Missing and Endangered

by J. A. Jance

  That night Jenny was supremely grateful Beth had disregarded her password-protection advice. With the Post-it in hand, Jenny typed in the laptop’s log-in code. On the start-up screen, Jenny noticed that Beth had eighty-seven new message notifications and thirty-five new e-mails. That seemed excessive, but intent on something else, Jenny ignored them. Instead she went straight to Finder, located the Find My Phone app, and turned it on.

  Moments later the app had pinpointed the location of the missing phone, marking a spot on a map with a pulsing green light. Jenny was able to expand the map until she could see that the phone had to be right there on campus, probably within a matter of blocks of Conover Hall. Had Beth tripped and fallen? Jenny wondered. Was she lying unnoticed in a snowbank somewhere nearby, unconscious and possibly freezing to death?

  Desperate to find Beth before it was too late, Jenny pulled on her boots, grabbed her coat and the laptop, and raced from the room. Using her own phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot and carrying the open laptop in her arms, she headed out of the dorm and marched purposefully across campus, keeping an eye on the moving red dot on the computer screen as she went.

  Eventually the red dot on the computer and the green dot came together as one. Looking around, Jenny saw nothing—no sign of Beth and no sign of her phone either.

  Standing on a stretch of cleared sidewalk and hoping to be able to hear the phone ring, Jenny dialed Beth’s number again. There was no sound, but when she looked around, she saw a small pink glow pulsing just under the topmost layer of icy snow.

  Pawing through the pile, Jenny quickly located the phone and dug it out. When she looked at the glowing screen, she discovered there were now ninety-three new messages and fifty-four notifications. Was there a chance one of those might offer a clue as to Beth’s whereabouts? Joanna had brought the password Post-it along. Digging it out of her pocket, she keyed the proper code into the phone. Once logged on, she went straight to Messages, where she opened the first one, from someone named Calvin. What she read there made no sense, so she opened the next one. That one came complete with photos, and as soon as she saw the first image, Jennifer Brady realized she had just stepped into a cyber nightmare.

  Chapter 26

  It was almost ten o’clock at night. The kids were in bed, and the kitchen was clean as well. Over the course of the evening, Butch had made two batches of candy—fudge and divinity. “I can bake cookies in a crowd,” he had told Joanna, “but making candy is a solo operation.”

  Now they were seated in the beautifully decorated warmth of their living room enjoying glasses of wine and a bit of adult conversation.

  “So you took on the DEA and scored a win,” Butch said. “Who’da thunk it?”

  Joanna smiled back at him. “Indeed.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “We need to figure out if Williams had anything to do with Madison’s showing up at Leon’s house prepared to knock him off. We might not be able to get either one of them on an attempted- murder charge, but conspiracy to commit might do the trick. Now that we know scopolamine was involved, I think that increases the chances that Randy was in on it, too.”

  “That he was possibly the supplier?”

  “Possibly,” Joanna agreed. “The problem is proving it.”

  Joanna’s phone rang. A call at this hour of the night usually meant a callout of some kind, so she gave her wineglass a wary look as she set it down and reached for her cell. When Jenny’s face showed in caller ID, Joanna felt a wave of relief.

  “Hey there, daughter of mine,” she said cheerfully, switching the phone to speaker. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, Mom,” Jenny blubbered into the phone. “It’s awful. I don’t know what to do.”

  Relief turned instantly to alarm. “What’s the matter, Jen?” Joanna asked as her motherly mind sorted through a list of dreadful possibilities. “Dad and I are both here,” she added. “You’re on speaker. What’s going on? Are you hurt? Did you have an accident?”

  “It’s Beth,” Jenny sobbed.

  Beth, Joanna thought. Thank goodness it’s not you. Aloud, she said. “What’s happened to her? Is she all right? Is she hurt?”

