No Man's Land

by Sara Driscoll

  “He is. But his hours are flexible. He doesn’t see him in the lab on a daily basis. Sometimes he works from home doing analyses. They have a flexible working arrangement because of all the time he’s required to spend out of state.”

  “Handy for when you need time during the workday to abduct and kill a senior citizen.” Brian’s tone was sour.

  “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  “I’m going to find his home address and send agents out there now. I want him locked down before—” Her phone rang again. “Sorry. It’s apparently going to be one of those days.” She accepted the call. “Agent Kate Moore. Yes. Yes, I . . . What?” She surged to her feet. “When? Did you double-check that? Yes, I have it. Do that.” She disconnected the call with an angry press of her thumb. “Mani Ramachandaran is missing. The agent on protective duty got nervous when he didn’t see any activity this morning in her house. He also had the shift yesterday morning, and she was up by seven and pottering around the kitchen. This morning, he saw activity around that same time, but for the last hour, nothing.”

  “Maybe she’s taking a nap?”

  “He wasn’t sure about that, so he walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. Nothing. He went around the rear of the house to investigate and found the back door’s been forced and the house is empty.”

  Now Meg and Brian were on their feet.

  “Where was this?” Meg asked. “If he has her, then we need to get the search started. He may already have her at whatever site he’s selected.”

  “Dover, Delaware.”

  “That’s going to take us hours to get there. We’re going to be too late. If that’s even where we think he’s going.” Meg turned to Brian. “I need Chuck. I need him to tell us where he thinks Stevenson is taking her.”

  “You figure that out,” Craig said. “Give me a location. Then head for Ronald Reagan Airport. I’ll fly you guys out there. Clock’s ticking—we don’t have time for you to drive it.” He threw up a hand in Kate’s direction before she could say anything. “Yes, I know it’s an expense. But this is their case, and it would take too long to bring a local field agent up to speed. And we need the dogs. It has to be them.”

  Kate simply leveled a raised eyebrow at him. “I’m not arguing with you.”

  “Oh. Sorry. We get pushback sometimes from people who don’t understand the crucial nature of the dogs.”

  “Not from me. If this case has taught me anything, it’s that we have zero chance of finding the victim alive without them.”

  Craig turned to Meg. “How many are going?”

  “Brian and me, with the dogs. Chuck. I’m going to ask Webb to come, too, as medical backup.”

  The sound of a throat clearing came out of the phone speaker.

  Meg looked at Kate, eye brows raised.

  “Fine,” Kate said. “Mr. McCord, you’re in. You got us here, I’m fine with you being a witness to the end, but you have to stay out of the way the second you’re ordered. You are not to be involved in the takedown. Everyone else who is there has a specific search-and-rescue task.”

  “Understood. I’m headed for Ronald Reagan right now. Meg, let me know where you need me to be.”

  “Will do.”

  “See you there.” Then there was dead air, and McCord was gone.

  “I’ll call Todd and Chuck from the car. Brian?”

  “All I need is my go bag from my desk.”

  “Me too. We’ll head for the airport, too, and update you en route.”

  Kate nodded. “Go. Good hunting. Take this guy down once and for all.”

  Meg, Brian, and the dogs left the unit at a run.

  CHAPTER 31

  Topping Out: A construction ritual celebrated after the installation of the last piece on the highest part of a large structure like a bridge or skyscraper.

  Wednesday, November 21, 12:40 PM

  Over Maryland

  True to his word, Craig had a chartered plane waiting for them at Ronald Reagan Airport, and they were in the air less than fifteen minutes later. Their destination was New Castle, Delaware.

  They had time while flying to update the group as a whole and to review Smaill’s choice of sites.

  “I got a text from Kate just before we took off,” Meg said from where she leaned on the back of Webb’s chair. “Brett Stevenson is Peter Stevenson’s only living relative. Brett’s parents were killed in a car accident four years ago.”

  “That clinches motive,” said Webb, half turned in his seat to look up at her. “He’s after a massive payout when his grandfather dies. He just needs to make sure his grandfather is the only investor standing at that point.”

  “Kate got a little more information about that. Peter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last February.”

  “The first kill was April.” Brian was kneeling side by side with McCord on the seats in front of Smaill and Webb, turned around to face the rear of the plane, leaning on the headrests with their elbows. “He hatched the plan sometime after the diagnosis and put it into action by April. But his first kills were sort of spaced out. What happened in September that kicked it up a few notches by October?”

  “Peter Stevenson had surgery to try to remove the tumor . . .” Meg glanced at the text message again. “In July. But in September it was clear the cancer had spread anyway. He was given three months to live.”

  “Which explains why the abductions have been practically one on top of the other since then,” said McCord. “His initial time frame got compressed.”

  “In spades,” Meg agreed. “Which leads us to today’s abduction. Chuck, tell us where we’re going.”

  “I know I’ve picked a site that’s a fair distance from where the victim was taken,” Smaill said.

  “About forty-five minutes away by car,” Meg said. “Why nothing closer?”

