American Predator

by Maureen Callahan

  Like many of his fellow investigators, Bell thought these profilers were a notch above psychics. Their predictions of violent offenders were almost always the same: Your suspect will be a young man, probably white, with a low-level job, difficulties maintaining relationships, and lots of anger issues, especially toward women.

  Hardly the most surprising conclusion to reach.

  * * *

  —

  One question loomed above all: In those Polaroids, was Samantha alive or dead?

  Doll wasn’t sure. Payne, Goeden, and Nelson all thought she was alive. Bell thought she was dead.

  But, Payne argued, Samantha had no cuts or bruises. She was wearing makeup. Her armpits were shaved. Her hair had been braided. Her skin looked healthy. Holding her head up like that might be for shock value.

  BAU brought in an expert in snuff films. That expert had no idea.

  The ransom note was riddled with misspellings. Was that intentional? Had to be. Whoever was behind this was obviously smart. Then again, why leave the note beside a main roadway and a popular hiking trail and risk getting caught? Why ask for only thirty thousand dollars? Everyone knew the reward fund was up to seventy thousand. James had made sure of that.

  Something else struck Payne as odd: The note made no reference to anything specific about Samantha, not even rumors on the street. There was no mention of drugs or drug debt. No reference to any of her friends, former or current. Nothing to indicate this person knew the first thing about Samantha. But, Payne reminded himself, stranger abductions are so rare. Maybe this was an attempt at misdirecting the investigation?

  One detail they agreed not to make public: was the author’s promise to return Samantha in six months. No member of the team had ever heard something like that before. None of them believed it.

  * * *

  —

  Now they had to respond to the note. Everyone agreed James had to put money in that bank account. But what should they say? This was another instance when Payne sought BAU’s help. What response was most likely to lure the abductor out?

  Someone on the FBI’s task force suggested canceling Duane and Samantha’s ATM card, depositing the cash, then having James text Samantha’s cell to ask for a face-to-face meet, the money in exchange for Samantha.

  Payne froze. This was the worst idea he’d ever heard. He listened in astonishment as investigators began discussing how it might work.

  No way should this happen. The ATM card and Samantha’s cell phone were the only links they had to her. Someone who commits this kind of crime, Payne thought, is going to put a lot of distance between himself and the scene. Whoever did this was no amateur.

  Payne struggled to stay composed. He had to get his way. He believed that Samantha was still in the state, if not Anchorage itself. With each passing minute, the chances of finding her were only getting worse. Having to fight this nonsense was only putting Samantha in more danger.

  Still, Payne knew he had to play it right. For logic to prevail he had to be calm, convincing, authoritative. “If we sever this tie from Samantha,” Payne said, “it’s going to be a huge mistake. I don’t know that we can recover from it.”

  Instead, he suggested, keep the ATM card active. The author was clearly thinking things through. Samantha’s sixteen-digit bank account number was included in the note—showing his bona fides. There was a good chance that once money went into the account, money would come out.

  Track the ATM card, Payne said, and we track whoever has Samantha.

  Others on the team, Doll among them, were pretty sure they already knew who had the card, because it had already been used—on the very night Samantha disappeared, and more than once.

  Did the FBI want to consider James’s odd behavior, not letting police into his house twenty-four hours after Samantha went missing? James was rumored to be a drug dealer. Doll had heard James was recently moving more than sixty thousand dollars in pot and may have stolen half that. Why continue this charade? Why not see what James would do if they suggested arranging a meeting?

  Even Bell found Doll’s theory far-fetched. Doll, he thought, might be a casualty of undercover work, her years at the DEA resulting in a default focus on drugs. Payne’s impulse to keep the card active and deposit the money was the right one.

  Payne won.

  * * *

  —

  Their elation was short-lived. As it turned out, James Koenig wasn’t so keen on depositing the money.

  Four days elapsed as investigators tried to convince James, who said he wasn’t sure if the note was real. The photos, he argued, might be fakes. In fact, James said, this whole thing might be one big hoax to con him out of reward money.

