[2017] The Extraction

by Steven F Freeman

  Okafor called me just after lunchtime that day.

  “Wyatt Thorne’s an I.T. geek all right,” she said, unable to mask the tremble in her voice. “You ready to roll?”

  I donned my shoulder holster and tucked in my Glock 22 as I spoke. “Tell me where to meet you.”

  A trio of Atlanta SWAT team members in full body armor smashed down the door to Thorne’s second-floor apartment without warning, ushering in two rows of teammates who filled the apartment within seconds. Per the instructions of Lieutenant Gwinn, the SWAT team commander, Okafor and I held back as his team cleared the unit to the sound of a yapping dog.

  Moments later, Gwinn appeared at the door. “He’s not here.”

  Okafor and her forensics teams entered, while I brought up the rear.

  Donning latex gloves, I paused at the entrance to each room, gathering details. This raid could turn out to be a bust. Perhaps Thorne wasn’t the offender, in which case I’d have major egg on my face. But better to be embarrassed than give this nut job time to hunt down more victims.

  We conducted our individual searches in silence for five minutes. In the kitchen, a beagle puppy clawed at its cage and barked at the intruders. This pup and the Santa outfit combined were probably the bait Thorne used to lure girls into his car.

  “Look here!” cried Okafor’s voice from the master bedroom.

  Her crew and I convened on the spot. She stood at the entrance to a spacious walk-in closet.

  “Look back there.” She moved aside so we could enter.

  She had already pulled the string of a ceiling bulb, sending light throughout the space. At the back of the closet hung a Santa Claus suit marred by steaks of dirt. An artificial set of white hair and beard completed the outfit.

  “Jesus…” I began.

  “That’s not all,” interjected Okafor. “Look in the back corner.”

  Okafor had pulled out the bottom drawer of a metal filing cabinet and removed a couple of polo shirts. Exposed was a neat stack of dog cones resting next to three or four packages of girls’ underwear. Behind those items were three baggies of human hair. DNA matching later proved it belonged to the victims, trophies Thorne could use to relive the events in his mind.

  Maybe other cops became accustomed to moments like this, but I never did. My face grew hot with rage. “Where’s Thorne now? At work?”

  “Good question,” said Okafor. “Let’s go see.”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  She turned to a sergeant, who replied, “Main post office branch, downtown.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” I replied.

  Back then, my Malibu worked just fine. But at that moment, it couldn’t go fast enough to suit me. More than any other time in my career, I wanted to see this guy busted. And while I’ve never tolerated rough police conduct, the frontier-justice side of me hoped that Thorne would try to escape and be shot. Given the abundance of evidence in his closet, there remained no question that he was the killer.

  Half an hour later, I trailed Okafor as she took long strides through the post office’s main lobby.

  She flashed her badge to the worker manning the information desk. “I need to see one of your I.T. employees.”

  The elderly lady, whose flaccid features seemed incapable of moving, raised a bushy eyebrow and motioned towards a faded wooden door that looked to have been installed during the Eisenhower administration. “I’ll buzz you through. Elevator’s on the left. Third floor. Should I tell them you’re on the way?”

  “No,” replied the detective through tight lips. “Let’s just keep this between us.”

  After Okafor left a pair of officers at the stairs, the rest of us took the elevator. She showed me a picture on her cellphone. “Here’s Thorne’s driver’s license photo.”

  The stocky face bordered by strawberry-blond locks hardly looked capable of murdering young girls. But then again, who the hell does?

  We approached the I.T. room with weapons drawn. This time, Okafor entered first.

  Racks of servers occupied most of the space. At the front of the room, a pair of cubicles with powerful workstations had been carved out to accommodate the meager staff.

  An African-American fellow wearing a pin-striped button down stared intently at his monitor, unaware of our entrance.

  Okafor lowered her handgun. “Excuse me,” she called.

  “Yes?” replied the techie, still studying his screen. Not receiving a reply, he turned around and froze.

  “Do you know Wyatt Thorne?” asked the detective.

  “Sure, he sits right here next to me.” His eyes flickered from Okafor’s handgun to the uniformed officers standing behind her. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “You could say that. Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He left about an hour ago.”

  “Do you know where he was going?”

  “Let me think…”

  We waited an agonizing ten seconds.

  “Oh, yeah. I remember now,” said the techie at last. “He got an alert from Watermark. That’s the security company that monitors his place. He said he was going to go check it out.”

  “How did you know it was Watermark? Did they call?”

  “No. He has a special chime on his phone for their alerts.”

  “What kind of alerts?” I asked.

  “Like if someone trips the motion detectors when the system is armed. I heard it last month when he accidentally left his dog out of its cage.”

  “You said he left an hour ago,” said Okafor. “Did he say when he was coming back?”

  “No, he didn’t say anything at all. He just did something on his workstation for a minute and took off. That’s why it took me a second to put together what happened.”

  I hurried over to the man’s desk. Not surprisingly for a tech guy’s computer, the icons for two dozen applications lined the system tray at the bottom of his screen. I toggled between them until spotting one called Watermark, then expanded it.

