Every Crooked Path

by Steven James

  He’d been amazed: even after two hours together it didn’t seem like she was growing tired of being with him. And he was definitely not growing tired of being with her.

  It felt good.

  It felt right.

  And even though they barely knew each other, he felt comfortable with her, more so than he’d ever felt with any other woman.

  Finally, at seven, they’d exchanged phone numbers. Then he’d given her a slightly awkward half hug, which she returned to him.

  Francis couldn’t believe how easy it was to talk with her. She listened to him, really, really listened without pestering him or accusing him or condemning him like the voice in his head so often did.

  No. She’s just pretending. She couldn’t really like being with you, Francis.

  Be quiet! Yes, she does.

  You’ll hurt her. You’ll do those things you think of sometimes. You’ll—

  I’m not going to hurt her. I would never hurt her!

  Before he left the restaurant, he’d invited her to join him tomorrow at the hospital when he was going to be visiting one of the children. “His name is Derek,” Francis had explained. “You might’ve seen his face on billboards or on a poster somewhere around town. He’s a minor celebrity.”

  “I’m not sure I have.”

  “There’s a slogan: You can make Derek’s dreams come true.”

  “Maybe, I can’t remember for sure, but I’ll keep an eye out. In either case I would like to come.”

  They agreed to meet at four in the lobby of St. Stephen’s Research Hospital’s children’s wing.

  Now, back at home, Francis had been trying to get something called “The Tor Browser” to work on his laptop so he could research sites on the Dark Web to try to help the FBI, but he hadn’t had much luck.

  The download kept stalling out and wouldn’t load.

  Frustrated, he set it aside for a minute, checked his phone, and found a text from Skylar. She’d sent a link to a news story about how the tortoise population in the Galápagos Islands was recovering. “Thot u mite like this :)”

  She remembered he liked turtles.

  Yes, she remembered.

  Even before reading the story, he texted her back to thank her for sending it, then added that he was glad he’d spent the afternoon with her.

  On the computer, a chat request came in from graciousgirl4, but he didn’t answer it.

  Instead he closed the Krazle tab on his browser.

  Then he sat beneath the posters of the children and started to read about the tortoises.

  Skylar texted him back that she was glad she’d met him too and as they texted back and forth, twenty minutes passed and he still hadn’t made his way through the webpage.

  At last they signed off with each other and he finished the article.

  The tortoises had been on the brink of extinction, of disappearing forever, but they were on their way back. There was hope for them once again.

  They had been given a second chance.

  Tomorrow, he told himself, tomorrow he would get the browser to work, but for now, he could go to bed thinking of how things were finally going right in his life.

  And how much Dr. Perrior would approve.

  51

  The man who chose to call himself Shane had killed twenty-one people, mostly children, in the last decade.

  These days he was the one the Final Territory called on when things were over, when they needed to wrap everything up.

  But it hadn’t always been that way.

  He’d started off by himself.

  Working solo.

  The first girl had been the hardest. He hadn’t really wanted to kill her, but she’d shrieked and screamed so much when they were alone together in the shed that he had to find a way to keep her quiet or else someone might have heard her out there behind the house.

  He warned her to be quiet, to please be quiet, but she wouldn’t listen, so he had to do something about it.

  It was messy and he cried for a long time when it was done.

  But then, when it was over, when he’d washed the warm blood off his hands and put the body in the ground, when he was back at the house holding the hand of the woman he was married to at the time and watching television beside her on the couch, he realized that he had felt more alive while taking that girl’s life than he ever had before.

  The dance of life and death, of power and breath and finality.

  There was something about the fear and the excitement and the thrill of it all, and the surge of those primal emotions and desires.

  It felt like a drug high. One he could easily get addicted to.

  It’d been hard to go back to normal day-to-day life afterward. Everything seemed black and white and dull compared to the color-rich world of the blood and the stark resonance of those cries for mercy.

  He tried to ignore the urge to experience those feelings again, of when life had split open into full, rich color before him.

  He managed to make it five months.

  Then he saw the girl at the state park, and he realized that he had his chance to feel that way again.

  Right then. That very day.

  He was walking his golden retriever, Duke, along the beach when he saw the girl, no older than seven or eight, watching him.

  After a few minutes he found himself on his way toward her and then he was saying hi and introducing Duke and telling her that she could pet him if she wanted to.

  And she asked was he nice and would he bite?

  And he told her that yes, he was nice. He was a good dog. And no, he would never bite anyone. Then he reached down to pet Duke to show her how friendly and not-dangerous at all he was.

  Duke stood obediently, docilely by his side.

  The girl came to them, placed her hand on Duke’s back, and stroked his golden hair.

  “What’s your name?” Shane asked her.

  “Samantha.”

