by Jack Rogan
“She’s no trouble, Caitlin,” Jane said, smiling at the baby even as she put a pan on the burner.
“I’m not working today,” Cait added. “I should be back by ten-thirty, at the latest, and then we’ll be out of your hair until Tuesday.”
“No problem,” Jane assured her. “Do me a favor, though? Before you leave, see if you can get a peek at whoever’s sitting in that BMW, or whatever it is, down in front of the DiMarinos’ house.”
“Sorry, what?” Cait mumbled. She’d been playing with Leyla, blowing air into the baby’s face to make her giggle.
“They’re away,” Jane said. “The DiMarinos, I mean. In the middle of the night there was this car parked in front of their house.” She went on to describe what she had seen out the window the night before. “It’s probably nothing, but I kept thinking, what if it’s someone planning to break in?”
“Are they still out there this morning?” Cait asked.
“They were when I woke up,” Jane replied.
As Jane started doling pancake batter onto the pan, Cait slipped the baby into her high chair and locked her in place.
“Where are you going?” Jane asked.
“To stick my nose where it doesn’t belong.”
“What about breakfast?”
“Save me some.” Then she crouched down so that she was eye to eye with Leyla. “Take care of Auntie Jane for a few minutes, baby girl.”
Her daughter gave her a toothless smile. Cait stood and headed out of the kitchen.
“Aren’t they going to be angry if you interrupt their stakeout?” Jane asked.
Cait paused in the door frame, arching an eyebrow. “Stakeout? Next thing I know you’ll be talking about skel informants and righteous shootings. They’re in your neighborhood and not exactly hiding. You have a right to know what they’re doing. This is America, remember?”
Jane’s smile was halfhearted. “Sometimes I forget.”
Cait didn’t reply. They tried to avoid talking politics in the Wadlow house. George was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, but Jane had turned her back on the party the moment the Patriot Act had been passed. Cait stayed out of it; she didn’t much care who sat in the Oval Office. She had seen the faces of Iraqis up close, seen them laugh and seen them die, and they were just like anybody else—forged by the world they lived in. The Muslims who wanted to live in peace were no danger to America, and those who were willing to die if it meant taking American lives … well, they couldn’t be stopped. As far as Cait was concerned, the best thing to do was just stay away from them. But that was why she had been a soldier, not a politician, and now she could only hope to never return to the Middle East.
Still barefoot, she went out onto the front steps and immediately spotted a silver Audi parked three doors down and across the street. At a quarter after seven on a Sunday morning, the neighborhood had a wonderful stillness about it. A door opened to her left and she glanced over to see a young bearded guy step out, shirtless, to retrieve his newspaper from the stoop. Other than that, the street was quiet.
She wasn’t surprised Jane had thought the car out of place. The street consisted of small Colonials and ranches built in the 1940s and ’50s. Any one of their driveways would have had room for another vehicle to park, including the absent DiMarinos’.
From a distance, and given the Audi’s tinted windows, it was impossible to tell if the car was occupied.
Well, there’s one way to find out.
She padded down the steps and across the front yard, enjoying the feeling of the grass under her bare feet. Once she hit the sidewalk, she stayed on her aunt’s side of the street, not ignoring the presence of the car but not paying it any special attention, either. As she walked, she turned the whole situation over in her brain. The Audi sparkled in the morning sun. Really, it was too nice a car for undercover cops to be driving. Government, maybe, but what the hell would federal agents be doing in Medford? So maybe they were cops after all. On the other hand, some romantic entanglement—a cheating spouse, maybe—could easily put a private detective into play. She didn’t know any private investigators, but doubted they could afford such a car.
A mystery, right here on Badger Road.
As she came abreast of the Audi, Cait stepped off the curb and strode toward the driver’s side, the pavement warm underfoot. She put on her friendliest, most quizzical smile, thinking she would just rap on the window. Behind the tinted glass, she could vaguely make out the shapes of the driver and another man. But the engine growled abruptly to life, then softened to a purr as the driver threw the car into gear and pulled away, leaving her standing in the middle of the road, staring after it.
