by Blake Pierce
“I need a moment,” she told him. The man didn’t look enthused to leave but he did so without a word.
“Oh, this feels very cloak and dagger,” Anderson said almost gleefully.
“It’s kind of sensitive.”
Anderson leaned in, getting as close to her as the shackles would allow. His next words were spoken in a whisper.
“Then you should know that even with the guard out of the room, the walls have ears.”
“I guess I’ll have to be cryptic then,” Keri replied, refusing to whisper herself but definitely lowering her voice. “Do you recall that the last time I was here, we discussed your… friend?”
“I do.”
His voice was pleasant but the playfulness had disappeared from his eyes. Keri proceeded carefully, not wanting to spook him.
“I got the impression that you have a strong sense of him; that in your time together, you might have developed some insight into how his thought process works.”
“I may have,” he said, revealing nothing.
Keri debated whether to continue. Something about laying her cards on the table with a man like The Ghost made her deeply uncomfortable. But she didn’t really have much choice. She was out of options.
“So if this friend wanted to protect some digital information, to keep it well hidden from prying eyes by requiring that the information be retrieved through a written key of some kind, do you have any ideas as to what that key might be?”
“You’ve come to the right person, Detective Locke. It so happens that I’m quite confident that I know what his…key is.”
“That’s great,” Keri said, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“What?” Keri demanded, her voice a mix of anger and confusion.
“I’m afraid I can’t reveal that information,” he repeated.
“What do you mean, you can’t reveal it? Why not?”
“The information I shared with you at our last visit was, if not common knowledge, at least easily accessible. Even if I was formally acting as a ‘rat,’ it was forgivable because what I told you wasn’t proprietary.”
“So you’re saying you’d feel guilty if you told me what I need to know now because it’s more secret?” Keri asked, dumbfounded.
“Not at all. Guilt isn’t an emotion I waste time with. How could I do the things I did if guilt was a factor? I’m saying that if I gave you what you’re looking for, it could be traced back to me. And my friend has many resources in this facility, among both prisoners and guards. I suspect that if word got out that I had assisted you, I wouldn’t make it to my parole hearing.”
“So you’re just covering your ass?”
“Can you blame me, Detective Locke? Even at my advanced age, I think it’s a lovely derriere. And I’d like to keep it in one piece.”
Keri shook her head, not amused. She’d come so close. She had the data to find Evie in her possession. She was sitting across from a man who could give her the password that would let her access it. And he wasn’t talking.
She looked back at him, trying to decide if it was worth going at him again in some other way. But she could tell it was a waste of time. His face had gone stony and the glint of playfulness had left his eyes.
“Guard!” she called out. As she waited for him to return, Anderson suddenly leaned forward with unfamiliar intensity in his eyes.
“Keri,” he whispered slowly, using her first name for the only time she could recall. “Listen very closely. I want to help you but I can’t. You must understand how these things work. Jackson Cave is the key to this place. You’ve got it all backward. It would be capital for you to find what you’re looking for. In truth, you already have everything you need. Mark my words.”
The guard stepped inside and Anderson stood up without having to be asked. He looked at Keri with a level of deliberation she’d never seen before. As the guard directed him out of the room, he turned back and repeated himself.
“Mark my words.” And then he was gone
*
Keri turned over Anderson’s last strange comments in her head as she drove back to the station. It was as if he’d turned into a different person in those last few moments. She couldn’t understand what had happened to him.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a call from Edgerton.
“You close to being back?” he asked when she picked up.
“I should be there in twenty minutes. Why?”
“Hillman has called an all-hands meeting. It starts in fifteen. I’ll try to stall him.”
“Why didn’t he call me himself?” she demanded.
“I’m pretty sure he did.”
Keri looked at her phone and saw two missed messages. They must have come in when she was with Anderson. The guards made her turn in her phone and gun when she entered. She’d been so wrapped up in trying to understand what was up with Anderson that she’d forgotten to check them.
“Is he pissed?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“Is he ever not pissed?” Edgerton replied.
Twenty minutes later, Keri walked into Conference Room A. Everyone else was already assembled. Edgerton was in the corner, showing Hillman some piece of paper, gesticulating meaningfully.
But as soon as he saw Keri, he stopped and went to his seat, giving her a little smile. She realized that whatever he’d been showing Hillman must have been intended just to distract him until she got there. She smiled back gratefully.
“Now that everyone’s here,” Hillman said accusingly as he stared at Keri, “let’s begin. Detective Brody, can you catch us up on where the investigation stands now?”
Brody, who had been chomping on an everything bagel, stood up and, oblivious to the bits of poppy seeds and bagel crumbs stuck to his tie, walked to the front of the room.
“So last night, we went to the Burlingames’ big fundraiser and interviewed a bunch of rich dicks. Everybody had the same story—‘They’re a great couple.’ Nobody could think why she might just up and bail. No sign of it. No real marital problems.
