False Positive

by Andrew Grant

  “Could be. We are near the airport. Want me to check?”

  “That’s OK.” Devereaux squeezed the Charger through a pair of bollards at the side of the street and onto a patch of rough, weed-strewn ground. “I’ll just head on in. Buy a pound or two of lobster. Ask a couple questions.”

  “You can’t, Cooper!” Loflin grabbed his arm. “Carver’s in the wind, and if this is his place, we’re raiding it on Thursday. If you go in now, you could screw everything up.”

  “Finding something that leads us to Ethan is way more important than some future raid.” Devereaux pulled himself free. “You heard the lieutenant. Do whatever’s necessary.”

  “This is wrong.” Loflin took hold of the armrest as if she was afraid that Devereaux would drag her out of the car. “I’m staying here. I want no part of it.”

  —

  Devereaux walked back toward the building and saw it was formed from two matching units joined together at the center. They had brick walls that were twelve feet tall, and curving corrugated steel roofs that more than doubled their height. The bricks were in poor condition. Much of the mortar was loose, and large patches of the dull brown paint that covered the metalwork were peeling badly.

  Devereaux followed the wall until he found a door with a tiny, faded sign, which read Reception. Please Ring Bell. Devereaux pressed the button, and while he was waiting for a response, his phone rang.

  “Detective Devereaux?” The civilian aide sounded harried. “What do you want me to do? Two of Ethan Crane’s teachers have called. The mother of one of his friends has, as well. They found the cards that the uniforms left for them. Do I schedule a time for them to come in? Or do you want to interview them at their homes?”

  “Neither.” Devereaux tried the handle to the door, but it was locked. “That ship’s sailed. Just call them back and thank them for their time.”

  Devereaux shoved the phone back in his pocket and rang the bell again. Still no one answered. To the right, a security camera had been mounted on the wall. It was eight feet from the ground.

  Only eight feet. That kind of sloppy setup was practically an invitation. Devereaux slipped off his jacket and hung it over the camera. Took out an expired credit card he carried specially for this kind of occasion. Used it to ease open the door. Retrieved his jacket. And stepped inside.

  The reception area was square, around ten feet by ten. The right-hand side housed a table and an immense, battered wooden counter. The foot-square marble-effect vinyl tiles on the floor were pale from excessive scrubbing, and there was a tank against the left-hand wall. It was home to half a dozen frisky lobsters, each with bright blue elastic bands around its claws. Straight ahead two perforated metal shelves, like the kind people have in their garages, were set on either side of a doorway. The shelves held an array of bizarre seafood memorabilia—stuffed animals, fish-themed board games, lobster-shaped cookie jars, crab tea-light holders—and the doorway was hung with broad multi-colored plastic strips to keep flies from getting through. The place was filled with a powerful smell of fish, so Devereaux figured there must be at least some legitimate seafood business going on in there.

  Devereaux picked up a cuddly lobster from the top shelf and pushed his way through the plastic strips, holding the bright red toy in front of him like he was looking for a clerk to help him make a purchase. The doorway led to a storage and sorting room. It felt several degrees colder than the reception area. Three walls were covered with modular industrial shelving, and a roll-up metal door was set into the fourth. It was closed. The floor space was big enough for a forklift truck to operate in, and Devereaux estimated that three-quarters of the shelves’ capacity was taken up with cardboard boxes. They were all the same size. He took one down at random and opened it. Inside, along with an extra large cold pack, was a pair of groggy two-pound lobsters.

  Devereaux worked his way along the shelves, looking out for any irregularities in the boxes. At the far end, the shelves on the right-hand wall stopped three feet shy of the corner of the room. As he moved closer, Devereaux saw that this was to allow space for another door. He tried the handle. It was locked, but with a little attention from the pick he routinely carried on his key ring, Devereaux had it open within twenty seconds.

  The door led to a corridor that ran the whole length of the other half of the warehouse. There were three rooms on each side, with staggered entrances so that people rushing out of them wouldn’t run into one another. Devereaux looked into the first one. It was a storeroom, crammed with folded-down cardboard boxes, stacks of glossy catalogs, and giant sacks full of unrefrigerated cold packs.

