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CHAPTER 54

WALSH NEEDED SOMETHING from me ?

“What do you have in mind?”

He smiled for the first time since entering the war room. Then, with a trace of reluctance, he said, “Okay, Lindsay, here it is. I know your husband. Joe and I were in the BAU together and I always liked him.”

My husband had begun his long career in law enforcement as a profiler in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico. Was Walsh’s case somehow related to Joe?

“What are you saying? What does Joe have to do with—”

“Nothing. Sorry, no, this has nothing to do with Joe. I just mention the connection because I’ve always trusted Joe, and I’m here to see you because I hope I can trust you, too. I have a working theory on the identity of this son-of-a-bitch note-writing killer. You and I are the top investigators on this case, but if what I say gets out of this room, it could blow up the career of an innocent man. A fellow FBI agent. So if you want to work together on this theory, I need your word that what I tell you stays just between us. For now.”

I said, “I’d feel better if you’d tell me what I’m agreeing to.”

“Trust me for a few more minutes, will you? If you can’t agree, we’ll forget this conversation ever happened.”

“All right. Tell me or I’m going to beat it out of you.”

The G-man laughed, and then he got serious, raked his hair back with his hand, planted his elbows on the table, and said, “There’s a guy in the Bureau I’ve known for about ten years. I worked with him on few cases, say five. We overlapped in Portland for a while. We’re not close, but we’re friendly.”

Walsh grew quiet again. I was trying to read his mind while giving him a full-bore stare, and I was about to slap the table and stand up in frustration when Walsh finally found his voice again.

“I saw this agent checking into a motel in Verne while I was following a lead. More on that in a minute. But this agent, he had no business being there. Verne’s major attraction is a slot machine at the town’s only gas station. I would have been notified if he was working anything related.”

“What did he say when you asked him?”

“He didn’t see me,” Walsh said. “And I wasn’t comfortable asking him, ‘What the eff are you doing here?’ A murder had been committed. I didn’t want to bring this agent into it without first knowing why he was there. But wait. There’s more.”

I nodded, encouraging him to go on.

Agent Walsh said, “Sadie Witt wasn’t the first of the ‘I said’ victims. There were at least two others. One in Boone, North Carolina, about eighteen months ago. That victim was Alvin Poole, who died inside his Tesla by a gunshot to the back of his head. He was eighty-one and had no known enemies. His wife was home, and she heard the blast. And they found a note stuck under a windshield wiper.”

I took a wild guess. “A note saying, ‘I said. You dead.’”

“Correct. It was a little strange but didn’t seem meaningful then. There was a write-up about Poole in the local paper. It was short, an obit, and attributed to no one. I learned that Poole’s Rollaboard company had bought him out not long before, and his share of the company was worth some money with a lot of zeros at the end.

“I’d say Alvin Poole was victim one.”

I was clenching my hands in my lap. What could Alvin Poole have to do with Jacobi or Robinson?

Walsh went on.

“Victim two, I believe, is a divorced woman who died under suspicious circumstances. This woman was an acquaintance of mine.”

“What kind of acquaintance?”

“Nothing like that. But her ex-husband was actually that other agent I mentioned. They’d divorced after a pretty short marriage, and I’d had a drink with him not long before his ex-wife died. He complained that she was a bitch and a gold digger.”

James sighed and apologized. “I’m sorry. This is very painful.”

“I understand. Please go on.”

“I think I could use some coffee after all.”