Between ten-thirty and eleven, we heard a loud roar like thunder in the eerie woods. Nervous eyes looked up into the blue-black sky.
“There’s a familiar old tune,” Sampson said as he saw the fluttering lights of an incoming helicopter approaching from the northeast.
“Probably mediflight finally coming for the body,” I said.
A dark blue helicopter with gold stripes finally swirled down onto the blacktop highway. Whoever was piloting the copter in was a real pro.
“Not mediflight,” Sampson said; “more likely be Mick Jagger. Big stars travel in copters like that one.”
Joyce Kinney and the regional Bureau director were already headed back to the highway. Sampson and I followed along like uninvited pests.
We received another rude shock right away. Both of us recognized the tall, balding, distinguished-looking man who stepped from the helicopter.
“Now what the hell is he doing down here?” Sampson said. I had the same question, the same uneasy reaction. It was the deputy director of the FBI. The number two man, Ronald Burns. Burns was a real hummer inside the Bureau, a bigtime cage rattler.
We both knew Burns from our last “multi-jurisdictional” case. He was supposed to be political, a bad guy inside the Bureau, but he had never been that way with me. After he had looked at the body, he asked to speak to me. It was getting stranger and stranger down in Carolina.
Burns wanted to hold our little talk away from the big ears and small minds of his own people.
“Alex, I’m real sorry to hear your niece might have been kidnapped. I hope that isn’t the case,” he said. “Since you’re down here, maybe you can help us out.”
“Can I ask why you’re down here?” I said to Burns. Might as well skip right to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Burns smiled, showing off his capped, very white front teeth. “I do wish you had accepted our offer of that VICAP position.”
I had been offered a job as a liaison between the Bureau and the D.C. police after the Soneji kidnapping case. Burns was one of the men who interviewed me.
“I like directness more than anything in a senior officer,” Burns continued.
I was still waiting for an answer to my direct question.
“I can’t tell you as much as you’d like to hear,” Burns finally said. “I will tell you that we don’t know if your niece was taken by this sick Johnny. He leaves very little physical evidence, Alex. He’s careful and he’s good at what he does.”
“So I’ve heard. Leads us into some obvious areas for suspects. Policemen, army vets, amateurs who study the police. That could be misdirection on his part, though. Maybe he wants us to think that way.”
Burns nodded. “I’m here because this has become a high-priority mess. It’s large, Alex. I can’t tell you why at this time. It’s classified large.” Spoken like a true FBI honcho. Mysteries wrapped in more mysteries.
Burns sighed. “I will tell you one thing. We believe that he might be a collector. We think he could be keeping a few of the young women nearby… a private harem maybe. His very own harem.”
It was a scary, startling idea. It also gave me hope that Naomi might still be alive.
&n
bsp; “I want to be in on this,” I told Burns, holding eye contact with him. “Why don’t you tell me everything?” I gave him my terms. “I need to see the whole picture before I start giving out any theories. Why does he reject some of the women? If that’s what he’s doing.”
“Alex, I can’t tell you any more right now. I’m sorry.” Burns shook his head and closed his eyes for a second. I realized that he was exhausted.
“But you wanted to see how I would react to your collector theory?”
“I did,” Burns admitted, and finally had to smile.
“A modern-day harem would be possible, I guess. It’s a common enough male fantasy,” I told him. “Strangely, it’s a prevalent female fantasy, too. Don’t rule that out yet.”
Burns catalogued what I’d said and left it at that. He asked me to help again, but was unwilling to tell me everything he knew. He finally walked back to be with his own people.
Sampson came up beside me. “What did His Rigidness have to say? What brings him to this unholy forest with us mere mortals?”
“He said something interesting. Said that Casanova might be a collector, maybe creating his own private harem somewhere near here,” I told Sampson. “He said the case is large. His choice of words.”