The Informant (32 page)
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heir plane landed at Miami International Airport that afternoon on BWIA, direct from St. Johns. Victoria stayed over in Miami just long enough to interview a couple of people on her Miami list who might know something about Hannon. She left on a late-afternoon flight for Washington National, arriving in the early evening, then drove straight to the FBI Academy in Quantico.
At 8:00 P.M. the full team of agents assigned to the case met in the north conference room on the second floor.
Victoria sat at the head of the table beside the large empty chair for David Shapiro, her unit chief. Steve Caldwell and Arnold Freeland, the CASK Unit profilers, sat on one side of the table. On the other side sat two field agents working on the case, both men. Victoria had thought they’d be bursting with questions, but the group sat in silence, waiting for Shapiro. A sense of importance lingered in the air, despite the austere government furnishings filling the room. Cloth
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office chairs rimmed a simulated walnut table with chipped corners of exposed particle board. Glossy white walls and fluorescent lighting made the room far too bright. The American flag draped limply from a pole in the corner.
The major intrusion in the room was a three-by-five-foot white display board resting on an easel near the head of the table, closest to Shapiro. On it was a diagram for an ocean line cruise ship, the
Peninsular II.
There were seven different ovals on the board, each a different size, each displaying the floor plan and cabin configuration for one of the ship’s seven different decks.
Shapiro rushed in at two minutes after eight and took the seat beside Victoria. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
Victoria bristled at his brusque tone. It seemed to punctuate the silent treatment from the rest of the group.
Apparently there were a few men in the room having a tough time handling the fact that Victoria’s infamous memorandum to Assistant Director Dougherty had been exactly right: The informant was
not
the killer. For now, though, she’d leave that out of things.
She took the long rubber-tipped pointer from the chalk rail behind her and moved toward the board.
“Twelve years ago,” she began, “Frank Hannon raped a twenty-two-year-old woman in cabin 503 of the
Peninsular II.
It’s located here,” she pointed, “on the Lower Deck. He was arrested, convicted, and served twelve years of a twenty-year sentence before being paroled eight months ago. The first in the series of so-called tongue murders happened just one month after his release.”
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Freeland rolled his eyes. “This is beginning to sound like that old Willie Horton commercial,” he muttered, just loud enough for everyone to hear.
Victoria ignored it. “Now that we know Frank Hannon’s involved, the common thread connecting the victims has become obvious: They were all passengers on the
Peninsular II
on the night he committed the rape.”
She laid the pointer on the table and picked up a red-tipped marker. “Not only were they on the same ship, but they were staying on the same deck, in the adjacent cabins. These were basically inexpensive single-passenger accommodations on the lowest deck, below the waterline, so the cabins didn’t even have portholes. They appealed to vacation bargain hunters, people on a budget—like the young woman who was raped. She was in cabin 503,”
she said, circling it in red.
“Hannon’s first homicide victim was in cabin 501.” She marked it in red, this time with an
X
. “Next was 502. He skipped 503, his rape victim, then went to 504, 505, and on down the line, right in sequential order.”
“Question,” said Caldwell, raising a professorial finger.
He spoke in trademark fashion, with his unlit pipe clenched between his teeth. “How did Hannon secure the passengers’ names?”
“When we checked the court files from Hannon’s rape trial, we found that his lawyer had subpoenaed the passenger manifest in pretrial discovery. We presume he was simply fishing for a list of potential witnesses, or other potential suspects.”
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He raised an eyebrow like a learned old judge, then leaned forward as he removed his pipe. “If a document existed that actually listed the names of the victims, why didn’t
somebody
make a connection somewhere along the line?”
