Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(62)

“Go get her,” Myron said. “Bring her in.”

I got up, left the room, and walked to my pod.

“Okay, Rachel, they’re ready,” I said. “Let’s just go in and tell them what we’ve got.”

“That’s the plan.”

She stood up and started gathering the papers she had spread out on the desk. She carried the paperwork under my open laptop, an indication she had something on the screen she planned to show us.

“You found something?” I asked.

“I found a lot,” she said. “I just feel like I should be presenting this to the police or the bureau, not the editor of a website.”

“I told you, not yet,” I said. “Once we publish, you can give it to whoever you want.”

I turned and looked at her as I opened the door to the conference room.

“Showtime,” I whispered.

Myron had moved to a chair next to Emily on one side of the table. Rachel and I sat across from them.

“This is Rachel Walling,” I said. “Rachel, this is Myron Levin and Emily Atwater. So let’s start with what happened this morning.”

I proceeded to tell them how I had stumbled across the connection between William Orton and Marshall Hammond, and how we had gone to Hammond’s home and found him hanging from the crossbeam in his garage lab.

“And it’s a suicide?” Myron asked.

“Well, it was pretty clear the police think that,” I said. “But Rachel thinks otherwise.”

“His neck was broken,” Rachel said. “But I estimated that his drop was no more than a foot. He was not a large or heavy man. I don’t think that kind of drop breaks the neck, and since that is the recurring circumstance in the cases you’re looking at here, I would term the death suspicious at the very least.”

“Did you share this with the police when they said it was suicide?” Myron asked.

“No,” I said. “They weren’t interested in what we thought.”

I looked at Rachel. I wanted to move on from the details of the death. She got the message.

“His broken neck is not the only reason to be suspicious,” she said.

“What else is there?” Myron asked.

“Documents recovered from the lab reveal—”

“‘Recovered’? What exactly does that mean?”

“I believe the killer spent time in Hammond’s lab either before or after he killed him. He hacked the desktop that contained records of much of the lab’s work. He printed out the records. But the printer memory kept the last fifty-three pages he printed. I printed those pages and that’s what I’ve been studying. We now have a good amount of documentation from the lab.”

“You stole it?”

“I took it. If that was stealing, then I would argue that I stole it from the killer. He was the one who printed it.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know for sure that that’s what happened. You can’t do that.”

I knew going into the meeting that this would be the place where ethical questions clashed with potentially the best and most important story of my career.

“Myron, you need to know what we’ve been able to learn from the printout,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” Myron said. “I can’t let my reporters steal documents, no matter how important they are to the story.”

“Your reporter didn’t steal them,” I said. “I got them from a source. Her.”

I pointed to Rachel.

“That doesn’t work,” Myron said.

“It worked for the New York Times when they published the Pentagon Papers,” I said. “They were stolen documents given to the Times by a source.”

“That was the Pentagon Papers,” Myron said. “We’re talking about a totally different kind of story.”

“Not if you ask me,” I said.

I knew it was a weak rejoinder. I gave it another shot.

“Look, we have a duty to report on this,” I said. “The documents reveal that there is a killer out there using DNA to identify and acquire victims. Unsuspecting women who thought their DNA and identities were safe. This has never been seen before and the public needs to know.”

That created a moment of silence, until Emily bailed me out.

“I agree,” she said. “The transfer of the documents is clean. She’s a source and we need to go public with what she knows—even if she came into possession of the documents in … an unsavory way.”

I looked at her and nodded, even though unsavory was not the word I would have used.

“I’m not agreeing to anything yet,” Myron said. “But let’s hear or see what you’ve got.”

I turned and nodded to Rachel.

“I haven’t even gotten through everything in the printouts,” Rachel said. “But there is a lot there. First off, Hammond was a very angry man. In fact, he was an incel. Does everybody know what that is?”

“Involuntarily celibate,” Emily said. “Women haters. Real creeps.”

Rachel nodded.

“He was part of a network, and that anger and that hate led him to create this,” Rachel said.

She turned my laptop so it was facing Emily and Myron. She reached around the screen so she could manipulate the keyboard. On the screen was a red log-in page.