Mounted Read online

“So after this Zack brought it to you, what did you do with it?” I asked.

  “I looked it over and called upstairs. They made the decision to call the authorities—about it, really.”

  “How does Mr. Shalagin fit in?”

  “He’s one of the big shots upstairs. That’s who I called when this package hit my desk. Pretty much anything that comes through here, we have to pass up to him. If it’s newsworthy, he passes it along to whoever he’d like to take charge of the piece. It gets real chummy upstairs. Basically, you have to be an ass kisser to get any kind of good story. So after I call up to him—or his office, I should say—he came down here to my office. Mr. Shalagin had a look at the package for himself, and that was about it. The police came within about an hour and took the box, which they seemed to believe was a hoax, and that was the last I heard of it. Was it not a hoax?” he asked.

  “We’re investigating it,” I said. “Just trying to get as much information as we can.”

  “So the local PD turned it over to the FBI?” he asked. The guy seemed to be putting two and two together as I pretty much figured he would.

  “They informed us, yes. We’re a little more accustomed to dealing with matters like this.”

  “So it was real? Son of a bitch. What was on the film? I mean, if you can tell me.”

  “Look, I won’t try to b.s. you,” I said. “Basically, it was legitimate, and we’re going to leave it at that for now. The Bureau will be releasing the information to the public tomorrow morning in a press conference. We’ll make sure your paper gets the time of the conference and all of that. It would be appreciated if this didn’t leak out prior.”

  “Hell, you don’t have to worry about it coming from me. I’m in my own little world down here. I do my job until six o’clock every day, punch out, and try to forget about this place until the next. What the paper creates and reports on isn’t really my concern. Shit, I don’t even read it.”

  “Okay, well, again to reemphasize, this needs to be quiet until tomorrow morning when we can get the facts out to everyone.”

  “Yeah, say no more,” he said.

  “Appreciate that. Can we get this Zack in here? I just want to get a quick run-through from him, and then I’ll be on my—” I cut my sentence short when the sound of the door opening behind me caught my ear. I turned to look and saw a midforties man dressed in a black suit and a red tie. His hair was styled and jet black, his face clean-shaven.

  “I’m Andrew Shalagin. Were you the agent from the FBI that was upstairs requesting me?” he asked.

  The man glanced past me and gave a nod to Ethan Bracknall, seated at his desk.

  “I am,” I pushed myself from my chair and shook the man’s hand. “Agent Hank Rawlings. I’m just trying to get some firsthand information on the package that arrived last week.”

  “And?” he asked.

  “And what?” I asked.

  “Are you receiving your information?”

  “Yes. We basically already have an account of what took place. I’m just crossing t’s and dotting i’s. I like to get firsthand accounts of everything on investigations I’m on.”

  “How did this get put through to the FBI?” He closed the door, walked into the office, and took a guest chair at my side.

  “The local department turned the matter over to us,” I said.

  “So the letter was real? This person killed four women and plans to kill more. Did you find more victims?”

  “Okay. I’m going to go over this again quickly because I just did it with Mr. Bracknall here prior to you walking in. Yes, the letter is legitimate. The FBI is putting on a press conference tomorrow morning. During this—”

  “What time?” Shalagin interrupted.

  I looked at him. “To be determined. I’ll make sure you get the time.”

  He said nothing.

  “Okay. During this press conference, we’ll reveal what we know and what steps we’re taking and lay the facts out from the investigation so far. The FBI would appreciate if we can keep this quiet until the time when we present everything.”

  Shalagin, again, said nothing.

  “As in, no articles about this hitting the papers prior to tomorrow morning.”

  He still didn’t respond.

  “Are you getting any of this?” I asked.

  “No mentioning of this until tomorrow,” Shalagin said. “It’s just news, you know, serial killer on the streets and all of that. Maybe just a headline of a possible serial killer and the announcement of your press conference in the morning?”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  He looked at me with a blank face. “You’re asking the press to not report the news.”

  “No, I’m asking you to not go against the wishes of the FBI. This is an open federal investigation. Literally, lives could be at stake with this.”

  “Whose lives?” he asked. “Who is this guy after?”

  I cracked my neck from side to side and looked him dead in the eyes. “Listen. We, as in the FBI, don’t want this out in the open until tomorrow, when you’ll all be more than welcome to report and also have facts to go along with your headlines. So if I see it in the paper prior to tomorrow morning, that would have to mean that you went against my request. See, something like that could affect my investigation, not to mention possibly putting lives in jeopardy. Do you understand that part? Your headlines will have to wait until the morning.”

  “Um, yeah, I get it. Don’t say anything.”

  “And we’re clear on that and the fact that I won’t be pleased if someone talking about it affects my ability to do my job? You know, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

  “Crystal,” he said. “You have my word, but we’ll need something for tomorrow.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A couple-minute exclusive. Just one of my journalists and whoever is in charge of the investigation.”

  “If I don’t see anything in the papers by morning, that’s a deal,” I said.

  Shalagin did a little fist pump, which rubbed me the wrong way.

