Every Crooked Path

by Steven James

  Billy and Randy McReynolds.

  Blake and his silent ladies.

  Aurora’s birthday.

  The task force.

  Tribaxil . . .

  Hearre Construction . . .

  I hadn’t heard from Lily Keating about Tobin’s photo.

  Maria had told me that no one from the task force at the Bureau was off on the day Wooford died.

  Descartes was looking through Romanoff’s bank records.

  Descartes, not Hinchcliffe.

  I was missing something here.

  Who went to the open houses? Who scouted them out?

  Hinchcliffe had found out that someone using Shane’s name had showed up at one of the open houses.

  But who was Shane?

  Could it be Hinchcliffe and maybe he mentioned Shane’s name as a smokescreen?

  It felt like I was circling around the clues but I couldn’t quite pry open the truth from them. The top of the rug remained a mystery to me. The more data I had, the more elusive and complex the pattern seemed to become.

  As I waited for more instructions to come through my phone, I found my thoughts returning to Tessa’s logic problem about the Goomian boy trying to get to the store, and for a few moments I allowed them to pause there.

  So, the river flows at five miles per hour and the boy needs to go fifteen miles. He swims at one mile per hour, which means—with the river’s current—he’s actually traveling at six miles per hour. So, in half an hour, he has gone three miles. Then he gets into a canoe that he can paddle at four miles per hour, plus the five of the current, so in the next half hour he travels four and a half more miles.

  That’s seven and a half total.

  The war canoe goes ten miles per hour, but when you add in the five of the current, he’s able to go seven and a half miles in the final thirty minutes. That’s a total of fifteen miles.

  Which is exactly where the store is.

  But that’s too easy. What are you missing? What are—?

  Oh.

  Then I had it.

  Assumptions.

  Yes.

  They’re so easy to make and so hard to step back from.

  We naturally assume that south would be downstream.

  But in her puzzle, the river flowed north.

  The store was downstream. But the boy had headed south.

  The wrong direction.

  He never got to the store at all.

  Assumptions.

  Don’t assume that—

  A limo was coming my way. It slowed as it approached me.

  Its windows were darkened so I couldn’t see the driver.

  When it stopped, no one got out.

  A text: “Climb in. Then throw both of your phones out the window.”

  Okay. So whoever was behind this knew that I had a burner phone as well as my personal cell. But who knew that?

  Only a handful of people.

  Actually, anyone on the task force if they looked into things closely enough.

  But I had an additional phone too: Maria’s.

  And she was the only one who knew about that.

  Opening the limo’s door, I saw that the backseat was empty, apart from a note written in the same script as the message that’d been in the box I was given at nine o’clock this morning.

  As I climbed into the limo, I furtively turned off the ringer, dropped Maria’s phone to the floor, and kicked it under the seat in front of me. Now there was a way for the team to track me.

  I tossed the other two phones out the window as directed.

  The note that’d been waiting for me on the seat read Put on the mask and then the hood. We’ll know if you don’t.

  I put on the mask.

  Slipped the hood on over the top of it.

  The limousine pulled forward.

  Without being able to see anything, my other senses sharpened. I noticed the smooth-running purr of the motor and the soft hum of the air-conditioning that was blowing cool air across my hands.

  I could smell the leather seats and the faint scent of smoke that still lingered in the air from someone who must have lit up while sitting in here.

  +++

  Francis approached the front doors of the ICSC. Outside the glass, Skylar stood alone, staring anxiously around.

  He unlocked the door and opened it.

  “I’m sorry, Francis,” she muttered. “He made me do it. Please—”

  “What?”

  Ivan stepped out from behind the hedges alongside the building, aiming a gun at Skylar’s chest. “Hello, Francis.”

  +++

  I tried to keep track of the right and left turns, tried to gauge the time and the speed, but that soon proved impossible, and for all I knew they were taking an indirect route to wherever we were going just to confuse me.

  The tattoo.

  The overdose.

  The note.

  The two brothers at the restaurant.

  Timing. Location . . .

  They blind you, assumptions do.

  The boy in the puzzle was going in the wrong direction from the start.

  Just like you’ve been.

  In a case like this, everything matters.

  The Pied Piper was a man who led one hundred and thirty children away.

  Wingtip shoes. The fifth person. The one filming everything.

  Two people didn’t watch the video last weekend that Tobin had shown: Hinchcliffe and Descartes.

  And Tobin, of course, who’d obviously seen it before.

  Yes.

  Something that was so easy to miss. The answer was staring me right in the face.

  Shane’s identity.

  And, if I was right, the Piper’s.

  94

  Francis was seated at his desk. Skylar stood beside him. Ivan had the gun barrel pressed against the middle of her back.

  “Download the file,” he ordered Francis, “or this night is not going to have a happy ending for Miss Shapiro.”

  “Don’t hurt her.”

  “I’ll give you to the count of three.”

  Angela and Lacey had been working on a patch that might be able to stop the virus, but Francis hadn’t heard back from them yet.

