“We’ve performed an extensive investigation since you called,” Cox said. “This guy Mike Smith is into all sorts of illegal stuff. We’re ready to take him down, tonight. We have a team formed, but we wanted to wait on you. We’re going to go by headquarters and go through this with you and the team one more time, then we’ll get him.”
Nick’s phone chirped. “This is Nicholas Lynch.”
“Lynch, this is the Governor. What do you want?” The Governor clearly was not happy.
Nick was determined to treat the Governor as professionally as possible, even though he suspected the jackass was sleeping with his wife. “Governor, thank you for calling me back.”
“Are you having any affair with my daughter, Lynch?”
“Of course not.”
“Because if you are, I’ll have your badge. You know I don’t like you, Lynch, I don’t think there’s much surprise there. Why my daughter would spend five minutes with the likes of you, I have no idea.”
“Sir, Phyllis has been kidnapped.”
“What?” the Governor practically screamed.
Good, I have his attention, Nick thought. “Sir, it’s why I called you. She—”
The Governor interrupted again, “Why would you call me about this?”
Nick snapped. “Listen, asshole, and I’ll tell you. If you want to keep interrupting me, then we’re not going to get anywhere.” He paused and there was silence. He probably hung up, he thought, but that was as worthwhile as having the jerk interrupting and disrupting the conversation.
He took a chance and continued. “Phyllis called me at about 8:00 and told me she had to go to a meeting with you. She said it was some commission you had formed, and the results were due shortly. I don’t know anything more than that, but that’s what she said. I’m guessing that isn’t true, but I wanted to check with you as I follow all of this up.”
The Governor hesitated. “Lynch, are you kidding me? I have no idea what your wife is working on.”
Nick measured his next comment carefully. “I’m only going to say this one time. I suspect you and my wife are having an affair.” The Governor attempted to interrupt, but Nick cut him off.
“I’m not going to go through the failures of my marriage with you or the immorality of any indiscretions you may or may not have been a part of. But I am going to tell you this. My wife is missing right now. Either you help me find her, or I’m going to go to the ends of the earth to prove the affair and to ruin your career. You have two choices right now. You can help me, or you can find out whether one as lowly as me has any power at all.”
“You can’t threaten me,” the Governor replied gruffly.
“I just did.”
“I’m going to ruin you, Lynch.”
“You do that. Take my badge, burn down my house, take my wife, whatever, but how about if we spend the next little bit finding Phyllis?”
“Okay, Lynch, you win, but you’ll pay. I don’t know anything about a commission she’s working on. I have not seen Phyllis since yesterday. I talked to her earlier this afternoon, but as far as I knew, she was going home tonight to work and be with the kids. If she went back out, I don’t know anything about it.”
Sandy Burns cleared customs just after 9:00. With her in tow, the Toronto Police simultaneously raided Video Playground and Mike Smith’s personal residence at midnight. Smith, asleep at the time, was arrested without incident.
“What the hell is this all about?” Smith asked.
Reading Mike Smith Canada’s version of the Miranda warning, Detective Cox asked, “Do you so wish to have an attorney present?”
“I do, thank you,” was Smith’s simple reply. With that, he was loaded into the police cruiser and taken downtown.
Video Playground yielded extensive pornography as advertised, but nothing illegal. Smith’s home provided a treasure trove of illicit activity, along with a number of questions.
“Detective,” one investigator said to Cox, “I need you to come see this.” Sherry Cox followed the young man to his finding, motioning for Burns to come along. Cox’s partner, Detective Bergmann, continued investigating other rooms of the house.
The young investigator first showed Detectives Cox and Burns the door that opened onto the attic on the second floor. They peered inside. “Do you see that window over there?” he asked. They nodded yes.
“If you look at it closely,” he continued, “you’ll see that to the right of it, the face of the house appears to come in. But, if you look on the outside of the house, it’s flush.”
Then he led her to a bedroom. “If you look in this bedroom, it ends right where the attic suggests it would. We knew he must have a hidden room. This guy didn’t even do a very good job of disguising it.”
