Patrick Bowers 08 - Every Crooked Path

by Steven James

  In essence, it was a home base, one that the researchers theorized optimized the proximity of the seals as well as the distance from other predators and likelihood of capture rates for finding the seals.

  And they’re not the only predatory species to do that. Many hunt in ways that appear to be random but aren’t random at all.

  Research has shown that the same is true for serial offenders—rapists, burglars, killers, arsonists. They base their movement around one of their activity nodes, typically their residence or work location.

  Animal predators.

  Human predators.

  Similar hunting patterns.

  And there’s a good reason for that, one that’s easy to overlook: when we talk about the animal kingdom, we’re also talking about the human kingdom. Obviously, we are animals. Whether we’re also something more than animals is a question philosophers and theologians have debated for centuries.

  No doubt that was an important question, maybe the most important one of all, but one I knew I wasn’t going to be able to answer at the moment.

  Right now I wondered if the findings on patterns of predatory and stalking behavior would apply in this series of kidnappings as well.

  I pulled up the information on the four missing children and began to study the data through the lens of a predator looking for his prey.

  +++

  Lily had never picked a lock before and it didn’t seem like she was making any progress. She wasn’t sure how long it should take, or if she was doing it right, but it hadn’t worked yet and she was getting frustrated.

  She kept trying different ways of positioning the end of the clasp and jiggling it around inside the keyhole, but the mechanism in the padlock didn’t respond.

  Also, she didn’t want to stay sitting with her back to the camera for too long for fear that if someone was watching her they might get suspicious and come check on her. So she would work at the lock for a little while, then stretch, pace, curse, cry, all the while pretending for the camera that she was desperate and hopeless.

  Acting.

  Yes.

  Starring in a role that her life depended on her getting just right.

  +++

  I was analyzing what I knew about the movement patterns and activity nodes of Stewart and Wooford and thinking about the shark research when dispatch called me.

  A valet at a condo on the Upper West Side had reported that a woman “may have been in trouble last night,” that he thought someone might have been trying to abduct her.

  It was all vague and didn’t really have the ring of urgency you would think something like that would have.

  Normally the NYPD wouldn’t have had any reason to let me know about a routine, possibly crank, call like this, but the location was close enough to the Brilington Towers that it raised a red flag for someone at dispatch, and I was glad it did.

  The third night in a row. The same vicinity. Timing and location. Something worth looking into.

  I thanked the librarian, assured her I would keep reading this summer, something all librarians like to hear, and left for the condo.

  30

  I arrived just as the two officers who’d initially responded were leaving. They informed me that they’d questioned the young male valet who’d called 911 and found nothing they deemed important or suspicious.

  I accepted that but wanted to hear the details from the source.

  The valet told me that his name was Joe. He didn’t give me a last name. Clean-cut. Stylish glasses. A slight stutter as he spoke. He seemed nervous when I told him I was with the FBI.

  I asked him, “If there was a woman in trouble last night, why did you wait until now to call it in?”

  “I did call last night, but whoever was there at the police department didn’t think it was anything big and told me not to worry about it.”

  “So you followed up today?”

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Okay, tell me what happened.”

  “I told those cops already.”

  “I’m not those cops. I’m here, I’m listening. Tell me.”

  “Well, this couple came in and I parked his Benz. Nothing weird, right? But when they came back out a couple of hours later, he was helping her, you know, like she was drunk or something. But I’ve seen a lot of drunk people. She didn’t seem drunk.”

  “So, drugs?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. Maybe. But as I opened the door for her, she turned and looked at me and I swear she said, ‘Please.’ It was something about the way she said it, like she was pleading for her life. And . . . she was dressed up like a cheerleader.”

  “A cheerleader?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen that guy a few times before. He always brings in different women. Some of them look really young—one time I thought it was maybe his daughter. Anyway, this lady last night—dude, I don’t know, she just looked scared.” He was rubbing his fingers together nervously. “I should go. My boss is probably wondering why I’m not working.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll talk with him if you need me to. Focus here: the other women this man has been with, were they drunk or drugged or anything when he left with them?”

  “Nothing like this. No.”

  He paused.

  “What else?”

  “It’s sorta weird. I mean, it’s probably nothing.”

  I liked it when people used that phrase. It usually meant something helpful was about to come next.

  “What was probably nothing?” I asked.

  “One time when I was parking his car I saw a mask on the floor in the front seat on the passenger side.”

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  “A mask?”

  “A white one. Plain. Sort of like something from The Phantom of the Opera—except this was a full mask. It would’ve covered your whole face. It’s just that it kind of freaked me out. I don’t even know why. It stuck with me. That’s about it. Otherwise, I don’t know. That guy was a good tipper. I know that.”

