Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

  Peering into the pit, Dagny spied a mess of beer bottles and sandwich wrappers, remnants from a night of teen mischief. When you live in rural Ohio, drinking beer and eating junk food in a giant hole in the ground ranks among your better social options, she figured.

  There was nothing around Canter’s except the highway entrance ramp. No witnesses. No traffic. No bank with a camera at the ATM; no rival gas station with its own security feed. Just bare lots owned by speculators, who were waiting for the suburbs to grow to them. That’s why the unsub had picked Canter’s.

  You can’t be a serial killer in the city anymore. You have to go to the countryside if you don’t want to be caught.

  She climbed back over the fence, got into the car, and drove past the highway entrance on the off chance that the unsub had taken back roads back to Bilford. Ten minutes later, she saw her first signs of life: an actual stoplight, with a McDonald’s on one corner and a Wendy’s on another. Dagny pulled into the Wendy’s and walked inside. She studied the calorie counts on the menu and ordered a grilled-chicken sandwich. Along with the Egg McMuffin from breakfast, it would get her most of the points she needed for the day.

  A video camera hung above the kitchen, pointing at ordering customers. Dagny turned around and looked at the passing traffic outside the front window. If the unsub had taken the back road, he’d be on the security feed. The clerk placed her sandwich in a bag and handed it to her. She, in turn, flashed her creds and asked to speak with the manager.

  The manager—no older than twenty-two, she guessed—was camped in an office between the drive-through windows, hunched over paper schedules and employee rosters, scratching and erasing indecipherable marks on them. When Dagny asked to see the video archives, he froze for longer than a moment, seeming to reach deep into his reserves for some nugget of advice from managerial training. Finally, he asked if he could talk to his regional manager. She told him he didn’t need to, and he relented.

  The surveillance feed was backed up on a remote server, but it was accessible from a computer in the back of the restaurant. He led Dagny to the terminal and logged her in. She sat in front of the monitor while the manager stood behind her. The interface was intuitive. A column on the left listed dates, and clicking on a triangle in front of each of them dropped a submenu of clips by the hour.

  “You have two weeks of film?” Dagny said, surprised.

  “It used to be one week,” he said. “But they keep adding capacity, and the price keeps dropping.”

  One day, everything would be recorded and saved, and there would be no need for history books.

  She opened the submenu for the day of the gas-station explosion, scrolled down to the hour after the blast, and hit “Play.” Three people stood in line at the counter. Traffic passed in the window behind them. A customer hesitated in her order, rubbing her forehead as she seemed to vacillate between various options.

  She hit a button to double the playback speed, but passing cars moved too quickly for her to identify any of them, so she slowed it down to real time again.

  “What are we looking for?” the manager asked.

  She gave it her best guess. “A pickup carrying barrels of fuel.”

  As she said it, one passed across the screen.

  She stopped the video and backed it up, playing it again at half speed. It was a black pickup truck with at least five barrels in the back. The license plate was not visible. The driver was a thin blob. In all, the truck was on screen for less than two seconds. Dagny stopped it and played the sequence again, but it didn’t help. After a third play, she let it run. The pickup left the frame, and then came back into the frame when it turned into the McDonald’s lot across the street and pulled into the drive-through lane.

  The truck was too far from the Wendy’s camera for it to provide any useful detail. But the McDonald’s would have cameras, and one in the drive-through window would be pointed right at the unsub’s face. It was the lucky break she’d been waiting for.

  She called Victor and had him arrange for a Bureau video forensic team to come to the Wendy’s. Before leaving, she used her own iPhone to record the Wendy’s footage of the unsub’s pickup.

  She downed her sandwich on the walk across the street to the McDonald’s. Walking through the door, she flipped open her creds and asked the woman behind the register to get her manager. The clerk returned with a thin, middle-aged woman in a blue business suit. She introduced herself as Margorie Davies, the owner of the franchise. Davies gave Dagny a tour of the restaurant, pointing out each of the security cameras. Two of them were pointed directly out the drive-through windows, capturing the faces of customers as they paid for their orders, and again as they picked them up.

  “How long is the footage archived?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve never had to use it,” Davies replied.

  Like the Wendy’s feed, the McDonald’s footage was sorted remotely and accessed via an Internet portal. Dagny followed Davies back to her office, where she sat at her computer, opened the login screen for the service, and stared at it for a few seconds. “I don’t remember the password,” she said. “We’ve never had to log in.”

  It took a half hour to navigate the security site’s phone tree, verify the necessary credentials, and obtain a new password. Dagny logged into the program, navigated to the date of the gas-station explosion, and found the folder empty. Scrolling through the calendar dates on the left side of the screen, she saw only three days of saved footage.

  A young man in India answered her call to the security company’s customer-service line. “I see only three days of footage,” she said. “Does that mean there are only three days of stored footage or that this account only gets access to the last three days?”

  “I don’t understand the difference, but I would very much like to help you.”

