“
Joe grinned. “It’s good to work with you again, Suzi.”
She glared at him. “That’s ‘Agent Madeaux’ to you, bud.” She glanced at her vibrating phone.
“Boyfriend?” Joe asked.
She rolled her eyes and answered. “I thought you might call. How’ve you been?”
“No complaints. Lucy told me about Weber. I just did a little checking on her. Crime reporter for ten years, then switched gears to write true crime books and special features for magazines.
“It’s an ongoing investigation, Rogan. I can’t talk about it.”
“You called Lucy.”
“She’s one of us now.”
“Her supervisor isn’t letting her get involved. We need to know how her name landed in the reporter’s file. I don’t have to explain to you why.”
He didn’t. Suzanne knew about Lucy’s background, and she understood why Lucy would be concerned if she thought Rosemary Weber had information about her past.
“Fair enough. I’ll let you know when I find out.”
“Why was she killed?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.”
“I just finished a case, if you need my help-”
Suzanne laughed. “The FBI is working with NYPD on this; why would we need you?”
In mock insult, he said, “Because I’m the best.”
She snickered. “Later.” She hung up.
“That was interesting,” Joe said.
“I’m sure you’ll be meeting him in the next few days.”
“Who was it?”
“Sean Rogan, P.I. out of D.C.”
“And he’s in New York?”
“He will be.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
FBI Academy
After two hours, Lucy put her books aside.
Tony’s file on the Rachel McMahon homicide beckoned her. Not just because it was connected to the murdered writer, but also because there were basic similarities between Rachel’s abduction and that of Lucy’s nephew Justin. Kidnapped from their home in the middle of the night and murdered before dawn. But that’s where the similarities ended.
Rachel McMahon had been a week shy of her twelfth birthday when she was killed. The killer had raped her in her own bed. According to the autopsy report, she’d suffered two cracked ribs and had likely been unconscious or unresponsive when Kreig kidnapped her. Though Kreig never once spoke about the rape and murder, Tony’s theory was that the murder wasn’t premeditated. Kreig had planned to rape her, but he thought she was dead or dying. In an effort to cover up his crime, he removed her from her room alive. She died of internal injuries within hours. Had she received immediate medical attention, she might have survived.
Though there was an extensive grid search and numerous volunteers and police looking for her, she wasn’t found until Kreig led authorities to her body six days later. However, the coroner’s report indicated that she’d been dead nearly as long.
MISSING GIRL FOUND DEAD
NEWARK, NJ-Six days after Rachel McMahon was abducted from her second-story bedroom, her body was found in the woods less than five miles from her home.
Though police refuse to confirm or deny the circumstances surrounding her death and discovery, sources close to the investigation say that her body was located by cadaver dogs in a shallow grave.
The search for Rachel McMahon began last Sunday morning. Her nine-year-old brother awoke during a storm and went to his sister’s room at three a.m., but she wasn’t in her bed. The police contacted friends and neighbors, but no one had seen Rachel.
The investigation was stymied by the missing girl’s own parents, who had a wild party the night she went missing, later identified by this paper as a “swingers’ party” where married couples swap sex partners for an evening of drugs, drinking, and sex. Because of the delay in obtaining a guest list, incomplete statements by both Mr. and Mrs. McMahon, and the two-day storm that destroyed physical evidence, the investigation was delayed.
No one has been arrested for the crime, but sources close to the investigation indicate a search warrant has been issued for one of the McMahons’ guests who has been in police custody for two days.
The Newark office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working in close conjunction with the Newark Police Department, devoted all available agents to interview witnesses, process evidence, and search for Rachel. Media Information Officer Special Agent Dominic Theissen stated, “We are deeply saddened at the discovery of Rachel McMahon’s body late this afternoon. An autopsy and thorough investigation will be completed to ensure that justice will be swift.”
The McMahons were unavailable for comment.
The FBI confirmed that there is no connection between Rachel McMahon’s disappearance and that of Camille Todd, a twelve-year-old girl who went missing from Newark the previous week.
On the surface, the case appeared straightforward-an eleven-year-old girl had been kidnapped from her bedroom late on a Saturday night. The time of her disappearance was a bit sketchy. No one had seen her between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. Her brother told police they’d been playing games in their playroom until 10:00 p.m. when she went to her room to call her best friend. He fell asleep and woke up at 3:00 a.m. The house was quiet, he went to her room, and she wasn’t in her bed. Her friend told police, and phone records confirmed, that they’d spoken for nearly an hour, hanging up at 11:03 p.m. Rachel wanted to go over to her friend’s house that night, but the mother had forbidden it. For the first day of the investigation, local police falsely believed that Rachel had either run away or left to visit her friend. The search focused on the four blocks between the McMahon home and the Miller home.
Because of the age of the missing girl, the FBI was called more as a formality in case there was foul play. In his personal notes, Tony had written:
The local PD covered their ass by calling us, but they didn’t seriously consider her disappearance a kidnapping until they interviewed the neighbors and learned about the party the night before.
An attached newspaper article printed the day before Rachel’s body was found illustrated that this wasn’t a typical neighborhood get-together.
A neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was at the McMahons’ party Saturday night.
“We’re swingers. It’s all safe; we have rules; nothing bad has ever happened.” The neighbor, who is also married, said he’d never seen the McMahon children at the parties and assumed they were staying with relatives. “We’re consenting adults.”
The closing of one of the earlier articles, before Rachel’s body was found, seemed important to Lucy, so she wrote it down in her notebook.
Search parties have been looking for eleven-year-old Rachel for the past twenty-four hours. Notably missing from the search is her father, Aaron McMahon, who has been interviewed by both local police and the FBI regarding his daughter’s kidnapping.
What made that interesting was that the next day the newspaper reported that the mother, Pilar McMahon,
