A Bustle in the Hedgerow (CASMIRC Book 1) Page 4

  “Thanks, Dylan. Did I miss anything exciting?”

  Harringer shook his head. “Nothing outside the usual.” He started laying down some files on the front table. “This one should catch your eye, though.”

  Dylan Harringer served as an excellent SAC. He knew well the strengths and weaknesses of his team members. More often than not, he got the most out of the men and women who worked for him. Though he lacked Jack’s charisma and likability—and certainly his recent fame— he was very well respected in this office and throughout the Bureau, more so for his commendable leadership skills than for the rippling muscles underneath his finely-tailored clothing.

  “Oh, yeah?” Jack replied. He felt an unfamiliar sense of unease. After his conversation with Philip Prince yesterday, and with Vicki last night, he wasn’t sure he was ready to take on a new case. Unfortunately, as he well knew, malfeasants rarely consider the preferences of law enforcement officials when committing their crimes.

  Two more agents entered the room, Heath Reilly and Camilla Vanderbilt, followed shortly by Amanda Lundquist and then Charlie Shaver, the agents comprising the rest of the team. Most of them greeted Jack back amongst them with honest appreciation. They all took seats in chairs aligned in two rows, facing the front of the room, where Harringer stood behind a plain table, his files piled neatly on top. Harringer signaled to Reilly, who stood up and plugged a flash drive into the computer on the far end of the front table.

  Harringer unceremoniously launched into the meeting. “This morning Heath took a phone call from a homicide detective in York, PA, about a murder earlier this week of a nine-year-old girl.”

  Jack’s heart sank. Immediately a vision of Lamaya Hollows popped into his head. He could feel that others in the room had similar reactions.

  “Last month we also received word of a similar homicide in Frederick, Maryland. Another nine-year-old girl. Both girls were strangled by hand, both in late afternoon. Both bodies were found near playgrounds. No eye witnesses, no fingerprints, no DNA.”

  “Sexual assault?” Camilla Vanderbilt asked.

  “No,” Harringer answered curtly.

  Camilla was in her mid-thirties, married, no kids. She had earned the reputation of a tenacious investigator. She never missed a detail in a witness’ story and poured over evidence item by item, line by line. Jack found her to be a very strong asset to the team.

  Since high school Jack created nicknames for many of those around him, as an unofficial sign of admiration and respect. Soon after meeting her, he began calling Camilla Vanderbilt “Camilla Commodore,” after the mascot of Vanderbilt University. Within a few weeks, this shortened to “C.C.”

  Reilly’s flash drive had connected to the conference room computer. Soon two photographs appeared on the screen in front of them: a pigtailed redhead’s fourth grade picture, and a crime scene photo of her lifeless body. Reilly took over the debriefing.

  “This is Adrianna Cottrell. She was found dead in York, PA on Monday. This morning the homicide detective…” He consulted his notes on his handheld device. “…Officer Ken Howard called me about some oddities in the investigation.”

  Jack had a quizzical smirk on his face that Harringer noticed. “What is it, Jack?” he asked.

  Jack blinked and shook his head. “Nothing important. Ken Howard is the name of an actor. He was The White Shadow—remember that TV show from the late 70’s?”

  “The White Shadow?” Harringer asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” Harringer said, matter-of-factly. Jack often made pop-cultural references, but usually not in team meetings like this one. Harringer generally found it annoying, even more so in the middle of a debriefing.

  “I remember that,” Reilly offered. He really didn’t, but he always took advantage of any opportunity to get on Jackson Byrne’s good side. He saw Jack as the future of this division and assumed that his best chance of ascending through the ranks of the Bureau would be riding on Jack’s coattails. Unfortunately for him, he did not realize that Jack saw through his sycophantism and actually didn’t care much for Heath Reilly. Jack had no nickname for him.

  “Great,” Harringer uttered. “Continue please, Heath.”

  Reilly refocused on his presentation. “Yeah, so, the oddities in the York murder. There were several post-mortem rib fractures and some bruising to the sternum. In addition, there was a slip of paper in her front jeans pocket with unrecognizable script on it.”

