The Royal Canadian Mountain Police had extracted a DNA profile from dried sweat residue on the javelins, although the killer had wiped off his fingerprints. Gabriel called the A-Division of RCMP, and an officer informed him that the detective in charge of the case wasn’t in for the day.
With nothing else to do except stare at the ceiling and get frustrated, he called David. As the phone rang, he took a hit from the inhaler.
“I’ve already emailed you the list and was waiting for your thank you call,” David said.
“Hold on, hold on, hold on. You did find a list.”
“Yeah. I also found that Simmons bought a new car in 2017. Does he own a Porsche?”
“I think so. How do you know?”
“He had an import receipt. Some kind man had gifted Simmons the car. But why? For this useless list of people with expunged records?”
“How can you be sure that that list is the one we’re after?”
“Because I randomly picked names from it and searched them in various federal criminal databases. All of those people were once teenage delinquents, and all of them have their dirty histories hidden, courtesy of our system. But why are you asking me all this? Like I said, I’ve already sent you the details.”
“I ask because I didn’t get any.”
“You checked the spam folder?”
Sounded like David was having an evening snack.
“I’ve been sitting in front of my computer for hours, David. I’m sure I didn’t get any email from you.”
“Well, I’ve sent it,” he said, as he munched.
“Where exactly did you send it?”
David read Gabriel’s office email address, for which Gabriel didn’t have access anymore.
“Fuck!”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you use that word. Kind of satisfying to know you aren’t perfect, after all. But why so unhappy?”
Gabriel liked David, and he had no qualms sharing with him the news of his latest joblessness, but it wasn’t the right time. He would need him in the future. Crimes these days couldn’t be solved without IT people.
“Never mind.” Gabriel gave him his personal email address and asked him to send the list there.
On his twentieth refresh, an email popped into his inbox in block letters, with a paperclip symbol at its end. He downloaded the attachment and opened it.
After editing women and persons of color out from the list, Gabriel was left with a thousand names on the spreadsheet. Though he expected that amount, it felt daunting to have to work through them. Then he remembered he had an easier way to curtail the workload. His friends had taken a break from their jobs to help him, hadn’t they?
But before selecting that option, he wanted to try something to save everyone the time, and test their luck. He used a simple spreadsheet formula and compared Simmons’s list with the passenger manifests from Seoul to find repetitions. If there was one, it meant pay dirt.
No hit.
Shit. Gabriel just knew his ghost was someone in Simmons’s list, but the histories of all the people in that file had been hidden. He couldn’t search them, analyze their crimes, or draw a profile for a possible serial killer. Maybe he could check if they had got a rap sheet after turning eighteen. Their killer was cruel, and cruelty rose from anger. If their guy’s anger was untamable, which was evident from the murders, he might have had many records after his juvenile detention, and all Gabriel needed to do was follow the breadcrumbs of increasing violence in his crimes.
But what if their guy had learned to bridle his anger by venting it only in controlled settings? With methodical abduction, torture, and murder?
Even then, Gabriel wouldn’t be disheartened. He could still compare their photos from driver’s licenses, passports, and social media to the suspect sketch from German police.
Gabriel divided the file into three parts, emailed one to Emma, one to Bill, and retained one for himself. Then he called them and explained what they needed to do with the files. He hung up and logged onto the National Crime Information Center. It didn’t let him in, reminding him that he had been ostracized by his police family. While biting his teeth, he used Emma’s credentials.
When Gabriel was just getting into the spirit of research, he got kicked from the server. A dialog box with a hazard symbol popped up with a ding. It read, Session terminated as your account has been logged into a different device!
Gabriel typed Victor’s ID into the NCIC login page, but not the password because he didn’t know it. So he called him and asked for it, but Victor refused, stating that it was against department policy to disclose such sensitive information to civilians.
Then Victor said, “How the hell do you manage to get me gifts on my birthday? Even I don’t remember the occasion, even though I use that date every day.”
“I don’t know. I… just do.”
Gabriel had never given presents to Victor, other than firm handshakes and merry thoughts.
“You’re a good friend, Gabe. It’s not even updated on my Facebook, and yet still you remember it.”
“Okay?”
“Talking about Facebook, I saw the funniest me-me in my feed today about a special character.”
“It’s pronounced meem, Captain.”
“Is it? I’ve been making a fool outta myself all these years, and no one’s corrected me?”
“What’s the funniest meme?” Gabriel understood the game now.
“Do you know what the most unfortunate-looking symbol is?”
“I don’t know, tell me.”
“Ampersand. Because it looks like someone’s dragging their ass along the floor like a dog with bad fleas.” Victor laughed. “Fair warning. Once you see the similarity, you can’t unsee it.”
After Gabriel hung up, he typed 08061968& into the password box and hit enter. A new dialog message popped up—Welcome, Captain Ivansky.
Chapter 25
April 9, 2019. 09:42 P.M.
In four hours, Gabriel had reduced his share of three-hundred-fifty-something entries in Simmons’s list by eighty-two. At this rate, he had to work twelve more hours to finish his interminable file. His ass, knees, neck, and back ached. The mere sight of arid spreadsheets lulled his morose brain to sleep.
