by James Swain
Nicki took them through the rest of the photos of her recuperation. They showed each day of Nicki’s recovery in which she seemed to regain her strength and facial color and included her friends from school and her chaperones, all of whom were female. Whatever doubts that Lancaster had harbored about Nicki’s story were put to rest.
The last photo showed Nicki and her classmates at Charles de Gaulle airport, preparing to board their flight home. Nicki looked better than in the previous photos, but she had yet to fully recover. The booze had done a real number on her, and Lancaster didn’t doubt the claim that she hadn’t had a drop to drink since.
“Do you believe me now?” Nicki asked.
He was beaten, his theory of what had happened in Paris in flames.
“Yes, Nicki. I believe you,” he said.
“Can I go upstairs to my room?” she asked her parents.
Melanie said yes. Nicki exited the collection of photos and left the study. Lancaster could feel the weight of her parents’ stares. They wanted to know why he’d put them through this torture. He didn’t have a good answer and decided to stall them. An image on the iPad’s screen caught his eye. He sat down in the leather chair and clicked on it. The photo was of Nicki taken several years ago, when she was maybe nine or ten years old. With her was a woman who could have been Nicki’s identical twin, aged twenty years. The resemblance was uncanny. They were facially the same, right down to their smiles. The older woman wore a black windbreaker with the initials FBI stenciled in white above the breast pocket.
“Who is this?” he asked.
He got no answer, and lifted his head to see that he was alone. He picked up the iPad and went into the foyer. Melanie had gone upstairs to talk to her daughter while Pearl stood at the foot of the stairs wearing a worried expression.
“This is very upsetting,” Pearl said. “I’m not sure what we accomplished here.”
“We’ve actually accomplished a great deal.” He pointed at the female in the black windbreaker in the photo. “Who is this woman with your daughter?”
“That’s my sister-in-law, Beth.”
“Is she with the FBI?”
“That’s correct. She works out of Quantico.”
“Excuse me, but why didn’t you ask for her help with this situation? The FBI’s resources are unlimited.”
“Melanie and Beth don’t have much of a relationship. Beth was interning with the FBI when she was a senior in college. She was at the Pentagon on 9/11 and lost several friends. She took exception when I took the job in Dubai.”
“Do she and her sister talk?”
“Not in years.”
“What’s your sister-in-law’s full name?”
“Elizabeth Daniels. Everyone calls her Beth.”
Melanie appeared at the top of the stairs and beckoned to her husband to join her. Pearl started up the stairs and turned to him. “If Nicki didn’t create these pornographic videos, then who did?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Pearl. I thought Nicki filmed herself and put them there, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Then where did they come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nolan, please,” Melanie called from the second floor.
Pearl hurried up the stairs. Lancaster returned the iPad to the study and went outside to his car. He knew that he’d found something important, even if he didn’t entirely understand what it was. Sitting behind the wheel, he used his cell phone to get on Google and did a search on Elizabeth Daniels, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Several dozen links came up, mostly of cases that Daniels had worked on that had been covered by the media. She’d had a spectacular career with arrests of serial killers and human-trafficking rings. An article from the Boston Globe dated seven years ago caught his eye, and he clicked on it. It featured a photo of Daniels leading a group of FBI agents in a bust of a child-trafficking ring. The article stated that underage girls were being trafficked from Mexico to Boston to be used as prostitutes, the operation generating $1 million a month. Daniels was quoted in the article thanking the Boston police for helping bring the traffickers to justice. Her title was mentioned, and his eyes grew wide. Special Agent Elizabeth Daniels ran the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children unit, and was responsible for the FBI’s ongoing fight against sexual predators.
CHAPTER 25
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
He went home and did a deep dive on Beth Daniels.
Outside of the newspaper articles chronicling her FBI busts, there wasn’t a lot of information about her. She didn’t have a Facebook page, and her name didn’t come up on any of the public record search sites. He checked to see if she owned a home in Virginia near Quantico where she worked. That also drew a blank.
He read the many newspaper articles in hopes a nugget of information might turn up, but they weren’t much help. He supposed he could have called Melanie and started asking questions, but couldn’t make himself do it. He’d been hired to figure this damn thing out, and asking her sister to fill in the blanks was cheating.
Several of the newspaper articles contained dramatic photographs of Daniels standing at a podium fielding reporters’ questions. She had a real presence, and it came through in every shot. She was a force to be reckoned with.
Daniels was not the only FBI agent in the photos. She had a team, and they stood behind her in each of the shots. Three men and one female. No names were given. If he could find out who one of them was, perhaps they’d lead him to Daniels.
He went back through the articles to see if any of the agents were quoted. After many hours of looking, he finally found a name. In the Boston Globe story about the bust of the child traffickers, Special Agent Heidi Winkler gave a brief statement. He decided that Winkler was the lone female he’d seen in the newspaper photos.
He did an online search on Winkler, hoping she’d lead him to Daniels. She, too, had her information hidden, except on her Facebook page. Winkler had two toddlers, a boy and a girl, and posted cute photos of them at every opportunity. There was no mention on her Facebook page that she worked for the FBI.