  Despite Jack’s initial hesitancy to get involved in another investigation, his brain couldn’t resist processing the information, formulating a question, and forcing it out through his vocal cords. “Unrecognizable to whom?”

  “To Detective Howard. The main reason he called was for linguistics help. Because of the nature of the crime, the phone call came to us,” Reilly explained. He clicked the mouse and two more photographs came up on the screen.

  “And this is Stephanie McBurney from Frederick. She was found three weeks ago. She had virtually identical post-mortem injuries to her chest and a slip of paper in her pocket. This one we’ve had for a while.” He clicked the mouse again. On the screen came a scanned image of the message found on Stephanie McBurney’s body:

  Confusion fell across the agents’ faces. No one said a word, until a melodic voice like that of a radio host announced, “It’s Serbian.”

  Everyone turned to face the tall, lanky man standing in the back of the room. He had slipped in unnoticed after everyone else had been seated. He wore a suede jacket over a collared shirt with jeans and had wavy gray hair with a salt-and-pepper beard. His circular dark-rimmed glasses seemed to accentuate his long, thin face.

  “Yes,” Reilly said, almost amazed.

  Harringer pointed to the mysterious man. “Everyone, this is Terrence Friesz. He’s a linguistics expert from the DC Field Office, and he will be joining us for this investigation. It seems as though his services will come in handy.”

  Friesz raised a hand to the group. “Hello, everyone. Call me Terry, please. It’s a pleasure.” He pointed towards the screen to redirect their attention. “It roughly translates, ‘I do not really hate you.’”

  “In Serbian?” Camilla reiterated.

  Friesz nodded, but then realized that no one saw his gesture because they all had turned back to the screen. “Yes.”

  Camilla turned her attention to Reilly. “Is the message from Monday also in Serbian?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think so. By Officer White Shadow’s description…” Reilly smirked, but Harringer did not seem amused. “…It sounds more like a Middle-Eastern or Asian language. It didn’t share any recognizable characters with our alphabet.”

  “Do we have a copy of it yet?” Camilla asked.

  CC’s really starting to sink her teeth into this one, Jack thought with admiration.

  Harringer fielded this one. “No. Officer Howard is going to scan it and e-mail it this morning, right Heath?”

  “Correct,” Heath said as he pulled his iPhone out of its belt holder. He checked to see if he had gotten any new e-mails, but he hadn’t.

  Jack looked back at the screen. “I do not really hate you,” he repeated aloud, mostly for himself. “It looks like it came from a printer.”

  “Yes,” Reilly replied. “Based on analysis of the ink, typeface, et cetera, it most likely came from an HP Photosmart printer, which is one of the most popular printers sold in the U.S.”

  Harringer stood up, placed his hands on his hips, and said, “All right.” This was his usual method of beginning a summative statement at the end of a meeting. “Clearly this has the look of a serial child killer. For right now, Heath and Camilla are going to go to York to speak with Officer Howard and investigate the scene.

  “Jack, I want you and Charlie to gather and summarize the findings from the McBurney murder in Frederick.” Harringer held his hand out with only his index finger and pinky extended—a common gesture of Texas Longhorn fans—pointing one stubby, muscular finger
at Jack and the other at Charlie Shaver. Shaver, a single man in his mid-forties, had been with the FBI for over a decade, but only recently moved to CASMIRC.

  Shaver nodded. Jack gave little response. Harringer placed his hand back on his hip.

  “Amanda…” this time Harringer just nodded his head in Amanda Lundquist’s direction. She was the most junior of the team, having only been at the CASMIRC for 5 months. “I would like you to search databases in the tri-state area, and even expand to North Carolina, Delaware, and West Virginia, to try to find any other similar cases of strangulation of young girls. Make sure to look at both solved and unsolved, and attempted murder as well.”

  Lundquist jotted down this assignment in her pocket notepad, then looked back up and nodded once.

  “Please try to have all this info in to me by 1:00 today. Heath will distribute the cryptic note from the York murder to Terry and the rest of us as soon as possible. He and Camilla will then report in from York by tonight. Terry, let us know your translation after you get the message.

