At What Cost

by James L'Etoile

  John couldn’t look at the pitiful image without choking up. He clicked the camera off, and white-hot anger swirled in his gut. John hit the gas pedal and shot across vacant downtown intersections. Stoplights meant nothing now.

  A dark sedan blowing through downtown draws attention. One with flashing red lights is residue of another gang shooting in midtown, dismissed as background noise. He flicked the switch on the dash, activating the bar of red strobe lights at the top of the front windshield. The wash of the red lights reflected off building facades, and pedestrians paid little notice.

  John stabbed at the gas pedal, shot up the on-ramp that connected to the Capital City Freeway, and merged onto US 50, eastbound. He glanced down at the speedometer, and the needle edged at ninety miles per hour. The digital clock on the dash warned that he had burned five precious minutes getting to the freeway.

  The Mather Field exit didn’t slow John’s progress. He drifted the car to the right as he made the turn toward the deactivated air force base. The sprawling facility, once the home of a B-52 bomber group, now served as a social services depot and a drop-off point for homeless shelters converted from the old barracks. The decommissioned terminal and runway serviced the local National Guard contingent and scores of air cargo flights.

  John followed the signs to the cargo terminal through the maze of squat, concrete buildings.

  “Two minutes, Detective. You’re cutting it very close. Take the next left into the cargo delivery gate.”

  The killer knew John’s exact location. The cell phone must have a GPS tracker so Winnow could follow his every move. Smart, John thought. He would have done the same thing.

  He turned at the gate and slowed, unsure how he was going to explain his way into a secured terminal area. Instead, an armed security guard waved him through the open chain-link gate.

  The guard pointed to a lone Learjet parked on the tarmac a hundred feet to his right.

  John waved at the guard and steered to the jet, parking behind the sleek blue-and-white craft. Lettering on the side of the plane read, Medi-Flight. Marker lights on the wingtips flashed, and as soon as he opened his car door, a whine erupted from the twin engines mounted high on the tail section.

  A man in a blue flight suit with EMT patches on the shoulders jogged down the stairway from the cabin door. He approached John at a rapid pace and extended his hand.

  “I wasn’t sure if you were going to make it on time,” the EMT said.

  “Who told you to wait?” John asked. He had to yell over the engine noise.

  The EMT shrugged. “They don’t tell me that. All I know is that we were to expect an organ transfer, in two cases.”

  “Two? I have three,” John said.

  “What? Where are they?”

  John motioned and walked to the trunk. He unlocked the lid and pulled it open, revealing the three metal cases.

  The EMT pulled a sheet of paper from a zippered flight-suit pocket and compared numbers on his document with small numbers near the handles of the cases, numbers that John hadn’t noticed in the hurry to get them out of the burning building.

  “These two are mine,” the EMT said, lifting two of the cases out of the trunk.

  “What about this one?” John asked.

  “Not mine. I gotta get these going.” The EMT turned to leave, and John grabbed him by the elbow.

  “Where are you taking them?”

  “Flight plan is filed for Mexico City. Where they go once we turn them over is a part of the book I never get to read.”

  “Who else is on board?”

  “What?”

  “Is there a patient on the flight? A boy?” John asked.

  “No, only me and the two guys driving this thing.”

  John grabbed the handle of one of the cases. “Let me help you with that.” He started walking to the foot of the stairs when a voice whispered into his earpiece.

  “You are wasting my time, Detective.”

  John hustled up the stairs with the case. Inside the plane, the passenger cabin was vacant. Two pilots hovered over controls and checklists in the cockpit, but there was no sign of Tommy.

  “Put the case on that rack,” the EMT said, pointing at a sturdy frame with thick lashing straps.

  The case fit into one of the open bays on the rack and locked into place.

  “Thanks for the hand, but we gotta get this in the air.”

  “You haven’t seen a little boy?”

  “No.” The EMT turned away and worked at the lashing straps that made certain the cases wouldn’t budge in heavy turbulence.

  John took his cell phone and hit the camera button once more. Tommy remained in place on the ratty mattress.

  John got to the top of the stairway, and the EMT closed the cabin door before he hit the second step. A heavy clunk announced that it had locked into place. He trotted down the stairs as the engines changed pitch, growing louder. As soon as John touched the tarmac, an airport employee rolled the stairs away from the jet.

  “Where’s my son?” John said over the roar of the taxiing jet.

  Winnow answered with, “Leave the car and walk away.”

  “What? I’ve done everything you wanted.”

  “My game, my rules.”

  John turned in time to watch the Medi-Flight jet lift off and bank off to the south.

  “Congratulations! Thank you for playing. You’ve completed this round. Your wife is on her way to pick up the boy.”

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Detective. I will release the boy to her, as long as you cooperate,” Winnow said.

  From the corner of his eye, John noticed a small caravan of black SUVs appear from around a building. Blinking blue lights flashed on their grills. They raced toward his location.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Cooperate,” Winnow said.

  The cell-phone connection went dead. John pulled out the phone, and the display confirmed that the call had terminated. John hit redial and received a recorded response: “The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again.”

