by Adira August
Garza reached out. His fingers caressed the monitor… Ruth. “Look at her. She's a mouse. Leaving her there was the perfect strategy, Hunter. He feels so powerful.”
“Leaving her there was a huge risk,” Hunter said with his cell to his ear. “We’re right at the ethical event horizon.”
“This whole scenario was your idea and that assistant D.A., Natani, approved it, right?” DiMato asked.
“Yeah, we’re covered legally.” Hunter stepped into the hall with his cell.
Garza’s dreamy gaze returned to the screen.
BRADLEY COWL—fifty, sleek city politico—and Diane Natani hurried toward headquarters from the new courthouse.
They stopped behind a group waiting to cross to the block entirely occupied by the squat Denver City Jail and police headquarters. The buildings shared the plaza and the underground parking.
“Why can't the FBI take over?” Cowl asked. “The mayor doesn't need any more deaths on his watch.”
“So he can shift blame to the FBI if this all goes bad?”
Cowl knew better than to respond.
“The FBI doesn't have jurisdiction, Brad.”
They moved diagonally across the intersection with the crowd.
“The FBI does this all the time!”
“On TV,” she said. “The real world has real rules. Laws. Procedures that the district attorney's office follows.”
They crossed the plaza to the front doors of headquarters. “You're new to this okay? So's the mayor. Why not see how Dane is handling things before we start worrying about the body count?”
CARRYING A COUPLE file folders, Deedee showed up at Ruth’s empty desk, peering into the squadroom.
Ruth jumped up in obvious relief. “Here. Here I am, Deedee.”
“Oh! Good. Our—um...” Spotting Ferriter, she took a step back. “Our copier. It jammed again. I'm just going to borrow yours.”
She fled past Ruth’s desk into the squadroom.
“Wait!” Ruth grabbed the red file and hurried after her. “You can't put an Assaults personnel number in there, it won't work anymore.”
Ferriter leaned over—no view of the copier or the women.
“Since when?”
“Last week. Didn't they do yours? … Here, give them to me, I'll use my number and do a bill over.”
The hum-thwick of the copier obscured their words. Ferriter checked the clock. 2:27. He relaxed, watched Wendy talk about the weather, and worked at the eyebolt with his thumbs.
“I TOLD YOU he wasn't praying before,” DiMato said.
“No way he gets that loose, right?” Chang asked.
“Nope. He’ll get blisters, though.”
Hunter brought Natani and Cowl into the room. “This is Bradley Cowl from the Mayor's office.”
The detectives offered hand-lifts of recognition but stayed focused on the screen.
Ruth re-enters with the red file.
Ferriter sits with his hands folded. “Welcome back.”
She gets to work on the forms.
“That’s him?” Cowl pushed so close to the screen, Chang had to cant sideways to make room for him.
“You aren't speaking to me, now?” Ferriter asks.
Cowl was not pleased. “Why isn't anyone questioning him?”
“Police can't question him,” Hunter said. “If we do that, we have to advise him. He lawyers up, and that's it for Brian Trowbridge.”
Cowl jabbed a finger toward the screen almost poking Chang in the ear. “He's sitting there watching forms being filled out. Then what? Paint the walls so he can watch them dry?”
Chang slipped on a headset to hear over the argument.
“If he sits there long enough Brian Trowbridge will be dead!”
“But he can't sit quietly.” Garza answered, still fixed on the monitor. “The boy is out there. Suffering. Afraid. Right now. Ferriter can't focus on anything else. Even his arrest is secondary. It's why he needs to watch the weather, so he'll know when the first flakes touch the boy. So he can fantasize about it.”
But Cowl had stopped listening and threw a horrified look at Hunter Dane. “What did you mean before, ‘We'd have to advise him’? He hasn’t been advised of his rights?”
DiMato and Chang exchanged an uh-oh look.
Hunter gave Cowl a blank stare.
“Are you insane? ARE. YOU. INSANE? Whether the boy lives or not, you just fucked this up so bad, that suspect’s going to walk away. Laughing.”
