by Jeff Miller
“Thank you,” Dagny said, jotting down notes.
A girl raised her hand, and Dagny gestured to her. “Manny Oscar. He’s my cousin. Twenty-one. We haven’t heard from him in over a week, and we’re scared.”
Dagny nodded. “Anyone else?”
All of the kids put their hands in the air.
CHAPTER 18
Victor attacked the phones like Vladimir Horowitz at the piano or Bobby Fischer at a chessboard. The sequence was rote, but he performed it like a ballet, connecting the Cellebrite to the phone, sucking its information to an SD card, popping the card into the laptop, downloading the information to a folder, and then moving on to the next phone. Throughout it all, the redheaded boy wonder’s hands flitted effortlessly about buttons and ports and keystrokes.
“You’re good at this,” Diego said.
He laughed. “That’s funny, Father.”
“No, I’m serious. And please, call me Diego.”
“Of course, Father.”
Some people wouldn’t call a priest by his first name. “Are you Catholic, Victor?”
“Protestant.”
“And do you believe?”
Victor stopped for a moment and seemed to give the question some genuine contemplation. “I think so.” He returned his attention to the Cellebrite.
While the Cellebrite sucked data from each phone, Diego used the laptop to open the file folder from the previous one, identifying the owners’ names and phone numbers, and recording them in the notebook they’d started the previous night. Some of the names, he knew; most, he didn’t. He wasn’t even sure updating the notebook was helpful, but he had to do something besides sit there.
Victor’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen and said, “Hmmm.”
“What is it?”
“Dagny texted the phone number the unsub used to call The Hank Frank Show.”
“That seems promising,” Diego said. “I feel dumb asking, but what’s an unsub?”
“Unknown subject. Don’t feel dumb. I didn’t know what it meant until a few months ago.”
“So, you only recently became an agent?”
“Graduated from training at the beginning of the year.”
“And before that?”
“I worked for an accounting firm for three years out of school.”
“How did you end up working with Dagny?”
“Her boss told her she needed a partner. We were in the same counterterrorism class at the academy, and she picked me.”
“High praise.”
“No, the opposite,” Victor said. “She chose me because she thought I was incompetent.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, she knew what she was doing,” he replied.
“It seems like she always does. She’s kind of . . .” Diego searched for the right word.
“She’s amazing,” he said.
It was close enough. “Yes.”
By noon, they’d made their way through half of the phones. Diego jogged to the downtown Quiznos and picked up three sandwiches—the third at Victor’s request, just in case Dagny should arrive in time for lunch. She didn’t. By two, Victor was hungry again, so he raided Beamer’s pantry for some Fig Newtons, despite Diego’s efforts to prevent the foraging. Dagny’s sandwich, he noted, was still in its wrapper, but Victor refused to touch it.
At three, they were done, having downloaded the information contained on all but two incompatible phones of unusual make and vintage. Victor turned one of them on and dialed a number. His own phone rang. “Now we know the number.” Diego recorded the number in the notebook.
Victor picked up the last phone, turned it on, and dialed. When his phone buzzed, he started to hand it to Diego, but stopped when he saw the number on the screen. “Darn it!”
“What?”
“It’s the number Dagny texted me. The one the unsub used to call Hank Frank.”
Diego wrote the number in the notebook. “If the unsub had used his own phone, we could have tracked it, I guess, and maybe found him. But we can’t, because he used a victim’s phone.”
“Now you’re sounding like one of us. But what I really need is for you to sound like a priest.”
“What do you mean?
Victor picked up one of the unidentified phones and navigated through the menu screens until he found a call history. “If we call the most-dialed number, the person on the other end will be able to tell us whose phone it is.”
“Yes.” That made sense.
“But when they see what number is calling them, they’re going to be excited, thinking that their loved one is alive and calling them.”
Diego saw where this was going.
“So, when they realize you aren’t their loved one, they’re going to be devastated. Personally, I could never handle trying to help them through that. But a priest could.” He handed over the phone.
Diego scrolled through the calls and found a number that had been dialed several times a day. With some trepidation, he pressed the number.
The woman who answered said only one word—“Raul?”—but it was tinged with all kinds of anxious hope, love, and elation. She sounded young—a girlfriend or a wife, not a mother, Diego decided.
“This is Father Diego Vega,” he said in Spanish. “I’m helping with the investigation into the disappearance of a number of young men, and we found this phone and others. We’re hoping to get information about the owners of these phones. I take it that this one belongs to someone named Raul?”
There was silence at the end of the line, and then the kind of sobbing that suggested the woman hadn’t heard anything other than the sound of his voice and the fact that he wasn’t Raul.
“We are doing our best to find these young men, but to do this, we’ll need all the information we can get. What can you tell me about Raul?”
“What can you tell me, Father?”
“I can tell you that the only thing I care about is finding these boys. But I need your help.”
