“If this mystery guy is so dangerous, why did Freddie invite him back to his trailer? Why break out the beers and the Jack Daniel’s?”
“Don’t know that, either,” he said.
I held up my ID for Anthony, a security guard I knew from my time at this office. He raised the gate to let us into the parking lot.
“We have three days before our new C.I. is up and running,” I said, pulling into a space behind the building. “That’s our time to look into whatever this connection is.”
Richie nodded, and we got out.
As we walked down the curving path that bordered the back lawn, I pulled the composite sketch from my bag. “Back in 2019 when the FBI was called onto this case, who was the lead?”
“A guy named Ed Offerman,” Richie said. “But he retired. I spoke to his old partner, Ray Chizek.”
I nodded, and Richie cocked his head. “You know them?”
“Offerman I knew a little,” I said. “Chizek, no.”
Inside the building, we made our way to the third floor.
Ray Chizek was camped out in a conference room, next to a table piled with file boxes, each with their tops off, revealing thick manila folders with color-coded tabs on the sides. He was in his forties and five foot seven, with the thick, muscular body of a three-down running back.
Chizek looked up as I got to the doorway.
“If it ain’t the special people who left us for the soft confines of Miami Beach.” Below his bushy brown moustache, his lips curved into a smirk. “Gardner Camden, right?”
I had never met this man before, but Cassie once told me that everyone in the building knew who I was. I extended a hand, and we shook.
“Ray Chizek,” he said. He turned to Richie. “You must be Brancato. You even look like a nepo baby.”
I glanced at Richie, but he didn’t blink at the comment, which referred to his grandfather, a man who had once run the FBI. I pointed at the file boxes. “I assume those are ours to go through?”
“Pfft.” Chizek blew out a gust of air. “No, no, no. The caseyoucalled about—the missing women who turned up dead? There’s not this much meat on the bone.”
He waved for us to follow him. As we moved through a maze of cubes, I noted that Chizek favored his right leg as he walked.
We emerged by a windowless office. He grabbed a file, no more than an inch thick, off the desk. “This is it,” he said, hiking up his dress pants with his free hand as he gave it to me.
I flipped through the file, seeing twelve pages of notes, along with DMV pictures and two typed witness interviews. In the case summary, I read the names of three women whose bodies had been found in a town west of here called Shilo.
The case notes were initialed by retired agent Ed Offerman. After them were photocopies of multiple sketches, each drawn in pencil and heavily shaded. Following the fourth drawing was the composite Richie had obtained, which we could now see was a combination of the previous drawings, put together by software.
“You mentioned this case had been sent to PAR for consideration,” Richie said. “But Agent Camden doesn’t recall that. And his memory is kinda… legendary.”
I glanced from the file to Chizek.
“Yeah, my old partner knew Frank Roberts pretty well,” Chizek said. “Every time he saw Frank in the elevator, he’d hit him up to take this thing on.”
“Did Offerman ever make aformalrequest to PAR?” I asked.
“Formal?” Chizek said, blinking. “I mean, we were all coworkers, weren’t we, Camden? One happy family?”
The attitude toward PAR in Jacksonville was not what I would characterize as happy. It was in this office that the moniker “head cases” had been invented. And it was one of the nicer things said about us.
I stared at Chizek until his face changed.
“All right,” he said. “Ed was an A personality. He crossed swords with a lotta people and rarely did anything through…officialchannels.”
We had wandered halfway back to the conference room while talking and were standing in a hallway. Twice now, I’d seen Chizek pause and tap at both pockets. I stared at the yellow marks on his teeth. He was a smoker, jonesing for a cigarette.
