Deadly Intent

by Kylie Brant

  “I remember everything you told me. Snookums.”

  She gave a snort. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you?

  Listen, I’ve heard chatter about a tactical raid on the east side. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  He shot another look at Travis, who was trying hard to appear interested in the scene in the street. “Baby, you know our arrangement doesn’t work like that.” The suggestion she made then was neither polite nor anatomically possible. “I’ve always enjoyed your imagination. I look forward to hearing from you.”

  Sliding the cell phone in his coat pocket, he looked at Travis. “You need something?”

  “Jesus, Burke, we’re running an op here. I’d think you could keep your mind off your sex life for a few hours.”

  The tips of the agent’s ears were red. Kell wondered if it was from the cold or from embarrassment at what he thought he’d overheard.

  “We all have our priorities.”

  “Look, we can probably head back. This is going to take all day, and they have plenty of agents inside to take care of things.”

  He looked at the man carefully. It was to Travis’s credit that he couldn’t meet Kell’s eyes. “That ever get old, Dan? Being Whitman’s bitch?”

  His words had the agent’s gaze bouncing to his, temper evident. “Watch it, buddy. I can’t quite figure out what sort of outfit Raiker is running, but I haven’t been impressed so far. Our agency has a hierarchy, and I’m not going to apologize for taking orders. Or are you going to tell me that your boss gives you free rein?”

  Just the thought had amusement rising. “Free rein with Raiker? Hardly. But he lets us do our jobs, and that’s a helluva lot more than I can say for the assistant director.” But his ire was already fading. He’d spent enough years with the Baltimore PD to recall what it was like following the chain of command. He hadn’t once missed it since he’d left either. “C’mon.” He was already turning toward the door. “I want to hear what the kid has to say.” Teenage boys hung out on the Internet a lot, didn’t they? And they needed to check the cell phones in the house. Depending on the provider and package, e-mail could be sent from cells, too.

  The hand on his shoulder stopped him. He looked at it. Then at Travis.

  “Whitman . . . it wasn’t a suggestion, Kell.” The man looked discomfited but determined. “I’m to take you back. We’ve got plenty to concentrate on anyway, right? We still haven’t followed up on all of Hubbard’s phone contacts.”

  “You gonna shoot me, Dan?”

  “What?” The hand dropped from his shoulder.

  “Do you intend to shoot me?” He gestured toward the man’s weapon. “Because that’s the only way you’re getting me to leave here before I’m ready.” He didn’t wait for a response. He was already reaching for the door and letting himself back inside the house. He caught the look Whitman threw, first at him, then at the agent trailing him. He returned it, in spades. There was a showdown coming between him and the assistant director, that was certain. Kell welcomed it.

  But for now, he contented himself with a terse nod toward the beefy agent as he continued through the house in search of David Elliott.

  “I’ve contacted all the people you requested,” Stephen Mulder was saying. He hadn’t sat since they’d entered the room where’d he set up his new office. Whitman was ensconced in his other one. Hands shoved deep in the pockets of his trousers, he paced the length of the room and back again, as if compelled to move. “They ought to be here soon. Cramer, of course is on the property. I’ll call him in whenever you’re ready.”

  Althea Mulder sat in the chair next to Macy, her gaze fixed on her husband worriedly. “You must not have come up with a match on those other samples you tested. That’s it, isn’t it? And now you need more samples, hoping one of them will match the ransom note?”

  “I want to be as thorough as possible.”

  Stephen turned to make a return trip across the room. He was dressed more informally today than she’d ever seen him, in trousers and a cashmere sweater, with Gucci loafers. But he looked as though he hadn’t slept for the duration of this trauma. “You told Whitman the program has a five percent error rate. So we can safely delete any of the authors of the samples you’ve tested as being involved.”

  “The odds are against any of them having authored the note,” she corrected. “Involvement is something else.”

