He shrugged his massive shoulders, which were so thick with muscle they barely moved anymore. “I assume you followed the stolen cars faster than we did.”
Porter nodded. “It’s been tough, but we’ve been in touch with several insurance companies and police stations across the South, trying to get a beat on every single stolen vehicle reported. The most promising trail led to Mobile. We knew that Pelletier had old contacts in Atlanta, so we hopped on a plane and tried to head him off. We were just getting into contact with the Atlanta Police Chief when the report of the Tacoma came in through the system. We lost track of the stolen vehicles somewhere near Troup County, which was where the Tacoma was taken from, so we knew we were getting close. Me and my guys here,” he glanced over his shoulder, “we’re all pretty high-strung right now.”
“I understand, Agent Porter. I do. I know how pissed off a man gets when his target gets away, and I know it’s exciting being on the cusp of catching him—”
“But did you know we’ve been chasing him for two years, ever since he busted out of Leavenworth?”
Leon shook his head. “All I heard on the wire was that he escaped prison years ago, and was a suspect in that shit over in Baton Rouge. Didn’t know from which prison or exactly how long ago until you just said.” By “on the wire” Leon meant the transcripts and news updates that LEOs (law enforcement officers) got way before the news programs thanks to a New Age network of communications tools modeled after Interpol’s ECHELON system. The FBI had hardly gotten it off the ground yet, and already it was showing promise. Atlanta was one of the cities testing the system to see how fast news would travel through law enforcement, and how long the information could be in their hands before the media got wind of it. It could prove vital in getting to the bad guys before they knew they were being hunted.
“I used to work SIS,” Porter said. “You know what they do?”
“Sure. SIS is like an FBI inside the prison system. Investigates prison gangs and plots inside the joint.”
“Yes. We were very upset when Spencer Pelletier escaped us. He did so in a very humiliating way for us, I don’t mind telling you. But it was the U.S. Marshalls’ jobs to track him down once he was gone, not mine. Then I got into the FBI and it was on again. He’s stayed quiet for these two years, and now we’re closer than ever to reeling him back in. We’ve found out a lot about him since he left Leavenworth. Detective Hulsey, he’s not what he seems. Not just a thief or a bank robber or a con man. He’s a monster. A real one, like they keep writing books about fifty years after they’re dead. He’s a violent, manipulative killer.”
Leon nodded. “You think he had something to do with my two missing girls?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. His goals…well, they’re amorphous, let’s just say that. Constantly changing. One minute he’s a small scam artist, then he’s a car thief, then a bank robber, then a car thief again, then aiding in a counterfeit money ring, then performing dead drops for drug dealers, then stealing cars again. He shows a, ah, proclivity for switching his game. Very unusual. Most criminals and psychopaths are specialists, not jacks of all trades. But at the same time as he’s doing all this, almost as an afterthought, he kills people.” The FBI man put his hands in his pockets and looked around at the other officers in the room, as if to make sure none were within earshot. “Lots of them.”
Leon considered this for a moment, and figured the man for the kind of guy who knew his job well, and didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was given to wild exaggeration. And Leon liked to think he had a perfect bullshit detector.
Then, Porter shrugged, showing marginal doubt. “At least, that’s the theory me and my team have been working on. We’ve found bodies over the last couple of years that, once forensics pinned down approximate times of death, started forming a timeline. A timeline that coincided with another timeline we’d made for tracking Pelletier.”
“I never asked you, Agent Porter. What department of the FBI are you in?”
“Serial Killer Task Force.”
Leon said nothing as a pair of SWAT officers walked in between them, issuing “excuse mes” as they went past them. He sighed. “Well, let me just talk to my captive over here. I’ll see what he knows about my missing girls and your Pelletier. You can listen in and, when I’m done, he’s your witness and I’ll listen in. Fair?”
“Sounds great to me.” Porter smiled, showing a row of perfectly aligned white teeth.