“So how do we get in there?” Cox asked.
“I’ll show you.” He walked into the bedroom and pulled a floor to ceiling bookcase open. “This was actually locked when we were looking. We figured this was the entrance, so we forced it. Otherwise, it was so secure an intruder would not have recognized this as an opening to a hidden room.” He led them inside.
The room was small but impressive. It was immaculately organized. Clearly, Smith believed this room would remain untouched even if his house was searched. A storage rack housed numerous state-of-the art computer servers.
“Look at this,” Cox said. She was holding a sheet of paper. “This was stuck in the top of this batch of old DVD’s. It looks like an inventory.” Burns looked over her shoulder and read, realizing she was seeing early snuff videos Mike Smith had sold.
“Detective,” Jim Bergmann said to Cox as they continued to work through the evidence, “I want you to see what our computer forensics expert found.” Cox walked over, leaving Sandy Burns to sort through the snuff videos.
“Detective,” Louis Badeaux, their computer expert, said, “what we have here is a trail following all the money this guy has deposited throughout the world. Recently, it’s all cryptocurrency. He has made a fortune on something.”
Cox looked over his shoulder. All of the transactions had at least six zeros. “Louis, how did you find this so quickly? Don’t you typically have to gather this up and take it to headquarters to process?”
“Of course. That’s normal protocol. But he had several applications open, so I couldn’t help myself. I had to have a look. And this was open. Beyond that, I wouldn’t want to shut things down or close them and then lose access. We are going to stay here and process what we can before we start gathering all of this up.”
“Sounds right,” Bergmann agreed. “What else are you finding?”
“He’s been extremely cautious,” Badeaux replied. “He only made one or two deposits in any bank, really in any given country. All are under numbers only, so there’s no name attached. He’s used the countries that provide the greatest safeguards for criminals, Panama, Costa Rica, you can see the list here. Even if we can prove guilt, and know where it is, it’s going to be hard for us to go get the money. Beyond that, it looks like he switched to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies five or so years ago. This is extremely sophisticated.”
“Right,” Cox replied firmly, “but I guarantee you we can figure out a way to tie it up so this guy can’t buy himself out of this one.”
“Bosworth,” he answered sleepily.
“Chief, it’s Nick, I need your help. I hated to wake you up, but it’s important.”
“No worries. I’ve only been in bed a few minutes. What’s up?”
“I have a really good lead on our guy, because he kidnapped my wife tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Boss, it’s a long story, but I’m sure this son-of-a-bitch is the one who killed my daughter. Now he’s taken Phyllis.” Nick explained to Bosworth his earlier suspicions of the link to Alisha’s death, how it all tied together, the note he found tonight that was probably intended for the next day, Phyllis’ call, and his discussion with the Governor.
“If I had p
icked up my mail and gone through it when they brought it around, Phyllis would probably be okay.”
“I doubt that. They usually don’t bring the second run around until after 7:00 p.m., so there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have seen it before she called, even if you were standing there waiting on it.”
“Shit,” Nick exclaimed.
“Call Burleson. You two meet me downtown in an hour.”
Thursday ⌁ day 18
Derrick Rhodes drove from Colorado Springs to Denver as the sun was coming up. He and Vince Burleson would rouse Gary Knight early, catching him off guard and tired. Burleson fought the fatigue of little sleep from the prior night, drawing on the adrenaline of the hunt. The two met for coffee, confirmed their approach to the interrogation, and arrived at Knight’s mansion before 7 a.m.
They beat on Gary Knight’s front door for so long, they considered kicking it in, knowing the repercussions would not be good. Finally, a bedraggled Gary Knight called from behind the door, “Who is it?”
“Police, open up,” Burleson announced authoritatively.
“Guys, it’s the middle of the night. Come back around nine.”
“Open the door immediately, Mr. Knight,” responded Burleson, almost chuckling at his own demand.
