Jeri saw the story online and read it with her morning coffee. She immediately pulled together the other stories: Danny Cleveland, the former Ledger reporter, who had been strangled in his apartment in Little Rock in 2009; Thad Leawood, strangled in 1991 near Signal Mountain, Tennessee; and Lanny Verno, murdered in Biloxi the previous year. Schnetzer, Cleveland, and Leawood had been known in Pensacola and the Ledger reported their deaths. Verno had been passing through and was not known; thus, there was no local coverage. She found the stories of the murders from the local newspapers in Little Rock, Chattanooga, Houston, and Biloxi, and arranged them all neatly in a file that she sent through a new email account to a reporter named Kemper, the woman who had written about the Schnetzer murder. She attached a cryptic note: Four unsolved strangulations of people with close ties to Pensacola. Verno lived here in 2001. Do your homework!!
She had not heard of the Schnetzer murder and wasn’t about to start digging. She was exhausted, and virtually broke, and simply couldn’t muster the energy for another investigation. As always, she suspected Bannick, but someone else would have to worry about the case.
The following morning, on the front page beneath the fold, was a sensational story about the four Pensacola men who had been murdered in other states. The local police wouldn’t comment and deflected all questions because they knew nothing. The killings were not in their jurisdiction. Likewise, the state police wouldn’t comment.
Jeri read it gleefully and immediately sent it, encrypted as always, to Lacy Stoltz. Minutes later she texted her the encryption key.
Lacy was at her desk reading assessments of other complaints when she saw the email and opened the file. There was no message. Who else would send her a private email, and then the key? Who else would have the old stories from the Ledger and the other newspapers? Once again she marveled at Jeri’s research and tenaciousness, and managed a chuckle at Herman Gray’s comment about her being needed by the FBI.
She closed her door and for a long time reread the reports of the old murders, and the new ones. She tried to gauge the impact of the morning’s story and finally concluded there was no way to predict what might happen. There was little doubt, though, that it would change the landscape. Bannick would see it, probably already had. Who in the world could guess his next move?
* * *
—
Judge Bannick was in a hotel room in Santa Fe when he saw it. As always, he scanned the Ledger online for all the news from home, and when he saw it he began cursing.
The only other person who could possibly link Lanny Verno to Pensacola was Jeri Burke. Maybe the ex-cop, Norris Ozment, but he was not in the loop.
A few of the older lawyers could link him to Schnetzer and their fee dispute, back in 1993. Perhaps a reporter at the Ledger might remember Danny Cleveland and his muckraking article about Bannick when he first ran for office, though this was doubtful. Cleveland had gone after several shady developers. No one to his knowledge was still around to link him to Thad Leawood. There had been no criminal charges and the frightened victims hid behind their parents, who had no idea what to do.
* * *
—
He was thirteen years old and had achieved the rank Life, with eighteen merit badges, including all the required ones. His goal was to make Eagle by his fourteenth birthday, something his father encouraged because after that the high school years arrived and scouting would become less important. He led the Shark Patrol, the finest in the troop. He loved every part of it—the weekends in the woods, the training for the mile swim, the jamborees, the challenge of making Eagle, the search for more merit badges, the awards ceremonies, the community service.
After the assault, he missed a meeting, something that never happened. When he missed the second one, his parents were curious. He could not carry the burden alone, and so he told them. They were horrified and devastated, and had no clue about where to go for help. His father finally met with the police and was distressed to learn that there had been another complaint, from a boy unwilling to be identified.
He suspected it was Jason Wright, a friend who had abruptly quit the troop two months earlier.
The police wanted to meet with Ross, but the idea terrified him. He was sleeping at the foot of his parents’ bed and hated to leave the house. They decided that protecting their child was more important than demanding punishment. The nightmare went from bad to worse when the Ledger ran a story about a police investigation into “allegations of sexual misconduct” by Thad Leawood, age twenty-eight. It was obviously leaked by the police, in Dr. Bannick’s opinion, and sent the town into orbit.