1st Case

by James Patterson

  Or at least so I thought. My bike was still in the back of his car, but when I went around to get it, he was already heading toward the office.

  “Hey!” I said, and he turned around.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I need my bike,” I said. “I’m going to take it to Eve’s and drive home from there.”

  “So you’re not coming to the shift meeting?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said, too numb to be surprised anymore. “Yeah. I’m definitely coming.”

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

  Answer: Not a damn thing, now.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE NERVE CENTER for this case—as well as my office—had been moved down to the fifth floor to accommodate a larger team. When I got there, people were milling around, taking seats, and getting ready for whatever came next. I got lost in the shuffle and took a seat on the side of the room where I could see everything. Just as well. I literally didn’t know my place here.

  Audrey Gruss was seated near the front, and Zack Ciomek from the CART was on hand, too, along with most of the expected players, plus a dozen or more unfamiliar faces. There were also six screens with alternating live feeds from various field offices around the Northeast. I saw Albany, New Haven, New York, Newark, and Philly all represented, along with whoever else might have been looping in by conference call. This operation had bulked up considerably since the last meeting I’d been allowed into.

  Keats got things started with a full briefing of the day, including some credit thrown my way, which I appreciated. Then he handed the meeting over to Zack.

  “For those of you who haven’t seen this, let me give you a current snapshot of the app’s penetration,” Zack said.

  He used his laptop to pull up a map of the US on several screens around the room. Then he toggled in to show just the Northeast. It was overlaid with swaths of green in different shades, from darker to lighter. The biggest dark patch emanated from Boston, with several others concentrated around various population centers.

  “Darker green indicates a denser saturation,” Zack said. “Lighter green down to white means less, or none at all. In total, we’re estimating that the app has landed on approximately 12,300,000 devices around the Northeast. Primarily cell phones. That’s as of thirty minutes ago.”

  “I’m sorry, did you say twelve million?” someone asked. It was the same question I had. That number seemed unfathomable, considering the relatively short amount of time the app had been in play.

  Zack nodded. “That’s right. Twelve point three million and growing fast. This morning, the number was eleven point nine mil.”

  He tapped out a command on his laptop and the screen displays jumped to a similar graphic but with smaller clusters of every shade on the map.

  “Here’s a simulation of what we’ve seen over the course of the last week,” he said. Then he hit another key to set the program into motion.

  A time sequencer ran across the bottom of the screen while the clusters darkened and grew over the course of a seven-day period. It was like watching a biological virus spreading out of control.

  “How are you doing this?” I asked. I didn’t know if I was supposed to be inserting myself, but I couldn’t help it.

  Zack eye-checked Keats before he answered. “One of our DC analysts found a way in,” he said. “Not by following the app directly to individual users, but with a surrogate marker at the ISP level that allows us to see where it’s landing.”

  “So you can’t tell who’s opening it, versus leaving it dormant on their systems?” someone from Philly asked.

  “That’s right,” Zack said. “That’s one of the limitations. Anything more specific than that is coming through Keats’s team, which you already heard about.”

  Keats picked it up from there.

  “Obviously, they’re casting a very wide net in the name of picking up just a few victims,” he said. “If there’s good news, that’s it. And all of those incidents have been consolidated in the Northeast.”

  “For now,” Gruss interjected.

  “Yes,” Keats said. “For now. But if they find a way to activate the app without permission from individual users, then we’re going to have a whole new shitstorm on our hands.”

  We sure will, I thought.

  To the tune of twelve million and counting.

  CHAPTER 39

  WORD FILTERED PAST my desk the next morning that another incident had been linked to Keats’s investigation. Authorities in Portland, Maine, were reporting a missing girl who had either run away or been taken from her bedroom overnight.

  The girl’s name was Reese Anne Sapporo. A series of suspicious texts found on her phone had been uniquely formatted with an .ras file extension. It was like the app’s signature move, using the victim’s initials that way.

  But the disappearance? That was something new.

  I got my first details from Zack when he told me I’d be traveling with the case.

  “You’ll be there overnight, at least,” he told me. “You can expense back a few things—”

  “Not a problem,” I said. I had an unopened toothbrush and some deodorant in my desk. I’d improvise around the rest.

  “Keats wants two from the CART,” Zack told me. “I’m sending you and Candace. She’ll be point of contact for the lab and you’ll assist.”

  Candace Yamaguchi was a senior ITS-FE, also known as an Information Technology Specialist–Forensic Examiner, basically one step up from me. I saw her pulling together a field kit at the back of the lab and went to help.

  “How much do you know?” I asked.

  “Not a lot,” she said, “but we just got this. It was sent directly to Reese Sapporo’s phone about thirty minutes ago.”

  Candace navigated to an image file on her tablet and turned it around to show me. “I guess the parents saw this before the police did. As if this bastard wasn’t already cruel enough.”