  “I don’t know if she’s hurt or not. She’s missing, Mom. I came home and she wasn’t in the room. I’ve been calling all night long, and there’s no answer. I finally used the Find My Phone app. I found her phone and not her, but what’s on the phone is so terrible—” Jenny broke off and sobbed even more.

  “What’s on the phone?” Butch asked quietly. “Tell us.”

  There was a long pause before Jenny was able to gather herself enough to speak coherently. “She had close to two hundred messages—some texts and some e-mails—on the phone when I picked it up. There are more now, way more. They keep coming in all the time.”

  “What kind of messages?” Butch asked.

  “A bunch of them show pictures of Beth,” Jenny answered at last. “Naked pictures of her. Some of them show pictures of the men writing to her, and they’re mostly naked, too. The messages are all addressed to ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike,’ and the things they’re saying are so ugly, so gross—” Jenny broke off again. “I’ve heard people talk about sexting, but this is the first time I’ve seen it. I can’t even say how awful it is.”

  “But if Beth is missing,” Joanna said, slightly changing the subject, “when did you last see her?”

  “This morning,” Jenny answered, seeming to get a grip. “She was still asleep when I left for my final. She had two of them today. When I came home this afternoon, she wasn’t there, but I didn’t think anything about it. I went down to the Lazy 8 to ride for a while. Then I met up with Nick, and we had something to eat. When I came home tonight, Beth still wasn’t in our room, but her purse was. I thought maybe she was doing laundry or hanging out with someone here at the dorm, but the longer I went without hearing from her and without her answering the phone, the more I started to worry. Finally I decided to go looking for her phone.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Right here where I’m standing—in the middle of campus.”

  “Have you called the cops?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You need to,” Joanna said. “You need to notify the campus police right now before you go back to your room. You’ll need to show them exactly where you found the phone because there might be other evidence there besides just that to tell them what happened. Call them first, and then call us back.”

  “You’re sure the photos are of Beth?” Butch asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of the tattoo,” Jenny said. “At Thanksgiving her mother had a cow because Beth was using a cell phone. If she’d seen the tattoo she would have gone bananas.”

  “What kind of tattoo?” Joanna asked.

  “I ♥ Ron with red ink in the heart,” Jenny answered. “It’s on her left breast. She showed it to me right after she got it. She was beyond proud.”

  “I’ll just bet she was,” Joanna said with a sigh. “Make that call now and then get back to us.”

  “Okay,” Jenny said uncertainly.

  “And don’t worry,” Butch added, attempting to reassure her. “I’m sure it’s going to be all right.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jenny replied, “but I’m hanging up now.”

  For several moments after the call ended, Butch and Joanna sat in stunned silence. “I’m guessing it’s the boyfriend,” Butch said. “She shared nude pictures of herself with him. Then, when their romance hit a bump in the road, he shipped them off to a porn site.”

  “And not just the photos,” Joanna replied. “He must have sent along her contact information as well.”

  “Contemptible!” Butch muttered.

  “It’s also against the law,” Joanna said. “This is called sextortion. There was a panel on this at the last sheriff’s conference I attended. Not only is this kind of extortion illegal, it’s also dangerous. Most of the time, the vict
ims are young and female, and many of them end up so ashamed that they commit suicide.”

  “So what do we do?” Butch asked.

  “I happen to know that the FBI has a task force working on this. I’m calling Robin.”

  Robin was FBI Special Agent Robin Watkins. Several years earlier she had gotten crosswise with one or more of the higher-ups in the D.C. office and had found herself banished to the hinterlands. From the hallowed halls of the J. Edgar Hoover building, Tucson might have looked like the back of the beyond and a suitable exile for someone regarded as an uppity female who needed to be brought down a peg. Unfortunately for them, Robin had taken to the Sonoran Desert like a duck to water. She and Joanna had worked together several times in the past, and Joanna had no compunction about calling at what many would have regarded as an inappropriate hour.

  “What’s up?” Robin asked cheerfully once she realized who was on the phone.

