Corrie entered the conference room and took a seat. She waited as the handful of other new agents—Supervisory Special Agent Morwood’s flock—arranged themselves around the room. To her consternation, she saw that a couple of senior agents had parked themselves at the far end of the table. Higher-ups sitting in on a Firing Squad was a common enough occurrence; she just wished these two had picked some other week for their evaluation.

Last in was Morwood, carrying the usual cup of coffee. He shut the door with his free hand, then took a seat at the head of the table. He had no notebook, tablet, or other writing instrument with him.

“Hear ye, hear ye,” he said. “This tribunal is now in session, the Honorable Hale Morwood presiding. All would-be crime fighters and upholders of the American way present and accounted for, I see? Good.” His perpetually sleepy eyes surveyed the room. “Swanson. Why don’t you start?”

Corrie almost jumped in her seat. Morwood never picked her first—her litany of cold cases usually came last. She’d expected more time to mentally prepare herself.

“Me?” she asked, realizing as she said it how stupid it sounded.

“You. Please: enlighten us with your forensic expertise.”

He would say that. Corrie cleared her throat, shuffled through her papers. There was a cough from across the table: Bob Wantaugh, his blond ducktail shaking faintly with displeasure. He’d become used to going first.

“Patience, Agent Wantaugh. We’ll get to the latest, ah, chapter in your saga soon enough.” Morwood looked back at Corrie. “Go ahead.”

Corrie cleared her throat again. Only she and Morwood knew the specific details about the case she’d been investigating. Even Morwood didn’t know all of it. She fervently wished he didn’t have to hear it for the first time in front of all these others.

“As I mentioned in last week’s meeting,” she said, “I investigated a crime scene at a cemetery in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, about eighty miles northeast of here. The cemetery—Pigeon’s Ranch—is a national historic site commemorating a Civil War battlefield, which is why this is a federal case. Upon arrival I found an unearthed grave, containing the iron coffin of a Florence Parkin Regis, who had died in 1862. Her remains were partially disinterred. Lying on top of the coffin was the body of Frank Serban, age fifty-four, of Denver. He had no identification and was later ID’d from prints. He’d been shot twice in the back of the head, execution style, the night before. No evidence of this shooting was found at the scene save for the bullets, which evidently had been fired from a silenced weapon. Serban had a long history of petty crimes.”

As she heard herself talk, Corrie realized she’d been over this ground the week before. When she was nervous she tended to overexplain. She made a conscious effort to pick up the pace.

“Forensic work by myself and the Crime Scene Unit ascertained that Serban had probably unearthed the coffin himself. The top portion of Regis’s remains was removed, the coffin closed, and Serban was shot and left on the coffin lid. Presumably this was a job for hire and he was eliminated as a potential witness.”

So far, so good. Here, Corrie knew, was where it got a little dicey.

“Not all the forensic evidence gathered at the site has been analyzed, but little of value has yet turned up, and it probably will not, beyond the two 9mm rounds. This appears to have been a clean and professional operation. However, when I started widening the parameters of my search, I came across something suggestive. In an effort to link this crime with others of a similar MO, I discovered that in two other cases, graves had been robbed with only the top portion of a corpse removed. One of those was a recently deceased mobster in Joliet, Illinois, named Carmine Scarabone. His grave had been desecrated, the coffin partially removed and his headstone vandalized. The other corpse belonged to Alexander Parkin, who had died in Nelson, New Hampshire, in 1911.”

She glanced at her papers. “In pursuing this MO, I widened the scope of my search. I found that six months ago in Paris, the grave of Thomas Parkin, an American who died in France during the Second World War, had also been disturbed. In that case only the skull was taken. But when I looked more closely, I realized there was an unexpected connection among all three cases.”

Here she paused and looked around. She was both gratified and made anxious to see she had the room’s undivided attention.

“Florence Regis, née Parkin; Alexander Parkin; and Thomas Parkin obviously shared a common surname. I checked census records and a genealogical database, and discovered that, in fact, all three shared a common ancestor as well.”

“What genealogical database might that be?” Morwood asked. “Is this some FBI asset I’m not aware of?”

Corrie paused. She hadn’t mentioned this part to Morwood before. “Uh, no. It’s Ancestry.com, sir.”

The two senior agents in the back exchanged glances. Morwood looked at her in disbelief. “You consulted Ancestry.com?”

Wantaugh tittered.

“I took advantage of it as a tool, a stepping-stone. I know it wouldn’t be admissible as evidence in court, sir.”

She glanced around again. The faces looking back at her were now waiting for the punch line.

“Three days ago, I learned that one Rosalie Parkin, twenty-seven and unmarried, a lawyer in Scottsdale, Arizona, had gone missing. With Agent Morwood’s approval, I went to Scottsdale, liaised with the local police, and examined her apartment. While there was no sign of a struggle, there was a very large amount of blood on the premises. The type matched Rosalie Parkin’s.”

“Any eyewitnesses?” somebody asked.

Corrie’s thoughts flitted briefly to Rosalie’s brother. “No. But the police are now treating it as a criminal missing persons case.”

She paused.

“Go ahead,” Morwood said. “Tell them the rest.”

“I checked, and the missing woman is related to the other three Parkins.”

“Checked on Ancestry.com?” Wantaugh asked.

Corrie decided to ignore this. “They are all descendants from a single line.”

“What about the incident in Joliet?” another junior asked. “The mobster?”

“Unrelated. The individual was not a Parkin relation, and the vandalism was most likely the result of the individual having been a CI.”

“What is your operating hypothesis?” Morwood asked.

“That there is a party or parties out there with a special interest in this particular family line.”

“What kind of interest?” Morwood prompted. This was his modus operandi—pushing and prodding, looking for holes in theories or gaps in investigative method.

“Maybe it’s a descendant,” Wantaugh offered. “With a peculiar collecting hobby.” There was faint laughter in response to this equally faint witticism.

One of the two senior agents shifted in his chair. “If this woman was abducted because of her relation to the disinterred,” he said, “why the sudden change in MO?”

This was the question Corrie had been asking herself, and the one she dreaded. “I don’t have an answer to that yet.”

“Kidnapping is dangerous and risky,” the senior agent continued. “And far more serious than grave robbing.”