  The difference was the world. “Was the footage overwritten or is it simply blocked from view by the account holder?”

  “It’s not available,” he said. “But I would very much like to help you.”

  Dagny was very much ready to do something else to him, but instead she asked for his supervisor. The representative obliged, and then dropped the call during the transfer. She called back, pressed all sorts of buttons at various prompts, connected with another agent, and was successfully transferred to a manager who assured her that he would very much like to help her.

  “I can confirm that the footage has been deleted,” the man said.

  “But has it been overwritten?”

  “That I can’t tell you.”

  There was a possibility that forensic experts could resurrect the deleted footage from the security company’s servers. Every new second of footage recorded, however, threatened to overwrite that which was previously deleted. “Whatever server or drive you’re storing this account’s feed to—you have to pull it off the system immediately,” she said.

  “I can’t do that without jeopardizing the storage of today’s feed. There would be a gap as we swap out the systems, and we could be liable for that.”

  “I can get consent from the customer.”

  “Not good enough. Other customers are on that server, too, and their footage could be compromised.”

  “I guarantee you that whatever the cameras fail to record isn’t as important as what we’re trying to save.”

  “I can’t do it without a court order.”

  “Where are the servers located?”

  “Albany, New York.”

  Dagny got the address. “You’ll have a court order within the hour.”

  Dagny grabbed a piece of paper from Davies’s desk, scribbled a sworn declaration, and signed it. She photographed the paper with her phone and e-mailed it to Bureau counsel with instructions to enlist an AUSA in Albany to serve an ex-parte emergency order at the storage center.

  Her phone buzzed with news that the video-forensics team had arrived at the Wendy’s. She jogged back across the street and knocked on the sliding rear-passeng
er door of an unmarked black van with tinted windows and numerous antennae. The door slid open, and five technicians jumped out. After introductions, Dagny instructed the team to download and analyze the video from Wendy’s while they awaited a court order for the McDonald’s feed.

  A half hour later, they had the order in hand. An agent in Albany served it on the security firm while the FBI forensic team logged into the servers remotely from the back of the van, culling through deleted files, searching for the surveillance feed from the day of the gas-station explosion. Because the metadata of the deleted files had been corrupted, review required a tedious process of playing back the beginning portion of every deleted clip in order to ascertain the time stamp of the recording. They divided the task, each member of the team taking a chunk of the files. The lead technician logged Dagny into a terminal so that she could contribute, too.

  It took three hours to make their way through all of the deleted clips, which went back only to the day after the gas-station explosion.

  This was a punch in the gut. If she had investigated the explosion at Canter’s one day earlier, they would have had a photograph of the murderer.

  Dagny gave herself a moment to mourn, then gave the troops their orders. The road to Bilford was littered with fast-food restaurants, drugstores, and gas stations, and they needed to check surveillance footage from each of them, even though it was unlikely that any captured more than the passing blur of the black pickup.

  After the troops left, Dagny climbed back into her car and checked her phone for messages. Victor had sent her an updated victim spreadsheet, and she pulled her iPad from her backpack so she could study it on a larger screen. The information—culled from phones, witness statements, and physical evidence—was voluminous. Columns logged calls, contacts, addresses, birth dates, family members, texts, estimated dates of abduction and death, relationship status, social media accounts, medical health, condition of the corpses, biological evidence gathered, hair color, eye color, weight, height, car, computer, phone, employment history, relationship history, and even the coyote who had brought the person to America, where it was known.

  The variables in combination were overwhelming. The database listed 387 addresses, 813 family members, 419 employers, and 1,543 contacts. It contained 250,345 text messages and 597,452 e-mails. By right-clicking on the header, Dagny could see how many different entries there were for each column. Thirty-seven cities of origin; seven variants on hair color; five kinds of relationship status (including “it’s complicated,” lifted from Facebook). Under coyote, there were three entries.

  Three entries. Three was a lot more workable than hundreds or thousands. Three was the kind of variable that could lead somewhere.

  She scrolled down the coyote column. About two-thirds of the boxes were blank—either they had made their way across the border without paid assistance or the courier was unknown. The rest were divided, more or less equally, among three names.

  Delgado. Erickson. Sanchez.

  She called Victor. “Where did we get the coyote information?”

  “Witness interviews. How’s the gas station?”

  “A day too late. How about the cigarette stub?”

  “No print. Lifted DNA, but no match in CODIS. You think the coyote is important?”

  “Maybe. Where’s Diego?”

  “Right here.”

  “Put him on.”

  A moment later, Diego was on the phone.

  “Before you got me involved, you talked to an employment coordinator for undocumented workers, right?”

  “Ty Harborman.”

  “Tell him we need to talk. I’ll be back at the high school in an hour.”

  CHAPTER 49

  There was nothing new on television that afternoon, just the same chatter from the same mannequins repeated on the same endless loop. No one answered the questions that mattered. Were they close to finding him? Had any witnesses come forward? Did he leave behind any fingerprints or DNA? How much longer would this go on? These were the questions that left him anxious and jittery.

