The room went silent.
“Fred. His name is Frederick Wilson Cheney.”
The father’s voice trembled with emotion. “He’s not just Debbie’s boyfriend He’s dead, murdered, too. My son!”
Words caught in his throat, and he hung his head to hide his tears.
I turned off the television, upset and unable to sit still.
Rose had been standing in the doorway, watching. She looked at me and slowly shook her head.
Fielding got up, stretched, and tightened the drawstring of his surgical greens.
“She just screwed herself in front of the whole damn world,” he announced, walking out of the library.
I realized as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee what Pat Harvey had said. I began to really hear it as it replayed inside my head.
“Hunted down like animals and murdered . . . ” Her words had the sound of something; scripted. They did not strike me as glib, off the cuff or a figure of speech.
A federal agency protecting its own? Hunt.
A jack of hearts like a knight of cups. Someone who is perceived or perceives himself as a competitor, a defender. One who does battle, Hilda Ozimek had said to me.
A knight. A soldier.
Hunt.
Their murders were meticulously calculated, methodically planned. Bruce Phillips and Judy Robe disappeared in June. Their bodies were found in mid August, when hunting season opened.
Jim Freeman and Bonnie Smyth disappeared in July their bodies found the opening day of quail and pheasant Ben Anderson and Carolyn Bennett disappeared March, their bodies found in November during deer season.
Susan Wilcox and Mark Martin disappeared in late February, their bodies discovered in mid-May, during spring gobbler season.
Deborah Harvey and Fred Cheney vanished Labor Day weekend and were not found until months late when the woods were crowded with hunters after rabbit squirrel, fox, pheasant, and raccoon. I had not assumed the pattern meant anything because most of the badly decomposed and skeletonized bodied that end up in my office are found by hunters. When someone drops dead or is dumped in the woods, hunter is the most likely person to stumble upon the remains. But when and where the couples’ bodies were discovered could have been planned.
The killer wanted his victims found, but not right away, so he killed them off season, knowing that it was probable his victims would not be discovered until hunters were out in the woods again. By then the bodies were decomposed. Gone with the tissue were the injuries he had inflicted. If rape was involved, there would be no seminal fluid. Most trace evidence would be dislodged by wind and washed away by rain. It may even be that it was important to him that the bodies be found by hunters because in his fantasies he, too, was a hunter. The greatest hunter of all.
Hunters hunted animals, I thought as I sat at my downtown desk the following afternoon. Guerrillas, military special agents, and soldiers of fortune hunted human beings.
Within the fifty-mile radius where the couples had vanished and turned up dead were Fort Eustis, Langley Field, and a number of other military installations, including the CIA’s West Point, operated under the cover of a military base called Camp Peary.
“The Farm,” as Camp Peary is referred to in spy novels and investigative non-fiction books about intelligence, was where officers were trained in the paramilitary activities of infiltration, exfiltration, demolitions, night-time parachute jumps, and other clandestine operations.
Abby Turnbull took a wrong turn and ended up at the entrance of Camp Peary, and days later FBI agents came looking for her.
The feds were paranoid, and I had a suspicion I might know why. After reading the newspaper accounts of Pad Harvey’s press conference, I had become only morel convinced.
A number of papers, including the Post, were on my desk, and I had studied the write-ups several times The byline on the Post’s story was Clifford Ring, the reporter who had been pestering the commissioner and other personnel of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Ring mentioned me only passing when he implied that Pat Harvey was in-appropriately using her public office to intimidate a threaten all involved into releasing details about daughter’s death. It was enough to make me wonder if Mr. Ring was Benton Wesley’s media source, the FBI conduit for planted releases, and that would not have been so bad, really. It was the point of the stories that, found disturbing.