  “One,” Ivan said.

  Francis pulled up the email message.

  “Two.”

  He tried to figure out what to do, tried to decide—

  “Th—”

  “Wait!” Francis tapped quickly at the keys. “There.”

  “There what?”

  “I logged out of my account.”

  “What?”

  “I’m the only one who can get you back in there. Let Skylar go and I’ll log in again. Then, when I’m done, you can kill me or do whatever you want with me. But she goes free.”

  “Francis, no! You—” Skylar began, but Ivan cut her off abruptly, cursing.

  He raised the gun threateningly, as if he was going to hit her in the back of the head. “Log back in. Do it!”

  “If you hurt her I swear I won’t help you. You’ll never get the file open.”

  Ivan scoffed. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.” He removed his phone from his pocket, tapped at the screen, and then spoke to whoever he’d just called: “Alright. If I don’t call you back in one minute exactly, I want you to take the kid at the hospital.”

  “No!” Francis said.

  Ivan hung up. “Log in and download the file or you’ll be responsible for both of their deaths.”

  Desperately, Francis tried to figure out what to do.

  “Time is ticking.” Ivan was staring at his watch.

  Francis glanced around his desk for anything he could use as a weapon, anything at all, but all he could come up with w
as the St. Stephen’s Hospital coffee mug.

  Typing frantically, he pulled up the log-in box. “Let Skylar go and I’ll type in my password.”

  Ivan nodded toward her and she scurried toward the door.

  “Now do it,” he demanded.

  To save Derek, Francis entered his password.

  Went to the email program.

  Clicked on the file.

  Just download it, don’t open it. You’ll be alright as long as you don’t open it.

  As the file began to download, Francis picked up the mug. “Call it in.” He pretended to drink from it. “Tell them not to hurt Derek.”

  “Not until the file is opened.”

  You need to get him close.

  Still holding the mug in one hand, Francis tilted the screen with the other so that only he could see it.

  When Ivan reached over to straighten it out, Francis swung the mug as hard as he could, cracking it against the side of Ivan’s head.

  The force of impact caught him off guard. His head snapped around and it stunned him for a moment, but only for a moment. Then he shoved Francis roughly to the floor to get to the keyboard.

  With the gun in one hand, he struggled to use the other to punch at the keys to open the file, but as he did, he suddenly cried out, straightened up, and reached around, back between his shoulder blades.

  Skylar was standing behind him.

  She’d driven a letter opener into his back. “That’s for hitting me this morning.”

  Francis went for the gun, wrestling it from Ivan’s hand.

  He aimed it at Ivan. “Get back!”

  You don’t know how to use this thing.

  It’s easy. Just squeeze the trigger.

  Ivan didn’t move.

  Francis aimed just above the man’s head and fired. The bullet punched a hole through the cubicle partition next to the desk.

  “I said get back.”

  Ivan edged back, holding up his hands. “Careful with that, Francis.”

  “Call the hospital,” Francis said. “Tell them not to hurt Derek or I’ll shoot you in the knee and then work my way up.”

  Ivan gulped, then made the call.

  “Get something to tie him up with,” Francis told Skylar, who grabbed a USB cord from behind the printer on a nearby desk.

  Francis’s eyes were glued on Ivan, but as Skylar returned to his side, she gasped and stared at the computer screen. “It’s too late, Francis. He opened the file.”

  +++

  I could feel the limo decelerating.

  We turned in a slow circle to the left and when we came to a stop, I honestly had no idea where we were.

  Someone opened the driver’s door, closed it, and a moment later opened the door beside me.

  “Alright, we’re here,” a man said gruffly.

  It was the same rough, gravelly voice of the behemoth who’d frisked me in the hallway outside Blake’s office behind the pub.

  He took my left elbow and led me away from the limo.

  The cool air, the smell of the waterfront, and the slip-slap of waves close by told me that we were near the shore. We walked forty-one steps and the sound of the water disappeared.

  Our footfalls echoed slightly.

  We’d entered a building of some type.

  A garage door closed noisily behind us.

  Finally, the man leading me stopped. “That’s good, right there.”

  Muffled cries came from the distance in two directions—both to my right and to my left.

  He patted me down just as he had yesterday, took my SIG, but left my knife in my pocket.

  I didn’t know why he let me keep it, and for some reason I thought of what Blake had told me in his office: “Be careful who you trust, Agent Bowers. The truth that’s right in front of you is often the hardest to see.”

  Be careful who you trust . . .

  “You can remove the hood,” the bouncer told me, “but keep the mask on.”

  I tugged off the hood and stared through the eyeholes of the mask.

  95

  9:00

  The choice

  Having been in the dark for so long, my eyes weren’t used to the light, and at first I had to blink against the brightness.

  I was in a warehouse.

  The middle of it was lit from high fluorescents dangling from the ceiling, but the sides of the building were ruled by shadows.

