he’s going to just head home and wait around for a knock on the door?’
‘Probably not, but we might find something.’
Franklin drummed his fingers on the desk, something Shepherd had seen him do in class when he was getting annoyed with a slow candidate. ‘OK, let me put it this way,’ he said, smiling through his evident irritation. ‘Do you think whatever we might find there will be more or less useful than talking to the man who sent these cards?’
Shepherd said nothing. He still wasn’t entirely convinced this wasn’t some kind of test designed to make him incriminate himself and give Franklin an excuse to can him from the investigation.
‘Tell you what,’ Franklin smiled and opened his hands like he was closing the deal on a car, ‘why don’t we get Ellery to follow up with the search of Douglas’s home.’ He pointed to the picture on the wall. ‘He has the local connections, he’ll probably do a better job than we would. That way he can claw back some of the self-esteem you think I’ve beaten out of him and it leaves us free to stay on the trail. We got the scent of this thing now, and if Cooper is behind all this, then I want to look him in the eye and know it.’
Shepherd thought it through. The correct protocol for any geographically spread investigation like this was to share any leads on new suspects with the field office nearest to the target to enable swift response and arrests and minimize the chance of the subject getting away. The nearest field office to Charleston was Charlotte and, despite what Franklin said, agents from there would still arrive faster than them because they could fly too if they thought it necessary. He couldn’t work out why Franklin, the seasoned, strictly-by-the-book agent, was suddenly bending the rules and cutting him in on it. It didn’t add up. But he also badly wanted to stay on the investigation. One of his tutors had once told him that when considering any unknown you should always remove emotion from the equation because if you know the answer you’re trying to reach you’ll skew your formula to get there. A chill slid down his spine as he remembered who it was – Professor Douglas.
‘How are you planning on flying to Charleston?’ he said, reaching for the laptop case.
Franklin smiled, picked up the phone and started to dial. ‘Same way we got here,’ he said.
Shepherd took the Questioned Documents results from Franklin and slipped them inside the case. Just this simple task made his battered muscles creak and complain. He thought of the cold hard seats in the hold of the C-130. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’
32
Assistant Director O’Halloran put the phone down and listened to the yawning silence stretching out beyond his door. All the other section chiefs had gone – some on leave, the rest God only knew where – leaving a long corridor of empty offices and darkened windows. He’d never heard the building so quiet, even at Christmas when everything generally wound down. He could feel the absence of other people like the lack of a coat on a cold day.
He hit a function button on his computer to turn the sound back on from the CNN news feed. Like most people in the intelligence community he was addicted to information and the twenty-four-hour news cycle helped feed his addiction. It was also useful to keep up-to-date on what was being reported, just in case a breaking story compromised an on-going investigation. The Hubble/Marshall story had yet to break. At the moment the lead story was still the freak weather sweeping the nation. He watched for a while, distracted by the novelty of seeing people building snowmen on Miami Beach and New Yorkers in shorts and T-shirts paddling and splashing around in front of the huge Christmas tree outside the Rockefeller Center where the ice rink usually stood. Strange days.
He nudged the sound down a little and turned his attention back to an open file on the screen, condensing everything Agent Franklin had just told him into a few bullet points that he added to the Hubble case notes, highlighting the name Fulton Cooper. The Reverend’s high-profile Christian charity work, particularly in relation to wounded servicemen and women, had turned him into something of a media favourite. He was an outspoken advocate of what he called a ‘new crusade’ which favoured a stronger and more aggressive military, particularly