under my nose and under the noses of some of the best agents in the FBI. How many people might we have saved if we’d seen or understood evidence that could have identified him earlier?
It was those kinds of questions that usually kept me from opening his files.
And I had to go through two more boxes from the Edgerton investigation, which began in earnest a few months after Craig shot the tie-shop owner.
Just looking at the Edgerton boxes made me agitated. There might be something in those boxes that could lead me to M, but there were definitely things in them that would drag me down a mental black hole.
I chose what felt like the lesser of two evils and went to the boxes dedicated to Craig’s crimes. I chose one at random and opened it to find a picture of Craig on the day he graduated from the FBI Academy.
Craig was twenty-six, already killing by then, but in that photograph, he had the face of an avenging angel. Or at least that’s how it struck me. Even though he was young in the picture, his resemblance to Pseudo-Craig was unmistakable.
I spent the next hour studying files covering Craig’s early life, paying special attention to members of his extended family. I made note of every male cousin who was roughly his age, plus or minus three years.
There were four who fell in that category. Two were the sons of Craig’s mother’s sister. One was his father’s brother’s son. And the fourth was his father’s sister’s boy.
I found a sheet dating back to when Craig was being considered for admission to the FBI Academy. There was a brief note saying that field agents vetting Craig had talked to his cousin Ted Shaw, the older of his maternal aunt’s sons.
Shaw told the agents Craig had been cruel to animals as a kid. Stuck firecrackers in frogs’ mouths, the note read.
How had that gotten by the screeners? Cruelty to animals is a red-flag warning. Many of history’s most heinous murderers started out being sadistic to defenseless—
A sharp knock came at the door, startling me.
“Alex?” Bree called.
“Hey, babe, I’m in the middle of something. Let me wrap up, and I’ll be down.”
“I’ll be up the street, across from the Caseys’.”
“You mean the house of the people with the barking dog?”
“Double homicide,” she said. “It just got called in.”
CHAPTER 60
UNIFORMED OFFICERS STOOD BY A cruiser parked in front of a bungalow across the street from the house of Nana Mama’s friends Jill and Neal Casey. They stood outside their place, looking worried.
“We called it in,” Jill said. She was in her eighties and still played tennis.
“I found them,” said Neal, who was less spry than his wife but still sharp.
They explained that the house had been recently rented to the Richardsons, a young couple from Newark. Mary was a night nurse at GW Medical Center. Keith was a day trader who was “deaf as a post” without his hearing aids.
The Richardsons had a Jack Russell terrier named Otto.
“Barked all night,” Jill said. “You could go over there and bang on the door, but if Keith had his hearing aids off, good luck.”
“Which was going on this afternoon,” her husband said. “I was trying to read, and the dog was barking, then finally stopped. I went over to talk to them about it and found their front door ajar. I looked inside and saw enough to call 911.”
Bree and I thanked them, then crossed the street to the uniformed officers.
“You been inside?” Bree asked.
“We figured you’d want to go in clean, Chief.”
“We do. Thank you, Officers,” she said and led the way up onto the porch where we paused to put on blue booties, disposable gloves, and surgical masks.
Bree pushed the door open. We peered into an entry with a staircase to our right. On the bottom step, the barking terrier was dead, apparently of a broken neck.
In the living area beyond the stairs, Mary Richardson lay on the floor by a large table. She wore green hospital scrubs, surgical gloves, and a heavy-duty respirator and visor. A blue-and-red rep tie was cinched tight around her neck.
Slumped in one of the high-backed chairs around the table, Keith Richardson was similarly dressed. The tie that killed him was a loud yellow-and-red paisley.
The table between the victims was set up as a repackaging operation for crystal methamphetamine. There was a typed note on the table in front of a kilo of the drug.
I’m usually as patient as a