  “Describe him—height, race, age, hair color. What did you notice?”

  “I don’t know. I mean he seemed kind of normal-looking. Around forty or forty-five, somewhere in there, I guess. Maybe younger. About my height.”

  That would put him at about five-eleven or six feet.

  “He was white,” Joe added. “Nothing else, really, that I know of.”

  “No visible scars, tattoos, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Facial hair? Glasses?”

  “No.”

  I studied the area. “You guys have security camera coverage of the front of this building, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Take me to your boss.”

  +++

  Joe’s supervisor was a balding man who sighed a lot and kept rubbing the back of his neck like he had a knot in it that he was trying to press out.

  He was a little reluctant to help me, but I could tell he also didn’t want to get in the way of an active investigation and after I explained that his cameras might have captured footage of a woman’s abduction, he took me to their security center.

  I reviewed the footage from last night at the time when Joe told me the couple had left.

  It didn’t take long to find them.

  Their faces were turned away from the camera, but it was clear that he was helping her to the car, supporting her weight. When he was retrieving his key from Joe, it appeared that their height was indeed similar.

  The angle of the car wasn’t right for me to see the plates and I “rewound” the footage—a term that makes absolutely no sense when you’re dealing with digital videos—to when the unknown man dropped off the vehicle earlier in the evening.

  I still couldn’t see his face.

 
That told me three things.

  First, he was aware of where the cameras were and knew which way to turn his head to avoid them.

  Second, he didn’t want to be seen.

  Third, he was brazen, since he came in here despite the cameras.

  This time I was able to read the New Jersey plates.

  I ran them and the owner came up as Ivan Romanoff of 1607 Bradley Road, Princeton, New Jersey. When I showed Romanoff’s DMV driver’s license photo to Joe, he shook his head. “No. That’s not him.”

  There was also footage of the man and the woman entering the lobby, but his face was turned once again away from the camera as he crossed toward the elevator bay.

  The two of them stepped onto an elevator and from there, even though I scanned the different floors, there wasn’t any footage of them leaving it.

  When I asked Joe’s neck-scratching supervisor about it, he explained that there wasn’t any footage of the penthouse suite. “The owners prefer their privacy.”

  “Can you get me up there?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Wait. I’m sorry about that.”

  “About what?”

  “I should have put it this way: I need to have a look up there. Let’s go.”

  +++

  Lily was focused on trying to pick the lock when she heard the rumble of the garage door in the house above her.

  A car drove in, then the garage door shut again. Car doors opened, closed.

  She waited, her heart thundering in her chest.

  They’re coming for you. What are they going to do?

  They’re going to check on you.

  Hide the clip.

  Pretending she was scratching her leg, she slipped the clip into her sock and strained her ears to discern how many people were entering the house. She knew she needed to get the padlock open, but if they were watching the video of her, she wasn’t going to be able to do that.

  “I’ll be back in a few,” one man said. Someone else muttered an indistinguishable reply.

  Maybe they’ve been watching you. They know you’re trying to get out.

  A door inside the house slammed and then heavy footsteps pounded on the floorboards above her.

  No, no, no. The man who took you. He’s here.

  You need to get out. Now.

  But how?

  You have—

  Then she heard someone crying out and what might have been the sound of feet kicking the floor.

  They have someone. They have someone else!

  But the cries didn’t sound like those of a woman.

  “Stop it, you’re hurting me!” It sounded like a boy. Maybe eight or nine years old.

  A gruff male voice rebuked him. “Shut up or we’ll put you in the dark place like we did last week. You remember that place? What happened down there?”

  The boy stopped crying out.

  “You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  Lily heard a faint “No.”

  “Alright, then.”

  You need to do something. You need to help him.

  Her first instinct was to call out to reassure the boy or to shout threats against the men, but given her situation, it would have been stupid and useless to do either, and thankfully she caught herself before making a sound.

  The best way to help the boy, the only way, was to get that lock picked.

  +++

  In the bedroom of the penthouse suite, I found three marks in the carpet in a triangular pattern pointing toward the bed.

  I’d seen this type of thing before.

  They were made by a tripod stand.

  If this guy brought women here a lot, it might explain why the marks were still visible now, even after the tripod had been moved.

  But Joe hadn’t mentioned the guy leaving with one, so where was it?

  I searched the place and found it in a hallway closet with a mask beside it on the floor.

  The camera was gone.

  I got on the phone with Jodie, told her where I was and what I’d discovered. “I want to know who owns this condo and if it’s the same guy who owns that Benz.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “And get a Crime Scene Unit over here.”

