“Call me Xander. It’s good to finally put a face to the name. Sam’s been talking about you a lot lately.”
Baldwin frowned slightly, as if to say not here, then smiled. “Taylor told me you were an army ranger. A sharpshooter, too?”
“That’s right.”
“I looked at your file. It’s very impressive. The Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart? You made quite a name for yourself after that stunt you pulled in Fallujah. It’s a bloody miracle you and your men aren’t all dead. They were lucky to have you. So are we. I’m glad to have you here.”
Xander stiffened slightly, but Sam bumped his shoulder. She saw exactly what Baldwin was doing—giving Xander’s bona fides to the other FBI agents. He might not have been law enforcement, but he was one of them, a patriot, a soldier who’d bled for his country. He would be an asset to the case, not a hindrance.
Sam shot Baldwin a grateful glance, and he winked at her. He took a seat and said, “Let’s get started. Rob, you want to fill everyone in on the situation?”
They settled around the table. Sam noticed Fletcher was edgy, drumming his fingers, impatient, annoyed at being kept on the leash. He was ready to get out there and find their suspect.
This was big. She could feel it. The tension in the room was overwhelming.
Thurber asked Blake to pass them each a piece of paper. “I need you to sign this. It’s a nondisclosure agreement. You know how this works. Everything we discuss in this room is confidential, and if you violate this agreement, you will be prosecuted. Got it?”
Now her interest was really piqued. She’d been asked to sign NDAs before being brought onto a case several times, especially ones she’d worked with the FBI, and the TBI—Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. In every instance, the case ended up being a headline grabber.
Xander signed his and handed it over. So did Fletcher. She glanced at the language. It was pretty standard: you must not share what we’re about to tell you under penalty of death, dismemberment and life in prison. She figured she could be safely expected to keep her mouth shut about all this, and signed hers, as well. The quiet agent who’d seen them to the conference room collected the NDAs and left the room.
Thurber sat back in his chair. “All right. First, using the fingerprint cards from Dr. Owens’s autopsy, we have positively identified the remains in Lynchburg as our former agent, Douglas Matcliff.
“Seventeen years ago, I was assigned to the Kaylie Rousch case. She was six years old when she went missing from her home in Bethesda. Got off the bus a block from her house like she did every day, and never made it home. I’ve prepared a full write-up of the case for you to read when we’re done here. News clippings, that sort of thing.” He handed them each a package of papers.
“Are your notes in this, too?” Fletcher asked.
“Not exactly.”
Thurber cast a glance at Baldwin, who shrugged and said, “We try to keep as much off paper as possible. Paper can be used in court, can be acquired through subpoenas. There are certain things we’d rather keep to ourselves. The Rousch case is a good example.”
There was a moment of silence while that sank in. Sam watched the three agents. They looked terribly uncomfortable, shifting in their seats like naughty children. She turned to Baldwin. “Why are you here? Really? Is this about—”
He cut her off with a big sigh, a noise she recognized from other cases she’d worked with him, and a small frisson of fear went down her spine. This wasn’t about her.
“I’m here because you need a profiler. And I’ve been on this case for many, many years.”
“Are we dealing with a serial killer?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Is the man who murdered Savage and Benedict the same one who kidnapped Kaylie Rousch?”
“It’s a possibility. There’s a complication, though.”
“Let me guess,” Sam said. “You’ve seen this M.O. before.”
Chapter
31
BALDWIN POURED HIMSELF a glass of water. “Right around the time Kaylie Rousch was kidnapped, there was a series of murders. Garrotings. Several people were killed, seemingly at random, with no connections between them. It was a spree that lasted three months.
“We found her body, the body we thought was hers, I should say, on the property of a man named Eric Wright. He lived in a double-wide trailer south of Ryder, Virginia, on about five acres of wooded land. Some hunters found the skeleton. It had been dug up by animals and wasn’t complete. There were several important parts missing, specifically the skull, so we weren’t able to do any odontological work. But it was clearly the body of a little girl, and the same blood type as Kaylie. The anthropologist who worked with the county made her age as six years old based on the growth plates on the ends of her femurs.”
Thurber said, “We’re going to have to do some investigating into how, exactly, the lab got the DNA wrong. It is a massive, unacceptable screwup.”