“Brad, just listen,” Natani said.
DiMato talked over her. “We couldn't take the chance—”
“The parents will own the goddamned city!” Cowl’s voice climbed an octave. “The mayor will be forced to—”
Chang leapt up, face like thunder, headphones still in place. “WILL YOU PEOPLE TAKE IT OUTSIDE, I CAN'T HEAR!” He pointed a raised arm firmly at the door.
Cowl opened his mouth; Natani got between them. DiMato led them out.
Garza hadn't so much as twitched, immersed in the scene playing out downstairs. Hunter grabbed him by the arm. “Follow me.”
Down the main hall, a right turn to a side hall. Halfway down that hall, Hunter stopped in front of double doors marked Denver Police Video Training Production. A red light glowed over the door.
“You think you know how to keep pushing Ferriter without breaking him?” Hunter asked.
Victor Garza grinned. “Do I think?”
“Actions and results impress me, Special Agent, and that’s all that does.”
Garza tilted his head as if looking at a particularly exotic bird at the zoo.
“I approve everything,” Hunter went on. “You have a plan? You tell me now. I’ll decide if you proceed.”
Garza's smile got warmer, mother to beloved child. “First, I'll give him what he wants. Snow and Brian. And then, snow falling on Brian.”
Garza stroked his own cheek. “And then I'll take the blizzard away. And then I'll take Brian away. And then Ferriter will spill all, bound in his private confessional with the only victim left to him.”
Garza opened the door to Video Production, giving a glimpse inside: Wendy in front of a green screen. Garza blew Hunt an air kiss and slipped into the studio, closing the door silently.
Hunter shook his head. The guy was brilliant. And also nutty as squirrel shit in a walnut tree.
THE NARROW GLASS window wall at the end of the main hallway framed the storm front like a sky-born tsunami towering over the city skyline. A thin whine of wind against the window. Leaves and paper blew past three stories up.
“I wish I still smoked,” Natani said.
“Can't smoke in here, anyway,” DiMato told her.
“I could look forward to it, though.”
Bradley Cowl stood aside, back to the storm, in no mood to be fucked with. “You two do remember the chief of police is not the top law enforcement official in Denver, the mayor is. What kind of goddamned conspiracy are you implicating him in?” No response. “Are you going to explain or should I have the U.S. JusticeDepartment call you directly?”
Natani took a weary breath. “No one’s conspiring, Brad. Remember: Real world, real rules. The police are not required to give Miranda unless three conditions are met—”
“—number one being you've arrested somebody,” he snapped.
“No,” she said. “Number one being the person believes they are not free to leave.”
DiMato explained. “Stop a guy for running a stop sign, he's not free to leave. But he's not under arrest. And he knows it.”
“The guy’s handcuffed to a desk in a locked room in police headquarters. Pretty sure he thinks he's not free to leave,” Cowl said.
“Number two,” Natani said. “He has to be a suspect in a crime in the mind of the police. And third”—she spoke over his attempt to interrupt her—“the police have to question him about the crime.”
“No police officer has, at any time, asked Ferriter a single question about the crime. And no police officer is
going to,” DiMato said.
“You're betting a child's life on some pseudo-scientific wishful thinking by whatever the hell that Garza kid is. What am I supposed to tell the mayor?”
Natani leaned her hot forehead on the cold glass. “You tell him hundreds of law enforcement officers and civilian volunteers are scouring the foothills for this boy. We're in constant contact with those teams. The investigation is ongoing.”
“You mean you don't have any idea where Brian Trowbridge is and he's going to die.”
“She means tell the mayor something he can give the press.” DiMato moved between Natani and Cowl.
“God damn it.” Cowl stomped away, muttering to himself.
“He really needs to chill out before he strokes out,” DiMato observed.
Natani straightened and crossed her arms over her stomach. “It’s easier when they’re already dead.”
HUNTER CAST A DISAPPROVING look at the cop in a chair in the corner of the vehicle processing cage. Officer Xavier slept with his arms crossed over his chest.
