Founders' Keeper (A David and Martin Yerxa Thriller - Book 1) Read online

  He looked at the line of cars creeping past them on the opposite span of the bridge. “Let’s get the plate records of any vehicles that crossed through the tolls heading east in the hour following the senator’s death.”

  She looked perplexed. “You think he crossed the bridge again after ditching the Mercedes?”

  “I don’t know about you, but when I light a firework I stick around to watch it explode.”

  “Whoa, a metaphor?” she said, making a face at him. “Fancy.”

  He smiled. “We’ll compare those plate logs to the toll records from the roads near the other murder sites. We might get lucky.”

  They met for a time with the on-site heads of the involved state and local law enforcement agencies, and then spent another twenty minutes with their own forensic people.

  When they’d finished, David asked her, “Are we working on cell phone data?”

  “Omar’s on it.”

  Omar Ghafari worked for the Bureau’s Communication and Information Technology Unit, or CITU, which handled the collection and analysis of any cellular or digital data related to an investigation.

  David asked her, “Anything else I should know about?” When she shook her head, he said, “I’m driving back to Quantico. Gene Lott left me a message saying he’s wrapped his post mortem on Hill and Aronson.”

  “I’m right behind you,” she said. “I just want to clarify a few more things with County.”

  “Glad I’m not County.”

  “Very funny.”

  She started to walk back toward the crime scene, but then she stopped and turned back to him. “Hey. You think your dad’s going to join us on this at some point?”

  He felt his scalp tighten. “One Yerxa isn’t enough for you?” he said.

  She looked at him appraisingly and waggled her hand as though she were underwhelmed.

  “You never know when Martin Yerxa might show up,” he said. “Why?”

  “I’ve never worked a case with him. It feels like I’ve been missing out on some kind of initiation right. Working with The Legend, you know?”

  “I’ll try to make it happen for you.”

  She held up her hands in surrender. “By the way,” she said, grinning. “I like that shirt.”

  This was a running joke between them. David wore the same thing every day: Gray T-shirt, dark pants, dark boots. When Lauren had pointed this out, he’d told her he didn’t like spending time and brainpower on something that didn’t matter.

  “Who are you?” she’d asked. “Steve Jobs?” From then on, she’d made a point of complimenting his shirt every day.

  Very few people—in fact, no one besides his father—ever played with David this way. He didn’t mind it.

  Now she waved to him and walked back toward the senator’s car. He watched her go until he realized he was staring.

  When he reached his own vehicle, he paused to take one last look at the activity on the bridge. He could see dark rain clouds moving in above the Chesapeake in the distance.

  Chapter 5

  AS DAVID DROVE toward Northern Virginia, his mind re-traced the events of the previous week. The killer’s pattern had evolved, and he felt the need to re-orient himself within the changing landscape of his investigation.

  “Here there be dragons,” Carl Wainbridge, David’s section chief and direct superior, had said when he called David into his office to assign him the lead on the investigation. Their conversation had taken place just a few hours after police discovered the second victim. That had been Friday, now four days past.

  Carl had paused and looked at him pointedly before continuing in his steady, deliberate baritone. “Are you familiar with the origins of that phrase? Medieval mapmakers would use it to label unexplored regions of the globe. Keep it in mind while you’re working on this case, David. I don’t know what you’ll turn up, but I have a feeling you’ll encounter a dragon or two along the way.”

  Along with well-worn black wingtips, Carl Wainbridge always wore a plain Oxford shirt without the pretension of cuff links. A thirty-year veteran of the Bureau, he was the most-senior African American at the FBI. He was also the antithesis of a micromanager. He’d spent the bulk of his career as an investigative agent, and his people thought of him as a “player’s coach”—someone who could be counted on to take an agent’s side when speaking to the Bureau’s higher-ups. He spoke earnestly and acted without bias, which were two of the qualities David appreciated most in a leader; he wouldn’t have worked for a man who didn’t possess them.

  “I’m assigning Lauren Carnicero to be your number two on this,” Carl had said.

  That had surprised David. Lauren had chipped in on at least a dozen of his investigations and he liked working with her, but she had never served as his direct assist.

  Carl had added, “Considering the tenor of this investigation, you have my permission to bring in your father if you determine that he would be helpful.”

  David had nodded without answering.

  His father, Martin Yerxa, had spent nearly two decades as a primary investigator within the Bureau’s serial crimes division—the same unit and position David now occupied. FBI agents were usually forced to retire at age fifty-seven, but because of Martin’s distinguished record, Bureau leadership had allowed him to stay on in a part-time capacity as a “special consultant.” He didn’t have to work with David exclusively, but so far Martin had not accepted casework requests from investigators other than his son.

  Now, as he drove toward Northern Virginia, David recalled his conversation with Carl Wainbridge. The tenor of this investigation, Carl had said. David thought of the messages left at each of the crime scenes—the direct references and indirect allusions to the American Revolution—and decided he couldn’t neglect to include his father. He had to put the business of his mother’s death aside, at least for now.

  He pressed a button on his steering wheel and said out loud, “Call Martin.”