  “On it.”

  “Joe, the valet, mentioned that the guy has been here before. Have an officer cross-check Joe’s work schedule with the video surveillance footage to see if this guy brought any other women over here who ended up on our missing persons list afterward.”

  +++

  After returning to the security room, I studied the footage again but wasn’t able to take anything else away from it.

  Wondering if the car’s owner, Ivan Romanoff, was connected with Stewart, I went to the case files and searched for his name on Stewart’s email list.

  Nothing.

  But when I went through Stewart’s contacts list, I found one for Ivan_r@inova8investments.com.

  There wasn’t any mobile number listed.

  It only took a few minutes of research to find that Romanoff had grown up as a trust fund baby and was an exec at his uncle’s investment firm.

  The trust fund part might explain how he could afford a Benz and a condo in this price range.

  I checked the time, then analyzed Romanoff’s Princeton address in relation to the abduction sites and the children’s residences, and it came up as a possible location in the hot zone for the abductor’s home base.

  Nothing certain, but the computer program I used told me there was a sixty-two percent probability for that part of New Jersey being the point of origin for the crime spree.

  In other words, if these four missing children really were linked, which the email subscription list seemed to indicate, Romanoff was looking good for this.

  Jodie sent me a text confirming that the condo was also in his name.

  That gave me some arrows to follow.

  Arrows lead to answers.

  There wasn’t enough to bring Romanoff in, but there was enough to justify having a chat with him.

  I asked Jodie to pull up what she could on him while I left to drive to his house.

  +++

  Things had been quiet upstairs for a while now and Lily was worried about the boy. However, calling out to him would only draw attention to her, and if the men came down here, they might find the hair clip, and then she would have no way of escaping, no way of helping the boy.

  Their best hope was for her to get out of here and find help.

  As she worked on the lock, she heard a television come on somewhere on the other side of the house, and then, just barely, through a vent about fifteen feet away, she heard the sound of the boy crying.

  31

  As I drove toward Ivan Romanoff’s New Jersey home, Jodie gave me an update on him: Forty-one. Single. Twice divorced. No kids. His money came from his family, not from his work ethic.

  Jodie had called in to see if Romanoff was at his office, but they said he hadn’t been in yet today. “They told me he keeps his own hours,” she informed me.

  “I’ll bet he does.”

  +++

  The boy would sob for a while, then stop, then start again.

  Hearing him cry like that was hard on Lily, especially since she wasn’t able to do anything to help him.

  The television cut off.

  The floorboards above her must have been pretty thin, or there wasn’t insulation, because she could hear two men speaking in the room that sounded like it was at the top of the steps.

  “We should drug him.”

  “They want him awake and alert when it happens. They’ll be logging on in about twenty minutes. Have you checked the video feed yet?”

  “You mean of our girl downstairs?”

  “Yes.”


  “Naw. Not yet.” This man sounded like he was from the Bronx. The other, Middle Eastern. Neither of them sounded anything like the man who’d called himself Shane.

  “Go peek in on her. See how our little honey’s doing. She should be awake by now for sure,” the Middle Eastern man said.

  “‘The kidnapped cheerleader.’ I think it’s gonna be a popular one.”

  You need to hurry, Lily. You need to get out of here!

  The door at the top of the stairs opened and a chunky, unkempt man shambled down the steps.

  She backed up against the wall and shivered from fear. It wasn’t just acting.

  He smirked at her and rested his heavy hands on his wide hips. “Hello, Lily.”

  Then he came toward her and she raised her hand to slap him, but he stopped her by grabbing her forearm. She spit at his face and he shoved her back against the wall.

  He wiped the spittle off his cheek. “Just wait ’til you see what we have planned for you. I don’t think you’ll feel quite so spunky then.”

  He grunted once, then returned upstairs.

  Lily waited a few minutes to make sure he wasn’t going to come back down, then turned her back to the camera and desperately probed the padlock’s keyhole with the wire of the hair clip.

  And without any warning, almost as if it’d been waiting for her desperation to reach a certain level, the mechanism inside the padlock clicked and the shackle snapped out of the body of the lock.

  It took her by surprise and she stared at the lock for a long moment before it registered that it was open.

  Yes, yes, yes.

  You’re free.

  Frantically, she removed the lock and was about to unloop the chain from her leg and run up the stairs when she realized that as soon as she did that, whoever was watching through the video camera would see that she’d left the mattress.

  Think this through.

  Maybe there’s no one watching it right now. Maybe they’re just recording you.

  The boy upstairs cried out again.