Worst Case (Michael Bennett 3)

“Feeling okay there, Mike?”

“Never better,” I said, smiling. “What’s up?”

Emily handed me a folder.

“We finally got the toxicology report back on the ashes found on the first victim, Jacob Dunning. Are you familiar with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy?”

“Had one six months ago,” I said, nodding. “Doctor said I’m as clean as a whistle.”

“Listen closely, wiseass,” Emily said, ignoring my acerbic wit. “Basically, individual elements reflect X-ray light in different patterns. They ran the ashes through the machine, and it turns out most of it is regular cigarette tobacco. The twist is that they found traces of some very interesting substances as well that came from the killer’s sweat.”

“Like what kind of substances?” I said.

Emily lifted a clipboard.

“Several amphetamines and a drug called . . . Iressa. It’s a chemotherapy drug for lung cancer.”

I rubbed my face as I nodded.

“Hey, good work,” I said. “I’ll get Schultz to contact Sloan-Kettering and the other cancer centers and check out their patients. It’s starting to make a little more sense now in terms of motive. If this guy is terminal, maybe he made out some psycho bucket list. Maybe this is his way of going out with a bang.”

“Funny you should say bang,” Emily said, pointing to a name on the fax sheet. “Because the drugs aren’t the worst of it. There was evidence of something called pentaerythritol. It’s found in plastic explosives, Mike.”

Chapter 72

KIDNAPPING, CHILD MURDERS, and now plastic explosives? This nightmare case kept getting worse and worse. I unsuccessfully tried to wake myself out of it as Emily answered her encrypted cell phone.

“Hold on, Tom,” she said into it. “Let me put you on speaker.”

“We got the print back, Em,” FBI lab chief Tom Warriner said a moment later. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s a hit, but one that’s coded to COINTELPRO.”

“Cointelpro?” I said.

“The FBI’s counterintelligence program,” Emily said.

“The section attached to this was run out of the New York office,” Warriner continued. “The Domestic Terrorism Squad from the sixties. The code name attached is Shadowbox.”

“In Intelligence Squads, when the identity of a person is classified, they designate code names,” Emily explained with a roll of her eyes. “Like the CIA, the FBI spook division loves codes and passwords. James Bond, eat your heart out.”

She aimed her voice at her phone.

“So, what do you think, Tom? Our guy, this Shadowbox, was probably a confidential informant on a domestic terrorist group?”

Terrorism? I was still trying to absorb the plastic explosives angle.

“Most likely,” the FBI lab chief said.

“So, how do we get a name to match the code name?” I asked.

“I’ve tried twice to crack the old databases, but some COINTELPRO records seem to be missing,” Warriner said.

Emily snorted.

“I’ll bet. Into the ol’ memory hole you go. What the hell are we going to do? How do we get around that?”

“I’ve been asking around, and the best lead I can tell you is that you guys should go see John Browning,” Warriner said. “He’s the former agent who ran the group out of the New York office from ’sixty-eight to

’seventy-four. I tried to call him, but there’s no answer at his house up in Yonkers. I worked with Browning on a few things when I was a rookie tech. Sarcastic pain in the ass, but a mind like a steel trap. If he can’t tell you who Shadowbox is, no one can.”