Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(65)

This decision to put her in the writer’s chair freed me up to do more digging and to review what I had already reported.

It also gave me time to notify people who had been helpful on the story and whom I had promised to alert. Christina Portrero’s mother and Jamie Flynn’s father were high on this list.

I tried to make these notifications by phone, and the calls were more emotional than I had anticipated. Walter Flynn in Fort Worth burst into tears when I told him the FBI had now officially linked his daughter’s death to a serial killer who was still at large.

After the calls were out of the way, I started pulling together my notes and making a list of other people I needed to call for the first time or to check back with for any new information. We essentially had twenty-four hours even though we had told Rachel Walling we needed twice that. It was a journalist’s trick to always say a story would take longer to report than it really did, or would be published later than it actually would. It gave us an edge against the investigation’s being leaked and our being scooped on our own story. I wasn’t naive. Rachel was taking the story into the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. There probably wasn’t an agent in the building who didn’t have an I’ll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine deal with a reporter somewhere. I had been burned by the FBI on more than one occasion and still had the scars.

Topping the list of who I needed to find and talk to was Hammond’s unknown partner. There were emails scattered throughout the printouts from Hammond’s house that indicated that he had a partner on Dirty4 who handled the digital aspects of the dark-web venture while he handled the lab work. The partner’s email identified him only as RogueVogueDRD4 and he used a Gmail account. The same alias was listed on the DRD4 site as the administrator. Rachel had said before leaving that she was confident the FBI could run it down, but I wasn’t sure about that and didn’t want to wait for the FBI. I contemplated directly reaching out to RogueVogue in a message. And after discussing it with Emily I did just that.


Hello. My name is Jack. I need to talk to you about Marshall Hammond. It wasn’t suicide and you could be in danger. We need to talk. I can help.



I hit the send button and let it fly. It was a long shot but a shot I had to take. Next, I started organizing what I would transfer to Emily for the story. She had not started writing and I could hear her on the phone in her cubicle making calls to watchdog agencies and observers of the genetic-analytics industry for general comments on what this sort of breach could mean. Every story had to have a lead quote—a line from a credible source that summed up the outrage, or tragedy, or irony of the story. It underscored the greater implications of the report. This story was going to trade in all of those elements and we needed to come up with one quote that said it all: that no one was safe from this kind of intrusion and horror. It would give the story a deeper resonance than a basic murder story and would get it picked up by the networks and cable. Myron would be better able to place the story with one of the big media guns like the Washington Post or the New York Times.

I heard Emily briefly summarize what we had found and what we would publish. As in her writing, she had a way of keeping it short and to the point. Still, I was getting nervous listening to her. My story paranoia was kicking in. We had to be careful when we solicited these comments because every one of those experts and industry observers could turn around and tip off a reporter they had a source relationship with. The trick was to give them enough information to respond with a usable quote without giving them enough to pass to another reporter.

I tried to tune her out and go about my work, reviewing the early stages of my investigation before I knew what I had stumbled into. I thought about calling the LAPD detectives and asking if I had been cleared yet through DNA analysis and if they had made any headway on the case. But I concluded that would be a waste of time as I was persona non grata with Mattson and Sakai.

Next I thought about causesofdeath.net and realized I had not checked the website since I saw the initial flurry of responses to my query. It had been a great starting point for me in connecting the cases linked—I believed—to the Shrike, and now I checked for more.

I went to the message chain I had started with the inquiry about atlanto-occipital dislocation and saw that three messages had been posted since I last checked. The first was a followup by Dr. Adhira Larkspar to her first post, in which the chief medical examiner had asked the original poster—me—to identify himself.


This is a reminder that this forum is open to medical examiners and coroners’ investigators only.



The warning did not stop two others from posting. A day earlier a medical examiner in Tucson, Arizona, reported that they had an AOD case with a female victim that was attributed to a motorcycle accident. The case was six months old and no other details were offered.

I copied the posting and shot it over to Emily in an email alerting her that we might have a fifth case to look into. Her response came quickly.


That can be a followup. Right now we have to go with what we have confirmed and get the story out.



I didn’t respond. The latest message on the forum chain had drawn my full attention. It had been posted only twenty minutes earlier.


Wow, we just caught two of these in the same day! A hanging in Burbank and a fall in Northridge. Coincidence? I don’t think so—GTO