by Trace Conger
I thumbed through the heaps of paper until I came across a pale yellow sticky note with an address for Evergreen Cemetery. I keyed the address into my GPS and fifteen minutes later I rolled through the iron gates at 2601 14th Avenue. The attendant on duty showed me where to find Josh Baker's gravesite.
After a brief walk past chipped headstones and grass that seemed too tall I found Josh's two-foot-tall grave marker. Two carved angels flanked an image of Josh's face etched on the front. As I stood there, I thought of my own eight-year-old daughter, Becca. With the exception of my divorce from her mother, Becca's life had little disruption. Her two overprotective parents rarely let her want for anything, something we'd probably regret in her teenage years. Becca lived in a safe and loving environment. She spent her days playing with dolls, making crafts, reading books and laughing with friends. Violence never reared its ugly face around her. For Becca, life was only sunshine and rainbows. I imagined Josh Baker's life was much the same until the day he met Jacob Vance and Raymond Turner. What did he do that morning? Was he excited to see the Christmas decorations at the mall? What did Vance and Turner tell him to convince him to follow them? How many times did he ask for his mother? Did he ever try to turn back as they led him further away from safety?
Beneath the etching of Josh's face was an inscription. I ran my fingers across the cold smooth surface, tracing the letters.
JOSHUA STEPHEN BAKER
BELOVED SON
WE LOVED YOU WITH ALL OUR HEART
BUT GOD NEEDED YOU MORE IN HEAVEN
THAN HE NEEDED YOU ON EARTH
Bullshit, kid. God didn't take you. Two sick fucks did.
I jerked my phone out of my inside coat pocket, searched through the call history and dialed.
"Hello?" said the familiar voice on the other end.
"I'll take your case, Willie. I'll let you know what I find, but sit tight. It might take some time."
I hung up the phone before he could respond.
Three
THE DRIVE BACK TO CINCINNATI gave me three-and-a-half hours to think about the quagmire I’d stepped in. This would be a tough case and I was already emotionally invested, which made me nervous. I always separated my work from my emotions because what I do requires a clear head. Emotions screw things up. It's like landing an airplane. You don't want your pilot thinking about some melodramatic bullshit when he should be focused on landing a one-hundred-ton aircraft careening toward a narrow asphalt runway at 120-miles-per-hour.
Josh Baker got a raw deal at the hands of two sociopaths and all I could think about was finding Vance and Turner, tying them to my rear bumper and dragging them back to West Virginia. In the pothole lane.
But something else bothered me, something I had dismissed until now. Vance and Turner killed Josh Baker thirty-two years ago. That's a lot of time to figure your shit out and change your ways, but was that possible for two kids? Not even fully formed, mentally or physically, nine year olds who kidnapped and beat the life out of a four-year-old boy a month before Christmas? West Virginia didn't give Willie an executioner, so he planned to hire his own after I unearthed Vance’s and Turner's whereabouts. That made me responsible for their deaths. While I didn't have a problem with the idea as I stood over Josh's grave, after reflecting on it I knew the decision wasn’t that easy. Consequence is a nasty bitch. Vance and Turner would meet her at some point, but if they’d turned their lives around, could I still give Willie's triggerman what he needed to put them down?
I kicked the doubt out of my head. No need wasting time on the emotional blowback until I had something to worry about. There were three-hundred-and-twenty million people in the United States and finding two of them, two people who didn't exist anymore, would be as easy as Chinese algebra after a bottle of tequila. And all I had to work with was a battered bag of files that had yellowed with age and a single photograph each of what Vance and Turner looked like before the puberty stick smacked them in the face.
Four scenarios loomed over me. One, Vance and Turner could be dead. And while that made the up-or-down vote on whether they lived a moot point, it didn't make finding them any easier. If locating a living person with a government identity was hard, finding a dead person with a government identity was damn near impossible. My only hope would be for an obituary to tie them to their West Virginia roots, but that was a moonshot.
Two, the government could have relocated them outside the country. I knew my way around the information channels in the States, but those channels got murkier the farther you traveled across the border. If they were in Canada or Mexico, I could probably still find them, but if they moved to Belgium, forget about it.
Three, Vance and Turner could have returned to prison. I'm not a criminologist and I couldn't psychoanalyze my way out of Willie's Walmart bag, but I had a hard time thinking these two were capable of leading normal lives after what they did. About seventy percent of violent offenders step in shit again, so the likelihood was high that at least one of these two asshats was behind bars or had done a stretch sometime between being released in 1992 and now. Finding an inmate only takes a call to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but if Vance and Turner landed back in the system they would be there under their new names and anyone answering the prison hotline would not know about their past.
Scenario four was the most likely. Uncle Sam relocated them to parts unknown, USA. Of the four scenarios, this offered the best chance for finding them. If they were still in the country, they were within reach. I assumed WITSEC provided the average relocation package to some small town in the Midwest, not an expensive international destination, so I decided to focus my effort on native soil.