  “That whole area of Delaware, it’s mostly farmland and small towns. There aren’t any big urban centers there, and Kent and Sussex counties—Dover is in Kent county—are agricultural areas. There aren’t large or complex urbex sites in those two counties that would work for us. Smaller sites, like old manor houses, but nothing big. And yes, Maryland is the east side of the Delmarva Peninsula, but it’s also agricultural. For big sites, you have to go north into New Castle. And there are a couple of spots there. An old hospital, a shoe factory, a school. But they’re all really urban. It would be harder to get in and out with a victim in the middle of the day and not be seen. But the New Castle Coal Dumper is different. It’s right on the Delaware River, in an industrial area, and tucked in directly behind the parking lot of a transport company. Most of the time that parking lot is full of empty semitrailers waiting to be loaded. So it’s almost like there’s a wall between the main road and the coal dumper. It’s isolated, and that makes it perfect.” He paused momentarily, his mouth working as if unsure of his next words. “But what if the killer doesn’t think it’s perfect? What if we’re headed to the wrong location?”

  “Then he’s won and we’ve lost,” Meg replied. “But we can’t blame ourselves for that. We’re making the best decision we can in the time we have.” She couldn’t help but remember the gut-wrenching choice she’d made during the Garber case when two victims went missing at the same time and she had to choose between them. One of the victims being her own sister might have made the decision more obvious but only added to the guilt of making an emotional call instead of a logical one. She was forever grateful that Webb had been with her that day, his medical skills saving the lives of both women in the end. “But we can’t let that cloud our judgment. We make the best call we can with the information we have, we commit to it, and then we carry it through. And if it’s the wrong choice, we know we did our best.”

  “I have to ask.” Brian looked a little sheepish. “What’s a coal dumper? I mean, besides the self-explanatory dumping of coal. But how? I don’t have any idea what we’re walking into, and I’d like to, from a safety standpoint.”

  “Yo
u don’t see them often anymore. This one was built during World War I but was closed in the eighties. Basically, it was a transfer station. Back in the days when coal was one of the main industrial fuels and electricity was produced at coal-fired power stations, the trick was getting the coal from mining locations to the individual states.”

  “Didn’t they do that by train from start to finish?” McCord asked.

  “Rail was great for that, but often it was easier to run barges up and down the coastline. Coal was brought to the coast by rail, but then they had to come up with a way to get it onto the ships. Enter the coal dumper. It was a pretty ingenious system, built on a pier out into the river to allow access by both rail and boat. An open hopper railcar full of coal would be brought into the dumper on the tracks, then the rest of the train would move away. Through a massive system of weights, the car was lifted up in the air to the loader, which was essentially a giant chute. The car was carefully tipped against a series of steel beams that held it in place but allowed the coal to pour out into the loader, down the chute, and be funneled into the waiting barge below. Lower the car back down and then bring in the next car of coal, apparently at a rate of about one car every two minutes.”

  “That’s fast.” Webb made a circling motion with his index finger. “So then they’d keep repeating the process until the barge was full. How did they get rid of the railcars if the dumper is built on a single pier out into the water?”

  “The new car coming in bumps the first car out of the way and it rolls downhill to the kickback. The kickback is essentially a mini ramp, so the empty railcar runs up the ramp and then back down it. In the meantime, when it went over the exit track, it threw a switch so that when the car runs down the kickback, it gets shifted to an entirely different track that runs alongside the dumper. Those empty cars are then reattached and taken away by the engine once the entire train has been emptied. It’s an entirely closed-loop in-and-out system on a narrow pier.”

  “That is ingenious,” Webb said. “How do you know all this?”

  “Actually, most of it is pretty evident just standing there. Well, maybe not now, but when I first explored it, it was in better shape and all the tracks and the kickback were intact. You could follow the track to see how the whole thing worked.”

  “What do we need to look out for?” McCord asked. “Every site seems to have some pretty dangerous areas.”

  “This one will definitely be dangerous. The biggest issue is straight-up disintegration of the structure. Last time I was there was probably two or three years ago. And even then, all the metal components of the site were starting to fall apart. It’s more than a hundred years old and has been entirely neglected for over thirty years, and that’s ample time for metal to rust and become unstable. Not to mention a large portion of the structure is on a wooden pier sticking out into the river, though some of it is on concrete pylons. The wood is waterlogged and rotting. The whole thing was in better shape before Hurricane Sandy roared through in 2012. That did a ton of damage to the existing structure, hastening the degradation.”

  “Hurricanes,” McCord muttered in a sour tone. “Great.”

  At Smaill’s questioning look, Meg explained, “The four of us went through Hurricane Cole in July, or came in right afterward for victim rescue and recovery.”

  “And then a bonus human trafficking case,” Brian added.

  Smaill nodded in understanding. “I heard about that. I had no idea that was you. Guess you’re not a fan of hurricanes.”

  “Absolutely not,” McCord said.

  As a reporter sent in to cover landfall, McCord was the only one of them who’d lived through the fury of the storm. Meg imagined it was an experience he never wanted to repeat. “Any tips on managing the site safely?”