  Doll couldn’t believe it. She’d been sidelined by Payne and now her suspicions were bearing fruit. Why wouldn’t anyone listen to her? Was it because she was the only lead woman on this case?

  It was a hard theory to refute. Why would James take his time now? He was still begging for money on Facebook. Why? How did he have the wherewithal, less than forty-eight hours after Samantha’s disappearance, to go on Facebook and actually post this:

  IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO DONATE TO THE REWARD FUND FOR THE RESCUE OF SAMANTHA TESSLA KOENIG YOU CAN DO SO BY GOING TO ANY DENALI FEDERAL CREDIT UNION AND USE ACCOUNT #135006, OR I HAVE ALSO SET UP A PAYPAL ACCOUNT GO TO PAYPAL.COM AND ENTER MY EMAIL ADDRESS, ALL LOWER CASE . . . ALL PROCEEDS GO TO THE RESCUE EFFORTS AND REWARD TO ANYONE THAT CAN RETURN HER HOME TO ME SAFELY AND UNHARMED.

  Doll knew that James was spending some of that reward money on himself. The whole city was talking about it. The Anchorage Daily News even asked James about the rumors, which he didn’t deny. “I am having to resort to some of the funds to keep my home running,” he said.

  This was yet another story Doll found suspect. Shortly after James’s odd behavior when investigators stopped by his house, Doll obtained a search warrant on the residence. She wasn’t surprised to find a grow operation in there, and, as any decent investigator knows, growing marijuana indoors, at that level, has to be for illegal purposes.

  Then there was the call to APD from a Koenig family friend. She said she’d spent a lot of time with James in the days after Samantha’s disappearance, and he was obsessed with money. The reward money in particular. Sometimes he’d go online multiple times a day just to track his donation jar.

  “Please check on this,” she said. “Because something just isn’t right.”

  FOUR

  On February 29, five days after discovering the ransom note, James Koenig called APD. It was 4:55 P.M.

  James informed police that he was depositing five thousand dollars of the reward money into Samantha’s account. The FBI, he said, told him not to put the whole thirty thousand dollars in. The point was to frustrate whoever was making the demand and push them to make contact.

  Over at APD, Detective Joseph Barth was tasked with tracking the bank account Duane shared with Samantha.

  The ATM card had first been used right after she went missing, at 3:00 A.M., at a local ATM. There had been no withdrawal. Samantha and Duane had less than five dollars in their account.

  Now Detective Barth watched, from his desk, as James deposited the five thousand dollars into Samantha and Duane’s account and four hours later watched, amazed, as someone tried to withdraw cash from an ATM in Anchorage.

  Bell had to admit he was leaning back toward Doll’s theory. Only James and Duane knew about this plan. How coincidental could it be that Samantha’s card was used immediately? Not only that: The attempted withdrawal was for six hundred dollars. Most ATMs limit daily withdrawals to five. Whoever did this didn’t have experience with electronically accessing this kind of money. Someone who ran an all-cash business, however . . .

  Goeden, Nelson, and even Payne had to concede that Doll was probably right, because less than two hours after that first attempt came a
nother, this one successful: five hundred dollars from an ATM at the Denali Federal Credit Union, a six-minute drive away from the site of the first failed attempt.

  Back-to-back withdrawals at four minutes to midnight.

  Half an hour later and another withdrawal, this one at an ATM across town at Debarr Road, which abutted thousands of square miles of wilderness. Whoever was using this card knew Anchorage extremely well and was a fast learner. He was now withdrawing money on either side of midnight, grabbing a thousand dollars in less than one hour.

  The bank activity itself wasn’t surprising. The ransom note demanded money, and now there was money. The ATM at Denali, it turned out, had working surveillance, though it would take at least until the next day to see it. But there was no rush by the FBI or APD to obtain video from surrounding businesses.

