Psycho ebook EPUB

by Ready, Set, Psycho (epub)

  From the lobby, Solomon hit the code for the Goodwin apartment: 1-8-7. No one answered. He tried again, and no one answered. Greg made a call on his cellphone. “We’re downstairs.” He said. “Okay.” He added. He hung up, and then, speaking to Solomon, “She doesn’t answer the buzzer anymore until someone calls ahead. Try again.” Solomon tried again, and someone on the other end picked it up, said nothing, hit 9 on their phone, and the door unlocked. They walked through.

  The building was old and not particularly well appointed but otherwise neat and tidy. The carpets were a well-worn but tough, simple gray with a triangular pattern. The walls were a builders’ beige. The elevator doors were stainless steel, and the inside of the elevators had dark wood paneling. The detectives took the elevator to the eighth floor and then got out, took a right, and knocked on the door of apartment 8F.

  A woman opened the door with the chain still engaged. “ID?” she asked.

  Greg flashed his badge and his identification card. He then slipped it through the crack in the door so she could inspect it closely. Satisfied, she closed the door, disengaged the chain, and opened the door. It was spotless, small, even by New York standards. To the right was a galley kitchen with few appliances. To the left were a bathroom and two small bedrooms. Straight ahead was the living room, cramped but efficiently decorated with proportionately small furniture.

  “Beautiful home, ma’am,” Solomon said.

  “You’re wondering why it is so clean, aren’t you?” the woman asked. Before either man could answer, she added, “I clean when I’m worried or upset. I’ve never been so upset. So this place has never been so clean.” She smiled and then stopped and went to sit in a chair in the living room.

  The detectives followed and sat on the couch, both leaning forward, their arms on their knees. “Thanks for taking the time to meet with us,” Greg said.

  “If I can help catch…” Georgia began before trailing off and grabbing for a tissue from a box close by. “I will help. Can I get you two coffee or tea?”

  “No, we are fine, Miss Goodwin,” Greg said, shooting a quick glance at Solomon.

  “Okay,” Georgia said.

  “Now, Miss Goodwin, before we start, I want you to know a few things. This is a very high-profile case — a case of extreme importance to the NYPD. The person who murdered your daughter, given the circumstances of her death, is very likely to repeat. It is also very likely that this was deliberate and planned well in advance. This leads us to believe it is very likely the person who perpetrated this crime knew your daughter on some level, in some way. So although I recognize these questions may make you uncomfortable, you can stop them at any time, and any information you give us may in fact help us catch this person and bring them to justice before they can do this again.”

  “I understand,” Georgia said, dabbing a tear coming to her right eye.

  “I understand that it was not unusual for your daughter to disappear for a few days at a time here or there?” Greg asked.

  “No,” Georgia responded. “It wasn’t. She had done it five or six times before.”

  “Did this start recently?” Greg asked.

  “No, about a year ago. She’s a teenager. She was always responsible, from what I knew. But I didn’t have time to watch her, and she didn’t want to be watched. It was a terrible combination.”

  “Did she have a friend that she would disappear with?” Greg asked.

  “Usually a friend named Andrea Cruz.” Solomon wrote this down. “They’d go everywhere together. It made me feel like at least she was being safe. I’ll give you her phone number.” Georgia read out the number, and Solomon wrote that down as well.

  “Did these two have anyone else that would join them regularly?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Do you know where they went?”

  “No. I preferred not to know,” Georgia said, more tears coming to her eyes.

  “I understand. I have a little girl of my own.” Greg bit his lip slightly and nodded. “Did she ever talk about anyone? Probability says this would be a man older than she was — any older men come around, or call her, or contact her on the Internet?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did you monitor her computer use?” Greg asked.

  “She never touched the computer, except for school projects. She did everything else on her cell. She took that with her the day… And I never got it back.”

  “We did not recover it,” Solomon said. Greg looked at him, and Solomon returned to note-taking.

  “Miss Goodwin, did your daughter say or do anything unusual at all in the last few days before she disappeared?”

  “The night she left,” Georgia said, “she didn’t take a bag or anything. I thought it was strange when she didn’t come back the next day. She usually planned these things in advance — she left in the night but always packed a bag. I should have known…”

  “You could not have known,” Greg said.

  Georgia cried, and the conversation broke down. Greg consoled her, holding her hand and stroking her back. “So she did not plan to leave.”

  “No,” Georgia said, sobbing gently. “Does that help?”

  “It does,” Greg said. The two detectives stayed for a few minutes more. Once Georgia composed herself, they thanked her for her time and left.

  In the elevator on the way down, Greg asked Solomon, “What do you think?”

  “Nothing,” Solomon said. “I didn’t get anything useful.”

  “You weren’t paying attention,” Greg said. The elevator reached the ground floor, and the two exited through the lobby into the shaded outdoors. “She left that night not expecting to go anywhere in particular for any amount of time. That means she either spontaneously decided to just leave — which doesn’t seem like her, given how her mother described the relationship with, what’s her name?”