Gary Knight reluctantly opened the door to his twelve thousand square foot mansion. He glanced disinterestedly at their credentials. Burleson noted he did not realize Rhodes was from Colorado Springs. He invited them in, and they followed him through various beautiful rooms until arriving in the kitchen. The room was grand, furnished in stainless and granite, with assorted pans and utensils hanging from modern racks. The island in the middle of the room would serve twenty. Knight pulled a stool to one corner and invited the two detectives to sit down.
As they sat, Knight stood back up and went about the business of preparing coffee. Burleson was amazed at Knight’s appearance. He looked as if he had been through a war. One eye was black, his forearms and face were cut and scratched, his legs revealed under his robe were deeply bruised.
“Mr. Knight,” Burleson said, “may I ask what happened to you?”
Knight did not even turn around. “Detective,” he responded calmly, “is that why you came here?”
“It might be pertinent to the line of questioning we would like to follow.”
The coffee started dripping, and Knight turned, re-tying his robe tightly. “I thought you were here to look into my disappearance.”
Burleson and Rhodes looked at each other, Burleson ceding the questioning to the more senior detective. Rhodes said, “Mr. Knight, a number of people have disappeared over the last several months during Coalition of Values seminars, all across the U.S. We have reason to believe someone is targeting people at your seminars, and we believe you may have information that will help us find this person.”
Gary Knight turned back to the coffee machine. Burleson’s detective senses told him Knight was weighing what he was going to say. He took his time, poured three cups of coffee without asking the others whether they wanted any, found sugar, artificial sweetener, cream, and spoons. Once finished serving, he responded, “Are you saying I’m a suspect? Because, if that’s the case, I would like to avail myself of the right to an attorney.”
“Mr. Knight,” Rhodes replied, “we are not saying you are a suspect, although I must say your behavior and appearance do lead to some very interesting questions. You can call your attorney at any time you would like; I suspect you know how all of this works as well as we do. However, I would appeal to your sense of civic responsibility, as the leader of the Coalition of Values, to help us find this killer.”
“Detective Rhodes,” Knight said, “can you tell me how many people disappear in any of the cities we’ve visited over the last year on a normal weekend versus how many disappeared during the Coalition of Values seminars? Can you provide that on a city by city basis? How about for the same weekend from the prior year and the year before that?”
“No, Mr. Knight, I can’t.”
“Right, I suspected as much,” Knight replied indignantly. “So you don’t even know if you’re dealing with an anomaly or not. All you know is a couple of people who attended these seminars have disappeared while out of town. It’s unfortunate that’s happened, but Detective, we draw one hundred thousand people to many of these cities. Unfortunate though it may be, bad things are going to happen to a couple of people along the way.”
Burleson knew Gary Knight was purposely evading them, but it was difficult to fight the logic. Apparently Rhodes saw the same thing because he took a different tack. “Mr. Knight, where were you for the nine days no one was in contact with you, from the first day of the conference in Sacramento to the time you returned to Denver? If you can answer that question for me in a way that I can verify, I believe that will clarify a lot for me.”
“Detective, that is not relevant to this case, and it’s none of your business.” He began gathering their half empty coffee cups. “If you require nothing further of me, gentlemen, I will bid you good day.”
Burleson saw Rhodes palm a spoon while Knight turned and put the coffee cups in the sink. As Knight walked them to the door, Rhodes said impetuously, “By the way, Mr. Knight. I don’t know if you noticed my credentials when we came in, but I’m actually a detective down in Colorado Springs. We had a triple homicide down there yesterday. A man, big guy actually, and two women. The guy and one of the women were stabbed to death. The other woman strangled and stabbed, I’m not sure yet which killed her. They all died a couple days earlier, someplace else. I’m guessing Sacramento, but what do I know? That’s confidential, by the way, how they were killed and all, but I wanted to tell you about them. We also found semen in the two women, so doing a DNA test won’t be hard. If you know anybody who might know anything about this, let us know, will you?”
