2. Katz and Rabbit
“Were the boys all right?” I asked, when Esther Katz had reached that point in her briefing.
Katz was an FBI special agent. I’d come down from New York to Philadelphia to meet her. We sat facing each other across the table of a diner booth. Outside, a police siren dopplered past.
“Terrified, but otherwise unharmed.”
I leaned back and took a sip of coffee that had cooled to lukewarm. Some tension left my shoulders. The tension was irrational, just as my question had been unnecessary. Injured or murdered kids would have been prominent in the news. As it was, against the backdrop of pandemic, police violence, mass protests, looting, curfews, and toxic politics, last week’s story of a priest murdered in a backwater parish had made hardly a blip.
“The Philly police found them hiding in the storeroom,” continued Katz. “Chad Lohman didn’t search after he broke in. He wasn’t looking for just two boys. He says he expected to find a lot of boys. Boys in chains. Boys in cages. He meant to liberate them.”
“So, another Pizzagate—is that why I’m here?”
Agent Katz quirked one side of her mouth and one eyebrow in a pained, quizzical grimace. There was a hint of anger, too. “Honestly, Dr. Arklow, I’ve no idea why you’re here. My supervisor told me to brief you, and the agent in charge told him to tell me. That’s all I know.”
“Call me James,” I said, for the second time since we’d met.
I could have read, “In your dreams, old man,” into the silent regard that got me, but I chose to interpret it as professional reserve. I added, soothingly, “Look, I’ll be able to speculate about my role once I know the details. At least tell me why the FBI is involved.”
“Lohman crossed state lines. He lives in a Baltimore suburb. Used to live.”
I sipped coffee while a second flashing, wailing squad car sped past the window. Agent Katz had hardly touched hers. Not surprising—it had started bitter and turned nasty as it cooled. This diner was as run down as its North Philadelphia neighborhood. The booth was tight for me; I had to twist so my legs wouldn’t bump Katz’s. Every second booth had bee-striped police tape stretched between the seats. I suppose that was the owner’s tongue-in-cheek way to enforce social distancing. If the Covid rules here were like New York’s, the place shouldn’t be open at all.
My Bureau contact had suggested I meet Katz near the crime scene. Since Philadelphia is halfway between the Bureau’s Washington headquarters, where she worked, and my home office in New York, that seemed a fair compromise. Not that I’d need to visit the crime scene; I’m not that kind of investigator. As a consulting psychologist, I get called on when there’s something perplexing about motive—the why—not the how, where, and when.
I was happy the client was the FBI. They’re usually more open-minded than city or state police. They pay their bills. Something else I was happy about: Esther Katz. I was beginning to like her. She had the earnest intensity of youth—she was perhaps twenty-four—but without the naïve bumptiousness of other trainees I’d met. Her face and hands told stories.
Katz had dark, wavy hair that she’d pulled back behind her ears. It wasn’t much longer than mine, which had grown like a shrub since the virus shuttered my usual barber shop. Her eyes were brown and her eyebrows thicker than was fashionable. They arched in a way that, along with her hair, gave her face an old-fashioned look. She had a wide, expressive mouth. What she might lack in ‘sternness and intimidation’ I figured she made up for with brains.
“What does the Bureau find interesting about the case?” I asked. “Why are you here, for example?”
“Right now, I’m working the angle that Father Torres was a pedophile. Molestation or child porn, if not actually boys in cages.”
“And?”
Katz turned up her hands in an elegant gesture of emptiness. “Nothing. Torres seems to have been a really nice man. The only thing was …” She shook her head.
“Was?”
“Doesn’t fit my investigation parameters.”
I grinned. “I don’t have parameters and I can work with impressions. Need nothing in writing. So you can throw me those scraps.”
Agent Katz frowned, then flashed a wan smile. “Because of the sex abuse scandals, priests are supposed to be extra-careful with the optics. Or so I’m told. Some female parishioners said Torres took risks like minding kids after school. He put pictures of himself with the kids on the church website. The parishioners worried there’d be malicious gossip.”
