The Vanished

by Tim Kizer

  “My mom has a few videos with Tom,” Carol said. “I’ll get them from her tomorrow.”

  Vincent went on the Internet and purchased two licenses of a cellphone spy software program, which enabled you to monitor the calls made to and from the phone it was installed on and to read the text messages sent from and received by that phone. One of the licenses was intended for Sam Powell and the other for Elizabeth Riggle.

  Then he bought a plane ticket to Phoenix and booked a hotel room.

  2

  Vincent arrived in Phoenix at 10:25 in the morning. He checked into his hotel, took a shower, and then called Carol, who was in the lobby of the DoubleTree Hotel Phoenix.

  “Do you know the passwords to your parents’ email accounts?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Carol said. “Do you want to read their emails?”

  “I want to see if they received any messages from Tom after he went missing.”

  “I’ll ask them for the passwords when I see them.”

  The background noise stopped abruptly. Carol must have stepped into an elevator.

  “No, don’t do it. I’ll figure something out. Are you going to visit both of your parents today?”

  “No. Just my dad.”

  “Where are you taking him?”

  “A restaurant in Biltmore Fashion Park.”

  “What time?”

  “Five.”

  “Does your father live alone?”

  “I believe his girlfriend lives with him.”

  “Be sure to take her with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll need at least an hour.”

  He heard a door shut. She must have entered her room.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you or your parents have any of Tom’s belongings?”

  “I don’t have any of his things. I’ll ask my parents if they have anything.”

  “I’m particularly interested in Tom’s cellphone, computer, diaries, and notebooks. I’d also like to have all the pictures he emailed to you and your parents after he got out of prison.”

  Carol was going to leave for her father’s place at three-thirty. At three o’clock Vincent met her in her hotel room.

  “Do you know how to use flash drives?” he asked as he took a USB flash drive from his pants pocket.

  “Yes.”

  Vincent handed the flash drive to Carol. “There’s a file on this drive called setup.exe. I want you to copy it to your father’s computer and then double-click on the copy.”

  The setup.exe file was a Trojan virus that gave the person controlling it remote access to the infected computer. It also recorded every keystroke made on the keyboard, which was an effective method of gathering such sensitive information as passwords and the contents of email messages.

  “What does this file do?”

  “It’s a program for monitoring emails. I need you to install it today.”

  “All I have to do is double-click on it?”

  “Yes. You’ll install this program on your mother’s computer, too.”

  Carol pocketed the flash drive.

  “I want you to get hold of your father’s cellphone today. Call me as soon as you have it. I’m going to send you a link to an app, which you will install on his phone. It’s an eavesdropping app. It should take you about two minutes to download and install it.”

  “You’re going to listen to my dad’s calls?”

  Vincent nodded. He gave Carol a folded piece of paper, and said, “This is the activation code for the app. Remember, you’ll need two minutes to download and install it.”

  3

  Sam Powell lived in a condo complex in Phoenix called Beacon Condominiums. Carol had been in her father’s apartment for an hour when she sent Vincent a text message saying they were about to leave for the restaurant. She let him into the building, and he went to the floor above the one where Sam lived, and stood by the elevator.

  When Carol, Sam, and Sam’s girlfriend got in the car, Carol was going to return to her father’s condo and let Vincent in, so he wouldn’t have to pick the lock this time.

  Four minutes later, the elevator door opened, and Vincent saw Carol. She showed him the key to the condo. He stepped into the elevator, and they descended to the floor below.

  “I installed that program on Dad’s computer,” she said when they went into Sam’s apartment.

  “Thank you.”

  Carol grabbed her purse, which was her excuse for returning to Sam’s condo, and left. Vincent walked into the kitchen and scanned the walls for a phone jack. He found one by the refrigerator. He took a screwdriver from his briefcase, undid the jack-cover screws, and removed the cover. Then he connected a phone bug to the wires and replaced the jack cover. The bug, which was less than half the size of a Zippo lighter, could transmit both sides of a phone conversation to any FM receiver to a distance of three quarters of a mile. It didn’t require a battery because it was powered by the phone line current.

  He tested the device by calling the local cable company’s customer support line from Sam’s living-room phone. The test showed that the bug was working properly. After he hung up the receiver, Vincent looked behind the couch, which stood against the wall to the left of the window. As he had hoped, he found a power socket there. From the briefcase, he took a three-way power splitter, which contained a listening bug with a highly sensitive microphone, and plugged it into the outlet.

  After noting that there were no computers in the living room, Vincent went to the master bedroom and plugged another splitter with a listening bug into a wall socket behind the dresser. There was a laptop on the small wooden desk in the corner. He could see no other computers in the room.

  He checked his watch. It was 5:09. He spent the next eight minutes looking for a box or a binder with Tom Powell’s name on it. His search turned up nothing.

  At 5:23 Carol called to say that she had Sam’s phone. Vincent sent a text message with a link to the spy app to Sam’s cell and then instructed Carol to delete the message after she installed the app.

  “Call me if you have any questions,” he said. “Does your father’s girlfriend have her own computer?”

  “No. She uses my dad’s laptop.”

