Noah didn’t find it humorous that Sean Rogan had predicted that method to hide the identity of the phone number holder.
The credit card yielded nothing-it was in the dollar amount for the yearlong subscription to several virtual numbers, all of which went to the same disposable phone number. The account had been opened three months ago, and changed disposable numbers four times. The current disposable phone, however, had been reloaded at a nearby location three weeks ago.
When he got the call that the surveillance team had finally arrived to relieve him from the impromptu stakeout, he left to check out the business.
Noah drove to a small convenience store only six blocks from the church, on the corner. Like other businesses in the area, bars covered the windows. When he pulled up, several loiterers left the area.
He walked in and the tall, young black kid behind the counter gave him the once-over. “You a fibbie?”
“Special Agent Noah Armstrong.” He showed his ID. “I’m looking for the owner.”
“That’s my dad. He’s not here.”
“I’m looking for this girl. She lives not far from here, and may have come in to refill a disposable phone.” He showed Ivy’s picture.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Noah wasn’t certain the number belonged to Ivy, but since it was only a mile from her house, he was taking a chance thinking it was her. With the multiple virtual numbers all going to the same phone, it suggested she was giving different numbers to different people. According to the company, the caller ID was set up to show which virtual number was being used. That would help Ivy keep track of who was calling her.
Noah had also asked about tracing the numbers calling in to the virtual numbers, but the company didn’t keep that data.
This was his closest lead. “The last time the phone was filled was three weeks ago, two hundred dollars cash.”
The kid lit up. “She-et, why didn’t you say so? Two bills, crisp and clean.”
“Was it her?”
“Naw, it was some older dude. Forties.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?”
The kid shrugged. “White. Maybe Mexican, Italian, something like that-but not a spic, if you know what I mean.”
Noah let the racial slur slide. “How was he dressed?”
“How’em I supposed to remember that? Not like a scumbag. No suit, but I thought he might have been an undercover cop. ’Cept the narcs I know try to look like addicts, you know what I mean?”
“You have a good memory.”
“Two bills? Don’t see those here. Counting pennies for a bottle of beer, sure, got that going down.”
“Anything else you can remember?”
“No, and I’d tell you, honest. You just killed my business for the next two hours, buddy. Everyone on the block pegged you for a cop. My dad is going to shoot me.”
Noah handed him his card. “Thanks for your help.” He glanced up and saw the security camera. “Any chance you have that guy on surveillance?”
The kid shook his head. “No chance. We copy over the tapes every twenty-four hours. My dad’s cheap, and tapes cost a lot, and do you know how much it costs to go digital?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Lucy closed her eyes as she savored the dark chocolate Haagen-Dazs ice cream Sean brought her.
“Umm.”
“Good?”
“Umm-hmm.”
Kate hit Sean in the shoulder. “You didn’t bring me any?”
“I’m sure Lucy will share.”
“No I won’t,” Lucy said between bites. “I’m the invalid here.”
Kate snorted and waved her hand around the family room. Lucy had taken over the coffee table with all the files and notes Noah had sent over. Her laptop was open and Noah had given her access to the complete Wendy James file. Because she’d been out of the loop on the James case for the last two days, she wanted to go through those documents first, with an eye for any connection to Ivy Harris or the murder victims.
“I need the chocolate to keep me focused on the task at hand,” Lucy said.
Kate sat on one of the chairs, tucked her shoulder-length blond hair behind her ears, and picked up a file.
“Wait,” Lucy said, “if you want to help, first read the Cyber Crime Unit report.” She leaned over and handed Kate the appropriate file, then took another big scoop of ice cream and put the lid on the carton. She started to get up to put it in the freezer, when Sean grabbed it from her.
“Sit.” He walked into the kitchen to put it away. Lucy glanced up when he came in a few minutes later, holding the cat. He sat down and adjusted the cat in his lap to pet him. The cat purred happily.
“Did you pick a name for him?” Lucy asked.
