Looking Glass

by Andrew Mayne

  We finally reach Chris’s school. Children are out in the playground and on the courts running laps, kicking a red ball around and laughing and yelling, making all those delightful sounds we forget when we become adults.

  William has his back to the fence. I can tell it pains him to be here. God knows what he’s feeling.

  I take some photos of the school through the fence, then walk over to a boxed-in cage.

  “This used to be the bike cage,” says William. “They don’t let the kids ride them to school anymore.”

  “Because of Chris?”

  “No. Bad drivers. Plus, kids’ bikes were getting stolen all the time.”

  From behind us a woman’s voice calls out, “Can I help you?”

  I turn around and see a sturdy African American woman in a Los Angeles Police Department uniform striding toward the fence that separates us from the school.

  William still has his back to the fence. I decide to use the honesty approach—or a form of it, at least.

  “I’m Theo Cray.” I slide my federal ID out of my pocket and show it to her. It’s given to certain civilian contractors who need access to government facilities. “I’m just doing some background work on the Chris Bostrom abduction.”

  She glances at it for a moment. “Well, you have to talk to Principal Evans if you want to be on school property.”

  I don’t bother to point out that I’m standing on public property. There’s no point to winning an argument when it might cost you the war. “No problem. We’re just leaving.”

  She catches a glimpse of William’s face. “And he has to leave right now or I will have him arrested.”

  This takes me by surprise. I’m about to ask why, but William grabs me by the sleeve. “Let’s go.”

  The officer watches us until we reach the corner, then heads back into the school. I stop at the intersection. “What the hell was that about?”

  William won’t look me in the eye. “After Chris was taken, I … I came by here a couple of times and yelled at some of his teachers. I was given a warning.”

  Ah. Got it. Understandable. “I see.”

  “Let’s just go back,” he says, visibly shaken, and starts to cross the street.

  “Hold up. Isn’t the faster route this way?” I point toward the end of the block.

  “Yeah. But this is the way home Chris took. I thought you might want to have another look.”

  “How do you know that was Chris’s route?”

  “It’s where they found his bicycle.” As he says this, I can see something awaken behind his eyes. “Wait …” His gaze turns toward the shorter path. “Could he have?”

  For him it means his years of canvassing and knocking on doors may have been concentrated in the wrong area.

  “I don’t know. But let’s assume that the location of the bike doesn’t confirm the path he took. Why don’t we just take the shorter route and have a look?”

  He nods and we head down the block back toward his house.

  As we retrace Chris’s possible alternate path, William eyes every house with renewed suspicion and each person we see with a sense of barely held malice. To him, any one of these people could have seen what happened. One of them could even be Chris’s abductor.

  I take photos and stare into houses when possible. I also play a mental game that I learned hunting Joe Vik and that I have since found helpful with my work at OpenSkyAI: it’s called “think like a predator.”

  Instead of projecting myself into Chris’s head, like William is probably doing, I imagine that I’m the abductor looking for the best place to snatch him while evading detection.

  If the bike was dropped away from the actual abduction location, then Chris’s abductor was directing attention away from something. Something that might still lie along this path.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THREAT ASSESSMENT

  By the time we make it back to William’s house, I’ve developed three possible scenarios, each with its own corresponding variables, relating to Chris’s abduction.

  In the first scenario, Chris was snatched by an opportunist who happened upon a vulnerable young kid and literally yanked him into his vehicle exactly where the bicycle was found.

  In the second scenario, Chris’s abductor didn’t live locally but had been following Chris, perhaps for days. He waited for the right time to grab him and then moved his bicycle to hide the place from which he’d been observing Chris in case a witness could provide a description.

  In the third scenario, Chris’s abductor lived on the path, either the one we initially believed Chris took or the shorter one. In this case, he moved Chris’s bike to draw attention from himself and his residence.

  There are dozens of other permutations based on the known knowns, and an infinite number if some of our core assumptions are incorrect. For now, though, we have three theories to work with, each with its own drawbacks.

  The first scenario is almost impossible to investigate without any additional data.

  The second relies upon witnesses from almost ten years ago being able to recall something from a specific date—which, given that the investigation did canvass those areas, makes it unlikely that any big breakthrough remains to be found. Smaller details, such as a spooky green van near the 7-Eleven in a police report, would be useful, but I’m not holding out any hope for that.

  The last scenario, and perhaps the most chilling, is the one that has the abductor living along the path. As police knocked on doors and talked to neighbors, Chris could have been alive and still unharmed, only a few dozen feet away.

  “What are you thinking?” William asks me as we reach his doorstep.

  “The alley seems a likely shortcut for Chris. I mean, if I was a kid, I’d take that route. The area by the Baptist church looked unobserved. And the corner by 117th had no houses directly facing it. Those would be my primary spots.”

  “I don’t suppose we’re going to find anything there now.”

  “I took photos. But other than that, it’s been too long to expect anything. If I can get the police reports, I can see if there’s anything that connects them.”