  He threw her a look filled with dark humor. “Well, damn. And here Althea and I were hoping this at least proved our innocence.”

  “Adam never suspected you,” she responded, speaking more freely than she would have in Whitman’s presence. “His opinion is the one that matters most to me.” But having the Mulders cleared on the tests she ran last night didn’t hurt. “There’s something else I wanted to broach with you. A man in your position gets a lot of threats.”

  Mulder looked impatient. “Of course. But I gave that information to Whitman the first day. Don’t tell me that hasn’t been tracked down yet?”

  As a matter of fact, if it had, those details had made it into neither their files nor the ones prepared for Travis. Macy vowed to follow up on that fact later. “Do you have a file of those threats? I’d like to run comparison samples on them.”

  Comprehension lit his expression, with a bit of hope. “Of course. The chief security officer at my company headquarters has copies of all written threats. I’ll have them messengered over today.” His expression lightened a bit. “There aren’t that many of them, despite what the press would have you believe. Crackpots, for the most part.”

  “Stephen and I have been talking.” Today Althea’s blond hair was arranged in an artful French twist. But her face was drawn with fatigue. “We think we should offer to do polygraph tests, but Mark is advising against it. He says they’re unreliable and that the results can be twisted. What do you think?”

  “I think you should run it by Adam,” Macy said firmly. That was an area she wasn’t about to get into.

  “I did.” Stephen began another turn around the room. “Just this morning, in fact. He wants me to hold off, at least until his return.”

  “You talked to Adam this morning?”

  Stephen gave her a grim smile. “He’s good about checking in daily. Hell of a lot better than Whitman about sharing information. He won’t be back in time for you to use his jet for your trip to Chicago tomorrow. I assured him I’d place my personal jet at your disposal.” He veered toward the desk in the corner and scribbled something on a notepad, before ripping the sheet off and walking over to hand it to her. “My pilot’s on standby but you should call him and let him know your timeline. One of my drivers will take you to the airport.”

  Macy tucked the paper into the file in front of her. “Thank you.”

  “It’s a relief, at any rate, to eliminate some from the list.” Althea lifted a hand as if to ward off objections. “I know you said that doesn’t mean they aren’t involved. But I hate to have our suspicion fall on those closest to us.” An unusual flicker of bitterness tinged her expression. “Again. Friendship with our family has become something of a burden.”

  It was telling that the woman didn’t mention having suspicion fall on her and her husband twice now when tragedy had struck. “So Alden, Spencer, and Amundson are among your closest friends?”

  “Mark, Lance, Stephen, and I went to Harvard together.” Something eased in Althea’s expression at the memory. “They’re closer than brothers, really. They stood up for him at our wedding seventeen years ago.”

  “That’s a long time to be friends,” she answered gently.

  “The three musketeers, I always called them when we were dating.” There was a slight smile on the woman’s face, even as she tracked her husband’s pacing with her gaze. “I used to complain about never getting enough time alone with Stephen. The other two were usually close by.”

  “And you all ended up in business together?”

  “Not right away.”
Stephen withdrew his hands from his pockets and flexed them, then seemed not to know what to do with them. “Mark and Lance came from well-to-do families, and they had jobs waiting for them when they graduated.”

  “Mark’s father is former Vice President Richard Alden,” Althea put in. “His father was in office when we were in college, so there was also the Secret Service to contend with when he was around. Used to drive him crazy.”

  Macy’s eyes widened a bit. “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Well, he’d never mention it.” Althea gave a delicate shrug. “People think that means he had it easy, but he has a fairly significant learning disability that made graduating from college and law school a real triumph. He was with a prestigious East Coast firm for years. And Lance’s family are heirs to a digital empire that I’ve never really understood. But it’s Stephen who started out with nothing and built a company from the bottom up.” The pride in her voice was obvious. “When he did, Lance and Mark came to work for him.”

  “With me, not for me,” Stephen corrected dryly. “I credit a lot of my success to the two of them.”

