by Brad Parks
“So they laid it all out for me. They told me exactly what to do and exactly when to do it. And then I was supposed to meet them near the school and let them have the kids and they would take it from there. And I didn’t have a choice. I—”
“Didn’t have a choice?” Alison snarled. “What in God’s name do you mean, you didn’t have a choice?”
Her fists were balled. There was a kind of fury on her face I’m not sure I had ever seen before.
Karen had been pouring all this out at me. But now she turned to her sister and, wiping her cheeks, sniffled out, “They said if I didn’t do it, they would kill my best friend.”
“What are you talking about?” Alison asked.
“You, okay?” Karen shouted. “They said they would kill you. They said they would rape you and torture you and then you would die a horrible, agonizing death. They showed me all these pictures of you—at work, at home, at the store. They knew where you were at every moment and they said they could grab you anytime and they started describing all the things they were going to do to you and I just . . . it was . . .”
“You should have let them kill me,” Alison said.
“Are you crazy? Ali, this wasn’t some hypothetical psychological experiment where you have to push one person off a bridge or five people in China die. This was . . . this was the real thing. They were going to kill you. And they said if I cooperated the kids wouldn’t be harmed. So it wasn’t even like the psychology experiment, because on the one side it was you dying and on the other side it was the kids being a little scared in the short term but eventually being okay. They said they would keep the kids for a little while and then return them once they got what they wanted.”
“Did they say what that was?” I asked.
Karen shook her head. “I assumed it was some kind of blackmail. I told them you guys didn’t have a lot of money and they were wasting their time. I didn’t even think this related to one of your cases until later.”
“These men,” I said, “tell me more about them.”
I expected a minor improvement on the same rough description she had already given, which wouldn’t really help us much at all. Instead, Karen dropped this bomb:
“Do you want to see them?” she asked.
Alison jumped out of her seat toward her sister, but Karen continued. “I took a video of them with my phone. It’s not very good. I didn’t dare let them see I was doing it, so I sort of had to hide the phone. And the sound is really bad. I think I must have been covering the microphone with my finger. But I got something anyway. Let me get my phone.”
Karen rose and left the room. Alison briefly made eye contact with me.
“She should have let them kill me,” she said again.
I didn’t have a response. Alison just stared at the coffee table.
Karen returned moments later. She knelt in front of where Alison and I were sitting.
“It’s not very good,” Karen said again.
Karen hit the play button. Alison and I leaned forward toward the tiny screen of an iPhone that was a few generations behind current.
The first thing we saw was the ceiling of our Honda Odyssey. Then there was Karen’s chin, nostrils, and the bill of her cap—like some kind of odd-angled selfie. Then the phone was turned and it captured an extreme close-up of the cracked leather on the side of the van’s well-worn seats. The audio was, as promised, essentially nonexistent—nothing but squelchy rubbing sounds.
Karen was obviously keeping the phone low at first, either on her lap or down at her side. But, slowly, she got more courageous with it. The view rose and shifted until we were getting the scene outside the passenger-side window. It was a thin strip of grass that descended into a stand of scraggly, adolescent pine trees.
“You’re about to see one of them,” Karen said.
Sure enough, there was a flash of a man. Dark, bushy hair. Dark, untrimmed beard. Caucasian.
“Pause it, pause it,” I said.
“You’ll get a better look later,” Karen said.
Then we saw the top of a blond head passing the window. I felt a stab in the gut as I recognized my son.
“That’s Sam,” Karen said. “They had the kids go one at a time. Sam went first.”
Alison asked, “Did they force them or . . .”
“They’re kids, Ali. They just did what they were told.”
“But did the kids ask you if it was okay?”
“The men told me I wasn’t supposed to speak. Like, not a word, the whole time. They were banking on everyone thinking I was you, the kids included. Hang on, this is going to be your best view of one of them.”
She hit the pause button at the right moment, just as one of the men appeared outside the window. Alison and I took turns looking at him up close. He was mostly in silhouette, but he was twisted slightly toward the car, so you could get some sense of what he looked like. If I had to guess his age, I would say mid-thirties, though it was hard to tell because the beard was so extensive. About the only features you could really make out were his nose, which was large and hooked, and his eyes, which looked like really strong coffee, so brown they were almost black. You could barely tell the irises from the pupils. They reminded me of a shark’s eyes.
“I’ve called him Alexi, just to have something to call him,” Karen said. “It’s not like they ever used their names around me.”
Once we had all gotten our fill of the still screen, she got the video going again.
“You never do see Emma, though it was around this time they took her out,” Karen narrated. “And then the one I call Boris returned to close the door to the minivan. This is the best view you get of him.”
Again, she hit the pause button. This time, she didn’t like where she had stopped it, so she monkeyed around with it a little, going back and forth until it settled on a frame she liked. Then she passed us the phone again.
