“Oh God,” Erica Taylor moaned, turning away, her face in her hands. It was true.
“What?” Jake Taylor barked, starting to charge across the room after his wife.
“I don’t think so,” Newsom said as he quickly stepped in front of Jake, stopping him in his tracks, and then walking him back to the wall. “Stand. Listen.”
“How long?” Tori asked evenly, her arms folded.
Erica Taylor shamefully looked down to the carpeted floor. “A couple of months.”
“And what do you know about him?”
“He moved in with his wife some months ago. He’s unhappy in his marriage. I’m not, obviously, terribly happy in mine.”
“Oh really?” Jake Taylor growled.
“Oh, like you are!” his wife shot back.
“We’ll be doing something about that!”
“Hey! Hey! Hey! How about we get your daughter back first?” Tori snapped at the Taylors. “How about we do that?”
She looked to Erica Taylor. “Let me tell you a few things about the neighbor. For starters, he’s not married. Second, we think his real name is Thomas Martens, not David Hutchinson. And third,” she turned to look at Jake Taylor, “Martens’ last known employer, up until eighteen months ago, was Spinal Intelligence in Cleveland.”
“They are a competitor of your company, are they not?” Newsom asked.
“Yes,” Jake Taylor answered, nodding along.
“Who is his wife then?” Erica Taylor asked. “Or the woman he says is his wife? I know her name is Avery.”
“We don’t know,” Newsom replied. “We just know the man is named Thomas Martens, or at least that’s what we’ve found out here in the last hour or so.”
“Are you saying he kidnapped my daughter?” Jake Taylor asked.
“Him?” Tori replied before shaking her head. “Probably not. He was running interference up here in this room with your wife, right?” she asked Erica Taylor, who nodded while looking away again. “While Erica and Martens are up here, someone else slips very quietly into the house, perhaps the woman we know as Avery, or maybe someone else, and takes Ava.”
“Why aren’t you questioning him?” Jake asked. “Why aren’t you over there right now?”
“Because Martens and the woman aren’t there,” Newsom replied and looked over to Erica. “Do you know why?”
“Uhh…he said last night that they had planned to leave for a long weekend,” Erica replied meekly, now dabbing at her eyes with Kleenex. “He said he wouldn’t be back until Monday.”
“We need his cell phone number. I know you have it. I saw you and Martens texting each other in the middle of the night last night,” Tori stated before recapping what she saw. “We need that number. Get it now.”
Erica Taylor sheepishly left the bedroom in search of her phone.
Tori looked to Jake Taylor. “If, and this is a big if…but if this is Spinal Intelligence doing this, the question is why? Why target you?”
“I don’t…” Jake started to answer and then stopped for a moment. “Because I’m the Chief Information Officer.”
“That strikes me as a management position,” Newsom stated.
“In most companies, that’s true,” Jake answered. “But I’m not only a manager of people, I know all the systems backward and forward. I’ve designed the security protocols and implemented them all.”
“Could you take down the security if you had to?” Newsom asked.
Jake Taylor nodded. “Yeah, easily. It would only take a minute or two, really.”
“From where?”
“From pretty much anywhere if I wanted to with my laptop. I just need internet access.”
“Here’s the number,” Erica said, coming back in the room and handing a slip of paper to Tori. “That’s the number I was texting.”
Tori called in Agent Fry and handed him the note. “Run the number, see what we get.”
Jake asked a question, “If this is Spinal Intelligence behind this, why are they asking for ransom for Ava then?”
Tori thought it through for a moment. “It’s a head fake. This is supposed to look like a straightforward kidnapping for ransom. If you’re getting a ransom call, we’re not asking why they would target you, beyond the fact people want money for your daughter. They don’t want us to think it has anything to do with you being the CIO for your company. But Martens, or the people he works for weren’t careful enough in burying his history. Now that we know what we know, maybe we can start turning the tables.”
Under orders from both Cal and Sheila not to spend another night sleeping in his office, Braddock instead returned home and immediately felt its emptiness. With Quinn gone, the house had little of its usual pulse and life. It made for a lonely existence. At least Quinn had been true to his word, as he used his new phone to make two calls, send three texts and five pictures.
One other thing that happened when Quinn left for this annual vacation was that Braddock’s diet took an annual three-week turn for the worse. Tonight’s example of gluttony was the double butter burger basket and large fries. He took the greasy bag of goodness, grabbed a non-lite beer out of the fridge and headed upstairs to his home office while reminding himself to make sure the swim went a little longer in the morning.
His nonstop research and continuous phone calls and networking over the past two days had him up to six women who’d gone missing with some similarity to the Genevieve Lash and Jessie Hunter cases. His latest case was from Iowa City, continuing the noticeable college town theme.
In Iowa City Dani Baxter, a twenty-six-year-old literature professor in her first year of teaching at the University of Iowa disappeared, last seen leaving a play at the university’s Hancher Theater. She told the friends she attended the play with that she was eschewing a post-play glass of wine and going home. The next morning her car was found abandoned behind a service garage on the western edge of the city. She was never seen again.
