by Alex Segura
“They’re all from the same time period,” Pete said.
“So?”
“So, our guy was creating e-mail addresses with different service providers,” Pete said. “But he couldn’t be bothered to change up the login names.”
“Again, so what? How does that get us any closer to anything?”
“Not sure yet,” he said. He cursed under his breath. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner?
Pete clicked on each ad from the list, opening each one in its own browser tab. He scanned them, one by one. They were identical, except for the second-to-last one.
“We’ve got a number,” Pete said.
“What?”
“There’s a phone number with this ad,” Pete said. “None of the others have one, but the text is identical otherwise.”
“Why have a number on this one?”
“Not sure,” Pete said. “This is one of the later ones. Maybe he was hoping to expand his client base?”
“Victim base, you mean,” Kathy said. He could see the weariness in her eyes. She wanted no part of this anymore. Pete couldn’t blame her.
Pete grabbed Kathy’s phone from the table and began dialing. She didn’t protest. After a quick exchange with someone on the other end, Pete hung up with a long, frustrated sigh.
“What happened?”
“False alarm,” Pete said.
“How so?”
“The number’s for a disposable phone,” Pete said. “Whoever had it before knew that. The number itself is worthless.”
“True, but the clue is valuable,” Kathy said. “It means he didn’t want to be traced, which implies he was doing something wrong. Not a smoking gun, by any means, but still. Something.”
Pete pushed himself away from the table in frustration and stood up. He was tired. His head hurt. They’d been holed up in this tiny, sketchy room for hours and all they had was a temporary cell phone number and a few Internet postings. He felt helpless.
“Something isn’t going to help us here,” Pete said. “We need more. This guy was going after girls. He had a fixation with his mentor, Rex Whitehurst. What else? What else can we pin on him?”
“How do killers pay homage to other killers?” Kathy said. “What methods did Rex Whitehurst have that Raul Aguilera could mimic?”
Pete nodded, starting to pace again.
“What did this killer do?” Pete said. “What did Rex do differently?”
“Rex’s kills were similar, but not the same,” she said. “He didn’t use ads, he’d troll neighborhoods and entice kids to come into his car…”
“Wait,” Pete said. “That’s it.”
“What is?”
“His car,” Pete said. “Rex drove a white van. That was his signature move. Erica Morales’s friend Silvia said she saw Erica get into a white van. But saying someone owns a white van in Miami is like saying you have sunglasses in LA. Still, what if Aguilera adopted that part of his stepdad’s MO?”
“That would make sense,” Kathy said.
“Can you find out what kind of van Rex Whitehurst used for his crimes?” Pete asked.
“Sure,” Kathy responded, already back at the laptop and typing. “Shouldn’t be too hard. Let’s see. Okay, here we go. A Ford Aerostar, 1983, white.”
“Ford stopped making the Aerostar a few years back, no?”
“How should I know?” Kathy said.
“It’s true,” Pete said. “They changed the name—to the Windstar. So someone still driving a Ford Aerostar, especially one from 1983 that’s white, has got to be rare.”
“Thank you so fucking much for being incompetent, Miami Times,” Kathy muttered as she continued to type. “Let’s see how far into the DMV records The Times system will take me before it raises a red flag and they realize I’m not exactly an employee anymore.”
Pete nodded. He’d done something similar the year previous during the Silent Death case, also with Kathy’s account, no less. The Miami Times, as the city’s paper of record, had unprecedented access to public networks, databases, and information, the Department of Motor Vehicles being one of them. But even that had its limits. If a user account was flagged for browsing sensitive sections of personal records, it could be shut down.
“Bingo,” Kathy said. Pete felt his stomach tie into a knot. “There’s a handful of 1983 white Ford Aerostars still registered and active in Miami. Most seem to be in the hands of older folk, or in junkyards—which means they won’t get their registration renewed or they’ve been on the garbage pile for years.”
“Anyone actively using one, though? Any person seem out of the ordinary?” Pete asked.
Kathy took a sharp breath.
“What is it?”
“Fuck,” Kathy said.
Pete moved in closer to the laptop and looked over her shoulder.
There was one person who owned a white Ford Aerostar from 1983 that wasn’t pushing it in age. His name was Julian Finch. He was thirty-five, white, male, and worked as a Realtor for Penagos Realtors in West Kendall.
Penagos Realtors.
Pete could see the shop’s neon sign as if he were standing in front of it. His mind jumped back to seeing Emily waiting inside. It jumped ahead a few days—to the body of Melissa Saiz being pulled out of a garbage dump behind the building. The fruitless search. They had been so close.
“Who the fuck is Julian Finch?” Kathy said.
But Pete wasn’t around to answer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
She wanted to die.
Nina Henriquez could hear her heart beating. Slower now, it seemed. She’d lost track of time. All she knew was that she was running out of water and had finished the last few crumbs of cereal yesterday.
The whirring sound—the camera, she figured—hadn’t come to life in a while. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. The man that brought her here—Steve, the real estate guy—was gone. Was he real? Her head was still foggy. But she had pieced together enough.
How could she have been so stupid? The thought crossed her mind throughout the days—weeks—she’d been here, in the small, musty-smelling room.
