by Barry Eisler
She knew he was trying to draw her in. Unfortunately, he didn’t need to.
“No, from what you’ve told me, I see it the same. But . . .”
He looked at her. “Don’t you worry about my feelings. Ever. It’s your insights I need.”
She nodded, wondering what he wanted in addition to the insights. “It would be a lot faster, and a lot easier, to kill the victim at the point of contact. That would be unusual, but it’s not impossible, and if that’s how it happened, you could be talking about a singleton.”
Little shook his head and clenched his jaw. His nostrils were flared, heat in his eyes. He looked like someone barely keeping it together. Someone dangerous.
“No blood,” he said. “No shell casings. No sound of gunshots ever reported. Killing someone that fast and leaving nothing behind would itself require too much luck over time. They’re not killing their victims right away. They kill them later.”
Livia nodded. “Agreed as far as it goes. But you’re basing all this just on what you learned from ViCAP?”
“Of course not. When something looked similar to what happened to Presley, I made phone calls to local law enforcement. Most of the time, what I’d learn from the call suggested a false positive. But when the details sounded sufficiently promising, I’d travel to the crime scene. Talk to the family and other potential leads. Walk the terrain. They all happened at about the same time of day—just as it was getting dark. Always on a quiet neighborhood street with few houses and a convenience store or bodega the girl was heading to on foot. Nothing ever found. No DNA at the scene. No body recovered. Just eight girls, each on an evening walk to the neighborhood store, vanished into thin air. Taken by the only people on Earth who know what happened to my little girl—because it’s the same two men who did it.”
Livia zipped up the neck of her fleece. “You mind if we keep walking? I didn’t realize we were going to be outside.”
He shook his head as though to clear it. “I’m sorry. Just . . . forgot myself.”
They headed the other way, the leaves crunching again, the water to their right now. Yeah, he was strung out. She had to handle him with caution. Someone drowning will grab on to anything, even a rescuer.
“Don’t worry about it,” Livia said. She glanced at his midsection. “You have a little more insulation than I do.”
He chuckled. “Don’t I know it. Wasn’t always this way, you know. But yeah, my college football days are behind me.”
“You said the men are back. What do you mean?”
“I mean, the disappearances went on for four years after Presley. Two predated her. Five came after. And then they just . . . stopped. Like someone threw a switch.”
“You check arrest records?”
He glanced at her. “You talking down to me?”
“Just being thorough.”
“Good answer. Anyway, hell yes I checked arrest records. It’s the first thing I thought of. Anyone, anywhere arrested for anything remotely like kidnapping teenage girls. Nothing fit. Whatever made them stop, it wasn’t that.”
“And now it’s started again?”
“Yes. And no, you don’t have to ask. I searched again—this time, in every goddamn database there is for records of imprisonment and release. I searched for everything. I searched for fucking tax evasion. Anything that could explain these two, or one of them, being out of business because they were in prison for the seven years in question. And there’s nothing that matches. Whatever stopped them, it wasn’t because they were doing time.”
They walked in silence for a moment while Livia considered. “Tell me about the latest disappearance,” she said, deliberately using disappearance instead of victim to maintain a degree of critical distance. She was aware the expression of interest might encourage him, but she didn’t see an alternative. What concerned her more was how easily he was drawing her in. He knew her past, knew what buttons to push. And he had a lot on her. So far, he’d never used it. But how well would reluctance hold up against desperation?
“Another teenaged girl,” he said. “Two weeks ago, in Campo, California. And she fits the pattern.”
Livia didn’t think the pattern Little had described was nothing. But she didn’t think it was enough to believe the perpetrators were the same, either. The problem was, Little wanted to believe. And how could he not? He was desperate for a link to Presley, a salve against the omnipresent background agony of just not knowing. She’d lived that horror for sixteen years, and knew how it could distort cognition. The trick would be finding a way to push back that would get past Little’s defenses.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I’m strung out. Desperate. Seeing lakes in the desert because I’m dying of thirst.”
She should have realized he’d be smart enough to see it from her perspective. “Only because I know how it is,” she said softly.
“Fair enough. But there’s more. The one in Campo was a Native American girl. Of the other eight, four were black, three were Latina, and one was Native American.”
“That’s more of a pattern, okay, but—”
“Hear me out. Every one of the nine—because it’s nine now, and it’s going to be more if we don’t do something about it—has been taken from a lower-income neighborhood. What do you make of that? Combined with the fact that all nine are minorities?”
Livia caught the we. Ordinarily, that kind of forced teaming pissed her off, but given Little’s state, she decided to let it go.
“Well,” she said, “if I were abducting teenaged girls and didn’t want more police attention than absolutely necessary, I’d probably steer clear of white girls from affluent neighborhoods.”
“Exactly. The last thing you’d want would be to take the daughter of a man who was rich enough or connected enough to bring unusual investigative resources and stamina to bear.”
“In which case, they got unlucky with you.”
“Not until I catch them they didn’t.”
There was a furtive movement near the embankment. Little stopped and peered over, his hand slipping inside his jacket. A skinny, whiskered man wearing a shoulder pack eased back into the gloom.