They walked over to the Yeti, who was just now blinking and looking around like a man waking up from a terrible dream, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t have to go back there. A couple of forensics guys came in with their equipment—luminol, Dictaphones, lifting tape, ultraviolent flashlights, scalpels, scissors, and of the course the increasingly essential cyber forensics kit. They looked at the Yeti, then at the apartment. Their dismayed faces showed they understood they were in for an all-nighter.
“Mr. O’Connor,” Leon said, kneeling in front of him and wincing as his knees popped. There were no chairs that could be easily cleaned off to sit on. “How are we this evening?”
“B-b-been better, I guess,” O’Connor said.
“Yeah, I get that. Listen, we have some questions for you.” Leon waved a hand around, gesturing generally about the apartment. “So listen, we’ve found a veritable mountain of evidence here that’ll send you away for a long, long time. And we’ve barely even scratched the surface.”
“Wh-who squealed on me, man?”
“It’s not important—”
“Who talked, nigger?” That last word hadn’t been said an invective. It was more desperate and pleading than anything, and junkies will say what junkies will say.
“We’re looking for a certain individual,” Leon went on, trying to keep this from going anywhere near the name or topic of Patrick Mulley. The things we do for family. “We came in search of someone very dangerous, and I believe he left here within the hour.”
“S-say nothin’ else,” O’Connor said. “You came for Spencer Pelletier, you got him.”
While Leon masked his surprise, Agent Porter was unable to conceal his own excitement. He knelt down beside Leon quickly, but remained respectfully silent. That was good since, technically, this just became a federal investigation. “Spencer Pelletier? He was here, then? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Yeah, man. I gave him some stuff.”
Leon could put two and two together. “New identities.”
“Y-yeah, man.”
“What else?”
“I dunno. A cell phone and an address. That’s it.”
“What cell phone? What address?” Leon had his notepad out, his pen poised to jot. If they had the cell phone’s number they could trace it, especially if Pelletier made a phone call anytime soon. Pinging was the latest rage amongst law enforcement, and if a call was made by a known number then it was no longer very difficult at all to find the phone’s exact location. Warrants were rarely ever needed, either, thanks to bills like the Patriot Act.
There was a stall here, though. The Yeti, half out of his mind from all the H and the flash-bangs that had disoriented him, now seemed to drudge up something vital from the deepest, darkest recesses of his brain. Survival mode kicked in. “I…I need a lawyer first,” he said. “I was read my Miranda, and I w-wanna see some follow-through from that p-part where I’m guaranteed an attorney.”
Leon tried to hide his frustration. He furrowed his brow and, once more, counted on his great size and deep voice to be imposing. “Mr. O’Connor, I want you to listen to me very carefully. You can of course have your attorney, but what we’re dealing with tonight is time-sensitive. You understand? Two small girls were kidnapped earlier—Kaley and Shannon Dupré. We believe Mr. Pelletier knows something about that. The better you can help us tonight, the better it’ll reflect on you in court.”
Here, O’Connor’s cloudy eyes seemed to have a moment of crystal clarity. Something dawned on him, and he said, “Is this about th
e Rainbow Room?”
“The what?” Leon said, blanching. His pen started writing automatically.
The Yeti looked between all the law enforcement people standing around with uncertainty. A couple of SWAT officers loomed like towers on either side of him. “You said it was little girls,” he said. “I h-heard these guys from L Street talking about the Rainbow Room guys. Th-they started off on Craigslist, then moved and made their own website wh-when things got too hot for them there. They move around a lot b-b-because Interpol’s after them. I hear they’ve got helpers in, like, Germany an’ Australia, an’ some other countries. They abduct kids, y-you know? Rape them. Tape it all. Put it on the Internet. The more you make the kids cry while, you know, fucking them, the higher your status in the Rainbow Room. The higher your status, the more access you get to all their videos.”