Locating people is equal parts art and science. A good investigator can find most people with a laptop, an Internet connection and a free afternoon. I don't deal with the "most people" slice of the population. I deal with the people who are actively evading someone. The ones who disappear and don't want to be found. Searching for two people with no names or known locations didn't unnerve me, since those are the usual suspects on my to-do list. But the process gets complicated when government identities are involved.
Vance and Turner were invisible and that required a different approach. Scientists don't find black holes by looking at them. They find them by looking at the ripples around them. That's how I'd find Vance and Turner. By looking at the ripples. And that meant starting with their families and friends. If I was lucky I would stumble upon a breadcrumb and that would lead me to the sandwich, and then the motherfucker holding the mayo.
WHEN I ARRIVED HOME THAT afternoon I found my father, Albert, and my ex-wife, Brooke, sitting on the sofa watching Columbo.
"How was coal country, son?" asked Albert. "You get black lung?"
"Don't think so. Just a bad case of cramped knees from the drive." I wondered why my ex-wife was there. "You two throwing me a surprise party or something?"
Brooke stood up and hugged me as Albert squinted at the television. "What took you to West Virginia?" she said, running her hand across the beard I had refused to shave for the past two months.
"House call. What brings you here?"
"I can't just stop by?" she said.
"I'm not saying you have to file a form or anything. Just not used to seeing you pop up unless you're dropping Becca off."
"I had the day off and Becca is at a friend's house. I got bored so I thought I'd come by and see what you two were up to."
"Well, it looks like Albert's halfway through the Columbo box set he found at the library."
"It's a good show," he said.
"It's a terrible show," I said. "It's entirely formulaic. Look for the guest star and that's your murderer."
Albert rolled his eyes. "Columbo isn't about figuring out who did it, it's about how he’s going to catch 'em." He pointed a thumb at Brooke. "Your wife likes it."
"Ex-wife" we said in unison.
"That doesn't mean much." I smiled. "She always had shitty taste in television."
"And men." Albert laughed.
"It's not bad," said Brooke. "I've been watching it for three hours. You'd think he'd get a better car. That one looks like it could fall apart at any minute."
"The car is part of the mystique," said Albert.
I moved to the kitchen to escape the conversation, hoping Brooke would follow. She did.
"So what was in West Virginia?"
"I met with a client about a missing person case."
"You going to be spending a lot of time there? In West Virginia?"
"Looks like it, for starters anyway. This case... I think it's going to keep me moving. I don't have a lot to go on, just decades-old police reports, but I could be out of town for a while."
"What about Becca?" asked Brooke.
When Brooke and I split up five years ago we decided to share custody of our daughter. She stayed with me on the weekends and lived with Brooke the rest of the week. Becca was the most important thing in my life and I didn't make a habit of missing our time together. I had only missed one weekend together since the divorce, but I knew I was going to have to postpone the next few sleepovers. I wasn't sure where this case would take me and I couldn't jet home every weekend.
"I'm not sure how long I'll be on the road, but I'm sure Albert can pinch hit while I'm out. Maybe introduce her to Columbo."
Brooke looked disappointed.
"I'm sorry. I don't want to miss out on any time with her and I plan to make it up to her when I'm back."
Brooke brushed a finger across the back of my hand and lowered her voice. "Maybe we can all spend more time together when you get back."
"What about Dr. Dickhead?" Since our split Brooke had been shacking up with Dr. Daryl Jennings, an anesthesiologist at the hospital where she worked. He ran into trouble a year ago when he fell into a fentanyl smuggling ring. While I got him out of trouble with the Indianapolis mob, there wasn't much I could do to get him out of trouble with Brooke. I knew that things between them had been rocky since then, but I just assumed they'd work it out because they always did.
"We're no longer seeing each other," she said. "He's agreed to stay at a hotel until Becca and I can find a place of our own."
"You broke up with him and kicked him out of his own house? That's pretty cold."
"I figured you'd be happy about it."
"I was never his biggest fan, given that, you know, you moved in with him the day after we split. Kind of makes a guy wonder."
"I'll be the first to admit it was a mistake. A stupid one. Hindsight, right? He was a security blanket. For me and for Becca. A way out of whatever you and I had once it started to crumble." She brushed a long strand of red hair from her face. "And I'm sorry. I hope I can make it up to you. And right now I don't even know what that means."
My living room, with Columbo blaring in the background, wasn't the ideal place to dwell on the shitty parts of our relationship, so I changed the subject.
"Maybe you can solicit Albert's real estate services and he can help you find a new place." I fanned my open hand across the room like a Price Is Right model showing a deluxe dining room set. "He did find us this lavish abode."
She laughed. "I should go. If I stay any longer I'm going to get sucked into more television with your father." She checked her watch. "I need to pick up Becca anyway. Let me know when you finish your case and consider what I said. You know, about spending some time together."
"I'll give it a noodle." I walked her to the door. After she yelled a goodbye to Albert, who stayed glued to the television screen, she put her hand on my waist and kissed me longer than she had in years.