  A live feed from his apartment showed the forensics team still there, dusting for prints and using hydrophilic adhesive tape to gather fiber samples.

  Okafor caught my gaze. We both knew what this meant. Thorne was on the run.

  CHAPTER 36

  “He outsmarted us, dammit,” I gasped to Okafor as we ran back to our cars in the post office parking lot. “He had this failsafe set up, probably from day one. I should have anticipated something like this from someone as organized as Thorne.”

  “But where will he go?”

  “Out of the country, if I had to guess. To somewhere that won’t extradite U.S. citizens, at least those who’d face the death penalty.”

  “After nine eleven, won’t he attract suspicion if he’s traveling without luggage?”

  “If he went to these extremes to protect himself, I’m sure he took care of that long ago, too. He probably has a suitcase in his trunk.”

  “So where do we look?”

  “Hartsfield. What better place to lose yourself than the world’s busiest airport? Plus, his chances of evading capture are best if he boards a plane now, before his image is plastered at every boarding gate in the southeast.”

  “What about an I.D.?”

  “He’s a tech guy. He could dummy up a passport and a credit card, too. Being a planner, he’s probably already set up a fake frequent-flier account in his dummy name. That way he could book a last-minute flight, no questions asked. And there’d be no credit-card trail in his real name to track his movements.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” said Okafor, not nearly as breathless as I. “Jump in my car. We’ll plan out a dragnet on the way.”

  Despite our best efforts, we never caught a glimpse of Thorne again. It’s like he evaporated out of the city. Two days after he fled the country, Bev Williams’ computers spotted his face in archived security-camera footage from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. This was in the early days of facial-recognition software, when direct feeds of
surveillance video to law-enforcement’s computer algorithms didn’t exist.

  As expected, Thorne booked and boarded a flight using an alias, Sandy Belasco. And it came as no surprise that a planner like him picked out Indonesia, knowing the country had no extradition treaty with the U.S. As a side benefit of this choice, he could more than likely resume his grisly pursuits among the archipelago’s thousands of remote islands.

  Odds are we’d never catch Thorne, but a sense of morbid fascination led me to research his background…to discover what kind of environment bred such a monster. This wasn’t completely a case of scratching a curious itch. Once a serial criminal is identified, an important final step of the profiling process is to compare my personality and behavior predictions against the newly revealed truth. Only in that way can I assess to what extent my profiling helped track him down.

  Thorne grew up in a lower-to-middle-class class home in Detroit. When he was thirteen, his parents moved to Atlanta to work at the airport, leaving him alone much of the time. Neighbors reported he abused the family dog for years to entertain himself during these lonely hours.

  Having no friends at his rough, south-side high school, Thorne withdrew into himself. The diversions of gaming and manga eventually grew to obsessions. The common theme in his versions of these pursuits was control. Gaining control over his life comprised his largest goal yet smallest achievement.

  So he sought out control in alternate ways. To the sociopath, the feelings or even lives of others aren’t a consideration. Only maximizing one’s personal pleasure counts. After months of planning, the control fantasies he’d entertained for years became realities. And the police taunting added more flavor to the recipe, a chance to dominate not only his victims but also authorities. The laptop he’d been forced to abandon at his apartment contained drafts of a dozen more poems he planned to leave for police investigators with the bodies of future victims. Thank God he never had a chance to use them.

  It tore me up that we were never able to catch Thorne. And in a way, this case proved key to ending my career as a profiler. By then, I’d seen some messed-up shit, but this took depravity to a whole new, basement-dwelling level. What people don’t tell you is that this exposure exacts a toll from your soul. The essence of criminal profiling is thinking like the killer—working backward from the evidence to deduce what kind of person would commit crimes in a specific way. But with that immersion comes a risk: not being able to break above the water’s surface and breath the air of the normal world again, instead recycling the poisonous vapors your mind exhales. How long can you immerse yourself in the world of these twisted fuckers before you become one yourself? And if you don’t completely lose yourself, you risk becoming deadened to much of the beauty and gentleness the world has to offer. So the Thorne case turned out to be the second-to-last one I worked before retiring from the FBI, the case that convinced me I was approaching a crisis point beyond which I’d never be able to return.

  CHAPTER 37

  In the parking lot of the condemned Brookdale building, I freeze. A shiver runs through my torso, but not simply because of the chilly breeze working its way into my shirt.

  In the fifteen seconds since Sampson mentioned the importance of the latest clue’s phrasing, the case details have flashed through my consciousness, a high-speed collage of events and emotions.

  “Geez, Grinder,” says Sampson. “You look like you just saw a ghost,” “What is it?”

  I smooth down the paper with the latest clue onto the hood of her Camry and read it again.

  A jolly good time can be had

  Even by those who are bad

  The treats in their cones

  Serve to nourish one’s bones

  And makes one a happier lad

  “Where is the next box?” you wonder

  I’ve gone and hid it down under

  Where athletes win gold

  And flesh gathers mold

  And machinery roars like the thunder.

  “I think I know who this is.”

  “A British guy?”

  “No. Wyatt Thorne.”

  The color leaves her face. The Thorne case took its toll on her, too—just not enough to make her quit.