“Fine, be that way!” she called after the Audi, making note of the plate number and wondering if she really had just screwed up somebody’s surveillance and, if so, who they might be surveilling. Was that even a word? She thought it must be.
As she headed back to her aunt and uncle’s house, intending to write down the license plate number, an awful thought occurred to her. What if it wasn’t something as simple as a cheating spouse? She had thought it might be a government vehicle. What if they suspected someone on the street of being involved in terrorism, or if one of the neighbors was a serial killer or something?
Despite the warmth of the August morning, Cait shuddered.
She had to jump in the shower and hurry if she wanted to get to Lynette’s office by eight o’clock, but she couldn’t just let this go. The odds were that the guys in the car were private detectives, but, just to be safe, she would put in a call to the Medford police as soon as she was out of her meeting.
The small plane that the Bureau had chartered to carry Josh and Chang from Florida to Maine touched down at Bangor International Airport just before nine a.m. The charter had been a necessity, as there had been no commercial flights departing Fort Myers for Bangor until late morning, and the clock was ticking for the abducted child. The kidnapper was a known killer and potential terrorist. Josh knew that the odds were against the infant being alive—this guy didn’t seem the type to ask for ransom—but hope was all that they had. And if there was any chance the child was still alive, they had to work as quickly as possible to track the son of a bitch down.
A car was waiting for them on the tarmac. The agent behind the wheel introduced himself as Ian Merritt; with the halo of gray that was all that remained of his hair and the doughy, too-much-whiskey complexion, he looked more like an accountant on the verge of retirement than an FBI agent. Still, Merritt didn’t balk at playing chauffeur to them, despite Nala Chang’s youth and gender. Josh had known other agents from Merritt’s era who would not have behaved so professionally, so the guy got points for that.
“The state police have agreed to let you guys set up shop in their Bangor barracks,” Agent Merritt said as he put the black sedan in gear, “but I assume you want to talk to the TSA folks on-site before we head over there?”
“We do,” Chang agreed. “Have they turned anything up while we were in transit?”
Agent Merritt drove alongside the domestic terminal, the vehicle eyed warily by an airport security agent standing by a car parked between two gates. Like all U.S. airports, Bangor International had a contingent of TSA agents on staff, screening bags and passengers and overseeing security. A typical map of the airport would show gates and restaurants and shops and checkpoints, but not the hidden rooms in which TSA personnel monitored the comings and goings of passengers and staff. There were other rooms as well, where people were detained and questioned, and sometimes searched.
Josh had done his homework. The Bangor P.D. maintained a small storefront in a corner of the domestic terminal, but while the local police would field complaints and help passengers as much as they could—mostly dealing with theft—nearly everything that affected security fell within the TSA’s purview. Tracking murderers with potential terrorist connections had to be pretty high on their list of priorities, but that hadn’t stopped the guy from getting on a p
lane in Florida and getting off in Bangor. Josh figured their suspect must be on a no-fly list under another name—maybe a lot of other names—but his picture hadn’t set off any alarms.
All of that would change now. No way was this guy getting on another commercial plane in the United States. But that wasn’t going to help them find the missing newborn.
Merritt pulled the car up to a nondescript door flanked by armed TSA agents. These guys were not baggage screeners. They were the rarely seen part of the Transportation Security Administration—the ones who handled the enforcement elements of the job. But Josh wasn’t paying much attention to the guards. His mind was on the mother and father at Acadia Hospital in Bangor whose infant had been taken from them at the very moment they were to begin life as a family.
“I don’t know their names,” he said.
Agent Merritt turned off the engine and opened his door, either not having heard him or correctly presuming the words hadn’t been meant for him. Chang turned in her seat.
“What?”