  Vincent got out his tablet computer and logged into the spy program’s control panel. Two and a half minutes later Carol activated the program on Sam Powell’s cell. Vincent put the tablet back in the briefcase and headed for the door.

  4

  He had dinner at a Thai restaurant on McDowell Road in Phoenix called Star of Siam. As Vincent tried to think of a way to find out how Tom Powell had learned hypnotism, it occurred to him that it would be a good idea to go through Tom’s bank and credit card statements. If Tom had studied at a hypnosis school, there was going to be a payment trail.

  You could learn a lot about people from their bank and credit card statements.

  If Carol was unable to obtain the statements, he would ask Paul Sibert.

  He called Carol and said, “I need all of your brother’s bank and credit card statements from his release to his disappearance. Can you get them for me?”

  “My mom might have them. She was the executor of Tom’s estate.”

  “You could try and get the statements your mother doesn’t have directly from the credit card companies.”

  “Okay.”

  “And ask your mother for a copy of Tom’s credit report.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  Vincent needed Tom Powell’s credit report because it listed all Tom’s credit cards.

  “By the way, my mom’s house has an alarm system,” Carol said. “I’ll give you the code tomorrow.”

  The first thing Vincent did when he logged into Sam Powell’s email account was search for messages to or from pizza789@mail.ru. There were no messages to or from pizza789@mail.ru in any of the email folders. Then Vincent printed out every email he was able to find that had been sent to and received from Tom Powell after his release from prison. The ema
ils were short, most no longer than forty words, and none of them made any mention of Tom’s plans to fake his death. The last message from Tom had been received on April 16 of last year, about a month before he went missing. It read: “Hey Dad, watch this. Awesome trick!” At the bottom of the message was a link to a video of a Japanese magician putting his hand through the glass of a fish tank to retrieve a playing card that was inside the tank.

  There was no mention of hypnosis or hypnotists in the emails. And there wasn’t a word about Tom’s friends or girlfriends there. Attached to one of Tom’s messages was a picture of Tom standing on the shore of a lake. According to the email, the photo had been taken at Lake Pleasant, a fairly large lake twenty-five miles north of Phoenix, on March 2 of last year.

  When he was done with Sam Powell’s email account, Vincent examined his cell phone text messages that had been received after Tom’s disappearance. He didn’t find any texts sent from Tom’s last known cellphone number. There were no texts that appeared to be sent by Tom, either.

  Vincent spent an hour searching the hard drive of Sam’s computer for pictures of Tom with his friends. His hope was that the hypnotist or the woman that had helped Tom kidnap Annie would be in one of those photos. He found six pictures featuring Tom and someone other than Carol or his parents.

  On Sunday, Vincent planted listening devices in Carol’s mother’s home. Elizabeth Riggle lived in a five-bedroom house in Maricopa, a small city thirty-five miles south of Phoenix. To get her and her husband out of the house, Carol took them to a restaurant in Tempe. Just before they headed out, Carol sent Vincent the alarm system code.

  He put a bug on the phone line and placed microphones in the living room, the dining area, and the master bedroom. He didn’t find any boxes with Tom’s name on them. He was in his hotel room when Carol installed the monitoring program on her mother’s computer. At ten past six Carol told him that she had gotten hold of Elizabeth’s phone. He sent the link, and Carol installed the spy app.

  Vincent didn’t find any messages from Tom that had been received after his disappearance in Elizabeth’s email account and cellphone. There were no messages sent to or received from pizza789@mail.ru there, either.

  Sam and Elizabeth must have deleted all the texts and emails they had received from and sent to their son after he went missing.

  While Vincent was browsing the contents of the My Documents folder on the hard drive of Elizabeth’s laptop, his phone rang. It was Carol.

  “I talked to my mom,” she said. “She says the police didn’t find Tom’s cellphone and computer. She thinks the killer took them.”

  “What about Tom’s notebooks or diaries?”

  “She doesn’t have them. My dad doesn’t have them, either. Maybe the police kept them as evidence.”

  “What about credit card statements?”

  “My mom will look for them.”

  “Did you get a video with Tom in it?”

  “Yes. I’m at the hotel, so you can come and pick it up.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Elizabeth had given Carol a video of Tom’s twenty-fifth birthday party and a video of the party she had thrown at her house to celebrate Tom’s release from prison. When Vincent returned to his hotel, he cut a three-minute video that consisted of clips where only Tom’s voice was heard, and then called Michael Camp.

  “This is Vincent Daley,” he said when Camp answered the phone. “Remember me? We met in your house in Magnolia three weeks ago.”

  “Yes, I remember you.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you. Do you have five minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m calling to ask you for a favor. I have a tape with the voice of the man who I believe called you last February. I need you to listen to the tape and tell me if that’s the guy. Can you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  Vincent clicked the Play button and held his phone to the left internal speaker. After two minutes, he stopped the video and then asked Camp, “So, is this the guy who called you?”

  “I think it could be him. It’s hard to tell for sure; it was so long ago. I’d say there’s a sixty percent chance it’s him.”

  A sixty percent chance. It was a fairly good chance, in Vincent’s opinion.

