by Chris Orcutt
Then the other guy pulled something from his jacket pocket. He paused for dramatic effect and pressed a button. A knife blade flicked out and glinted in the light.
“A switchblade?” I grimaced. “Bit of a cliché, don’t you think? Now, this, on the other hand…” I raised my hand holding the baton and, with a snap of the wrist, instantly telescoped it to its full two feet of striking steel. “This is more original.” I couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but his hesitation said he concurred. “Walk away, kid,” I said. “Whatever Stinky’s paying, it’s not worth getting your wrist broken.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He stepped forward brandishing the knife. He was more cautious than his buddy had been.
“That’s it,” Stinky said, easing away from the car. “You keep him busy while I deal with Dr. Malone.”
Knife Guy came toward me in a low crouch, holding his knife arm back and jabbing it toward me every so often. As a rule, tough guys for hire aren’t well-trained, and their hand-to-hand skills tend to follow deeply grooved patterns based on what’s worked for them in the past. I kept my eyes on the knife, but in my periphery I was observing Knife Guy’s footsteps, trying to figure out his footwork pattern.
Before jabbing with the knife, he two took sidesteps, followed by two stutter-steps forward. I waited for him to repeat the pattern twice, and when he started to repeat it a third time, I brought the baton crashing down on the back of his hand. The knife clattered under the BMW. By the way he screamed, I knew I’d shattered all of those thin and sensitive bones.
He regained his composure quickly though, and while my stance was still open he kicked me in the thigh, precariously close to my groin. I replied by lashing out with the baton again—a solid strike across his collarbone. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain.
“Dakota,” Svetlana said, “behind you!”
I spun around. Stinky was straddling Dr. Malone on the pavement, throttling him. “Tell me where she is! Tell me or you’re dead! Tell me!”
Dr. Malone’s face was red. He tried to talk, but only croaking sounds came out.
“Stop!” I struck Stinky on the shoulder with the baton, but he kept throttling Malone. I struck him again, this time across the arm, but he still wouldn’t let go. Finally I pulled my gun and shoved it in his face.
“Enough!” I shouted. “Now back off!”
When he let go, Dr. Malone got to his feet coughing and holding his throat. He staggered to the BMW and opened the door.
“Dr. Malone,” I said, “wait for the police.”
He either didn’t hear me or acted like he didn’t, because he jumped in the car and started it. He squealed out of the parking spot, nearly running over Karate Guy and Knife Guy in the process, and sped out of the garage. I hurried over to Svetlana. Her pupils were dilated.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I am physically unharmed, if that is what you mean.”
“Good.” I gave her my car keys. “Go get my car. It’s up there. Walk slowly and take deep breaths. I’m going to talk to Stinky here.”
She nodded and walked away. I pointed my gun at Karate Guy and Knife Guy.
“You two…beat it,” I said.
They rose unsteadily to their feet and stumbled down the garage ramp. I holstered my gun and pocketed the baton.
“All right, Stinky,” I said, nodding to him, “it’s just you and me now.”
“Go to hell.”
“Look, you want to be nice to me,” I said. “I’m an ex-FBI Special Agent investigating Dr. Malone’s involvement with the girl you saw earlier. I’ve investigated a number of kidnappings, and something occurred to me.”
“Oh yeah? What?”
“Your level of anger and desperation is exactly like what I’ve seen in the parents of kidnap victims,” I said. “I think your daughter really was abducted and that you, correctly or incorrectly, believe that Dr. Malone is behind it. The bottom line is, I want to talk to you.”
He looked at me in disbelief, then his head sunk and he began to sob.
Ugh…another person crying. First Mrs. O’Toole, and now this guy. Should I put a hand on his shoulder, say an encouraging word? This was the part of the job nobody trained you for. I hadn’t liked it when I was a Special Agent, and I liked it even less now that I was independent. I was walking over to him when Svetlana pulled up with the Mercedes.
“Listen,” I said to him, “come back to my hotel with us. I’ll buy you lunch and we can talk. What do you say?”
Nodding, he continued to sob. I held out a hand and helped him to his feet.
“I’m Dakota Stevens, and the woman driving is Svetlana Krüsh,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Kevin,” he said. “Kevin Teller.”
“Nice to meet you, Kevin.” I opened the back door of the Mercedes for him. “I have just one request.”
“What’s that?”
I pinched my nose. “My hotel has an excellent shower.”
He nodded and slid inside. As soon as I got in the front, Svetlana drove down the ramp toward the exit.
“Can we stop by my van first?” Kevin asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Where’s it parked?”
“The IHOP. Know where that is?”
“Yes. But what’s there?”
“Change of clothes,” he said. “But mostly something else.”
“What?”
“Evidence,” he said.