  The next room was a kitchen. Its end wall was kitted out with basic cupboards and drawers in some kind of fake reddish wood, a length of battered melamine countertop, a scratched stainless steel sink, a small microwave oven, and a coffee machine, which was hissing and gurgling as it completed its brew.

  But Devereaux hardly noticed any of those things.

  Because there was a woman’s body lying in the middle of the floor.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Sunday. Afternoon.

  Ethan missing for forty-four and a half hours

  The woman looked young, maybe in her late teens.

  She was extremely thin. Scantily clad. She had tall black pumps on her feet. And a plastic Walgreens carrier bag pulled tight over her head.

  Devereaux could see that she wasn’t breathing, but he dropped the toy lobster and checked for a carotid pulse, anyway. He didn’t find one. He took a close-up with his phone, loosened the bag, and pulled it up gently over the dead woman’s forehead. He’d expected to see the aftereffects of suffocation—blue lips, extended tongue, bulging eyeballs—but the woman’s face was flawless. Beautiful, even. It was as if she were just in a deep sleep.

  The only unusual aspect was the way her head seemed to be tipped slightly back. Devereaux rolled her partly onto her side, and he saw why that was. The back of her skull had been caved in. She must have died somewhere else—maybe in Florida, or in a truck on the way to Birmingham—and been stored here awaiting disposal. That would explain the lack of blood. The bag must have been to contain any other trace evidence—hairs, splinters of bone, chunks of brain matter—and stop it from leaving a trail back to Carver.

  Devereaux was already halfway to his feet when he heard the tell-tale click of a switchblade opening. He spun around and saw a figure standing in the corridor, looking in. A man. He was wearing a blue suit with a white shirt and striped tie. His black Oxford shoes were brightly polished, and there was a blob of mud on the left toe-cap. He had a diamond stud in his left ear. And a knife in his right hand, low down at his side.

  The man stared at Devereaux for ten seconds, then raised his knife. He touched it against the pad of his left index finger and nodded as if he was satisfied with its sharpness.

  “Sean Carver?” Calm clarity flooded through Devereaux’s body and he adjusted his feet, ready to react if the man rushed him.

  The man didn’t respond.

  “Please.” Devereaux pointed down at the woman’s body. “Tell me you did this.”

  The man continued to stare at Devereaux. Then in one fluid motion he spun the knife around so he was holding it by the blade and bent his elbow, ready for the throw. Devereaux braced himself, preparing to dive out of the way. The man’s arm started to move, but then his body lurched to the side. Devereaux registered the sound of a gunshot. The man jerked twice more. There were two more bangs. Then the knife hit the floor and the man slumped over sideways, with only his feet still visible through the doorway.

  Devereaux sprang forward, pressing himself against the wall and drawing his own gun. He held his breath, waiting for the shooter to appear.

  Instead, he heard a voice.

  “Cooper? Are you in there? Are you OK?”

  The voice was Loflin’s.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The woman loved the reality of the place. But she hated the name.

 
Business Center. Exactly how much business was being done in that airless basement room at the theme park hotel? Precisely none, was her guess. And there certainly shouldn’t be any. Parents were on vacation with their kids. They should be paying attention to their kids. How important did these people think they were? Their companies and practices and partnerships couldn’t survive a day or two without them? Over the weekend? If so, they hadn’t set them up very well. And given the way most of the children she’d seen were behaving, a little more parental supervision wouldn’t go amiss. A lot more supervision…

  On the other hand, free access to a room full of computers? All with high-speed Internet? And no one to keep records of who was using what? It was perfect. The ideal conditions for checking on her webcams.

  The boy would be going home, very soon, and she needed to check that everything was still the way it should be.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Sunday. Afternoon.

  Ethan missing for forty-five and a half hours

  “Do you want me to call my delegate?”