Livia put a hand on Little’s shoulder. “Homeless,” she said. “Come on.”
They kept walking. Livia glanced at him. “I need to pressure-check. Okay?”
“I told you. More than okay.”
“When a teenaged girl disappears with no evidence of a crime, the most common reason is—”
“Is that she’s a runaway. But there are upwards of two million runaways every year. They don’t get entered into ViCAP. Anyway, believe me, I’ve ruled out hundreds of runaways. Usually with no more than a few phone calls. I talk to local law enforcement, talk to the parents, the teachers, the coaches . . . You know how it is, you can read between the lines pretty quickly most of the time. But these nine, including Presley, they weren’t troubled. No alcohol or drug use, no suicidal tendencies, no mental illness . . . none of the risk factors. They were good kids, with good grades, good relationships with their parents. Some of them were athletes, they had part-time jobs, they were applying to colleges. One of them—literally—was a candy striper. They weren’t runaways. They were stolen. By the same two men.”
They walked in silence again. Yes, Little was motivated to believe, and his theories had to be discounted accordingly. But was she motivated by the opposite? She didn’t want to be involved. Couldn’t afford to be, after her conversation with Chief Best and the advice—or call it a plea—from Strangeland. Was she looking for a way to downplay Little’s theories to slip loose from whatever he wanted of her?
“Look,” Little said. “You could replicate my work. Start with ViCAP. Cross-reference with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Identify teenaged girls who disappeared without a trace. Screen out the runaways. You’ll be left with the same nine I’m looking at. Each of which shares too many parameters with the others for coincidence to be the explanation. O
r even if I have one or two false positives, hell, even if half are false positives, there’s a pattern here. Can’t you see that? Even discounting how emotional I am, can’t you see it? You were emotional about your sister, but in the end weren’t you still able to find out what happened to her?”
In any other circumstances, someone invoking Nason’s memory as a means of manipulation would have set Livia off. But she felt Little’s pain so acutely that his attempt barely riled her.
“There were things I could see,” she said, trying not to remember. “And a lot I was missing.”
“Fine. I’m sure it’s the same for me. That’s why I need your help.”
She realized he’d anticipated her response, and she’d walked right into the setup. Little’s pain was so close to her own trauma that it was throwing her off her game.
“I’m not the most objective person when it comes to missing teenaged girls,” she said, still looking for a way out.
“I don’t want your objectivity. I want your ferocity.”
And there it was. “For what?”
“I can’t investigate the girl from Campo. I made some calls, calls that confirmed she fits the pattern. So I applied for leave and was granted it, and then they shut me down.”
“Shut you down? Who?”
“My boss, Ronald Tilden, the head of HSI’s Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center. He knows my past, and my obsessions, and he’s never denied me leave before. Something’s going on.”
“Come on, B. D.—”
“Don’t come on me, Livia. I’m not being paranoid. You think I don’t know how messed up I am? I’ve been living it every day for almost a decade. It doesn’t mean my instincts no longer apply. I could tell something was up. ‘We need you here, B. D., I have some unspecified bullshit I’m going to send your way.’ Oh, and ‘The budget’s too tight for anyone not assigned to Islamic terrorism,’ which doesn’t make any goddamn sense either because I was asking for leave, not a per diem. On top of which, he looked scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“How the fuck do I know? Someone got to him, that’s all I’m sure of. Maybe it was the indictments I backed for those child-pornography senators. That earned me a lot of enemies, especially because everyone knows, even if they can’t prove it, that I was behind some of the leaks that made the indictments politically impossible to stop. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t know yet.”
“This is why . . . the burners? All the precautions?”
“Yes.”
“You think someone is monitoring you.”
“Yes. Otherwise, why would they shut me down?”
“Why would anyone want to interfere with your investigation of a missing teenaged girl?”
“Why would anyone have interfered with your investigation of a child-pornography ring? Because the investigation threatened other interests that at the outset you couldn’t see. But this is actually good news. Because the fact that someone has taken an interest, that someone’s trying to stop me . . . it could open up a whole new avenue to investigate. This might be the most important development I’ve ever had, don’t you see?”
It was impossible to say how much of what he was telling her was real, and how much was the result of something in his mind beginning to unravel. She understood—there were times during her sixteen-year search for Nason that she had come to doubt her own sanity. But those doubts hadn’t been without reason.
She considered. Maybe there was a way to help him without putting herself at risk. “The pattern,” she said.
“What about it?”
“I once heard about an intelligence program. Something the CIA and maybe the NSA use to monitor everything people buy other than with cash, and everyplace people go, and who they meet with—unless they and everyone associated with them leave their cellphones at home—and everything people search for on the Internet, and everyone people know and interact with through social media. It’s a powerful tool.”
She didn’t add anything about how she knew the program was powerful: it had been instrumental in her hunt for a serial rapist who had previously been a ghost. She understood that at some point, her contact at the CIA, Tom Kanezaki, was going to ask for something in return for having used the program to help her. She didn’t care. Whatever it was, it would be worth it.
