by Jeff Miller
“I know.”
“But I miss it, too. That’s why we can’t do it anymore.”
“I know.”
“Good-bye, Diego.”
“Good-bye, Katrina.”
As he hung up, pain swelled in the pit of his stomach. He had called seeking closure, and now, having gotten it, he felt worse than ever.
CHAPTER 24
They spent the day talking to more families of the missing. Most of the families greeted them with cautious smiles and guarded optimism, drilling Dagny with questions aimed to elicit good news and drifting into a somber, quiet despair when she failed to deliver any. Diego facilitated the conversations and made the families feel comfortable. Victor sat in general silence. She had invited him to come because he had earned it; she’d also admonished him to say nothing, lest the number of inquisitors overwhelm the families.
None of the visits provided any useful information, but Dagny hadn’t expected any. They were talking to these families because they needed to feel as if they were working the case while they waited on the phone data.
At 4:00 p.m., they returned to Beamer’s basement, ordered pizza, and waited for the schools to deliver the promised software. The pizza came first. She ate three slices, which brought her all the points she needed for the day. John Beamer arrived next; he had knocked off early to see what her eminent domain of his basement had yielded. At 4:59, two e-mails popped up on Victor’s laptop, each with a link to download software.
They huddled behind him and watched him download MIT’s software first. When it opened, Victor clicked File in the menu bar and selected Import Data. A pop-up showed a progress bar that grew from 1 percent to 73 percent, and then stopped. The arrow on the screen turned into a spinning rainbow-colored ball, and then the application crashed.
“Darn it,” he said. He opened the application again and tried to import the data. Once again, it crashed at 73 percent.
“C’mon, Caltech,” Beamer said in the hushed tone of a prayer.
Victor clicked on the link from the Caltech team and downloaded the software. A button on the top bar read Import Data, and he selected it. The progress bar moved slowly from 1 percent to 73 percent, where it froze. The four of them stared in silent dejection.
“Please, please,” Victor muttered. It must have worked, because the progress bar moved again, all the way to 100 percent. “Caltech wins.”
A street map showed greater Bilford. Toggle buttons on the side of the screen let him choose between satellite, street, and hybrid views as well as flip between Google and Bing maps. He clicked on the “Filter” button on the top of the screen, and a drop-down list of the eighty-one names appeared. A slider above the map was labeled “Timeline.” A button to the right of this read “Settings,” and he clicked on it. A text-entry box let him set the duration of the timeline; he selected six months.
“Just to be safe,” he said.
Another box said “Extinguish Red,” and an explanatory note beneath it said, “Turn dots red when data ends due to loss of power.” He clicked to turn on this option.
After closing the settings, he grabbed the button on the slider with the arrow and started to drag it along the timeline. They watched the dots move about the geography of the screen. At times some of them would converge, move together, and separate at the end of the day. “This is what their lives looked like,” Victor said.
Something seemed wrong. “I don’t think there are eighty dots on the screen,” Dagny said. “It’s more like thirty.”
“Well, we won’t see dots for all the phones all of the time,” Victor said. “Some of the phones only store seven days of GPS data, and some store even less than that.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds, because most of the phones have apps that can log GPS, too,” he explained. “If they made phone calls, we’ll have an approximation of their location from cell towers. And most people had location services turned on, so their location might be logged within Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, whatever other app they might be using. This will pull those locations.”
“Then it still seems like there should be more dots,” she said. “Can you zoom out?”
Victor hit the minus sign to zoom out, and more dots started to appear. He stopped when the entire state of Ohio was visible. The dots were concentrated in the southwest quadrant of the state. The biggest pocket of dots was around Bilford, but some appeared in the outskirts of Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus, too.
He continued to tug the slider along the timeline. When he hit the three-month mark, a cluster of dots converged and turned red in Bilford County.
“Go back and slow it down.”
He backed up the slider, hit a button that said “1/2 speed,” and pushed the “Play” button on the bottom of the screen. They watched as a cluster of eight free dots formed next to Fowler Road. “That’s where they gathered to look for work,” Dagny explained.
The dots left together, packed so closely they looked like a single, pulsating dot. They traveled down a few roads, and then veered off the street. “Hit satellite,” she said, and Victor obeyed.
The dots moved through deep woods and across a dirt road that bisected a clearing on a farm. They stopped at a giant silo, and then, one by one, flipped to red. He right-clicked and put a pin on the silo.
“Keep it going,” she said.
Another week passed on the timeline, and then a cluster of dots outside of Dayton traveled on the highway to Bilford County and the same farm. Again, the dots stopped at the silo, then turned red as they extinguished.
“John, do you know where that farm is?” she asked.
“That’s the old Hoover farm. It was foreclosed. Been abandoned for years,” Beamer replied.
“Perhaps not entirely abandoned,” she said.
The timeline continued to play, and dots continued to move about their lives. Another cluster gathered along Fowler Road and made its way to the farm.
“Eleven more,” Victor said as they turned red.
A week later, twelve more dots from north of Cincinnati filtered across the screen to the silo. Then eight more from south of Columbus. Another thirteen from Fowler Road. Twelve more from Dayton.
