by J. C. Fields
Jessie Summers offered his hand when he stopped in front of Kruger. “Good to see you again, Agent Kruger.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Sheriff. Although I’m retired from the FBI.”
“Yeah, well, once Bureau, always Bureau, right?”
Kruger just smiled.
Kruger met Sheriff Summers two years prior during the hunt for serial killer Randolph Bishop. Bishop murdered a Christian County family of four before Kruger and his team killed the man in a confrontation that left Kruger seriously wounded. It was the last case of his FBI career, and he retired to teach psychology at a large university in Springfield.
Summers, looked at his shoes, cleared his throat. “Uh, we need you to look at something before you leave.”
“Okay.”
“The guy you shot is well known to my deputies.”
Tilting his head to the side, Kruger frowned. “Why?”
“He’s been convicted of child pornography and currently a registered sex offender.”
Kruger kept his expression neutral.
“I have several deputies at the house he rents,” the sheriff continued “Uh…” He looked at the sky. “It’s disturbing.”
Looking at JR and then back at the sheriff, Kruger nodded. “Let’s go.”
***
The walls of the dark and dreary bedroom of the small craftsman home were covered in pictures of nude girls. The ages ranged from pre-teen to late twenties. Some of the pictures were old Polaroids, and many were self-printed digital pictures on regular copy paper. Kruger turned to Summers and asked, “How many distinct individuals?”
“I’m told there are at least twenty-four.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jonathan Luna, goes by the name Jonnie.”
“How old is he?”
“We think around forty-five or forty-six.”
“You think? You’re not sure?”
Summers shrugged, “He has several aliases.”
Kruger did the math. “That would make him somewhere around thirty in 2002. Do you know where he was at that time?”
“At this stage, no. I can have someone at the office try and find out.”
Kruger just nodded as he looked around the room. “I didn’t think you would at this point, but I would like to be notified when you do. It’s important.”
Summers nodded.
Old news magazines, including Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, were stacked in piles throughout the room. A bookcase contained books about true crime and several novels. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood appeared well read. Bending over, Kruger noticed one book in particular that troubled him. Slipping on latex gloves, given to him by the sheriff, he retrieved the book from its place in the bookcase.
He looked at the cover and started flipping pages. He stopped on the dedication page. A handwritten note was scrawled in barely legible script. ‘This is how it is done.’
JR walked up behind him and looked at the book.
“What’s that?”
Kruger was silent.
JR knew his friend well enough not to ask again. After twenty long seconds, Kruger replied. “A book written about a series of abductions I investigated back in late ’90s and early 2000s.”
“What about them?”
“Four separate incidents. Six women disappeared. Their bodies where never found, and a suspect never identified.”
“I vaguely remember hearing about them.”
“Apparently, our Mr. Luna likes to study crime.” Kruger continued to flip through the pages until he came to a chapter he knew personally. It was the chapter where the author interviewed Kruger about his investigations of the abductions.
“I didn’t know you were in a book.”
“Not a high point in my FBI career.”
“Why?”
“We never found the bodies or the kidnapper.”
“Were they all related?”
“We think so. Clues were non-existent. They were all abducted in a public place, never in a place with a security camera and always when the victim was alone. Except the last case, when three women walked out of a café and disappeared. The only connection we could determine was all four abductions targeted college-age female basketball players.”
“No clues?”
“None.”
“And the bodies were never found?”
Kruger shook his head as he stared at the book.
“Sucks for the families.”
“Yeah…”
Extracting himself from his funk, Kruger put the book back into its slot in the bookshelf. Looking around the room, he located Sheriff Summers and walked toward the man.
“Sheriff, I know it’s early, but there is a chance, however small, this man may be involved in an unsolved case I investigated seventeen years ago. As soon as possible, I need to talk to him.”
Summers tilted his head and glared. “He’s in critical condition. It could be days before he’s alert enough.”
Handing the sheriff a business card with a number scrawled on the back, Kruger stared the man in the eyes. “I was never able to tell a lonely father what happened to his daughter. It’s important.”
Summers’ eyes softened, and he took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ll give you a call when he’s stable.”
Nodding, Kruger started to walk out of the apartment. Summers stopped him with a question. “Agent, what have I got here?”
Kruger turned at the entrance to the house. “Sheriff, you have a predator on your hands. Be prepared to be shocked, saddened, angered, and mad. You will not like what you find in this house of horrors.”
Summers stared at Kruger, but did not respond. He turned and started instructing deputies on how to gather the evidence.
JR followed Kruger out the door.
Once they were back in the Mustang and driving toward Springfield, JR turned to Kruger. “What do you think?”
“I don’t believe in coincidence, but I have to know for sure he is not the man who abducted those women almost two decades ago.”
“How many men like that are out there, Sean?”
