Baldwin’s voice was hard. “Let’s put that aside for now, Rob.”
Thurber nodded, gave him a tight smile, then continued. “We went to talk to Eric Wright. He acted dodgy, so we executed a search warrant. In a trunk in his bedroom, we found clothes that matched the description of what Kaylie was wearing when she disappeared, plus her backpack and a child’s doll. There was also a garrote, with the blood of one of the known murder victims dried into the dowels. We had our guy. Wright was prosecuted, found guilty of second-degree murder and went to jail for life.”
“All right,” Sam said, “I’ll bite. If he’s in jail, how can he be out murdering people?”
Thurber responded angrily, “Because we got the wrong guy. But we didn’t know until it was too late. The DNA evidence was sketchy to begin with. Turns out the lab messed up, contaminated the sample—yes, this is the same lab that blew the Kaylie Rousch identification. By the time we discovered there was a problem with the lab, Wright was dead. He died a few months after he was sentenced, shived to death in the prison showers. Wright always claimed his innocence, said he had nothing to do with Kaylie’s disappearance or the garrote murders. He was telling the truth. We screwed the pooch, and an innocent man died.”
Fletcher had been playing with his pen, absently doodling on his FBI notepad like a bored kid. They each had one to take notes on, though no one seemed to be writing anything down. He looked up from his drawings. “Then how did he get her clothes and backpack?”
“We think they were planted by the real killer to throw us off the trail,” Baldwin said. “A man who’s been out in the world with impunity, free because another man went down for his crimes.”
Fletcher dropped the pen on the table. “So what does this have to do with Savage—sorry—Matcliff and Rachel Stevens?”
“Doug Matcliff and I worked the Kaylie Rousch case,” Thurber said. “He’s the one who found her personal effects at Wright’s house.” He shifted in his chair and Sam watched him, trying to decide what this was all about.
Sam shook her head. “You think he planted the evidence? But he was an FBI agent.”
“It happens,” Baldwin said lightly, and Sam realized her gaff. He’d been involved in a similar situation, had nearly lost his job over it. But his suspect had been guiltier than sin, a child rapist and murderer who had skated on a technicality and killed again. It was different. Very, very different.
Thurber twisted his hands in front of him. “Yes, he was. And he was a good one. But ten years ago, Matcliff went undercover in a new religious movement called Eden, which we suspected of running drugs. After three months, he very suddenly stopped reporting in. He was never heard from again. We assumed either he was found out and killed or he went native.”
“Native,” Fletcher said. “You mean he got caught up in what he was investigating and joined the cult?”
“Not a cult. At least, that’s not the term we use. We prefer new religious movement. NRMs. The vast majority of NRMs are simply new religions led by harmless individuals. They mind their own business, even work with the local authorities so they aren’t persecuted for their beliefs. Only a handful are even on our radar, and those are usually because they’ve applied for some sort of exception to the law that will accommodate their beliefs. The NRMs we worry about are the ones that are clearly apocalyptic and may cause harm to themselves or their members, the ones that are gathering weapons or making threatening gestures and statements to the government or the surrounding areas.
“Eden never had a history of causing trouble, wasn’t even a concern, until a couple of hoodlum teenagers accidentally found themselves on the NRM’s land and were taken, well, hostage is too strong a word. They were detained for a couple of days. Once the misunderstanding was ironed out, they were dropped off by their car. They reported it, though, and we looked into the group, just in case.
“They were based out in the western part of Fairfax County, self-sustained farming, purely agricultural. A flyover showed some pot plants, and the local police said there’d been a massive uptick in drug-related activity in the area, so we went in and seized everything. They didn’t raise too much of a fuss, claimed it wasn’t theirs, and when we pulled the property records, sure enough, the crop had been grown on the land abutting theirs, so technically, they hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“But you got suspicious enough to send an agent in undercover?” Fletcher asked.