Winkler had 120 Facebook friends. The friends section had a search engine, and on a hunch he typed in the name “Beth” and hit “Enter.” Winkler had only one friend named Beth, and her name was Beth Skye. Her profile picture was of a sunset. He clicked on it, and, like magic, Beth Skye’s page popped up.
He started to read. There was scant personal information on Beth Skye’s page. She lived in Virginia and had graduated from Dartmouth and that was it. But there were postings from friends, and by scrolling through them, he learned that she was an avid runner, a reader of mystery and thriller novels, and that she lived with two Doberman pinschers, Max and Danny, who accompanied her on her runs. There was also a posting between Heidi and Beth about going to a pistol range to practice target shooting.
The photos section wasn’t much help. Mostly photographs of sunsets and/or her running with her dogs, her face hidden from the camera. In one she was accompanied by a man in running shorts whose face was also hidden. He guessed this was her boyfriend.
He clicked on her favorites pages, and learned that she liked music by Linkin Park and Depeche Mode and her favorite books were Red Dragon, Whoever Fights Monsters, and The Hanover Killers. He knew the first two books. Red Dragon was a novel by Thomas Harris that had introduced the character Hannibal Lecter, and Whoever Fights Monsters was FBI agent Robert Ressler’s chilling account of his tracking the country’s most notorious serial killers. The last book, The Hanover Killers, was new to him.
There was nothing else on Beth Skye’s Facebook page. He exited Facebook, and went to Google, where he did a search of The Hanover Killers and discovered that it was a self-published book about the unsolved murders of two female college students that had taken place at Dartmouth College in the winter of 1999. The book had been written by a reporter named Mike Salinero, who’d covered the story for a local paper called the Valley News. The book was available on Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords in both paperback and e-book editions. Beth Skye’s page had said that she’d gone to Dartmouth, and he wondered if she was somehow connected to this case.
On his Kindle, he ordered the e-book edition of The Hanover Killers. A message on the page thanked him for his purchase and told him that the book was in the process of downloading.
He tucked his Kindle under his arm and went to the kitchen and poured himself an iced tea. He’d lost track of the time and saw that it was five o’clock. He’d spent the better part of his day trying to figure out how Special Agent Beth Daniels fit into this confusing puzzle, and his instincts told him he was getting close. In the living room, he put his drink on the coffee table, sat down on the couch, and started to read.
Dartmouth was one of the country’s most prestigious research universities and a member of the Ivy League. Tucked away in the sleepy burg of Hanover in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley, it was a leader in medicine, engineering, and business, a place of higher learning where nothing exciting ever happened.
That had all changed on a bitterly cold Saturday evening in late January 1999. An eighteen-year-old student named Phoebe Linkletter was working a part-time job at Banana Republic at the local mall, and phoned her roommate to say she’d meet her at a popular watering hole called the Canoe Club after she got off work. When Phoebe didn’t show up at the arranged time, her roommate called the police. Three days later, Phoebe’s naked, mutilated body was found in a wooded area on the outskirts of town. The Dartmouth police conducted an investigation and hauled in Phoebe’s boyfriend, whom she’d broken up with right before the holidays. The boyfriend had a rock-solid alibi for the night of the killing, and was released.
One week later, an eighteen-year-old exchange student named Naseema Agarwai went missing. Naseema had gone to her part-time job at a yoga studio in a strip mall, and never returned to her apartment a half mile away. Two days later, her naked and disfigured body was found in a field behind the Hood Museum of Art. The crime scene was identical to the Linkletter killing, right down to the way Naseema’s body was displayed like a snow angel on the frozen ground. Believing they might be dealing with a serial killer, the police contacted the Manchester office of the FBI and asked for their help. The FBI sent two seasoned field agents to work the investigation. While the agents were on campus conducting interviews with friends and classmates of the victims, a third student was abducted. She was a sophomore named Beth Daniels, and her miraculous escape from her kidnappers would earn her the title of “The one that got away.”
Daniels was walking from class to her apartment complex when two men wearing black ski masks jumped out from behind a hedge. They began wrestling with her and tried to tie her up. Beth put up a hell of a fight, and she landed some serious blows before being subdued and thrown in the trunk of a dark sedan. In their haste to escape, her abductors did not slam the trunk with enough force, and it did not properly close. It had been a harsh winter with lots of ice, and the roads in Hanover were filled with potholes. Several miles outside of town on a quiet two-lane road, the sedan hit a pothole so hard it popped the trunk open. The jolt also woke Beth up.
“At first, I didn’t know where I was. All I could see was bright blue sky, and I started wondering if I’d died and gone to heaven,” Daniels later told the newspaper. “Then the trunk started to close and the sky disappeared. It was so scary.”
Daniels stuck her foot out and stopped the trunk from closing. The sedan had slowed down, and she decided to take her chance. Her wrists were tied behind her back, so she struggled to pull herself to a sitting position, then managed to get her feet beneath her. With the sedan still moving, she jumped out and rolled across the macadam, dislocating her shoulder and chipping two front teeth. Then she got up and fled into the woods. The sedan had pulled over, and her abductors ran after her.