If he thought he had been overworking, he had nothing on his MacBook. The keystrokes were warm, so was the aluminum under the heels of his hands. The monitor felt hot as he folded it closed, and the Apple logo on its back glowed an unusual yellow.
Gabriel stood, arched his back, and stretched. Then he grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and headed out. While standing on the empty sidewalk, he took a long sip, the cool liquid welcomed by his parched throat.
Given the risks their killer had taken for animals, and for what he perceived as retribution, it was possible that he was a vegan. If that was the case, then how could someone love animals so much, but be cruel to humans? So cruel as to skin a woman alive? How was it possible that such extreme points of love and hatred amalgamated in the same mind without destroying it?
What was Gabriel thinking? Of course his mind had been destroyed. No person with an intact mind would do what their killer was doing.
Gabriel looked at the end of the street, and then readjusted his focus, which had become blurry from looking at the computer screen for too long.
His precinct stood at the left side of the street corner. It wasn’t that long since he’d been suspended, but it felt like forever. Gabriel missed his dinky office, the machine coffee that tasted a little better than mud, stained floors, the chipped wood of the handrails, and the cop jokes he never laughed at but found amusing nonetheless. He missed them all, wondering if they’d even noticed his absence.
Even though he was something of a star in the NYPD, Gabriel had always been the kind of person that people didn’t know existed until he was absent. Like that lone bird on the windowsill opposite your balcony, always there but never missed until it disappeared one day.
A d
rop of condensation from the bottle fell on his bare foot and brought him back from his reverie. He emptied it, tossed it into a dumpster across the street, and returned to work.
He touched the surface of the MacBook, which wasn’t as hot, but was still warm. While it booted up, Gabriel inhaled from his menthol stick and revised what he had found so far from the crossed-out eighty-two entries.
Although their juvenile records were sealed, the crimes the offenders had committed after turning eighteen had been stored by the government. Adolescent delinquencies harbingered a life of crime. Most of the troublesome youth from the list entered the system again—vandals became carjackers, who in turn became burglars. Burglars became muggers, then robbers, and finally violent robbers who in some cases resorted to murder. Weak became tough, and tough became tougher. The longer they’d been locked inside, the meaner their next crime was, as if the prolonged exposure to the prisons was directly proportional to the severity of their subsequent crimes. There was something seriously wrong with the system, and the correction in correctional facility must be a cruel joke.
But even in this demimonde, no one struck Gabriel as a serial killer. Their crimes were all money, drug, or sex-related. Only a small amount of guys hadn’t let their criminal past follow them into their adulthoods. Not that they’d gotten their acts clean, not by a long shot. When Gabriel checked their financials, he found that these guys didn’t pay taxes because they had no proper incomes. Once every three months, their bank balance saw a sharp hike before falling again, which meant they were still hustling but had gotten smart inside.
After spending an hour with the remaining entries, he closed the laptop. He had a new idea he wanted to experiment with. It wouldn’t work without the omniscient FBI, but Ethan wouldn’t do. He needed someone on active duty.
Madeline answered on the eleventh ring, and Gabriel explained what he wanted.
“So let me get this straight,” Madeline said. “You want my help to search the International Border? You do know that the border we share with our northern neighbor is the longest in the world, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Three hundred thousand people in one hundred fifty thousand cars use it every day. It has more than a hundred crossings.”
Gabriel had done his research before calling her, so listening to it didn’t dissuade him. It was all about ruling out inessential data and working with remnants.
“Our guy got his record expunged at a law firm in the Bronx,” he said.
“Okay?”
“He stole the plates from Albany the day he went to Ottawa and killed Gerald. So I’d wager he was in New York when he made the trip to Canada.”
“You will only check the roads connecting New York and Canada?”
“Uh-huh. Before you lecture me, I know New York shares four hundred fifty miles of the border and sixteen crossings with Canada.”
“Then how will you narrow it down?”
“A camera on Gerald’s street recorded a suspicious vehicle, the one with the stolen plates. With its timestamp and the average time it takes to drive from Gerald’s house to each border crossing, we can derive odd timeframes within which the car must have crossed the selected crossing. I will start with the closest one to Gerald’s house.”
“Still, it would be really congested.”
“I have an idea for that, too. The RCMP found that the javelins stabbed into Gerald’s back were not sold anywhere in Ottawa. So our killer bought them in New York. Before you ask—no, we can’t track them to a shop. Too generic.”
“Then how is it going to help?”
“The Buick Regal is a spacious car, but not long enough to accommodate eight-foot javelins inside the cabin.”
“Wait a minute. You’re just going to fast forward and look for a car with shiny javelins tied to its roof?”
“Yes. Once we get that vehicle in the camera frame, we will look for the passport entry made at that time.”
“Wow… that’s... that’s great. No wonder you caught Mr. Bunny before Conor did.”
Gabriel smiled to himself.
“Too bad he’s sending you to jail,” she added.
The smile became an exasperated breath.
“So what can I do to help?” Madeline said.
“Access to the border cameras.”
“I can’t give you mine.”
“Oh.”