  “So Lance Spencer has his finger on all your finances?” Macy said slowly.

  Mulder gave her a tight smile. “We have dozens of people in finance, but yes, it’s Lance at the helm. He and Mark are working on liquidating some of my assets so I’ll be able to meet the ransom demand by the deadline.”

  His words brought the worry back to his wife’s eyes. Looking at Macy, she said hesitantly, “You haven’t said . . . you compared the samples of authorship but you were going to do something else. A threat assessment, you said.”

  Her stomach plummeted as the parents both fixed their gazes on her. “What did you discover?”

  Choosing her words carefully, Macy said, “There’s really no way to be sure that the exact threat in the note will be executed. The database really just gives statistical odds regarding intent to harm.”

  Looking from one of them to the other, she wished she could be anywhere but there. “But the threat assessment is positive. Your daughter is in real danger.”

  Chapter 9

  “So what have you come up with?”

  Abbie Robel answered Adam’s question first. “Rob Bigelow is a bona fide kiddie perv. And we did find the pictures Art Cooper sent him of Ellie Mulder in his rather extensive collection.”

  “But we haven’t found any evidence that Bigelow ever acted on his fantasies.” Ryne draped an arm around Abbie’s shoulders. “We’re getting good cooperation from local law enforcement. They were grateful for the tip and didn’t waste any time getting a warrant. Even let Abbie have a go at Bigelow in interrogation, and she was a sight to behold.” He gave his boss a grim smile. “I think Bigelow was ready to piss himself before she was done with him.”

  Abbie tapped a finger against the table in front of her impatiently. “He was scared. The guy’s a weasel. I think I got everything he had. He gave us a list of names of people he swapped photos with. Websites he visited. Kiddie porn live streams he’d subscribed to. He has three computers at his place, and all of them are full of images and movies. But his alibi checks out. He showed up for work every day for the last month, on time. He certainly wasn’t in Colorado a few days ago.”

  “He wouldn’t have the brains or the balls to put together the kidnapping of Ellie Mulder,” Ryne put in. “Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if something arises once news of his arrest gets out. Maybe a victim will come forward. But I’m not seeing how he impacts your case.”

  Ruthlessly, Adam tamped down a surge of impatience. “You said you had something I needed to see. So far you’ve given me nothing.”

  The look Abbie sent to her husband was telling. “We did discover that Bigelow shared those old photos of Ellie that Cooper had sent. Apparently these guys network widely. There are secret portals on the Internet. They hijack legitimate pages and you click on a letter or corner of a graphic, and bam. You’re in pervertville.”

  “Then they change that up on a regular basis to stay one step ahead of law enforcement,” Ryne added.

  “I’m familiar with their tactics.” Seven and a half years ago, his last case for the bureau had involved one of the most sadistic child predators operating in the country. “You said Bigelow shared Ellie’s photos. How widely?”

  “The tech has found traces of the images being sent hundreds of times.” Ryne shook his head in disgust. “It’s like a spiderweb, Adam. You can follow the threads all over the world and still come up with nothing but more threads. There’s no telling how many hard drives have her picture on them.”

  Adam battled back a wave of frustration. It had been a long shot, after all. And the process of following it had removed one more lowlife child porn lover from the street.

  But it hadn’t brought them any closer to the person responsible for kidnapping Ellie Mulder.

  “What’s the local LEO’s involvement?”

  “They’re on this in a big way. Multiagency task force. They’ll be chasing down all the leads on this thing with a vengeance, going after every e-mail sender and recipient, and every website visited. For as long as the money and interest holds out, I guess.”

  Adam nodded. “Stay with it awhile longer. Concentrate on getting identities to go with the e-mail names. Check out their backgrounds. Then cross-check them with the file I sent you of disgruntled ex-employees from Mulder enterprises. People he’s turned down for jobs. Those that have made threats. See if you can find an intersection.”