The sobbing slowed. “His name is Raul Nieto. He is twenty-three. We are engaged. My name is Anita Gordillo. I haven’t seen or heard from Raul in twelve days. He went to look for work and never came back. I’ve called his phone a thousand times, and there was never any answer.”
He placed his hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Victor. “What else do I need to ask?”
“Physical description. Address. Friends and family. Where he went to look for work.”
He asked for each of these and more, taking down detailed notes. When he finished, he thanked her for her time.
A sense of relief poured over him when he hung up the phone. “You did great,” Victor said.
“I survived.”
Diego picked up the second phone and called the number most dialed. A man answered the phone, again with excitement and joy, only to descend into tears as Diego explained the situation. “Antonio Perez,” the man said, identifying his son. Diego wrote it in the notebook.
They had names for all of the phones. They had downloaded data from almost all of them.
“What now?” Diego said.
“We need a way to put it all together.”
CHAPTER 19
Twenty-eight years ago, the thin man smoked what he thought was his last cigarette on the front steps of the Bilford County Hospital, while his father lay dying inside of lung cancer. The old man had been terrible to him, beating him for small infractions, leaving for months at a time without notice or explanation. But after the doctor had given him the prognosis, he’d been a different man. Warm and affectionate. Patient and understanding. Seeking forgiveness. Maybe he was trying to make himself right with the Lord.
There was no Lord, but the thin man gave his father forgiveness, anyway. The old man had won $120,000 from a scratch-off lottery ticket the week before his diagnosis. It was easy to forgive the dying rich. Forgiving the living poor—that was hard.
Standing on the hospital steps, the thin man smoked the cigarett
e down to a stub, dropped it to the concrete, and headed back to the old man’s room. His father’s eyes opened when he walked through the door. The old man looked terrible—tubes running to his nose and into his arms. He was thinner than the thin man for the first time in his adult life. Motioning with his hand, he drew his son to the side of the bed.
The thin man pulled up a chair and put his hand on his father’s. The father smiled, and a tear rolled down his cheek. “Promise me two things, son.”
“What, Dad?”
“Promise to be a good man, because I wasn’t. And promise me you’ll never smoke again.”
He nodded.
“I need you to say it.”
“I promise, Dad.” He said it because you gave the dying what they wanted, so long as it didn’t cost anything. Promises were free.
They sat together in silence for the rest of the day, and the thin man watched the life drain from his father. By dusk, the doctors pronounced the old man dead. The thin man asked them for one last moment with his father, and when they left, he used the phone in the room to call his father’s lawyer to find out about the will. It had only taken a couple of hours to break his first promise.
He kept the second promise for twenty-eight years—not to honor his father, but because he didn’t want to die weak and weepy like his dad. Once he started killing the Mexicans, though, he knew he’d never make it to lung cancer, so a pack of Camels seemed like a good idea. One pack led to two, which led to two a day.
Climbing into his pickup, he pulled a new pack from his pocket. Grabbing the ribbon, he tore the cellophane, withdrew a cigarette, and set it in his mouth. He lit a match and brought a flame to the cig. Drawing a deep breath, he leaned back and smiled. It felt like he was young again.
Anderson Demolition was six hours and two states away from Bilford, Ohio, but the thin man liked it that way. The demolition company had gone bankrupt because people only destroyed buildings if they wanted to build new ones, and no one was building much of anything these days. While a trustee sorted through Anderson’s debts, the company’s inventory of supplies sat there, ready for the taking by anyone who could jump a fence and pry a window. The thin man could do both, and he did.
He was never one to keep a job, and that served him well; he learned to do a lot of different things. Over the years, he had learned to fix motel toilets, recruit laborers, maintain foreclosed properties, and bring down a building or two. He wandered among the shelves of materials, scrutinizing them with an educated eye. Putty, wire, powder, and a handful of digital timers, triggers, and remotes—he took more than he would need, just in case he ever needed to do it again, and slipped out the window. Climbing into his pickup, he dropped the materials into the passenger seat, lit another cigarette, and started back for Ohio.
There was an elegant way to take something down—an artistry, actually. A careful and choreographed implosion would leave the least scatter of debris and the smallest cloud of dust. That wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted nothing less than a volcanic eruption. There would be nothing elegant about this explosion. It would be all fireworks, no ballet.
Material on hand, now he needed the fuel. Outside of Dayton, he spied a place called Canter’s Gas, right off the highway, all by itself. He pulled up to a pump, swiped Guillermo Bespa’s credit card through the machine, and popped the diesel dispenser into the first of the six metal barrels in the back of his pickup.
When the barrel was half filled, the pump shut off—he had reached the credit card transaction limit. The thin man swiped another card. He had at least fifty of them, pilfered from various victims of his spree. Each barrel took two dead men’s cards.
By the time he was filling the fifth barrel, the gas station clerk was watching through the window. The thin man nodded toward him, the way someone would nod if he were up to nothing. The clerk did not nod back.
