“It works, Jack,” Emily said. “We can say the FBI is investigating, give the story immediate credibility. The FBI gets us past go.”
I realized all three of them were right and that I had just come off rather badly, putting the story ahead of the safety of dozens of women. I saw the disappointment in both Rachel’s and Emily’s eyes.
“Okay,” I said. “But two things. We make it clear to the bureau, the cops, any agency involved that they can do what they need to do but no press conferences or announcements until after we publish.”
“How long will that be?” Rachel asked.
I looked at Myron and said the first number that popped into my head.
“Forty-eight hours,” I said.
Rachel thought about it and nodded.
“I can try to make that work,” she said. “Realistically, it will probably take them that long to confirm what we give them.”
“Myron, you good with that?” I asked. “Emily?”
They both nodded their approval and I looked at Rachel.
“We’re good,” I said.
The Shrike
29
He waited on the food-court level at a table against the railing. It gave him a view directly down onto the second-level stores on the north side of the mall. There was a circular banquette designed as a spot for husbands to sit while waiting for their wives to shop. He did not know what Vogel looked like. Hammond’s partner had managed to keep his images and locations off the web. Kudos for that. But the hacker was of a type. The man who called himself the Shrike hoped to be able to identify him among the weekday shoppers in the mall.
The Shrike had picked the spot, putting out the mall location with the excuse that he — as Hammond — already planned to be there. It wasn’t the best location for what he intended but he didn’t want to raise any suspicions in Vogel. The priority was to get him to come.
He had a full tray of takeout food in front of him as camouflage. On the chair across the table from him was a shopping bag containing two gift-wrapped boxes that were empty. He was making a high-risk move and blending in was key.
He didn’t touch any of the food because after he ordered it he thought it all smelled disgusting. He also thought it might draw attention to him if someone noticed he was wearing gloves. So he kept his hands down in his lap.
He checked below and saw that a woman was now seated on the banquette. She was watching one of the children in the nearby Kiddie Korner playground. No sign of anyone who might be Vogel.
“Can I clear anything here?”
He turned to see a table cleaner standing at his side.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m still working on it.”
He waited until the cleaner walked away before checking down below. Now the woman was gone and a man had taken her place. He looked like he was in his early thirties. He had on jeans and a lightweight sweater. He seemed to be checking his surroundings in a casual but purposeful way. He wore sunglasses inside and that was the final giveaway. It was Vogel. He was a bit early but that was okay. It meant he might grow tired of waiting sooner and would leave when he believed the rendezvous was not happening.
That was when the Shrike would follow him out.
Jack
30
On any story reported by a team there always comes the awkward decision of who writes it and who feeds the facts to the writer. Writing together never works. You can’t sit side by side at the computer. The one who writes generally controls the tone of the story and the way the information is delivered, and usually gets the lead byline too. This was my story and it was my call, but I was smart enough to know that Emily Atwater was the better writer and I was the better digger. She had a way with words that I did not. I would be the first to admit that the two books I had published were heavily edited to the point of being reorganized and rewritten. All kudos to my editors but the royalty checks still went to me.
Emily was a lean writer, a follower of the less-is-more school. Short sentences gave her stories momentum and I was not blind to this. I also knew that putting her name first in the byline would not reflect badly on me. It would look like we had equal billing because it would be in alphabetical order: Atwater and McEvoy. I told her she could write the story. She was at first floored and then thankful. I could tell she believed it was the right call. She was just surprised I had made it. I thought the moment helped me make up for some of my missteps with her lately.
This decision to put her in the writer’s chair freed me up to do more digging and to review what I had already reported.
It also gave me time to notify people who had been helpful on the story and whom I had promised to alert. Christina Portrero’s mother and Jamie Flynn’s father were high on this list.
I tried to make these notifications by phone, and the calls were more emotional than I had anticipated. Walter Flynn in Fort Worth burst into tears when I told him the FBI had now officially linked his daughter’s death to a serial killer who was still at large.
After the calls were out of the way, I started pulling together my notes and making a list of other people I needed to call for the first time or to check back with for any new information. We essentially had twenty-four hours even though we had told Rachel Walling we needed twice that. It was a journalist’s trick to always say a story would take longer to report than it really did, or would be published later than it actually would. It gave us an edge against the investigation’s being leaked and our being scooped on our own story. I wasn’t naive. Rachel was taking the story into the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. There probably wasn’t an agent in the building who didn’t have an I’ll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine deal with a reporter somewhere. I had been burned by the FBI on more than one occasion and still had the scars.
Topping the list of who I needed to find and talk to was Hammond’s unknown partner. There were emails scattered throughout the printouts from Hammond’s house that indicated that he had a partner on Dirty4 who handled the digital aspects of the dark-web venture while he handled the lab work. The partner’s email identified him only as RogueVogueDRD4 and he used a Gmail account. The same alias was listed on the DRD4 site as the administrator. Rachel had said before leaving that she was confident the FBI could run it down, but I wasn’t sure about that and didn’t want to wait for the FBI. I contemplated directly reaching out to RogueVogue in a message. And after discussing it with Emily I did just that.
Hello. My name is Jack. I need to talk to you about Marshall Hammond. It wasn’t suicide and you could be in danger. We need to talk. I can help.
I hit the send button and let it fly. It was a long shot but a shot I had to take. Next, I started organizing what I would transfer to Emily for the story. She had not started writing and I could hear her on the phone in her cubicle making calls to watchdog agencies and observers of the genetic-analytics industry for general comments on what this sort of breach could mean. Every story had to have a lead quote — a line from a credible source that summed up the outrage, or tragedy, or irony of the story. It underscored the greater implications of the report. This story was going to trade in all of those elements and we needed to come up with one quote that said it alclass="underline" that no one was safe from this kind of intrusion and horror. It would give the story a deeper resonance than a basic murder story and would get it picked up by the networks and cable. Myron would be better able to place the story with one of the big media guns like the Washington Post or the New York Times.