When Shadows Fall Read online

  “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.”

  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.

  “The kids said they saw some paraphernalia, trucks coming and going in the middle of the night, some other things. Since there’d been an increase in drugs in the area and no one knew for sure who the source was, it seemed like the smart thing to do.

  “Doug was the one who suggested we look deeper into Eden, and volunteered for the job. Our boss agreed and we moved forward, but there was no way Doug was going to be the UC. He was green as hell, just a few years out of the Academy, and he got turned down in favor of a more experienced agent. He was pissed. At the last minute, that agent had a heart attack, so we had an operation in play with no one to go in. Against our boss’s better judgment, she sent Doug undercover into the NRM.

  “He was under for about three months when he stopped reporting in. We sent a team, asked some questions, looked around, but Doug wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The leader said she’d never known anyone by that name, stonewalled the crap out of our people. We went back to D.C. and got a broad-scoped warrant, but by the time we returned to Eden to do a more thorough search, it was too late. Do you recall Heaven’s Gate?”

  “The suicide cult,” Fletcher said. “Did the folks at Eden do the same thing? Go to meet the comet?”

  “Yes.” Thurber’s face clouded; it was clearly a disturbing memory. “Freakiest thing I’ve ever seen, right out of a horror movie. Fifteen women and four men, all members of Eden Doug had identified, were found hanging in a barn. Just swinging in the breeze. The only people missing were the head of the cult, surprise, surprise, Doug and a girl he’d mentioned in one of his reports—Lauren. They, and he, never surfaced again, until now.” He trailed off, then shook himself as if he’d felt a chill.

  “I think I remember hearing about it. I don’t recall the name Eden, though, or Curtis Lott,” Fletcher said.

  “We kept those details out of the media.”

  Fletcher crossed his arms. “Why in the world would you do that?”

  Thurber didn’t answer. Instead he said, “Damn, ten years of wondering what the hell happened to Doug, and he’s living in Lynchburg, of all places. Why the hell wouldn’t he let us know he was okay?”

  “Thankfully, he reached out to Sam before his death, so we can start finding some answers,” Baldwin said.

  “I’d like to hear more about Eden. Is it rare to have a female cult leader?” Sam asked.

  Thurber nodded. “Not rare, but certainly not common. Eden was an interesting crew. They were set up to work in a trinity—I don’t know if you’re familiar with the idea of synarchist rule? Harmony among multiple leaders? Historically, Eden had three leaders, all from the same bloodline. Three generations of women. A young girl, a middle-aged woman and a woman in her seventies.”

  “Maid, mother and crone?”

  “Right. But the older woman was among the dead at the barn. The ‘mother’ was in her forties at the time, and from the reports Doug sent in, one seriously crazy bitch. I think she decided she wanted the whole thing for herself, killed off dear old Mom and everyone else who might get in her way and reestablished herself somewhere else.” He shook his head. “We missed it. Doug never indicated they were headed for any sort of mass suicide. He said the leader was a preacher of sorts, had some funky beliefs about the end of time, but nothing he reported on indicated that the time was nigh.”

  “Who is their leader?” Sam asked.

  “She went by a number of names, but at the time Doug went undercover, she was calling herself Curtis Lott. Some of the clippings in your file are on Eden, their history and such. They were a peaceful group going back to the sixties until all this happened.”

  Sam sat straighter in her chair. “Her name was Curtis Lott?”

  He nodded. “You’ve heard of her?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you might think. Curtis Lott was one of the beneficiaries of Savage’s will. And the name Lauren was written on the back of a letter included with the will. She wasn’t left anything, and the name was oddly out of place. Let’s shoot for the moon here. Are you familiar with the names Anne Carter or Frederick McDonald?”

  Thurber nodded. “Anne Carter, absolutely, yes. She was our boss during this time period. She’s retired now, lives out in Fauquier County toward Front Royal. McDonald—him I don’t know.”

  “Well, now we’re five down with one to go. At least we have an idea of what Savage, sorry, Matcliff, was up to with his will. He was pointing us in the direction of the story. So we’d find these people, and it would all come to light. But why be mysterious about it? Why not just lay it all out? And how did Benedict’s killer find out about the will?”

  Thurber shook his head. “We don’t know. Remember, we didn’t know Doug was even alive until this afternoon.”

  Xander crossed his arms on his chest. “Why did Matcliff leave the FBI hanging, not knowing whether he was alive or dead? Not reporting in, running away from his duty. These don’t seem like the actions of a patriot.”

  “No, they don’t,” Thurber said. “He walked away from his world, his training, his job. There must be a reason. I think he snapped, and started killing, and realized he liked it. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had a military man start killing on American soil.”

  “I think you’re reaching,” Xander said evenly. “He’s a very convenient scapegoat.”

  “Then who planted Kaylie Rousch’s things at Wright’s house? I don’t think we’re too far out on a limb here thinking Doug was involved.”

  Baldwin shook his head. “I don’t know, Rob. That theory has always felt like a reach.”

  There was an awkward silence, which Fletcher broke. “So we have a disappearing cult, a missing, now dead FBI agent who might have been a serial killer and a resurrected girl. The will clearly has some clues as to what’s been happening to Doug Matcliff over the years, right? I’d say that’s something to go on.”

  Jordan Blake finally spoke up. “All this speculation is great—we need to brainstorm what’s happening. But I don’t have time to sit here and reminisce. We have another child missing right now, and I vote the rest of this case is shelved until we find her. Rachel Stevens has to be our priority. We owe it to her, and to her parents. We don’t need another Kaylie Rousch on our hands.”

  Chapter

  32

  FLETCHER RAPPED HIS knuckles on the table. “I
agree with Agent Blake. The Rachel Stevens case must be the priority. What do you want us to do, then?”

  “You continue to work with Jordan to find the Stevens girl,” Baldwin said. “Rob will be recusing himself from this part of the case. He’s going to work on identifying the body we’ve mistakenly identified as Kaylie Rousch. Sam, Xander and I will work on Matcliff and Eden, see if we can’t shake things loose from this end.”

  Sam caught Thurber’s eye—he wasn’t at all pleased with this turn of events. He hadn’t offered to recuse himself. He’d been instructed to. No wonder he was being so pissy.

  “You know, Baldwin, if your profile is correct, Rachel Stevens could still be alive. She’s only been missing for a day,” she said.

  Baldwin nodded. “That’s why we need to get this profile to the media right away. Since Rachel went missing after Matcliff died, it stands to reason we were wrong, and he’s not involved in the cases, after all.”

  Thurber said, “Hey, now, hold up. Doug went undercover in a psycho NRM and has the DNA of one of the missing girls on his body. Are we sure we want to dismiss him as a suspect? He’s certainly involved in this, up to his neck.”

  “He reached out from the grave to get help solving his murder, which tells me he might have been on the run,” Baldwin said. “Maybe we’ve been approaching this wrong all these years. Maybe he’s the innocent one in all of this.”