  In as few words as possible, Joanna brought Robin up to speed. “All right, then,” Robin said when Joanna finished laying out the situation. “If the boyfriend is in D.C. and the girl is in Flagstaff, thanks to the Internet this has already crossed state lines. I know some of the people working on these kinds of cases. I’ll put them in touch with the campus cops at NAU. And give me Jenny’s cell number, too. I’m sure they’ll want to talk to her as well.”

  As Joanna finished giving Robin the number, Jenny called back, and once again Joanna put her on speaker. This time Jenny seemed to be more in control than she’d been earlier.

  “I’m back in the room,” she said. “When the cops showed up, they told me to come back here and wait for a detective to come interview me while they search the scene. But before they got there, I looked at the contacts list in Beth’s phone, and it’s really weird. There’s no listing in her phone for a Ron or Ronald Cameron—none at all. If he’s Beth’s boyfriend, why wouldn’t he be in her contacts?”

  “That is weird,” Joanna agreed.

  “While I was at it, I looked back through her call history. There are calls almost every night, right around midnight, lasting an hour or more, but they’re always from a blocked number. And those are always incoming calls, not outgoing ones. It’s as though Ron always calls her and she never calls him.”

  “That sounds pretty one-sided.”

  “Hey, Jen,” Butch said from the background. “Do you still have that backup drive I gave you?”

  “I have it,” Jen replied, “but I haven’t used it. Why?”

  “The cops took Beth’s phone, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Once the detective gets there, he’s going to take her computer, too. But before he does, make a clone of her computer. Robin may be calling in the big guns from the FBI, but there might be a snippet on there, some detail that only someone who knows Beth well will be able to recognize. If that’s the case, you might be able to help.”

  “Is that legal?” Jenny asked.

  Joanna was the one who answered. “You had access to her computer and to her passwords, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I doubt that would constitute an illegal search. Go ahead and make the copy.”

  “All right,” Jenny said. “It’ll take a few minutes, but I’m on it.”

  Chapter 27

  Jenny did her best, but before she was able to connect the external hard drive to Beth’s computer, someone knocked on the door. When she opened it, a man and a woman—both clearly police officers—stood in the corridor displaying their badges. “Did you find her?” Jenny demanded.

  The woman shook her head. “We have not,” she said. “Are you Jennifer Brady?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “I’m Detective Ava Hunter and this is Detective Hank Weatherby with the Flagstaff Police Department. May we come in?”

  Jenny stepped aside and allowed them to enter. “It’s cold and it’s dark out there,” a worried Jenny said. “Where can she be?”

  The woman helped herself to a seat while her partner loomed in the doorway. “We have people out searching,” Detective Hunter said. “So far there’s no sign of her. We’re in the process of bringing in a K-9 unit. Would you happen to have a piece of Beth’s clothing available?”

  Rather than answer, Jenny retrieved Beth’s pajamas from a hook just inside the closet door and handed them over. Detective Hunter passed them along to her partner, who took them and left the room without another word. Meanwhile Ava Hunter, preparing to take notes, retrieved an iPad from her purse and turned it on.

  “We understand you’re the one who located Beth’s phone and reported her missing,” Detective Hunter continued. “Is that true?”

  Jenny nodded again. “I used an app on her computer to locate her phone.”

  “You have access to her computer?” Ava asked.

  Jenny nodded. “I helped Beth set it up. She keeps all her passwords in her desk drawer.” Still wearing her coat, Jenny pulled the crumpled Post-it out of her pocket and handed it over.

  “So you and Beth are friends, then?” Detective Hunter asked.

  “Roommates more than friends, I suppose,” Jenny said. “Beth doesn’t seem to have many friends. But I saw the pictures on her phone,” Jenny added. “They were utterly vile, and they went out to all kinds of people, including names from her contacts list. I think Beth was too embarrassed to face anybody who might have seen them, and that’s why she ran away.”

