Chapter 5: North Carolina

Day 22, Friday

Just like the FBI didn’t have elite teams of agents that flew around the country, they didn’t have a government plane to take Special Agent Bellinger to Durham, North Carolina. They did, however, have a telephone for him to call the Charlotte office of the FBI. He did that as soon as they drove back to the Manhattan office. He called the Charlotte office and then prevailed upon both the ASAICs, the Assistant Special Agents In Charge, of the Newark office and the Manhattan office to call their counterpart in North Carolina and impress on him the seriousness of their concern. A special agent was assigned the job of contacting Jack Watson and letting him know what was happening.

The first thing that Special Agent Phyllis Waters did was try to call Jack Watson. Unfortunately, the call immediately went to voicemail, and she didn’t have phone numbers for his wife or children. She left instructions with one of the secretaries to continue trying to call on an hourly basis.

The second thing she did was call the Durham County Sheriff’s Office in Durham. The address for Jack Watson was about halfway between Durham, in Durham County, and Hillsborough, in Orange County. A quick glance at a map showed it was just inside Durham County. She spoke to the Sheriff, and then repeated the conversation with the Undersheriff, the person who actually handled the day-to-day operations of the office. He promised to send a deputy out to the Watson home and find out why they weren’t responding.

Special Agent Waters hung up feeling less than assured. Jack Watson was being stalked by somebody who had already killed five people and had disappeared. A sixth body was found on a Greyhound bus in Trenton and Drebin was suspected. Roger Drebin had been out of contact with anybody for a week and could be anywhere on the planet. Realistically, that meant anywhere in the United States, since the State Department reported he didn’t have a passport. If the Watsons were out of reach, that might mean they were permanently out of reach. She grabbed her go-bag and went to the motor pool. A charming government sedan was waiting for her.

It was a little over two hours before she arrived at the Durham County Sheriff’s Office. The Undersheriff told her that he had sent a deputy to the house, but it was locked up and nobody seemed to be home. He had ordered the deputy to stick around until relieved, and then gave the special agent directions. She was at Watson Manor fifteen minutes later.

Deputy Barney Winslow was sitting in his patrol vehicle, a Ford Expedition with the patrol package. Unlike in the movies, he was awake and alert, and not sleeping in the back seat. When Waters pulled up the driveway, Winslow climbed out of the patrol vehicle. Waters flashed her credentials and went to the deputy. “Deputy ... Winslow,” she started, reading the name on his uniform. “I’m Special Agent Waters of the FBI. I just drove in from Charlotte.”

“Yes, Miss, uh, Special Agent. I got a call from the office that you were coming. Everything is quiet so far.”

“Anybody home?”

He shook his head. “As far as I can tell, nobody, and I don’t think it’s anything bad. There’s just nobody home.”

“Nobody knows where they went?”

The deputy shrugged. “School hasn’t started yet, so they might be on vacation. We did a little checking. John Watson has a wife and two children, a boy and a girl. He was an only child, and his parents and grandparents are all dead. His wife was an orphan who was raised by an aunt and uncle, but they aren’t close. We tracked them down in Wilmington and they don’t know where they are.”

“Vehicles?”

“According to DMV they have three, a new silver BMW 760i in John Watson’s name, a three-year-old green and white Mini Cooper, also in John Watson’s name, and a two-year-old Toyota Sienna in Sophia Watson’s name. Sophia is Mrs. Watson. We’re not sure of the Mini Cooper, but it might be the son’s. He’s sixteen and is also named John. The minivan is out back. That makes me think Mr. and Mrs. Watson are together in his car. Not sure about the kids, but since the Mini Cooper is gone, either they went with Mom and Dad, or are off with friends.”

“If they were with their parents, they’d have probably taken the Sienna,” said Waters. “Neighbors?”

He waved an arm at the woods. “What neighbors? Welcome to the ass end of Durham County.”

“And you checked the grounds?”