  “David,” his father answered, his voice big and loud as a shotgun blast.

  “How’ve you been, Pop?”

  “I’ve been watching the news all morning. Hell of a mess on the Bay Bridge. Hell of a mess.”

  David gripped his steering wheel a little tighter. “So you know then.”

  “Know what?” Martin asked, his voice softening. When David didn’t answer, he went on, “Do I know you’re handling the investigation? Yes, I know.”

  “What else?”

  Martin cleared his throat. “I know this senator’s murder is connected to a few others by some messages or clues left at the scene. Some unusual stuff. But that’s all I know.”

  David patted the steering wheel. “Only one message,” he said. “ ‘Don’t tread on me.’ Our subject has left it at each murder site along with a section of dead snake. Eastern rattler.”

  There was a short pause on the other end of the phone. “Gadsden Flag,” Martin said.

  David nodded to himself.

  His father—a native Philadelphian—had always been fascinated by America’s history and the role his city had played in the country’s origins. Martin had inherited this interest from his own father, Sander Yerxa—a Dutch immigrant who’d kept a portrait of George Washington on his living room wall, and who’d felt a foreigner’s obligation to learn and pass on to his family the story of his adopted nation.

  “Our name—Yerxa—we changed from the Dutch Jurckse,” Sander had said to David many times when he was a boy. “And Jurckse means, Son of George.” Smiling proudly, Sander would point at the portrait of Washington and add, “Here in America, we are all sons of George.”

  “There’s a lot about this case that would interest you,” David said now to his father. “That’s why I’m calling. Can you leave Philly for a few days?”

  He could imagine his father’s grin on the other end of the line.

  “My bag’s packed,” Martin said. “When should I head down?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  Mar
tin cleared his throat, and David could tell his father had been hoping to join him immediately. But he wasn’t ready for him.

  “I’ll let you know where to meet me,” he said. “Probably Quantico, but that could change. I’ll call you first thing.”

  “Fine,” Martin said.

  “I’m having the files sent to you today. Get acquainted.”

  “Couriered?”

  “I know you won’t read them on the computer.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Martin cleared his throat again. “Looking forward to it, boy. We’ll get this mess cleaned up.”

  We’ll get this mess cleaned up, David repeated to himself. He started to hang up, but he heard his father say, “You still there?”

  “I’m still here.”

  Martin paused. “How’ve you been, David?”

  “I’m all right,” he said quickly. “But I have to go. We’ll catch up tomorrow when you get here.”

  “Fine.”

  David ended the call.

  He told himself it was the right thing to do, and that what happened with his mother could wait. Then he pushed his father out of his head and drove in silence, his mind turning over the details of the investigation until he saw the freeway exit leading to the FBI’s secure compound at Quantico.

  Chapter 6

  GENE LOTT WAVED his hand over the man’s naked stomach. The cadaver lay on a gray slab of steel in the middle of the examination room, the overhead fluorescent light as lifeless as the body below.

  David and Lauren watched as the medical examiner gestured toward various regions of the dun-colored corpse.

  “Livor mortis and organ temperature indicate Hill had been dead approximately twelve hours before his body was discovered,” Gene said. “No inconsistencies in terms of lividity, so I don’t believe the body was moved or manipulated after death.”

  Harmon Hill was the wealthy, middle-aged son of a textiles magnate. The police had found him slumped against a wall in his estate’s stables, a rusty bayonet plunged four inches deep in his chest, puncturing his left lung.

  According to Gene’s autopsy, Hill had gasped and bled for at least fifteen minutes before expiring. Near his body, local detectives had discovered a plain, postage-less package containing a section of a rattlesnake’s torso. They had also found a scrap of paper bearing the warning “Don’t tread on me” like the one David had examined in Senator Deke Jacobsen’s vehicle. That had been Thursday. Five days had since passed.

  Hill was, presumably, the first victim. At that point there hadn’t been any pattern to distinguish the murder as serial in nature, and so the FBI hadn’t paid the incident much attention.

  Staring at Harmon Hill’s body on the examination table, David thought of his mother, lying on her back in D’Amato’s Funeral Home on Philadelphia’s South Side, her face painted over and padded into an expression he had never seen while she was alive.

  With effort, he pulled his eyes away from Hill’s cadaver. He heard Lauren ask the medical examiner, “And Aronson?”

  Rebecca Aronson, the presumed second victim, was a thirty-five-year-old attorney. Neighbors had discovered her body on a farm located about twenty minutes from Asheville, North Carolina. Aronson had inherited the property from her parents, and had been using the farm as a retreat from her professional life in the city. It was her childhood home.

  David and Lauren had arrived on the scene roughly six hours after the neighbors notified local police about their discovery of Aronson’s corpse. David had watched as the authorities pried her remains off a smoldering pyre erected near the back of her family’s property, where he imagined she’d chased fireflies as a young girl. Her body had resembled a piece of charred firewood.

  On the counter in Aronson’s kitchen, he and Lauren had found the section of snake and its accompanying message.