  James was now suspect number one. Doll had been vindicated.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, March 1, Payne and his team found an interesting story in the Anchorage Daily News, which had been covering Samantha’s disappearance nonstop. Lieutenant Parker had made yet another ill-advised statement, telling the paper that the investigation was “making progress day by day” and Samantha was, in fact, alive.

  This was a major unforced error.

  Parker had no proof that Samantha was alive. No one did. It was yet another violation of investigative procedure, and Payne was upset. Everyone over at APD was in way over their heads. How could a veteran cop make such a mistake? If Samantha was, God forbid, no longer alive, her abductor would know how little information these investigators had. If Parker was wrong and Samantha’s remains were found, it would make the entire department and the FBI look like idiots.

  And what about James and Duane, and the rest of Samantha’s family and friends? That kind of promise gives only false hope.

  Payne, Bell, Goeden, and Nelson were all working twenty-hour days, frayed to the point of exhaustion. No one shut off, ever. They’d all go home and log on to their computers, looking for leads, and despite their access to top-secret databases, they all relied most heavily on Google.

  It wasn’t lost on them that they were investigating like any civilian playing online detective. Samantha had now been missing for twenty-nine days.

  * * *

  —

  Worse than predicted, it took another two days to get surveillance stills from the Denali ATM withdrawal to FBI headquarters at Quantico. There, they landed on the desk of a young image analyst named Chris Iber. Steve Payne’s request came without the proper paperwork, but all Payne had to say was “young girl kidnapped” and everything else was pushed aside. Iber knew that the Bureau sometimes looked the other way. He’d worked the Boston Marathon bombing and no one waited for paperwork on that either.

  Iber was one of only six agents at the Bureau who did forensic image analysis, and he was also cross-trained in video. He was the best Payne could have hoped for.

  Iber never shared this knowledge with agents like Payne, but he’d learned a hard truth: If images wound up with him, they were pretty bad to begin with, and he couldn’t make something out of nothing, no matter what websleuths or the millions of people who watched CSI might think.

  Payne wanted Iber to determine what kind of clothing the man in the ATM surveillance video was wearing, a time-consuming task. First, Iber had to confirm the authenticity of the images, that they hadn’t been manipulated in any way. He had to try to enhance the image without distorting it. He had to do photogrammetry, measuring the man’s height against the measurements of other objects in the frame. Finally, to make out logos and lettering on the man’s jacket, Iber had to do comparison analysis with thousands of fonts.

  Iber worked well into the night; he could tell, by talking to Payne, how anxious he was. And Payne was going slightly crazy, whipsawing between theories.

  So many signs pointed toward James, but part of him still couldn’t believe it. Bell saw each passing day as proof Samantha was dead, while Payne needed to believe she wasn’t. He couldn’t trust himself to see clearly, but he didn’t know whom to talk to: not his girlfriend, already upset over his total immersion in this case, not his team members, not even Bell. He couldn’t risk eroding confidence in him as their leader.

  Instead, Payne called his best friend and former partner at the Bureau. They’d worked together for twelve years, and Payne thought of him as one of the finest investigators he knew.

  “Am I out in left field here?” Payne asked him. “Am I off?”

  Payne knew his own limitations. He thrived on order and logic. He had gotten his degree in math and that didn’t help him on cases like this, where 1 percent of what the FBI does is black and white and the rest is shades of gray.

  “Here’s what we know,” Payne said. “We have a ransom note. We have a photo. Her skin pigmentation, the way she’s posed, she looks like she could be alive. There’s no proof she is, but am I letting my hopes cloud the case? I’m trying to be true to the evidence, but we don’t have a lot of evidence. Am I doing this right? Am I asking the right questions? Following the right leads?”

  “No,” Payne’s old partner said. “You’re not trying to make assumptions. You’re doing this right.”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Chris Iber had good news for Payne. He was able to determine, despite the bulky clothes, that the man had an athletic frame. His dark jacket was possibly hooded. It looked like there was some light-colored paint spatter on the left chest, and the lettering on the back seemed to read “CORPS.” Payne emailed the images to Bell, who saved them all on his iPhone. Bell said he thought the suspect was now or had been a Marine.