  To her credit, she doesn’t let the news distract her. With a swallow, she asks, “Why do you say that?”

  “We were thinking ‘jolly good time’ sounded like a British expression, right? It’s not. Who’s the jolliest person everyone knows? Santa Claus.”

  She nods but doesn’t look convinced. “Could be.”

  “And then there’s the rest of the first stanza. ‘The treats in their cones’ sounds like ice cream, right? Well, it’s not. For Thorne, the ‘treats’ were his victims, which he outfitted with dog cones when he raped and killed them. And ‘bones’ isn’t a reference to parts of his skeleton. Rather, it’s his erect member, the boner he had while committing his crimes. And the clincher is that he used to write his own poems, remember? The ones he left with the second and third vics.”

  “Jesus, you’re right.” She studies the note a few seconds more. “The second stanza is the one that’s supposed to tell us where the next box is. But what does it mean?”

  “I’m not sure about that yet.”

  I read it again.

  “Where is the next box?” you wonder

  I’ve gone and hid it down under

  Where athletes win gold

  And flesh gathers mold

  And machinery roars like the thunder.

  “‘Hid it down under,’” she repeats. “Does that mean in Australia?”

  I rub my chin. “If it wasn’t for the very first note, the one that set up this whole scavenger hunt, I’d say yes. After all, Australia is a lot closer to Indonesia than the U.S. But whoever’s behind this would have to know there’s no way I could make it there in twenty-four hours, so I don’t think the next box is there.”

  “So Thorne has snuck back into the U.S.?”

  “Not necessarily. The other notes referenced perps who were either still in jail or dead. We know they didn’t plant all these clue boxes. But I guess it’s possible Thorne is here. Somebody had to leave the clues.” I realize I’m drifting off topic. “If he has managed to sneak back into the U.S., we’re not going to be able to track him down in the next…” I check my watch. “Three hours and fifty minutes. We’ve got to turn our attention to finding the next box—the last one.”

  We resume our study of the second stanza. Between the concussion and the stress of Trin’s looming deadline, the edges of my concentration blur. No ideas come to mind.

  Focus, Decimus!

  “‘Machinery roars like the thunder’,” I quote. “Thorne’s place was pretty close to I-75. Do you think it’s talking about highway noise?”

  Sampson shrugged. “Could be. I have to admit, I’m stumped on this one.”

  “Me, too. But I’d rather go check it out than sit here staring at this paper.”

  “In the meantime,” says Sampson, “why don’t I go back to HQ and look up the site of each of his victims? Maybe one of them is near a factory or something else with a lot of machinery.”

  “Good idea. And maybe look to see if there have been any new mentions of Thorne or the ‘Santa Claws’ killer recently.”

  “Will do.”

  “Let me know what you find out.” I glance at the agents standing by, waiting for my former colleague’s instructions. “Any chance I can bum a car off of one of these guys? Mine’s back in the trailer park.”

  “Take mine,” replied Sampson. “Only…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Um…are you good to drive? I don’t know if you’ve seen yourself, but you’re a mess. And you just woke up from a concussion a little while ago, right?”

  “I have a headache, but I’m okay.”

  “Hang on.” She turns to one of the agents. “I need your cellphone. Don’t worry. You’ll get it back later.” She hands me the borrowed phone and her car keys. “You remember my c
ell number, right?”

  “Yeah. And Sampson…thanks, for everything.”

  I pocket the phone and jump into her Toyota. Pulling out of the parking lot, I glance at my watch. My fiancée has three hours and forty-five minutes to live.

  CHAPTER 38

  The location of Willow Manor, Thorne’s former apartment complex, is one of the many pieces of information from my profiler days that I’ll never forget. Besides, it’s on a major road—hard to miss.

  The drive to Marietta, the northwest suburb in which it’s located, will require a good half hour, maybe forty-five minutes…time Trin doesn’t have. But what’s the alternative? If I hadn’t made educated guesses about the location of the earlier boxes, I wouldn’t have found even the second one yet.

  Once I pull onto I-75 and merge into the fast lane, my mind ruminates on Wyatt Thorne. With him now in the picture, the whole ordeal of Trin’s kidnapping begins to fall into place.

  Back when Thorne fled the country, Detective Okafor gave my name to the papers, said I provided the insight that broke open the case. To her credit, she did so out of a spirit of fairness, of giving credit where credit is due to media outlets frantic for updates on the “Santa Claws” case. But now it looks like she inadvertently centered me in this psycho’s crosshairs.

  Thorne had to be behind it. The kidnapping played to his need to control events and wield power over others. And unlike the criminals referenced in the earlier clues, he wasn’t incarcerated or dead. The guy was an I.T. geek. After fleeing the country, he could have hacked into the security cameras of the Atlanta FBI building to learn where in the building I worked and traveled.

  Certainly friends and family members of the other criminals could be involved to the extent of writing poems and providing case details, but the mastermind behind the entire project now appeared to be Thorne. He might have organized it and enlisted the help of angry family and friends of the criminals I’d previously helped catch. Oswald Pritchard, my former chief suspect, could have dispersed the boxes to their various hiding places. The two men shared a penchant for organization and cunning.