  He nods.

  “Also, we can do a background check on everyone who lived on the streets between here and there.”

  “Like homeowner records?”

  “I can get police records, too. We just need to make a list of addresses.”

  While my government access puts a frightening amount of personal data at my disposal, the kind of information we’re looking for could be purchased relatively inexpensively from private companies that specialize in providing information to loan companies and prospective employers.

  I’ve found that a lot of government records are routinely inaccurate—except when there’s a financial connection. That’s why the IRS or a creditor can track you down faster than the police can.

  As William makes a list of houses to research, I check my e-mail and find a response to my police-records request.

  The good news is that they can provide me with what I requested; the bad news is that they need four to six weeks to gather the information.

  William is leaning over a map spread across his kitchen table, taking note of all the houses. “It kills me to think he could be here …”

  “Yeah. We got a problem. I can get the records, but they say it’ll take at least a month.” In my head I’ve already accepted the fact that a month isn’t going to make much of a difference on a case that’s already a decade old.

  He sits back and folds his arms. “A month?”

  I point to his map. “We can still follow up on the houses, see who lived in them at the time. There might be something there.”

  He nods, tacitly accepting that this is just one more disappointment that life has decided to throw at him.

  I shove my hands into my pockets, and my fingers touch the hard plastic of my ID. William takes a moment to acknowledge the situation, then goes back to making notes and putting together a list of address
es.

  “Fuck it,” I reply. This could cost me my job, if I haven’t lost it already. It could mean jail time. I hold up my ID. “I might be able to go to the LAPD and just have a look.”

  “Are you allowed to?” asks William.

  “Until somebody stops me.” I might be able to come up with some bullshit excuse that I was working on a DIA research project or something. The truth of the matter is that I can get away with it if nobody makes a stink. If, on the other hand, I piss someone off, I could have problems. So … better not let Park know what I’m up to. “Do you have a scanner?” I ask.

  “A document scanner? I got a portable one in my office. Hold on.”

  William goes down the hall and pulls out a key to unlock a door at the end of the house. Since I started working in the intelligence world, I’ve encountered several people with secure rooms inside their houses. For an accountant, it’s probably the same thing. His clients probably want to know that nobody else could go snooping through their records.

  “Here you go,” he says as he shuts the door. “It uses a smart card to store the documents in PDF. Will that work?”

  It’s about the size of an extra-long bread stick. “Perfect.” I could use my phone, but having a specialized scanner makes things much easier and will make me appear less fly-by-night to the records custodian—assuming my pass gets me through the door.

  CHAPTER TEN

  COLD CASE

  In what will go down as the most boring heist in history, after presenting my ID to the woman at the desk of the records office, I was led through a secure door, given a map of the labyrinthine maze of tunnels and storerooms under the city of Los Angeles, and sent on my own merry way without an ounce of skepticism or even a second look.

  I chalk this up to two things. The first is that all my ID did was give me access to records that could be obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. I was not being given access to LAPD’s current case files and wouldn’t be able to pull so much as a parking ticket if it was still working its way through court—at least that’s what was explained to me on the flyer that the woman gave me with my map.

  But as I passed a room that said ACTIVE RECORDS, I got the impression this was more of an honor system than a series of actual barriers blocking prying eyes from ongoing investigations.

  Content with simply having access to Christopher Bostrom’s case, I found the room where the missing-persons case files were stored and a completely uninterested clerk who could be charitably described as “retired in place.”

  He grunted some general directions toward the row that included a cabinet that held a folder containing Christopher’s case. I had to check with him to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, because the file I found was thinner than the paperwork I’d had to file to get my apartment.

  The police work didn’t appear sloppy. The initial report was concise. Interviews with neighbors, teachers, and others that took me by surprise but made sense once I put myself into the cop’s head: like talking to bus drivers who ran the routes near where William’s son went missing, postal workers, and even utility and electrical work crews. The detective, Ted Corman, even went so far as to reach out to FedEx and UPS drivers in case they’d seen anything.

  He had a solid, street-level view of who might have seen something. Unfortunately, nobody had seen anything.

  As far as forensics were concerned, there were none. Only a photo of Chris’s bike. I checked through the file, and it didn’t even appear that the bike had ever been fingerprinted. I’m not a cop, but that seemed like a big mistake.

  I understand how they wouldn’t think their suspect had ever touched the bike if they thought Chris had dropped the bike to get into the car, but there was no reason to make that assumption. I send William a text message telling him not to touch the bicycle.

  Hopefully the bike had gone straight from the police cruiser to his garage and he hadn’t handled it much. While lifting a regular fingerprint after nine years is unlikely, if the abductor touched any bicycle grease, then it made for an increased possibility—remote, yet possible.

  Getting that print would probably require a really good state lab or the FBI—which brings me to another odd thing about the file: there were only two calls placed to the FBI.