  Iber had more. The man was wearing clear or light-colored eyeglasses, a gray face mask, gray gloves, dark pants, and light or white shoes.

  Iber apologized. He wished he could see more.

  Payne was moved, not just by Iber’s findings but his willingness to work late into the night on a case so far away, for a faceless FBI agent asking for help with one of the 2,300 people who go missing in the United States every day. It was a reminder, in a case that got darker by the hour, that there were still good people out there.

  * * *

  —

  Fear and anger in Anchorage, however, was surging. Bell could feel it, and he knew the community wasn’t wrong. They sensed that APD wasn’t handling this investigation properly.

  If they only knew.

  It had taken until February 20, three weeks after Samantha’s disappearance, for it to occur to APD to request surveillance video from the Home Depot across from Samantha’s kiosk.

  Another two days passed before they were able to obtain that footage—the same day the ransom note was posted. And it gave investigators a beginning to this story.

  At 7:45 P.M. on February 1, a white truck pulled into the Home Depot parking lot. The resolution was fuzzy, but Bell could tell by the number of letters on the truck’s back that it was a Chevrolet. No other American automaker has a name as long.

  There were no license plates.

  The driver sat for ten minutes, then got out of the truck and walked across Tudor Road, disappearing from view. After nearly twenty minutes, he reemerged across the street, at the same crosswalk, with Samantha. His arm was around her shoulder. Other people walked by. None seemed concerned.

  But when the traffic light changed and they started crossing the street, Samantha broke away and ran. Her wrists were tied together and it was now clear that she was in a panic, taken against her will. Did she scream? They couldn’t tell.

  Within seconds the man tackled Samantha, then stood her upright. He seemed to whisper something in her ear, then walked her over to the white pickup. He waited with her while a few strangers milled about the car next to his.

  Oh, no, Payne thought. You have your chance. Yell “Help!” Or “Fire!” Do
n’t let this man take you somewhere else. But Payne knew how this would go. Whatever the man said after that first escape attempt had paralyzed Samantha. She stood and waited until the strangers got in their car and drove off.

  The man opened his truck’s door, put Samantha in the passenger seat, calmly walked around to the driver’s side, got in, and pulled out of the lot.

  Payne was crushed. What else had they missed?

  Now, with so much time lost, they had to find a white Chevy pickup truck. No problem, Payne thought. Only the most popular truck in Alaska.

  FIVE

  The next ATM withdrawal was unexpected—in the Lower 48. Payne got the call at 10:30 P.M. on March 7. Samantha’s card had been used just ten minutes earlier, a four-hundred-dollar withdrawal in Willcox, Arizona, a tiny town right off the I-10 corridor. It was now more than a month since Samantha disappeared.

  Payne was electrified. Six days had passed since there’d been any ATM activity at all. Now, though Payne and his team were nearly four thousand miles away, they were virtually right behind their suspect.

  He got on the phone to the FBI field office in Phoenix. One of those agents knew this bank’s owner, and within the hour they were all on-site, pulling surveillance video and canvassing the scene for hair, fibers, fingerprints, tire tracks.

  It wasn’t lost on Payne that this bank, the Western, was too small to have a centralized database for pulling video and financials. It would take a day for the surveillance video to be overnighted to Payne in Anchorage, and then another day to send to the lab at Quantico. Samantha’s kidnapper probably knew this. He was smarter than they’d thought.

  Still, a local FBI agent took pictures of the footage from the Willcox ATM and emailed still shots to Payne. Not great, but enough to make out the figure. He looked, Payne thought, like the guy who’d been caught on camera in Anchorage. He was tall, about six feet, wearing bulky clothes to disguise his frame. He had on a hood, sunglasses, and what looked like a face mask. He wore jeans and white tennis shoes.