  “You realize that this person is killing young women, right?” I asked. “Living, breathing young women with families and futures ahead of them? Does that sound like it should be a reason for you to get excited? To be celebrating with your little fist pump there?”

  He said nothing.

  “Do you have children?” I asked.

  He fumbled for words. “I, uh, I have two teenage daughters.”

  “Why don’t you think about that for a while?” I turned my attention back to Bracknall, who’d been sitting quietly. “Can we get this Zack in here for a couple questions? I’m going to need to get back to the office.”

  “Sure. One second,” Bracknall said.

  I stayed seated as Bracknall left the office in search of his temp. Shalagin peppered me with questions regarding the investigation as I waited—I debated just getting up and leaving after the fifth or sixth. To every question Shalagin asked, I delivered the same canned response: “You’ll get everything you need regarding the investigation tomorrow.” My parroting of the same line over and over didn’t seem to dissuade him from trying to rephrase the questions and asking again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Duffield called me just as I was leaving the front doors of the newspaper. I clicked Talk as I walked toward my car.

  “Rawlings,” I said.

  “Hey, Hank. I was just going to leave you a message. Figured I’d get your voice mail.”

  “I’m leaving the paper now. Headed back. What’s up?”

  “Anything there we didn’t know?” he asked.

  “Nah, just got their account of how they received the package. About it.” I unlocked the doors on my rental car, tossed my bag in the back, and got behind the wheel.

  “Okay. And they were fine with keeping a lid on it?” Duffield asked.

  “I had to ask nicely once, not so much the second time, but I think I left seeing eye to eye with them.”
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br />   “Sure. Well, I was calling to let you know that we’re going to have a meeting in a little bit here. If you can make it back in time, great. If not, no worries. It’s just going to be to gather everyone and get them up to speed. Beth is back here, so she could probably just fill you in if you miss it.”

  I fired up the engine and pulled from the lot. “I’ll be back in about twenty minutes. When are you starting?”

  “Half hour or so. So that should be perfect. I’ll get everyone gathered and see you in a bit.”

  “Sounds good.” I hung up and pulled up the navigation on my phone to have it direct me through downtown back to the field office. Twenty or so minutes of classic rock on the radio later, I parked my rental car in the Bureau’s parking lot, ventured through the building, and walked into serial crimes. I found everyone gathered in one of the larger conference rooms, entered, and took a seat between Beth and Duffield, who was sitting at the head of the table.

  “Okay,” Duffield said. “Looks like we’re all here. Let’s get rolling.” He clasped his hands in front of himself on the table. “Basically, I wanted everyone in to go over where they are and what they’re currently working on. Everyone on the same page would be good, and everyone knowing what everyone else is working on is also good. We’re going to have a press conference tomorrow morning at nine. It’s going to be short and sweet—pretty much a This Is What We Have, and This Is What We’re Doing.”

  I glanced up and down the long conference table. Duffield held down the end, and four agents were seated across from me. Next to Beth at my side, were a couple guys from the tech department whom I’d been introduced to when I dropped off the memory card with the abduction video earlier that morning. Sitting in a chair in the corner was a thin, forty-something-year-old man with dark hair, wearing a lab coat. One foot was crossed over and resting on his other knee. I’d been introduced to the man, named Frank Witting, when we viewed the package upon our arrival to the bureau office—he was the forensics department lead.

  Duffield looked toward the agents sitting at the table across from Beth and me. “Houston, where are we at with the wooden mounts?”

  The agent seated farthest left at the table—in his thirties, with a square face and short blond hair—spoke up. “You could buy them from five or six places within about a fifty-mile radius—mostly the taxidermists we’d already looked into. None reported selling any.” He brushed a finger across his equally blond mustache. “Basically, I got responses that they would sell them if someone called, but no one had called. I expanded by a bit to a couple of other places but received more of the same responses. From there, I started looking online. You can buy them virtually anywhere. The shape that these are—I guess it’s kind of a shield shape—is pretty damn common. I just don’t think we’re going to have much luck there, unfortunately.”

  “Okay,” Duffield said. “Do you think that’s it on that?”

  “I do,” he said. “There’s just too many online places they can be purchased from, no real brand to look into. I even found places overseas they could be purchased from for resale. It’s endless.”

  “Right.” Duffield turned his attention to the agent seated next to Agent Houston. “Braine, how are we on finding where those glass eyes came from?”

  “Well, we have a number of places where they could have come from, but seeing as how we have a quantity, if I can find a place that sold multiples, we should have our spot. I was going to start straight with the distributors and work my way down. By morning, I should have all the subpoenas going to get their sales reports, specifically for green human-like glass or acrylic eyes sold in the last year. There’s around five or six places that are on my top level. From there, I’m just going to try to follow them down—call each place and see if they’ve sold multiple sets and to who. I’m kind of bookmarking my entire day tomorrow to hammer on it.”

  “Good,” Duffield said. “Houston, if you’re done with the wooden mounts, give Braine a hand with the eyes.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  I had a thought brewing, so I spoke. “What makes you so certain that we’re dealing with any kind of quantity on these eyes?” I asked.