Leon just stared; around him, the room seemed to grow quiet. The Yeti had spoken about it all so casually. Leon had known human trafficking was on the rise in Atlanta, but hadn’t known they had anything like this on their hands. Could it be true? Certainly Interpol had been busting up operations like this all over the planet in the last ten years, but nothing like it had yet come to Atlanta. At least, not to his knowledge. “Mr. O’Connor, you know for a fact this is going on?”
“No. Like I said, th-the guys on L Street were telling me. I, uh…I sold them some IDs, all right? Okay? A-and they were asking me how’s b-business, how’s the money flowin’, shit like that.” The Yeti licked his lips, and his neck muscles went through spasms, causing his lips to press tight against his teeth and stretch. “They s-said these Rainbow Room guys were involved in some big g-g-gangster types from overseas, and that they were looking for locals to help them get to kn-know the city and snatch some kids off the streets. S-s-s-sounded like bullshit to me, but they warned me not to do business with no ch-child rapists, and I s-s-said of course I wouldn’t.”
“Who were these guys who told you about the Rainbow Room?”
“Couple o’ El Salvador guys who’ve already split the c-country. This was six m-months ago, man. I haven’t seen them since they split and I ain’t heard anything else about th-the Rainbow Room since then, so maybe it was all bullshit.”
Leon started to ask his next question, but here Agent Porter finally could contain himself no longer. “You mentioned a phone and an address that you gave Pelletier,” he said. “Give us those numbers.”
There might’ve been a testy exchange between Leon and Porter if that hadn’t just so happened to be what Leon wanted to know, as well.
At first, it seemed like the Yeti wouldn’t reply, then he said, “You’re…you’re for real about s-s-s-some girls gettin’ kidnapped, man?” It once again amazed Leon just how quickly criminals and cops could become allies, even if for a moment, all because of the nature of the crime. He shouldn’t have been so surprised, though, because the most repugnant things in the criminal underworld were child rapists, especially organized ones.
“We are,” Porter said. “We are for real about that, Mr. O’Connor.”
The Yeti swallowed hard, and his left eye twitched uncontrollably. “The n-number to the cell I gave him is programmed into my other phones. Bring me one an’ I can show you. The address…I c-can’t remember it, but it was from the DMV. I don’t recall the license plate he had me look up. B-b-but it’s the last thing my printer printed out so I can recover it if you’ll let me at my computer.”
Though he didn’t know it, Officer David Emerson still had a part to play on this violent night. A very important part.
The call went out to all vehicles in the area, but it came in to car number 1A4 when Emerson and his partner had pulled into a Steak’n Shake on Elm, just outside of the Bluff. They had finished canvassing all of the neighbors around Dodson’s Store—a vain exercise if there ever was one—and had just placed their orders when dispatch gave the all-points bulletin.
“All available units in and around Vine City, please converge on 12 Townsley Drive,” came the call from dispatch. Beatrice hollered at the guy taking her order over the speaker to hold up one second while they listened. “Repeat, 12 Townsley Drive. Suspect is Spencer Pelletier. He is believed to be at or on his way to that address. Suspected of multiple murders and wanted for questioning in the abduction of two girls. Move in without sirens or lights. Consider armed and extremely dangerous.”
“Well, damn,” said David, half let down about missing his meal until he glanced at the computer screen situated at the center of the dashboard. The new computers linked directly to a variety of networks, allowing more than just quick license plate checks and the recording of witness statements. Dispatch had sent a picture of Spencer Adam Pelletier, which filled the screen. An exact match of the description he’d gotten only two hours ago from Terry “Mac” Abernathy. Thirty years old, Caucasian, very pale complexion, 6’ 1” tall, 182 lbs., black hair and feral blue eyes. A predator. Pelletier stared directly at whoever had taken his prison photo with the ghost of a smirk on his face. A confident predator. “All right,” he said, tugging on his seat belt. “Let’s get moving.”
Beatrice didn’t offer an apology to the drive-through guy for wasting his time. She pulled right out of the parking lot, flashing her lights briefly to get through a stoplight that was immediately off the Steak’n Shake’s property, and then kept them on for the time being.
