Exacerbyte (Ellie Conway Book 3)

by Cat Connor

  “I think I’m over having everyone hear my conversations,” I said and took the microphone off my shirt. I turned it over in my hand and flipped the tiny switch to ‘off.’ I left the receiver on and in my ear. Listening to Sean talk to the cops was interesting.

  “Too much jibber-jabber for one day, SSA,” Sam said with a wide grin.

  Sam and I set up our computers. We set two laptops side by side at one end of the table and the third at the far end. I looked around for the CCTV cameras. There were four covering the entire room. Doors at the end of the room lead to a smaller air-conditioned room containing the monitoring stations for the cameras. I checked out the panel and four TV screens, making sure we could record everything that happened in the room to DVD.

  Out in the room I spoke to Sam, “Can you configure one of the laptops so that we can start and stop the recording from in here?”

  “Shit like this makes the hole left by Mac seem huge,” he replied more or less under his breath. “I’ll probably screw it up.”

  I’m not entirely sure what the expression was on my face but I think Sam forgot I still had a receiver in my ear.

  He backpedaled. “I’ll get on with it, might take me a few minutes.”

  “Do what you can; I need to get this interview under way.”

  You could drive a truck through the hole Mac left.

  “Call the rest of the team in,” I said and started looking over the files, paying particular attention to the three missing girls’ information. The kid we grabbed looked very like the first missing kid, the one from Auckland.

  There was a quiet knock at the door and Lee, Sean and Doc entered.

  “That guy hasn’t said a word, not one word,” Sean announced. He carried a black attaché case, which he set down on the table. “Turner is with the kid.”

  “Well, either he has nothing to say, or an accent he doesn’t want us to hear,” I said.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Most people would be yelling for lawyers and demanding to know what was going on. He’s said zip. The kid isn’t talking either.”

  “I want the girl in first.”

  “I’ll call Turner and have him escort her to the front desk,” Sean replied.

  “I’ll meet her,” I said and headed out the door.

  Turner handed her over at the front desk.

  “Thanks. Can you two sit with the male for a bit longer? I’ll try to make this as quick as possible. If you are okay with it, I’ll have you sit in on his interview and see how we work.”

  “Yes ma’am. Call us when you are ready for him.”

  “Thank you.”

  I took the silent girl by the arm and led her to the elevator, from where it was a short walk down a wide, well-lit hallway to our temporary and very stylish office.

  She wore wide fabric bands around her wrists. They were black with red smiley faces on them.

  She said nothing.

  She made no eye contact.

  She walked willingly.

  She kept her head down.

  I sat her in a chair between the computer stations we’d set up. Sam was sitting at one, with Sean next to him.

  I joined Lee and Doc at the far end.

  I smiled at the girl and introduced myself but not the team; she didn’t need to know who was in the room.

  “I am Special Agent Ellie Conway.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “What’s your name?”

  No response.

  “Your name?”

  Nothing.

  “Stand please.”

  She stood but didn’t look at me; her gaze remained fixed on a single spot on the table.

  “Turn out your pockets. All of them,” I instructed, firm but pleasant.

  She hesitated.

  “Either you do it, or I do it for you.” I started to rise from my chair.

  That was enough to mobilize her. She dropped everything from her jeans’ pockets onto the table, plus the contents from the front pocket of the sleeveless hoodie she wore. In front of her lay an assortment of things. The most interesting one for me was the cell phone.

  The girl sat back down.

  “Do we have gloves?” I whispered to Lee.

  Sean heard and rose from his chair. Guess that meant they were all still wearing mikes and receivers. He picked up the attaché case he’d brought in earlier and opened it, walked down to me and handed me a pair of latex gloves and a pile of evidence bags.

  He went back to his chair. I smiled at him. He grinned back.

  As I pulled the gloves on, the rubber snapped against my wrists. There was a subtle change in the kid as I did.