  “Where is your mother, Samantha?”

  She was still petting the dog. “Over there.” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the water. He didn’t see anyone in particular, though. No one was keeping close tabs on the girl. A few women were sitting beneath large beach umbrellas talking. Samantha might have been pointing toward them, he couldn’t tell.

  A voice inside him told him what he could do, how this could work, how everything could play out.

  Just to his left was a rise and a trail through the sand dunes. He and Samantha could take that back to his car. The hill would hide them from view of anyone on the beach.

  You could bring her to the shed. Just like Trixie.

  “Well, shouldn’t you be getting along, then?” he said to her.

  She shrugged. Kept petting. “It’s okay.”

  He felt his chest tighten and his pulse race, and the moment seemed to stretch to infinity and he found himself scanning the beach and realizing that no one was close by, no one was watching. For all practical purposes he was alone with Duke and the girl.

  Yes, he could take Samantha to his car.

  He could do this.

  Right now.

  “Would you like to see my other dog?” he asked her.

  “You have another one?” She sounded astonished, as if owning two dogs would be the most amazing thing in the world.

  “Yes. He’s in my car.” Shane pointed toward the trail. “It’s not far. When we’re done, I’ll walk you back to your mother.”

  “Okay.”

  But as they started down the trail, she’d hesitated, so he had to use his hands and hurt her so that she couldn’t cry out.

  Then he carried her in his arms, as if she were his own daughter and had simply fallen asleep and he was taking her upstairs to her room.

  That time was easier than the first. Quicker. Not so mess
y.

  And he didn’t cry nearly as much when it was over.

  So she was number two.

  The remaining children came later.

  After a while he didn’t cry at all when it was over. He just looked forward to the next time.

  Once you developed a taste for it, it was hard to say no to those urges.

  The Internet makes it easy to find people with the same tastes, and eventually, through the Dark Web, he’d made the connections that allowed him to foster and pursue his growing interests. Consequently, he’d been contacted by the Piper and given his current duties.

  Without the anonymity that Tor provided, he never would have met the people he needed to meet.

  Now, tonight, he went to bed thinking of how, when everything went down on Wednesday, things would be so much safer, of how the risk of law enforcement entanglement would drop to its lowest level since he’d started living life in full color.

  And his pastime would be easier than ever to pursue.

  52

  Sunday, June 17

  Last night Tobin and I stayed up until nearly two o’clock turning over the rug, going through his files looking for patterns and intersecting factors between the crimes, trying to see if we could find any additional links between the eighteen homicides he’d charted in that spare bedroom in the basement.

  We put in a call to the family of Haley Furman, the girl who’d been taken from her home last year in a similar manner as Adrienne, to see if they’d been planning to move and might’ve held an open house so we could find out if Higgs had perhaps attended that one. They had, in fact, had some showings, but they didn’t recognize Higgs’s picture when we emailed it to them.

  I thought there might be a connection between the fact that Stewart had a real estate email list, and at least two families that were going to move were targeted, but I wasn’t sure what it might be.

  Since it was Sunday morning, contacting other realty companies about open houses or showings for the remaining children would need to wait until business hours tomorrow.

  Admittedly, however, I wasn’t holding my breath about that line of inquiry.

  Most people keep notoriously sketchy records, and there was no compelling reason why anyone who was up to no good would use his real name while attending an open house he was using as a scouting trip in preparation for a child’s abduction.

  Potential home buyers don’t have to show an ID to realtors. There’s no background check. It’s one of the few times when we allow people we don’t know into our homes, often giving strangers carte blanche to wander through our residences, even allowing them access to our children’s bedrooms.

  Most homeowners don’t even give it a second thought that the person might be a burglar, a child molester, or a potential kidnapper when they open up their houses like that.

  Though Higgs hadn’t had a criminal record when Tobin pulled him over, he’d picked up a litany of minor offenses over the last couple of years, but nothing related to the case we were looking at.

  We studied his background and used that to compare his known addresses with the times and locations of the other abductions. Although there were no definitive connections, there was a stronger correlation than chance would allow between the places he’d lived and the sites of four abductions and three sites where bodies were found.

  +++

  During our late breakfast, I asked Tobin the question that’d been scratching around in the back of my mind since last night. “You still haven’t told me where you were on Friday and on Saturday morning,” I said. “You weren’t with your mother—what were you doing?”

  “I was looking into something that I thought might relate to the case.”

  “And that was?”

  “Someone named Blake. He might be affiliated with the Final Territory, I’m not certain. I went undercover to some bars I heard he frequented, but either my informants didn’t have accurate intel or they were leading me on a wild-goose chase. In any case, I didn’t find anything. It looks like he’s going to be hard to get to.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that right off the bat?”