  Even though a standard kidnapping wouldn’t be under FBI jurisdiction in most cases, there would be a lot of contact between LAPD and the Los Angeles FBI office. Informally, there’s often even an agent on scene in a case like this, to make sure of jurisdiction.

  Corman’s report mentions getting a call from the FBI—they reached out to him—and a return call from him, updating them on what the LAPD had found: nothing.

  Another confusing aspect of the report is that it mentions conferring with two agencies. One’s the FBI; the other isn’t mentioned.

  If I had to go out on a limb, maybe it was the IRS, since William was an accountant. Did they want a character witness who could tell them if the disappearance might have been caused by a domestic disturbance?

  The last interesting bit of information is the fact that Chris wasn’t reported missing until 11:00 p.m. While William told me that Chris got abducted after school, there was an eight-hour window between when his last teacher saw him and the 911 call William placed to the police.

  The transcript was about as matter-of-fact as an episode of Dragnet:

  911: Nine-one-one, how may I assist you?

  W. Bostrom: My boy, he didn’t come home today.

  911: How old is your son?

  W. Bostrom: Eight. Nine. He’s nine years old.

  911: Is it possible he’s at a friend’s house or with another relative?

  W. Bostrom: No. He doesn’t have a mama anymore. When I got home, he wasn’t here. He should have been home.

  911: Okay, sir, we’re going to send a patrol car by. Is 1473 Thornton your correct address?

  W. Bostrom: Yes, ma’am.

  911: Okay. Please stand outside so the officer can see you.

  W. Bostrom: Thank you.

  The police car was there eight minutes later. Detective Corman arrived on the scene almost two hours after that.

  According to the responding officer’s report, they called the parents of Chris’s classmates and sent out extra cruisers to look for him. His bicycle was found that night by a uniformed cop with a flashlight.

  Besides the length of time it took William to report his son missing, the only other unusual thing about his actions is that he mentioned to the uniformed cop that he’d called someone named Mathis and asked him if he knew anything.

  Corman didn’t follow up that line of inquiry in his report, but he did everything else he was supposed to: sent out an AMBER Alert, contacted other departments, and put Christopher into the appropriate databases. Beyond that, there wasn’t much else in the file.

  In biology, you can tell how tightly bonded a community is by its degree of response to danger. Packs and herds will rally around their young. Distant relative whales will protect a young calf when an orca is nearby. Other animals, mainly nonmammals, are indifferent. If a predator snatches a child, their evolutionary calculus tells them they’re lucky it wasn’t them and life goes on. The reaction to Chris’s abduction doesn’t quite feel as if a strong pack response—at least from the leaders—was demonstrated.

  But we’re talking about people, and many of the authorities involved were black, so it couldn’t simply be a racial thing—not all of it. I’m missing something here.

  Did it look like Christopher ran away? Was he not so happy at home? Was there a suspicion regarding William that the cops couldn’t substantiate enough to put into a report?

  Why didn’t anyone seem to give a fuck?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PERSON OF INTEREST

  I suspect I could build a computer profile that could guess your occupation with a better-than-random outcome based upon posture and eye gaze. Doctors tend to look around you, kind of like a farmer sizing up a heifer. Scientists
look into the space next to you as they think about your words or, more likely, their own precious thoughts. Cops look right at you. They don’t look away when you make eye contact. They maintain the dominance stare because they’ve got a gun and a license from society to intimidate you. If you stare back and threaten that dominance, they’re only one radio call from a bunch more cops with guns.

  As I step out of the records room with my digital files and a head full of my own precious thoughts, I’m being given the dominance gaze by a cop. Which shouldn’t be a surprise in a building full of them, but this one is staring directly at me.

  He’s middle-aged, bald, with a thick black mustache flecked with gray, dressed in a black LAPD polo shirt, badge on one hip, gun on the other; this man is about as cop as you can get. For a fleeting moment, I wonder whether that’s what decides academy admission.

  “Find what you were looking for, Mr. Cray?” asks the man.

  I used to be much worse at these kinds of encounters. That was before the forest. I’m not saying I’m the smoothest operator now, but I’ve learned to not just stand around with a slack jaw.

  I give him a wide grin and reach my hand out to shake his. “How you doing?”

  Reflexively he shakes mine. There’s a slight change in his demeanor. The eyes still stare right at me, but now they’re trying to read me, not telling me how to react.

  “I apologize, what was your name?” I’m pretending we are friends. “Did we meet at the San Diego counterterrorism conference?” This is me signaling to him that we’re in the same field. “Were you at my talk?” Now I’m telling him I’m a peer, if not a superior.

  He regains his composure. “No. We’ve never met.” There’s a small pause. “And you know that.”

  My social-engineering skills exhausted, I only have one option left as I try to figure out the real purpose of this encounter. I’ll have to be Dr. Theo Cray. “Well, in answer to your question, no. I didn’t find what I was looking for. And what is it you’re looking for?”

  He softens his expression. “I just wanted to have a friendly chat. My office is across the street. Mind if we head over there?”