“I had to talk to the doctor for a while. He held it together okay up on stage giving his speech. But afterward, he cornered me and started asking all these questions about what he could do to help. He was a frickin’ wreck. I felt for the guy but what everyone said about him is true. He’s boring. And according to the guests there, she’s not. Supposedly they seem to like it that way. But I guess she was more bored than people thought because everything’s pointing to her adios-ing town, right, baby boy?”
Edgerton, looking annoyed at the moniker, started to open his mouth, but Hillman shut him down.
“We’ll get to that in a minute. And Brody, try to be professional, okay?” He turned his attention to Keri. “Locke, you’ve been AWOL all morning. What have you been doing with your time?”
“I spent the morning interviewing Kendra’s younger sister, Catherine,” Keri said, refusing to take the bait. “She also indicated that the marriage seemed to be fine, although she admitted that she and Kendra hadn’t been very close in recent years. She also found it hard to believe that her sister would just bail on her life. She was too committed to what she was doing.”
“Or not,” Hillman said, turning to Kevin. “Catch us up, Edgerton.”
“Yes sir. We recently learned that Kendra Burlingame’s bank account has been closed and all the money transferred to an account in Switzerland.”
“How much was in there?” asked Detective Jerry Cantwell, an old-timer who was almost as fossilized as Brody.
“A little over seventy grand. But what’s weird is that it could have been a lot more. Both Burlingames have their own separate checking accounts, as well as a joint one. She could have pulled as much as she liked out of the joint account too but the money she took came exclusively from her account.”
“How much was in the joint account?” Keri asked.
; “Three hundred thirty-two thousand.”
“Holy shit!” Brody shouted. “She just left all that money on the table?”
“Maybe she didn’t want to screw over her husband,” Suarez volunteered. “If this was just her feeling like she needed to start over, it makes sense that she wouldn’t want to leave him destitute. It doesn’t seem like she wanted to ruin his life, just reboot hers.”
“Was anything else taken from other accounts?” Hillman asked.
“No,” Edgerton answered. “All of her investments are untouched. But accessing them would have taken longer and been more complicated. Maybe she didn’t want to risk tipping someone off to what she was doing.”
“Good work. What about the whole Palm Springs bus station thing?”
“Oh, I asked Patterson to take that over so I could focus on the financials.”
“Okay, where are we at, Patterson?” Hillman asked.
Detective Garrett Patterson, a quiet, smallish guy in his mid-thirties, cleared his throat. His nickname was Grunt Work, mainly because he didn’t mind doing it. He seemed to get off on checking endless hours of surveillance footage, reviewing database records, or cold-calling potential witnesses.
“I’ve gone through the footage from the Phoenix bus station and there’s no record of the woman in the video at the Palm Springs station getting off there. I also checked every other stop that had security footage—Tucson, El Paso, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans—”
“We get it, Patterson,” Brody interrupted. “Cut to the chase.”
“She’s not visible exiting the bus at any location along the way or when they stopped for good in Orlando.”
“So what does that mean?” Brody asked, visibly frustrated. “Are you saying she’s still hiding out on that bus?”
“No. There were lots of other stops at small stations without cameras. She could have gotten off at any of them and we’d never know.”
“What about the bus itself?” Keri asked. “Doesn’t it have cameras?”
“It has one near the driver’s rearview mirror. But it wasn’t working.”
“Disabled?” asked Edgerton.
“Unknown. But it was working fine for all that bus’s trips last week. There’s more.”
“Good news, I’m sure,” Detective Sterling, Cantwell’s partner, muttered sarcastically.
“Afraid not. Palm Springs PD collected every snow globe from that gift shop at the bus station to test for prints.”
“Why not just the one with the Palm Springs façade?” asked Keri.
“There were four Palm Springs snow globes and they couldn’t be sure which one Kendra grabbed. They’re testing those first but they took them all just to be safe.”
“What did they find?” Suarez asked.
“A lot of prints. You can imagine how many people walked through that store and picked up those globes. Apparently they don’t get cleaned that often. Their forensic guys are working through them to identify everyone they can but it’s a slow process.”
“Thanks, Patterson,” Hillman said, stepping forward. “So you can see, we’re at a bit of an impasse here. We’re not dropping the case just yet. I want to pull the strings on these outstanding issues—the prints, more interviews with the doctor’s co-workers, following up on that Swiss bank account to see if anyone comes collecting, assuming the bank will cooperate. We’ll look into all of that and have another all-hands tomorrow morning, bright and early at eight a.m. But if nothing firm has turned up by then…”
“Sir,” Keri started to say but stopped when she saw the look in Hillman’s eyes. He continued.
“If we don’t have anything by then, we may have to close this case, whether you want to or not, whether her husband wants us to or not. He has the resources to hire his own investigator if he chooses. But as you all know, if Kendra Burlingame decided to check out of her life and hasn’t done anything nefarious along the way, there’s not much we can do. We’re in the business of investigating crimes and there doesn’t seem to be a crime committed here. That is all.”