“Was there?”
She leaned on her elbows and spoke quietly. “Not by parishioners. But his name appeared on a list of—” She clammed up abruptly.
I recognized the annoyance and self-doubt in her expression. This whole meeting must be uncomfortable for her. She was a recent graduate from the FBI Academy at Quantico, where the mantra ’never discuss a case with civilians’ got hammered in hard.
“No worries, Agent Katz. I’ve worked with the Bureau before. I’m familiar with the sources you monitor.”
Katz quirked her lips to one side, then shrugged. “Someone added his name to a list of child traffickers on a darknet site. But you find more stuff like that for any of the bishops, almost always false.”
I tried another angle. “What can you tell me about the killer—Lohman?”
She leaned back again, folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. “You’d better speak to the supervisory agent. I’m no longer assigned to Lohman.”
I figured she’d shut the door to see what I’d do. I echoed her own neutral, just-the-facts cadence. “But you were the first federal agent assigned. My Bureau contact said so. You must know the file, or we wouldn’t be talking.”
“Okay, Dr. Arklow. What would you find interesting about the case?”
My words back at me. Deadpan, I answered, “Just the high points, Agent Katz, and whatever has you flummoxed, so I can solve it for you and get back to important work. I’ll let you take the credit.”
Katz held my gaze for a few seconds with one brow lowered, lips quirked to one side. She had a nice mouth, I thought. She also had a full cup of coffee—a hazard, if she took me seriously.
“Okay,” she said again, sighing out the word. The hidden hand appeared to point at me. A small, precise movement. “But then it’s your turn.”
My jab hadn’t got a laugh, but maybe got the door open. We both knew she didn’t have a choice. But she could make it harder. I nodded.
She unfolded her arms and knitted her fingers round her cup. “Chad Lohman was ex-Baltimore PD. Twenty-three years in the force, from age twenty-one. Never made it past Sergeant. He retired in 2005 after getting a gunshot wound to the foot.”
“Record?”
“He arrested a lot of people, but a lot of the arrests didn’t stick. Got some ‘gun arrest’ commendations and two for valor. Plus reprimands for excessive force.”
“The BPD has such a thing?”
“Yeah, but it takes effort to earn one. He beat up a female sex worker and shot a handcuffed suspect.”
“Right. Go on.”
She counted off the file facts by tapping the plastic lid of her cup with her thumb. “He killed four suspects during his career and wounded several more—all Black or Hispanic. When an internal investigation questioned that, his union rep. argued it was because of his beat’s demographic. He was promoted to Sergeant just before retiring early with a full pension. The union got that for him. He was a solidarity enforcer in the union—the Fraternal Order. Along with a bunch of them, he was also a member of the Aryan Blues.”
“White nationalists.”
“Yup. The more radicalized cops join the Baltimore chapter of the Klan.”
“Is Lohman still a member?”
“Nope. Dropped out after he retired and his wife left him. They didn’t have kids. He bought into an auto repair business, but it closed three years ago. He blames a franchise that opened nearby. Claims Mexicans run it using illegal Mexican labor.”
“Holds a grudge,” I said.
“Maybe. But he didn’t shoot up an auto shop in Baltimore. He shot a priest in Philadelphia.” Katz took one hand from the cup to make a neat little shooting gesture. “He shot Father Torres with his duty weapon. They let him keep it when he retired. What with the BPD corruption cases, it’d look bad in the media. Maybe that’s why you’re here?”
She was right about the media. Their camera eyes were all on the George Floyd protests. But in an instant, this backwater murder by a white nationalist ex-cop could be swept into the blaze. Ugly—but not ugly enough to get attention at the Bureau’s executive level. It didn’t explain why Katz—who worked at the Washington headquarters, not the Philadelphia field office—was here.