  The two exchanged looks. “Okay.”

  He stared first at Abbie, then at her husband. “There’s nothing quite as annoying as these shared spousal looks, full of secret meaning. Do you practice that? Is there some sort of marriage seminar that teaches it? You should know the rest of the world finds it damn annoying.”

  “We found something else.” Ryne took a thin file folder out of the portfolio on the table in front of him and slid it over to Adam. “Can’t see how it applies to this case. But thought you’d be interested.”

  His mind already on the next leg of his journey, he flipped open the folder and scanned the contents. There were three sheets inside, all dated a decade ago. Each was a copy of an e-mail exchange. Unsurprisingly, one of the names was Bigelow’s.

  But the other name had memory rising up like a red-hot poker, searing inside him. John LeCroix.

  He read the pages more carefully. Bigelow had been at this game for a long time if he’d corresponded with LeCroix. From the gist of the messages, it seemed that Bigelow had received some photos from the other man ten years ago. He’d thanked LeCroix, praised the detail and content of the pictures, and informed him he was a girl lover, asking if he had any other images to share.

  Adam’s empty eye socket throbbed in phantom pain. “LeCroix liked little boys. We know he showed off his work. But none of the photos would have had him in them. He was a careful bastard.”

  “What do you want us to do with this?”

  Adam considered for a moment. “Send it to Paulie. He keeps a file on LeCroix.” Then he grabbed his cane and used it haul himself to his feet. “Stay on the Bigelow lead until I let you know otherwise.”

  Without another word, he let himself out of the West Virginia motel room. At his appearance, the driver of his rented town car started up the car and did a slow U-turn in the lot and headed toward him. And all the while the name repeated itself in his mind like echoes of clanging metal.

  John LeCroix.

  The man he’d chased across Florida, Georgia, and into the Louisiana bayou country. The man responsible for the kidnap, rape, torture, and murder of twenty-seven boys under the age of ten. Adam had managed to rescue his latest victim, but LeCroix had captured him shortly after.

  And that memory was destined to haunt him for the rest of his life.

  John LeCroix had cost him his eye. Very nearly his leg. Unconsciously, he raised his hand to finger the scar across his throat. It’d been three long days before he’d esc
aped from the makeshift torture chamber in the dark swamp.

  The only positive memory about the whole mess was the one where he’d sent the son of a bitch to his grave.

  Martin Becker vigorously cleaned his wire-framed glasses with his handkerchief. “This is highly unsettling.” There was a hint of Long Island in his voice and a sheen of nerves to his expression. “I’ve already talked to some CBI agents. Just hours after Ellie was found missing. I gave a statement then. I haven’t recalled any other useful information to give you.”

  “What can you tell me about your observations of Ellie Mulder?” Macy suggested. She had a copy of the man’s statement. Of all the statements gathered in the course of the investigation. And although what she was after was a handwritten communication from the man, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to gather a few details about the girl they were seeking. Know the victim, know the crime. It was Raiker’s most oft-repeated mantra.

  The request seemed to startle the man. “Ellie? Well, she’s an average eleven-year-old girl, I suppose.”

  When Macy raised her brows, he seemed to flush. “Academically speaking, of course. She’s bright enough. I don’t believe she received any schooling for two years . . . um, when she was gone before. But under my tutelage, her deficits were remediated. She not only caught up but surpassed other students her age. Not that she always works up to her potential—she can be a bit disengaged at times—but she’s an intelligent, if unimaginative student.”

  The compliment was couched in rather unflattering terms. “Unimaginative. You mean creatively? In her artwork and writing?”

  “More in her problem-solving ability. Ellie tends to approach things in a rather pragmatic, concrete way. Functional, certainly, but until she has a better grasp of the abstract, she won’t be a truly great thinker.”

  Stemming a strong urge to remind the tutor that the child was only eleven, Macy asked, “What are her interests? What kind of music and books does she like?”