Every Crooked Path

  I wanted to talk more now, to sort things out, to solve this, but she must have gone for a walk because, though I waited for her, she didn’t show up.

  Being here in the apartment and knowing her situation and her dilemma, her place seemed even more cramped than before—very cramped compared to the wide-open possibilities of life out on the plains.

  No, there has to be another way!

  It’s amazing how quickly your perspective can change.

  Yes, yes, in the blink of an eye.

  Tessa was in her room.

  I didn’t disturb her.

  I needed to leave in just over an hour to help Jodie. I could cancel, of course, but maybe giving Christie some time to herself this morning was what she needed.

  I texted that I was here if she wanted to talk and that I could tell Jodie I couldn’t make it, but Christie replied that I should go help her, that she was okay. Then she reiterated how sorry she was.

  Once more I told her that she didn’t need to be.

  Call her and tell her that you love her. That’s what she needs to hear.

  No. That was probably the last thing she needed to hear. It would’ve only made things more confusing, made her dilemma more difficult to sort through.

  Right now we needed to think about this rationally, not let impulsive emotions cloud our reason.

  She wasn’t trying to manipulate me; I didn’t get that from her at all. She was just trying to figure things out, to chart out what was best for her daughter and how I might be a part of their future.

  In truth, what other option did she have than to bring things up the way she had? Yes, she wanted what was best for Tessa, but she cared for me as well.

  Staying here meant mortgaging Tessa’s future.

  But leaving meant losing me.

  Trapped.

  Unless you were to go with her.

  I found myself asking what I wanted more—the excitement of working here in New York City or the adventure of starting a new life with Christie in Nebraska, or wherever destiny might take us.

  Just for argument’s sake, let’s just say you did move and things didn’t work out with her, what then?

  Well, first, just getting the transfer wasn’t a done deal, and even if I could get a position there, it wasn’t like I would just be able to return again to New York City—things didn’t work that way in the FBI. It might take years—if a transfer back here would even be in the cards at all.

  And what about the seminars at the Academy? Would I lose the opportunity to teach those as well?

  Almost certainly I would. Logistics-wise, teaching at Quantico would be a nightmare if I were living out there.

  So, what did I want more—a lasting relationship with an amazing woman who’d taken up residence in my heart, or the career I’d dreamed of for years?

  There had to be another option.

  There just had to be.

  Marriage was a possibility of course, but I saw that as something on the far horizon, not around the next bend.

  If Christie and I weren’t going to be able to discuss this now, I needed to get my thoughts moving in a different direction before leaving to meet up with Jodie, so I turned my attention to the case.

  I logged in to the Federal Digital Database to check the updates on the investigation and saw that Ivan Romanoff was still missing.

  Officers were searching for anything on Muhammad El-Sayed and doing their best to identify the other man who’d been burned beyond recognition in the fire, but so far they weren’t having a lot of luck.

  The psychologist spoke with D’Nesh and the NYPD brought in a sketch artist who did his work on a computer sketch pad to add color to what he was working on. However, neither D’Nesh nor Lily was able to give us anything that matched photos of the persons of interest we’d collected, based on tips called in or leads from other cases that we were thinking might have been linked.

  Taking into account the cameras at Romanoff’s suite and in his house’s basement, the Bureau’s Cyber Division was searching for any “cheerleader” videos that might have been posted online featuring Lily Keating in the hours since her abduction.

  Nothing so far.

  The arson investigator had uploaded video footage of a walk-through of the burned-down home.

  I watched it and listened to his preliminary analysis of what had happened.

  He concluded that the walls of the house had been filled with some sort of flammable material instead of fire-resistant insulation. It was as if the place had been designed from the ground up to be consumed quickly if it were ever to catch fire.

  I sent in a request to Agent Descartes for a complete background on the construction company that’d built the house.

  On another front, the computer techs were still trying to mine the data from the USB drive.

  Apparently, they’d been able to pull off a few corrupted photos of child pornography—all of which were already in the ICSC database, and none of which were images of the three remaining missing children. However, there was still more than a gigabyte of data they were attempting to access and it was taking longer than they’d anticipated to get through the firewalls and encryption.

  Their latest update, entered yesterday at 7:03 p.m., noted that they would post the results of their final analysis “as soon as possible,” which, translated, could mean anytime now, or maybe never. I didn’t take it as a good sign that they weren’t predicting when it would be done.

  I put a call through to Harrington’s contact at Homeland’s Cyber Crimes Center, the one who was in charge of Wooford’s case. This time I used his cell number rather than his work number and I was able to reach him at the golf course.

  He restated some of the information that was in Wooford’s files and told me I could call him next week during office hours if I had any questions, that he would be glad to address them.