“I sent him home.”
“I know,” Twee said. “But this is my turf, and I decided he could stay. … I pulled one of his prints off the fender.”
Hunter let it go. “So. Hair? Fibers? Prints? You find anything yet?”
Twee gestured toward the open doors of the Mercedes. “The back seat’s clean, but the front has all sorts of trace, including fluids.”
“We could be chasing our tails for weeks analyzing all that.” Hunter checked out the interior. “How clean is the back?”
She pointed a small, power flashlight along the seat. “Vacuum marks. There’s not even dust. He did this today.”
“What about the trunk?”
Twee grabbed an ultraviolet wand, and they went around to the back of the car. The trunk lid stood open.
“We assumed, because of the scarf being on the trunk, he put the boy inside.” She called to a tech, “Alonzo, get the lights.”
The overhead lights went out leaving them in semi-darkness with only faint ambient light from the rest of the underground garage. Twee switched on the wand. The entire interior of the trunk glowed yellow-green.
“What the hell?”
“He sprayed it with something that fluoresces under ultraviolet,” Twee explained. “Tonic water. Maybe detergent water. If there are body fluids, they're camouflaged.”
“You have a time frame for this?”
“It was still damp.”
Hunter nodded a little. “We have zero indicators Brian was ever in the front seat. Realtors and control freaks keep their cars meticulously clean, because clients ride with them. Rich guys have their cars detailed. Ferriter’s all three. No way he did this and not the front seat unless he wants to convince us there’s nothing to find anywhere else.”
She sighed. “Boss, you gotta stop thinking these guys are as smart as you are. Maybe he just didn’t want to take the time, so he only cleaned where Brian had been. He needed to get back to town before the blizzard. Before anyone noticed his absence.”
“The GPS is disabled?”
She nodded. “As well as the emergency release inside the trunk.”
“Can he claim it’s a malfunction?”
“No. Looks like he smashed it with a hammer. He’d have to claim some kind of mishap.”
“Okay. We know where Brian was, backseat and trunk. And where he wasn’t. Front seat. You must have a way to search for the spit, the sweat?”
Twee produced an evidence swab encased in a protective plastic sleeve. “It'd take hundreds of these. And weeks, months even, to get the results.”
“Brian was in the backseat and this trunk and I have a twenty-four-hour warrant for this vehicle. If something doesn’t break, we'll have another dead kid and Ferriter'll sleep at home tonight.”
“You want me to ignore the front seat?” She shook her head. “That leaves us wide open to a defense challenge when we get to court.”
“Put someone on it. Vacuum the hell out of it. Swab it all, whatever you need to do. Just don’t send it up as priority until you find whatever you can back here. I’m just asking that this happens first.”
Twee looked from the glorified Q-tip in her hand to the open trunk.
“Someplace, somehow, in that car, Brian will have left you his DNA. … don't stop looking until you find what he left you.”
“Lights, somebody!” she called. “And I need a drop cloth back here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go where Brian was,” she said. “I’ll let you know when I find something.”
“You’re dismissing me?”
“I am.”
“Okay, but I’m taking sleeping beauty with me.”
Hunter went over to the sleeping Xavier and kicked one of his feet to wake him. “C’mon, rookie. I have a job for you.”
IN VIDEO PRODUCTION, Garza, Wendy and her producer scanned clips of children in the snow. The school picture of Brian was taped to the edge of the monitor.
“We think one of these two might be what you're looking for,” Wendy said.
Split-screen image. On the left, a boy Brian's age struggles to walk through snow up to his hips. On the right, a boy in a schoolyard with sandy bangs looks solemnly into the camera that moves in on his face as fat snowflakes settle on his hair and eyelashes.
Garza touched the right side. “That's the one. He's perfect.”
As Garza studied the clip, Wendy studied Garza’s profile. “We'll set it up for you.”
“WHY ISN’T WHAT we have enough to charge him?” Xavier asked Hunt in the elevator.