“My goodness,” Diego said. “We’re watching people die.”
Clusters kept aggregating, floating to the silo, and extinguishing. As more of the green dots disappeared, the remaining traveled in smaller and smaller groups to their end. Occasionally, a dot would travel there all by itself.
When there were three green dots left, two of them traveled to the silo, where they stayed for two days. Then they made their way to Hillsborough Park, where they met with the last remaining dot. Victor clicked on that dot, and a data box appeared with Adelmo Fox’s name and address, along with buttons that revealed other metadata from his phone.
“That’s when the unsub went off to bury the bag of phones. It looks like Adelmo happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Dagny said.
The two other phones expired, and only Adelmo’s dot burned green. The dot worked its way to Beamer’s house, where all the other dots flashed green again. “Because we plugged them in,” Victor explained unnecessarily.
Dagny turned to John. “Can you drive us to the farm?”
“I can drive,” Diego said before John had the chance to respond.
“We can’t all squeeze into your hot rod,” she said. “And besides, you’re not coming.”
Diego grimaced. “Dagny, I have to come. This is all on me.”
“Too dangerous. You’re a civilian.”
“I’ll drive,” John said.
As Victor and John headed up the stairs, Diego grabbed her arm and stopped her. “I don’t have kids or a wife or a family. I have literally nothing to lose. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.” She understood it well.
“I have nothing except the notion of purpose. All I have is the belief that I might be useful. And I would be useful. I
’m strong and fit—more than Victor, more than John.”
“You’ve never done anything like this.”
“Neither has Victor, right?”
“It’s dangerous, Diego.”
“I can handle a gun.”
“You’ve fired a gun?”
“Yes,” he said.
There was a lot she didn’t know about the priest. She yelled up to Beamer. “John!”
“Yes?” he called from upstairs.
“We’re going to need to borrow an extra gun.”
CHAPTER 25
Dagny, Victor, and Diego waited in Beamer’s car behind the police station while the officer covertly absconded with four Kevlar vests and a police-issued gun. Dagny claimed the extra gun and gave hers to Diego, since Beamer might be excused for lending a gun to an FBI agent—albeit a suspended one—but it would be impossible to explain giving a gun to a priest. Only a fool would give this priest a gun, she thought.
At her direction, Beamer drove them to the T.J.Maxx in New Bilford, where they purchased black shirts, pants, and shoes, so they could move freely as dusk turned to night. The store had a limited range of sizes, so Victor’s clothes were snug. “I look like a fat ballerina,” he muttered.
“It’ll do, Black Swan.”
On the way to the farm, they stopped at the Bilford Motor Inn, where she fished through her suitcase for the Radar Scope she’d once borrowed from a military friend and had never returned. Beamer eyed the green device when she slipped back into the front passenger seat of his Civic. “What does that do?”
“You hold it against the wall of a house, and it tells you if anyone is inside.”
“Never heard of such a thing.”
“They used them in Iraq.”
Victor leaned forward between the front seats. “So, we’re going to war?”
Perhaps they were. They had assumed that a single culprit was behind the mass abductions, but it could have been a group or a cult. If there were a gaggle of armed Koreshians waiting in the farmhouse, they needed to know.
It took twenty minutes to navigate the maze of back roads to the Hoover farm. They parked two properties away and walked through the woods toward the farm on foot. Five minutes in, they could see the crest of the massive silo. It took another ten minutes to make it to the clearing that brought the rest of the farm into view. A gravel drive bisected fields of high grass and led to a two-story, nineteenth-century farmhouse, then curved left to a large barn and the silo. Beyond the barn were fenced fields, seemingly empty of the livestock they’d once fed.
Although it was dusk, the windows of the farmhouse were dark. That did not mean that the house was empty. Dagny ordered the others to stay low and still until she gave them the signal to proceed. She crept through the grass to the right side of the farmhouse and pulled the Radar Scope from her backpack. The scope sent out a stepped-frequency radar and looked for changes in the Doppler pattern of the returned signal. If someone were inside the room on the other side of the wall, it would blink. She held the scope against the wall and pressed the button. No blink. Crawling along the perimeter of the house, she tested the scope at even intervals. The first floor appeared to be empty. She rose and peeked through a window, staring into an empty living room. No furniture, no rug, not even a picture on the wall. The lock on the window was unlatched. She placed both hands flat on the glass, pushed the window up, and climbed into the house.
The place was dusty and smelled like cigarette smoke. She grabbed a flashlight from her backpack and surveyed the room. A flattened cigarette stub lay in the middle of the floor. She noticed that the wood floor was lighter at the perimeter than the middle, which meant that there used to be a rug in the room. The cigarette stub had been dropped after that rug had been removed. She took some tweezers and a Ziploc bag from her backpack, picked up the stub, and dropped it into the bag. A small find, but cases had been solved with less. Grabbing a marker from the front pocket of her backpack, she scribbled the date and location on the white part of the bag.
She continued to search the first floor of the house, but no matter how softly she tiptoed, the floors squeaked. Gun drawn, she flitted through the kitchen and dining room.