  On the surface, it was classic Devereaux. An early shot across the bows. A warning that any shit thrown in his direction would be returned, shovel for shovel. But on this occasion—forty-five minutes after leaving the seafood warehouse—he was just going through the motions. His mind was elsewhere. It had drifted away to his cabin. That’s where he wanted to be. Not in his captain’s office. Even if the guy had come in specially on a Sunday…

  “You’re a disgrace.” Captain Emrich was a year younger than Devereaux, and from the opposite end of pretty much every spectrum possible. “An embarrassment. A massive operation, totally screwed. Two states. Multiple agencies. Months of manpower. Tens of thousands of dollars. And what’s left to salvage? Squat. Have you got any idea how bad this makes us look?”

  Have you got any idea how little I care? Devereaux thought.

  “Detective Devereaux had a good reason to be surveilling those premises, sir.” Hale had shuffled her molded plywood chair a few inches closer to the captain’s steel-and-glass desk and was leaning a little to the side, as if she was trying to physically position herself between the two men. “We have the welfare of a missing seven-year-old child to consider.”

  “What about the welfare of the dozen women who were about to be herded here like cattle on Thursday?” Emrich balled up a piece of paper and flung it into the wire mesh trash can near the door. “And the methamphetamine that will now end up on the streets of Birmingham, instead of in the incinerator? How many lives do you suppose will be ruined by your little—”

  “I don’t know.” Devereaux couldn’t help himself this time. “How many?”

  “It was a rhetorical question. But this isn’t. Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t reactivate your suspension?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, I can give you one good reason.”

  “The detective’s unique insights have been critical in this case.” Hale glared at Devereaux, willing him to be quiet. “By removing him from the equation, the odds of us recovering the missing boy—Ethan Crane—would be seriously reduced. With that at the forefront of my mind, sir, along with the difficulty of explaining such a change in personnel to the press in the event of an unsuccessful outcome, I respectfully request you don’t go down that road.”

  Emrich picked up a tiny wooden rake and paused, holding it an inch above a miniature Japanese garden he kept at a forty-five-degree angle on the corner of his desk. He told people it had been presented to him by the chief of police in Hitachi after he’d been there on a six-month cultural exchange. Devereaux couldn’t have cared less about its origin. He was too busy wrestling the temptation to suggest that the captain should repurpose it. As a suppository.

  “All right, Lieutenant.” Emrich put the rake down without it touching a grain of gravel. “On your own head be it. But one more screwup, and I’ll be looking to fill two vacancies.”

  —

  Hale thanked Emrich and dragged Devereaux out of the office before he could open his mouth again.

  “Cooper, sometimes you’re your own worst enemy.” She led the way to the elevator lobby, and Devereaux noted how much plusher the carpet was on the fifth floor. How there were no scuffs or scrapes on the walls. “You know that, right?”

  Devereaux shrugged. He’d seen the likes of Emrich come, and he’d seen them go. Usually to resurface nearby, seeking elected office of some kind. Devereaux thought of them as pre-politicians. Which was the only thing worse than actual politicians, in his book, because there were more of them.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Sunday. Late Afternoon.

  Ethan missing for forty-six hours

  After the first three hundred feet, the route from police headquarters to the FBI field office was a straight shot up 18th Street. It was a hair over three-quarters of a mile. Three minutes in afternoon traffic. Devereaux would have preferred a fifteen-minute stroll in the fading sunshine to purge his system after the encounter with Emrich, but Hale insisted on taking the car.

  The field office reminded Devereaux of a Hampton Inn, and as they were clearing security he caught himself idly wondering if the FBI had used the same architect. Bruckner was waiting for them at the base of a scruffy palm in a giant pot at the center of the building’s sunny, circular atrium. He shook Hale’s and Devereaux’s hands. Led the way to the elevators. And two floors up, ushered them into a meeting room. Its air-conditioning was working overtime, and the place was freezing. Grandison was already there, wearing a navy-blue FBI windbreaker. He was waiting on his own at the far side of a square wooden table that had chairs for twenty.

  “Where’s Detective Loflin?” Grandison stood as the others walked in.

  “She’s not coming.” Hale took the seat nearest the door. “She’s downtown. Buried in paper. She was trying to get an angle on Sean Carver ahead of the raid on his place, Thursday. There was a shooting. She’s fine, but you know how it goes. There are procedures to follow. We’ll have to do without her for a while.”