  The thin man clicked off the television and put on his jacket. It was time to see the epicenter of the investigation in person. Since the police were likely looking for a black pickup and missing taxi, he decided to walk. He used the hour it took to come up with a plan.

  A plan. It was about time for one. He’d killed the first batch of Mexicans on a whim, with no understanding of why he’d done it except that he was angry and confused and that he felt betrayed. Now, he understood that the murders were an attempt to atone for his own sins. Having helped to bring Mexicans to Bilford, it was his duty to remove some.

  With those bodies in hand, he’d remembered the silo at the Hoover farm. Terry Hoover had plugged up the door to the silo when the bank served its papers, so now it was just a big concrete tomb. The thin man had stolen a scissor lift to do general maintenance on the property, and he used the lift to take the bodies up to the top of the silo, where he dumped them sixty feet to the bottom. He should have felt bad about the whole thing, but he felt good.

  If he had stopped then, perhaps nothing would have come from it. Over time, he might have erased the murders from his memory. Life would have continued as it had before.

  But he didn’t want life to continue as it had before.

  He killed the second group to recapture the feeling of release that came from the first. The boiling rage inside him receded as they died, and he felt vibrant and alive in ways he never had.

  When he killed the third time, he expected the sensation to dull, but it didn’t. If anything, the swelling count of his victims made him feel powerful, and he needed to feel powerful.

  The fourth time, he put the Mexicans to work first—repairing the ladder that ran up the silo and building the platform floor inside the top of it. After they carved a hole in the middle of the platform, he sent them down it under the pretense that they would clean out the floor below. He listened to their cries and pleas for several hours before leaving them to die. It wasn’t enough to just kill them anymore; he had to hear the terror in their voices echo up through the cylinder of their concrete tomb.

  Within weeks, there were more than eighty bodies in the silo, and no one had noticed they were gone. It was enough to make the thin man question his sanity. Was it all a dream or hallucination?

  The fireball made it real, which was what he wanted. It also made him famous, but only in the most generic sense. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody understood what had happened to him.

  As the thin man took a seat on the rocky hillside overlooking Bilford High School, he thought about the story Allison would help him tell. A story about fatherhood and victimhood, and how he rose above it. People would understand. History would be kind to him. Long after he was dead, people would talk about him, his struggles, and his signature achievement.

  And if Allison couldn’t see the beauty in what he’d done—if she couldn’t see the poetry of it all—he could kill her and find another reporter who could.

  He removed his binoculars from their case and surveyed the scene at the high school. Two dozen unmarked trucks were parked parallel near the gymnasium doors. He wondered what they were. Mobile laboratories for analyzing hair, fibers, fingerprints, and DNA, perhaps. Had they found any tangible evidence of him? Even though he was a lifelong scoundrel, he’d managed to avoid arrests, so his fingerprints wouldn’t be found in any government databases unless the military had digitized old files, which he doubted. A lab had his DNA from the paternity test, but it had never made its way into a case file as far as he knew. The people in the vans were working hard for naught, he figured. More taxpayer dollars being wasted.

  A red Corvette pulled into the lot and drove up to a checkpoint, where a hand extended a badge out the window to a guard. The guard handed the badge back and let it through. The thin man followed the car with binoculars, watching it park. When the door opened, Dagny Gray stepped out. He’d watched her press conference that morning and had
been captivated by her lithe beauty. The thin woman had delivered her remarks with eloquence and poise. He was glad he had not killed her. A man in a black suit and clerical collar walked out of the school and approached Dagny. A priest. His hair was cropped close and clean, and there was stubble on his face. Hispanic. He looked familiar to the thin man. He’d just seen him somewhere recently, maybe just a couple of days ago, but not dressed like a priest.

  The priest and Dagny stood by the Corvette. It was a real-American car, and that made the thin man smile. The priest leaned against the back fender, talking, while Dagny nodded along. She said something, and then he did. She shook her head, and the priest laughed. He said something, and she nodded.

  The priest walked her to the passenger side of the car, placing his arm behind her body, with his hand dangling ever so lightly upon her waist for a moment, before he jerked it away abruptly. And then again, when the priest opened the door for her, his hand curled around her sleeve, just above her elbow, as she slid into the car. Twice the priest had touched her, with an ease and a comfort that was wholly inappropriate for a man of the cloth. Twice this priest had disrespected God.

  The thin man smashed his binoculars against the rocky hillside and bolted from his seat. As he walked home, he thought about the ungodly priest, and remembered where he had seen him before.

  CHAPTER 50

  As they drove to Dayton, she could still feel Diego’s touch on her arm and waist. Her friend Julia once confided that she’d stopped noticing her husband’s touch after two years of marriage. Dagny had never carried a relationship long enough to grow used to the sensation of the man’s hand, no matter how short or incidental the contact. She rubbed her arm to shake Diego’s trace.