  “Questions?” Harringer finished his plan as he began it: per routine. No one voiced a query, and a quick glance around the room revealed no raised hands.

  “Let’s get to it, folks.” Harringer dropped his hands from his hips and exited the room. The rest of the team gathered themselves and followed out, all taking one last look at the odd text on the screen in front.

  12

  Jack sat at his desk, flipping a pencil in his right hand. He sensed an emotion that he didn’t think he had ever felt before.

  Insecurity?

  No, he had felt insecure before, back in his teenage years. Granted it was a rare occurrence, as an intelligent, athletic, likable person, but he surmised that everyone felt insecure at least once during adolescence.

  Fear?

  Not even close. He knew fear. Not terribly intimately, but he had certainly made fear’s acquaintance on more than one occasion. For Jack, fear was that neighbor that lived six houses down, whose name he knew, whom he waved to when driving by, and with whom he might exchange pleasantries at the local grocery store. They weren’t tight, but familiar enough to recognize.

  He looked at the photo of Vicki and Jonah on his desk. The unfamiliar emotion didn’t swell, nor did it dissipate.

  He turned his head to the left, peering through the glass wall that led into Dylan Harringer’s office. His eyes moved back to the desk in front of him.

  Uncertainty.

  Bingo.

  At first, he could not recall ever feeling this way. He certainly had not experienced this in his professional life. He had felt discontent, accompanied by the urgency to escape his current position, when working at the law firm in Bethesda. But he had never felt uncertain, unsure of which path to take.

  Unexpectedly, an emotion began to swell, bubbling up from some deep, dark, forgotten place, shooting to the surface like boiling water from some subterranean geyser. He suddenly remembered uncertainty. The first piece of the memory came—as it does for many people—in the form of a scent. He remembered what it smelled like in that moment almost thirty-five years ago: dirt. Wet, cold dirt. He had positioned his sleeping bag inside his tent with his head toward the zippered entryway. It had been raining most of the night, soaking the mossy soil around him. He had drifted in and out of sleep most of the night, in part due to the noise of the rain and in part due to the hard ground underneath him. He had just closed his eyes again when Uncle Ned, his mother’s sister’s husband, unzipped the flap in front of Jack’s face and scooted into the tent. He swiftly yanked the zipper back down.

  “It’s nasty out there,” Uncle Ned whispered, running his hand through his sopping wet hair. Jack didn’t respond. He felt confused. He couldn’t understand why Uncle Ned had come into Jack’s one-person tent. Uncle Ned had his own two-person tent just a few yards away, with Jack’s cousin Greg. Why would he be coming in here?

  “You warm enough?” Uncle Ned asked.

  “Yeah,” Jack lied, his teeth nearly audibly chattering.

  “Are you sure?” Uncle Ned seemed disappointed, as if he wanted Jack to feel cold.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t quite know why, but Jack felt scared.

  “Here,” Uncle Ned said, deciding that he knew better than Jack how to handle the temperature. He lay down beside Jack on the ground and put an arm around him, squeezing him gently. “Is that better?”

  Jack could feel Uncle Ned’s warm breath on the nape of his neck. “No,” the young Jack said timidly.

  “Oh.” Again Jack sensed disappointment in Uncle Ned’s voice. “How ‘bout I just crawl in there with you. That’s a pretty big sleeping bag.” Uncle Ned began to slip his right arm into the top of the sleeping bag, curling it around Jack’s torso.

  Jack’s eyes widened in the dark, his pupils saucers. He knew this was wrong. “No. No, no, no, no. No!”

  Uncle Ned took his arm from around Jack. “Ok! Keep it down, ok? I was just trying to help.”

  They both sat there silently, inches from each other but not touching, for several minutes. Uncle Ned shuffled his feet under him and got into a crouch. He reached for the zipper on the tent. “You shouldn’t tell your mom or your dad about this, ok, Jack? You wouldn’t want to look silly.”

  Jack didn’t know how to respond. He did feel embarrassed, but he didn’t quite know why.

  “Don’t look silly, ok, Jack? There’s no need for that. Ok?”

  “Ok,” Jack finally said.