He switched pumps for the last barrel—gasoline this time, because it was a better explosive and would help get the show started. As he stuck the pump into the barrel, the clerk came out of the store and walked toward him. He was a small guy with some stubble around his chin that he probably called a goatee. “How you doing today?” the clerk asked, studying the barrels in the back of the thin man’s truck.
The thin man grinned. “I ain’t never been better in my whole life.”
“Looks like you need a lot of gas today. Mind if I ask what for?”
“Fleet of tractors at the farm. Like to keep a supply on hand.”
“I hear you.” The clerk circled around the back of the truck, looking at the barrels. “Not sure these meet the regulations for transport. That’s an awful lot of fuel to be hauling around back here.”
“Ain’t never had trouble with them before.”
The clerk nodded, then circled back around the truck. On the way, he glanced down at the license plate, pausing long enough, it seemed, to remember it. It was an unfortunate glance. Now the thin man would have to do something about it.
He looked at the name tag on the clerk’s shirt. “You worried about regulations, Tim?” He lifted a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and popped it into his mouth.
“You can’t smoke here.”
He lit a match and brought it to his cigarette. He inhaled, then blew out a puff of smoke. “Looks like I can, Tim.”
“You can’t smoke by the gas pumps, sir! I need you to put it out.”
“Okay,” he said. He pulled the pump out of the barrel and turned the spout toward the clerk, squeezed the handle, and sprayed gasoline all over him.
“Jesus! Are you—”
The thin man flicked his cigarette onto the clerk and waited for him to ignite. Nothing happened.
“Are you crazy!” the clerk shouted.
Nothing was easy. The thin man reached into his truck, pulled out his gun, and shot the clerk. He doused the body with more fuel and replaced the pump. With a flick of his wrist, he lit a match and dropped it onto the body. The flame extinguished before it landed.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” The thin man lit another match, shielded it with his hands, and touched it to the clerk’s wet pants. The flame took.
It seemed like a good time to leave, so he climbed into his truck and drove. He was a couple hundred yards away when he saw a flash of light in his rearview mirror, followed quickly by a loud boom. The entire station had exploded. This was a good thing, he decided. All his fingerprints at the pump would be gone. If there were any security cameras, the tape would be destroyed. Maybe they’d chalk the whole thing up to an accident—a clerk who had smoked too close to the pumps or something. Maybe they wouldn’t even find the bullet.
He stopped at the first McDonald’s, bought himself a celebratory Big Mac, and savored it on the ride back. It was a big moment for him. He’d killed an American citizen—his first.
Not, he expected, his last.
CHAPTER 20
Dagny hadn’t yet stepped down to the basement floor when Victor shoved a Quiznos Honey Bourbon Chicken sandwich into her hand. Six hundred calories and fifteen points on the Weight Watchers scale. She opened one end of the wrapper and took a bite. It was cold, which was fine. The taste didn’t matter; she needed the numbers.
“Tell me good news,” she said.
“We were able to download all the phones but two, and we’ve used the call history of those to identify their owners,” Victor replied.
“You dialed them?”
“Diego did.”
It was a breach of any number of protocols, but they’d already broken so many rules, it hardly seemed to matter. She looked over at the priest, who slouched in a chair, lost in thought. She worried about the toll the case was taking on him.
“You okay?”
He nodded, but it wasn’t reassuring.
“We’ve got a ton of data for the phones,” Victor said, “but it hasn’t been synthesized. We need to put it all together, see how it all relates.”
She took another bite of her sandwich. Even w
ith all these calories, she’d need to eat another entire meal before the end of the day. The thought depressed her. “The Bureau has software that will take all the information from the phones and plot it on a chronological map,” she said. “Each phone will be an icon, and we can watch them move on the map over time.”
“Yes, but it’s not very reliable, and to get the software, I’d have to reach out to the Computer Analysis Response Team, or the Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory for the Miami Valley. But we can’t do that, right? Because neither of us is supposed to be working this case.”
He was right, of course. Being off the reservation made things difficult. It was a catch-22. They needed to find the bodies in order to get the resources necessary to find the bodies.
“What about commercial software?”
“There isn’t a program out there that can do what we want,” he said. “So, we’re going to make one.”
Dagny smiled. “How?”
“A contest.”
She had worked with a lot of agents who were good at articulating reasons why they couldn’t do what needed to be done. Victor was the rare partner who solved problems. “Let me guess. Colleges?”
“MIT and Caltech. Twenty-four hours to deliver the best product.”
“Starting when?”
“About an hour ago.”
She looked at her watch. It was six o’clock. In twenty-three long hours, they would be able to replay the movements of eighty missing men. “Winner gets?”
“Bragging rights and a shout-out in the press release when the case is closed.”
“If we solve this case, you and I won’t even get a shout-out in the press release.”
Victor laughed at this, but Diego remained quiet and numb. She sat down next to him and searched for some words of uplift.
“The worst part of this job is notifying a family member that something has happened to a loved one,” she said.