, FL student HM, DOB 6-1-82, DOD 2-14-92

Ligature strangulation, molestation (kapok fiber)

2. Robert Smathers, Chicago student BM, DOB 8-11-81, DOD 8-15-93

Manual strangulation, mutilation antemortem

3. Althea Granadine, Dallas student BF, DOB 10-10-84, DOD 1-4-94

Multiple stabbing, chest, mutilation antemortem

4. Manuela Cortez, Albuquerque, NM housekeeper HF, DOB 4-11-46, DOD 8-16-94

Multiple blunt force, mutilation postmortem (kapok fiber)

5. Theresa Lofton, Denver, CO student, day care employee WF, DOB 7-4-75, DOD 12-16-94

Ligature strangulation, mutilation postmortem (kapok fiber)

"Okay, once again we are missing one," Doran said. "Baltimore. I understand the case was not a child, but a teacher. Polly Amherst. Ligature strangulation and postmortem mutilation."

She waited a beat in case people were writing notes.

"We are still in the process of having files and data faxed in on these cases," she continued. "This was just put together for the meeting. But, preliminarily, what we are looking at as far as these secondary cases go is a commonality involving children. Three victims were children, two worked directly with children and the last one, Manuela Cortez, was a housekeeper who was abducted and murdered at some point while going to the school her employer's children attended to walk them home. The extrapolation is that the intended targets in this chain were children but in half the cases perhaps something went wrong, the stalking pattern was somehow interrupted by the adult victims, and they were eliminated."

"What is to be made from the mutilation?" an agent on the outer rim asked. "Some of it's post and with the kids… it wasn't."

"We're not sure, but a guess at this time is that it might be part of his cloaking. By using different methodology and pathology he has been able to camouflage himself. On this page these cases may look similar but the more complete the analysis the more different they are. It is as if six different men with differing pathologies killed these victims. In fact, all the cases were submitted on VICAP questionnaires by the local agencies but none drew matches to the others. Remember, the questionnaire is now up to eighteen pages.

"Bottom line, I think this offender's read up on us. I think he knew how to do things differently enough with each of these victims so that our trusty computer never scored a match. The only mistake he made was the kapok fibers. That is how we have him."