by Steven James
“They’re watching me. Someone might find out.”
“Leave that to me.”
“And we won’t be the only ones working on a manuscript.
Promise me you’ll pass along any information about subsequent crimes as soon as you have it so I can keep writing and stay ahead of the pack.”
“I promise. You’ll be the first to know about the next victim.”
He stepped into the shadows.
And then he was gone.
She waited for a few minutes until she heard the warehouse’s door close, then she pulled her digital voice recorder out of her purse and verified that it had recorded the entire conversation.
She would work with the profiler for now, but if she needed to, she would use the audio tape to keep him on a short leash.
Yes, it was happening. The story of a lifetime.
Things were finally coming together.
She immediately emailed three of the literary agencies she’d been in touch with and told them about the qualifications of her coauthor and about her personal connection with the last two victims.
After the emails went through, she left the warehouse to transcribe her conversation with the FBI profiler onto her laptop.
And she realized how much she liked the feeling of being in control.
A feeling she never intended to give up.
No matter what.
97
Tessa Ellis.
Tessa Ellis.
Tessa Bernice Ellis.
On every exam, she’d had to write her name. Her first and last name. And on this stupid chemistry final, her full name.
Tessa Bernice Ellis.
Her mom had complained that the day she found out she was pregnant was the worst day of her life, and then—surprise, surprise—decided to get an abortion.
So here Tessa was: stuck forever with the last name of the woman who hadn’t wanted anything to do with her. Who’d wanted to abort her.
Ellis.
As she thought about her name, it occurred to her that she hadn’t mentioned to Pandora that she’d read the story.
Later.
No big deal.
Just focus on this test.
But as she stared at her chem exam, her thoughts felt soggy and thick, and even though, normally, the finals would have been a total breeze, with everything that was on her mind, she just couldn’t concentrate. Her eyes wandered to the name at the top of the page.
Tessa Bernice Ellis.
As she scribbled down a few more fumbled answers, she realized that if nothing else, if nothing else at all, she at least needed to find out her real name.
But her mom didn’t use last names in the diary. So, how was she supposed to find out Paul’s last name?
Duh, Tessa: she stuck postcards in the diary. Postcards have return addresses.
Yes. It was possible—
“Two minutes!” her teacher announced. Tessa still had a quarter of the exam to finish.
She waded through the test questions but was still distracted thinking about the diary. She’d already decided that she couldn’t read anything else in that thing, I mean, what if her mom wrote about how much she wished she’d gotten the abortion in the first place?
The hall bell rang. “All right,” her teacher called. “Set down your pencils and place your tests on my desk as you walk out.”
Tessa joined the crowd of kids heading toward the door, turned in her unfinished exam, and went to find Dora in the hall to see if she could look through the diary after school to find her father’s last name.
I figured that the note John had left in Dr. Bryant’s house promising to complete the last three crimes tonight justified breaking a few FAA guidelines. So, despite the regulations prohibiting the use of mobile transmitting devices on commercial flights, I spent the trip to Denver reworking the geographic profile using my computer’s wireless access to the military’s defense satellite network through FALCON.
We still hadn’t heard from Father Hughes, the priest who’d disappeared on Tuesday. And even though I couldn’t be certain that he’d been abducted, considering the timing and progression of the crime spree, I felt that his disappearance was too much of a coincidence to be unrelated, so I added his home, only two blocks from Rachel’s Café, and the location of St. Michael’s Church to the geoprofile. Then, I included the home and work addresses from the last two victims: Benjamin Rhodes and Professor Adrian Bryant, and the route Bryant had driven to the Denver News building.
Using the updated data, I analyzed the distribution and temporal progression of the crimes and discovered that the travel routes of the victims intersected in four geographic regions—near DU, Cherry Hills Mall, a section of downtown, and the neighborhoods surrounding City Park. FALCON told me there was a 58.4 percent chance he lived or worked in one of those four areas.
It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Most crimes occur at the nexus of opportunity and desire—the offender sees the chance to get away with something and acts. But John was different. With him, everything was premeditated. Everything was carefully planned. In fact, I couldn’t shake the thought that so far we’d only discovered what he wanted us to discover.
As I considered all of this, the advice I’d gleaned from Poe’s fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, came to mind: “It is essential for the investigator to understand his opponent’s intellect, training, and aptitude and then respond accordingly.”
That’s what I needed to do. Respond accordingly.
I typed three headings into my document and filled in my notes beneath them.
Physical description
Male, Caucasian, medium build, approximately six feet tall, athletic.
Training
• Drugged or poisoned at least six people. Knows lethal dosages/how to remove a human heart. Medical training? Medical background?
• Subdued Sebastian Taylor. Possible background in martial arts/self-defense?
• Knew how to distribute the hay and boards to most effectively burn down the barn. Diversionary tactics or explosives/ ordnance training? Arsonist?
• Blocked the GPS location for the phones he used to make his calls. Hacker? Military/communications experience? Intellect/Aptitude
• Broke into Taylor’s home and Dr. Bryant’s home.