“They chased me for a while, and I could hear their breathing,” Daniels was quoted as saying. “Whenever the breathing got closer, I made myself run faster. The ground was slippery, and I heard one of them fall and his partner fall on top of him. I stopped and turned around. I looked right at them, and I cursed them. Then I took off.”
With that, the killings at Dartmouth had ended. No more coeds disappeared, and life returned to normal. The FBI sent a special team to Hanover to take over the case. The team had a profiler who determined that the killers either lived in the area or had spent a great deal of time in town. This conclusion was based upon the killers’ use of back roads and geographical knowledge of the campus. Hanover had a population of seventeen thousand, and two strangers would have been noticed. The killers were local.
This revelation had sent a chill through the community. If the killers lived in the area, who were they? Did they work at the campus or in town? Perhaps they were public employees and worked at the post office or sanitation department. Or maybe they were students or teachers. It could have been anyone.
During her tussle with her abductors, Beth had managed to rake her fingernails across one of the men’s faces. The police forensics department had gotten a tiny piece of this skin from Beth, and turned it over to the FBI, who had run it against a database of known serial killers. It had turned up nothing, and everyone had forgotten about it. But then an unusual thing happened. Men living in Hanover came to the police department and gave samples of hair or saliva so that their DNA could be run against the abductor’s. The men did this to clear themselves so that their friends and family would know they were not one of the monsters that had taken two innocent young lives.
Within a week, over a thousand men were cleared. At the end of two weeks, the number was three thousand. And by week three, every single male in Hanover who wasn’t in a nursing home, lying in a hospital bed, or in jail had been tested and cleared. If the killers were locals, they had done a good job of rendering themselves invisible.
And that was how the book ended, with a giant question mark hanging over the town and its people, the case unsolved, the killers never brought to justice. In the epilogue, the author had speculated as to who the killers might be. He’d also interviewed Beth Daniels, who was a senior at Dartmouth at the time of the book’s writing. Her life had gone back to normal, except for one thing. She no longer wished to be a research scientist, and had decided to study criminology and enter into law enforcement.
He’d found Special Agent Beth Daniels.
He placed his Kindle on the coffee table and stared into space. The pieces of the puzzle were swirling around, and he was having a hard time fitting them together. Daniels looked like Nicki, just older, and she also looked like Cassandra on the lewd videos he’d watched. He’d come to the conclusion that Nicki hadn’t created the videos because there was no time in her young life to have slipped away from her parents and done so. Someone else had created and posted them on the internet sites visited by perverts.
It felt like a cleverly constructed sting. Put tantalizing videos of a pretty teenager on the internet and draw the scum out from beneath their rocks. The FBI was masterful at setting up stings, and he could see them orchestrating this. If that was true, then Beth Daniels was certainly behind it, since this was her turf. But why had she gone and used her niece as bait? Daniels was in the business of catching sexual predators, and would have surely known the danger she was putting Nicki in.
He didn’t know the answer and decided to find out. Soon he was on his laptop searching the internet for a phone number for the FBI’s offices at Quantico. The FBI was massive, and Quantico housed several divisions—including the Violent Crimes Against Children/Online Predators unit. He called a general information number, and an automated voice answered. He listened to the directory and punched the number that would allow him to dial by name. There were a lot of agents, and he was happy that Daniels was at the beginning of the alphabet. Her extension was #167. He punched it into his cell phone’s keypad and heard the call go through.
“This is Special Agent Elizabeth Daniels. I’m in the field and
can’t take your call. Leave a message, date, time, and I’ll return your call at my first opportunity.”
A short buzz filled his ear. He wrestled with how much to say, and decided to keep his message short and sweet.
“Good evening. My name is Jon Lancaster, and I’m a private investigator living in Fort Lauderdale. I would like to speak to you about the Cassandra videos. We can do this over the phone or in person. Please call me when you get this message. I’ll be up.”
He left his cell phone number and ended the call. Then he got an iced tea and went onto his balcony and sat in a chair and watched the day come to an end. Beth Daniels had become an FBI agent because of her past. She was on a mission, and probably the kind of agent who worked all hours on cases and regularly checked her voice mail.
His eyelids had grown heavy. He hadn’t gotten much sleep in the last few days and was exhausted. His bed was calling him, only he didn’t want to be asleep when Daniels rang him back. He didn’t expect her to be forthcoming with information and would have to word his questions carefully and draw her out. He needed to be sharp to do that.
Sipping his drink, he wondered how long it would be before he got a call back.
CHAPTER 26
DANIELS
The blare of a car horn snapped him awake.
It took him a moment to get his bearings. He was still in a chair on the balcony, and it was pitch black outside. The lack of city lights suggested early morning. His empty glass sat by his feet; beside it, his cell phone. By glancing at the screen, he could tell if he’d gotten any calls while asleep. There were none.
Special Agent Daniels hadn’t called him back. He would have bet money that she was going to. His batting average was poor when predicting women’s behavior, and he guessed that was why he was still single.
He heard the horn again. His unit faced the front of the building, and he went to the railing and looked down. A car was parked by the guardhouse, trying to get in. The apartment had twenty-four-hour security, but at night the guard often went inside to drink coffee with the cleaning people.