  Solomon took his notepad from his inside right jacket pocket. “Andrea Cruz.”

  “Yeah. Not likely that she just spontaneously decided to leave. Which means she was called somewhere, and went somewhere, and somewhere between home — where she would have returned to that day or the next — and that place, this guy grabbed her. We just need to find that place. So what’s next?”

  “We follow the leads,” Solomon said. In the car, they radioed for Andrea Cruz’s address and then drove a few blocks west to find her apartment.

  Andrea’s mother was home. She told the two detectives that her daughter was working her after-school job at the Starbucks on Shuter Street. The detectives thanked her and went to find her. At the coffee shop, Solomon pulled up slightly onto the curb, and then the two got out and went into the store. They waited in line at the counter but asked to see Andrea when they got to the front. Andrea was at the espresso machine finishing a latte. When done, she came around the side of the bar and went outside with the detectives.

  “Cops, huh?” she asked. The detectives paused. “You park on the curb, walk like cops, wear suits like cops, my friend is dead. It doesn’t take a detective to figure this out.”

  “Fair enough,” Greg said. Solomon took out his notepad. “Did you speak to Francine the night she disappeared?”

  “Sure,” Andrea said.

  “And what did you talk about?”

  “Boys, clothes, mostly.” She smiled.

  “I know you’re grieving,” Greg said. “And it isn’t easy at any age to lose a friend. And I know you don’t like cops — I’ve seen the records, I know you’ve been returned home by cops half a dozen times. I get it. But I want you to be angry at the man who did this, not me. I can catch the guy who did it. You can help. And then you can be in court the day he gets what is coming to him. Is that a deal?”

  Andrea nodded sheepishly, crossing her arms and tilting her hip to the side.

  “So did you speak to her that night?
” Greg asked.

  “We didn’t speak. We chatted on Whatsapp. And we were talking about our next trip.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “North Carolina, probably. But it wasn’t for sure.”

  “Were you planning on taking anyone with you?”

  “No. We don’t usually take anyone.”

  “You meet people there?” Solomon said.

  “We meet men there,” Andrea said. “We go to cities with big universities, usually when they are having massive parties on campus. Easy to blend in. We’re not that bad or stupid.”

  “Did you finalize the plans?” Greg continued.

  “No,” Andrea said. “The conversation just went dead.” She put her hand over her mouth. Her arm was shaking. “I didn’t mean to say that.” She sobbed.

  “I know,” Greg said, rubbing her arm. “You’re doing great. So, what did you mean?”

  “I mean, we were chatting minute by minute, and then it stopped. I just assumed she fell asleep or something. It happens. But no one else was speaking to me either.”

  “No one else?” Solomon asked, looking confused.

  “Yeah,” Andrea said. “I was having like four conversations at once, and they all stopped. That was weird. So I got some food and watched some Netflix, and an hour later it still wasn’t working. I had to reset my password, and then it was fine.”

  “Is that normal?” Greg asked.

  “Not even, like, a little bit,” Andrea said. “Do you think it has something to do with Francine going missing?”

  “It’s possible,” Greg said. “Is there a way to recover the messages from that missing hour?”

  “Yeah,” Andrea said. “They all get saved to iCloud. After work, I can get home and send them to you.”

  “You’re off work now,” Greg said. “I’ll go tell your boss.”

  Andrea nodded. Greg went inside and spoke to the manager, and then came back out. Andrea was looking at her phone. “So you’re off for the afternoon,” Greg said. “Do you need a computer?”

  “No,” Andrea said. “I’m almost done.” She made a few more swipes on her phone. “There. Here’s the history. And it looks like I got a bunch of messages that night during that hour.”

  “Did you send any to Francine?” Greg asked.

  Andrea put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my god.” She tossed the phone to Greg and put her other hand over her mouth. “It says I asked to meet her here.”

  Greg looked at the phone and then handed it to Solomon. He did the same. “Did you send those messages, Andrea?”

  “No!” Andrea said. She sat on the ground. “Do you think it was…?” she said before stopping short.

  “You’re certain?” Greg asked. Andrea nodded.

  “Can we keep your phone?” Solomon asked. Greg looked at him sharply.

  “We will take you home,” Greg said, squatting, getting eye level with Andrea. “You have no idea how helpful this has been.”

  Greg arrived home late. His wife had fallen asleep watching television on the couch. He kissed her forehead and snuck past her, into the room that held his two baby girls. Ashley was ten and Veronica was seven, but always his babies. He hugged them and kissed their foreheads and whispered that he would always be there for them.

  When Ashley was two years old, she was a terrible sleeper. She would fight sleep every night. She would get up constantly, leave her room, seek attention and get it — positive and negative. Greg and his wife Bea did not want to sleep-train their kid. Did not believe in leaving her to cry. Tried to console. But in two years, they had maybe a dozen or so uneventful bedtime routines where Ashley simply went to bed. The rest of the time they simply went without sleep.