Thump.
The noise came from upstairs.
Thump.
Dagny ran to the foyer and stood at the bottom of the staircase, holding her gun steady with both hands. She started up the steps, arms straight, gun leading. Her heart was pounding.
Thump.
There were three bedrooms at the top of the stairs. She went into the first of them, crouched low, gun ready. The room was spare; the opened closet was empty. She ducked into the second bedroom. Empty. She peeked into the bathroom on the way to the last bedroom. There was a pedestal sink under an open and empty medicine cabinet. The shower was clean; no curtain hung from the rod.
Thump.
It came from the last bedroom. She crouched in the hallway and peeked through the open door. There was a folded metal cot next to the window on the left wall, and a small closet in the far one.
Thump.
It came from the closet.
Dagny took a deep breath and charged into the room, gun first. She kicked open the closet door.
A bat flew into her head. It chirped and hissed. She swatted it away and ducked down. It flew into the wall, and then charged back at her. She dropped to the floor, rolled to the wall, and opened the window. The bat flew out.
She peered out the window and watched the bat fly into the dark sky. When it disappeared, she headed down the stairs and stifled a laugh.
Downstairs, she climbed out the open window. Scampering through the grass, she approached the barn and withdrew the Radar Scope once again. A trip around the barn perimeter indicated it was empty. She pushed open the barn door and walked through with her flashlight. A black tarp covered something. She tore it away and found a scissor lift. There was a keyhole on the control panel, but it was empty. The rest of the barn was littered with dirty junk—a broken wheelbarrow, paint cans, distressed lumber. Anything of use or value had been removed, save for the scissor lift, which was pristine. A recent addition to the barn, she decided.
She stepped out of the barn and pulsed the flashlight. The three men came running. They should have been creeping close to the ground, but they weren’t. Dagny had forgotten to tell them. This group needed close instruction. Although she had confirmed that the house and barn were empty, there were plenty of other hiding spots around the farm. The boys didn’t appreciate the potential for danger.
“Stay down,” she barked in a screamed whisper. They ducked low to the ground and made their way to her.
“What about the silo?” Beamer said, crouching beside her.
“That’s where we’re going. Guns out, gentlemen.”
“Even me?” Victor asked. Most of his prior firearm experience involved the word mishap.
“Even you.” She paused, and then added, “Maybe keep the finger off the trigger.”
Dagny led them along the ground to the silo. She placed her hand on the side of the towering cylinder and felt the cold, rough concrete. Somewhere there had to be a door. Circling the edifice, she found a large rectangular opening that had been filled in with concrete. The unsub had turned the silo into a tomb.
A metal ladder ran up the side of the silo, held six inches from the concrete by bolted metal arms every ten feet or so. She counted the intervals and concluded that the silo was about seventy feet tall. A difficult climb for anyone. Even more so with a body.
Victor must have been thinking the same thing. “Tough climb.”
“He used a scissor lift,” she said. “It’s in the barn.”
The silo’s concrete wall was probably too thick to allow for sonar, but faulty assumptions had killed many investigations. She took the Radar Scope from her backpack anyway and held it to the wall.
The scope blinked.
“Does that mean someone’s alive in there?” Diego asked.
Dagny
banged against the side of the silo. “Hello!” she screamed. The others joined in.
A faint voice emanated from behind the concrete. It sounded like: “Help.”
“Someone’s alive!” Beamer said.
“We need the lift,” Diego added.
“The key’s missing,” she replied. “It won’t work.”
Diego turned to the ladder and stuffed his gun in the waistband of his jeans. “Then it’s this,” he said, grabbing the bottom rung and pulling himself up.
“No, Diego, stop!” But he ignored her and kept climbing. She grabbed the bottom rail and pulled herself up.
Victor looked up at her. “Maybe we should stay down here. For cover.”
“Yes,” Dagny called down to him. “For cover.” She looked up at Diego, who was half a dozen rungs above her. “Diego, you don’t know what’s at the top.”
“I know what’s inside. That’s enough.” He continued up the side of the silo.
She increased her pace, spearing the rungs and pulling herself higher. Halfway up, she looked down at Beamer and Victor and felt a little dizzy.
“You don’t mind heights?” she called up to Diego.
“Hate them, actually,” he replied.
The wind seemed to swirl more the higher they climbed. “What do you plan to do at the top?” she said. “You don’t have rope. I doubt there’s a staircase inside.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “But I have to do something.”
“We’ve lost wars with that kind of thinking.” Then again, if he hadn’t started up the ladder first, she would have. Sometimes you had to do something.
She looked down again. Fifty feet to the ground. Victor and Beamer looked blurry to her. She had to stop looking down, so she looked up at Diego. He glanced at her.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I wish my job were a little less vertical.”
“Just fifteen more feet and then—”
She felt the explosion first—a violent shaking of the ladder that nearly threw her down. The sound followed—a thunderous blast that rang in her ears after the noise itself had dissipated. Then there was the flash of the fireball that blew out the top of the silo, blinding her, while the sparks of the explosion rained down and singed the skin on her arms and scalp.