  He had two options: he could wait for Sam and Elizabeth to start communicating with Tom or he could try to make them do it.

  How could he get Sam and Elizabeth to contact their son?

  Nine years ago Vincent had been hired to track down a businessman who had defrauded investors out of five million dollars. He told the businessman’s wife that her husband had inherited seven million dollars from a great-uncle, and a week later the guy came to his hotel room. Would this trick work on Sam, Elizabeth, and Tom? It might. But it was also possible that Tom’s parents would smell a trap or think it was some kind of scam.

  He needed to come up with a different story.

  After an hour of brainstorming, Vincent hit on an idea he believed was going to work.

  He was going to tell Sam and Elizabeth that the police had found Tom’s body, that he had been killed the day before.

  What would you do if you learned that your son had been killed? You would call him, hoping against hope he would answer the phone. You wouldn’t believe he was dead until you saw his body with your own eyes. At least that was what normal people would do, and Sam and Elizabeth seemed to be normal people.

  Chapter 24

  1

  On Monday, Vincent told Carol about his plan to trick her parents into contacting Tom.

  “It’s a clever plan,” Carol commented.

  Vincent asked her to say as little as possible when Elizabeth and Sam told her about the discovery of Tom’s body.

  Later, he went to Maricopa and placed a GPS tracker on Elizabeth’s car.

  The next morning, two of his investigators, Bob Navarro and Dennis Hatton, flew into Phoenix from Dallas. At three in the afternoon, Vincent rang Sam Powell’s doorbell. He expected Tom’s father to be home because Sam’s phone was in his apartment (the spy app installed by Carol allowed Vincent to track the phone’s location).

  His investigators were in their assigned positions. Bob Navarro was sitting in a van parked a hundred yards from Sam’s condo complex, listening to the transmissions from the eavesdropping devices Vincent had placed in Sam’s apartment. Dennis Hatton was in Maricopa, monitoring the bugs planted in Elizabeth’s house.

  Sam opened the door and asked, “How can I help you?”

  Vincent flashed a fake Phoenix police badge, which Bob Navarro had brought with him from Dallas, and said, “I’m Detective Duncan. I’m here to inform you that your son is dead. He was killed yesterday in Avondale.”

  Sam frowned. “Please come in.”

  Vincent stepped into the apartment. As they went to the living room, Sam asked, “Are you talking about Tom?”

  “Yes. Tom Powell.”

  Sam’s face froze in shock. “Did you say he was killed yesterday?”

  “Yes. Yesterday morning.”

  “Tom was murdered a year ago.”

  “I was told Tom was presumed to have been murdered a year ago. His body wasn’t found.”

  “That’s correct.” Sam chewed on his lower lip, then said, “How do you know it’s him?”

  “I can’t tell you the details right now, but we’re sure it’s your son.” Vincent cleared his throat. “I’m very sorry, Mister Powell.”

  “Can I see the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I see it today?”

  “No. We’ll let you know when you can do it.”

  His eyes shifting around the room, Sam sighed and then said under his breath, “Oh my God.” Aloud, he asked, “How was he killed?”

  “He was shot. We believe it was murder.”

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  “We don’t have a suspect yet.”

  “Where did you say you found the body?”

  “Avondale.” Vince
nt pulled out his notebook. “Can I get your cellphone number?”

  “Sure.”

  Vincent wrote down Sam Powell’s number and stood up. “We’ll keep in touch.” He shook Sam’s hand. “I’m really sorry about your son, Mister Powell.”

  When Vincent climbed behind the wheel of his car, he switched on the receivers tuned to the frequencies of the room and phone bugs planted in Sam’s apartment, and logged into the cellphone spy program’s control panel. The phone bug receiver was silent, and there was no activity on Sam’s cell. Vincent started the engine, drove one block, and pulled over to the curb.

  The phone bug receiver was still silent. Vincent checked the spy program’s control panel and saw that Sam still hadn’t called or texted anyone from his cell. He logged into Sam’s email account and found that Sam had sent his last email at 9:48 this morning.

  Vincent had expected Sam to call Elizabeth and tell her about Tom’s body, but apparently he had been wrong. Perhaps Sam disliked his ex-wife.

  He opened the GPS tracking program on his tablet and saw that Sam’s Chrysler was still sitting in the parking garage (he had put a tracker on Sam’s car before he went to talk to him). Vincent withdrew his cell and dialed Bob Navarro’s number.

  “I’m leaving for Maricopa,” he said when Bob answered the phone. “Give me a call if you hear something interesting.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  Half a minute later Vincent was on his way to Elizabeth Riggle’s house.

  As he drove down Interstate 10, Vincent analyzed Sam’s reaction to the news about Tom’s body.

  Sam had appeared shocked when Vincent told him about the body.

  Would a man who thought that his son had been murdered a year before be shocked when he heard that the police had found his son’s body? Shock implied surprise and emotional disturbance such as horror or disgust. Sam would have had no reason to be surprised and horrified if he had sincerely believed that Tom had been dead since May of last year. Even if Sam had clung to the hope that Tom was alive, he wouldn’t have been shocked by the news that his son’s body had been discovered. He would have been upset and saddened but not shocked.