Ransom X

by a b

  The next morning couldn’t have started worse. Light streaming through a large window in the study brought a wave of impulses to Legacy’s optic nerve. The residual effects of caffeine in his bloodstream fed these impulses. Legacy remembered blinking at five am and now two hours later his eyes were opening again.

  A pool of papers had been carefully laid out in rows and columns on the floor. He had put them there for a reason, something in his mind connected the contents better when they were viewed as part of an overlapping puzzle.

  Words were running together in his head, but the facts of the case were clear, too clear. Legacy often wondered if recognizing the motives and basic human condition of the sickest people on earth made him laudable or loathsome. He had been introduced to some new tricks of the sick mind and felt a little disturbed that none of them gave rise to any level of surprise.

  Legacy hadn’t said goodbye to Chess that morning. He left home at his normal time, but he was occupied up his exit with videotapes that had been stacked beside the briefs. He had saved them for last because the images of a crime can be so powerful that the details get hidden behind the potent emotional noise. It was like the light that penetrated his eyelids this morning – it flooded his perceptions and he couldn’t see clearly until he’d looked away.

  He was happy to look away from the video when it finished.

  The tapes were the kind of thing that most decent people look away from immediately, but others are simply fascinated with it. Legacy knew that it would be the first thing that Wagner would want to talk about. She’d want to know his thoughts. Unfortunately, he was collecting the thoughts of the perpetrators of the crime, not his own reactions to their work. It wouldn’t be easy to explain that to her. He walked the path to the subway.

  A man shaking a tambourine stood in the entrance with a sign that read, “I only play for money.” It was a very modern take on panhandling. It was an artist putting himself above his audience. Legacy could feel his mind borrowing from his surroundings; sometimes it was like watching another consciousness at work. He found that his mind obliged him by constructing a portrait of the kind of people he was pursuing.

  He clenched his jaw, and it felt like a creaky vice as the two plates of teeth came together. He was uncomfortable. Legacy felt his involvement pulling at him in a way that he didn’t like. There was no warm embrace from the facts of this case.

  Wagner waited at the desk opposite Legacy’s. The scowl on her face was the same as the previous day, but the suit that she was dressed in was a shade darker than the day before.

  “You didn’t see it coming?” Legacy wasn’t much for morning pleasantries.

  “Don’t you like my suit?” It was exactly, precisely and explicitly the thing she least wanted to talk about.

  “It won’t work for today.” Legacy quickly moved to his desk. He cleared one of the case sections and dumped a load of papers out of his briefcase. He picked out a roll of film and turned to Wagner.

  “I need these blown up until they cover that wall.” The long white wall had scattered photos from other cases. He passed over the film.

  “I’m not your assistant.” She stood defiantly. Her suit stood with her, both seeming to be insulted. “And what do you mean this won’t work for today?”

  “Later, I’m going to send you downtown to solicit adult movie stars in the area – and they’ll think you’re a narc if you’re dress like that.”

  “I am a narc.”

  “Be that as it may.” Legacy beckoned with a single finger. He knew Wagner’s greatest fear. “I know you didn’t expect that girl to die. I’m telling you right now that the girl they have now, the one that’s about to finish – is safe. We have at least a week.”

  Wagner looked at him like the words he’d spoken were in some lost foreign language. “How do you know?”

  “And pick up some coffee on your way back, ask –” He realized he didn’t know her name. “My secretary knows how I like it.”

  Legacy was pushing around the papers on his desk, just as if the arrangement was some kind of puzzle. He heard Wagner’s final comment and it rang in his ears.

  “I want to hear your thoughts on the case when I get back.

  Of course she did. Everyone did. The troubling fact was that he hadn’t really developed any thoughts of use at all. There was no astonishing revelation or infallible blueprint that had formed overnight. After a night of study, he knew these men, but he was no closer to them.

  Wagner needed to hear that the steps she was taking in her high-heeled leather uppers were steps closer – in reality, Legacy knew that they were simply taking steps. Whether closer or farther, he had no idea.

  If she had known him better, this was the kind of game that would get Legacy a polite elbow to the bridge of his nose. She didn’t know him well enough to hit him, yet.

  Telling someone what they want to hear is probably the least prosecuted crime in the world. Legacy let his mind wander into the morality of his actions. It’s only when the words cross the line into a lie that anyone really gets upset. Yet if a deliberate lie gets a person closer to their greater goal, is it really such a bad thing? Had Legacy announced that now he was certain that their task was impossible to complete in the time they had been given, if he’d told her how careful and methodical he perceived the criminals to be, it would have been a self-serving diagnosis. There would have been nowhere to go.

  He knew the moment would come when he had to give Wagner his thoughts. An eager person could have the tasks he’d sent her on done in two hours, so he expected Wagner to burst in the door any moment.

