“Good,” I replied, although I wasn’t sure the suspect list was going to be much help.
As investigations like this progress and people call in with tips, names are added to the list of potential suspects generated by the evidentiary aspects of each crime scene. The list usually grows exponentially with time. When I’d read the case files on the drive to Taylor’s earlier in the day, there were already 180 names on the list. I’ve worked cases with tens, even hundreds of thousands of names on the list, and I had a feeling the number of suspects for this case was going to grow quite a bit before it began to shrink. Sometimes the lists are beneficial, but many times the killer’s name never even appears, or if it does, it’s often buried so deeply in the stack that it gets overlooked.
Reggie arrived, and Kurt began to have words with him on the far side of the room.
As I watched the forensic technicians work, I began to feel useless standing around here, and anxious to move forward on this case-and now at least there were some specific leads to research.
That message: Must needs we tell of others’ tears?
The pot of basil.
The Keats and Alexander connection.
I heard the exchange between Kurt and Reggie growing louder, but I was only able to catch bits and fragments of their conversation. Something about Reggie’s wife, Amy Lynn.
Then Reggie raised his voice. “I know, but I can stay with her.”
“That’s not enough.” Kurt’s tone was sinewy and strong. “We’re going to do whatever we need to do to protect her.”
“I’m aware of that. But Amy Lynn-”
Before he could finish, Kurt led him into the hall to continue their conversation out of earshot. Obviously, the two of them were not in agreement on how to best protect Reggie’s wife now that the killer had sent her the basil, marking her as a potential victim.
We needed to move on this case before the killer had a chance to make that happen.
“All right,” I said to Jake and Cheyenne. “It’s time for me to go.”
“And do what?” Jake asked.
“I think we should start with the Keats poem and the paintings of John Alexander. The victims so far have been posed, their murders so unusual that I’m wondering if maybe the killer is reenacting other violent poems or portraying other paintings.”
“Hmm,” Jake said. “To create some kind of gallery of portraits of the dead.”
“Maybe.”
Cheyenne looked around the room. “Well, for the moment there’s nothing more for us to do here. We can use the conference room on the sixth floor. The computers up there are actually less than a decade old.”
“I’ll come too,” Jake said. “Give me a few minutes, though.” He was staring at the head. “Then I’ll be right up.”
Cheyenne and I left and found Kurt just outside the door, alone. Reggie was already halfway down the hall. I watched him for a moment and let my gaze become a question for Kurt.
“He wants to let Amy Lynn keep working,” he said. “We’ve assigned an officer to her, but I think we should move her into protective custody. The note, the pot-they connect her to the case. I don’t like it.” He paused. “I want her safe.”
“You need to ask Amy Lynn,” Cheyenne said. “Not her husband. It’s not your call or Reggie’s. It’s hers.”
She was right, of course, but from my brief meeting with Amy Lynn I didn’t get the sense that she was the cautious type. I couldn’t see her choosing protective custody.
Kurt let out a thin sigh. “Point taken.”
Cheyenne told Kurt where we were going, and he said he’d join us as soon as he’d spoken with Amy Lynn.
Then, as we left, I glanced back into the forensics lab and saw Jake Vanderveld leaning over, staring intently into Travis Nash’s lifeless eyes. It looked like he was whispering to himself.
But maybe he was whispering to the ears of the dead.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what he might possibly be saying.
Amy Lynn Greer didn’t like the fact that no one would tell her why the police and FBI were in such a hurry to remove the flowers after the teenage girl told them it was a pot of basil, or why they’d stationed an officer right outside her door, and she let Benjamin Rhodes know it.
“You can’t get involved with this,” he said. “Not with your husband’s position.”
“I’m already involved. The flowers were sent to me.” Rhodes looked like he was about to respond, but before he could, she added, “Look, I spent all morning following up on this. I know more about it than anyone else. And you’re telling me being knowledgeable disqualifies me from writing about it? What kind of-”
“Amy Lynn, settle down. Let’s just see what the police find out first.” Rhodes rounded his desk and stood beside the window, hands folded behind his back. “The executive board feels that if we move on this too fast there might be legal ramifications. They want us to sit on it until we have something a little more solid.”
“But don’t you see?” she said. “That’s all the more reason to investigate it now, so we can be prepared to run a story when the time comes.”
If the pot of basil was related to the week’s previous murders, she could already envision this story shaping up as a true crime book. This was her chance for a big story, a breakout story, and she wasn’t about to let it slip through her fingers just because the board wanted to play it safe.
“No,” Rhodes said. “I’m sorry.”
Amy Lynn was about to let him know what she thought about him and the executive board but held her tongue and simply said, “All right.”
“Finish the steroids piece, get your weekly column on my desk. I’ll give you till four this afternoon-then we’ll see.”
“Yes. All right. Thanks.” She left his office, brushed past the police officer waiting for her in the hallway and headed for her desk.
No, she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her day writing about a baseball player.
She was going to find John.
37
We split up the research.
Cheyenne took the Alexander paintings, I scoured the Internet for Keats poems that might bear some semblance to the murders, and Jake looked for other literary references to pots of basil or to the message about telling of others’ tears.
Even though Cheyenne had suggested we use the sixth floor conference room because of the computers, it didn’t take me long to realize that they were dinosaurs compared to the laptops the Bureau provided. I switched to my computer, and five minutes later, I noticed Jake had done the same.
Each of us sat in a separate corner of the room and disappeared into our research, and as if by a unanimous, unspoken agreement, we worked quietly for nearly twenty-five minutes typing and surfing and scribbling notes before Jake broke the silence. “Well, let’s see what we have.”
I looked up and saw him gaze from me to Cheyenne.
“Sure, I’ll go first,” Cheyenne offered, but she sounded frustrated. “I looked all over Alexander’s online portfolio and, apart from two pictures that vaguely resemble the view of the mountains near the mine where we found Heather’s body, I’m not seeing any paintings that have a connection to the other murders. Nothing solid at all.”
I tilted my laptop’s screen so I could read it more easily. “Well, I don’t have much either. Just one thing, though. A section of the poem by Keats.”
And then I read aloud,
O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, on some other day,
From Isles Lethean, sigh to us-O sigh!
Spirits of grief, sing not your “Well-a-way!”
For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;
Will die a death too lone and incomplete,