There were distinct commonalities to all the disappearances. They always happened at night. With the lone exception of Jessie Hunter, who was seventeen, the women were all in their twenties, ages twenty-two to twenty-seven thus far. Jessie Hunter went missing in July 1999, Lash twenty years later. His six other cases were in a window of 2005 to now 2019, with Lash and then, if connected, Joanie Wells just three days ago in Brookings, South Dakota.
There was also the common factor of the victim’s vehicles.
“At the vehicles they’re alone, they see something wrong with their car and this guy comes along and says…what happened?” he speculated out loud. “The women must be alone. They’re upset because of what has happened to their cars. He approaches them. They turn their back and he attacks them.” Or, he thought, it could be that the damage distracts them long enough and he jumps out and attacks. “But nobody ever hears or sees anything. How is that possible?”
If all these cases were connected, they spanned twenty-years and left him with the uncomfortable thought that if there were six possible cases in addition to Lash and Jessie Hunter, there was a decent chance there might be more.
“This guy is a predator. He hunts and sets them up.”
That thought in and of itself made him think of Tori. Surprised he hadn’t heard from her, he wondered what she would think of the connections he’d found. Of course, being the pro that she was, he had no doubt she was engrossed in her own case. “And,” he chortled, “being a big thorn in someone else’s side for a few days.”
Her last words were don’t stop, and he hadn’t. He reminded himself of that as he took a drink of his beer and started removing files from his brown expandable folder.
The victims themselves were pretty women, attractive, in all cases single with no boyfriends nor any steady men in their lives at the time of their disappearances. In their twenties, all were intelligent, educated and social. “Not loners, or shy, or withdrawn,” he murmured.
All of which brought him back to the lack of witnesses. It reflected planni
ng and discipline. “Because if he sees a witness or has any worries, he simply backs off and tries later or moves on,” Braddock muttered as he looked at the files spread across his office desk.
Interestingly, in all cases the women, their purses and cell phones disappeared. “What does he do with them?” he muttered as he took a bite of the large burger and then a sip of beer. “Where are the bodies?” Probably buried in unmarked graves somewhere around Iowa City, or Oshkosh or Brookings, he thought.
He stuffed a French fry into his mouth and unfurled a large map on the desk. It was a map of the Upper Midwest marking the cities where the disappearances took place. “How am I going to nail this down?” he wondered. “How?”
And how could he confirm the cases were in fact connected?
His gut told him they were; they felt connected. Elements of the methods of abduction, the common traits of the women, the college towns all at least suggested there was a connection, a pattern, but could he prove it? And as he evaluated what was in front of him, he couldn’t help but wonder as to whether he was the one that should even try to prove it.
As the clock slipped past nine p.m., Tori stood in the Taylor’s home office with her arms folded, peering through the blind slats out the picture window, frequently glancing left to the house next door with the faintest of hope that Thomas Martens would return.
She suddenly heard footsteps running to the front of the house. “We have a bead on the phone. We need to get moving,” Newsom called out as he opened the front door.
“Where?” Tori asked, following him out of the house.
“I’m surprised, but the Hyatt in downtown Des Moines. We weren’t getting a trace at all, but he must have turned on his phone and that’s where he is.”
“He’s actually there?”
“Working on confirmation now.” Ten minutes later as they sped toward downtown Des Moines on I-80, Newsom got his answer. “Two Des Moines PD detectives confirmed with two employees at the front desk. Interestingly, he’s registered as Thomas Martens,” he added as he depressed the accelerator, pushing eighty miles per hour on I-80, his flashing light moving traffic. “What I can’t figure out is why he’s still in town.”
“To play out the long con,” Tori answered, having thought through the setup since they’d confronted the Taylors hours earlier. “Let’s game this out. Say there is a ransom drop, the kidnappers make Jake Taylor take down the network security at his company and they get what they want, and Ava is returned. Don’t you think it looks odd if Martens never returns home as David Hutchinson? If he didn’t come back, wouldn’t people start asking questions?”
Newsom nodded. “Right. He comes back, at least for some time. He and his fake wife.”
“Right, because nobody knows their real story. They play it out, say a month or maybe two,” Tori replied. “Maybe he even keeps the affair going, at least for a bit before one day saying his wife found out about it. He wants to save his marriage and to do that they have to move away. With Ava home, or even if Ava doesn’t make it back, nobody ever hears of David Hutchinson or Avery Bronson ever again. They disappear and nobody’s the wiser.”
“I could buy into that.”
Newsom pulled into the parking ramp for the Hyatt and a minute later they were fast-walking into the lobby to find the two local detectives. “He’s in the lobby bar right now,” a detective named Grimes reported. “We have two men in there monitoring him and I have two more on the way. This Martens fellow is staying in Room 607.”
“Any sign of the woman?”
“We showed the photos we have of her, distant as they are to the bellman, front desk and some other hotel staff, including security, and they all said no,” Grimes answered. “We’ve made a walk around the main and upper level here and we haven’t seen her.”
“What do you think?” Newsom asked Tori.
“Get a keycard for 607,” and then Tori looked to Grimes. “Here’s what I want you and your men to do.”