He’d planned her capture well, Nina mused. Tying her hands just so. She was able to stretch her fingers and reach the food—sometimes even the water—but it was almost impossible to yank the cloth wrapped around her face. Almost.
Her legs felt dead under her. She rocked back and forth, trying to get the blood circulating again. She knew it was only a brief respite. Her wrists—tied to her ankles—were rubbed raw. Her fingers massaged her toes.
She’d stopped crying a while ago. Not because she didn’t think anyone could hear her. She’d figured that out soon enough. She didn’t want to give him the pleasure. This asshole had manipulated her. Taken advantage of her. For what? She wasn’t sure. She may never know. But she wasn’t going to feed his sick fantasy. She wasn’t going to just be a notch on his wall.
Every day, she’d allow herself to think about her brother for a second. A minute, if she needed to. She wondered where he was. What he was doing. If he was mad at her. He probably thought she’d up and left like her mom, found a better life. She hoped he didn’t think that. She would never leave him. Even if she didn’t survive this.
She gritted her teeth and held her breath. This was the worst part. The painful part of her daily ritual.
The cords wrapped around her wrists were not smooth. They felt like rope, but weren’t. Maybe Velcro, she thought. She rubbed her wrists together, fast at first, but slower as the pain kicked in. The scabs—from the previous days’ work—were gone now.
She felt the blood dripping around her wrists. It was warm. A trickle at first, but more than last time. The scrapes and scabs and cuts she’d collected under the cords were something now. For the first time since she’d been taken into this dark pit, she felt motion. She allowed herself a tiny sob. She felt the tears running down her face but refused to acknowledge them. She was crying, but she wasn’t going to cry. Not for help.
Not for anyone.
It happened faster than she thought. The blood soaked the cord wrapped around her wrists and ankles. She felt light-headed. She scrunched her hands into tiny, lean shapes—like two long triangles—and pulled. The first tug hurt like hell. The scrapes being dragged toward her palm and creating new abrasions. The second gave her hope. By the time she’d managed to put her toes between the cord and her hands, she wasn’t sure she’d have hands for much longer.
Her right hand popped out first and she let out a yelp of surprise. It was throbbing, but she ignored it. The room was dark, but even the minimal light emanating from the small bulb above her was enough to cause her to squint. She took a few deep breaths and let her eyes adjust.
She looked at her free hand. It looked like a wild animal had taken a nibble and passed because it was too light on flavor. She would have laughed under better circumstances.
She looked at the tiny room and felt a wave of disgust. The smell and temperature she’d become accustomed to hit her as if for the first time.
She noticed the camera. It wasn’t on—or the lights weren’t flashing.
She was able to free her other hand soon after. It was then just a matter of figuring out her captor’s knot style. This guy was good, but Nina had basically been a Boy Scout, or so she liked to think. Hell, she’d helped her brother with his scout work and gone on enough camping trips to know a square knot from a bowline.
She managed to free her legs after a bit. She made the mistake of standing up in one motion. The shock to her system—which had spent who-knows-how-long sitting basically cross-legged—was painful and jarring. The blood rushed through her body and sent her back down, screaming.
“Fuck,” she said. Her voice was dry and it felt strange to hear herself.
She got to her feet. It still hurt, but less so as long as she took it slow.
That’s when she heard the knock.
***
The knocking turned into banging. Someone was trying really hard to get in. Just outside the tiny closet-sized room she found a small set of stairs that led up to a door—the noises were coming from there. She walked up and put an ear to the door. She could hear panting on the other side. Cursing.
Nina struggled to find something—anything—she could use to defend herself. She held the ropelike cords that bound her.
Her breathing quickened. It wasn’t meant to be like this. She’d almost made it out of an unthinkable prison. She was about to escape. But who was on the other side? It wasn’t “Steve”—he’d just waltz in, and that would mean the end of Nina.
She didn’t have more time to think about it. She tried to position herself somewhere that would give her an element of surprise, but there was nowhere to hide that wasn’t in plain view of anyone coming down the stairs. She settled for flattening herself against the wall, hoping that the door opened inward and she’d have a few seconds of a head start.
The words she did manage to hear from the other side made her rethink the plan—and jump down the stairs three at a time.
“Coming in…shoot…door…back,” the person said. It was definitely male. She waited at the bottom of the stairs. This is it, she thought. She wasn’t going to just roll over and die. She’d come too far for that.
The gunshot echoed around the small room and Nina covered her ears and closed her eyes for a second. The door opened and she heard footsteps speeding down the stairs. Nina bolted toward the stairwell—arms flailing.
She felt her fist connect with a face and heard a groan of pain, then the weight of someone falling onto her, pushing her back. She clawed, felt a face, and took some pleasure in the man’s scream. More footsteps. Another person?
“Holy shit.” The other voice, female. “Holy fucking shit.”
Nina’s head was spinning and her hands were pinned down at her sides. She felt the man keeping her on the ground, his heavy breathing hot on her face. She couldn’t open her eyes. No. She couldn’t deal with this. To taste freedom for a second and then have it stolen. It was over. She’d been so close.