  But while I had him on the line I went ahead and asked my questions now: if the eight-minute gap in the security footage had ever been investigated, if anyone had visited Wooford in the detention facility prior to his death, what their hypothesis was on why they never found any evidence of the Final Territory on Wooford’s computer, what his lawyer’s name was—but the agent didn’t give me any new information.

  “We can talk next week, when I’m at my computer,” he told me. “You caught me at a bad time.”

  And then, before I could reply, he hung up.

  +++

  After the call, I went back to reading through the online case files.

  The lab had analyzed the video that Edlemore had found of the four masks, and they were able to discern that it’d been filmed three months ago, which didn’t really help us much because we already knew the date of D’Nesh’s abduction.

  I sent in a request for Officer Hinchcliffe to review the security camera footage from the coffee shop during the month when it’d been uploaded, and to run facial recognition to see if anyone in our databases might have been there.

  Then I shifted my focus to Randy McReynolds and the events preceding his death.

  Based on what he’d said to me on that balcony at the Brilington Towers, I wasn’t convinced that his suicide note had anything to do with date rape allegations from high school, as his brother, Billy, had speculated.

  Agent Descartes was searching through the names of women from Randy’s high school to see if any had reported sexual abuse, but so far that had come up empty.

  However, in my view, Randy’s state of mind and the things he said didn’t jibe with a guy who was simply distraught over false sexual assault allegations from a decade earlier.

  Based on what he’d said about us not being able to protect Ted, and our discovery of Ted’s connection with the Final Territory, it was more logical to begin with the premise that Randy’s death had to do with that group and maybe that fi
le that he’d mentioned to me, “Aurora’s birthday.”

  But then why the suicide note?

  I pulled it up again and studied it:

  Dear Billy,

  I’m sorry it came to this, but it’s the only thing I know to do. Whatever you want to believe about me, whatever anyone says, you need to know that I never did the things she’s claiming I did. I’m sorry I let you down.

  —Randy

  Apart from the contrast between his blunt denial and his repeated apologies in the note itself, nothing jumped out at me. It seemed a little odd that he’d written “Open only in the case of my death” on the envelope. Why include the word “only,” if he was planning to kill himself? But I didn’t know where that took us.

  Related to all this, we still didn’t know for sure that McReynolds killed Stewart. Yes, his prints were on that remote; yes, the knife wounds were consistent with the blade he’d been carrying when he attacked me, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was the murderer.

  Assumptions are the easiest things in the world to make and the hardest ones to walk back from, so you need to avoid making them even as you move through a case.

  You test those theories and discard them when possible as you uncover new evidence.

  But sometimes you end up having to go back and pick your discarded hypotheses clean of the facts, and perhaps reconsider them again as you dig up new information.

  And so it goes. You cycle your attention into and out of the pool of evidence, sorting, sifting, evaluating, eliminating theories, then reconsidering them, always trying to brush away speculation so the truth can take center stage.

  I wanted to know more about which online communities Stewart might have been involved with, so I sent in a request for an agent to look through his credit card purchases to find out what games he’d purchased for his Xbox.

  Finally, I worked on the geoprofile. We had a lot of data now to sort through in relationship to the missing children and the crime spree, as well as regarding the location of Romanoff’s home in Princeton, New Jersey.

  It would take me a couple of hours at least to analyze it all, so I only had time to get the preliminaries done before leaving to help Jodie move.

  I could dive into it more in-depth this afternoon with Tobin after he returned to the city and after I’d spent a little time with Tessa as I’d promised Christie I would do.

  39

  The house where they did so much of the filming was lost.

  Lily and the boy were both out of the picture and, with their police protection, they would be difficult—although not impossible—to get to.

  And two Associates were dead—Shane had taken care of one of them himself, to stop him from being taken in for questioning. After all, there’d been only one bike there and officers were en route.

  But at least they still had the other place, the one in the city.

  And at least they still had the other three children.

  He tapped the phone number into his encrypted cell phone and the voice answered, the electronically altered voice, the voice of the person calling all the shots, the voice of the Piper. “Hello, Shane.”

  “Hello.”

  “I’ve been watching the news.”

  “I’m the one who shot Garrett.”

  “They haven’t reported that yet.”

  “No, I would suppose not. They’re going to play this close to the chest. Do you want me to go after the boy and the prostitute? They’ve seen me.”

  “A lot of people have seen you, Shane.”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “I’d like you to make sure everything is in place for Wednesday night. At this point that’s what matters most. The boy and the courtesan are of little consequence. Going after them now would unnecessarily complicate things. Let them be. Get the algorithm into the system.”

  “I will.”

  “Has it been tested yet?”

  “The team is working on finishing it up. It’ll be ready in time.”

  “I’m not pleased that you’re cutting it this close.”