  One night, Ashley crept out of her room and asked for milk. Greg brought it to her in a sippy cup. He tucked her back into bed. Delirious from his own exhaustion, he said something he had never said before at night. “You’re safe; I love you; good night.” She did not get up again that night.

  The next night was more of the regular routine: Ashley getting up, stretching boundaries, trying to stay awake. Greg went up to see her, tucked her in and said, “You’re safe; I love you; goodnight.” She went straight to sleep. The next night, after reading her the book they read her every night, he said the same thing, “you’re safe; I love you; goodnight,” and to sleep she went. He did that each night for the next week, and every night she went to sleep.

  That was all she wanted, Greg thought. She wanted to know that she was safe and she was loved. That was what it was all about. So as he stood over his baby girls that night, he said the same thing he had said every night for the better part of the last decade.

  “You’re safe; I love you; goodnight.”

  Chapter Twenty:

  Solomon

  Solomon sat in his car. Lisa knocked on the window, and he unlocked the doors. She entered and sat with a thud. “What did you find?”

  “I found the container,” Solomon said.

  “And what was inside?”

  “Literally, shit,” Solomon said. “Nothing but a bucket of shit, food wrappers, empty plastic bottles of water. He called me when I arrived. But there was no clue, no next step.”

  Lisa shook her head. “That was the clue.”

  “What?” Solomon replied.

  “He saw you. It means he’s watching the place. It means there is a remote camera somewhere there. Or something.”

  “Something,” Solomon said. He picked up his phone and made a call. “Kevin, can I take you for a ride?”

  Solomon drove. Kevin sat in the car, fiddling with the radio, and stopped on a pop station. Solomon shot him a disappointed glance, and Kevin said, “I listen to it ironically.”

  They drove back to the harbor. When they arrived, they got out and walked to the warehouse where the container was located. Solomon let himself back into the warehouse. It was open, and no one was around. “It was in here. I figure if we stand at about where the container was located and look around, we could probably find a camera that doesn’t fit. Something like that.”

  “Got it,” Kevin said

  “Good,” Solomon said, walking forward.

  “No,” Kevin said. “I got it.”

  “Already? Found the camera?” Solomon said.

  “It’s not a camera,” Kevin replied. “It’s an IMSI.”

  To Solomon, it sounded like he said imm-see. “I don’t get it. Dumb it down for me, Kevin.”

  “A fake cell tower. It’s a man-in-the-middle attack. It picks up cell signals from phones and then snoops around before passing it on to the real cell tower. There are thousands in America. Mostly they’re ours — CIA, NSA, etc. But plenty of Chinese, Russian, German, and general baddies. Almost impossible to find them all. They act with near impunity. There’s one here.” Kevin held up his phone. “I’ve got an app on my phone that warns me when I connect to one. Blocks the signal so I’m not passing my info along.”

  “He made one? Or bought one?”

  “Well, probably made one. It isn’t that hard. Then he waited for you to connect, knew you were here, and called you through the tower. It’s what I would do. A lot of what he would do is what I would do.” Solomon looked at him askance. “Minus the murder,” Kevin added. He walked back outside of the warehouse toward a telephone pole. His phone was beeping faster and faster as he approached and emitted a near continuous beep when he arrived at the foot of the pole. “Here it is.”

  Kevin scampered up the pole and removed a black box about eight feet up. He jumped back down and opened it. Inside was another cell phone, as well as the guts of the unit itself. “Can you trace him with this?” Solomon asked.

  “Not likely,” Kevin said. “He left this to be found. So once he made contact, he’d be sure to burn any traces to him.”

  “Except that he wants to be found
,” Solomon said.

  Kevin shook his head. “No, Sol. He wants you to think that he wants to be found. He wants you to have hope, and then he wants to take it away when you fail.”

  “He’s not making it easy, but I know this guy.”

  “You’re lying to yourself, Sol. The only way to win this game is not to play. Feedest ye not yonder trolls, as the saying goes. You lose just by playing the game, Sol. Even if you win, you lose. Engagement is the loss, here.”

  Solomon took the phone. It was an iPhone 4. He opened it and navigated to the pictures. There was Hyacinth — the same photos Justin had sent before. “He used this phone to send me these photos,” Solomon said. “So what should I do, Kevin? What would you do?”

  “The only way to win the game is not to play, Sol. Don’t play. Let Roger and Thomas do this.”

  “He’ll kill her,” Solomon said.

  “That’s his problem,” Kevin replied.

  “No,” Solomon said. “That’s her problem.” He held up the phone, showing the picture of the unconscious girl. “I’m not saying that what he is doing is fair, Kevin. But it doesn’t have to end in her death, and if there is anything I can do to make sure that doesn’t happen, I will.”

  Kevin shook his head.

  “So where does this lead, Kevin?” Solomon asked.

  Kevin examined the unit. “He made this himself. It has an Arduino motherboard. Lots of places sell those. There’s no technological fingerprints here. “

  Solomon took the box. He flipped it over. On the bottom of the black plastic shell of a box were eight digits: 100101001. “It’s binary code for something,” Kevin said. “What could that mean?”