I had my elbows on the bar and now rubbed my hands together, pushing my fingers back. As my internal alcohol level was rising, my courage was dissipating. I was deciding to let my suspicion go for another night — like the ninety-nine before it.
“Are you having second thoughts?” Rachel asked.
“No, not at all,” I said. “Why?”
“Observation: you’re wringing your hands. And you just seem... I don’t know. Pensive? Preoccupied? Off.”
“Well... I have to ask you something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while.”
“Sure. What?”
“That night at the Greyhound when you were acting like a source and giving me and Emily all that stuff about Vogel and describing the surveillance photo you saw...”
“I wasn’t acting. I was your source, Jack. What’s your question?”
“That was a setup, wasn’t it? You and the FBI — that guy Metz — you wanted us to lead the Shrike to Vogel. So you told us—”
“What are you talking about, Jack?”
“I’ve just gotta say it. It’s what I’ve been thinking. Just tell me. I can handle it. It was probably your allegiance to the people who kicked you out. Was it some kind of a deal to get back in, or—”
“Jack, shut the fuck up before you once again ruin something good.”
“Really, I’m the one who will ruin it? You did this thing with them and I’m the one who ruins everything? That makes—”
“I don’t want to talk about this right now. And stop drinking.”
“What are you talking about? I can drink. I can walk home if I’ve had too much, but I’m not even close to that now. I want you to tell me if that was a setup with you and the FBI.”
“I told you, it wasn’t. And listen, we have a problem here.”
“I know. You should have told me. I would’ve—”
“No, I’m not talking about that. We have a problem right here.”
Her voice had dropped to an urgent whisper.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Just play along,” she said.
She turned and kissed me on the cheek and then put an arm around my neck and nuzzled in close. Public displays of affection were a rarity with her. I knew something was up. She was either going to bizarre lengths to distract me from my question or there was something terribly wrong.
“That guy across the bar,” she whispered in my ear. “Be casual about it.”
I reached forward for my drink and took a glance down the bar to the man sitting by himself. Nothing about him had seemed suspicious to me. He had a cocktail glass in front of him that was half filled with ice and clear liquid. There was a slice of lime in the glass as well.
I turned my stool so I was facing Rachel. We had our hands on each other.
“What about him?” I asked.
“He came in right after me and he’s still nursing his first drink,” she said.
“Well, maybe he’s pacing himself. You’re on your first, too.”
“That’s only because of him. He’s been kind of watching us without watching us. Watching me.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he has not looked over here once since he got here. But he’s using the mirrors.”
There was a large mirror that ran behind the bar and another on the ceiling above it. I could see the man in question in both of them so that meant he could see us.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And look at his shoulders.”
I checked: his shoulders were large and the biceps and neck thick. In the days since the Shrike had come to light, the FBI was pursuing a theory that he was an ex-convict who had built up his body in prison and possibly perfected his neck-breaking move there as well. The investigation had zeroed in on the unsolved murder of an inmate at the Florida State Prison in Starke whose body was found stuffed behind an industrial washing machine in the laundry. His neck was broken so severely that the cause of death was listed as internal decapitation.
The case was never solved. Several convicts worked in the prison laundry or had access to it, but the surveillance cameras were fogged over by steam released by the dryers — a problem that had been noted by staff repeatedly but never addressed.
For more than a month the bureau had been looking at video from prison-yard cameras and running down data on every convict who worked in the laundry or could have had access to it on the day of the murder. Agent Metz had told me he was sure that the Shrike had killed the inmate. The murder had occurred four years earlier, well before the Shrike killings began, and it fit the pattern attributed to the Shrike starting in Florida.
“Okay,” I said. “But wait a minute.”
I pulled my phone and went into the photo archive. I still had a photo of the artist composite of the Shrike. I opened it and tilted the screen to Rachel.
“Doesn’t really look like him,” I said.
“I don’t put a lot of trust in composites,” she said.
“What about Gwyneth saying it was a good match?”
“She was emotional. She wanted it to be a match.”
“The Unabomber composite was right on.”
“One in a million. Plus the Shrike’s composite has been on every TV channel in the country. He would have changed his look. That’s a big thing with incels. Plastic surgery. Plus he’s the right age: mid-thirties.”
I nodded.
“So then what do we do?” I asked.
“Well, first, we act like we don’t know he’s there,” Rachel said. “And I’ll see if I can get Metz involved.”
She pulled out her phone and opened the camera app. She held the phone out as though she was taking a selfie. We leaned close and smiled at the screen as she took a photo of the man at the other end of the bar.
She studied the shot for a moment.
“One more,” she said.
We smiled and she snapped another photo, this time zooming the focus in closer on his face. Luckily Elle was leaning into a conversation with the couple in the middle so Rachel got an unobstructed shot.
I leaned over to see what she got and fake-laughed as if she had taken a bad photo.
“Delete it,” I said. “I look like shit.”
“No, I love it,” she said.
Rachel was editing the real shot, expanding it as much as possible without clarity decay and then saving it. When she was finished she texted it to Agent Metz with this message.
This guy is watching us. I think it’s him. How do we handle?
We pretended to chat while we waited for a reply.
“How would he know to follow you here?” I asked.
“That’s easy,” Rachel said. “I’ve been in your stories as well as the podcast. He could have followed me from my office. I came straight here after locking up.”
That seemed plausible.
“But this flies in the face of the profile,” I said. “The bureau’s profilers all said he was not vengeance motivated. The story is already out. Why risk coming back to do something to us? It’s behavior he hasn’t shown before.”
“I don’t know, Jack,” Rachel said. “Maybe it’s something else. You’ve made a lot of generalized statements about him on the podcast. Maybe you got him mad.”
Her phone’s screen lit up with a return text from Metz.
What’s your 20? I’ll send Agent Amin out in a Lyft. See if he follows and we’ll lead him into a horseshoe.
Rachel sent back a text with the address and asked for an ETA on the Lyft car. Metz replied that it would be forty minutes.
“Okay, so we have to order another round and then act like neither one of us can drive,” Rachel said. “We fake a request for a Lyft and then get in the car with Amin.”
“What’s a horseshoe?” I asked.