• Picked the lock to the morgue. Skilled in disabling security systems, picking locks, locating video surveillance cameras, breaking and entering.
• Avoided leaving fingerprints or DNA. Forensically aware.
• Knew the location of Baptist Memorial’s video cameras. Access to blueprints or hospital security?
• Knew to ask for the Rocky Mountain Violent Crimes Task Force and that I was a member.
• Found out my unlisted phone number.
As I examined the list, I recalled Tessa’s comments about the Dacoits: to find them, the Indian authorities evaluated the most likely travel routes, studied land use patterns, and compared those with the proximity of the crimes to reduce the suspect pool.
Yes, reduce my suspect pool.
I still hadn’t had a chance to follow up on Jake’s surprisingly cogent suggestion that the killer might have access to the Federal Digital Database, so now I logged in and pulled up the access directory for all federal, state, and local government employees in the city.
Denver trails only Washington DC for the highest number of federal employees in a U.S. city, and I ended up with a huge list: 21,042 names.
But the list shrank exponentially with each of the search criteria I added: male, Caucasian, height between 5'10" and 6'2", weight between 175–190 pounds. Then I weighted the search with consideration to military or medical background, previous convictions, forensic and hand-to-hand training, inclusion on the suspect list, or residential or work addresses in one of the four hot zones.
I might have landed on the list myself if I were an inch shorter, but as it was, I ended up with fifty-one names.
Finally, I c
ross-checked those names against the flight manifests to and from airports in the Chicago vicinity on Thursday and Friday. I came up empty with that, but as I looked over the list again, I did recognize some of the fifty-one names: two dispatch personnel, six police officers, including Officer Jameson, the man who’d researched the owner to Bearcroft Mine, and Lance Rietlin, the young resident from the medical examiner’s office who’d led me and Cheyenne to the morgue.
Lancaster Cowler had mentioned that someone from the ME’s office had accessed the 911 transcriptions. That’s where Lance worked. He was also one of the three people who’d responded when Cheyenne had intercommed for help in the morgue.
I uploaded the list to the online case files and emailed a copy of it to Cheyenne, asking her to follow up on all of the names, specifically on Rietlin.
Then the flight attendant announced that we were beginning our final descent to the Denver International Airport, and as the seat belt sign went on, I folded up my computer and got ready to go to work.
Over the last four hours, Giovanni had taken one man and one woman to his self-storage unit against their will. However, since then he’d had to follow up on some work-related business and was only now able to slip back to check on them.
He found that they were both still secure. Still alive.
Good. He would return later tonight to take care of that.
Before leaving the storage unit, he made sure that his duffel bag was packed with all the necessary items and checked the temperature of the warming pad: 84 degrees.
Perfect. He placed the pad on the backseat of his car, laid the cloth bag containing his three remaining rattlesnakes on top of it, locked the storage unit, and went to find Amy Lynn.
98
4:40 p.m.
“Well?” Tessa said.
“Just chill,” Dora replied, her mouth thick with gum. “I’m looking.” Earlier in the day, Martha had removed the diary from Tessa’s trash can but had returned it to her when she’d asked for it after school.
Now, as Tessa waited As Patiently As Humanly Possible for Dora to find her dad’s last name, she twisted and untwisted the sides of the Rubik’s Cube, solving it twice—but it didn’t count because she had her eyes open.
After five more minutes of waiting, Tessa asked again, “Anything?”
“I’m going as fast as I can, but it’s hard. Your mom didn’t use last names.”
I already told you that!
“I know,” Tessa moaned. “Like I said before, don’t look so much at what she wrote. More the other stuff. The letters. The postcards. The things she glued in there.”
“I am,” Dora snapped, in a tone of voice Tessa had never heard her friend use.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. I know. It’s just, I’m doing my best, OK?”
A moment of uncomfortable silence crawled through the room.
Finally, Tessa said, “I read your story last night.”
“My story?”
“The one about your name. Pandora’s Box. I should have read it before, way earlier, I know. But anyway, you were right. I thought it would end with some kind of plague or infection or something, but it doesn’t.”
Dora looked up from the diary. “So, you know what the last thing out of the box was?”
“Yes,” Tessa said. “It was hope.”
Dora started slowly thumbing through the diary again.
“I like how it begs her to let it out, and finally when she does . . .”
But Dora had stopped flipping pages and was staring at the diary.
“What?” Tessa asked.
Her friend was silent.
“What is it?” Tessa dropped the cube and crawled across the bed toward her friend. “What did you find?”
Dora answered by handing the diary to her, and Tessa saw the postcard pasted onto the page:
Christie,
Found your address online. I still think of you.
I hope you’re well.
—Paul
It’d been postmarked just three years earlier and sent to the address in New York City where Tessa and her mom had lived before they ever met Patrick.
And it included a handwritten return address: P. Lansing, 1682 Hennepin Avenue East, Minneapolis, MN 55431.
Suddenly, everything about her dad seemed more real than ever. He was an actual person who lived at an actual address on a specific date.
Your last name should have been Lansing.