Victoria glared. He was clearly implying she’d overlooked something. “The only person who might have been able to link this list to the victims is Hannon’s defense lawyer, and he’s dead. Cancer, eight years ago. Even if he were alive, I doubt even
he
would have made the connection. These passengers weren’t really a part of the trial. They were just names on a defense lawyer’s very long list—three thousand names, if you include staff and crew members. None of them ever testified at trial, because the few passengers who
were
interviewed all said they saw nothing. You have to remember, too, that these passengers never knew each other before the cruise, and they all went their separate ways afterward. Think about it: Do you remember the names of the people who were in the hotel room next to you on your vacation twelve years ago?”
“I suppose not,” Caldwell grumbled. “Anyway, now that we’ve identified his potential targets, what’s being done to notify and protect these people?”
Shapiro spoke up. “I made that call. We’re not going with a media blitz, if that’s what you’re wondering. That would just send him into hiding—or worse, send him on a killing spree. I don’t want to do anything to tip our hand to Hannon that we know he’s the killer. We’re working discreetly through our field offices to contact everyone on the Hot List first—
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which is everyone on the same deck where the rape occurred—and ultimately everyone who was on the ship, both passengers and crew. We’re keeping the media out of it.”
Caldwell made a face. “I’d be a lot more comfortable with the clandestine approach if we knew
why
he was targeting these people.”
“We do know why,” said Victoria, casting a long look across the table. “That’s where Michael Posten fits in.”
The garage light was burned out, but the old Coleman lantern gave Mike all the reading light he needed. Although he’d moved out after the separation, his files had stayed behind in their place of honor—the garage. The entire east wall, from the garden tools in the corner to the washer-dryer at the opposite end, was a floor-to-rafters collection of stacked banker’s boxes, containing every file on every story he’d written in thirteen years as a
Tribune
reporter. There were marked-up drafts, handwritten interview notes, some old phone messages. Somewhere in there was even his first issue as editor in chief of his college paper, the
Independent Florida Alligator.
Mike was sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, surrounded by a semicircle of old boxes he’d pulled down from the wall. A stack of yellowed papers lay scattered before him. The lantern rested on the floor at his side, lighting a small area like a campfire, so that he and his selected boxes seemed shrouded in a ball of light in the dark garage. The lantern’s gas-fired
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mantles gave off a faint but steady hiss, the only break in the heavy silence. A hungry mosquito buzzed in Mike’s ear, then lighted on his cheek. He swatted it, splattering the blood on his chin without ever looking up from the yellowed clippings at his feet. He simply turned the page.
He was reading one of his stories on Frank Hannon, written for the
Tribune
twelve years ago.
A passing shadow suddenly broke his concentration.
He caught his breath as he quickly checked over his shoulder.
“Karen,” he said with a sigh of relief. “What are you doing up?”
She was wearing a white silk robe, cinched at the waist.
With the backlight from the lantern, Mike noticed the curve of her breasts underneath. Her hair was mussed, as if she’d been at war with the pillow. She sat on top of a stack of boxes near the lantern.
“I couldn’t sleep. Not after what you told me about Hannon.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to spook you. I just thought you should know.”
“Don’t be sorry. Not knowing is worse.” She smiled thinly, appreciatively, then glanced at the clippings spread out across the floor. “So, what are you looking for?”
“This is so frustrating,” he said with a sigh. “I feel like I should have known it was Hannon. Hell, I’m the guy who passed the tip along to the police that got him convicted.”
“Don’t blame yourself. With all the stories you’ve written, twelve years ago is like ancient history. You 321
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didn’t know any of the victims, so there was nothing to trigger any memories of him. As far as you knew, Hannon wasn’t even supposed to be out of prison for another eight years.”
Mike grimaced cynically, shaking his head. “The parole board called him a model prisoner. Can you imagine such a thing?”
“If he was such a good prisoner, they should have left him in prison.” She caught his eye, then tried to smile.
“I’m worried about you. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”
“I can’t. Hannon’s on a revenge rampage. It’s clear to me he’s determined to find the source of my information.
It may be futile, but I have to go over this stuff, just to see if there’s anything I’ve overlooked. I
have
to figure out who my source was before Hannon does.”