Josh looked at her. “The parents—the people whose baby this asshole took. I don’t know their names.”
Chang frowned. For a second Josh thought it was disapproval, but then he realized that she had momentarily forgotten their names herself.
“Kowalik,” she said at last. “The last name is Kowalik. The father is Richard, I think. The mother is Farah. That one I’m sure of.”
“What about the baby?”
A glimmer of pain flickered across Chang’s eyes. “They’d narrowed it down, but as of when I talked to Bangor P.D. before the flight, they hadn’t agreed on a name yet.”
Josh felt a fresh wave of hatred. The bastard had stolen a baby so new to the world that her parents hadn’t even had time to decide on a name. Kowalik, he thought, committing the name to memory. Richard and Farah.
A Transportation Security Officer awaited them just inside the door. Lost in his own thoughts, Josh followed Chang and Merritt as the TSO led them through a long corridor, through two sets of locked doors, down another corridor, and into a room where monitoring equipment hummed quietly. Screens revealed live images from various security checkpoints and entrances in the airport, empty gates, and people waiting in chairs for their morning flights. Officers on monitor duty sat at several different stations, watching it all unfold, but Josh’s attention was drawn to the rear of the room, where a Maine State Police lieutenant stood with a fortyish, hawk-nosed man in a suit. The cop and the hawk were looking over the shoulders of a young Latina in the TSA uniform as she worked the controls at her station, running back and forth through a particular piece of video surveillance.
The hawk in the suit glanced up at them, muttered something to the cop, and walked over to greet them.
“Agents,” he said, holding out a hand, aiming directly at Josh. “Alfred DeLisle. Federal security director.” That meant DeLisle was the top TSA official at the airport, but he spent his days supervising the supervisors, distant from the actual work being done by his people.
Josh shook DeLisle’s hand, but narrowed his eyes. “Josh Hart, ICD. But you really want to speak to Agent Chang.”
DeLisle glanced irritably at Merritt, as if blaming the local FBI agent for not giving him enough information to avoid looking foolish. Then he smiled at Chang and shook her hand, as well, as if he hadn’t just insulted her by assuming Josh was in charge.
“Agent Chang,” DeLisle said. “We’re at your service. Whatever you need.”
Chang shook his hand, behaving as if she hadn’t noticed the insult. “What can you tell us about the suspect’s arrival in Bangor, Mr. DeLisle?”
DeLisle flinched at the word mister, probably offended at not being called “Director DeLisle”—or whatever he thought his proper title might be—but they weren’t here to assuage egos.
“Well, your people gave us a fairly narrow window to search,” DeLisle replied. “We examined video from all arrivals originating from the southeastern United States, beginning with yesterday morning and ending thirty minutes before the kidnapping from Acadia Hospital. I had three teams on it, but once we found what we were looking for, I sent them home.”
It grated on Josh a little, the way DeLisle kept saying “we,” as though he had done any of the work himself.
“What have you got?” Chang asked.
“He arrived shortly before eleven a.m. yesterday on a flight from Fort Myers, traveling on a Florida driver’s license.”
“Name?” Josh asked.
DeLisle pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and read what he’d scribbled there. “Jamil Nassif.”
Chang glanced at Josh. “Sounds Saudi, but that means nothing. It’s got to be an alias.”
“No doubt,” Josh replied.
Agent Merritt had been listening to all of this in silence. “I don’t get it. Why would this guy fly from Tampa to steal some random baby?”
“That’s the question we need to answer,” Josh replied. It wasn’t Merritt’s fault that he was playing catch-up.
DeLisle gestured toward the monitoring station where the state cop still loomed over the young Latina.
“I’ve had the video edited together. Come have a look at your suspect. There’s no question it’s the same guy from the hospital kidnapping.”