  The SUV caravan came to a stop, one vehicle behind him and one on either side. Men in black tactical vests and Kevlar helmets hopped out, stubby automatic rifles directed at John.

  “FBI! Drop whatever you have in your hand! Get down on your knees!” one of the men said, edging closer.

  “I’m a cop! My son’s been taken,” John said as he dropped to his knees.

  “Face down, Penley. You know the drill.”

  “What are you doing?” John asked.

  “Sir, we have one,” another officer said from behind John’s car. He lifted the case from the sedan’s trunk. “No sign of Horn.”

  An FBI agent called out, “Penley, you’re coming with us. Agent Lincoln isn’t going to be a happy camper.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The holding cells in the FBI building were little more than windowless offices with a reinforced door. Everything about the room was temporary, including the government surplus chair, a bunk with a US Army property tag, and a stainless-steel sink-and-toilet combo unit that looked like it came from a scratch-and-dent sale at Leavenworth. The single thing that hinted at the room’s purpose was the metal plate on the inside of the door where a doorknob should have been.

  John sat on the edge of the bunk and rubbed the red welts from where the handcuffs had cut into his skin. The cuffs had come off when they’d tossed him in this custodial way station while Lincoln and company figured out their next move.

  A shadow crossed the six-by-six-inch window in the door. The bunk springs creaked when John rose. Out in the hall, one of Lincoln’s men sat in a chair facing the door. The man showed no expression when John peeked through the window glass.

  John paced back to the bunk. He couldn’t sit still while his son was out there, stashed away like last week’s garbage. The worst scenarios tumbled through his mind. He knew what Winnow did to the people he
kept. Tommy was a liability, an object Winnow no longer needed for leverage.

  An expressionless FBI agent’s face filled the small window, and the lock mechanism clacked as the bolt unlocked. The agent opened the door and stood back. Special Agent Lincoln strode into the room with two uniformed federal officers. Lincoln stopped a few feet from the doorway.

  “You’ve lost your damn mind, Lincoln.” The frustration made John’s words venomous. “You people are dicking around while my son is still out there.”

  Special Agent K. Lincoln looked down her nose at John. She paced in front of the small metal table as she spoke.

  “Between the two of us, Mr. Penley, I’d say that you’re the one who’s lost his mind. I mean, I get it. I get why you thought you needed to go out on your own. But you couldn’t think you’d ever get away with this.”

  “Listen, I told you. Winnow told me to pick up those cases. I did what he told me to do so I could get Tommy back.”

  Agent Lincoln sat in a chair across from John and leaned forward. She spoke in a soft voice. “I understand, and I want to help you. You’ve gotten in way over your head, so make it easy on all of us and tell us where he is.”

  “I don’t know where that asshole is,” John said. The exasperation bubbled over in his voice.

  “For a time, I wondered what you may have done with the boy.”

  “Boy? Wait, my son? You think I did something to my son? Find Melissa. Winnow said he was going to release Tommy to her.”

  “It has to be a huge financial drain, having a kid with all these medical bills. I think we’ve had this discussion before. I have to ask. Child abduction is a nasty thing. Did you have anything to do with Tommy’s disappearance?”

  “Brice Winnow has him,” John said.

  “I know. We all saw the video. He took him from the hospital.”

  One of the FBI agents handed Lincoln a file folder. She placed it in front of her and made a show of opening and turning a few pages. She relished having something John didn’t.

  “It says here you were recently denied a home-equity loan. I imagine you needed that to pay down some of those hefty medical bills.” Lincoln didn’t bother looking up from the file. “It sure would be nice to have that problem go away.”

  “That’s why we needed the loan.”

  “So your idea was to get rid of the problem? Right?” she asked.

  “What are you talking about? You saw him take my son on that hospital surveillance video.”

  “Did he take the boy for you?” she said, closing the file.

  John looked across the table in disbelief. He couldn’t imagine how she could make that connection. It was wild fantasy, unless . . .

  Lincoln saw the uncertainty in John’s face. “I know about the ten-thousand-dollar payment made to Patrick Horn’s account.”

  John shook his head. “There was no payment.”

  “You paid Horn to abduct the boy and then set up this elaborate chase. Can you explain the ten-thousand-dollar deposit into Horn’s account?”

  “I don’t know anything about a ten-thousand-dollar deposit.” John remembered the web pages on his laptop—the ones he hadn’t opened.

  “What was that?”

  “I’ve told you everything I know. I want my son.”

  “Give your wife some closure. Tell me what you did.”

  John fell silent.

  “This is your last opportunity. Tell me. You paid ten thousand dollars to Patrick Horn, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  She held the file in front of him. “I have your own bank records showing an electronic transfer of the money to Horn’s account.”

  Lincoln stood from the table, tucked the file under her arm. “I know you didn’t have anything to do with the human remains we recovered in the trunk of your car. Lieutenant Barnes and that partner of yours managed to get you crossed off the suspect list, for now. But there is still a connection between you and the killer—the money and your son’s disappearance. That isn’t easily explained away.”

  “Brice Winnow set all this up, the killings, the organ harvesting, and he took my son.”