  “Second-guess every structure,” Smaill replied, looking up at her. “Don’t assume that because something looks solid, it is. Floors can give way, bolts that look secure can snap under the slightest stress, wood can shatter. Especially on the upper levels, where the structure has been exposed to the elements with absolutely no maintenance for about thirty-five years. I have ropes and harnesses in my pack, but if Stevenson is on-site, you’re not going to have time to use them. Safety first at all times, because this place is deadly. And one other complicating factor—I checked the weather. It’s supposed to be pouring rain there, which is going to make every foot- and handhold slippery. So, as I said, second-guess everything.”

  Meg ducked low, peering out the small aircraft window to the east. “Lots of cloud cover out there.” She straightened. “A storm coming in off the ocean is going to stack the deck against us.”

  “How?” Smaill asked.

  “It’s going to complicate the search for the dogs. A little rain isn’t a bad thing in a search—it can even concentrate the scent on the ground, making a clearer path for the dogs. But a big storm with pouring rain can simply wash the scent away. Then we’re essentially going in blind. How is this place set up?”

  Smaill pulled his phone out of his pocket and started flipping through pictures. “I downloaded some photos so you know what to expect. Ah, here’s a good one.” He brought the photo up full screen and handed it to Meg, who studied it for a minute and then passed it to Brian. “That shot is from one of the urbex boards. You can see that whoever took the photo is standing on the shoreline, looking out onto the pier. The railroad tracks on the right go up to the dumper. The set on the left comes back from it. There’s a walkway there on the very right, to get to and from the dumper.”

  “And that massive structure is the dumper? It looks like a box on spindly legs.”

  “Not so spindly when you are standing next to them. And that structure is easily five or six stories tall. See how the tracks go uphill to the dumper? What you can’t see is the structure under the tracks. That houses the giant engines and winches for the weight and pulley system that moved both the railcars and the loader, because the loader would have to be winched up into the air to allow the boats to move in or out from beneath it; then it had to be lowered into position to dump the coal. All the works are underneath. It’s possible your victim could be there, but I doubt it. If you want to leave someone where they can’t possibly get away, up top is the way to go.”

  McCord took the phone from Brian. “From what I see here, the dumper is basically steel struts, looks like four on each side, with a platform up above, the loader hanging on one side and the weights on the other to counterbalance it. The top platform—that’s where the pulleys are, I assume?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a control room on one side of the dumper, three quarters of the way up?”

  “Yes. From there, the site manager could see everything—where the cars are coming in and going out, where the boats are on the water. And there was a second control room on the loader itself, so there would be communication going on between those two rooms.”

  “The victim could be in either control room.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt she would be in the loader control room.” Smaill held out his hand for his phone, then selected another photo and turned it around to show everyone. “The loader itself hangs in midair, winched up about halfway, sticking out over the water. The control room tilts upward at a crazy angle at the end of it. It would be incredibly treacherous to get out there, even harder to get into the control room itself, especially dragging a victim along with you. One fall and you’d be three or four stories down into the water. Depending on how you landed, the fall could kill you or you could drown.”

  Meg plucked the phone out of Smaill’s hand to study the picture. “That doesn’t make sense, then, going with the theory that this is one of the investors’ grandsons trying to kill off all the investors except his grandfather so that when the grandfather dies, he inherits everything. You can’t inherit if you’re dead. He’s already taking chances, but why take that kind of chance when there are other options available?”

  “I think he’s going to go straight
up,” Webb said. “Can I see a picture of the whole site? From a distance?”

  Smaill took the phone from Meg, scrolled through to another picture, and handed it to Webb.

  He took a moment to study the layout. “Here’s my concern. Yes, the site is going to be dangerous. But Stevenson is also going to be dangerous, too, once it becomes clear we’re on-site with him and we know who he is. It’s the entrance to this place that bothers me.” He pointed to the long open area of the pier leading out to the dumper, twin runs of railroad tracks on disintegrating wood bordered on one side by the concrete walkway. “I don’t like how exposed this is. There’s no way to hide our approach. If he’s up top, he’s going to see us coming in. And if he’s armed, we’re going to be sitting ducks.”

  “I thought about that, too,” Smaill said. “And you’re right. This section here”—he pointed at the section of the pier closest to the shore—“is definitely going to be problematic. Once we get to the point where the track curves upward, we’ll have some shelter, but for the first two hundred feet or so, the best we’re going to be able to do is come in as quietly as possible at a dead run. If he starts shooting at us, we’ll have to hope we’re too far away and moving too fast and that he’s a lousy shot. On the bright side, if it’s pouring rain, it’s going to make visibility the pits, so that will increase our chances of coming in undetected. Let’s review once we get there, but I think that’s our only option. We can’t go by water, because we’ll be slower and just as visible. Speed is the only solution, I think.”

  “Unfortunately, I agree with you,” said Meg. “The layout of this site gives us an opportunity to trap Stevenson. But that’s going to make him desperate, so we need to be ready for anything.” Meg glanced from Smaill to Brian. “Same teams as last time? You guys have paired up a few times and that seems to work.”