  I snapped the gloves again, this time watching her closely. She flinched. It was almost undetectable, as if she’d trained herself not to react.

  Interesting.

  Slowly I walked over to her and stopped on her right. She stared at the same spot.

  I picked up the cell phone from the table. Her head never moved and her eyes remained locked on the table.

  The phone was on. No text messages received in over three days, not even mine. Prior to that messages were sparse and all from the same number. They were instructions. ‘Get dressed’, ‘Eat’, ‘Go to bed’. I checked each message; they were days apart. I wrote down the number and gave it to Sam to look up. Her outbox was empty. I suspected she’d deleted the messages if there were any. I searched for phone numbers for her parents.

  “Check that,” I said. I found a phone number filed under ‘mom.’ Nothing filed under ‘dad.’

  From my phone, I called the number. The call dropped out before it was answered. I tried again from the hotel phone that sat upon the table. No answer. Nor was there voicemail attached to the phone number. I scanned the rest of the objects on the table. There was a school identity card. I picked it up, looked at the name then slid it down the table to Lee.

  “Seems your mom isn’t home,” I said.

  She said nothing.

  “Does she go out a lot, Abbey?”

  She blinked slowly. “I’m not Abbey,” she said.

  My eyes cut to Sam’s. He nodded his head.

  “Yeah, you are. You are Abbey Jenkins and you’ve been missing for five days.”

  I heard Sam whisper in my ear. “She’s eleven years old, Ellie.”

  “No! I am not Abbey,” she replied.

  Uh-oh.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  I was starting to smell a big problem. It smelt like Post Traumatic Stress or some kind of dissociation at work. I looked at Doc for confirmation. He nodded.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t know.”

  “We think you’re Abbey,” I said softly. “Who gave you the wrist bands?”

  She didn’t reply but shoved her hands back into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie.

  “Show me?”

  I waited.

  “Please?”

  She slowly withdrew her hands and removed one wristband. I could see red welts circling her wrist.

  “Show me the other one,” I said, taking the band she gave me.

  She closed her eyes and handed over the second band. Both wrists bore the same painful-looking welts.

  Someone had handcuffed the kid. Angled welts, not straight, ran around her wrists, in some places, almost raw. I felt sick. The little kid in front of me had been handcuffed to something – and she’d struggled.

  “Doc, you need to see this and we need to get a medical team in here.”

  Sam picked up his phone then looked at Sean who took the phone and made a call.

  We could hear him talking to emergency medical personnel. Doc joined me.

  “Is it okay if I have a look at your wrists?” he asked quietly. “My name is Kurt. I’m a doctor.”

  Abbey said, “I’m not sick. I’m not her.”

  “I won’t touch, I just want to see,” Doc said.

  She shook her head and held her arms across her body where he couldn’t see.

 
; I touched her arm below the shoulder but above the elbow, the safe zone. She flinched, this time it wasn’t subtle. Doc raised his eyebrows at me.

  “We’re going to get you some help. You will be taken to the hospital and you will be safe,” I told her as I crouched next to her. “One of us will go with you and make sure you are safe.” I looked over the rest of the contents of her pockets. She had gum, sugar-free mints and a lip-gloss.

  “Who is the man you were with?” I asked, not wanting to push her but not wanting to lose the opportunity to gather information.

  “I wasn’t with a man,” she replied.

  “Do you know Melanie Talbot?” I asked, showing her the picture I had in my pocket.

  Slight surprise registered in her eyes before she shook her head.

  I repeated the question, “Do you know Melanie Talbot?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard her name before?”

  She looked down and didn’t answer.

  “Have you taken anything, maybe someone gave you a pill or something?”

  “… No,” she replied.

  “You hesitated. Did you take a Tylenol tablet or aspirin?”

  “I don’t know what the first one is.”

  Sean spoke, “Panadol? Disprin? Nurophen? Any pill for a headache or anything like that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t remember taking anything.”