“I’m no spin doctor, Agent Katz.” I might have sounded curt.
She blinked at me.
“Did Lohman have other connections?”
“The NRA and a Baltimore shooting range, but his memberships lapsed. Didn’t see friends much. Didn’t attend church. No—”
“Did he ever?” I asked, quickly.
“He was a choirboy, once. I guess you’d call him a lapsed Catholic. You’re thinking he was abused?”
Katz was on the ball. I made a non-committal gesture.
She continued. “Anyway, neighbors said he’d become a recluse since his business failed.”
“Did he have a computer?” The Question.
“Yup. A laptop salvaged from his business.”
That’s what I’d been waiting for.
Inside the diner, R&B played in the background, like gerbils singing. The young woman behind the counter jiggled to a different beat from her earphones, texting as she did. In front of the dollar store across the street, men in limp tee-shirts cursed each other as they passed a lighted cigarette around. A black SUV with tinted windows rolled slowly by, interrupting my view. I turned back to Katz.
She sat straight-backed, her face neutral and alert. It was like she’d wrapped herself in a clean, quiet office. She’d pulled her coffee cup nearer and still had her hands around it, thumbs crossed on the lid. The door was closed again. Because of The Question. Because I hadn’t shown my cards, she wouldn’t show hers. Special Agent Katz was nobody’s pushover.
I didn’t push. I speculated. “Let’s see. He’s a brash extrovert who’s lost touch with his drinking buddies. Things haven’t worked out. He feels embarrassed, helpless, bitter, and alone. He needs contact, to be part of something. So he turns to social media, starting with what he knows, like the union’s alumni chat group and the Aryan Blues. Gun enthusiast sites. The search engines bubble him, and soon he’s immersed in views that justify his past actions, that validate his opinions about Latinos, women, politics, whatever. He doesn’t discriminate; doesn’t know how. And because he’s an extrovert, he wants to take part.”
Katz eyed me, head a little to one side. Not talking. I’d have to work harder.
“You frisked his computer. It’s all there, because he didn’t know how to hide it, even if he wanted to. Email, chats, cookies, browser history, anything he downloaded, files he thought he’d deleted. Whatever websites the browser forgot, the Bureau got from his Internet provider. Likely you found porn, but not child porn. To see himself as the hero of his story, he needs a line he won’t cross: children, for example. A line that allows him to divide heroes from villains.”
Now I’d moved the effort dial from zero to one. I paused to see if Katz was ready to open the door a crack.
She nodded. “You’re right about the porn. It’s like men’s magazine stuff. Implied violence, but nothing illegal.”
She didn’t offer more, so I turned the effort dial to two. “He moves on to fake news sites like InfoWars and The Boston Tribune, and conspiracy-oriented social feeds like Parler. What he reads enrages him. He spits angry comments on Twitter and Reddit, but sees them vanish in the flood. No impact, no satisfaction.
“So he drops into darker rabbit holes. Two years in, he arrives at Russia-based message boards like 8chan, 8kun, 11dan, and BetterDead—forums that give him a sense of being an insider, part of something the sheep don’t know about. But he never graduates to the darknet war rooms. He can’t handle the access technology or provide the social proofs that would get him an invitation. At least not until he killed Torres.”
I wouldn’t work harder without a cookie. I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup, exactly as Katz had, and waited.
She blinked, took a breath, then made an eloquent gesture of concession. I found her movements interesting. Quick, precise, graceful, economical. Unstudied. Like fine clockwork, yet asymmetric and ever-changing. They brought to mind a Zen aesthetic.
“Not bad,” she admitted. “He used all the boards you named. Recently, he posted mainly on 8kun and BetterDead. He read a lot more than he posted. A follower, not an instigator.”
“Somebody’s soldier?”
She wrinkled her nose. “More like a lost rabbit. A rabid one.”
A lonely, rabid rabbit with a mission. The question was: who’d given him the mission?
