“Her name is Georgette Brockman.”
Still crouched on my haunches next to the open bag, I stared up at Rachel as I put it all together. There was only one reason Freddy Stone would have that name written on a Las Vegas newspaper in his warehouse. He had trailed me to Vegas and knew I was going up to Ely to talk to Oglevy. He was the one who wanted to isolate me in the middle of nowhere. He was Sideburns. He was the Unsub.
Rachel took the newspaper from me. Her conclusions were the same as mine.
“He was in Nevada trailing you. He got her name and wrote it down while he was hacking the prison system’s database. This is the link, Jack. You did it!”
I got up and approached her.
“We did it, Rachel. But what do we do now?”
She lowered the paper to her side and I saw a sad realization play on her face.
“I don’t think we should be touching anything else here. We need to back off and call in the bureau. They have to take it from here.”
Equipmentwise, the FBI always seemed ready for anything. Within an hour of Rachel’s calling the local field office, we were placed in separate interrogation rooms in a nondescript vehicle the size of a bus. It was parked outside the warehouse where Freddy Stone had lived. We were being questioned by agents inside while other agents on the outside were in the warehouse and the nearby alley, looking for further signs of Stone’s involvement in the trunk murders as well as his current whereabouts.
Of course, the FBI didn’t call them interrogation rooms and would have objected to my calling the converted mobile home the Guantánamo Express. They called it a mobile witness interview unit.
My room was a windowless cube about ten feet by ten feet and my interrogator was an agent named John Bantam. This was a misnomer because Bantam was so big he seemed to fill the whole room. He paced back and forth in front of me, regularly slapping his leg with the legal pad he carried in a way I think was designed to make me think that my head could be its next destination.
Bantam grilled me for an hour about how I had made the connection to Western Data and all the moves Rachel and I had made after that. All the way, I took the advice Rachel gave me right before the federal troops showed up:
Do not lie. Lying to a federal agent is a crime. Once you commit it, they have you. Do not lie about anything.
So I told the truth, but not the whole truth. I answered only the questions put to me and offered no detail that was not specifically asked for. Bantam seemed frustrated the whole time, annoyed with not being able to ask the right question. A sheen of sweat was forming on his black skin. I thought maybe he was the embodiment of the whole bureau’s frustration with the fact that a newspaper reporter had made a connection they had missed. Either way, he was not happy with me. The session went from a cordial interview to a tense interrogation and it seemed to go on and on.
Finally, I hit my limit and stood up from the folding chair I had been seated in. Even with me standing, Bantam still had six inches on me.
“Look, I told you all I know. I have a story to go write.”
“Sit down. We’re not finished.”
“This was a voluntary interview. You don’t tell me when it’s finished. I’ve answered every one of your questions and now you’re just repeating yourself, trying to see if I get crossed up. It’s not going to happen because I only told you the truth. Now, can I go or not?”
“I could arrest you right now for breaking and entering and impersonating a federal agent.”
“Well, if you are going to make things up, I guess you could arrest me for all kinds of things. But I didn’t break and enter. I followed someone into the warehouse when we saw him enter and thought he might be committing a crime. And I did not impersonate a federal agent. That kid might have thought we were agents but neither of us said or did anything that even remotely indicated that.”
“Sit down. We’re not done.”
“I think we are.”
Bantam slapped the pad against his leg and turned his back to me. He walked to the door and then turned back.
“We need you to hold your story,” he said.
I nodded. Now we were finally down to it.
“This is what this was all about? The interrogation? The intimidation?”
“It wasn’t an interrogation. Believe me, you’d know it if it were.”
“Whatever. I can’t hold the story. It’s a major break in a major case.
Besides, splashing Stone’s face across the media might help you catch him.”
Bantam shook his head.
“Not yet. We need twenty-four hours to assess what we’ve got here and at the other locations. We want to do that before he knows we’re onto him. Splashing his face across the media will be fine after that.”
I sat back down on the folding chair as I thought about the possibilities. I was supposed to discuss any deal not to publish with my editors but I was beyond all of that now. This was my last story and I was going to call my own shots.
Bantam took a chair that was leaning on the wall, unfolded it and sat down for the first time during the session. He positioned himself directly in front of me.
I looked at my watch. It was almost four o’clock. The editors in Los Angeles were about to go into the daily meeting and set the next day’s front page.
“This is what I am willing to do,” I said. “Today is Tuesday. I hold the story and write it tomorrow for Thursday’s paper. We keep it off the website so it won’t get picked up by the wire services until early Thursday morning and won’t start making waves on TV until after that.”
I looked at my watch again.
“That would give you a solid thirty-six hours, at least.”
Bantam nodded.
“Okay. I think that will work.”
He made a move to get up.
“Wait a minute, that’s not all. And, this is what I want in return. I obviously want exclusivity. I made this break and so the story is mine. No leaks and no press conferences until after my story hits the front of the Times.”
“That’s no problem. We’ll-”
“I’m not finished. There’s more. I want access. I want to be in the loop. I want to know what is going on. I want to be embedded.”
He smirked and shook his head.
“We don’t do embedded. You want to be embedded, then go to Iraq. We don’t take citizens, especially reporters, inside investigations. It could be dangerous and it complicates things. And, legally, it could compromise a prosecution.”
“Then, we don’t have a deal and I need to call my editor right now.”
I reached into my pocket for my cell phone. It was a dramatic move I hoped would force the issue.
“All right, wait,” Bantam said. “I can’t make this call. Sit tight and I’ll get back to you.”
He stood up and left the room, closing the door. I got up and checked the knob. As I had guessed, the door was locked. I pulled my phone and checked the screen. It said no service. The soundproofing of the cube probably knocked down service, and Bantam had probably known it all along.
I spent another hour sitting on the hard folding chair, occasionally getting up to knock loudly on the door or to pace in the tiny room the way Bantam had. The abandonment started to work on me. I kept checking my watch or opening my phone, even though I knew there was no service and that wasn’t going to change. At one point I decided to test my paranoid theory that I was being watched and listened to the whole time I was in the room. I opened my phone and walked the corners like a man reading a Geiger counter. In the third corner I acted like I had found service and started through the motions of making a call and talking excitedly to my editor, telling him I was ready to dictate a major breaking story on the identity of the trunk killer.
But Bantam didn’t come rushing in and it only proved one of two possibilities. That the room wasn’t wired for sight and sound, or that the agents outside watching me knew my cell service was blocked and I couldn’t possibly have made the call I had just pretended to make.