  He closed his eyes. The sound of the clattering music from his stereo was like a struggle in the background. It mimicked what was going inside Legacy’s head. Time slowed. Legacy sifted through the case filtering every grain of possibility, sweeping over it again and again like the second hand on a clock. The clock barely moved before he opened his eyes again.

  Chapter 6 Dirt

  Upon reading the details, Legacy knew why they needed him. The group that the case file called “the Vinyl Men” knew how to commit a crime. Their activities and methods were self-consciously unique, meaning they took great pains to protect themselves from the very organized methodical authorities by purposefully being random and unpredictable.

  Precedent being the ground rod of investigation and profiling – there wasn’t a lot to go on. Criminals who break new ground usually get away with it for a long time before their methods become familiar enough to constitute a pattern. Getting in front of them was not going to be easy.

  Legacy recognized that his special ops training as an interrogator made him very good at deciphering behavior, but patience would be the single attribute that he would point to as the reason he cracked cases that nobody else could. He waited for the motives to fall in place behind the profile he created of the criminal. He didn’t mind waiting years, he knew who his man was; it didn’t matter if a few harmless decades passed by before he got him.

  Decades were turning into days, and the minute hand on his watch was suddenly vying for his attention too, he had to concentrate.

  The first file told the story of a prom queen, a pom-pom girl fresh off a parade float getting abducted and held captive for two weeks. Missy Anne Naverlau, a senior at a Burgess Florida High School vanished, tiara and all, only to reappear two weeks later in Maine on the campus of the college that she had been accepted to and planned to attend. Her original story triggered the investigation, but she had since recanted, telling the investigators that it was all an act of teenage rebellion.

  A transcript of her first interview ran through Legacy’s ears. Legacy concentrated, put himself in the room – walked around the environment as the girl was questioned, in his mind

  “So you were walking to your car – “

  “Yes, if I’d changed after – I could have walked faster, but the dress was dragging. At first I thought I’d snagged it on a car or something, but then I turned.”
>
  “What did you see?”

  Her voice trembled, “A man – a man in a leather suit.”

  “Go on.”

  “I should have yelled, someone would have heard me. I should have called for my dad, he would have come.” She broke down in sobs.

  “We don’t have to continue.”

  She snapped her head up like somehow the policeman’s reluctance to hear her story meant that he doubted her.

  “I felt someone come up behind me then a prick in my neck. A sting or something, like a needle. And the man in front of me said that if I turned around it would leave a scar. They must have been working together.” She paused lost in thought.

  Legacy could tell that she hadn’t thought much about the experience. She pieced it together as she spoke in a way that made sense.

  It happens when reasonably sheltered people go through an unreasonable, unsheltered experience. The details make no sense combined so the mind stops looking for rational connections. It compartmentalizes the moments. It’s easier to think that everything about the situation is wrong and makes no sense. Her slow breathing, in and out– her shirt riding up her stomach, the fold of her capri pants brushing her leg hairs - she was close to recognizing reality again. A couple more seconds of thought was all that she needed for a breakthrough. But what she got was a dour officer asking the wrong question.

  “Have you used needles in the past?” The officer broke into the silence.

  Another heavyset agent chimed in “What I think Officer Dunn is asking is if you know the feeling well.”

  “That’s a much nicer way of putting it, Officer Dumm.”

  “I’m O’Conell, he’s Dunn, with an “n” D-U-N-N.”

  She continued, “It’s hard to tell you apart, my apologies officers. After the prick, I felt weak. I fell back and someone caught me. And even though the man in the leather suit had a hat brim tucked down around his eyebrows I saw him do something – I can’t forget it – he smiled. It was like everything in the world was going his way, on the day that I was going to regret for the rest of my life. The thrill he exhibited was sickening.”

  Legacy followed the accounts of the next couple of days closely, reading more for the moments like the capture.

  She woke up from her drugged state in a room. There was dried vomit in her mouth and nose, but her dress was clean and pressed. There was a mini bar in the room and a sink with a toilet. No windows or natural light leaking in from anywhere. Every ten minutes or so, footsteps on the roof would inform her that she was guarded and not alone. The bed was flophouse quality and the springs creaked as she lifted herself from the sweat-stained sheets.

  The noise must have brought attention, because someone walked in the door only a moment after.

  It was Legacy, or really it wasn’t. But Legacy had burrowed far enough into the story that he was standing in the doorway when the figure that really entered brushed by. Watching what followed, he wished he were farther away. The man, his face hidden by a leather mask, body covered in a royal blue acrylic or vinyl mixture that looked like rubber and conformed like paint.

  The report stated that he was “quite kind.” Legacy watched as the Vinyl Man mimed a conversation with the girl. When he was done talking brushed his fingers through her hair.