She heard the woman approach and kneel down beside her head.
“Nina? Nina Henriquez?”
Nina opened her eyes. The man holding her down rolled off her and was panting, out of breath. He was fat and had a scraggly beard. Nina slid backwards, toward the wall, facing them.
“Who the hell are you?” Nina croaked.
“My name is Kathy,” the woman said. She was older. Thirties, probably. She seemed worn out, like she hadn’t slept in a few days.
Nina froze. She felt her mouth moving but the sounds—mutterings—coming out of her mouth weren’t words. Somehow, her brain and body realized that these people—these strangers—weren’t there to kill her and began an immediate shutdown of defenses, leaving Nina shaking and on the verge of tears.
“It’s going to be fine,” the man said. He didn’t try to get closer to her. His hands were up, trying to calm her. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“You’re safe now,” the woman said. “It’s all over.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Pete pulled into the strip mall parking lot and parked near the little bodega he’d walked by so many times in the last week. The sun was out, and Pete realized it was close to eight in the morning—still too early for anyone to be getting to work. Or was it? He felt something vibrate in his pocket. He pulled out Kathy’s cell phone and answered.
“Hello?”
“Not only do you dart off without saying anything, but you steal my phone?” Kathy said. “And Dave’s car? What do you do to people you don’t like?”
“I wasn’t going to drag you along any further,” Pete said, his eyes on the front door of the real estate office, which was still dark. No one home.
“How very kind of you,” Kathy said. “While you ran off to play hero, Dave and I found Nina.”
“What?”
“She’s alive, Pete,” Kathy said, all humor gone. “We cross-referenced properties owned by either Aguilera or Finch and came up blank, but dug a bit deeper and found out that Aguilera was renting a storage space in Homestead under his mother’s name. That’s where Nina was. She’s tough—she’d already gotten out of her restraints.”
Pete took in a sharp, surprised breath. He wasn’t sure what to say.
“That’s… holy shit—that’s a miracle,” Pete said. “Kathy, I…can’t believe…where is she?”
“Well, I’m technically still wanted by the police, so I felt it wasn’t in my best interest to walk into headquarters with a girl that’s believed dead,” Kathy said. “So one of Dave’s goons dropped her off at Homestead Hospital.”
“She’s alive.” Pete felt his eyes welling up. Not everything was lost.
“Where the hell are you? Or do I know the answer?”
“I’m in the car, waiting outside,” Pete said.
“I’m going to assume you have not notified our colleagues in law enforcement about this,” Kathy said.
“That’s a safe assumption.”
“So, what are your plans if and when you run into this Julian Finch? Did you ever stop to consider that he might just be Joe Regular, who happens to drive a white Aerostar? What then? Citizen’s arrest?”
“Hadn’t thought past coming here,” Pete said. Then he hung up.
Pete checked the time on the dashboard. 7:45. He hadn’t slept in almost two days. The energy that had propelled him from Dave’s hideout to West Kendall would fade soon, and he’d be left exhausted and with no plan. He leaned his head back and stared at the car’s ceiling. It didn’t help that he hated and was terrible at stakeouts. He let his eyes close. Just for a second.
***
Pete woke up with a start. It took him a second to remember where he was. He rubbed his eyes. He had a vague, fading memory of a dream. He checked the time on Kathy’s phone. It was almost 9:30. The iPhone’s battery was dying. He’d slept for almost two hours. Pete cursed under his breath. So much for staking out the scene. He l
ooked over at the real estate office and noticed the lights were now on. Someone had opened the door. Someone was inside. Pete exited the car. He looked around the small parking lot. No one else was around this early. He felt for the gun resting behind his back, supported by his jeans waistband. He walked toward the small real estate office.
The door chime went off and startled Pete as he opened the door. The office, though small, was divided in two. Pete was in the main lobby area, which was cordoned off by a reception desk. Pete assumed the Realtor offices were past the reception area. There was no one around. The lights were on.
He walked up to the desk and pushed the button that would alert the receptionist. He heard some rustling in the back room. Voices? He wasn’t sure. After a few minutes, a short, stout woman of about fifty made her way to the front desk and took a seat. She eyed Pete. He could tell she was having a hard time smiling.
“May I help you?” she said. The nameplate on her desk said Myrna.
“Hi, I’m looking for Julian Finch,” Pete said, trying his best to sound casual, probably failing.
He noticed something in her eyes. Pete wondered if it was normal, or if he’d tripped some kind of alarm in her head.
She cleared her throat. “Julian isn’t in yet,” she said. “Most of the agents are either out in the field or not here until later.”
Pete put on his best neighborly smile. “Ah, gotcha,” he said. “Any idea when he’ll be in?”
“Probably later this afternoon,” she said. “Can I take a message?”
Pete noticed her hands were shaking as she rummaged through her desk for a pen.
“Sure, but I can wait,” Pete said.
“He won’t be here for some time,” she said, her voice firm. “I wouldn’t want you to be stuck here for hours.”
“Can you call him?”
“What is this concerning, Mr.…?”
“Fernandez,” Pete said. “A friend of mine was here recently and I wanted to follow up for her about an apartment she was looking at.”