Tessa Lansing.
Tessa Lansing.
Tessa Bernice Lansing.
She read the note again. It was too brief to really tell her anything—except that Paul Lansing had never really gotten over her mom. Quietly, half to herself, half to her friend, Tessa said, “He doesn’t say anything about me.”
Dora chewed her gum squishily for a moment, then took it out and stuck it to a piece of crumpled paper in the trash. “Maybe he doesn’t know about you.”
“What?” Tessa watched Dora shove the trash can away from the bed. “What do you mean? When she was pregnant he wrote to her asking—”
“No, I know all that. I mean, what if he didn’t know you were even born?”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why not?” Dora asked.
“I don’t know, it’s just—he had to.”
A slight pause. “Did your mom ever actually say that he was the one who moved away?”
Tessa let the diary slide from her fingers and land on the pillow beside her. “Are you saying my mom did instead?”
Dora shrugged. “Sure, I don’t know. Why not?” She was unwrapping a fresh piece of gum. “I mean, she was scared and didn’t want him in her life. Maybe she just packed up and left to start over somewhere else.”
It seemed unbelievable.
But also, not so unbelievable.
Paul wanted to help raise you. If he knew you were alive, he would have come to be with you, especially after Mom died.
But as Tessa thought about it, she realized that she couldn’t remember her mother ever telling her outright that her dad was the one who’d moved away from them. Maybe she’d just assumed that he—
“So, now what?” Dora was chewing again.
Tessa’s racing, quivering heart made it hard to think, hard to consider her options. “I don’t know.”
Maybe she could just pretend that she hadn’t found the memory box or the diary or Paul’s letter and his postcard, and just go on with life like none of this had ever happened.
Yeah, right. As if that would work.
On the other hand . . . Tessa stared at the postcard. The address.
She grabbed her school backpack, pulled out her laptop, and flipped it open.
“Wait.” Dora scooted closer to her. “You’re not thinking—”
“Yeah,” Tessa said, “I am.”
Martha didn’t have wireless, but one of the neighbors did, and Tessa was able to jump onto their network. She clicked to an online white pages site and typed Paul Lansing’s name in the search box.
Pressed “enter.”
99
As soon as the plane landed, I slid out my cell.
I needed to connect with Cheyenne to follow up on any leads generated by the list of fifty-one names, however, I didn’t like the fact that John had left a note for me at the crime scene earlier in the day. So, before heading out to spend the rest of the night tracking him, I wanted to make sure that Tessa and my mother were safe.
Maybe if Cheyenne could meet me at my parents’ house I could kill two birds with one stone.
I punched in her number, but the line was busy. So I left a voicemail asking her to meet me, ASAP. Then I told her the address, and before I ended the call, I thanked her for the pendant and assured her that my testimony had gone fine.
Which was true, whether or not justice ended up being carried out.
A few minutes later as we were taxiing to our gate, the phone vibrated and I thought it might be Cheyenne returning my call, but when I ans
wered it, I found myself talking to Dr. Eric Bender.
“Oh,” he said, “I must have punched the wrong number. I thought this was Tessa’s phone.”
“I’m borrowing it for the time being.”
“Well, hey, now that I’ve got you on the line, Pat. The reason I called—I need to do another autopsy tonight—an unrelated case, but Dora isn’t answering her cell. The thing is . . . I don’t want her home alone. Not with John still at large. I just . . . I’m worried.”
I completely understood his concern.
The pilot maneuvered the plane into the gate.
“You know that my wife is out of town for the week. Well, Dora went over to be with Tessa after school; I just wanted to ask if she could stay over there tonight. I don’t think I can get out of here until 10:30 or 11:00. I can swing by and pick her up if I get off early—”
“No need. She’ll be fine. Tessa’s at my mom’s; the girls can stay there. Two officers are watching the house.” The seat belt light went off. I stood. Collected my things. “In fact, I’m on my way to check on them right now. Just one quick question. Your resident, Lance Rietlin, was he working with you on Saturday afternoon?”
“Yeah. We were at the hospital together until almost six. Why?”
Then he couldn’t have been at the ranch. He couldn’t be John.
Dead end.
“Just checking up on everyone involved in the case.” All the passengers were deplaning. I joined the pack.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll let you know if my plans for tonight change. And can you have Dora give me a call when you see her?”
“Sure. Talk to you soon.”
I hung up, exited the plane, escaped the terminal.
And headed to my car.
As Amy Lynn Greer turned her car onto her street, she couldn’t help but smile.
Since meeting with the FBI profiler—and digitally recording their conversation—she’d spent a few hours writing, drove to Evergreen to get a look at Sebastian Taylor’s house for herself, and then talked with two literary agents in New York who were both interested in representing her—well, her and her coauthor.
And since she’d been careful to keep her Blackberry turned off for most of the day and had an older model car with no GPS, she’d enjoyed the freedom of being alone and not being followed everywhere by a cop or an FBI agent. Still, she knew Reggie would be incensed that she’d slipped away from him. It was time to get home. Kiss and make up.
