“I know,” he said. “I read it online.”
“Then what’s your point?”
Lancaster reached into his shirt pocket and removed a square of paper, which he carefully unfolded. It was a twenty-two-year-old newspaper article from the Bedford Bulletin that he’d printed off the internet on the laser printer in his study. Its headline screamed BEDFORD MURDERS SOLVED! KILLER CAPTURED. Beneath the headline was a mug shot of a man in his forties with a handlebar mustache and the hardened eyes of a killer. The caption identified him as Clyde Bessemer of Bedford.
“This article from the Bedford Bulletin said that a pair of FBI agents broke the case,” he said. “Their names were Special Agents Don Mates and Troy Holloway, and they worked as field agents out of the FBI’s Bedford field office. These two guys are your killers.”
“That’s utterly ridiculous,” she said.
“No, it’s not. Their office was an hour-and-ten-minute drive from Dartmouth. As field agents, they could come and go as they pleased and not arouse suspicion. They used the Bedford killings as a blueprint for the Dartmouth killings. After your escape, they decided to rein it in. Then you were promoted to run the Violent Crimes Against Children unit, which I’m guessing was announced internally. Is that right?”
“It was announced on the FBI’s intranet, which is only available to staff,” she said.
“That explains it. Seeing that you were promoted infuriated Mates and Holloway. You were the one that got away. So they decided to pay you back.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” she asked.
“No, I just think you missed them.”
“The FBI didn’t miss Mates and Holloway, and neither did I,” she said, unable to hide the indignation in her voice. “The bureau recognized that there were parallels between the Bedford killings and the Dartmouth killings right away. Two agents that worked the Dartmouth case interviewed Mates and Holloway to see if they could shed any light on who the killers might be. It didn’t lead to anything.”
“Mates and Holloway had time to get their stories down and fooled your agents during the interview.”
“Be quiet and let me finish. When I graduated from the academy, I got my hands on the interview with Mates and Holloway, and I studied it. There was nothing there. But I still wanted to look them in the face, and make sure they weren’t the killers. If either one of them had a discolored right eye, I’d know it was them.”
“Your gut was telling you something.”
“Would you please let me finish? I couldn’t just demand an interview since they’d already been cleared. So I bided my time. Three years after my promotion, my team busted a child-trafficking ring working out of Boston. When the bust was over, I decided to take my shot, and I called Mates and told him I was in the area, and would he and Holloway be willing to meet with me? I explained that I’d gotten a firsthand look at the Dartmouth killers, and was hoping it might jar a memory or two. Mates was pleasant over the phone and said he’d talk to Holloway. He called me back an hour later, and said yes. So I drove up to Bedford.”
“You actually met with them. Wow.”
“Are you insinuating that I made a mistake?”
“They could have killed you.”
“Damn it, Jon, it’s not Mates and Holloway. They took me out to lunch to a really nice place, and we sat at a corner booth and discussed the two cases. I was as close to them as I am to you right now. Neither Mates nor Holloway has a discolored eye.”
“Mates has a discolored eye. He got injured playing lacrosse in high school.”
Daniels acted like she might slap him. “Haven’t you heard a word I just said? It’s not them.”
“You’re wrong. It is them. Mates either had surgery to fix his eye, or he’s now wearing contact lenses that hide the discoloration. He probably did this right after you escaped from him and Holloway in the woods in Dartmouth.”
“You think they fooled me?”
“Afraid so.”
“Prove it.”
He again used his cell phone to get on the internet. Earlier, he’d found Mates’s Facebook page, and learned that the special agent had grown up in the town of Montague in western Massachusetts. Working off the assumption that Mates had attended the local high school, he’d done a yearbook search using a site called e-Yearbook, which he’d used before to hunt down suspects. It had taken a while, but he’d eventually found Don Mates’s photograph and profile in the class of 1988’s yearbook. Mates had been captain of the lacrosse team in his senior year, and Lancaster now pulled the team photo up, and used his thumb and forefinger to enlarge it. He passed the cell phone to her.
“That’s the Montague lacrosse team circa 1988. Mates was the team captain. He’s standing in the front row on the very left. Look at his right eye.”
She raised the phone to her face. “He’s wearing an eye patch.”
“If you read the posts, his teammates mention him getting hurt during the final game of the year. Mates took a stick in the eye.”
“That still doesn’t prove anything.”
“There’s more.”
He took the cell phone and pulled up Mates’s graduation photograph. He put the cell phone in front of her face. In the photo, Mates’s right eye was scarred, the discoloration rectangular-shaped in the lower part of the iris.
“Is that the bad eye you saw?” he asked.
Her hand came up to her mouth. “Oh my God.”
Her face was pale, and she was at a loss for words. She’d looked the murderous bastards right in the eye and not recognized them. It was going to haunt her, and he hoped she was strong enough to recover from it.
“I found Mates’s and Holloway’s Facebook pages and searched the postings. Mates relocated to Fort Lauderdale eight years ago, while Holloway followed a month later. They must work out of one of the FBI’s Miami offices.”
“Do you think they’re a couple? The FBI has an open policy on gays, lesbians, and bisexuals becoming agents, so it wouldn’t be unusual.”
“I think they’re both straight. A coworker at the Bedford office posted a photo from Mates’s going-away party. There was a hand-painted sign that said TO THE LAST CONFIRMED BACHELOR. I think Mates and Holloway are serial killers who realized they were less likely to get caught if they stuck together. I found their address on the DMV database. They share a house in an area called Sistrunk. It’s a slum.”
“They live in a slum?”
“They’re not the first serial killers who’ve done that. Your neighbors are less likely to bother you in a bad neighborhood. We need to take a ride over there and case the place. If my hunch is correct, they’re holding a girl there now.”
“What are you basing that on? Because I’m expecting a new set of photos? If we show up and start snooping around, they’ll get suspicious and get rid of any incriminating evidence. We need to handle this by the book.”
“There’s no time for that. We need to move fast.”
“Why? What did you find?”
“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children keeps a database of all children that are reported missing. I have access through Team Adam, and reviewed the most recent cases. One stuck out. An eighteen-year-old girl named Ryean Bartell was reported missing yesterday. Ryean works as a server at the Jamba Juice in the Coral Ridge Mall. When she didn’t show up to work, her manager contacted the sheriff.”
“She’s only been gone a day. How can you be sure it’s an abduction?”
“Yesterday was payday. The manager thought it was strange that Ryean didn’t come in to collect her paycheck, so she called Ryean’s roommate to see if there was a problem. The roommate said that Ryean didn’t come home the night before and had disappeared.” He paused and then said, “She fits the profiles of the other victims. Mates and Holloway abducted Ryean after she got off work two nights ago, and took her to their house in Sistrunk. They’re going to go through their ritual, then kill her and snap photos and drop them off at a local pharmacy so they can keep torturing you. Or, we can stop them.”