“What do you think we have?”
Xavier gave Hunter an are you kidding look.
“Tell, me. How do you see the evidence lining up?”
The doors opened and they stepped off, but Hunt moved to the side and waited for an answer.
“The boy’s scarf was stuck on his car. He probably had to special-order a backseat with trunk access when he bought the car.”
“The scarf was on the outside, things on the outside of a vehicle aren’t much good at trial because cars move and so do people. The defense will say whoever really took Brian put the scarf on a random car.”
“Twee told me he disabled the GPS.”
“Which many people do who aren’t kidnaping and killing children. We have the scarf which is just enough for a seventy-two-hour investigative hold.”
“It sucks.”
Hunt walked him toward video surveillance. “It’s the law and it protects us as well as frustrates us. Leave it to bloggers and trash TV to convict on the basis of no evidence.”
“You’re a liberal.”
Hunter paused outside the door. “Officer, what would we need to charge Harold Ferriter, tonight, with a crime in the disappearance of Brian Trowbridge?”
Xavier didn’t respond, not sure if Hunter was setting him up.
“You don’t know?”
Xavier shrugged. “Put the victim with the suspect. Like, it would have to be today, I guess.”
“And how can we do that?”
“Evidence in the car. A witness who saw the suspect grab the victim.”
“What else?”
Being picked on in class by the teacher was not one of Xavier's fondest memories. “I don’t know. It’s not like the guy’s gonna confess or tell us where to find the kid so we can save him.”
“You assume.” Hunter opened the door.
THE SURVEILLANCE ROOM was silent. Chang worked under headphones, DiMato on a laptop while texting on his cell.
Hunter brought Xavier into the room. Chang lifted one side of his headset.
“DiMato, give Xavier your seat and grab the laptop. … Thank you. Officer Xavier, your job is to standby here. Sergeant DiMato has a new assignment, and I’ll be needing Detective Chang on and off. When he steps out, you watch the monitor. If there’s a malfunction, you call me immediately. Don’t text. Call.”
Chang raised a finger
to acknowledge Xavier and went back to the screen, making notes as he watched.
“Am I supposed to make notes?”
“No,” Chang answered for Hunter. “I’ll go back over the video and cover whatever I missed later. Just make sure we don’t lose the picture on either camera.”
“Officer, this is one of those jobs that’s very boring and very critical. You awake and up for it?”
“You bet.” He took the vacated chair.
“Good. When Detective Chang is here, you can occupy yourself looking up the Colorado Criminal Code and learning what the elements of this particular crime are and reading the relevant decisions from previous court cases.”
Chang’s mouth quirked a little. “There are extra notebooks in the cabinet behind you.”
Xavier didn’t say a word.
DiMato followed Hunter out. “He piss you off?”
“Not yet.” Hunter led DiMato down the hall to a room that resembled the backroom of a computer repair shop.
DiMato connected with Cam and put his cell on speaker.
“Snow?” Hunter asked.
“I’m here, Boss.”
“Great job. Please pass that on to Deputy Vargas. You and Sergeant DiMato can get that feed to us here?”
“I think so. Give us a few minutes.”
“It’s auto-uploading to cloud storage now,” DiMato explained. “Snow will piggy-back his laptop’s hard drive onto Ferriter’s.”
“We don’t know it’s Ferriter’s,” Hunter said.
“The lieutenant hates assumptions,” Cam told DiMato. “I’ll send you the laptop's numbers, and you can get the FBI to trace the machine.”
“I don’t get it,” DiMato said. “It’s like he didn’t bother to cover his tracks.”
“I’m thinking it’s stolen,” Cam said
Hunter agreed. “He was careful and clever about a lot of things. Like knowing the firetower was closed for the season. He’s assuming this blizzard will make access to it impossible, maybe until spring. He was so careful and clever, he believes he cannot be found. Or if he is, that we can’t prove anything.”
“Caring less about the sociopath and more about the kid, right now,” Cam said. “I’m going back to work.”