22
The All-Over, Full-Body Kind
Back at the hotel, after Kevin got cleaned up, the three of us went downstairs to the hotel restaurant for a late lunch. Svetlana had skirt steak; I had a Caesar salad with wood-grilled shrimp; and Kevin, clearly comfortable as our guest, had page five of the menu. It was obvious the man hadn’t eaten much in days, so I didn’t bother him with questions while he was eating. But when the waitress came around with the dessert menu, I waved her off and started putting the screws to Kevin.
“Listen, Kevin,” I said, “I didn’t invite you here so you could break the restaurant’s eating record. I want to hear your story. You said your daughter was abducted in May. Start with that, telling us everything that’s happened since then.” I glanced at my watch. “And please be brief. Svetlana has another appointment soon.”
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and dropped it in his plate.
“Sure, Dakota,” he said. “Since May, when Ursula disappeared, I’ve been on the road. I took a leave of absence from the force—that’s back in Des Moines—borrowed a van from a friend, and followed Malone across the country.”
“Where did you start?” I asked.
“Chicago,” he said. “Ursula was a junior at the University of Chicago. Straight-A student. Here.”
He showed us a shopworn photograph, in which a curvy blonde girl wearing a St. Patrick’s Day hat stood on a bridge with a green river in the background.
“Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He gulped and hurriedly put the photo away. “So, just the facts, right? Here goes. In January, Ursula participated in Malone’s study. But afterwards, when Malone pursued her for a date, she told him she wasn’t interested. Two months after that, Ursula disappeared.
“The FBI investigated—for about a week—and then the lead agent tells me, ‘With kidnappings,’ he says, ‘after the first forty-eight hours, the chances of finding the missing person decline rapidly.’ And then he says, ‘Chances are, Ursula’s dead.’ Says it cold just like that. I wanted to kill the sonovabitch. Then he says they’ll keep the case open, but they have to scale back their resources. That’s when I got the van and started my own investigation.
“Ursula kept a journal—she was an English major—and she wrote how Malone kept pursuing her. He was calling her as late as April, a month after he left. She re
ported it to the Dean, but the Dean said that since Malone had never worked directly for the university, there was nothing they could do.”
His eyes started to tear up. He sipped some ice water.
“You’re doing great, Kevin,” I said. “Keep it together. After Chicago, where did you go?”
“Oberlin College, in Ohio,” he said. “That was the next place Malone was supposed to do his study. But there wasn’t enough interest, and he left a couple days before I got there. So I decided to look into the schools he was at before Chicago. I backtracked my way west—Colorado College, University of Arizona, University of Las Vegas, UCLA, and Stanford University. And guess what I found?”
“Other girls had disappeared?”
“Bingo.” He opened a thick manila envelope and handed over a sheaf of papers and photographs. “All told, fourteen girls have gone missing from schools where Malone performed his sex study.”
Sifting through the papers and photos, I quickly recognized the girls’ initials and faces from the evidence we’d discovered in Malone’s apartment. Finally I learned the names behind the mysterious initials:
Tabitha Andersen
Vicki Crane
Anya French
Tamara Goldwyn
Amber Holt
Jennifer Leigh
Heather O’Neill
Stacy Prentiss
Nora Reese
Veronica Snow
Isla Suarez
Ursula Teller
Mercedes Vonn
Mallory Waters
While I jotted the girls’ names into my pocket notebook, Svetlana laced her hands together on the tablecloth and leaned across the table.
“And what pattern, if any, did the disappearances follow?” she asked.
“Good question,” I said. “Svetlana is a chess grandmaster”—I jutted my head in her direction—“so she’s really good at patterns.”
“All of the girls disappeared after Malone left,” Kevin said. “Usually within two months of his departure. All of them either applied for, or participated in, his ‘study.’ They were all attractive and unique-looking in some way. In other words, they didn’t all have blonde hair like my Ursula, or—”
“Kevin,” I said, “what is Ursula’s blood type?”
“Excuse me?”
“Her blood type.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“It might be important,” I said. “Just humor me, okay?”
“A-B negative.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Yes, of course I’m sure,” he said. “She got in a car accident last year and lost a lot of blood. It was touch and go because her blood type’s so rare. The blood bank had trouble coming up with enough A-B negative for her.”
I wagged the sheaf of papers and photos.
“What about the other girls in here? Do you know their blood types?”
“No.” He crossed his arms.
“What’s this photo of?” I showed him the photo. It was a picture of a dilapidated brick building taken from a hilltop.
“I was getting to that,” he said. “It’s an abandoned warehouse outside of Montreal.”
The back of the photo had GPS coordinates on it.
“And these coordinates,” I said. “The location?”
“Yeah,” Kevin said.
“Is this where you think the girls are being held?” I asked.
“No.” He frowned down at the table. “I wish. I think it’s like a distribution center…for the girls.”
“How did you find it?” I asked.
“I got lucky.”
Kevin described how, while he was at Stanford University, he spoke to a woman in Payroll. When he told the woman about Ursula’s kidnapping, she gave him the only permanent address the university had for Malone—an apartment in Montreal. Kevin then drove east to Montreal and staked out Malone’s apartment for a week. When Malone showed up, it was late at night, and the next morning he drove to the warehouse. Other vehicles showed up, including two windowless vans, and they all left an hour later.
