38
The Greyhound was less than two minutes away and Rachel drove all three of us. I sat in the back seat, looking out the rear window for a possible tail the whole way. If the Shrike was following I saw no sign of him and my thoughts returned to the question of whether I was being vigilant or paranoid. I kept thinking about the man in the Tesla. Had I simply wanted him to look like the face on the composite or did he really look like the face on the composite?
I had never been to England but the inside of the Greyhound looked like an English pub to me, and I saw why Emily had adopted it as her local. It was all dark woods and cozy booths. A bar ran the entire length of the establishment, front to back, and there was no table service. Rachel and I ordered Ketel martinis and Emily asked them to pull the tap on a Deschutes IPA. I waited at the bar for the drinks while the women grabbed a booth in the back corner.
I took two trips to deliver the drinks so as not to spill the martinis and then settled into the U-shaped booth with Emily across from me and Rachel to my right. I took a full sip of my martini before saying a word. I needed it after the ebb and flow of adrenaline the evening had so far produced.
“So,” I said, looking at Rachel. “What have you got?”
Rachel took a steady-handed draw of her martini, put the glass down, and then composed herself.
“I spent most of the day at the FO in Westwood with the ASAC,” she said. “I was treated as a leper at first, but when they started going through the checkable facts of the story I was telling, they started seeing the light.”
“ASAC?” Emily asked.
She said it the way Rachel had — A-sack.
“Assistant special agent in charge of the L.A. Field Office,” Rachel said.
“You said his name is Metz?” I asked.
“Matt Metz,” Rachel said. “Anyway, I already told you that they’ve linked at least three other cases by cause of death and then Gwyneth Rice, the only known survivor.”
“Were you able to get the new names?” I asked.
“No, that’s what they’re holding back to trade with you for pushing the story back,” Rachel said. “I didn’t get them.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I insisted. “We’re going to publish tomorrow. Putting out the warning about this guy is more important than any other consideration.”
“You sure that the scoop is not the most important thing to you, Jack?” Rachel shot back.
“Look, we’ve been over this,” I said. “It’s not our job to help the FBI catch this guy. Our job is to inform the public.”
“Well, you might change your mind when you hear what else I got,” Rachel said.
“Then tell us,” Emily said.
“Okay, I was dealing with this guy Metz who I knew from when I was an agent,” Rachel said. “Once they legitimized what I brought them they started putting together a war room and attacking this from all angles. They found the other cases and one team was working on that. There’s also a case in Santa Fe where they’re going to do an exhumation of the body tomorrow because they think AOD might have been missed at autopsy.”
“How could they miss a broken neck?” I asked.
“Condition of the body,” Rachel said. “I didn’t get the exact details but it was left out in the mountains and animals got to it. AOD may not have been seen for what it was. Anyway, another team was looking at Hammond and the Dirty4 angle, trying to pull all of that together.”
Rachel broke off there to take another sip of her martini.
“And?” Emily prompted.
“Through the site, they IDed Hammond’s partner,” Rachel said. “At least they think they did.”
I leaned in over the table. This was getting good.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“His name is Roger Vogel,” Rachel said. “Get it? Roger Vogel becomes RogueVogue in the digital universe?”
“Got it,” I said. “How did they find him?”
“I think his fingerprints — digital, that is — are all over the site,” she said. “They brought in a cipher team and I don’t think it was that hard. I didn’t get all the details but they were able to trace him to a stationary IP address. That was his mistake. He did some maintenance of the site from an unmasked computer. Got lazy and now they know who he is.”
“So, what is the location?” I said. “Where is he?”
“Cedars-Sinai,” Rachel said. “It looks like the guy works in Administration. That’s the location of the computer he used.”
At first I felt a jolt of excitement at the prospect of confronting Vogel before the FBI grabbed him. But then the reality hit me: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was a massive, high-security complex that covered five entire blocks in Beverly Hills. It might be impossible to get to him.
“Are they picking him up?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Rachel said. “They’re thinking that having him loose might work to their advantage.”
“As bait for the Shrike,” Emily said.
“Exactly,” Rachel said. “It’s clear he wanted to take Vogel out and made a mistake with the guy up in Northridge. So he may try again.”
“So,” I said, thinking out loud. “If the bureau is watching this guy, there is nothing to stop us from going in there and confronting him. Have they traced him to his home or other locations?”
“No,” Rachel said. “Thanks to you giving Vogel the warning about the Shrike, he’s taking all precautions. They had a loose tail on him and lost him after he left work.”
“That’s not good,” Emily said.
“But here’s the thing,” Rachel said. “He’s a smoker. He is taking precautions but he still has to go outside to smoke. I saw surveillance photos of him at a smoker’s bench outside the building. There was a street sign in the background. It said George Burns Road. That goes right through the middle of the complex.”
I looked across the table at Emily. We both knew exactly what we were going to do.
“We’re going to be there tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll get him when he comes out to smoke.”
Emily turned to Rachel.
“Would you recognize this guy off the surveillance photo you saw?” she asked. “If you saw him at the bench, I mean?”
“I think so,” Rachel said. “Yes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then we’ll need you to be there too.”
“If I do that, it will burn me with the bureau,” Rachel said. “I’ll be like you two, on the outside looking in.”
“Okay, we’ll have to figure out a plan for that,” I said.
I grabbed my glass and finished off my drink. We had the rough outlines of a plan and I was good to go.
39
The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was a cluster of tall glass buildings and parking garages crowded together on a five-block parcel but still segregated by the grid of city streets passing through those blocks. At the office that morning we used the Streetview feature of Google Maps to locate the smoker’s bench Rachel had seen in the FBI surveillance photo. It was at the corner of Alden Drive and George Burns Road, an intersection almost dead center in the medical complex. It was apparently centrally located to serve patients, visitors, and employees from all buildings in the complex. It consisted of two benches facing each other across a fountain in a landscaped strip that ran alongside an eight-story parking garage. There were pedestal ashtrays at the ends of each of the benches. We finalized a plan and headed there from the office at 8 a.m. — hoping to be in place before Roger Vogel would go out for his first smoking break.
We watched the smoking benches from two angles. Emily and I were in the nearby ER waiting room, where the windows gave us a full-on ground-level view of the benches, but no view of the Administration Building. Rachel was on the third level of the parking garage because it gave a commanding view of the benches plus the entrance of the Administration Building. She would be able to alert us when Vogel emerged and headed to the benches to smoke. Her position also kept her out of the view of the FBI. Using the angles she remembered from the surveillance photo she had seen the day before, she had pinpointed the FBI observation post in a medical office building across the street from Administration.