by Steven James
After a moment, Cassandra stared up, then down, then from side to side as if she were looking for something.
Another tear fell.
The only audio was the sound of a man’s slow, heavy breathing.
The cameraman.
My heart began to hammer. I didn’t like this. I knew already that this video was not going to have a pleasant ending.
The image continued to widen until Cassandra’s shoulders came into view. I could see that she was standing facing the camera, but where, I couldn’t tell. The background was blurry. She shuddered, and a thin shiver ran through her. There were two dress straps draped across her shoulders.
I felt my heart churning in my chest.
The cameraman’s breathing continued to grow faster. The image widened, and I could see that Cassandra was wearing a crimson evening gown. Maybe silk. It looked expensive. She was terrifyingly beautiful.
And very, very afraid.
Another shiver caught her, held her. Shook her.
The center of the picture reflected a fine glint, and now I saw why. She was standing behind a pane of glass.
I leaned closer. The image widened.
No, not just a pane of glass. Cassandra was in a large tank. If she was five-eleven, the tank was about three meters wide, deep, and tall. Eight pipes, inserted through holes in the glass, formed the top of the tank, the spaces between them providing air for her to breath.
The camera tilted, and the video traveled down her body, down her legs, to show us that she was standing barefoot in a pool of water that reached her knees. Something was around her ankle.
The camera drew in for a close-up, and I saw that her abductor had clamped a shackle around her left ankle. A chain led from the manacle to a rusty ring at the bottom of the tank.
My beating, beating heart.
Cassandra kicked her foot uselessly against the chain. Her ankle was raw from previous kicks, but she didn’t seem to care. Still, only the sound of the cameraman breathing; now faster, though.
She kicked again, harder. His breathing quickened. He was getting excited by what he saw. No sound of Cassandra’s cries. No sound of the splashing water or the chain.
Then, the camera swept up to the top corner of the tank where a gray pipe was spitting out a narrow, but steady, stream of water.
No, no, no.
He’s going to drown her. He’s going to film her as she dies.
I felt a rush of the same cold, terrifying anger that I’d felt thirteen years earlier when I saw what Richard Basque had done to Sylvia Padilla in the slaughterhouse. Anguish and terror flooding through me.
What humans are capable of …
What humans do …
Suddenly, Cassandra closed her hands into tight, desperate fists, squeezed her eyes shut, threw her head back, and screamed—but to us, her blood-curdling terror remained silent, muted, then overlaid with the cameraman’s breathing. Seeing Cassandra standing there screaming at the top of her lungs, and yet making no sound, sent chills down my back. It was more disturbing, more heartbreaking, than if I could have heard her.
My heart slammed against my chest.
She screamed until she was out of air, and then she shrieked soundlessly again as the camera panned to the side to reveal dark red words, the color of blood, scrawled on the gray plaster of a nearby wall: Freedom or Pain?
You decide.
8:00 p.m.
Finally, the camera returned to Cassandra, one last time. She’d crumpled to the floor of the tank and was now sitting tragically in the water. Her hands covered her face. Her shoulders shook as she wept. The water rippled and washed against the glass.
Then, the video dissolved into black, and all we could hear was the sound of the cameraman’s breathing. Until that, too, faded.
And then all was dark and still and silent.
Except for the deafening roar of blood, rushing, pumping, screaming through my heart.
40
2:49 p.m.
5 hours 11 minutes until Cassandra’s deadline Ralph and I sat in silence after watching the video. Terry stared at me quietly from my computer screen. A long moment and then another passed. The stillness in the room seemed like sacred ground, and none of us wanted to be the first to trespass across it.
Ralph was clenching and then unclenching his fists. “Terry, make sure this isn’t posted anywhere on the web. You know Angela Knight in our cybercrime division?”
“Yeah. She’s good.”
“The best.” Ralph looked at his watch, no doubt factoring in Quantico’s three hour time difference. I knew Angela works nights, comes in at 5:00. “Give her a call,” he said to Terry, “and get her a copy of this. Have her sweep the web, look for any postings. If this is on the Internet we need it taken down. Now.”
“OK.” Terry began clicking his keyboard. “If it’s on there, we’ll get it off. We’ll also analyze the video, the digital resonance, the content. Everything.”
“Good,” I said. “When was the email sent?”
“At 8:51 a.m.”
“Can you tell where it’s from?”
I saw Terry referring to some handwritten notes beside his computer. “Whoever sent it knows how to hide his tracks. He positioned it as a piece of junk mail and sent it through a spam router in the Ukraine. Ever since I opened the file I’ve had my computer tracking it.” He glanced at his notes. “So far we’re up to seventeen transfers in four countries. It could take ten or twelve hours to find the original source.”
I shook my head. “We don’t have—”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
“All right,” said Ralph. “Keep on it.”
“Terry,” I said, “I have some encrypted files for you from Cassandra’s computer. I’ll send them to you. See what you can decipher.”
“Done.”
After we’d ended the chat and I’d sent him the files, I asked Ralph,
“Can you tell what kind of building that tank is in?”