  The agent named Braine showed me a confused look. “Four women, four sets of green eyes, maybe more if he’s continuing.”

  “Who is to say he doesn’t just have one set,” I asked, “switching them from one mount to the next? We don’t have a photo of all the mounted heads together to see if they all have eyes.”

  The agent was silent for a moment. “I guess I didn’t think of that,” he said.

  “I think starting with the distributors is fine to follow them down to where they went,” I said. “That part is smart. It will give us retailers that we won’t be able to find with a simple search. I’d have to say we need to find all of these that were sold though, even if it’s just individual sets.”

  “Houston, you take the small and mid-level places that sell the eyes. Call each,” Duffield said. “Any sets sold, we need to know. Braine, continue with what you had planned out with the larger suppliers. I want to either know where the hell those eyes came from and who they were sold to, or get it crossed off the list entirely as a dead end.”

  They both agreed.

  Duffield turned his attention to the other two agents, who had yet to speak. “Collette, Tolman, what do you have working?”

  “Well,” the one on the right said, “I touched base with the missing persons departments that were dealing with the girls we have IDs for. What you see in the files is what we have—nothing that we don’t already know there. So after that, I started working with the missing persons departments across Kentucky and neighboring states. I wanted to see if this may have extended beyond the Louisville area. Basically, what I’m looking for is a number of women, all fitting the same age criteria taken from a single geographical location in a short period of time.”

  “And?” Duffield asked.

  “We haven’t found anything that would suggest it.”

  “Collette?” Duffield asked, turning his attention to the other agent.

  The last agent, yet to talk, piped up. “I’ve had my plate full. Since we got the investigation, I’ve been trying to work with other agencies and expanding our reach as much as possible, looking for bodies of women found that were missing heads and hands. Kind of drawing a blank, though. There have been a few, but they’re scattered across the country, and we haven’t found any unknowns. Basically, the women’s bodies that have been found like that, we know who they are and who was responsible. Seems dumping a body minus a head that can lead to an ID through dental records or hands, which can do the same via fingerprints, isn’t entirely uncommon.”

  “All right. You two keep doing what you’re doing.” Duffield looked toward the tech guys. “Anything new on our video?”

  The tech lead, named Aaron Koechner, flipped through a couple pieces of paper in front of him. He wore a gray polo shirt and khakis. I put him somewhere in his later forties. “We went through everything that we had previously gathered again and tried to see if we could connect anything with the footage that Agent Rawlings picked up this morning from the abduction of the Willard woman. My guys and I had pretty much all day with it. There’s just nothing there. On a little bit better note, we did clean up the footage of the abduction a bit and sent it over to the Oldham County Sheriff’s Office. We did a few points of reference on the footage and estimated our guy’s height and weight. It’s looking like he’s around five ten or eleven and roughly one hundred eighty pounds. We blew the footage up a bit, and it looks like she hands him a slip of paper as well as a driver’s license.”

  “Two things a cop would ask for at the window,” I said. “DL and registration.” I pulled out my notepad, flipped to a clean page, and jotted down the estimated height and weight.

  “Anything else?” Duffield asked him.

  “Nothing concrete, but just from my personal observation, I’d say the body movements of this man loo
k like someone in his fifties.”

  “The reasoning there?” Beth asked.

  “Just the stride length,” Koechner said. “It’s a couple inches shorter than it should be for a person of the height. Stride length decreases with age.”

  I wrote down fifties with a question mark in my notepad.

  Duffield looked at Beth. “Agent Harper, anything we didn’t know from the friends and families?”

  Beth rubbed her eyes. “I made stops with everyone we had on file, except one, which I’m scheduled to be over at in about an hour. Pretty tough day with nothing to show for it,” she said.

  “Grieving families can be rough,” Duffield said. “Never a part of the job I’m too eager for.”

  “The meetings are worse when the families have been told that their loved ones are dead, we don’t have a body, and they can’t see the photographic evidence that we have. It makes for some hard interviews—just a full day of tears and questions I had no answers for. Not a single thing new that we didn’t already know.”

  “Okay, Rawlings?” Duffield asked.

  I gave the room an overview of my day, which aside from finding the video that morning, had been fruitless. However, something on my list did demand an answer, and as I thought back to what I’d watched on the video, it created additional questions.

  “Anyone know where April Backer’s vehicle currently is?” I asked. “The one that was found with the flat?”

  “City impound probably,” Agent Collette said.

  “The bureau never processed it?” I asked.

  “Hold on,” the agent named Tolman said. He paged through a stack of papers in front of him, pulled a few sheets, and read them over. “She went missing eight days ago. Locals went through the vehicle, found nothing. No prints that weren’t hers. This is all on the missing person’s report and file. It doesn’t say where the vehicle currently is.”

  “I’ve looked it over, but you have it right in front of you there, does it mention if the window was down, personal items remaining inside, keys in the vehicle, anything like that?” I asked.

  Agent Tolman shook his head. “No.”