“Why does Sean get to name the cat?” Kate said.
“Because he’s taking him when I’m at the Academy.”
“No he’s not.” Kate looked from Lucy to Sean, narrowing her gaze to a glare. “You travel too much, Rogan.”
“Patrick and I are rarely gone at the same time.”
“I’m here every night. The cat needs consistency.”
“Admit it,” Sean said, “you like the cat.”
“I never said I didn’t.”
Lucy laughed. “You told me you didn’t want a pet.”
“Cats are easy.”
The cat suddenly meowed loudly and jumped off Sean’s lap.
“See, he doesn’t like you,” Kate said, picking the cat up. “Good kitty. I knew you wanted to stay with me.” She stuck her tongue out at Sean, an odd and hilarious gesture for a woman who was nearly forty.
“There’s a bump on his neck that’s probably sore, that’s why he jumped down. You should take him to the vet.”
“If I’m taking him to the vet, I’m keeping him while Lucy’s gone,” Kate said.
“I guess that’s final.” Sean winked at Lucy and she suspected the conversation wasn’t over on the cat.
Lucy finished going over the Wendy James reports while Sean worked on his laptop.
Next, she picked up the arson report on the Hawthorne Street house and reviewed it again.
“What I don’t understand,” Lucy said, “is how Ivy Harris was able to rent that house on Hawthorne when she was using a false name. Did she have a complete fake identity? Social Security number and everything?”
“Where’s the rental agreement?” Kate asked.
“I haven’t seen it.”
Sean said, “Maybe someone cosigned the agreement, or she took an ID. Often, the companies do only a cursory background check. Or, if someone has a good record as a tenant, a reference from a previous landlord is sufficient.”
“It’s not here,” Lucy said. “At least, it’s not in the arson reports. I don’t know that we requested it.”
“Tell Noah to request it tomorrow,” Kate said.
Lucy didn’t want to wait that long. “The agreement may give us an emergency contact, someone who knows Ivy-maybe even knew she was using a fake name.”
Kate pulled out a paper. “Here’s the contact information for the owner. Give them a call.”
The doorbell rang as Lucy was on the phone with the owners. Kate jumped up to answer it.
By the time Kate came back to the family room with Noah, Lucy had the answers she needed. “The owner is going to fax me a copy of the rental agreement.”
“For what?” Noah asked.
“The Hawthorne Street house. Check if Ivy Harris has any references or a previous address. Someone knows where she is.”
“Good plan.” He sat down. “I can’t stay long, but I need to follow up on your accident.”
“I sent you a report. That’s everything I remember.”
“And it was detailed. I went back to talk to Patricia Neel, the neighbor, and she identified a church that Hannah Edmonds had attended.”
“You mean Ivy?” Kate asked.
“Ivy Harris is a false identity,” Noah explained. “We have confirmation t
hat the girl known as Ivy is in fact Hannah Edmonds, who’s bipolar and suicidal.”
Lucy shook her head. “She wasn’t acting suicidal. She was definitely in preservation mode, believing that she’s the only one who can protect her sister.”
“Which is asinine,” Noah said. “She must not be thinking straight if she thinks she can protect a fourteen-year-old better than the authorities.”
“She may have some reason for distrusting law enforcement. She got in the car because she was terrified of the guy chasing her-she said she didn’t know him, and that may be true, but she’d seen him before, I’m certain of it. If we can get her to work with a forensic artist, we can get a good rendering.”
“That’s a big if, because she ran from the crash site.”
“You’re treating her like a criminal, not a victim,” Lucy said.
“You don’t know that she’s a victim. She is accused of kidnapping her sister, a fourteen-year-old minor. She is using a fake identity after making her family believe she committed suicide. She’s a known prostitute who fled a murder scene. Yes, she is most certainly a person of interest.”
Lucy felt chastised, and Noah wasn’t wrong about the situation, but at the same time they didn’t have all the facts. Pieces were missing that would make the picture clear.