They were standing at the door, Knight awkwardly looking down the steps in his unflattering bath robe at the two detectives about to get in the car to leave. “Detective, if you’re implying I had anything to do with this….” His voice trailed off.
“Mr. Knight,” Rhodes replied evenly, “what I’m telling you is that if you had anything to do with this, it is not going to be very hard to figure out. If there’s something you want to tell us, with or without your attorney, you better hurry. If we figure it out on our own, it’s going to be much worse for you, I promise you that.”
Gary Knight answered by slamming the door on the detectives.
“Thought so,” replied Rhodes smugly headed to the car.
As Burleson drove away, Rhodes put on evidence gloves.
“What are you doing?” Burleson asked.
Rhodes pulled the spoon and a comb from his pocket and placed them in separate evidence bags. “I got a spoon that he licked. And when I went to the bathroom, I took a comb. We’ll have DNA from the hair and fingerprints from the spoon. We’re going to figure out whether or not this guy had something to do with the three folks down in the Springs.” Then he muttered, “Two to one he calls us before we even have the answers.”
Friday ⌁ day 19
Nick arrived home as the sun was coming up, then slept for an hour before feeding the kids and taking them to school.
“Where’s Mom?” Michelle asked.
“She had another one of those meetings she got called to at the last minute.” Thankfully, they asked nothing more.
He pulled up to Police Headquarters right at 9:00, barely three hours after he had left.
As he walked toward his cube, Kelly Barela approached him and said, “What time’s your flight?”
Nick replied with a blank look.
“Portland, man, did you forget?” Barela asked.
“Dang it,” Nick replied, back to avoiding expletives. “It’s at 11:00, but I’m not sure I’m going.”
Nick settled at his desk and called Vince Burleson, ringing him as he and Rhodes were pulling away from Gary Knight’s estate.
Vince filled him in on
everything that had happened at Knight’s.
“You think this guy really did it?” Nick asked.
“I think there’s a good chance,” Burleson replied.
“Do you think Rhodes can handle what needs to be done with Knight and down in Colorado Springs?”
Burleson replied, “Truth of the matter, he’s the one doing everything, I’m just tagging along. No problem there.”
“I need to ask you a favor. This is going to be an imposition, but it’s a huge opportunity for you as well. Catch my 11:00 flight to Portland. Go instead of me. I was supposed to meet up with Mike Martin, and we were going to go interview the young lady at the Portland Mental Health Institute. She’s the one on the video with Steven Blair. She killed him. You have to talk to her and figure out what’s going on. She’s the key to finding Christine Crawford and one of the most important links to us busting this wide open. With Phyllis missing, I can’t go.”
“I’ll be on the 11:00 flight. We’ll find her, don’t worry.” Nick wasn’t sure if he meant Christine Crawford or Phyllis, but either would be good.
Governor McFadden called the Mayor of Toronto and made a special request that Sandy Burns be allowed to question Mike Smith. Also to be present were Detective Jim Bergmann of the Toronto Police Department and Andrew Mashburn, Smith’s attorney. Detective Sherry Cox and others would observe from an adjacent room through a one-way mirror.
Sandy set an iPhone in the middle of the table and hit record.
“My name is Sandra Burns, and I am a Homicide Detective with the Grand Junction, Colorado Police Department,” she started. Upon completing the formalities and receiving Mike Smith’s permission to record the conversation, she proceeded.
“Mr. Smith, early this morning the Toronto Police Department conducted a search, under warrant, of both your business and your home. At your home, they found a number of videos that are believed to be illegal, snuff videos if they are real. They also found a money trail that we suspect will be shown to tie to these videos. Now Mr. Smith,” she said, and then nodded to his attorney, “and Mr. Mashburn, I want you to know that we are currently pushing to have Mr. Smith extradited to the United States on charges of first-degree murder. As a person in possession of and very likely marketing these videos, under U.S. law you are as culpable as the person who actually carried out these crimes. I have been authorized, Mr. Smith, to offer you limited immunity in exchange for the name and location of the person who made these videos.”
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