  Uncle Ned left the tent as abruptly as he had arrived.

  After the zipper closed, Jack wondered briefly if that had actually happened. Jack, ever the thoughtful boy, lay awake all night, unsure of what to do. Should he say something to his parents? Or maybe to cousin Greg? Was this really as weird as it felt, or did he imagine that disturbing feeling? Maybe it was just the cold, damp night that made him feel so creepy. Maybe he should have let Uncle Ned— with his supposedly forthright, innocent intentions—try to keep him warm. Eventually, after his head hurt from hours of consternation and lack of sleep, he decided to forget that it ever happened.

  He never said a word to his parents. He actually had never mentioned that night to anyone, not even to Vicki. Not even to his psychological analyst during his entrance exams into the FBI. Uncle Ned never touched him again, not even to shake his hand. About ten years later, and only about three months after cousin Greg’s suicide, Uncle Ned drunkenly drove his Honda Civic into a river and drowned. Jack presumed that Uncle Ned took the events of that camping trip to his grave, and, for reasons he couldn’t fully understand—or, in truth, didn’t want to— Jack intended to as well.

  He hadn’t thought of that night in decades. He also had never pondered the seemingly obvious influence of that experience on his life's career path.

  Now, in his cubicle at CASMIRC, Jack had to rub his eyes to clear his thoughts, like a windshield wiper cleaning the run-off sprayed by the preceding pick-up’s tires. He found himself in another quagmire, a crossroads, and he needed to focus. He surmised that the decisions he made in the next few days would likely shape the rest of his life.

  He got up from his desk and went to Harringer’s office. Jack rapped his knuckles on the open door.

  Harringer looked up from his desk. “Yeah, Jack.”

  “Do you have a sec?”

  Harringer looked a little confused. It struck him as odd that Jack received an assignment twenty minutes ago and hadn’t already immersed himself in it. “Sure.” He gestured to one of the chairs opposite his desk.

  Jack closed the door behind him before he sat down. “This one feels bad.”

  Again, Harringer seemed confused, now obvious on his pursed face. “Don’t they all? On some level, they all feel bad.”

  Jack nodded in acquiescence more than agreement. “This one seems different.” He scratched his chin. “Maybe it’s me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jack shook his head, as if attempting to deny his thoughts and the words about to c
ome out of his mouth. “Maybe I’m not ready to come back just yet.”

  Harringer raised his eyebrows. “Did you get bitten by the literary bug? Or maybe the Hollywood lifestyle? Traveling around, talking on talk shows, drinking cocktails…” He said this last comment in an attempt at light humor, trying to get some emotion out of Jack. No success.

  “I think I just have a few things going on that I need to sort out. And I’m pretty sure that if I get involved in this case, it will… cloud my judgment. Make it more difficult to sort them out.”

  Harringer considered this, then got hit with an apparent epiphany. “Have you gotten some kind of job offer? You’re not going to go private on us, are you?”

  “No, no,” Jack said. Technically he had not received a job offer; no one offered him the job of US Senator. Jack felt better about relying on technicalities to avoid lying. “I just have a few personal things that need some attention.”

  “How long do you think you’ll need? This is an important case for us, Jack. And for those families in York and Frederick.” Harringer hoped that playing a sympathy card might work with Jack. Despite Jack’s hard exterior, Harringer knew that he was a family man, and that he often developed close bonds with victims and their families. That was part of what made him so successful as an investigator. Finally, Harringer reached back and threw a fastball down the middle with all he had. “And for the family of the next victim if we don’t get this guy.”

  “I know. A couple of days. I’ll be ready by the end of the week.” Jack didn’t take a swing at Harringer’s juicy pitch.

  Harringer seemed a little disappointed. He contemplated Jack’s proposal. “All right. Come in early on Friday. I’ll meet you here and debrief you on everything we have until that point.”

  “OK,” Jack said, knowing that there was a good chance he would not be coming in on Friday. “Thanks, Dylan.”

  Harringer nodded. “Be ready by then, though, OK? Be fresh.”

  Jack nodded reassuringly as he left the office, leaving the door ajar behind him.