by James Swain
“Yes, they are.”
He finished his meal. The Cassandra videos were bait, and the men that took that bait deserved no sympathy. But he still wasn’t clear on why an agent in their local office hadn’t paid him a visit, instead of Daniels doing it herself. Something in his background reports had raised a red flag that had made her personally fly here from Washington, and that bothered him.
She pulled into Inverrary Resort and parked in front of a deserted valet stand. She got out and grabbed her briefcase before they headed inside. Inverrary had once been a playground for the rich and famous, with fine dining and sprawling golf courses, but it had fallen on hard times and now rented rooms to drug addicts and assorted miscreants.
“This could be the set for a horror movie,” she said.
“Wait until you see the rooms,” he said.
“You’ve stayed here before?”
“When I was in uniform, we got called here every night.”
The desk manager was a gaunt Pakistani wearing a white dress shirt. He studied Daniels’s ID and search warrant before handing it back.
“Is Rusty in trouble?” the desk manager asked.
“He’s in a lot of trouble,” Daniels replied. “Are you friends with him?”
“We are not friends. I ask because he’s behind on his rent.”
“That’s too bad. I need to see his apartment.”
They all took a creaky elevator to the third floor and were soon standing in Rusty’s one-bedroom. The overhead light didn’t work, and Daniels drew the blinds so that sunshine flooded the interior. “I guess housecleaning isn’t included in the daily rate,” she said under her breath. The carpet was torn, the wallpaper was peeling, and a sink ran in the bathroom. The desk manager tried to turn the water off and cursed under his breath.
“I will have to call a plumber and get this fixed,” he said.
“Not so fast,” she said. “We’re going to have a look around, and then a team of FBI agents is going to pack everything up and take it away to be analyzed. I don’t want any workers in here until that’s done. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
The desk manager made himself scarce. Daniels placed a call on her cell phone to the local FBI office and requested a team be sent to pack up Rusty’s things. Ending the call, she unzipped the side pocket on her briefcase and removed two pairs of white latex gloves, one of which she tossed to Lancaster.
“Put these on before you touch anything,” she said.
“Will do. What else do you have in that briefcase?”
“You’d be surprised.”
A laptop computer sat on a small desk that was bolted to the wall. Daniels pulled up the room’s only chair and powered up the laptop. The screen saver was a beach at sunrise taken from a lifeguard’s high chair, and Lancaster guessed that Rusty had taken the shot. He wasn’t going to be seeing many more of those where he was going.
Daniels tried to gain entry and was denied. The laptop was password protected.
“I know a good hacker,” he said.
“So do I,” she said.
From her briefcase she removed a black box with an electrical cord and a USB connector, and she connected the box to the back of Rusty’s laptop. Soon the device was running tens of thousands of passwords per second through the laptop. Daniels leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“The FBI hired a hacker to build them for us. It’s now standard equipment, just like the firearms we carry.”
“Can I get one?”
She shook her head.
“What if I help you catch this guy?”
The device beeped, indicating it had found the correct password. Daniels brought her face up to the rectangular screen and began her search.
“Do you mind if I look around?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” she said.
He searched the room and discovered that Rusty had little in the way of material possessions. There were assorted articles of clothing, a boom box, a pair of flip-flops, a pair of sneakers, and a jump rope. On the floor of the closet was a cardboard box that begged a closer look. It was heavy, and he popped the lid to find it filled with old laptops. He carefully removed each one and placed it on the bed. There were eight in all, with models by Dell, Gateway, Sony, and Apple. Their combined value was more than all the other items in Rusty’s possession.
“What do you think of this?” he asked.
Daniels glanced at the bed out of the corner of her eye. “Isn’t that a nice collection. Don’t bother turning them on. The hard drives have been erased.”
“How can you be sure?” he said.
“Because that’s what guys who share kiddie porn do.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed. He thought he understood but wanted to be sure. “Is that the game? Rusty buys a new laptop every six months and transfers his porn library before erasing the hard drive on the old one. He gets a new IP address with each new laptop, which makes it harder to catch him. He also moves around a lot, just in case the law gets him in its crosshairs.”
“That’s the game,” she said. “The smart ones also get new email addresses.”
“How does that work?”
“Gmail lets a user create multiple email addresses under different aliases. There’s a tutorial on YouTube that explains how to do it.”
“The internet is heaven for these sick bastards, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. We still catch them, it just takes longer.”
The minutes dragged on. He went to the room’s only window and gazed down at the rear of the property. A narrow concrete sidewalk ran alongside the brown fairway of the resort’s eighteen-hole golf course. The golf course was no longer in use, and a family with several small children sat on a blanket enjoying a late-afternoon picnic.