“You really have no idea who she was?”
“No. It was a totally anonymous call. She was scared to death to get involved. That’s why I never wrote a story based on the tip—just follow-up pieces. I couldn’t verify who she was, so I just passed her information along to the police, for whatever they thought it was worth.” He looked away, then glanced back curiously. “How’d you know it was a woman?”
She shrugged. “I guess I just assumed a woman would be more fearful of retaliation from a rapist, that’s all. She might think it’s safer to make an anonymous call to a reporter. The guy might come after
her
if she went to the police.”
Mike nodded. “The one good thing is that Hannon knows less about my informant than I do.
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Based on the way he’s selected his victims, he’s apparently assuming that whoever saw him coming out of the victim’s cabin was staying on the same deck, probably in one of the cabins nearby. That’s probably a reasonable assump-tion, given the way it happened in an isolated cluster of cabins at the end of a dead-end hall, where the only people who had any business being there at three o’clock in the morning were the passengers in the area. But he obviously doesn’t know whether it was a man or a woman, black or white, old or young. His victims have been just about every combination of race, sex and age. Basically everyone who was staying in that little area.”
Karen moved to another box, closer to Mike and more at eye level with him. “There’s something I don’t understand about all this. Why is Hannon focusing on the anonymous source? You’d think he’d be more angry at the judge or the jury or the witnesses who actually showed up at trial.”
“That’s the whole point. Without the informant there never would have been a trial. The police didn’t even have a suspect when the investigation started. They collected a small amount of semen from the victim’s vagina, but they couldn’t very well run blood and DNA tests on all two thousand male passengers and crew members, looking for a match. The big break came when the informant called me with the physical description of the man she saw leaving the victim’s cabin. She focused the entire investigation on Hannon. Once the police knew he was their man, it was just a matter of collecting circumstantial evidence that linked him to the crime. Blood test matched.
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Fibers matched. A pubic hair matched. And when the DNA matched, they didn’t need the informant’s testi-mony.”
Karen turned pensive, staring off to the darkness. “Are you afraid?”
“I’ve dealt with some pretty scary people. Hannon is definitely the scariest.”
“I meant, are you afraid he might come after you?
Maybe he’ll try to get you to tell him who your informant was.”
Mike shook his head. “He
knows
I don’t know who my informant was.”
“How?”
“Eventually it became public knowledge that I didn’t know. The police issued a statement after Hannon’s arrest, praising me for passing on the tip. It was explained that I didn’t run with the story because I couldn’t verify the source.”
“I hope he bought that explanation,” she said in a hollow voice. She was silent for a moment, then glanced up from the articles at his feet. “So, what do you think he’ll do now?”
“It depends on what the FBI does. I think he may lay low for a while, maybe change his identity, wait for the manhunt to scale back a bit. He knows that not even the FBI can keep the intensity up forever.”
Her voice softened. “You think he’ll keep on killing?”
Mike blinked, then looked her in the eye. “Truthfully?
I don’t think he’ll ever stop. Not even after he finds the informant. Not until somebody stops him.”
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he night sky was a cloudless blanket of stars from every galaxy, the sea a gentle scape of blackness with white foamy waves. A steady east wind filled the mainsail and jib on a broad reach toward Puerto Rico. Hannon was shirtless, wearing only a pair of Bermuda shorts he’d taken from the captain. He was at the helm, manning the tiller. He closed his eyes, then opened them, enjoying the cool sea air on his face.
The captain sat at the other end of the cockpit, facing Hannon. His hands were tied behind his back. A rope around his waist kept him secured in place. Navigational charts lay on the seat beside him, showing the way from Antigua to Puerto Rico. He was still in the same nightshirt he’d been wearing when Hannon had come aboard twenty-six hours earlier. He hadn’t slept since then, though he’d watched Hannon get his fair share. All he could do was watch, since Hannon had tied him so securely. The man looked much older than his sixty-one years. Part of it was a life