  “Did he give you anything to eat or drink?”

  “Water in a bottle.”

  “Like you buy in the store?”

  “No, a drink bottle.”

  There was a knock on the door. Sean let the paramedics in. He ushered them straight to the girl. I rose to my feet and tapped Doc. Together we took a paramedic aside.

  “I am SSA Conway with the FBI. This is Doctor Kurt Henderson also an SSA with the FBI.”

  Doc took over, “We have reason to believe this child was drugged. I also suspect there was sexual abuse and she maybe in a dissociative state. She is denying her name but can’t offer an alternative.”

  Lee joined us with the paramedic and handed over the police missing person’s sheet on the girl.

  “Thank you,” the medic replied as he read the sheet.

  “We are trying to locate her family,” I said. Lee went back to his computer. “Someone will ride with you, this kid is pivotal to an international investigation regarding a child trafficking ring.”

  The medic nodded; I appointed Sean to the task. Sending Doc was moot, as he wasn’t licensed to practice medicine in New Zealand. As the only female on the team, I felt I should’ve gone, but I was also the agent responsible for the investigation. Even Special Agent Chicky Babe couldn’t be in two places at once.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” Sean said. “I’ll give the boys a call on my way down. Let’s hope you can get more out of the male.”

  Doc and the first paramedic helped the kid to her feet.

  Sean came forward.

  “Abbey, this is Sean. He works for me and he’s going with you. He will keep you safe until we can get your family here for you.”

  She blanked out. Her reactions went back to zero.

  I watched them leave with mixed feelings. She was safe but I had a horrible feeling we were too late. The door was shut. I turned to talk to Lee.

  The door flew open with a crash and Abbey stood wide-eyed in the doorway.

  She said, “Tom Mix.”

  “Is that his name?” I asked.

  She nodded. Sean led her away.

  Lee typed the name into Google.

  “Wanna know which movie that name is from?”

  “Sure, make my day,” I replied.

  “Bruce Willis played Tom Mix in the 1988 movie Sunset.” He typed again. “This is interesting, probably not to the case but triviawise. The character Tom Mix was based on Thomas Edwin Mix who was an American film actor and the first real Western movie star we had. He was born January 6, 1880 and died October 12, 1940.”

  “Thank you for that Lee, I can’t wait to be able to toss that cowboy movie fact into my conversations.” I grinned at him. “When Turner and … Hooch, or whatever his name is, get in here … have one of them notify the police that we found Abbey and need to contact the family.”

  The missed call log on the kid’s phone said no one had called her cell phone in over a week. There were no text messages from her mother or anyone else except that one number. Oddly, there weren’t many entries in her contacts list: three people including her mother. I fiddled with her phone for a minute and attempted to send a text message. Moments later Message not sent appeared on the screen. I looked at the screen; the icon that showed cell service bore a cross through the middle. I cleared the kid’s possessions off the table, dropping everything into evidence bags and storing it all in Sean’s attaché case. I pulled off my gloves and threw them in the waste paper bin by the door.

  Lee said, “I think his name is Jay, Ellie.”

  Jay not Hooch.

  “I wanna know what that prick gave that kid,” I said. “She had a fuc’n cell phone … but it’s not connected to the network. Or the network is down. Guess that’s why didn’t she call her mom at some stage. And why didn’t she call for help?”

  Neither of them responded.

  The rant just wouldn’t stop. I tried. But it wouldn’t. “There is no record of my text being received on this phone either. I don’t know why I’m surprised: a major cell network that has serious outages and failures was bound to cause life-threatening situations. Where is her mother?”

  Doc’s hand touched my arm. “Breathe.”

  “I am,” I spat, shaking off his arm. I felt my blood pressure soar. I reread the missing child report. No one cared about this kid. No one missed her except one teacher, who had called the police when the child failed to show at a holiday program and she’d been unable to contact a parent. I wondered if the mother was even alive. I read more about the teacher. She was running a school holiday program for kids with nowhere to go.