  “You think she ran away as opposed to being taken?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Jenny asked. “I’m sure I would.”

  Detective Hunter made no reply to that. “You’re sure the photos involved are of Beth Rankin?”

  “I’m sure,” Jenny said. “I recognize the tattoo.”

  “So who do you think took them?” Detective Hunter asked. “Her boyfriend, maybe?”

  Jenny shook her head. “I think they’re all selfies, and they were probably taken right here in our bathroom. Her boyfriend lives in D.C. I don’t believe they’ve ever met face-to-face.”

  “The boyfriend’s name?”

  “Ronald Cameron. Beth calls him Ron.”

  “How long have they been . . . involved?” Detective Hunter asked.

  “Since right after school started,” Jenny replied. “They met online on one of those dating sites. I don’t think Beth had ever had a boyfriend before.”

  “What does Ron do?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jenny answered. “I believe it’s something to do with cybersecurity. I don’t know if he works for a government agency or for someone else. He calls her almost every night, usually in the middle of the night when they can talk in private, but there’s something weird about that. While I was waiting for the campus cops, I looked at her phone history. The incoming calls are there, but no outgoing ones, and there’s no name or phone number associated with any of them. Also there’s no number for Ron in Beth’s contacts list. In fact, there’s no listing for him at all.”

  “When was the last time you saw Beth?” Detective Hunter asked.

  “This morning. She was still asleep when I left for a final. When I came home the first time, she wasn’t here, and I didn’t think anything about it because she had finals today, too. When I got back later this evening, her purse was here. . . .”

  “It wasn’t here earlier?”

  “No, so I thought she might be somewhere in the dorm, maybe visiting someone or doing laundry, but then, as it got later and later, I started to worry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was afraid she might have done something to hurt herself,” Jenny answered. “She’d had a terrible weekend. I’m pretty sure she and Ron are in the process of breaking up, and she’s taking it really hard. In fact, I was going to try calling Ron to ask him straight out about what was going on, but that’s when I remembered the Find My Phone app, so I did that instead—I went looking for her phone.”

  Detective Weatherby returned looking decidedly unhappy and spoke briefly to his partner, whispering som
ething in Detective Hunter’s ear.

  Scowling, she turned back to Jenny. “Your mother is Sheriff Brady from Cochise County?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “And you already spoke to her about this before you spoke to us?”

  “She’s my mother,” Jenny said, pointing out the obvious. “Why wouldn’t I talk to her?”

  Detective Hunter turned off the iPad and stowed it in her purse. “Well,” she sniffed, “it would appear that she’s run the situation up the flagpole to someone at the FBI, and they’re evidently taking over the cyber part of the investigation. We’ll still be trying to locate Beth, but that’s it. The feds will be doing the forensic analysis of Beth’s devices, but we’ve been advised to take them into custody. So tell us, please, which of those two computers belongs to her?”

  Jenny’s and Beth’s virtually identical computers sat side by side on Jenny’s desk. Jenny retrieved the latter and handed it over. Clearly Detective Hunter was pissed about this turn of events. She took Beth’s computer and stalked from the room without a word of thanks and without bothering to say good-bye either.

  It was close to eleven when the detectives departed, leaving Jenny alone. She crawled into bed, not because she expected to fall asleep but because she needed the comforting warmth of her covers. She lay there in her cocoon of blankets and thought about Beth Rankin outside and alone in the frigid cold and dark. It was enough to leave Jennifer Brady feeling empty and broken.

  Chapter 28

  Most of Gerard Paine’s neighbors in the town houses along West Placita Del Correcaminos in Tucson’s Starr Pass neighborhood were retirees who spent their daytime hours playing golf or tennis or bingo or bridge. He did not. They walked or jogged or rode bikes. He did not. They did their shopping at grocery stores. He ordered most of his goods online, including some fresh items he had delivered from a local Safeway. They had pals and friendships. He was a loner.