read, “Sadly, I know I am shorn of my strength.” Of course, I hadn’t known Petry. But I had never heard a cop use the word “shorn” before. The line he had supposedly written had a literary feel to it. I just didn’t think it would have come from the hand and mind of a suicidal cop.
The second of the cases was also a one-liner. Clifford Beltran, a detective with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department in Florida, had supposedly killed himself three years earlier—it was the oldest of the cases—leaving behind a note that said simply, “Lord help my poor soul.” Again, it was a conglomeration of words that sounded odd to me in the mouth of a cop, any cop. It was just a hunch but I included Beltran on my list.
Lastly, the third case was included on my list even though there was no mention of a note in the suicide of John P. McCafferty, homicide detective with the Baltimore police. I put McCafferty on the list because his death eerily resembled the death of John Brooks. McCafferty had supposedly fired one shot into the floor of his apartment before firing the second and fatal shot into his throat. I remembered Lawrence Washington’s belief that this was a way of getting gunshot residue on the victim’s hands.
Four names. I studied them and the rest of the notes I had taken for a while and then pulled the book on Poe I had bought in Boulder out of my flight bag.
It was a thick book with everything that Poe had supposedly ever written. I checked the contents page and noted there were seventy-six pages containing his poetry. I realized that my long night was going to get longer. I ordered an eight-cup pot of coffee from room service and asked them to bring some aspirin as well for the headache I felt sure I would get from the caffeine binge. I then started reading.
I’m not one who has ever been afraid of aloneness or the dark. I’ve lived by myself for ten years, I’ve even camped alone in the national parks and I’ve walked through deserted, burned-out buildings to get a story. I’ve sat in dark cars on darker streets waiting to confront candidates and mobsters, or to meet timid sources. While the mobsters certainly put fear in me, the fact that I was out there by myself in the dark never did. But I have to say that Poe’s words put a chill in me that night. Maybe it was being alone in a hotel room in a city I didn’t know. Maybe it was being surrounded by the documents of death and murder, or that I felt the presence of my dead brother somehow near. And maybe also it was just the knowledge of how some of the words I was reading were now being used. Whatever it was, I put a scare on myself that didn’t lift as I read, even when I turned the television on to provide the comforting hum of background noise.
Propped against the pillows on the bed, I read with the lights on either side of me turned on and bright. But, still, I bolted upright when a sudden sharp sound of laughter shot down the hallway outside my room. I had just settled back into the comfort of the shell my body had formed in the pillows and was reading a poem titled “An Enigma” when the phone rang and jolted me again with its double ring so foreign to the sound of my phone at home. It was half past midnight and I assumed it was Greg Glenn in Denver, two hours behind.
But as I reached for the phone I knew I was wrong. I hadn’t told Glenn where I had checked in.
The caller was Michael Warren.
“Just wanted to check in—I figured you’d be up—and see what you came up with.”
Again I felt uneasy about his self-involvement, his many questions. It was unlike any other source that had ever provided me with information on the sly. But I couldn’t just get rid of him, given the risk he had taken.
“I’m still going through it all,” I said. “Sitting here reading the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. I’m scaring myself shitless.”
He laughed politely.
“But does any of it look good—as far as the suicides go?”
Just then I realized something.
“Hey, where are you calling from?”
“Home. Why?”
“Didn’t you say you live up in Maryland?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Then this is a toll call, right? It will be