He nodded. “Feel free to look around. The house and the pool house are locked up, but I looked in the windows and doors and nothing is out of place. No broken glassware or windows, no suspicious rolled up carpets, no drag marks to shallow graves in the woods. What’s going on with these people?”

“Technically, it’s just the father, John Watson. The long and short is that he’s a writer, and there’s a nut job who thinks he caused his marriage to crash and burn. Totally batshit crazy. He thinks Watson is sending secret messages or something, and he’s already killed five people.”

“Shit! And he’s coming here?” asked Deputy Winslow.

It was Waters’ turn to shrug. “Maybe. Probably. It’s not like we got an engraved invitation from him. We’ve got some people who are pretty sure of it. That’s about it. If they’re not here is there any way we can track them down?”

“I heard the office put out a BOLO on their vehicles. If we find them, we can get them into protective custody, sort things out from there.”

She nodded. “Well stick around. I’m going to take a walkaround myself.” She did much as the deputy had done, looking through the windows, trying the doorknobs, and walking around the property. She did the same with the pool house out back, and even looked through the windows of the Sienna. The deputy was right. Nothing looked out of place. There was the normal amount of clutter and mess. There were no bodies at the bottom of the pool and no wild animals fighting for bones in the woods.

She returned from her inspection to find Deputy Winslow leaning against his patrol vehicle. “Find anything I missed?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, no. We need a better class of mass murderer. They need to give us better clues.”

“I’ll pass that along to the Sheriff. Any idea how long we’re going to be here? We going to continue with a man out here until this is over?”

The FBI agent shook her head. “I have no idea. I’m heading back to town now. I’ll ask there. Thanks.”

The deputy waved and Waters got back in her car. She already knew the answer. No sheriff or police chief was going to station a permanent watch, three shifts a day, until something happened that nobody was even sure was going to happen. They would keep it up for another day, but sometime tomorrow the word would come down to just make regular drive-bys and area patrols, and that would be it.

Roger Drebin looked at the driveway through the binoculars he had taken from the rider on the Greyhound bus. He had driven the car that he had borrowed from the Reedlings to the bus station in Princeton. He hadn’t wanted to hurt them, but they hadn’t been reasonable. Harry hadn’t told him how Jacqui Watson was sending messages to his wife and had even come up with a ridiculous excuse that Jacqui Watson was actually a guy! Roger had tried to get him to tell the truth, but he just couldn’t convince him to cooperate. His wife was even worse. She had started to scream, so he had to hit her to get her to be quiet.

It was quieter on the bus, but he had to sit next to a woman who said she was going down to Maryland to look at birds. She kept talking about birds, and wouldn’t leave him alone, so he gave her a little smack and she got quiet. He got off at the next stop and started walking, taking the bag and binoculars and other stuff she had been carrying. Some of it he threw away, but he managed to hitchhike into Philadelphia and get a cheap room for the night. He spent the next week hitchhiking south and avoiding anyplace that might be looking for somebody who killed a rider on the bus.

Now he was in the woods across the road from Jacqui Watson’s house. Before the cop showed up, he had wandered around the place, trying to get in, but nobody seemed to be home, and when the cop came, Roger decided to move into the woods. He circled the house slowly and ended up across the road from the driveway. He wondered what Watson was like and how hard it would be to convince her to tell him how she was sending messages to his wife. When the woman cop drove down the driveway, he moved back and lowered the binoculars. He wasn’t sure how long it would take. He might have to hike down to town for food.

Ophelia Desdemona Cosgrove hated her name; her mother taught Shakespeare at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Half her friends didn’t even know her real name and she swore that when she turned eighteen, she was going to legally change it. Until then she insisted on going by ‘Cozzie’, even to the point where she wouldn’t respond to anybody, including her teachers, who used her real name. That caused a few detentions until the school principal informed her teachers to honor her wishes.

Three other teen girls were in Cozzie’s bedroom, Kelly Wagner, Brianna Colloseo, and Sarah Watson. Sarah was staying with her friend for a few days while her parents were on vacation, Kelly and Brianna were there for a weekend sleepover. They were all in the same grade in school and did everything together.