  “More difficult to pinpoint TOD due to the nature of her death,” Gene said now. He walked away from the examination table and picked up a file folder from a nearby desk. “Lung analysis revealed only slight traces of smoke inhalation. I’m fairly certain she was still alive for several minutes after the fire began.”

  David saw Lauren’s knuckles whiten as she held the ME’s report. She scowled and said, “Jesus Christ.”

  Gene pulled a pair of reading glasses from the front pocket of his shirt and leaned forward, flipping through the pages of his post mortem analysis. “If you’ll turn to the toxicology results on page nine, you’ll see we found small amounts of tetrodotoxin—or fugu—in both of the bodies.”

  “Puffer fish?” Lauren asked.

  Gene smiled at her. “Exactly right, Agent Carnicero.”

  David looked at them both questioningly, and Lauren said, “Don’t you eat sushi?”

  Gene chuckled at David’s blank expression and said, “Let me explain. Tetrodotoxin is a type of neurotoxin found only in the Asian puffer fish, which the Japanese call fugu. It’s considered a gourmet delicacy in that country, though improper preparation can be deadly. It’s available in some high-end U.S. sushi restaurants, but it’s flown in frozen and pre-stripped of its toxic components. The poison is a sodium channel blocker that partially paralyses the victim’s muscles and eventually leads to asphyxiation.”

  “So our victims were poisoned?” Lauren asked. She looked at David.

  For reasons he couldn’t explain, his mind flashed back to the bridge and the prominent smear of blood on the railing—heavy enough to have withstood the morning rain.

  “Yes, both Hill and Aronson were poisoned,” Gene said to Lauren. “Not enough to kill them, but enough to render them weak and immobile. Based on the degree of muscle atrophy, I believe the poison was administered twenty to thirty minutes before time of death.” He turned to the next page in his report. “Also, this neurotoxin doesn’t affect cognition. The victims would have been conscious and in possession of their mental faculties despite their physical paralysis.”

  “So our subject would’ve had time to speak with them before he killed them,” David said.

  “What?” Lauren asked him.

  He looked at her. “Our killer wanted them to know what was about to happen to them.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “There are a lot of ways to poison someone, but our sub uses a rare type that leaves his victims paralyzed but alert. Also, he doesn’t kill them right away.”

  As Gene nodded in agreement, David went on, “The ways these people are dying—the methods of execution and the messages . . . there’s purposeful spectacle to all this. That part’s meant for us. Someone’s trying to send a message, but it’s not just about the message. The poison proves that. Our subject hated these people enough to torture them—to tell them they were going to die and why.” He paused and shook his head. “But something doesn’t fit.”

  Lauren and Gene both looked at him, waiting for him to go on. When he didn’t, Lauren said, “What doesn’t fit?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something.”

  “Like you’ve got a gut feeling?”

  “My gut has nothing to do with it.”

  “It’s just an expression,” she said.

  “I know. It’s a dumb expression.” He realized how this sounded and held up a hand in a show of apology. “Our brains are capable of a lot more than we give them credit for. People call something instinct or intuition, but that’s wrong. It’s your mind recognizing something you’re not fully conscious of in the moment.”

  “Like that student on the bridge today,” she said. “The big head thing.”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “So when is your unconscious brain going to let us all in on whatever’s bugging it?”

  “Good question. Hopefully soon.” He bent his head and scribbled notes on the medical examiner’s report, ignoring the look Lauren exchanged with Gene Lott. When he’d finished, he turned to Gene and said, “How easy would it be for someone to get a hold of this fugu to
xin?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s illegal in this country, and the varieties of puffer fish that carry the poison aren’t native to domestic waters.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Lauren said.

  David nodded to her and turned back to Gene. Before he could speak, his cell phone began to ring in his pocket.

  “Special Agent Yerxa.” The woman’s tone was polite but brusque. “This is Deputy Director Jonathan Reilly’s personal assistant. The deputy director would like to speak with you in his office as soon as possible. Are you at Quantico?”

  David didn’t answer right away.

  Jonathan Reilly was second in command of the entire Bureau and held the highest FBI post not requiring a presidential appointment. Considering the director’s many roles as functionary and public figure, Reilly was the de-facto head of the Bureau’s day-to-day operations. David had met him on several occasions—all formal group gatherings—and the two had never exchanged more than a handshake.

  Reilly’s office, as every agent knew, was located on the seventh floor of FBI headquarters in downtown Washington.

  “Yes I’m at Quantico,” David said. “What’s this about?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say. The deputy director will expect you within the hour. Is that possible?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good. Thank you.” The line went dead.

  David looked from his phone to the exam table, and then at Lauren.

  She cocked her head. “Everything all right?” she asked.

  He was quiet for a moment, his mind running through the possible explanations for his summons. “I need to head up to the District,” he said finally. “Let me know about the plate numbers we get from the bridge authority, and about the cell phone search.”

  Her eyes searched his face. “Will do,” she said.

  He thanked Gene and stepped into the hallway outside the examination room. He stood for a moment in the empty corridor, listening to the building’s regulators circulate air into and out of the controlled atmosphere. He pressed the down arrow next to the twin elevators and waited.