“You’re talking about Guardian Angel?” Little said. “Previously known as God’s Eye?”
Livia glanced at him. Maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised, but still, how widely was the program used not just for counterterrorism, but by law enforcement?
“Yes,” she said.
“I already tried. The problem is, the program’s only a few years old. And all the data involved with the first eight disappearances is older than that. All I have to feed the program is the disappearance at Campo. But the program can’t do anything with single data points. It needs multiple points, so it can identify patterns. So yes, if we can’t learn anything about what happened in Campo the old-fashioned way, it’ll likely happen again somewhere else. And then Guardian Angel could be useful. But by then, another girl will be gone.”
Well, so much for that. She wondered how Little would feel about other girls disappearing if it helped him find out what happened to Presley, or got him to the men who took her. She could imagine. But probably it was better not to know.
“So your plan was to go to Campo,” she said. “And interview local law enforcement, and the family, and the teachers, the way you do. Walk the terrain, try to uncover a new clue that could provide a breakthrough about Presley.”
“Exactly. And now I can’t. I managed to concoct a reason for visiting the HSI Seattle field office, but Tilden already called me there once. Probably he’s got people in the office keeping an eye on me, too, making sure I’m in Seattle and only Seattle.”
Livia stopped walking. She felt trapped. She looked down the embankment at the dark, rippling water. She could hear the sounds of traffic on the Fremont Bridge, but the park still felt deserted.
“You want me to go to Campo for you.”
“Yes. There’s no one else I can ask. Whose discretion I trust, or their ability.”
“Well, your timing sucks,” she said, still looking out at the water. “After Paris and OGE and all that, my chief has a target painted on my back. She’s watching me, practically baiting me, trying to put together enough pieces to take me down. My lieutenant has her own suspicions, and she told me I have to lay low for a while—and not just for my sake. For hers, too. I can’t get involved right now. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Livia. Look at me. Please.”
She realized that refusing to meet his eyes had shown her ambivalence. Her weakness.
She blew out a breath and looked at him.
“Please,” he said again.
“Damn it, B. D., I’m not going to be any use to you if I get fired. Or put in prison, for that matter.”
He was shaking his head before she’d even finished talking. “You know what it’s like,” he said. “You know. You reach a point where you’d give anything, you’d give your life, you’d put out your own eyes or set yourself on fire just to know, just to know what happened. Where is she? What happened to her? Is she alive? Where’s her body? Just let me bury her, just let me be tender to her one last time.”
His voice cracked. Damn it, she wanted to help him. She did. But she couldn’t. Not now.
“You know what it’s like,” he said again. “All that hurt, that pain, that agony, I can’t even lock it away, I can only cram it into a room with a heavy door that doesn’t have a lock. And I lean on that door every damn day, trying to keep it shut, and if I relax for even a minute, the door bursts open and the pain comes flooding out.”
She turned away again. He’d recognize the weakness, she knew, but if she kept looking into his pleading, agonized eyes, she was going to crack.
“Please, Livia. I’m begging you. Please. Help me find what happened to my little girl. Please.”
<
br /> She didn’t answer.
“I helped you, goddamn it. You owe me now.”
No. That kind of pressure was the wrong move. She gave him a steady stare. “You didn’t help me. You used me.”
“The one doesn’t preclude the other. Without me, you wouldn’t have been able to track down the rest of the men who took you and Nason. You wouldn’t have been able to kill them. The way they deserved to be killed.”
“This is what you wanted from the beginning, isn’t it? Or at least what you hoped for.”
“I wanted you on my side, yes. But if I owe you for that, I paid up front.”
She looked away again. God, she needed a workout. To train. To cut loose.
“A nonstop to San Diego,” she heard him say. “And then an hour’s drive to Campo. Just one day.”
She sighed. She realized she’d been fooling herself. It wasn’t in her to say no to something like this, no matter the risk. It was how she kept faith with Nason.
She hoped she wasn’t rationalizing recklessness. She supposed she’d find out.
She looked at him. “What if I don’t find anything?”
He held up his hands in supplication. “Then you don’t find anything. Just this trip to Campo. That’s all I’m asking.”
She knew he believed that was true. Just as she knew it wasn’t. He was asking for much more than that. More, probably, than either of them yet realized.
9
Boomer paced along the concrete of San Diego’s Ocean Beach Pier. It was late, but the night was breezy, warm, and dry, and there were still a few people around, mostly kids toking up or making out or both. Boomer had the family Labrador with him. He wasn’t much of a dog enthusiast, but the wife and the kid loved the thing, and it was certainly great cover for action if you needed to be out at night. Just a good citizen walking the dog, the kind of neighborhood event cops found not just unremarkable, but even reassuring.
Boomer didn’t feel reassured himself, though. He was pissed, and even a little scared. Local Portland news networks were running stories about a gruesome rape-murder—a woman and her toddler son—in the Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood, which was close to where Hope Jordan lived. The networks hadn’t yet reported the victims’ names, but it would have to be a hell of a coincidence. Especially because there were no other reports of, say, carjacking killings, which was how Snake was supposed to do it.