  Missy pulled back and the man kindly patted her knee instead. He walked to the door and knocked three times. Three more Vynil Men entered the room: Orange, Brown and Yellow. They wheeled in a metal frame nearly as tall as the doorframe, cubically geometric in form. It looked like it was some kind of fitness equipment, but seconds later they had her hands clamped to the corners, back arched over a center support, stretched out and immobile.

  The three men were out the door with a gesture from Blue. Missy gathered a breath to scream, and it was only then that she found a very thin membrane over her mouth. It flexed to allow air in then sealed completely against outward pressure. All of the air leaving had to be expunged through the nose. There would be no screaming.

  Legacy studied the device on her mouth. It was homemade; the design was simple and effective. It was the exact opposite of what an interrogator would develop. He was up against more than just a group of criminals; they were engineers, circus conductors and drunken stationmasters. He could have really enjoyed the chase if it were not for what came next, the sickness that ensued with him as a helpless observer – the video images were living in front of him.

  Blue approached Missy face to face, he told her not to look down. His hand went under her dress and he flipped a switch then came a humming sound. Pubic hairs began to drop out from under her dress. He leaned in to ask a question at intimate range.

  Missy watched the officers in the interrogation room carefully. “He asked me if it tickled. He didn’t hurt me. He was the nice one.”

  Dunn asked, “And two weeks later they let you go? That was it?”

  Missy’s eyes darted up and left, lingering in a memory. “Two weeks of hell.”

  Legacy would have handled the questioning in a completely different manner. If he had gotten to her, right after she’d been released, he might have found details that she would never admit to knowing now.

  “This was the point in the questioning that she went inside herself and never came out again,” Legacy thought. There were more questions on the transcript. Legacy stood at the edge of the light watching the interrogation, scuffing his shoes on the grey-flecked industrial tile. They’d lost her. Her body language was closed off and her voice seemed distant and hollow in the microphone.

  Legacy pushed stop on his tape player and the recording came to an abrupt halt. He was back in his office. There was nothing more of use on this tape. He scanned down the paper transcript and saw that the policemen peppered her with more questions but the answers became more and more vague. She’d realized that she was being humiliated, and then the use of the wrong tone, or the wrong words had seemingly put the police in fraternity with those who had watched her.

  “How much did their incompetence cost?” Legacy was furious. He knew that his best chance lay with getting inside the first victim’s head. The first was where a criminal organization made all of its mistakes. This girl had retreated.

  This was supported by the fact that two weeks later she recanted her testimony, saying that she’d spent the two weeks with her boyfriend on a cross-country trip. The pictures of her on the Internet? They weren’t her.

  Legacy’s nails dug into the transcript, he was ready to push the file into the trash when his eye was drawn to one line at the beginning of the interview. How had he missed it before? He was so busy putting himself into the scene, he hadn’t noticed a very basic behavior. He hadn’t learned anything from the details of the abduction, but rereading what they had said, it was clear that this was not the case for the men who took her. The men had learned something from an earlier attempt, and they had to brag. He drew a line under a sentence of the transcript:

  And the man in front of me said that if I turned around it would leave a scar.

  There was another victim out there; they hadn’t found the first abductee of the Vinyl Men yet.

  Chapter 7 Darci

  Darci sat outside a truck stop on I-84 on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. She had a self-styled quaff of hair that looked like a muffin top. The front dangled below her eyes like an uneven greasy hat brim. Two dazzling blue eyes peeked out of the mess. Her skin had a pale shine, but like her body it was thin and fragile.

  “It’s all natural.” Darci said pointing to a stain on her shirt just beside the outline of her nipple.

  Bong, one of the three rebellious skateboarder boys cutting school and listening to her story, spit chew on the ground and grimaced.

  “So is that, but I don’t want it on my shirt.”

  “Some boys got no control.” She said wetting her lips then striking a match and putting a cigarette between them.

  A chorus of “damn” “whoa” and “shit that” came from the slacker boys. It was
the most impressed they’d been in months.

  Bong pointed to three more stains on her shirt. “How often do you wash this?”

  His question was met with cat-trance sass. Darci smiled took a deep drag off of the cigarette. “Twice a day –”

  A semi-truck rolled by but it was like the entire world went silent as the boys digested this news. Darci slugged Bong in the arm to break the trance. “Tard, every week, what kind of slut do you think I am?”

  A watch alarm went off, and the boys explained that they needed to get home for dinner. Bong lingered after the other boys had mounted their skateboards. He did his best pre-pubescent James Dean impression and told Darci that he might be back, “after dark.”

  Darci said nothing. She put her middle finger all the way into her mouth then sucked it clean. The boy was halfway to an erection when he noticed that at the end of the seduction she was flipping him off, middle finger playfully tapping pursed lips. Bong responded by finding somewhere to target his anger.