by J. D. German
Chapter 31 – Justice
Lynn awoke as the sun was setting, rested and ready to resume her attack on the pedophile Senator from Pennsylvania. She vaguely recalled the visit by Jack’s spirit earlier, but couldn’t remember what he said. . . . “Two questions, he said. . . . About the girls in the videos. What were they? . . . Yes! Where did they come from and where did they go . . . afterward. When they weren’t useful any more.” Lynn opened her laptop and began a search that would finally give justice to everyone he had hurt.
Even though it disgusted her Lynn went back into the VEC data files and watched the first few minutes of several videos to capture facial images of the girls in them. Some of the videos were over five years old, so these girls would not look the same now, but she might be able to identify some of the more recent ones. When she had face image files of more than a dozen girls she left the VEC computer system and opened the FBI missing children web site. One at a time she entered the faces of the girls and waited for the results.
Lynn’s impatience made the wait seem longer, but she started getting results back in just a few minutes. The first victim identified was Lisa Carson, age 11. She disappeared from her middle-class Boston neighborhood just over a year ago and was never found. There was no sign of foul play – she just didn’t come home from school one day.
The next one, Elaine Spitzer, was twelve years old when she disappeared three years ago. Her mother left Elaine in the car while she went in to pick up a few groceries. When she came back out her daughter was gone. No one in the area saw anything helpful. She was found six months ago, dead from an apparent drug overdose. The police in New York City where she died carried out a brief investigation, but without results. To them she was just another runaway who got hooked on drugs.
Latisha Frasier was kidnapped from her Baltimore home while her parents were out to dinner. Apparently they thought there was nothing wrong with leaving a 10-year old girl home alone. The police found evidence that the back door had been pried open with a crowbar, but the crime was never solved. Her file had a footnote: Latisha Frasier’s body washed up on the beach in Atlantic City two years after the kidnapping. What was left of the body showed signs of sexual abuse and drug addiction.
The next two on Lynn’s list, Winifred and Gloria, disappeared less than a year ago, but there was no mention that that they had been found, dead or alive. Hopefully that meant they were still alive. Lynn looked at the release date of the two videos featuring the girls and found the most recent was produced just last month. She sat back and thought about it. If they’re still alive, where are they? Where does VEC keep them when they aren’t making movies? If I could find that out, the police could raid the place and rescue the girls – the ones who were still alive at least.
Lynn sent Dave an email asking for the rest of the week off, then pulled up a map of Camden and located the address of the VEC building. She moved to Google Earth and got a good image of it. It was larger than she imagined – five stories with a foot print of 450 feet on a side. That would be plenty of room for dormitories to house the girls. It would also keep them from getting out and telling what was happening to them.
Lynn knew she needed more evidence before the police would act. She might even be wrong about the girls being there. I guess it’s time for a stakeout. She checked the time and realized it was almost four a.m. Too early to start watching the building, but I could check out the place and be there when the employees start arriving. Maybe I’ll see Ritter go in.
An hour later Lynn was sitting in Jack’s truck parked in an abandoned lot diagonally across the street from the VEC building. She noticed there weren’t any signs advertising the Voyeur Entertainment Company. A business like that has to keep a low profile, she thought.
She brought along Jack’s 35mm camera with a zoom telephoto lens. Like everything Jack owned it was top of the line – high resolution digital photos and video capability with enough memory to store thousands of pictures. While she waited for the workers to show up she used it to scan the upper floor windows, looking for some sign of occupancy. A light went on in the corner of the third floor, so Lynn zoomed in for a closer look. She saw a fiftyish woman taking pots and pans down from the cupboard. Must be a kitchen up there! They would need to feed the girls if they stayed here.
She watched the woman busy herself at making breakfast for a few minutes, then she saw two more third floor windows light up. Then another . . . and another. It must be the girls waking up! Wait a minute. Slow down. I’m jumping to all kinds of conclusions based on my assumption that the girls live here. It might be something entirely different. I need something I can take to the police.
A figure stepped up to one of the windows and looked out over the city. Lynn stared so long that she almost forgot to take some pictures. She ran off a dozen pictures before the person moved away from the window. She carefully studied the girl on the camera screen. It’s her! It’s Winifred Williams! From a missing children case and one of the videos. Lynn was so excited she wanted to call the police – or at least Dave – right then, but she turned her camera back up looking for other faces in the windows. She got good shots of two other girls, but she didn’t recognize them. They weren’t in the videos she had watched.
As people started arriving for work in the parking lot, the upstairs lights snapped off one-by-one, so she turned her attention the parking lot. To get into the building each of them held a card up to a box beside the door – tight security to keep unwanted visitors out. Lynn thought about trying to get inside to see what was going on but decided to get back to her place with the photos. She was just about to leave when a cab pulled up in front of the building. She aimed her camera and zoomed in. Two well-dressed men got out and headed for the door.