The sidewalk was busy with residents of the hotel having a cigarette or taking a stroll. An elderly man pushing a wheelchair came into view. He wore an orange tracksuit and was pushing an emaciated woman who appeared to be in the final stages of life. As the wheelchair got close to the others on the sidewalk, they moved out of its path but did not speak to the elderly man or the dying woman. Watching this happen gave him pause, and he thought about the near-abduction of Nicki at the Galleria mall. Nicki’s abductors had used a wheelchair, and now he understood why.
Daniels slapped the desk. She pulled out her cell phone and typed in a text message, then punched the screen with her forefinger.
“You found Creepie’s email,” he said.
“Yes, and I just sent it to FBI headquarters in DC,” she said. “The FBI has an unwritten agreement with the country’s internet service providers. When we want to find out who an email belongs to, the ISPs will tell us without a subpoena. It comes in real handy during investigations.” Her fingers tapped the desk impatiently. “We’ve been searching for these monsters for a long time. Let’s hope this leads us to him.”
He hoped she was right. In his experience, two criminals working as a team could go for years without getting caught. One member of the team committed the crime, while his partner cleaned up the incriminating evidence.
They waited for Washington to get back to Daniels. She wasn’t very talkative and continued to search the contents of Rusty’s laptop. He sat down on the bed and rubbed his wrists. They were still chafed from Daniels’s handcuffs.
“I’ve got some extra-strength ibuprofen if you need it,” she said.
“I’ll live,” he said.
Her cell phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID and answered it.
“What have you got for me?” she said, unable to hide her excitement. She listened, and her face crashed. “There’s no record? How can that be?”
She got her answer and ended the call.
“God damn it,” she swore. “There’s no record of the email address in any of these ISP databases. It’s as if it never existed.”
/> “How does that work?”
“The hell I know.”
There was a knock on the door, and Lancaster went and answered it. The Pakistani desk manager and a team of FBI agents wearing hazmat suits stood in the hallway. He turned and spoke to Daniels.
“Your boys are here,” he said.
Back in the car, Lancaster decided to play his hand. Daniels had refused to share any meaningful information with him except by accident, and he thought he knew why. She still didn’t completely trust him. Her distrust had little to do with him, and was a byproduct of her investigation.
“Tell me how to get back to your place,” she said.
“Are we done?” he asked.
“Yes, Jon, we’re done. Thanks for your help.”
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee? I’d like to talk with you.”
“About what?”
“Your niece. These stalkers aren’t going away. One is going to get his hands on her, and Nicki’s going to get hurt or killed. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”
“I’ll deal with Nicki’s situation in due time. Meanwhile, you can keep protecting her. My sister and her husband have plenty of money, and can afford your services.”
“That’s pretty callous.”
Her jaw tightened, and she stared at the road. “Don’t judge me without knowing all the facts.” The rental sped up. She was itching to get rid of him. It was time.
“Creepie’s a cop, isn’t he?” he said.
Daniels pulled onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes, then turned in her seat to stare at him. “How the hell did you know that?” she asked.
“The way you handcuffed me gave you away.”
“Why? I always handcuff suspects.”
“You left them on for too long. Your sister told you that she’d hired me, yet you didn’t make a move to release me. You were still suspicious.”
“That’s pretty flimsy reasoning,” she said.
“I’ll agree with you. It was flimsy reasoning until we questioned Rusty and you took the cuffs off him in the interrogation room. Rusty was a pervert, yet you didn’t feel threatened by him. You knew Rusty wasn’t Creepie because you ran a background check and saw that he’d never been a cop.”
“That’s still flimsy reasoning.”
“There’s more.”
“Keep talking.”
“Creepie and his partner are the same pair that tried to abduct you at Dartmouth College. I read The Hanover Killers before I called you. The book’s author said that every male in Dartmouth submitted to DNA testing and it didn’t do any good. In the book’s epilogue, the author speculated who the killers might be. One theory was that it was two cops from a nearby town, since the cops never submitted to DNA testing. Well, those cops are still abducting young girls and killing them, and you’re chasing them.”
“That’s very good, Jon. I’m impressed.”
Her opinion of him had changed. He could see it in her face and especially in her eyes. He’d demonstrated enough deductive reasoning to put them on equal footing.
“Come on, let me buy you dinner,” he said. “There’s a place nearby called Country Walk that serves really good food. We can talk in private there.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’ve got to get back to DC.”
“But I want to help you.”
Daniels shook her head. She was as stubborn as a mule, and he decided to play the last card in his hand. “If I told you that I have a video of Creepie and his partner trying to abduct your niece, would you change your mind?”
Her eyes grew wide. “What are you talking about?”
“Did your sister tell you about what happened at Galleria mall?”
“Melanie said two men tried to grab Nicki, but Nolan stopped them.”
“I have a surveillance video taken at the mall. Let me show it to you, and explain why I think it was them. You can judge for yourself.”
“All right. But I need to pay for my own dinner. Bureau rules.”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
She asked her phone for directions to Country Walk, and an automated voice gave her instructions. Then she merged into traffic and got back on the road.