  I didn’t have enough answers.

  “Where is the freaking mother? Why couldn’t police find her?” I looked at Sam. “Someone needs to visit her home – can we make that happen? Who was it who did send those messages to her fuc’n phone?”

  “Yes, SSA.” Sam checked his screen then typed quickly. He looked at me. “The number that did contact her – it was her mom. It’s a pre-paid cell phone but she registered it.” Sam called Sean and imparted my request. “He’ll have local police go around there now.”

  I crossed Abbey Jenkins off my missing list.

  We waited in silence for the knock at the door. It seemed to take an awful long time to come.

  Sam opened the door and let in the officers and the handcuffed Unsub. He indicated seats for the officers and one in the middle of the long table for the Unsub. Jay and Turner smiled at me.

  He was calm. He didn’t react, nor did he resist.

  With everyone seated, I introduced myself, “I am Special Agent Conway. And you are?”

  I waited and let him have his minute’s silence.

  “Name, rank, serial number?”

  He said nothing.

  Unlike the girl he didn’t fix his gaze on the table, he chose a spot on the wall, which meant he sat straight and his head was up.

  “Big fan of Bruce Willis, or is it just cowboy movies that you like, Mr. Mix?”

  My comment garnered a slight smirk.

  “Country of origin?”

  Nothing.

  “The girl will be returned to her parents.”

  He shrugged.

  “We’re going to need a DNA sample from you.”

  His gaze remained fixed.

  Lee went to the other side of the table with one of the digital cameras. He snapped a clear head shot of the Unsub then uploaded it to our database.

  “While we wait for your name to spit out … how do you like New Zealand so far?”

  He didn’t react.

  “I think
it’s a lovely place. I’m really looking forward to spending some quality time sightseeing,” I carried on as if he was taking parting in the conversation. “Might give the Antarctic center a try. The Casino looks good too.”

  The Unsub was not a great conversationalist.

  Lee eventually spoke a name, “Harvey Bauer.”

  A small glimmer of amusement flickered across our guest’s eyes.

  “Harvey Bauer, born Harvey Wilhelm Beckenbauer in Hamburg, Germany. Date of birth May 12, 1970. A current resident and citizen of The United States of America,” Lee said. “You are a long way from home buddy.”

  He remained silent.

  “Well, it’s a relief to know he’s not a deceased cowboy actor or Bruce Willis,” I said.

  I leveled a cold stare at Harvey Bauer. “We’re going to turn out your pockets, Harvey.”

  He remained stationary. His eyes moved from the wall to his handcuffed hands.

  “If there is anything you need to tell us, now is the time,” I said.

  He stared at the wall again.

  Lee’s computer beeped. I looked over at his screen. The incoming beep alert was from the Department of Defense. Our photograph of Harvey had caused a ripple effect. Someone else wanted him.

  “Dammit,” I mumbled and immediately decided to ignore the alert. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt.

  Harvey sat motionless.

  “Sam, do the honors,” I said.

  Sam eased himself from his chair, fished some large latex gloves from the attaché case and pulled them on. They were tight. His fingers looked like cooked sausages. We needed to carry extra-large gloves.

  He reached Harvey in three strides.

  “Anything you want to tell me about before I search you?”

  Nothing.

  “If anything sticks me, I am not going to be happy … you don’t want me unhappy.”

  Sam did an awesome Mr. T impersonation.

  Sam hauled Harvey to his feet and turned out his pockets, then conducted a quick body search. To the table of clutter he added a military knife and a Beretta M9.

  It’s fuc’n amateur hour.

  I looked over at Jay and Turner and shook my head. “Good thing he was cuffed.”

  They looked sheepish.

  I turned my attention to Harvey.

  “Oh dear, possession of a firearm and a dangerous weapon. What else have we got there, Sam?”