  “What happened with the Honda?” Devereaux sat next to Hale, keen to move the conversation along before it touched on the details of the debacle at the warehouse. He didn’t need the agents adding their disdain to Captain Emrich’s. “Did you find the owner?”

  “No.” Bruckner hit the space bar on his laptop, waking it up and causing a map of the United States to appear on the far wall. “It was a bust. The owners are in Hawaii, on vacation. Their van was stolen from an off-airport long-stay lot serving Shuttlesworth. But that’s minor league—Pee Wee League—compared to what we’ve come up with now.”

  “You sound like a game show host.” Hale drummed her fingers on the table. “Stop teasing. Just tell us.”

  “One second.” Grandison walked to the door, flipped the lock, pulled down the blind, and returned to his seat. “OK. Now, before we get to the meat of things, we need to talk about profiling for a minute. We’re not involved in some kind of black art like you see on TV. What we do is very methodical. We start with a known behavior—as evidenced by a crime scene—and then we extrapolate the kind of person who could have been responsible for it. The better the data, the better the profile we produce. But the problem we have with this case is that none of the crime scenes—the Crane house, the Roadside Rendezvous hotel room, and the Honda Odyssey—have yielded much material. So instead, we’ve had to go old school. We’ve been crunching numbers, looking for connections, factoring in experience and intuition. Fortunately both Bruckner and I have plenty of miles on the clock, because at first the task looked hopeless. Nearly three million kids go missing each year. But we weren’t deterred. We soldiered on. And what we came up with is this.”

  Bruckner hit another key and ten red dots appeared on the map. One each in Alabama, New Mexico, California, Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, Arizona, and Massachusetts. And two, side by side, in Missouri.

  “These are the cases I want to focus
on.” Grandison nodded to Bruckner. A little girl’s smiling face filled the screen for a moment, her thick brown hair pulled back behind an Alice band, which was attached to a large pair of furry Pluto ears. Then the image receded into a frame with an arrow pointing to the dot on the map in New Mexico. “First, chronologically, was Albuquerque. Sixteen years ago, this girl—Miranda Gonzalez—disappeared. She was seven years old. She was last seen climbing into a green station wagon outside her school.”

  “There was a witness?” Hale was frowning at the girl’s photograph.

  “Three witnesses. All were under the age of ten. Their stories were wildly inconsistent. The only thing they agreed on was the color of the car.”

  A second picture flashed up on the screen. It showed a little boy this time, with wild blond hair and traces of ice cream smeared across his plump cheeks.

  “The next kid disappeared fourteen years ago, when he was four. His mom had taken him shopping at a mall in the San Fernando Valley, outside Los Angeles. One minute he was by her side while she picked out polish for her toes at a nail salon. The next minute, he was gone. No one saw what happened. No witnesses. And nothing was picked up by the security cameras.”

  A third picture appeared. A skinny kid with dark, frightened eyes and a tiny head, which was swamped by his crisp, new Cubs cap.

  “This little boy was also four. His family lived in the Chicago suburbs, and on spring break thirteen years ago his aunt took him for a day out in the city. They were rounding things off with a walk through the zoo when the kid said he needed the bathroom. The aunt let him go in alone. No one ever saw him come back out.”

  The fourth picture was of another boy. He was smiling cheekily, with his mouth open and his eyes half shut. He was wearing a baseball cap, too, though his was turned backward, hiding the team logo.

  “This little guy—he was five. In Minneapolis. A decade ago. His nanny was walking him to a play date when she was attacked from behind. Hit in the head with something blunt. She woke up in the hospital. The weapon was never recovered, and there’d been no sign of the kid when the paramedics scooped the nanny up. When the parents realized their son hadn’t made it to his buddy’s they raised the alarm. The local PD traced the motorist who’d called 911 when he spotted the nanny lying at the side of the street. He said he couldn’t be certain, but he didn’t think the boy was there when he drove past.” The fifth picture was of a little girl. She was looking down at the ground and trying to tug strands of her curly red hair in front of her face.