“More than I care to think about.”
Silence fell between the two friends. Two minutes later, JR glanced at Kruger. “How is this man different from Bishop?”
Taking a deep breath, Kruger exhaled slowly. “Hard to explain. Suffice it to say, they don’t feel emotions like you and me. I’m pretty sure this Luna character is not the man I couldn’t find in 2002, but he might give me a better understanding of who I’m looking for.”
“You going to re-open your investigation of seventeen years ago?”
“Don’t know. Maybe…” He was silent for several moments. “Probably.”
Chapter 7
Springfield, MO
The attic yielded its contents reluctantly. Kruger’s FBI notes and files were buried in a corner behind old suitcases from Stephanie’s and his days of constant travel. Cardboard bank record boxes, purchased at a local Staples, contained case notes stored for reasons he could not remember. One box on the bottom of a stack in a dark corner contained files and two personal copies of the same book he found on Luna’s bookshelf. One was signed by the author and the other had been given to him by a now-deceased colleague. As soon as he lifted the lid from the box, he hesitated. The contents brought back a rush of emotions. It was an investigation composed of failure, loneliness, loss, and a lack of closure for many families. It also reminded him of a time in his life without Stephanie.
Moving the box to a clear space on the attic floor, he removed the copy of the book given to him by a fellow agent, at one time his mentor. The book contained handwritten notes in the margins that would be read later in the comfort of his home office. For now, the purpose of finding the book was to re-read the last few pages of his interview with the author, pages he had read repeatedly for several years. The title of the book summarized his feelings about the case.
“Lost Lives and Fut
ures.”
The author, Christopher Park, contacted Kruger four years after the abduction of Linda Kelly, Karla Sharp, and April Lane. He turned to the page he sought and started reading by the light of a single bare light bulb attached to a stud in the attic.
Park: Agent Kruger, the last abduction occurred four years ago. Since then, nothing. What is the official FBI viewpoint about the investigation?
Kruger: The Bureau maintains an active group of investigators working daily on the case.
Park: You were the lead investigator, correct?
Kruger: Yes.
Park: But you are not involved anymore, is this correct?
Kruger: You are correct. I am no longer involved.
Park: What is your opinion about finding these women after four years?
Kruger closed his eyes and remembered his reaction to this question. Taking a deep breath, he kept reading.
Kruger: I’m not optimistic the women will be found or the investigation closed.
Park: Why?
Kruger: Because after the abduction of Linda, Karla, and April, the kidnappings stopped.
Park: What do you think this means?
Kruger: There are three possibilities. One, the man is dead. Two, he’s in prison for something else, or three, he stopped. If he’s dead, we will never know the truth. If he’s in prison, we might catch a lucky break and learn his identity after he brags about it to a fellow inmate. This hasn’t happened, so I don’t believe he’s in prison.
Park: What about the third possibility?
Kruger: That one bothers me the most. If he quit, he doesn’t fit the normal profile of a serial killer. If this is the case, we are dealing with someone who is far more dangerous than we previously thought.
Park: Why?
Kruger smiled at the editorial note made by Park before he wrote the answer to his previous question.
Author’s Note: Agent Kruger paused for a considerable amount of time after this question was asked. He stared at me and then turned to look out a window for several minutes. Finally his attention returned and he answered.
Kruger: The vast majority of individuals who we in law enforcement encounter suffer from substance abuse or mental illness. The ones we lose sleep over are the ones who plot out these types of abductions and are never caught. These individuals are usually of high intelligence and can hide their psychosis from those around them. They can be the husband and father next door, even their families are unaware of their particular desires.
Park: Why do you keep referring to this individual as a he?
Kruger: Statistically, they are always male. But, mental illness is an equal opportunity condition. Females can suffer from this type of illness, but generally, as a rule, do not act as sexual predators. They can, but it’s rare.
Kruger stopped reading, took his reading glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. He heard a noise behind him. As he turned, he saw Stephanie’s head pop into the attic opening.
Stephanie Harris Kruger was a petite woman seven years younger than her husband. She was strikingly beautiful with naturally curly brown hair she wore touching her shoulders. Her pale blue eyes sparkled in any light, and her smile was infectious. Kruger had fallen in love with her the moment they met.
“You’ve been up here for hours. Are you okay?”
He smiled and nodded.
“Got involved with a file. I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Did you forget JR and Mia are coming over for dinner? You’re supposed to grill.”
“I did not. I just haven’t thought about it recently.”
“In other words, you forgot.” Her tone was playful.
He nodded. “I’ll be right down.”
Replacing the files back into the box, he scooted it closer to the opening. Turning off the light bulb, Kruger lugged the box down the folding step ladder and closed the entrance to the attic. The box was set on his home office desk before he joined Stephanie in the kitchen to prepare for their dinner guests.
