I blinked. “Wrong in what way?”
We reached the elevator, and Johnson hit the button to call it.
“The hotels up there,” he said, “some have been remodeled in the last few years. But most of that land was sold off fifty years ago. Long before whoever you interviewed grew up.”
I pictured Natalie Kastner, staring at our sketch. Some memory from her past that she couldn’t shake loose.
“So there’s nothing new?” I asked. “Up that way?”
The elevator door opened, and we got in.
“There’s new things all the time,” Johnson said. “But the families who stayed up that way—those big estates—they’ve been owned by the same people since I was a kid.”
“How many are there?” I asked. “That never sold?”
“Mansions?” he said. “Wow, I dunno. Figure… seventeen or eighteen?”
The elevator door opened onto the lobby, and we walked out.
“Hell, they builtthisplace,” Johnson said. “Back when the local rich considered it their civic duty.”
I squinted at him. “By ‘this place,’ you mean the police station?”
“Oh yeah.” He steered me over to a framed picture on the lobby wall, commemorating the building. It was a color photo of a group of men and women from the ’90s, standing on the lawn of a building. The photo was twelve by eighteen, matted and surrounded by shiny red oak.
“They bought an old Spanish-style building,” Johnson said. “Retrofitted it. Donated it back to the city.”
I scanned the faces of the men and women in the framed picture.
There was something familiar about one of the men. I pulled out my phone and stared from our sketch to the picture. It didn’t match. It wasn’t El Médico.
“What can you tell me about this guy?” I asked.
Johnson glanced from the photo to the caption below it, which listed the names of the men and women. “Paul Burrows,” he said. “No idea.”
I kept scanning the photo, and Johnson made a huffing noise. “I told you I got kids, right?” he said. “A wife? Folks waiting on me?”
I didn’t answer him.
Johnson’s shoulders stiffened, and he bit at his lower lip. He walked over to an ornate wooden information desk, twenty feet away, where a patrolman sat.
“Let me behind there, will ya, Mac?” he said to the cop, who cleared out. Johnson took his seat and began typing, moving from screen to screen.
“That particular guy’s deceased, Agent Camden,” he said finally. “Had one child, a son named Edward. He’s thirty-six.”
“Any criminal record?”
He pounded a few more keys.
“None,” he said. “And there’s this.”
Johnson had opened a browser and found a recent article about the son of the man in the picture, Edward Burrows, an up-and-coming architect who had closed down his practice. The article featured other men in their thirties and forties, and its focus wasn’t on Burrows but on a larger phenomenon. That of a generation ofonce-thriving professionals in the Lucas Beach area, who now never left their homes. “Professional Shut-Ins,” the headline read.
I stared at the photo of Edward Burrows.
Over the last four hours, I had begun a project of taking every face on the case and breaking it into pieces, per the three principles of the Loomis method that sketch artists used. First, I reimagined each cranium as a flattened sphere, which helped me think of the top of the head in quadrants. Next, I rethought how the jawline and cheekbones attached to the cranium. Then I broke the facial features into thirds, worrying less about matching the sketch of El Médico and more about finding strips of a face that connected to any piece of evidence on the case.
Something about Burrows was familiar, but I could not figure out what.