Boris looked a lot like Alexi. He was a little shorter, a little heavier. His nose was maybe slightly more aquiline, but he had the same black eyes. They looked like brothers.
She resumed the video. Once Boris departed, Karen had gotten a little bolder with her camerawork. She swung the phone up and, positioning it just above the dash, captured an image of the upper half of a white, windowless panel van—the vehicle Sam had described to us.
The audio was back at this point, though it was essentially worthless. It was just Karen, breathing hard, and the muffled sound of the van’s engine starting up from the other side of her windshield. As it drove off, she lifted the phone higher, allowing us to see more of the white van, eventually all the way down to the tires. But by that point it was already small in the distance.
“I tried to slow it down and see if I could get the license plate, but it was too fuzzy,” Karen said.
“I’m sure it’s either a stolen van or stolen plates,” Alison conjectured.
The video ended shortly thereafter. It wasn’t more than two minutes of footage. We watched it again. It was a moment I had been imagining for the better part of a month now—my children being secreted off by bearded men. Seeing it in living color made it both more mundane, because it was just kids hopping out of a minivan, and more terrifying, because of those men’s eyes.
“You said they had accents,” I said. “Could you place them?”
“I thought . . . Well, I might be wrong about this, but I thought maybe they were Turkish. Their accents sounded exactly like Justina’s.”
Alison’s glare went straight to me. Had her intuition been right, as always? Had Justina really been trying to seduce me? For that matter, when Jenny saw her at the mall that day with the leather jacket, had Justina actually been following Jenny somehow?
For the first time, it struck me as a mistake to make Justina move out. We should have kept her close, where we could watch her. Giving her a free pass out of
our line of sight—essentially letting her get away without any of the questions that would have arisen if she simply disappeared—might have been exactly what she wanted.
Karen continued. “I’ve obviously had a lot of time to think about this, and my theory is that they were somehow connected to Justina. They seemed to know all the things Justina would know, like where the keys were and how the pickup at school was supposed to go.”
“But why didn’t you just tell us?” Alison said. “I mean, there we were, at our house, two days after it happened, bawling our eyes out—”
“Because they said I couldn’t. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even Mark. The men said the children being returned unharmed relied entirely on me doing exactly as I was told. And they said I couldn’t say anything. That was like the first thing they said to me and the last thing: ‘Say nothing. Say nothing.’”
SIXTY-EIGHT
Once it became clear Karen didn’t know anything else—and that Alison was going to make her rehash it three or four more times anyway—I stuffed the brass keychain in my pocket and announced my departure.
I had a hearing to resume. I had recessed us only until one o’clock. A judge returning fifteen minutes late was nothing unusual, but I didn’t want to push it beyond that.
As I drove, I replayed the video in my mind and thought about what Karen had said. In some ways, her confession—or the connection to Justina being made after all this time—didn’t change any of the circumstances in front of us. There were still bad men who had Emma. They were men with beards and foreign accents. We knew that already. What Karen told us and showed us just filled in some of the details, like that the accents were apparently Turkish.
It was also further confirmation that the kidnappers were well prepared and well organized, disciplined and efficient. Just being able to watch them walk was instructive. Their movements were precise and direct, with nothing wasted.
And then there were those black, black eyes. Men with eyes like that could certainly shoot Herb Thrift in the back and head, then mutilate his corpse, then send me a finger in the mail. Men with eyes like that were capable of anything I could imagine and things that were far worse.
I put myself in Karen’s position, being approached at home by these shark-eyed villains and ordered to kidnap my niece and nephew, under threat of my sister’s death. What would I have done?
Probably exactly what Karen did. Possibly, I would have said something to the parents. No, I definitely would have. Selfishly, I would have wanted to unburden myself of that secret just as soon as possible.
Otherwise, Karen just did what I—or any reasonable person—would do when faced with a choice between the unthinkable and something far worse. Defying their orders wasn’t an option. Men like that, making threats like that, demanded total obedience.
But there was something else about the men in that video that struck me. They were completely unemotional about what they were doing. They could have been moving anything out of that minivan—a load of bricks, stolen computers, two little kids. It didn’t matter to them. They were professionals. This was a job, nothing more.
Which begged the question that, three weeks into this ordeal, I still couldn’t begin to answer: Whom were they working for?
I somehow doubted it was Justina. She was the conduit to us, yes. And maybe she had known those two brothers from back in Turkey. But there had to be someone else in charge. Her parents? I had never met them. Her father was supposedly a university professor. Or was that just a cover story? Were they really involved in organized crime somehow?
But then I thought back to the voice I had heard that first night, the one that told me he had my kids and I better follow his instructions. That voice, filtered and muddied though it may have been, was definitely not Turkish. It was American.
That was who called the shots for Alexi, Boris, Justina, and everyone else. And we still didn’t really know anything about who that person was or what, exactly, he was looking to gain by commandeering this case.