CHAPTER 33
WHEELCHAIR ETIQUETTE
“I want to be straight with you about something,” Daniels said as she pulled into a parking space at Country Walk and silenced the engine. “I had no idea how identical Nicki looked to Cassandra. Had I known, I would never have posted the videos.”
Her voice was riddled with guilt. Lancaster had worked stings as a cop and never liked them. There were often unintended consequences to setting a trap that no one ever saw coming. As he started to get out, she grabbed his wrist.
“You believe me, don’t you?”
“I don’t think you’d do anything to hurt your niece,” he said. “But you must have realized that another teenage girl might bear a resemblance to Cassandra. And that by posting those videos, you’d put that girl in harm’s way.”
Her lower lip began to tremble.
“That never occurred to me,” she said.
“I find that hard to accept,” he said.
He was roasting without the AC and tried to get out. She kept holding his wrist.
“Please believe me,” she said.
“But I don’t,” he said. “If you were an ordinary cop, that would be another story. But you’re an FBI agent and you also went to Dartmouth, which is Ivy League. You’ve got to be pretty smart to get into that place. The sting you created had the potential to hurt an innocent girl. You knew that, but you still went full steam ahead.”
A single tear ran down her cheek. She wiped it away and took a deep breath.
“All right. I knew there was a risk, and so did my superiors,” she said. “But we took it anyway. We didn’t really have a choice, considering the circumstances.”
“You’ve lost me. What circumstances?”
“If I tell you, you have to promise you won’t talk about it.”
“You have my word.”
She reached into the back seat and grabbed her briefcase. Holding it in her lap, she unzipped an inside compartment and removed a large manila envelope with a drawstring, which she spent a moment undoing. From within came a handful of old-fashioned square photographs that was an inch thick. She passed the stack to him, and he thumbed through them. They were a collection of different young women taken before and after their lives were extinguished. In the before photos, the women were clothed and had smiles on their faces and looked either high or drunk. In the after photos, they were naked and tied up, their lifeless faces etched with anguish and pain. Unable to process anymore, he handed the photos back to her.
“That’s beyond horrible,” he said.
“Welcome to my world,” she said.
Dinner no longer sounded appealing. She found a Starbucks, and he went inside and bought two grande cups of Pike Place and brought them out to the car. He placed a handful of sugar packets and artificial sweetener on the seat between them, along with a pastry.
“Only one? Talk about showing a girl a good time,” she said.
“We can split it,” he said.
She leaned against her door and blew the steam off her drink. “I joined the FBI right after I graduated from Dartmouth and worked my way up the ranks. Maybe because of what happened to me in college, I became adept at catching sexual predators. I would stay up all night running them down. My bosses noticed, and in 2012, I was promoted to running the Violent Crimes Against Children/Online Predator Unit. I wasn’t on the job two weeks when the first photographs landed on my desk.”
“The killers sent them to you?”
“They were more clever than that. The victim’s photographs were taken on an old-fashioned camera, and the film was dropped off at a pharmacy to be developed. When the pharmacy processed the film and saw it was of a murder, the local police were contacted. The cops didn’t know what to do with the photos. They didn’t have a body or
know the victim’s identity, so the photos were forwarded to the FBI. Since the victim was a young girl, the photos were passed on to me.”
She tore a piece off the pastry and popped it into her mouth.
“You can have all of it,” he said.
“Thanks. The first photos came from a pharmacy in Houston, so I flew in and worked with our office there trying to identify the victim. We eventually matched her to a body that had been found in a field on the side of a highway. She was an illegal Mexican immigrant who left her job at the mall one afternoon and never arrived home. There were no real leads in the case, so I went back to DC.”
“Those were the photos you showed Rusty,” he said.
“Yes. She was the first victim.”
Half the pastry was gone. It seemed to help her relax.
“Six months later, another set of murder photos showed up on my desk,” Daniels said. “Same scenario as before. Taken on an old-fashioned camera and dropped off at a pharmacy to be processed, this time in Atlanta. Again, the cops didn’t know what to do with them, so they were sent to the FBI, and I got them. I flew to Atlanta, and worked with our office there to identify the victim. She was another teenage girl who worked at a mall and never came home. The body was found in a field while I was there. It struck a nerve.”
“The killings in Hanover,” he said.
She nodded. “The Hanover killers also discarded their victims’ bodies in fields. It made me wonder if the murders were connected, so I had a forensics team compare the evidence from the Hanover killings to the killings in Houston and Atlanta. All four of the victims had worked in malls. They’d also been fed a meal before they were killed. There were enough similarities with the cases that forensics concluded the same pair of killers had murdered all four victims.”
“That must have freaked you out,” he said.
“It was very upsetting, to say the least. I went to my bosses and asked them to open an active investigation into the Houston and Atlanta killings. An active investigation means the bureau devotes a portion of its budget to a case, and is required to report its findings to the Justice Department every six months. My request got approved, and I’ve been chasing the killers ever since.”