He shook his head. “Hard to say. Concrete floor … hardly any basements in California, so maybe a garage. Could be a deserted factory, a boiler room somewhere. Any of a hundred warehouses down by the shipyards.”
“OK,” I said. “So unless Austin Hunter sent this video to himself, he’s no longer our primary suspect in Cassandra’s disappearance.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Let’s watch it again. But this time, look at everything except Cassandra. Whoever filmed this video was concentrating on her, distracted by her. You could hear it in the way his breathing changed.
He might have been careless, let something slip into the frame that can help us find her.” I clicked “play” again.
We were halfway through the second viewing when Lien-hua arrived. I saw her stand frozen beside the door. When the video ended, her lips parted as if she was about to say something, but it never came. She shook her head, her eyes intense. Frighteningly intense. I don’t think Ralph noticed. But I did.
“Is that Cassandra?” she asked.
I nodded.
She took a seat beside me. “Play it again.”
I did. And when it was finished, a moment of silence washed over the room once again.
Lien-hua pulled out her notepad. “All right. At least we’ve got time on our side.”
“How do you figure?” asked Ralph.
“After all the work of constructing that tank, abducting Cassandra, then chaining her inside, it’s unlikely he’ll move her.
If we can find where she was when he shot the video, we’ll find where she is now.”
Her words rang true to me. “OK.” I looked at my watch. “It’s 3:01. Assuming 8:00 p.m. is really our deadline, that gives us less than five hours to find Cassandra.” I set the timer on my watch to go off in four and a half.
“Lien-hua, what’s your take on this?” asked Ralph. “What struck you when you saw the video?”
“Everything is specific: the camera angles, the timing of the shot
s, the tank. It all plays into his fantasy. The camera doesn’t shake.
There’s no hesitation. He’s done this before. Cassandra isn’t his first.” This was her turf. Profiling. And even though I didn’t want to admit it, her observations seemed to be right on target.
“All right,” said Ralph. “Before we go any further, I’ll call the police department, see what kind of help they can give us. Maybe Lieutenant Graysmith’s attitude will change when he sees this video.
Also, I need to call FBI Director Rodale back and brief him. We meet back here in five minutes.” I was glad Ralph was here to take the reins, that way I could focus more on the case than coordinating a team.
While he made his calls, I stepped out of the room to grab a drink from the water fountain at the end of the hall, the words paralyzed prey ringing in my head once again.
Shade phoned Melice and had started to give him instructions when a woman’s voice said, “Who is this?”
End call.
It was Shade’s first mistake.
And Shade vowed it would be the last.
So Melice had given the phone away, or lost it. That did not make Shade happy. No, everything lay in too delicate a balance to be making foolish mistakes.
Perhaps track down and then eliminate the woman? Yes. That could be done easily enough.
But on the other hand, it would be better to stick to the plan for the time being. Only move on her if necessary.
No, Shade hadn’t said enough to her to cause suspicion. Not nearly enough.
Shade tapped a cell phone key, and a photo, sent from a friend, filled the screen. Shade stared at the twenty-two-year-old woman standing at a funeral, her grief captured in digital clarity.
Dark glasses. Black hair.
Lien-hua Jiang.
Long before she became a special agent. Even before she was a detective. The tears on her cheeks, frozen in time.
This was the key, the reason for everything that was about to happen.
Shade would find another way to be in touch with Melice. Until then, it was just a matter of watching and waiting and staying focused.
Without making any more careless mistakes.
After Ralph had made the calls and we were all back in the room he said, “All right. This has officially shifted from a missing person investigation to a kidnapping. It’s related to the arson investigation, though. I explained to Rodale that you two know more about what’s going on here than anyone, and that we need your help to find Ms.
Lillo. He gave you the green light to stay involved. So, let’s do this and let’s do it right.”
“Good,” I said, glad to be officially on the case.
“OK. Let’s watch it again,” said Lien-hua.
“This time,” I said, “let’s be specific. Ralph, watch for images on the glass. Earlier when we watched it, I saw a glint. Maybe you can see something in the foreground, a reflection of the cameraman.”
He nodded, his jaw set.
“Lien-hua, concentrate on Cassandra: the way she’s blinking; could it be Morse code? Is she mouthing anything? Her hands—is she signaling in some way? Look for any indication that she’s trying to get us a message.”
She nodded, positioned her legal pad in front of her, and slid a pen into her hand.
“I’ll focus on the chain and the pipe and the message on the wall,” I said.
Then, I began to play the video once again.
Inside the office of the warehouse, Creighton Melice checked his watch. Shade was supposed to have contacted him fifteen minutes ago, at 3:00 p.m., but he hadn’t heard from him at all since the call last night directing him to pick up Cassandra. Of course Creighton didn’t have his phone, but he did have email and Shade had often used that before. Creighton didn’t like it when things did not go according to schedule.
He glanced at the live video feed of the tank.