The meeting broke up and everyone else hurried out, not wanting to incur Hillman’s wrath. Keri stayed in her seat.
“Anything you care to add, Locke?” he asked curtly as he gathered up his papers.
“No sir,” she said, getting up and heading back to her desk.
Hillman was right. All the evidence indicated that Kendra had skipped town to either get away from her current life or just start a new one. Just because everyone Keri had spoken to said it wasn’t like her didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Keri’s job often consisted of arresting people no one thought capable of the crime they’d committed.
She sat down at her desk and allowed herself to take a mental break from the case. She still had that itch in the back of her brain, saying something wasn’t quite right about it. But there wasn’t much she could do until forensics came back and there was no point in doing what she so often did: obsessing.
Keri pulled out the old Android phone with Cave’s data and stared at it again.
So this is my life? If I’m not obsessing over one case, I have to obsess over another?
Apparently it was, she had to admit to herself as she stared blankly at the phone, the word “password” emblazoned tauntingly on the screen.
All she needed was one word to open up a whole world of information on the underground child abduction trade. If she could get just one word, it would unlock everything else. It was the key.
Then something popped into her head, something Thomas Anderson had said when he was rambling at the end of their meeting: Jackson Cave was the key.
What if he meant that literally? I did ask what the key was.
She cast her mind back to their conversation. It was less than an hour ago and she could still recall it almost completely:
You must understand how these things work. Jackson Cave is the key to this place. You’ve got it all backward. It would be capital for you to find what you’re looking for. In truth, you already have everything you need. Mark my words.
Jackson Cave is the key. What if that wasn’t just hyperbole but the literal truth? Anderson had said to mark his words. He’d said it twice. It was the last thing he’d told her, almost pleading with her to get it. What if Cave’s name was the key, the password?
But the password could only be one word, not two. Keri shook the doubt out of her head and forced herself to focus on Anderson’s words.
You’ve got it all backward.
As quickly as she could, Keri typed in Cave’s name backward as one word: evacnoskcaj.
The screen blinked before displaying the message “invalid password” in red letters.
That’s not the whole clue. He also said “It would be capital for you to find what you’re looking for.”
“It would be capital” sounded ridiculous, like he had suddenly joined the cast of some Gilbert and Sullivan musical. But he would have known that. He wanted it to sound weird, to draw attention to it—capital.
Keri tried the backward name again, this time in all capital letters: EVACNOSKCAJ.
The screen blinked again. After a long second, a new phrase popped up:
“Password accepted.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Keri stared at the screen for several seconds, refusing to blink for fear that what she saw might disappear. She couldn’t believe her eyes.
On the screen was a long list, organized in a way she couldn’t immediately understand, with numeric codes scattered throughout. But among the codes were what clearly seemed to be initials and dates.
After a few minutes it became clear that the organizing principle of the list was the abductors. There would be a heading with what looked to be initials. Below that were dated entries with the coded numbers she couldn’t understand. She suspected that they referred to the specifics of the abduction or perhaps the identity of the client or even the child.
Keri scrolled down hungrily, looking for anything that looked familiar
. Then she froze. On the screen in front of her was a date—9/18/11. That was the date Evie was taken.
The date was followed by a series of numbers and letters that meant nothing to her. She scrolled back up to see what the heading title was and gave out an audible gasp at what she saw.
Suarez, one desk over, looked up in alarm. She gave him a half-smile.
“Big sale at Target,” she said. He nodded, uninterested, and returned to his paperwork.
Keri’s eyes returned to the screen, disbelieving. The header was titled simply “Ctr.” It could stand for anything but one reasonable possibility was that it stood for “Collector.” Even more promising than that, following those letters was an e-mail address.
After all these years, was it possible that she was just an e-mail away from contacting the man who’d kidnapped her child? Was it really possible?
I guess I’m about to find out.
Keri quickly set up a dummy Gmail account and prepared to type a message. But as her fingers rested on the keyboard, she could feel the anxiety creeping into her gut. What if she screwed this up and the guy never responded? What if he shut down the account?
Borderline angry with herself, she shook the thoughts from her head.
Keep the emotion out of it. Forget about Evie. Just set something up with the suspect. Do your job.
She wanted to keep it simple and non-threatening. She didn’t even know if the address was legitimate. But if it was, she wanted to keep her message vague while still piquing the Collector’s interest. Finally she typed a brief message:
“Need some work done. You come recommended. JC speaks highly. Would like to discuss.”
Keri looked at the e-mail repeatedly, trying to find some flaw that would give her away. But it seemed pretty good. Her email name, Guy347BD5, was randomly chosen and hopefully gave the impression that as a potential client, she was careful.
You’re stalling now. Just hit Send.
She did so, then wrote a separate e-mail to Edgerton asking him to try to trace the e-mail for “Ctr.” She doubted he’d find anything. This guy was a professional and she suspected he was pretty good at covering his tracks or he’d have been caught long ago. Still, it was worth a shot.