“I understand,” she said, “but she’s a classic victim, particularly if someone in authority let her down. Distrustful of the police-”
“So are criminals,” Noah interrupted.
Lucy continued, “Protective of her family, scared, hiding.”
“I know a lot of bad guys who fit that bill, too,” Noah said. “You know nothing about her. She’s considered dangerous.”
“Her house was burned down in the middle of the night. She went to someone she trusted-Jocelyn Taylor-who wasn’t under duress. We know that Chris Taylor contacted Senator Paxton for advice, but was killed before he could meet with him.”
“Maybe Ms. Edmonds didn’t want him talking to anyone.”
“You think she’s party to the murders of her friends?”
Noah hedged. “No, but I think she knows more than we do about who is responsible.”
“Have you talked to the runaway that Jocelyn relocated?” Kate asked, trying to break the tension in the room. “She might have some insight.”
“An agent from the Richmond office had an interview this afternoon with the girl and her mother.” He looked at his watch. “She said she’d have the report to me this evening.”
He said to Lucy, “We’re going off the theory that the three crime scenes are interconnected, but we have no suspects and the one witness who can help ran. We need her in custody.”
“I agree, to protect her. Her house is gone, her friends are dead, she’s terrified, and she’s trying to protect her sister.” Lucy didn’t like how Noah was putting Ivy in the role of suspect.
“All signs of desperation-and that’s what I’m worried about. She’s going to do something desperate and get someone killed. Genie Reid is damn lucky that bullet didn’t kill her. If it was a higher caliber, or she was turned only a few degrees, it would have hit her chest, not her arm.” Lucy had rarely seen Noah angry until this week. Now, every time they talked about the case, he seemed to be angry.
But Lucy was confident Ivy was as much a victim-and target-as those who had already been murdered. “I agree, we need to get her into protective custody, but someone is targeting all the girls in the Hawthorne house. There were at least six, and we know about five of them. Maddie and Nicole were murdered; Ivy, Mina, and Ivy’s sister are in hiding.”
“The pastor of His Grace Church near their house knows more, and I have a team outside the church watching for any sign of Hannah Edmonds or her sister. I also have a lead on the virtual phone number you ID’d on Nicole Bellows’s body.”
Noah glanced at Sean, who had been oddly silent during the entire conversation. “You were right, Rogan. Someone bought a prepaid credit card to use for the virtual phone service. We have a vague description of a forty-year-old white male of Italian or Spanish descent who last reloaded the card. Now that we have that number, we’re going back to the virtual phone company to run a reverse program, to trace that credit card to any other virtual numbers it purchased, under any name.”
Sean nodded and said with mock surprise, “Smart.”
Noah snapped back, “The FBI has a good cyber crimes team.”
“They’re adequate,” Sean said.
“Hey,” Kate said, “I’ll take you on head-to-head with a computer anytime, Rogan.”
“You’re not on cyber crimes, you teach them,” Sean grinned. “You’re head and shoulders above anyone else there.”
Noah sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t have time for this, Rogan.”
Noah was showing signs of strain and fatigue, and Lucy realized there was a lot of pressure on him from all angles-Congress, Matt Slater, AD Stockton, DC Metro, Reverend Edmonds.
She forced herself to stay calm and not take his anger personally. “Let’s put the Ivy-Harris-as-suspect theory aside for a moment. Consider her as a target. Wendy was killed the day before the fire. Ivy and the others at Hawthorne Street were in the house when the fire was set-which is still ruled as inconclusive and a possible arson. We know this because of the clothes found in the hotel room. Ivy calls Jocelyn and asks for help. The girls split up for some reason-”
Kate interrupted. “That has me perplexed. Wouldn’t there be safety in numbers?”
“Maybe not everyone was home during the fire,” Lucy said. “Or they felt hiding individually was safer. Or maybe they had a falling-out.”