“I tried to follow Malone from there, but he lost me,” Kevin said. “I didn’t want to tip him off that I knew about the warehouse, so I took that photo and went to the Mounties. You know, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
“Yes, I know who the Mounties are, Kevin,” I said. “Go on.”
He shrugged. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I spoke to the chief superintendent, but he said they didn’t have any probable cause to investigate.”
I held up the photo of the warehouse. “May I keep this? There’s someone at the Bureau I want to share it with.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “I contacted the lead agent on my daughter’s case and told him everything I’m telling you, and he gave me the blow-off.”
“Well, I’m not giving you the blow-off.” I flipped to a fresh page in my notebook. “What’s Malone’s address in Montreal?”
He told me, and I wrote it down. Svetlana leafed through the photos and documents, and then handed them back to me.
“How about these files on each of the girls?” I said. “Can we keep them? It would make our work a lot easier.”
“Sure, I’ve got copies,” he said, handing me the envelope. “In fact, back in my van, I’ve got boxes of stuff. Believe me, Dakota…Svetlana…Malone’s behind this. I just hope I can find my daughter before the bastard permanently shuts down his study and disappears.”
“I can’t guarantee anything,” I said, “but I’m pretty confident the Bureau will get involved now.”
“That would be great,” he said. “I’ve been doing this all alone for months. I’m exhausted, and I’m broke.”
“I wish I could help you out,” I said, “but I’m not in a position—”
“Thanks, but I’m fine. I’ve been getting by with carpentry gigs.”
“Look, do you have a phone number? A place where agents can contact you, so they can look over all the other evidence you’ve gathered?”
“My cell phone broke, and I haven’t had the money to replace it,” he said. “Just have them go to the IHOP parking lot. My van’s the red Dodge in the back corner, Iowa plates of course.”
I took out $50 and handed it to him.
“No, I don’t want—”
“To get yourself a cab,” I said. “I can’t drive you back. I’m sorry.”
He nodded meekly and pocketed the money. “Thanks. Both of you. You’ve taken a huge weight off me.”
We shook hands with him, and he left. When the waitress came with the check, I charged it to my room and gave her a generous tip. She poured us coffee, and Svetlana and I sat in silence. While gazing out the window at the Charles River, I put down my coffee cup and spoke.
“I hope I did the right thing,” I said.
“By…?”
“By not sharing the photos we found, or mentioning the blood samples.”
“I believe you were wise to omit them,” Svetlana said. “You should not get his hopes up prematurely. Better to share when you have more data. What will your next move be?”
“As soon as we’re finished here, I’m going over to the Bureau office in Government Center and discuss this with an agent I know there.”
Svetlana gave me a wry smile. “Is this the agent who was helping you at eight o’clock yesterday morning?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m hoping I can convince her to look into Malone a little bit—maybe find out who his mysterious benefactor is.”
“May I be of assistance?”
I sipped my coffee. “You mean with talking to her, or something else?”
“Research,” she said.
“Yes, that would be great—thanks. What’d you have in mind?”
“Looking into the disappearances at
the various schools, perhaps contacting the parents of the missing girls. Inquiring about their blood types, for one thing.”
“All right.” I slid the sheaf of papers and photos back into the envelope, and handed it to Svetlana. “Just be careful. Make up a cover story for why you’re contacting these people. I don’t want Malone to get wind of this and blow town.”
“ ‘Blow town’?” A puzzled look came over her face as she stirred cream into her coffee.
“An American colloquialism from old gangster movies,” I said. “It means ‘to leave a place rapidly and without warning.’ ‘Fly the coop’ and ‘skedaddle’ mean the same thing.”
“I will be discreet,” she said.
“I really appreciate your help, Svetlana,” I said. “I’m not crazy about the drudge work—like calling people or researching stuff on the internet. I can do it, mind you. I just don’t like doing it.”
“Understood,” she said. “And what will you be doing tomorrow?”
“Continuing to persuade Sally to dump Dr. Malone.”
“So…seducing her?” Svetlana said.
“No—taking her on the town.” I sighed. Who was I kidding? “Yeah, seducing her basically.”
Svetlana shook her head and clucked her tongue.
“Listen, Svetlana,” I said, “do you think I like this so-called ‘case’? I don’t. The more I get to know Sally, the more I see she’s a sweet girl who’s starved for attention and affection. She has serious daddy issues—so serious that, at the drop of a hat, she’ll get involved with any older alpha male who shows her a speck of attention. I don’t want to toy with her like this, but what I’m learning about Malone tells me she’s better off getting her feelings hurt with me than she is staying with Malone and having who-knows-what happen to her.”
Svetlana nodded. “You are right. I am sorry if I seemed judgmental.”
“Forget it.” I looked at my watch and stood. “How about I drive you where you have to go, and then I’ll head over to Government Center?”
“That would be most helpful.”