  What I saw was a picture of a girl, presumably Reese Sapporo, in the open trunk of a car. Her wrists and mouth were duct-taped, and her eyes were wide and wild.

  Even after everything else I’d seen, that photo sucked the air right out of me. But I knew I had to make a choice. I could get emotional right now, or I could get ready to go. Not both. So I grabbed a second field case and focused on the checklist of things we’d need for this trip.

  Camera, tool kit, gloves, blue tape, wire cutters, evidence tags …

  Twenty minutes later, we were in a van with Keats and the rest of our six-person team, heading to the helipad at Boston Harbor. One of the Bureau’s black Bell helicopters was waiting when we got there, and by eleven, we were lifting off for the forty-five-minute flight to Portland.

  It was a surreal feeling, watching the city fall away beneath that chopper—my biggest reminder yet that I was running with the big guns now. Which also meant no wiggle room. If the FBI couldn’t get this done, who could?

  Tiny mistakes were the difference between life and death here. I was going to need to do everything I could to hold up my little corner of this investigation. And no matter what else happened now, I just hoped we were moving on this fast enough to make sure that Reese Anne Sapporo made it back home alive.

  That is, assuming we weren’t already too late.

  CHAPTER 40

  WHEN WE LANDED in Portland, two reps from the Cumber-land County Sheriff’s Office met us with cars at the airport. The reps were fairly cool and neutral about the whole thing. It was hard to gauge if we were a welcome resource or some kind of law enforcement interlopers to these people. That seemed to be the norm in the cop shows and movies I’d seen, but then again, I was on a pretty steep learning curve these days. It was all about where those stories left off and reality picked up.

  From the airfield, we drove to the Deering neighborhood, where the Sapporos lived. I rode with Keats, Adam Obaje, and a Detective Friebold, who briefed us on what they had so far.

  Ther
e were no indications of a forced entry, or a struggle of any kind, at the Sapporos’ house, Friebold said. Other than a single window left unlatched in the girl’s room, the whole place had been left undisturbed.

  “We’re guessing Reese let this creep in but didn’t leave willingly. Might have been drugged,” Friebold told us. “If only because her phone was left behind. You don’t see a lot of fifteen-year-olds doing that, you know?”

  I’d been thinking the same thing. Especially not when it came to fifteen-year-olds who were phone-oriented enough to fall into an app like this one.

  Friebold went on. “As soon as that photo came in this morning, we reclassified the case from missing persons to an abduction,” he said. “But there’s been no word since. No demands. Nothing. Her poor folks are out of their minds.”

  An Amber Alert had gone out, and police were already speaking with Reese’s friends, teachers, and neighbors. They were also covering all major transportation hubs, but it was impossible to know how many hours’ head start the kidnapper might have had. I tried not to imagine it too much from Reese’s perspective, how freaked out and terrified she would have been. But at the same time, I tried not to push it away, either. I could feel myself sharpening my analytic skills, even if that lingering dread in my gut was the same as ever.

  “What are the chances she’s still alive?” I asked Keats. “Statistically speaking.”

  “Statistically? Ten percent, maybe,” he said. “But there’s nothing typical about this.”

  I wasn’t completely sure what Keats meant by that, but something told me to cut off the rookie questions at that point and just focus on the briefing we’d had.

  When we reached the house, Keats met with Mr. and Mrs. Sapporo while Candace put in a call to the family’s ISP to start tracking down whatever we could get on every device in that house. I shut myself up in Reese’s bedroom and got busy with her Samsung Galaxy phone. It had already been fingerprinted and left as it had been found, on the unmade bed.

  Knowing what we did about the app, my instructions were to work silently, avoiding any possible eavesdropping through the phone. I sequestered it in a Faraday bag, cabled it to my laptop, and started running a copy right away.

  Once that was going, I turned my attention to Reese Sapporo herself.

  Besides the bed, everything about her room was crazy tidy. The only things on the white painted desk were a gooseneck lamp and a rose gold MacBook Air laptop. Her books were organized by color, and the clothes in her closet looked like they’d never been worn.

  A quick check on her social media showed me a heavyset, plain girl. She didn’t seem to have a ton of friends, and her postings tended to be on the geeky side. I saw several Game of Thrones references, and lots of generic memes with vaguely inspirational or funny little sayings.

  Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

  Is it Friday yet?

  If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, that means nobody wanted it. Set it free again.

  Not that there was anything wrong with all that. From what I could see, Reese was the same kind of girl I’d been at fifteen. Which is also to say, nothing like the other known targets: Gwen Petty, the pretty, popular one, and Nigella Wilbur, the aggressive wild child.

  Something told me that Reese was drawn into these online conversations as much by loneliness and insecurity as Gwen had been by vanity and Nigella by raging hormones.

  The question was, what did they have in common? Certainly they were all risk-takers, whether or not they knew it. Loading that app onto their phones was like hanging a COME AND GET ME sign on the front door.