It was 1:08 P.M. when I pulled back into my parking spot behind the courthouse. Ben Gardner was not manning the employee entrance, so I nodded at another court security officer as I dashed through the metal detector. Then I hustled toward the (empty) elevator and down the (empty) fourth-floor hallway. It was apparent that everyone who still cared about the outcome of this case had packed themselves back into the two courtrooms, where they were waiting for me.
I hurried through the front door to my chambers into the reception area, where Mrs. Smith looked up at me.
“Hello, Judge,” she said.
“Hi, Mrs. Smith,” I said, not breaking stride as I continued toward my office.
But she stopped me with, “Judge, I’m sorry to trouble you, but someone dropped something off for you and it looks important.”
She stood up and handed me a manila envelope. I felt myself squinting at it for a moment, then made out that too-familiar block lettering on it:
JUDGE SCOTT SAMPSON
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. OPEN IMMEDIATELY.
“Thank you,” I forced myself to say.
The envelope was closed but unsealed, its flap held down only by the brass clasp. I lifted the wings of the clasp and withdrew a thin sheaf of papers from inside.
There was a sticky note attached. It read:
DELIVER THIS TO THE CLERK’S OFFICE FIRST THING MONDAY MORNING. THE MOMENT WE SEE IT HAS BEEN FILED, YOUR DAUGHTER WILL BE RELEASED, UNHARMED, TO A SAFE PLACE. WE WILL CONTACT YOU WITH DETAILS.
I lifted the sticky note to look at the document underneath. It was the ruling, already written out for me. I skimmed it and found it well written, obviously done by someone with legal training and a familiarity with all the filings in the case. There were the appropriate findings of fact, followed by a ruling in favor of ApotheGen.
So there it was. All along, this had been about ApotheGen winning. Which still didn’t make sense. If Barnaby Roberts or someone at ApotheGen was at the controls all along, why force me to grant the preliminary injunction? Why not have ApotheGen’s attorneys file a motion to dismiss and then order me to grant it? They could have ended the whole nightmare in just a few days, saving their shareholders billions of dollars in losses and their CEO from what had likely been a month-long angina.
I reached the last page of the document. The only thing missing was my signature.
“When did this arrive?” I asked.
“Someone slipped it under the door during lunchtime,” Mrs. Smith said.
“Oh?” I said.
And then I smiled, just slightly. It was probably my first real smile in a month. This was an unbelievable break.
I felt like I had been chasing the same lead runner in a marathon for twenty-five miles, always a few steps behind. And then, just as we entered that final mile, the guy I had been trailing all that time had suddenly tripped on his shoelaces and fallen flat on his face.
The kidnappers had finally made their first mistake.
* * *
The two cameras that covered the entrance to my chambers were concealed in fake light fixtures that hung down from the ceiling a few yards on either side of the door. Up until that moment, I might have questioned how much camouflage those two plastic bubbles really offered.
But I could now say, with authority, that they did their job. Because whoever slipped that envelope under my door neither saw them nor gave a second thought to the possibility that they might hide cameras.
Everything captured by those lenses was sent to the computer on my career clerk’s desk. The footage stayed on the hard drive for some length of time before being wiped clean—a week, a month? Definitely longer than an hour.
All I had to do to see who had slipped me that envelope was get Jeremy to work the software for me. He was the only one on my staff who had been trained in its use. And I might have been able to work around th
at, but he was also the only one who had the password.
Which meant I needed him. And he had been anywhere from standoffish to hostile toward me for two weeks now. Not that I blamed him.
A court security officer had already come out to the reception area, thinking I was going to slip on my robe and let the show resume. But I said, “Hey, can you give me just five more minutes?”
“Of course, Judge,” he said.
“I’ll call Jean Ann and let her know,” Mrs. Smith said.
I shoved the ruling back into the envelope. Then I walked eight steps to Jeremy’s domain. My tap on his doorframe earned me an enigmatic stare.
There were two ways to handle this: ask for his help or order him to give it to me. But, frankly, I just couldn’t deal with another confrontation. It was time to make peace. I wanted more than just Jeremy’s grudging cooperation. I wanted him as an ally again.
“Hey,” I said. “I really need your help with something and I know I have no right to ask for it, given how I’ve treated you. But I have to ask you all the same. Can I come in?”
“It’s your chambers, Judge,” he said tersely.
I entered, closed the door behind me, and sat down.
“First of all, I owe you an apology for those pictures I had taken of you,” I said. “I had no right to invade your privacy that way. I also owe you an explanation for my strange behavior over the last three weeks. But I need to swear you to secrecy. You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to say. Can you agree to that?”
“Sure, Judge,” he said. “You have my word.”
I gave him the quick version. He gasped a few times, nodded solemnly at others. I could see his ever-logical mind filling in what had previously been blank spaces in the narrative of the last month. Things that had seemed terribly out of place suddenly clicked back in.