Gabriel was disappointed. He didn’t take Madeline for a bluenose.
“No, I mean, I literally can’t. My ID works only on my laptop.”
“Looks like you are going to search on my behalf.”
“Yuck. I hate such fine-tooth combing. I feel like I’ll get a stroke or something.”
“Or you can lend me your laptop when you come here to return the motorcycle… which should be any minute now.”
“I can’t give you my laptop. I have a job, you know? A job I’d like to keep.” She laughed. “However, I can share my desktop with you. But the price is you letting me use the wheels one more day.”
“Yeah, keep the bike. What do you mean you can share the desktop? I don’t understand.”
“You run Windows OS?”
“Mac.”
“Ugh. Fine, we can still do it.”
Madeline taught Gabriel about remote desktop connections. She guided him on how to connect his MacBook to her laptop with an IP address and a password, after which she showed him how to access the border CCTV footage that was stored categorically in the FBI servers.
Gabriel asked her if he could share the remote desktop connection with Emma and Bill, because six eyes were more productive than two. Madeline permitted, warning him that they shouldn’t get her in trouble.
Gabriel thanked her and hung up. Then he moved the cursor around his desktop screen, which now had the FBI insignia as its wallpaper.
Chapter 26
April 10, 2019. 12:02 A.M.
Gabriel dropped the empty cartons of the Indian he’d ordered for dinner into the trash can. Chicken Tikka might turn out to be a bad idea, but he ought to indulge while he still had a little freedom left. He thanked Madeline for reminding him of that during their last conversation.
Stifling a yawn with the back of his hand, he slid back onto the chair and woke his computer. Before the food delivery girl called him from his doorstep, Gabriel had spent hours chiseling away at Simmons’s list and the border crossing video logs. He spared no effort, but with no result.
Bored out of his wits, he called Ethan.
“I talked to the replacement who handled Mila’s case,” Ethan said. “Looks like he’s vacationing in Hawaii, and his—”
“Shit. Here I was hoping we’re going to get something. You should have let me know,” Gabriel muttered.
“Listen to me fully. His junior is helping me out now.”
“Oh, that’s good. Can he work a little faster? I’ve been waiting for that information all evening.”
“I called him at five. Meaning, it was eleven o’clock in Munich when I woke him up. Now he is giving up his sleep and comfort to get us the immigration records from German bureaucracy. All of which he didn’t have to do, I’d like to point out. Why are you in a hurry?”
Gabriel felt a pang of guilt. “I just need to arrest the killer fast and lock him up before he hurts someone else.” Before I go to jail.
“So it’s purely public service?”
“Yes. It’s for the people.” When he said it out loud, it did feel a little like bullshit.
“Yeah, sure. So anyway, how are things going at the border?”
Gabriel pledged he would never divulge anything to that blabbermouth Madeline ever again.
“The crossings either have four or six booths, and each booth has two cameras. When I get bored watching the endless stream of vehicles, I switch over to Simmons’s list. It’s overwhelming to keep track of my progression, and I still have days of work ahead of me.”
“It sounds like a bitch, yet you’re squealing like a kid on a b
ounce house.”
“What about you? It’s past midnight, but you’re sober. Seems like we both love our jobs. Too bad they aren’t ours anymore.”
Ethan laughed. “Keep checking your inbox, Chase.”
* * *
Gabriel was watching the banal traffic move at the pace of an old snail on Ogdensburg–Prescott International Bridge. It was the most likely of crossings their killer would have used if he’d driven from NYC to Ottawa via Albany. It had been two hours since Ethan hung up, and Gabriel went back to the grind, but the inbox stayed untroubled.
Just as Gabriel’s fidgety impatience had overpowered his shame and convinced him to call Ethan again, his laptop chimed. He disconnected the call and downloaded a huge attachment. Not wasting a microsecond, he opened the folder when it was ready.
It was the data on every white American who’d traveled to Germany the week Mila was murdered. As a compliment, or as a punishment, the agent had also attached another monstrous list of American expats who lived in Bavaria around the same time. Gabriel opened the first file named Stamped Passports. He could see only twenty rows, but he knew the list was bottomless. And he didn’t even want to imagine that he would be required to go through them all.
Then he brought up Han’s list and compared it with the new file. Due to the large size of the data from Germany, the spreadsheet took its time to search for repeated entities, and Gabriel hoped his computer wouldn’t freeze. It didn’t, but the search returned zero results.
Gabriel deflated. He really believed this was going to be it. As his heart sunk, he felt a spark of hope.
Wait a minute!
He also had the list from David, didn’t he? To prevent the plunge of heart again, he reminded himself that if the search didn’t yield anything, then that wasn’t the end either. He still had the border videos from Canada. One way or another, he would find the guy.
He compared the German immigration file to the list of people Simmons had helped with expungement. While the software worked its magic, he bit his knuckles and tapped his feet.
Please…
Gabriel jerked when a dialog box popped up on the screen. With one result. His pulse accelerated. Static electricity jolted from his underbelly, traveled through his body, and made the hair on it stand up.
Inhuman: Detective Chase hunts an animal who protects his own Page 15