  Now one of those girls was dead. One was still alive. And one was missing.

  But what did this guy plan on doing with Reese Sapporo?

  Or even worse—had he already done it?

  CHAPTER 41

  AS SOON AS I had a secure copy of Reese’s phone on my system, I used it to open the app and see what had been left behind.

  The most recent item was the photo of Reese from that morning, bound up and wide-eyed with fear in the trunk of that anonymous car. I skipped over it as quickly as I could, but not before it had burned another little hole in my psyche. It was hard to think about and even harder to look at.

  After that, I found a long string of texts and conversation fragments going back almost five months. He’d taken his time with Reese. Something told me he’d had to. Even here, the only responses she offered to his long texts were nothing more than shy little bursts, heavy on the stickers, hashtags, and emoticons.

  At least, that’s what we were allowed to see. There was never any knowing what the app’s administrator was editing out—or adding in—for purposes of his own.

  In any case, as I read through what was there, it was easy to see shades of the same guy from before. His sentences were full and well punctuated. His language was mature for a teen, but not quite adult, either. And while I didn’t see the Cummings poem this time, there was one verse of old-fashioned poetry. I had to google it to find out it was Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy.”

  The fountains mingle with the river

  And the rivers with the ocean,

  The winds of heaven mix for ever

  With a sweet emotion;

  Nothing in the world is single;

  All things by a law divine

  In one spirit meet and mingle.

  Why not I with thine?

  He was wooing his target this time, as opposed to seducing her. The character who came across, through this line of communication, seemed like a young and naive person, just like Reese herself, and much less overtly like some lothario trying to get into a girl’s pants. That’s the version I’d seen in his communication with Nigella Wilbur, and to an extent with Gwen Petty, too.

  There were no selfies this time, either. No nude pics or anything overtly sexual at all. Basically, he had turned himself into the kind of person Reese Sapporo would respond to. And he’d told her exactly what she wanted to hear, as she wandered further and further into his trap. I hated seeing these strings in retrospect, where it all seemed so clear, even if it hadn’t been to the victim at the time. But reading them over now felt a little like watching the crime play out through soundproof glass, while Reese flew like a moth toward that flame.

  He’d even called himself JonSnow2 on-screen. It was a reference to the best-looking guy from Game of Thrones, who also happened to make regular appearances on Reese’s Instagram.

  For that matter, it wasn’t hard to imagine my own fifteen-year-old self responding to some of this. The secret boyfriend. The kindness he showered on her. The attention he paid. Even the little moments of self-deprecation. It all added up.

  And it was all lies.

  CHAPTER 42

  Let me tell you what I imagine when I think of you. I imagine a girl who has no idea how beautiful she is. I may not know what you look like, but I do know you’re beautiful. I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable. It’s just the truth.

  I know you’re just saying that, but thanks

  #dontstop ☺

  —————

  Would you ever want to meet in person? I’d like to be friends if that’s okay with you.

  Totally want to be friends!

  Let me think about the rest. I’m kinda shy …

  Actually, the truth is I want to be more than that, but not if it scares you off … I’m not even sure if I should be honest about this stuff or just shut up …

  #behonest

  —————

  You want to hear something embarrassing? Sometimes I pretend you’re my girlfriend. How lame is that? I can’t help it.

  That’s not lame. It’s sweet.

  I pretend the same thing sometimes

  (And now I’m REALLY blushing …

  The truth is, I’ve never had a real girlfriend. I don’t even have that many regular friends. I don’t know why. I just don’t really fit in at my school. It�
��s kind of depressing, to be honest.

  I can relate

  <3 <3 <3

  hugz

  I’m just going to say it. You’re fricking adorable.

  No … you are

  You really are. I mean it.

  —————

  Guess who’s getting his license on Monday? That would be me!!!

  #iwish

  #jelly

  If you ever want to meet, I can go anywhere you want now. McDonalds? Your school? Hell, I’ll meet you at the police station if that makes you feel safer … :-). Seriously, it doesn’t matter where, and it doesn’t have to be a “date” or anything. I just want to meet you. For real!

  You are soooo sweet

  Can I think about it?

  I want to. I’m just shy (obviously …)

  —————

  Don’t let me screw this up by coming on too hard, okay?

  We can just keep talking if that’s what you want.

  No prob

  Def keep talking

  Tx!

  I do have one request. If you’re going to dump me, don’t just disappear, okay? I’d hate if we stopped talking, but I’d hate it even more if you didn’t at least say goodbye.

  I would never do that to you

  I’m 100% serious

  You don’t have to worry about that.

  I’m not going anywhere.

  You’ve done so much for me, way more than you know.

  Thanks for listening.

  #youtoo

  #anytime

  #meanit

  —————

  Hey. Do you like surprises?

  Depends. What kind?

  I have a good one for you.

  ????

  You’re going to have to be patient. But I promise it will be worth it.

  I can wait

  No I can’t

  Hahaha …