  “It’s the best way to avoid early detection.”

  “And the woman you chose, the one who is . . .”

  Shane sensed that the Piper was searching for the right word. “Undercover” wasn’t quite it. “Incognito” didn’t nail it either, but it was closer.

  “She’ll come through for us,” he told the Piper. “Don’t worry.”

  “I don’t need to remind you that some of my clients are more interested in adults than children. You know what that would mean for you if things don’t go as planned.”

  Shane had seen what the Piper did to people, and despite all he’d done to others himself over the years, he felt a shiver.

  “I won’t let you down.”

  He waited for a reply, but the Piper had already ended the call.

  Shane kept the ringer on just in case, and went online to email the team in Russia to see if they were almost done with the algorithm.

  40

  Jodie had rented a small moving van to transport her things to a storage unit.

  Thankfully, Dell had left for a few hours, so there wasn’t the added stress of having her around while we carried the boxes to the van.

  Agent Descartes and another friend from work had shown up to help, and Jodie had relatively few possessions so it was going pretty quickly.

  When it was just the two of us in the room, she said, “I’ve been wondering a few things about the case.”

  “What are those?”

  “First of all, with his Special Forces background and training, would Randy really have left tool marks in the lock to Stewart’s apartment?”

  “It’s hard to say, but yes, that’s a good point.”

  “And maybe that’s how he was able to disappear too. I mean for the last six months—because of his training.”

  Now that she pointed it out, I had to admit that, regarding his history, we might never learn where he’d been living or what he’d been doing since January.

  A thought struck me. “And he was also trained on how to kill someone.”

  “Yeah, which you almost found out the hard way.”

  “No, I mean, why was there so much blood in the apartment and so much of a struggle? Stewart made it to the bedroom before his attacker was able to fatally wound him. They fought loud enough for a neighbor to hear them and contact the police.”

  “You’re saying McReynolds would have been a lot quicker, a lot more efficient about it if he were the killer?”

  “There’s nothing to indicate that Stewart had studied martial arts, close combat, or self-defense, and yet he was able to hold his own in a hand-to-hand fight with someone as skilled and experienced as McReynolds, who was also armed with a knife? It doesn’t fit.”

  “So someone else killed Stewart.”

  “I think that’s something we need to seriously consider. Maybe someone else left the tool marks.” It was a thought I’d toyed with briefly earlier in the day. Up until this morning we’d been working from the hypothesis that McReynolds was the killer, or was at least present at the time of McReynolds’s death. Now a whole new set of variables came into play.

  Assumptions.

  So easy to make.

  So vital to set aside.

  “What else have you been wondering?” I asked her.

  She loaded up her trophies from her college swimming meets and closed up the box. “If he was so motivated to find this file, why would he kill himself first?”

  “That is a good question.”

  “And why would Stewart be killed if he was a part of this group? Was he looking into things?”

  “That’s a motive we may never know.”

  The other movers returned for more boxes and we finished getting Jodie’s things loaded up. A few
of her friends had already signed on to help her unpack at the storage unit, which was good because it freed me up to spend time with Tessa.

  Once again, Jodie thanked me for letting her stay at my place, then we agreed to touch base later and I returned to Christie’s apartment to meet up with her daughter.

  +++

  Tessa was in the kitchen waiting for me, munching on a carrot, when I came through the door.

  “So, do you have anything in mind for this afternoon?” I asked.

  “No. You?”

  “I brainstormed a few things.”

  “You brainstormed them?”

  “Yes.”

  I pulled out my notepad.

  “And you felt the need to write ’em down?”

  “I wanted to be thorough.”

  “Oh boy.” She eyed me cautiously. “Alright, read it to me.”

  “Well, first, I was thinking we could visit Ellis Island.”

  “Oh, I see, sarcasm.”

  “No, I was being serious.”

  “Do I look like a Japanese tourist to you?”

  “What about Central Park?”

  “Sunlight and I don’t get along.”

  “Times Square?”

  “Been there a million times. Next.”

  “How about a matinee? Something off-Broadway?”

  “Too expensive.”

  “A movie?”

  “Weak.”

  “Um, how about an art museum?”

  She peered at my list, reading it upside down. “That’s not even on there.”

  “I’m improvising. So, what do you think about a little culture?”

  “I’m not into art. It’s too predictable.”

  “How is art predictable?”

  “Just look for three things: penises, breasts, and eyeballs. There you go. It’s all you need to know to interpret art.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to walk me through that.”

  “Penises stand for male dominance or suppression; breasts for fertility and femininity; and open eyes for seeing things in a new way—new opportunities, doorways, insights. Closed eyes equals blindness, naïveté, repression. It’s tiresome. The art world needs an injection of creativity.”