***
JR Diminski leaned against the handrail of Kruger’s back deck and watched his friend clean the iron cooking grates on a large outdoor gas grill.
“When did you learn to cook chicken so good, Sean? Last time we did this, you cooked steaks.”
“Stephanie.”
Chuckling, JR smiled at his friend. “Care to enlighten me?”
“Stef wants us to eat less beef and more lean protein, like chicken and fish.”
“No vegan tendencies, I hope.”
Kruger smiled and shook his head. “No, nothing that drastic. I tend to agree with her. We’re using more fresh and frozen vegetables and staying away from the canned stuff.”
“That I agree with.”
The two were quiet for a few moments as Kruger finished cleaning and then lowered the grill’s lid. He turned to his friend. “I need your perspective on something.”
“Sure, what?”
“I brought down my file notes on the abductions I investigated seventeen years ago.”
“Did Luna bother you that much?”
The ex-FBI agent nodded. “Yeah, he did. I need to put a new perspective on them.”
“Okay.”
“I want to start by looking at what each of the colleges would have in common around the turn of the century.”
JR tilted his head slightly. “In what respects?”
Kruger shrugged. “Anything.”
“Didn’t you do that back when the investigations were fulltime?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t have someone like you to bounce stuff off. Other than an older agent I worked with, I was generally by myself on these kidnappings. Budgetary constraints, I was told.”
“Okay, so bounce.”
“When I reviewed my notes, I found a reference to a phone call I totally forgot about.”
“A phone call?”
“Yeah, the voice was electronic.”
“Huh.” JR was quiet for a few moments. “Lots of ways to make that happen.”
“The call was interactive. The caller even laughed at me a couple of times. When I had Washington contact Alltel, they told the Bureau no such call was ever made to my phone.”
JR frowned, but remained quiet.
“What do you think?”
“I’m thinking. When did this occur?”
“About two and a half months after the three women were taken. Late 2002.”
JR pursed his lips and stared at his friend. “The first keyboard demonstration of a voice synthesizer was in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair by Homer Dudley. He used a system invented by Bell Labs in 1930 called a Vocoder. Synthesized speech started getting mainstream in the 1990s. With today’s technology, it almost sounds human and can be interactive. But not in 2002.”
“Kind of what I thought. What about the lack of a record at Alltel?”
“Not hard to do today, not so much then. You need to look for someone exceptionally skilled with computers.”
“We didn’t do that.”
JR shook his head. “You would have no reason to. Where did the other three abductions occur?”
“1999, Jacksonville University in Florida. 2000, Concord University in Athens, West Virginia. And 2001, University of Akron in Ohio.”
“A year apart?” JR’s eyebrows shot up.
“Yes, almost exactly a year apart.”
“And no bodies were ever found, correct?”
Kruger shook his head. “No bodies even to this day.”
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. The conversation lagged as he withdrew it and answered the call. JR turned to look out over the back yard as twilight turned to night.
“Kruger.”
There was silence as JR listened to the one-way conversation.
“I see… So he was in prison from 1997 to 2005.”
More silence.
“That’s what I needed to know.”
Quiet.
“No, I don’t believe I need to
interview him. Thanks for the call, Sheriff.”
Kruger ended the conversation and placed the phone back into his pocket. JR turned back to look at his friend. “In prison?”
“Yeah. I knew it was too good to be true. Where were we?”
“The call. If we assume the suspect is good with computers, and I believe we have to, he could have been at the schools as a consultant or as a trainer for new software the schools were installing.”
“How could we check? That was a long time ago, and admin personnel have probably come and gone over the course of seventeen years.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Let me think about it tonight.”
Mia opened the kitchen door and looked at JR, saying, “We’ve got to get this little boy to bed, JR. Time to go.”
***
The first time Kruger met JR Diminski, he and Mia lived on the third floor of a three-story building in the downtown region of Springfield. His business occupied the second floor, with storage and administrative functions on the first.
When Joseph Sean Diminski was born, the couple sold the building, bought a house across the street from the Krugers and moved the business to a two-story structure on the southwest section of town in a multi-use development a mile from their house.
JR’s business had grown from a one-man operation to a nationally known computer security firm employing fifty-one individuals. He let others run the day-to-day operations while he met with clients and did the programing. His sideline business and first love remained the art of hacking.
Kruger stood next to JR as he watched his friend’s hands dance over the keyboard while his head swiveled back and forth between three flat screen monitors. “What are you looking for?”
“Personnel records of the four colleges.”
“I won’t ask how you found them.”
“Probably best.” JR stopped typing. “Okay,” he pointed to four lists on the screens, “these are the individuals at each college with twenty or more years of service. The department where they work is the second column next to their name.”
“I didn’t realize how many individuals might still be there after so many years.”