The Poet

Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, learns that his twin brother Sean McEvoy, a homicide detective with Denver PD, has shot himself at Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Sean left a message written backward on his fogged windshield: "Out of space. Out of time" (12). The death is ruled a suicide, attributed to Sean's obsessive pursuit of the killer of Theresa Lofton, a University of Denver student found strangled, mutilated, and severed at the midriff in Washington Park. Sean had been secretly seeing a psychologist about depression caused by the case.

After Sean's funeral in Boulder, near the grave of their sister Sarah, who drowned as a child falling through the ice at Bear Lake, Jack takes two weeks off to grieve. He returns to work and tells his city editor, Greg Glenn, that he wants to write about his brother's death. Glenn approves. Jack gains access to the sealed police file on Sean's death and persuades Sean's partner, Detective Harold Wexler, to let him review the Lofton murder files. The last entry in Sean's case records notes a meeting with an informant identified only as "RUSHER."

The turning point comes when Jack reads a New York Times article about Chicago detective John Brooks, who killed himself after failing to solve the murder of twelve-year-old Bobby Smathers. Brooks left a note quoting Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Haunted Palace": "Through the pale door" (79). Jack connects "RUSHER" to Poe's character Roderick Usher and discovers that Sean's farewell is a line from Poe's poem "Dream-Land." Two supposed cop suicides, both quoting the same author, cannot be coincidence.

Glenn refuses to fund travel until Jack produces harder evidence. Jack returns to Bear Lake and establishes that the park ranger was out of sight of Sean's car long enough for someone hiding in the backseat to escape. He then argues to Wexler that the fogged windshield proves a second person was in the car, since the heater was off. The decisive proof comes when Jack finds the rear security lock of Sean's impounded car disengaged, a state the habitually cautious Sean would never have allowed. Wexler accepts that Sean was murdered, and Denver PD reopens the case.

Meanwhile, a parallel storyline follows William Gladden, a convicted child molester released from Florida's Raiford prison on a legal technicality. Gladden photographs children at the Santa Monica Pier, is arrested under a false identity, and is released on bail arranged by attorney Arthur Krasner, whose name Gladden found on a pedophile network's referral board. Gladden is desperate to keep police from his car, whose trunk holds a laptop containing incriminating photographs.

Jack flies to Chicago and convinces Detective Lawrence Washington, Brooks's former partner, that Brooks was also murdered. Washington reveals his own suspicion, based on two shots fired at the scene: one fatal, one to plant gunshot residue on the victim's hand. Chicago's Major Investigations Unit reopens the case. In Washington, D.C., Jack seeks access to the Law Enforcement Foundation's police suicide database but is denied without FBI approval. Michael Warren, the foundation's public affairs director and a former L.A. Times reporter, secretly helps Jack copy the relevant files after hours. Working through the night with the files and a volume of Poe's complete works, Jack identifies four additional victims: detectives in Albuquerque, Dallas, Sarasota, and Baltimore, each of whom left a note quoting Poe. He now has six confirmed cases of murdered detectives, all linked by the same poet.

FBI Agent Rachel Walling of the Behavioral Science Services unit intercepts Jack at his hotel and, after a tense confrontation, reveals the FBI has independently identified five of the six cases and dubbed the killer "the Poet." At Quantico, Jack negotiates with Assistant Special Agent in Charge Bob Backus: in exchange for complete access as an observer, Jack will withhold the story until the investigation concludes. At the first status meeting, Agent Brasilia "Brass" Doran presents the emerging theory that one killer commits "bait" murders of children to draw out homicide detectives, who then become the true targets. The team hypothesizes the Poet controls veteran detectives through hypnosis enhanced by chemical suppressants.

The investigation diverts to Phoenix after a seventh victim, Detective William Orsulak, is found. Forensic examination reveals pinprick marks on Orsulak's hand consistent with hypnosis testing. Rachel discovers shattered car glass near the crime scene, leading to a stolen car stereo traced to a Hertz rental registered under an alias linked to Gladden. Florida agents discover that the Sarasota victim, Detective Clifford Beltran, had been a Best Pals volunteer, part of a Big Brothers-type program, who sponsored the young Gladden, establishing Beltran as Gladden's childhood abuser. A taunting fax from the Poet to Backus confirms the connection. Jack and Rachel begin a romantic relationship during this period.

The L.A. Times breaks the story after Warren uses the information to write his own article. Jack files competing stories for the Rocky but is pulled off the byline, his editor arguing that a reporter who has become part of the story cannot also cover it. The investigation converges on Los Angeles, where Gladden is identified through rental car records. The FBI discovers Gladden has ordered a replacement digital camera at a store on Pico Boulevard and plans an elaborate sting: Agent Gordon Thorson, Rachel's ex-husband, will pose as the clerk while a critical response team waits to arrest Gladden.

The sting goes catastrophically wrong. Gladden arrives disguised as a woman and recognizes the setup. He drives a knife into Thorson's throat, seizes Thorson's gun, and takes Jack hostage. After the response team throws a concussion grenade through the window, Jack lunges for the weapon. In the struggle it discharges twice, clipping Jack's hand and fatally striking Gladden. Before dying, Gladden tells Jack he killed his "brother" to save him "from becoming like me" (412–413), a statement Jack later realizes referred to one of the child victims, not Sean.

FBI specialists crack Gladden's laptop, finding photographs of child victims and records of sales through a bulletin board called the PTL (Pre-Teen Love) Network, operated from Raiford prison by Gladden's former cellmate Horace Gomble, a former hypnotist who taught Gladden trance techniques. But Jack, brooding over inconsistencies, including phone calls placed from Thorson's hotel room to both the PTL Network and Warren, constructs an erroneous theory that Rachel is the Poet. He presents this theory to Backus, who agrees to set a trap at a wired house in the Hollywood Hills.

At the house, Backus reveals himself as the true Poet. He explains that he learned of Gladden during a prison interview project years earlier, then used Gladden's crimes as cover while murdering homicide detectives across the country. Backus forces Jack to swallow codeine and begins hypnotic induction. Rachel, who grew suspicious and followed Backus instead of boarding her plane, bursts in and confronts him at gunpoint. In the firefight, Jack shoves his chair into Backus, and Rachel's shot sends him crashing through the rear glass wall into the canyon below. Despite an extensive search, Backus's body is not found. Months later, decomposed remains with his identification surface in a drainage tunnel, but the body cannot be conclusively identified, and many in the bureau believe Backus staged the discovery.

Jack remains in Los Angeles on leave, writing a book about the case. He places most of the proceeds in trust for the unborn child of Sean and Sean's wife Riley. Rachel, placed on desk duty pending review, takes leave and goes to Italy. Jack waits to hear from her but receives no word, haunted by his failure to trust the person he wanted most and by the conviction that Backus, who styled himself the Eidolon, is still alive somewhere in the darkness.