everybody else was reading.
PRELIMINARY VICTIMOLOGY REPORT—THE POET, BSS95-17
VICT #
Clifford Beltran, Sarasota County Sheriff’s Dept., homicide.WM, DOB 3-14-34, DOD 4-1-92
Weapon: S&W 12 gauge shotgun
one shot—head
POD: residence. No witness
John Brooks, Chicago Police Dept., homicide, Area 3.BM, DOB 7-1-54, DOD 10-30-93
Weapon: service, Glock 19
two shots, one impact—head
POD: residence. No witness
Garland Petry, Dallas Police Dept., homicide. WM, DOB 11-11-51, DOD 3-28-94
Weapon: service, Beretta 38
two shots, two impacts—chest and head
POD: residence, No witness
Morris Kotite, Albuquerque Police Dept., homicide. HM, DOB 9-14-56, DOD 9-24-94
Weapon: service, S&W 38
two shots, one impact—head
POD: residence. No witness
Sean McEvoy, Denver Police Dept., homicide. WM, DOB 5-21-61, DOD 2-10-95
Weapon: service, S&W 38
one shot—head
POD: car. No witness
The first thing I noticed was that they didn’t have McCafferty on the list yet. He’d be number two. I then realized that the eyes of many of those in the room were falling on me again as people read the last name and apparently realized who I was. I kept my eyes on the page in front of me, staring at the notes under my brother’s name. His life had been reduced to short descriptions and dates. Brasilia Doran finally rescued me from the moment.
“Okay, FYI, these were printed up before the sixth case was confirmed,” she said. “If you want to put it on your sheet now, it will be between Beltran and Brooks. The name is John McCafferty, a homicide detective with the Baltimore Police Department. We’ll get more details later. Anyway, as you can see, not a lot of things are consistent through these cases. The weapons used differ, places of death differ, and we have three whites, one black and one Hispanic as victims . . . The additional case, McCafferty is a white male, forty-seven years old.
“But there are limited common denominators to the physical scene and evidence. Each victim was a male homicide detective who was killed by a fatal head shot and there were no eyewitnesses to these shootings. From there we get into the two key commonalities that we want to exploit. We have a reference to Edgar Allan Poe in each case. That’s one. The second key is that each victim was believed by his colleagues to have been obsessive about a particular homicide case—two of them to the point that they had sought counseling.
“If you turn to the next page . . .”
The sound of pages turning whispered through the room. I could feel a grim fascination settling over everyone. It was a surreal moment for me. I felt like maybe a screenwriter does when he finally sees his movie on the screen. Before, all of this was something hidden in my notebooks and computer and head as part of the far realm of possibility. But here was a room crowded with investigators openly talking about, looking at printouts, confirming the existence of this horror.
The next page contained the suicide notes, all the quotes from Poe’s poems that I had found and written down the night before.
“This is where the cases irrefutably come together,” Doran said. “Our Poet likes Edgar Allan Poe. We don’t know why yet, but it’s something we’ll be working on here at Quantico while you people go traveling. I am going to defer to Brad for a moment to have him tell you a little about this.”
The agent sitting directly next to Doran stood up and took up the lead. I flipped to the front page of the package and found an Agent Bradley Hazelton listed. Brass and Brad. What a team, I thought. Hazelton, a gangly man with acne-scarred cheeks, poked his glasses back on his nose before speaking.
“Um, what we’ve got here are that the six quotes in these cases—that’s including the Baltimore case—come from three of Poe’s poems as well as his own last reported words. We are looking at these to determine if we can get some kind of common fix on what the poems were about and how they may relate to this offender. We’re looking for anything there. It seems pretty clear that this is where the offender’s playing with us and where he is taking the risk. I don’t think we’d be here today or Mr. McEvoy would have found a connection among these cases if our guy didn’t decide to quote Edgar Allan Poe. So, then, these poems are his signature. We’ll be trying to find out why he chose Poe as opposed to, say, Walt Whitman but I—”
“I’ll tell you why,” said an agent sitting at the far end of the table. “Poe