"Good luck on whatever you're working on." She started out the door, but stopped and turned. "And Finn. I like the beard."
"Thanks," I said, watching her walk down the breezeway.
Four
AFTER BROOKE LEFT I STROLLED past Albert, still transfixed by Lieutenant Columbo's detective skills, and slipped into my office.
You can't trust many people in this business. Willie Baker had an agenda—he wanted Vance and Turner dead. And while I had no reason to doubt his story about their government protection, something didn't sit right about the Feds protecting two child killers. The whole idea seemed ridiculous, but it wasn't the first time I'd used that adjective to describe the government.
It's possible what Willie told me was the real deal, but I'd been fooled before. That's why I wanted to get as much information as I could on Jacob Vance and Raymond Turner before diving too deep into this case.
I scrutinized the bag Willie had given me. It's easy to fabricate a case file, especially since the real case file would be sealed and even I would have a hard time getting that. Right now the only background information available was a stack of photocopies and I had no idea if they were legitimate or not.
The first thing I wanted to know was if Josh Baker really was beaten to death and left next to a tobacco shack in Parkersburg. That wouldn't be hard to confirm because the press would jump all over something that horrific, especially in small town, West Virginia. A quick LexisNexis search revealed a string of articles from the Charleston Daily Mail and the Parkersburg Sentinel that corroborated the details Willie shared. The clips didn't identify the two boys because they were minors at the time and were protected from being outed publicly. A reporter named Nell Richards filed a dozen bylines during the trial. I jotted her name in my notepad and moved on.
I also wanted to verify if Vance and Turner had entered WITSEC and dropped off the face of the earth. Had they gone under, all traces of their existence would be swept under the rug. Maybe Willie got his facts wrong and these two just left town after being released from the juvenile detention center. Or maybe the WITSEC story was just a rumor started to cover their tracks and deter anyone from looking for them. Willie said he had hired other PIs to find them and they all came up short. If that was true, then I suspected Vance and Turner really were in WITSEC. Otherwise, someone else would have already found them.
Social security numbers are the gold standard for PIs trying to locate someone. That's because most personal records are searchable using a social security number, including marriage and divorce records, banking information, residence histories, bankruptcies, judgments, employment histories, criminal records… you name it. If those numbers were still active, which they shouldn't be if Vance and Turner went into protection, I could generate a report with all the information required to find them. If those numbers were inactive, it meant they really did go under.
I grabbed their social security numbers from the booking photos and ran a trace. I hoped to get an employment hit confirming that one of them was collecting a paycheck from a Best Buy somewhere in Minneapolis, but that didn't happen. All activity linked to their social security numbers ceased in 1992, the year they left detention. That told me the government scrubbed their original numbers and assigned new ones.
New numbers get assigned all the time. If someone is a victim of identity theft and their credit turns to shit, they can apply for a new social security number and hit reset. When the government assigns new numbers they keep the old numbers in the system. It's like retiring a baseball player's jersey, but instead of hanging on the side of a grand stadium it collects dust in a government database. And since Vance’s and Turner's numbers hadn't been touched since 1992, they had a lot of dust on them.
Vance and Turner were off the grid, and the theory the Feds reassigned them new identities fit. The story Willie told me held up and I was ready to move on to the next step and research the hell out of everyone involved.
Five
I WORK ALONE. MOST OF the time. I don't like people knowing the details of my cases for obvious reasons, but I can't do everything myself. Some information and certain skills are beyond my reach. That's why I rely on a few trusted individuals for support from time to time. Cricket is one of the professionals in my tool bag.
Cricket is a jack-of-all-trades, and most of those trades are illicit. I don't know
where he gets his information, but he's damn good at getting it. He's also a whiz at farming out special projects for people like me. Need to hack a cell phone photo bank? He can get it done. Need someone to park outside your home and sit watch with a Street Sweeper in his lap while you sleep safe and sound inside? He'll do it. Need to reconstruct a fifty-year-old birth certificate with a raised seal from South Dakota? He's your man.
Truth is, there hasn't been much I've thrown Cricket's way that he was unable to handle with speed and discretion. Unfortunately he doesn't come cheap, and since our skill sets overlap in certain areas I only turn to him for the stuff I can't do myself.
On a personal level I didn't know much about Cricket. Other than his first name is Jim, which somehow led to the nickname "Jiminy Cricket" or Cricket for short. He’s tall and boney with sunken cheeks, and the kind of thin that makes him look like he’s sick and undergoing some medical treatment, though as far as I know he’s as healthy as me. I hadn't used him in a year, but I needed his help on this one.
I dialed his number and he answered on the second ring.
"Cricket, I need a favor."
"What's that?"
"You have access to any age progression software?"
"I know someone who dabbles in it."
"Is it accurate?"
"Depends on the source photo. If you've got a good photo, the software can generate a pretty accurate image. Of course, criminals have been known to change their appearance, Finn."
"Does it work with kids?"
Cricket drew in a deep breath and sounded annoyed at my questions. "You mean like one of those missing kids they put on milk cartons? The then and now shots?"