Other agencies, including the NYPD, were aware of Unit Five designations, but ultimately only two people had full access to the unit’s records: the special agent in charge of the New York field office, Edgar Ross, and his assistant, Brad. It was this assistant who, twenty minutes after the initial referral, knocked on his boss’s door with four sheets of paper in his hands.
“You’re not going to like this,” he said.
Ross looked up as Brad closed the door behind him.
“I never like anything that you tell me. You never bring good news. You never even bring coffee. What have you got?”
Brad seemed reluctant to hand over the papers, like a child concerned about submitting flawed homework to his teacher.
“Fingerprint request submitted to AFIS, taken from a body dump in Idaho. Local girl, Melody McReady. She disappeared two years ago. Body was found in a pond, wrapped in plastic. The print came from the plastic.”
“And we got a match?”
“No, but there was something else: a photograph. That started ringing bells.”
“Why?”
Brad looked uneasy. Despite the fact that he had been with his boss for almost five years now, everything to do with Unit Five made him uneasy. He’d read details of some of the other cases that had been automatically flagged for the unit’s attention. Without exception, every one of them gave him the creeps. Similarly without exception, every one of them seemed to involve, peripherally or directly, the man named Charlie Parker.
“The prints didn’t match, but the symbol did. It’s been found on two earlier bodies. The first was the corpse of an unknown woman fished from the Shell Bank Creek in Brooklyn over forty years ago, after she was shot by a cop. She was never identified. The second match comes from the body of a teenage girl killed in a car at Pearl River about twenty-six years ago. Her name was Missy Gaines: a runaway from Jersey.”
Ross closed his eyes and waited for Brad to continue.
“Gaines was shot by Charlie Parker’s father. The other woman was killed by his father’s partner sixteen years earlier.”
Now, reluctantly, he proffered the papers. Ross examined the symbol on the first sheet from the McReady body dump and compared it to the symbol from the earlier killings.
“Aw, hell,” he said.
Brad reddened, even though he knew that he was not to blame for what was to come. “It gets worse. Look at the second sheet. This was found hacked into a tree near the body of a kid called Bobby Faraday.”
This time Ross swore more forcefully.
“The third one was cut into the wood beside the back door of the Faraday house. It was assumed R Q was assu that they’d killed themselves, but the chief, a guy named Dashut, didn’t seem so sure. Took them five days to find it.”
“And we’re only getting it now?”
“State police never passed it on. They’re kind of territorial out there. Eventually, Dashut just got tired of the lack of progress and went over their heads.”
“Get me every piece of paper you can find on the McReady girl and the Faradays.”
“Already on their way,” said Brad. “They should be here within the hour.”
“Go wait for them.”
Brad did as he was told.
Ross put the papers beside a set of photographs that had been on his desk since earlier that morning. They came from the previous night’s crime scene on Hobart Street, and showed the symbol that had been drawn on the wall of the kitchen with Mickey Wallace’s blood.
Ross had been informed of the murder within an hour of the discovery of Wallace’s body, and had asked for evidence photos and copies of all documentation relating to the case to be made available to him by nine the following morning. As soon as he saw the symbol, Ross began covering the trail. Calls were made to One Police Plaza, and the symbol was scrubbed from the kitchen wall. All those who had been present at the scene were contacted and warned that the symbol was crucial to the case, and any mention of it outside the immediate investigative team would result in disciplinary action and, ultimately, dismissal without recourse to appeal. Additional locks were placed on all police files relating to the Pearl River killings, the shooting in Gerritsen Beach, and the accidental death of Peter Ackerman at the intersection of Seventy-eighth and First nine months before. The lock prevented those files from being accessed without the express permission of both SAC Ross and the NYPD’s deputy commissioners of Operations and Intelligence, even though all the relevant files had been carefully “sterilized” after the events in Pearl River to ensure that any matches that might arise at a later date would be referred to the commissioner’s office and, when it subsequently came into being, Unit Five. Any inquiries relating to them would immediately be red flagged.
Ross knew that the death of a reporter, even a former one, would draw other reporters like flies, and the circumstances of Wallace’s death, killed in a house where two high-profile murders had been committed a decade earlier, would attract further attention. It was important to keep a lid on the investigation, but it couldn’t be too tight or the more excitable reporters would start to sense a cover-up. Therefore, it was decided, in conjunction with One Police Plaza, that a suitably sympathetic “face” would be presented to the media, and a series of carefully controlled unofficial briefings would disseminate enough information to keep the media at bay without actually divulging anything that might be considered dangerous to the conduct of the investigation.
Ross traced his fingers over the picture of the symbol on the wall, then retrieved copies of four different photos from the various files on his desk. Soon, its surface was covered with variations on the same images: symbols burned into flesh, cut into wood, and carved on R Qd carved stone.
Ross turned his chair to the window and looked out over the city. As he did so, he dialed a number using a secure line. A woman answered.
“Let me speak to the rabbi, please,” said Ross.
Within seconds, Epstein was on the line.
“It’s Ross.”
“I was expecting your call.”
“You’ve heard, then?”
“I received a call last night to alert me.”
“Do you know where Parker is?”
“Mr. Gallagher gave him a bed for the night.”
“Is that common knowledge?”
“Not to the media. Mr. Gallagher had the foresight to remove his license plate when he realized that he might be forced to conduct a rescue.”
Ross was relieved. He knew that, in the absence of a New York lead, reporters had already attempted to track Parker through the bar in Maine in which he was working. A call to the field office in Portland requesting a drive-by at the Parker house had revealed two cars and a TV van parked outside, and the owner of the Great Lost Bear had told an agent that he’d been forced to put a no reporters sign on his door. To ensure that his request was complied with, he’d hired two large men in hastily made no reporters T-shirts to man the doors. According to the agent in question, those men had been waiting to start work when he’d visited the bar. They were, he said, without question two of the widest individuals he had ever seen in his life.
“And now?” asked Ross.
“Parker left the Gallagher house this morning,” said Epstein. “I have no idea where he is.”
“Have you spoken to Gallagher?”
“He says that he doesn’t know where Parker has gone, but he confirmed that Parker now knows everything.”
“Then he’s going to come looking for you.”