  Lincoln paced, avoided eye contact with Penley, and said, “And your interference in this investigation put me further behind.”

  John started to respond, but Lincoln waved him off.

  “Maybe there is a way for you to get us back on track,” she said.

  “Fine, let me go after him.”

  “Call Winnow and get him talking. We’ll monitor the conversation. Get him to give up something incriminating.”

  “How does that help me get Tommy?”

  “If Winnow is who you think he is, he’ll lure you in with a chance to reclaim your son. When he does, we’ll have the hostage rescue team ready to respond. HRT will put this son of a bitch down.”

  “He won’t come out of hiding to take a phone call. He’ll demand something more secure.”

  Lincoln leaned on the table, palms flat, and leaned in toward John. “What do you have in mind?”

  “I need access to my laptop. I contacted him before, I can do it again,” John said.

  Lincoln pondered the idea for a moment. “He’s too smart for that. He picked up that we hacked the connection last time.”

  “Then don’t. Stand over my shoulder if you have to, but don’t give him any reason to think you’re listening.”

  Lincoln stood, straightened the hem of her jacket, and nodded. She looked to one of her men and said, “Bring her in.”

  The door opened, and a confused Paula Newberry entered.

  “Your partner is ready to go. Pick up your laptop and wear this.” Lincoln slid an undercover radio transmitter across the table.

  “I’m wearing a wire?”

  “You narrate what Winnow says, and I will be with the HRT on the takedown.”

  “Rescue, not takedown,” John said.

  “All the more reason for you to be precise and get him to give up the location.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Do you trust that skank, Lincoln?” Paula asked as they pushed into the detective bureau with the liberated laptop.

  “You know she can hear you, right?”

  “I don’t care. She knows what she is. How do you know that she didn’t have the FBI cybercrime people mess with your laptop while they had it?”

  “As long as Winnow pops up long enough for us to get a bead on him, it doesn’t matter.”

  John put the laptop on his desk, plugged it in, and powered it up. Too anxious to sit, he tapped his fingertips on the desktop while the machine booted up.

  Paula pulled her chair around to the desk. “What if this doesn’t draw him out?”

  “It will,” he said as he brought the web browser up once more. There were multiple windows open on the screen. Lincoln had begun to reconstruct his browsing history and communication with Winnow over the dark web. One window didn’t look familiar, and his breath caught when he read the thread. His hand shot to the mouse and closed the window. “Dammit, Mel, what have you done?”

  “What?” Paula asked.

  “Nothing—nothing. Lincoln must have erased all my saved passwords. I’m trying to remember where to log in.”

  She pointed at one of the open Tor dark web browsers.

  He clicked on one of the windows, and it required him to log into the account. “Paula, pull the photo of the tag from Winnow’s briefcase at the ice plant.”

  “Got it.” She had the file in her lap, and he sorted through the documents until she found a closeup shot of the tag addressed to her partner.

  “Read off the numbers on the bottom of the tag.”

  He entered the sequence as she read the numbers, and the screen unlocked as it did the first time John stumbled across the portal.

  “I’m beginning communication with Winnow now, Agent Lincoln.”

  John spoke as he typed for the benefit of the feds on the other end of the transmitter.

  The cursor on the screen blinked
at the end of the last letter John typed.

  “Maybe he’s not online,” Paula said.

  “He is. Remember Layton’s last words? He wants me in exchange for Tommy. He’ll be waiting for this contact.”

  “The old man was insane. You can’t believe anything he said.”

  The echo of her last word still hung in the air when the cursor began to move.

  What if I told you it’s too late? John read the question aloud.

  John typed, I’ll kill you if anything happens to Tommy. Then John said aloud, “I know you want me in exchange for my son.”

  Paula looked to John and nodded. She understood he was giving Lincoln a different account.

  The screen blinked again. I told you I’d release the boy, and I will. “We can work something out,” John said for Lincoln’s benefit.

  John tapped the keys. When?

  The cursor scrolled out again with Winnow’s response. I have a client who is in a great hurry for my services. Remember when I told you to cooperate? The time for that has come. John tensed and said, “He wants to meet.”

  Paula grabbed him by the elbow and raised an eyebrow, a look that asked if he was sure about this course of action.

  He patted her hand and then tapped the keyboard.

  It’s time we continue this face to face. “I’m asking him to meet.” No embellishment needed this time.

  Agreed. Meet me at the place where we first met in one hour. Come alone or the boy dies. No FBI, no Detective Newberry—nobody, or your son will vanish. Understood?

  John pushed back from the keyboard for a moment to compose himself. “He wants to meet. He says to meet him at Raley Field in an hour.”

  John scooted back to the keyboard and replied. Understood.

  The cursor came alive once more. What was your blood type, again?

  He shut the laptop down, closed the lid, picked it up with both hands, and slammed the laptop against the edge of the desk. The plastic and glass shattered, sending laptop shrapnel across the floor.

  John’s desk phone rang, and Paula grabbed it while he brushed broken laptop pieces into his trash can. She held the phone to him. “Lincoln.”