“This is one-Adam-four, responding to that call for Townsley Drive,” David said into the radio.
“Copy that, one-Adam-four. What’s your twenty?”
“We are on that side of town about three or four minutes away.”
“Ten-four. Be advised that others have called in, but they are farther out so you’ll probably be first on scene. Do not approach the house until backup has arrived. Detectives and SWAT are on their way.”
“Ten-four, dispatch.” David’s eyes had been grazing over Pelletier’s rap sheet. The computer was touchscreen, and he scrolled his finger to get an overview. “Jesus. This guy’s been busy over the last decade.”
Beatrice checked her rearview quickly, then zipped into the far right lane. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Armed robbery when he was nineteen. Then a bunch of GTAs, a couple of bank robberies, a prison escape—from Leavenworth, shit—and some drug-slinging days back in the beginning of it all. FBI addendum says he’s now suspected of…waaaaaaait…holy shit!”
“What?” Beatrice said. “What is it, partner? Don’t leave me in suspense.”
“You heard about that shit over in Baton Rouge?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re saying he’s suspect numero uno in it all,” David said, reaching for his pistol. He glanced up to look at the street signs. They were on Glenwood, a mile and a half from Townsley, which he knew to be an out-of-the-way little hole in the wall around Fenton Park, a failed dog park that had turned into a failed community park a decade ago. There was a small forest all around that area and empty duplexes that were filled with crackheads. APD sometimes had to chase them out like cockroaches when the lights came on. David had helped with that a few times.
The trees hid everything that goes on back there at Townsley. Like a bandit cove, David thought. It always reminded me of a bandit cove. Two dead bodies and a stash of money found there within the last year helped that fantasy along.
A few specks of rain hit the windshield in a small burst. Beatrice switched the wipers on then off. Townsley Drive was ahead on the left.
The neighborhood wasn’t just quiet, it was dead. Spencer killed the lights and pulled to a slow stop as soon as he spotted the two familiar vehicles parked in the front yard of the only house on the right.
He switched the car off and sat there, taking a moment to look around. There were lights on inside the house, but no sign of movement. His window was rolled down but he heard no sounds, either.
There was a body lying facedown in front of the porch. “Huh,” he chuckled. “You don’t see that every day, either.”
Spencer had found two packs of Tic Tacs and a pack of gum in the middle console while driving. He took out a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint and popped it in his mouth. A dog barked someplace off in the distance. There was the distant roar of a jet plane somewhere. A fire truck siren blew far, far away. Wind blew lightly, pushing a forgotten page of coupons slowly across the street.
A song of the night, he thought, reminiscing about another neighborhood he’d known like this.
He glanced across the street to a dilapidated home that looked like it hadn’t been occupied since the Great Depression. The trees all around both homes ensconced this little zone of the city from everything but a helicopter pilot’s view.
This was one of those Forgotten Places. That’s what Hoyt Graeber had called them. Hoyt, ever the criminal philosopher and the man that had introduced Spencer to the criminal lifestyle, had spoken of places like these. Wilderness survival experts, some of which Spencer would encounter in his brief, one-year fascination with primitive survival skills, called these areas “dead spaces,” and said that some dead spaces were large and some were small. They allowed people to hide in plain sight. A dead space might only be the corner of a room that psychologically most people were incapable of looking at when they first entered, or a dead space might be an entire neighborhood or road that people drive by their whole lives and rarely look at, even if they live in the area.
Forgotten Places, he thought. Dead spaces. Both were adequate descriptions here.
Spencer savored the spearmint gum a couple seconds longer, then hopped out of the sedan and pulled out his Glock. “Here we go.” He approached in a crouch, with his weapon at ready-low position. He moved first behind the El Camino, peeking through the windows and seeing nothing but a sawed-off shotgun in the floorboard. The window was rolled down and he reached inside to lift it. “Yoink,” he whispered with juvenile glee after checking to see if it was loaded. He moved on to the Expedition. Nothing of note inside there.
Psycho Save Us Page 17