They gathered together around the monitor and watched it all unfurl on-screen. The man calling himself Jamil Nassif had been flying coach, so he emerged from the gangway amidst a cluster of other people. He wore blue jeans and hiking boots and a white cotton shirt. Though he needed a shave, he was otherwise neatly groomed. His luggage was a small black carry-on suitcase, unobtrusively ordinary.
“Obviously, Nassif had gone through security at the time of his departure from Fort Myers,” DeLisle said as they watched the man in the white shirt make his way from the gate, through the terminal, and then out the door toward where taxis waited for arriving passengers.
“We get it,” Chang said. “Domestic passengers don’t get a lot of attention when they’re arriving. Why would they? You’re not on the hook for this, Mr. DeLisle. But he’s going to leave Bangor at some point, and if he tries to do it through this airport—”
“We’ll detain him,” DeLisle said quickly.
Chang nodded. “And don’t be gentle about it.”
As the tech ran the footage again, Josh studied the suspect closely. He moved with a calm determination. He knew precisely why he was in Bangor and what he had planned. A sick feeling uncoiled itself in Josh’s gut—a cold certainty that they would never find the Kowalik baby, or if they did, the child would already be dead. He shuddered, watching the impassive face of the killer as he exited the terminal.
“There must be a camera outside, picking up the taxi stand,” he said.
The state police lieutenant, who had been silent thus far, grunted in agreement. “You’d think. But they relocated the taxi line in the spring and haven’t gotten around to moving the camera.” The cop gave DeLisle an aggravated look. “As for the Amber Alert, it hasn’t turned up a damn thing yet, but I have people questioning all the cabbies who were on duty yesterday morning. At least we’ll be able to find out where he went from here. It’s just a matter of time.”
Time the Kowalik child doesn’t have, Josh thought. But he kept it to himself. These people were all doing their best.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Chang said. “Agent Merritt tells me you’re loaning us some space to work out of.”
“We’re setting up a command center for you, yeah,” the cop said. “It’s not much, but you’ll have secure computer access.”
“That’s great. Thanks.”
“Happy to do it,” the cop replied. “We’ll take all the help we can get on this one. I am curious, though. I mean, yes, if the guy takes the baby across state lines, kidnapping is a federal crime. But you’re not waiting for evidence of that to get involved.” He looked at Josh. “And Homeland Security … is this guy a terrorist or something?”
Josh looked at Chang, but she gave him a nod that indicated he should answer.
“Technically, we’re not supposed to answer that,” Josh said, looking at DeLisle and the tech before turning back to the cop. “And the truth is, we’re not one hundred percent certain what we’re dealing with yet. Whatever we find, though, you need to run it through Agent Chang and her supervisor before you discuss anything publicly.”
“Of course,” the lieutenant said, apparently irked that Josh felt the need to caution him. “I was just wondering. I mean, this sort of thing happens all the time. Not babies being snatched outside of hospitals, but kids being abducted. Parents snatch kids when they’re unhappy with court decisions about custody. Perverts and crazies steal them off the streets. At some point, I’d love to know what makes this case so special.”
So would we, Josh thought.
But the question stayed with him. Obviously the murders in Fort Myers and the baby-snatching in Bangor were connected by the suspect, this man who called himself “Jamil Nassif.” But what if the cop’s instincts were right and the fundamental similarity between the two—the children—was the more important connection? Was this actually about the kids? And what did the kids have in common?
Josh would have to ponder the question, but he knew that the place to begin answering it was Acadia Hospital, where Richard and Farah Kowalik were camped out, waiting for news of their stolen child.
Voss started Sunday morning with the biggest cup of iced coffee in the world—at least according to a poster in the window of the café—laced with a double shot of espresso. The night before had been a long one. The news had started running enhanced images of the two suspects who had approached the realtor to get a tour of the Greenlaws’ house. The murders at Manatee Village had become the hottest story of the current news cycle, and the media vultures were already picking at the bones. Voss knew it was their job, but somehow could never quite forgive them for the way they seemed to relish reporting the ugly news.