She was rapid-firing her camera to catch them from every angle, but they wouldn’t turn toward her. One of them held an entry card up to the scanner and, as he stood aside to hold the door for the other guy, she got what she wanted. Then, when the other man turned back to thank him, she got a bonus shot. As she enlarged the images on the display she smiled . . . It was Ritter and the Mayor of Philadelphia. They were using the VEC studio as their personal brothel.
Lynn spent the afternoon wrestling with her options. If she went to the city police the mayor might be powerful enough to shut down the investigation. If she went to one of the federal agencies, they would put it at the bottom of their priority list. She could go to the news media with it, but she didn’t know how far the Ritter family power reached. They were one of the oldest families in Philadelphia. They would do anything to protect their reputation. And she didn’t have anything linking him directly to the kidnappings.
“I’ve got to find something else on him; something that would guarantee immediate action. Maybe I could link him to the dead girls. Seven of the thirteen girls from the image identity search have turned up dead. All were ruled suicides or accidental deaths, but seven out of thirteen is way too high to be coincidental. These girls were murdered to keep them from talking. I need to check into those cases more closely.”
Lynn grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at her laptop, hacked in to the New York City Coroner’s Office computer system, and searched for the autopsy results on Elaine Spitzer. She found nothing remarkable – no physical trauma that would indicate she was forcefully injected. The drug overdose had been huge – four times the fatal dose. And there was only a single needle puncture, so she wasn’t a regular user of injected drugs. Hair samples showed traces of cocaine, and the lining of her nose was eaten away – another sign of cocaine use.
Lynn thought back to the videos the girls were in. They acted like they were high on something, so maybe the video producers gave them cocaine before filming. The other thing she remembered, particularly in the older girls, was a sadness in their eyes. They were laughing and cavorting, probably from the cocaine, but the joy didn’t reach their eyes.
Lynn went back to Elaine’s report to see what else the coroner
found. Not much. Except the sexual abuse. The coroner said the physical damage to her genitals was severe, like she was forcibly raped recently. In fact, he extracted a semen sample from her that was still viable. But without a suspect to match it to the sample was useless. The DNA test results were run through the database of known sex criminals but no match was found. At that point it officially became a cold case.
“I’m getting nowhere on this. Every idea I try leads to a dead end. I guess I need to run more images through the missing children database. Maybe something will show up.”
She hacked into the VEC system again and opened another video. This one had four girls in it, so she captured the face images of them all. As she zoomed in on the images to get more detail she paused on one of them. She looks familiar. I must have seen her in one of the other porn movies. Lynn was studying the other images when it hit her. “That’s the girl who Ritter raped in the private video ‘JR in Action.’ She’s a little older – filled out more in the face – but it’s definitely the same girl.”
Lynn switched back to the missing children web site and submitted the girl’s face image. Three minutes later the information popped up on her display. Marietta Moore, age 10, disappeared from a shopping mall in Trenton, New Jersey a year and a half ago. Later examination of the mall security video had showed her sitting at a table in the food court when a young man came up and sat down across from her. They started chatting and, from their body language, it seemed they knew each other. After a few minutes he took her hand and led her away. Another camera showed them leaving the mall through a fire exit. No trace of the two was ever found. Not much there, she thought. . . . Then she saw the footnote:
Subject deceased. Refer to Case File 10258-16 in Harrisburg, Pa. homicide records.
In took Lynn only four minutes to hack into the Harrisburg police records, and another three to get the coroner’s report. The girl was found in an abandoned house in the slums of the city. She had been strangled, then sexually violated after death. Initially a 30-year old black man was arrested for the crime, but he had a solid alibi – he was in the county jail for car theft at the time. No other leads were found.
“Yessss! This is it. I have a video showing the pedophile senator raping a girl who ended up murdered.” She felt an emotional high surge through her body, as it always did when she won at the revenge game.
“So, who do I send this information to? Who will act quickly on it? I already ruled out the Feds and the Philadelphia police . . . But not the Harrisburg police! The District Attorney will jump on this unsolved murder so fast that Ritter – and VEC – won’t know what hit them.”
Lynn spent the next two hours composing a letter with the details she had learned and putting it, along with the ‘JR in action video,’ and the internet link to the VEC movies showing more girls who ended up dead, in a manila envelope addressed to the police chief in Harrisburg. She made two more copies of everything – one for the District Attorney and the other for the newspapers in case the police didn’t move fast enough. She was careful to wear gloves so no one could trace the letters back to her. After adding more than enough postage stamps, she drove to a branch post office and dropped the envelopes in a drive-through mailbox.
Lynn kept a close watch on the news from Harrisburg for the next few days to see if they would act on her information. She was rewarded a week later while watching the nightly news on the ABC affiliate, WPVI, in Philadelphia. It showed the arrest of Ritter and a raid on the VEC studios. By the seven a.m. the next day the story was carried on all four major networks. When she saw this Lynn she set her coffee cup down and went into what a television commercial would call her ‘happy dance.’