  “I was wondering if Blake might be someone in law enforcement. I wasn’t sure who to trust.”

  “But you trusted me.”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I did.”

  We took a little time to analyze the online case files and update them with what we’d discovered last night regarding the identity of Garrett Higgs.

  While I was studying a calendar, looking at the timing of the most recent abduction, I noticed today’s date and recalled Tessa telling me how, on Father’s Day, she often thought of her dad and of how much she hated him.

  Figuring that wishing Tobin a happy Father’s Day would only bring back painful memories, I said nothing, but I did make a mental note to call my own dad later on. Though we weren’t estranged, I honestly couldn’t recall the last time I’d spoken with him.

  On a case this sweeping and complex, there are a lot of moving parts, and staying informed on all of them was proving to be an ever-growing challenge.

  The forensic evidence left in the van at the site of the fire indicated that both D’Nesh Agarwai and Maggie Rivers had been in it. The team was still looking for evidence that it might have been used to transport the other two missing children as well. Nothing from Descartes on the names of any women who might have accused Randy of sexual abuse in high school. Officer Hinchcliffe had managed to find the name of one registered sex offender on Stewart’s mailing list but he was living in Florida and wore an ankle monitor. He was at home during the crimes.

  As we came up on noon, I said, “Let’s step back for a minute.”

  I filled Tobin in on the great white shark hunting pattern research that I’d considered on Friday when I was looking for the home base of the person behind the four recent abductions.

  “What about Stewart’s mailing list?” I asked. “Is there anything there that we might have missed?”

  “I’ve been over it forward and backward, analyzed it every way I can. There’s nothing there.”

  “Hmm . . . Well, what if that list isn’t the one we’re looking for?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, people buy and sell mailing lists all the time. What if Stewart bought or maybe sold that list to someone else? That might be the link we’re missing here.”

  “Hinchcliffe knows that list best. I’ll have him look into it, see if he can dig anything up—especially anything dealing with realtors.”

  “Good.”

  He called it in.

  Then we contacted the parents of the three remaining children—Maggie Rivers, Andre Martin, and LeAnne Cordett—to see if any of them had been planning to move or had held showings or open houses prior to their children’s abductions.

  Just one family had—the Martins. But they didn’t recognize Higgs’s photo when we sent it to them. So even after all that, we weren’t any closer to identifying who might’ve been scouting out the homes of potential victims.

  +++

  After lunch, I hopped onto the interstate to head back to Christie’s apartment.

  On weekends like this when cases come at me from every side, I sometimes wish I had normal hours off. Some agents are free on weekends, with nine-to-five weekday hours.

  In my job, things don’t often play out like that—not to mention the fact that I have a hard time turning off cases once they crawl into my head.

  Occupational hazard.

  Something I needed to work on.

  On the drive I called my dad.

  He and Mom lived in Denver and I didn’t see them much except for the times I was able to sneak out there for the holidays or for some rock climbing.

  Now as we spoke, I found myself struggling to say the two things that you should tell your father on a d
ay like this: that you’re thankful for him and that you love him.

  Instead I simply said I hoped he was having a good day. He asked me about baseball, which I don’t follow, and then he told me about how well the Rockies were doing and I didn’t know where to go with any of that.

  Because of case confidentiality, I couldn’t really talk about my job, and since my future with Christie was quite likely in flux, I didn’t want to get into that either.

  That didn’t leave us a lot of common ground, and we ended up circling back to baseball and how much he hated the Yankees. I wasn’t sure if they actually played the Rockies or not, but either way I listened to his rant without interrupting.

  Before I knew it, we were saying good-bye and getting ready to end the call. “Hang on,” I said. “Dad, I love you.”

  Silence on the line, then, “I love you too, Pat.”

  After we hung up, I realized that now I just needed to sort out if I could—or should—say those words to Christie.

  But did I love her? Or did I only desire to be in love?

  Right now I wasn’t certain. And I wasn’t even sure how to tell the difference.

  +++

  That morning, Francis had been able to get on Tor.

  He’d promised the agent that he would look for files with masks, and so he’d started with what he knew: the masks, the Final Territory, and the video containing the missing boy’s backpack.

  He also searched for any other files that might have had the letters FT embedded in them or digitized in the background, and he looked for other instances of the hash values for that file with the backpack. In the end, apart from a few scattered references to someone named Blake, he didn’t come up with anything.

  He didn’t know if Blake was a first name or a last one, but he figured he could at least contact Agent Bowers tomorrow morning and share that much with him.

  Before closing up his laptop, just out of curiosity, Francis went to Krazle, logged in to his account, and read through the dozen or so messages from graciousgirl4 asking him where he was and why he wasn’t replying. Had she done something? Was it something she said? Didn’t he want to chat anymore?