J.T. smiled. “I'll just hang for a little while, in case you need me to go over any of the fine points with you.” He finished with a yawn.
She sat back in her chair and drummed a pencil on her desk as she continued to read.
“ You ought to get home to Richard. Leave this for tomorrow, and get that drumming habit fixed.”
“ I'm not planning to review every item and detail to-night. Mostly interested in the Kenyon and Swantor reports, see if there's anything in either or both that might strengthen the case against that other freak, Cahil.”
She wanted to rush home to Richard. They had made plans for the evening. But looking over the protocol made by the attending FBI medical examiner from field to lab at Grand Island and in New Orleans worried her for some reason. All appeared exactly as Jessica recalled it, and the photos brought back graphic memories of the event, but she felt an obligation to at least peruse the final reports.
Something caught her eye, and she leaned forward in her chair, causing it to squeal. This got J.T.'s attention. “What is it now?” he asked.
“ What's this about the bone cutter going missing, J.T.?”
“ It was never recovered, so far as I could tell from my reading of it.”
“ But it was there. I used it on the damned alligator.”
“ I guess someone must've thought it'd make a hell of a souvenir.”
“ That'd figure. Damn, you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.”
“ Ain't it the truth.”
“ I knew I shoulda kept control of the damn scene, John. You know as well as I do that that's no ordinary bone saw. It could speak volumes to a jury.”
“ Kenyon's not on trial, Cahil is. It's unlikely the bone saw would get in, Jess.”
“ We'll never know now, will we?”
“ Jess, they have a strong case against Cahil.”
“ All because I couldn't take any more. Thanks to my turning every goddamn thing over to-”
“ Stop it. Damn it, Jess. We've been over this. You won't be viewed as weak because you stepped away. You chased this guy across what, six, seven states. You'd been through enough hell for three agents down there, and it was time to turn over the reins, that's all.”
“ Who told you that?”
“ Who told me what?”
“ That it was time to turn over the reins, that I was exhausted beyond my limit.”
“ Well… no one put it in those terms.”
“ Who put it in any terms?”
“ Your friend Mike Sorrento for one, that Captain Quarels of the Coast Guard cutter for another.”
“ I see…”
“ Jess, you're only human. You did your job, and you did it well.”
“ Yeah… I did my job. I rushed back here when I should have remained at least as a consult on the postmortems.”
“ You've already had this talk with Eriq. No one's holding it against you.”
The medical team that had taken over consisted of a small army of men and women who had to autopsy six bodies: Selese Montoya, Sheriff Danby Potter, Petty Officer Nicholas LaPlante, Dr. James Harris, Dr. Jervis Swantor and Dr. Grant Kenyon.
“ The team, by all accounts, appears to have done a thorough job,” J.T. added. He got to his feet and bid her good night. “Got a couple of loose ends to tie up in my office before I turn off the light there.”
“ Just want to get away from my bitchin', right?”
“ That too.”
After J.T. had left, people began to disappear from the building, until soon the place appeared deserted, a ghost town eeriness coming over the offices. She brewed a fresh pot of coffee and gave each of the various reports a cursory look, and then she turned over the file relative to Grant Kenyon. Sipping at her coffee and reading, she stumbled onto something that made her sit up a second time tonight. The words lifted off the page and filled her mind with question and worry.
The attending M.E. at the FBI lab in New Orleans had written:
Parts of Kenyon's skullcap and all of his brain matter missing. Presumed ingested in the alligator carcass discarded at the scene.
“ All of it? This doesn't make sense,” she said to the empty room.
Jessica rifled through the accounts, looking for any mention of this by anyone else. There was nothing else mentioned, but she clearly recalled finding nothing of the kind in the alligator she had turned inside out in her search of Mrs. Swantor.
She stared at the words about the missing brain matter. She recalled seeing some of Kenyon's brain oozing out when they had pried him from the alligator's death grip. She distinctly recalled that while his skull was significantly crushed, there was no reason the brain would not be encased in the mangled outer shell. It just seemed so odd, so strange, so like… like the contagion of Cahil's madness, infecting someone new, as it had with Max Strand.
She recalled the moment when she, Konrath and O'Hurley had parted from Sorrento, leaving him alone with the body. To her knowledge, he was the only one left alone with Kenyon's remains and the missing bone saw. In the interim, a part of Kenyon's remains had vanished, and so had the deadly saw.
She could hardly believe her thoughts. Mike Sorrento? Why? She recalled Max Strand's strange end, and how even Dr. Deitze had fallen into a fascination with Cahil, and she thought of the hundreds of thousands who logged on to Cahil's website.
She buzzed J.T., catching him still in his office.
“ Jess're you still here?”
“ That computer list of AOC subscribers to Cahil's online brain show…”
“ Yeah, what about it?”
“ Do you have it nearby?”
“ I've got a copy, yes. Prosecutors have the original.”
“ Log ons before and after Daryl's arrest?”
“ Yes. I have 'em, why?”
“ Pull it for me, will you?”
“ Jess, what's this about?”
“ I'm not sure just yet.”
Thorpe located and pulled the list, laying it pound for pound on his desk. He got back on the line. “What now?”
“ Look down the list to the S's.”
He rifled through to the S's. “You want to revisit Swan-tor?”
“ See if you have the name Sorrento listed.”
“ Sorrento? As in Michael Sorrento?”
“ Just do it, John.” In a moment, a breathless John Thorpe said, “No, Sorrento's not on the list.”
She felt a wave of relief wash over her. “Good… that's good.”
“ Of course, he could be using another subscriber other than AOC.”
“ Of course…”
“ Actually, all our field offices use PQ Uninet. If he were say investigating the case, researching, he might log in via Uninet.”
“ Who's got Cahil's computer now, our Cyber Squad?”
“ Watching it like hawks, yeah.”
“ OK, I'll talk to Dana in the morning about this.”
“ About what?”
“ Ahhh, it may be nothing… and unless I have more to go on, I think I'll keep it to myself, John.”
“ More than one agent in a field office logged on while we were monitoring, Jess, out of curiosity, you know. You know how the FBI grapevine works. We also had a few field agents warning us about this dangerous website from tips they'd received. Mike Sorrento may've been among them.”
“ Forget about it tonight, John, and thanks.”
The following day, Jessica pursued it with Dana Morill, and the computer expert left a written message in an envelope by the end of business day. It read:
Yes, Agent M. Sorrento, New Orleans Field Office, logged on August 12, seeking information. Was he researching the case? His inquiries look like a fishing expedition. They date back to just before we confiscated the computer. He never logged on again.
Perhaps he had been fascinated with the case and was researching it against the day that he could contribute to it, but it seemed odd that he had said nothing to her about logging on to the weird website.