“And we won’t know until we talk to Hannah Edmonds, but,” Noah said with rare sarcasm, “she ran from the authorities.”
Everyone turned to Noah, equally surprised by his tone.
He didn’t notice, and said, “Just get to the point, Lucy.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sean tense and lean forward, just a bit. Couldn’t he tell Noah was on edge? Did he want to push him even more?
“My point,” she said crisply, hoping to defuse the tension for everyone, “is that when we know why these girls were targets, we’ll know who the killer is.”
“That’s a big revelation?”
Again, Lucy tried not to take the slight personally, because Noah was under strain, but it hurt. Was she stating the obvious? Except everyone was focused on finding Ivy Harris, and no one was looking now at why she was on the run.
“I think the focus has changed from finding the killer to finding Ivy. We need to do both,” Lucy said.
“We are.”
“Okay, then we have no problem.”
She swallowed her frustration and embarrassment. Her voice cracked just a bit when she said, “I’ve been thinking about the killer’s strategy. He started by trying to cover up his motive. First the attempted rape, then a fire that he tried to make look like an accident. But when that fire didn’t give him the results he wanted, he grew bolder. Killing Nicole and leaving the rat. Jamming security at a hotel, killing three people and then showering in the same room. He’s arrogant, thinks he’s smarter than most everyone and definitely smarter than the police. He will not hesitate to kill again. While he has above-average intelligence, he’s not wholly focused on self-preservation. Coming after Ivy in daylight was dangerous for him.”
“Especially,” Kate said, “because she jumped into a cop car.”
Lucy shook her head. “He might not have known. Genie’s car is unmarked-not even a government plate. But if you get closer-like he did-he might have been able to see the radio panel, or maybe he knew what Detective Reid looked like.”
“You think he went back to his crime scenes?” Noah made a note. “We photographed bystanders.”
“No, he’s not the type of killer who would go back. He’s not killing because of a thrill. I can’t say whether he gets any personal rush from murder, but that’s not the reason he kills. He does like to play gam
es, however. That’s why the messages are important. He’s taunting his victims, but there’s no guarantee his targets will even see the messages. He is the type who would monitor the investigation. Listen to the media. Read the newspapers. Follow online media for any rumors or theories. He doesn’t want to be caught, but he definitely wants to finish his mission. And his mission is to kill the six girls who lived at the Hawthorne Street house.
“And the only thing that makes sense,” Lucy continued, “knowing what we know about Ivy Harris and Wendy James’s secret room, is that together they knew something that was dangerous to one of their clients. That maybe they worked together to record men like Alan Crowley to blackmail or threaten them.”
“So far, finances on Crowley and the other men we know Wendy was involved with are clean. No unusual payments. But,” Noah added, “Stein’s team is going through them again at different angles, as well as those zindividuals who rented apartment seven-ten. Maybe there’s something there, but it’s buried. And Stein’s team is going through all the public filings of DSA, to see if something matches up to the other records.”
“DSA?” Kate asked.
“Devon Sullivan and Associates, James’s former employer. They’re lobbyists.”
“They fired Wendy after the affair with Crowley was exposed,” Lucy said.
Kate rolled her eyes. “So a single female secretary gets fired for having an affair with a married guy, but the said married guy is still a sitting congressman pulling in over a hundred thou annually, with perks? That sucks.”
“Things haven’t changed much over the centuries,” Sean interjected. “Look at Hester Prynne.”
Noah cleared his throat. “Psychologically speaking, do you think we can bluff the killer into making a move?”
“Yes,” Lucy said. “Without a doubt. But it can’t be heavy-handed. He has sharp instincts.”
“I’ll talk to Stockton and Hans and see what they want to do with that. In the meantime, Kate-I’m pulling you in for the next day or two. Slater said I can use anyone I need, and considering that you’re the top cyber crimes guru that the FBI has…” He shot a glance at Sean with a hint of a smile, almost daring him to contradict him. Lucy was relieved. The tension began to dissipate.
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