  The place must have served as a mannequin warehouse at one time because dust-covered body parts of mannequins were stacked on shelves nearby and dozens of bare mannequin bodies were positioned throughout the warehouse.

  This is where Blake got his silent ladies.

  Eight people in masks stood motionless and mute at various spots around me. One of them was setting up a video camera on a tripod. Two others, who were standing about five meters away from me, were aiming handguns at me. The big guy beside me wasn’t wearing a mask, but it wouldn’t have done much good at hiding his identity anyway, since he was twice the size of anyone else here.

  On each end of the warehouse was a single wooden chair, and on each of the chairs, with a noose around their neck, and a taut rope stretching up to the ceiling, stood someone I knew.

  Tobin on one chair.

  Naomi Morgan, the Port Authority officer who’d impersonated Tessa, on the other.

  Both had been gagged. Their hands were bound behind their backs.

  A man in a mask stood beside each of their chairs.

  Naomi? How did they find out about her?

  The only one who knew about her was Tobin.

  And DeYoung. You called him to let him know what you were doing—

  Wait.

  There was one other person on the task force who could’ve recognized her from the video. He—

  One of the men stepped forward, and before he could speak, I said, “So this is why you left dinner early, Billy.”

  “Agent Bowers.” Billy McReynolds’s distinctive radio-voice resonated through the warehouse. “This isn’t how we planned on having things play out, but you just wouldn’t stop poking around, would you? Was it the video? Is that how you knew it was me?”

  “The handwriting. It matched the suicide note I found on your brother. Also, the tattoo. You wouldn’t have known about it if you saw him for the last time two years ago. But you saw him the night he died, met him at the LeBange, and that’s when you slipped him the Tribaxil.”

  “Yes. His proverbial last supper. Poor, dear Randy.”

  “You wrote the suicide note and you put ‘only’ on the envelope—‘open only in the case of my death.’ Why would someone who was committing suicide phrase it like that? Since Randy would have recognized your handwriting on the front of the envelope, he probably thought it was your will or something. Is that what you told him?”

  Billy was quiet.

  “And then when he was dead, you came forward to identify it as his handwriting and made up the story about the sexual assault allegations. Very clever. It got us looking in the wrong direction from the start.”

  Jodie was going to try tracking Billy’s phone and car. That should lead her here. Or maybe Maria’s phone would.

  Unless Billy was careful. Unless—

  “You won’t find the children, Agent Bowers,” he told me. “And once this is over, you’re going to have to live with the knowledge that you couldn’t save them, that you were too late.”

  Keep him talking!

  “Randy was innocent this whole time,” I said. “He found out about the video of Aurora’s birthday and you couldn’t let him see you were on it, could you? Because he would have identified you. No, Randy didn’t kill Stewart. And I’m guessing you didn’t want to get your hands dirty, that’s not what the Piper would do. So who did you send? Shane? It was messy. He’s not q
uite as skilled with the knife as he is with a gun, I guess.”

  “You didn’t do as Blake requested,” Billy McReynolds said. “You didn’t film Tessa Ellis changing. You chose to use Officer Morgan here.” He pointed in her direction. “That was your first mistake.”

  “No, that’s not what this is about. That can’t be. It’s the virus, right? At the ICSC.”

  “Oh, it’s much more than that.”

  Why would they want to alter the hash values? It’d make the files untraceable, but—

  Then it hit me.

  “You mean to upload them.” The weight of what I was saying hit me hard. “No search engines will know to block them.”

  He held up a phone and checked the screen. “The file has been downloaded. Twelve minutes from now when I punch in the passcode, we’ll change the landscape of the Internet forever. All available. All free. For all time. And there is no delete key on the World Wide Web.”

  That was almost the same phrase Lloyd had said to us in prison.

  Maybe they were working together before he was arrested.

  “In the meantime,” Billy said, “I’m going to give you the chance to save one of them: Detective Cavanaugh or Officer Morgan. Who will it be? I’ll leave that choice to you.”

  So what’ll happen to the other one? They can’t let us live. We know too much.

  They can’t—

  “Good-bye, Agent Bowers. I have a few children to attend to.”

  I studied the room. Evaluated my options. The two men with the guns were too far away for me to disarm them. All I had was that knife.

  Billy McReynolds left the warehouse.

  Pat, you need to stop this!

  “Take off your mask, Chip,” I called. For a moment no one moved. “I know you’re here. I know you’re Shane.”

  The man closest to Tobin’s chair removed his mask.

  Officer Chip Hinchcliffe.

  “And here I thought my mask was good enough.”

  “You didn’t watch the video last weekend. Why not—was it because you helped produce it or simply because you’d seen it before?”

  He shook his head. “There has to be more than that.”

  “None of the agents on the task force had time off on the day when Wooford was killed. It had to be someone from the NYPD. And you’re the only other one besides Tobin who’d worked with Naomi, who could’ve identified her in the video I sent Blake. You also subscribed to the real estate mailing lists. What was it—researching more open houses?”