The water was up to Cassandra’s waist now. She couldn’t sit down to rest any longer. So it looked like it would be a long afternoon for her. He would have preferred filming all of this in real-time web streaming, but Shade had insisted that it would be too easy to track the location if they posted it on the web.
Possibly.
Probably.
As annoying as he was, Shade did tend to be right.
But still, it would have made for a satisfying day.
He watched her press her hands uselessly against the glass. Yes.
He would use the tank one last time with the woman Shade had promised him, and then everything would come to a glorious finish.
She took a breath, bent into the water, and tugged at the chain with both hands.
Let her tug.
The others had tried that as well. That chain was not going to break.
41
3:18 p.m.
4 hours 42 minutes until Cassandra’s deadline After twenty-five minutes of reviewing the video, we’d come up with only four observations that seemed potentially helpful.
Ralph noticed that the video had been edited in several places—right after the close-up of the shackle around Cassandra’s ankle, and then ten seconds from the end when the handwritten words appeared, just before panning back to the final image of her sitting in the water. “This creep took his time to shoot it, edit it, splice it,” he said.
“He’s patient,” Lien-hua said, echoing my thoughts. “Self-con-trolled. Back when I was a detective in DC, I worked a similar case of a man who filmed his murders. The care that killers like this take in making their videos speaks to the seriousness of their intentions.
Our man doesn’t just want to blackmail Hunter, he also wants to kill Cassandra. And he’s going to do it.”
During our third viewing, I saw that Cassandra’s body cast a faint shadow across the water to her right. The shadow’s size shifted after each of the videos edits, which led me to surmise that the light source was natural rather than artificial, and the change in the length of the shadow marked a change in time as the sun rose higher in the sky.
“Terry told me the video was sent to Austin Hunter at 8:51 a.m.,”
I said. “Taking into account Cassandra’s height and her shadows in relationship to the sun’s position in the sky—”
“We’re not looking at a garage,” said Ralph.
“No,” I said. “The light source at the filming site would need to be higher. Windows on the second or third story. So, she’s probably in a warehouse.” Ralph called the SDPD to have them start canvassing the warehouse districts of the city, but I knew there wouldn’t be enough time to check them all.
Beyond that, we didn’t have much to go on.
FBI Director Rodale notified Ralph that he was personally reassigning seven agents from the field office to help us find Cassandra, as long as we kept Lieutenant Graysmith in the loop.
Ralph agreed and we adjourned for fifteen minutes so he could coordinate the efforts of the FBI with the San Diego Police Department. Lien-hua went to a quiet room to work on developing her profile of the abductor, and I headed for the door to get some fresh air and call Tessa to see how she was doing.
42
Tessa was in one of San Diego’s downtown Internet cafes, surfing the web and thinking about the kind of tattoo she wanted to get, when Patrick called. “Hey, Tessa, how are you?”
“Good.” She shifted the phone to her shoulder so she could keep typing and clicking through websites.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just checking my email.”
“Are you at the hotel?”
“Naw. I’m at this Internet place nearby. You’d like it. They have all this weird-sounding coffee from Central America.” Tessa was glad to see that the cafe also had printers. That way she could print out exactly what she wanted.
“I’ll have to check it out,” said Patrick.
“How’s the case?”
A pause. “Honestly, the farther we move into this thing, the more tangled up it gets.”
“Well, at least it�
��s interesting, though.” Tessa thought she knew which image she liked best, but she scrolled through one more Edgar Allan Poe site just to make sure.
“That’s not exactly the word I would use. People’s lives are in danger.”
“No, that part’s horrible. It’s just, I mean, pain—that’s what’s interesting.”
“What are you talking about, Tessa?”
How to put this without sounding unfeeling? … “I mean, think of a good story. It’s only interesting if something goes wrong. No one wants to read a story about someone who always does what she should and gets what she wants. So like, Poe’s stories are interesting because all sorts of bad things happen. In The Pit and the Pendulum, things just get worse and worse all the way through right up till the end, so it’s great.”
“I could deal with things not always getting worse and worse.”
“It’s not that I mean I want people to get hurt …” She scrolled past Poe’s short stories to his poems. She knew what she was looking for, but the setup of the website was lame. Very twentieth century.
Hard to find stuff. “It’s just when you read a story you want to worry about the main character. You want to wonder if he’ll catch the bad guys, if he’ll get the girl, if he’ll survive at the end of the book. It doesn’t always happen, you know. The more danger the more interesting the story. We want things to keep getting worse.”
She thought about that for a second. “Maybe we like stories so much because there’s something in us that just wants to see other people suffer.”
Patrick was slow in responding. “That’s a very troubling thought.
Let’s hope you’re not right.” He took a breath. “I’m sorry I have to change the subject, but I don’t have a lot of time here. I’m wondering, when do you want to meet for supper?”
She paused the cursor in the middle of the page. “Um … yeah
… Could we, like, make it late? I wanna go for a walk, maybe visit Balboa Park or something.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. She did want to go on a walk and she did want to visit Balboa Park before leaving San Diego; it just wasn’t all she wanted to do.