Five minutes later, Tori was sitting in the swivel chair for the desk and Newsom was leaning against a wall in the entryway of Room 607 when they heard the release of the door lock and Grimes, with three other detectives behind him, guided an ashen-faced Thomas Martens into the room.
“You’re in a lot of trouble, Mr. Martens,” Newsom stated flatly, leading Martens by his left arm to a soft chair in the corner of the room and forcefully sitting him down. Newsom stood over Martens.
“Where is she?” Tori asked, having turned in the chair to face him.
“I don’t know,” Martens answered, knowing he was cornered. “I don’t know!”
“Where is your lady friend? And does she know?”
“Look, I…”
“Answer Agent Hunter’s question,” Newsom ordered, reaching down for some extra menace in his voice. “Now!”
“She’s not here in this hotel. I’m supposed to turn my phone on every four hours. She calls to check in.”
“Show me the number,” Newsom demanded.
Martens took out his cell phone, powered it on and then called up the phone directory. The number was attached to a woman named Chloe.
“What’s her full name?”
“Chloe Moore, if that’s really her name. I honestly don’t know if it is.”
“And what is she to you?”
“She’s here to make sure I do what I’m supposed to do.”
Newsom took out his own cell phone and made a call. “I’ve got another number for you to trace,” he stated as he stepped out into the hallway.
Martens slumped in the chair.
“Spinal Intelligence, right?” Tori asked.
Martens shook his head. “It’s not the company. It’s an investor or would-be investor who bought a bunch of stock in the company when the price was way down. He wants something that Internal Medical Solutions has that could give his investment a boost, give him a big windfall.”
“Why? Why did you do this?”
“Debts. I have gambling debts. I got in too deep in a regular poker game. Those debts were owed to associates of this investor, apparently. I think he’s Russian. My betting debts in Cleveland were to Russians. Anyway, Chloe, on his behalf, says he’ll solve my money problem, but I have to do something for him.”
“And the something was this? Kidnapping a two-year-old girl?”
“No. No. No,” Martens answered, shaking his head vigorously. “I’m not a monster. I was just supposed to find some way to compromise Jake Taylor, to blackmail him to drop the security system for his company. There is something this investor is after, I don’t know what it is. I was trying to get to know Erica Taylor to get to her husband. I could tell she wasn’t all that happy in her marriage. I dropped some similar hints, playing the sympathetic neighbor, we have something in common angle. So, day after day I’d stop over to see Erica and we’d talk. One afternoon after about six weeks she put Ava down for a nap in the family room. We were having a glass of lemonade in the kitchen, talking quietly, standing close when all of a sudden she leaned in and kissed me, I mean really kissed me. And then she asked me if I wanted to go upstairs.”
“Just like that?”
“Basically yeah,” Martens replied. “And I went up. Why wouldn’t I? But that’s when things changed. At first, I was able to get a key and Chloe and I went into the house when the Taylors were gone, looking for something but we couldn’t find anything for leverage. Jake Taylor is on the straight and narrow. The guy works his ass off and is honest as the day is long. Then I guess the people who put us out here wanted faster action. I didn’t even know they were going to do it, but while I was upstairs with Erica, Chloe slips into the house and takes Ava.”
“And you just let them do it?”
“I didn’t know they were going to kidnap the kid.”
“Oh, come on!” Tori asked indignantly.
“I didn’t know!” Martens insisted. “I didn’t know they were going to do that. I have a six-year-old girl back in Cleveland. I told C
hloe I didn’t sign up for this but then she stuck a gun in my face and showed me pictures of my parents, my brother and then my…”
“Daughter.”
“Yeah,” Martens replied nervously. “If I didn’t go along, I wasn’t the only one that would pay the price.”
“And the million-dollar ransom?”
“They said that would be my payment,” Martens replied, slowly shaking his head and sighing. “But it dawned on me while I was sitting at the bar downstairs that it will not happen. I’m too big of a liability now. They’re just going to put a bullet in my head when this is over. I deserve it.”
“You’re going to live, Mr. Martens,” Tori stated after a minute. “But you’re going to pay a pretty high price for life.”
Newsom burst into the room. “Let’s go.”
They left two Des Moines detectives behind to sit with Martens. As they walked down the hall to the waiting elevator, Tori’s phone rang. It was Tracy Sheets. “Hey Tracy, things are really moving here and I’m stepping into an elevator.”
“Okay, call me in the morning. But let me leave you with one number.”
“What’s that?”
“Twenty-three, and yes, that number means what you think it means.” The line went dead. Tori just stared at her phone.
“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” Newsom remarked.
“Yeah, maybe…twenty-three of them,” Tori replied, snapping out of it. “So where are we going?”
A half-hour later they were parked along the side of the street in an industrial area in southeast Des Moines. Situated between a salvage yard to the east and a meat packing plant to the west sat a one-story dirty white cinderblock building with two cars and two mini-vans parked in front of it. While the windows were covered, around the edges of them they could see a tiny thin glimmer of light. Lights were on inside the building. The signal for Chloe Moore’s phone was beeping from that location.
On their way over Newsom asked the question, “Is Ava where Chloe Moore is?”
Tori thought it likely. “From what Martens says, I think she’s the brains behind the operation.”
Silenced Girls Page 19
