“Got it,” Sheila replied without hesitation. “I assume this is about the Lash and Jessie Hunter cases?”
“Correct. I want you to put together a list of males, ages thirty-seven to sixty-five residing in Shepard County, as well as the surrounding six counties.”
“That’s a really wide range, Will.”
“It’s a start. We’re going to be looking to whittle it down. To the extent you can, it includes men within those parameters whose address is in fact local, such as Manchester, Holmestrand, Crosslake, you get the idea. But I also want weekenders with a cabin or lake home up here who aren’t necessarily year-rounders.”
“Because both abductions took place in the summer.”
“Exactly. I want all the vitals, addresses, residential history, vehicles, marital status, dependents, employment, military, criminal, tax, wage, educational history, anything we can get. The more data points the better. Whoever our guy is, he knows the local scene so that could be locals or a man who spends half the year up here.”
“Anyone, broadly speaking, you’re particularly interested in?”
“I’m not sure how this would pop, but anyone who has a connection of some kind to Genevieve Lash, Jessie Hunter, Katy Anderson or their families. The tie could be employment, educational, residential, who knows.”
“We do have that report the BCA provided already,” Sheila noted.
“That was for sex offenders only. It didn’t cover spousal battery, for example,” Braddock answered. “It didn’t necessarily cover your garden variety sexual assault or rape.”
“Anything else?”
“One red flag that might interest me would be if you found anyone who lived here in July 1999 and then moved back here recently. I’m interested in anyone with a criminal history, particularly for domestic abuse or sexual assault, anything evidencing a bent to violence, particularly against women.”
“And what do you want me to do with this list?”
“You’re going to coordinate with the BCA on the compilation of data and then make a searchable database.”
“Okay, I’m on it.”
Sheila left to start her project and Braddock thought about the second question that kept him up last night. The one that Tori said she’d have her friend at the FBI dig into. However, with Tori gone, would that happen? He decided he would spend some time looking into that problem himself. If there were others, that would be another data point to run against the list Sheila was compiling.
Tori arrived at the Taylor house and was immediately debriefed by two local FBI agents, Newsom and Fry. They were joined by two investigators with the Iowa Department of Public Safety (DPS).
“Let me get this straight. In broad daylight, someone breaks into this house and abducts a two-year-old little girl, and nobody sees or hears a thing. Nobody?”
Agent Early with the Iowa DPS simply nodded and then shrugged his shoulders. “So far, Agent Hunter, that’s what we have.”
Inside the front door she immediately noticed to her left, in what was a spacious office, two FBI agents sitting with recording and tracking equipment, awaiting the ransom call.
Before proceeding further, Tori stood in the grand entry able to view into much of the main level. The Taylors lived in a tastefully furnished executive home with all the bells and whistles of suburban success. There were expensive cars in the driveway. The rooms of the house all looked to have been decorated by a high-end interior designer. There were large top-of-the-line electronics and appliances throughout. On the expansive desk in the office, Tori could see specs for a swimming pool in the backyard.
She walked ahead into the family. Erica and Jake Taylor, an attractive couple in their mid-thirties, were sitting on opposite ends of the sectional couch. Jake Taylor looked pensive yet composed. Erica Taylor was a teary wreck.
Newsom introduced Tori. “Agent Hunter is a child kidnapping specialist out of our New York City office.”
“Are you here to help with the ransom call?” Erica Taylor asked.
“If it comes to that, yes,” Tori answered. “But, as Agent Newsom said, I specialize in missing children cases,” she added as she pulled a chair closer to the couch. “I have some questions. First, tell me about yourselves.”
Jake Taylor was a chief information officer for Internal Medicine Solutions, a local medical device company. He traveled occasionally to his company’s other facilities across the country, “particularly over the last six months as we’ve installed program upgrades into our system.”
“Can you think of anyone or any reason someone would want to harm you or your family?” Tori asked. “Anyone come to mind?”
Jake Taylor shook his head. “I make decent money, but I don’t have any enemies to speak of. I can’t think of anyone who I’d have made so mad as to do something like this. I’m in IT, how many enemies could you make?”
Erica was once in medical device sales; it was how she met Jake as they worked at the same company. But after the birth of Ava she’d been a stay-at-home mom. “I do a little consulting from home but for the most part I’m here with Ava. That’s my life.”
“You were out of town on travel?” Tori asked Jake Taylor.
“Kansas City. We have a production facility down there and for the last several months I’ve been going down there on Tuesday mornings and coming back on either Wednesday or Thursday night as part of our system upgrade.”
“And this has been your standard schedule for how long?”
“The last three months or so. Why do you ask?”
“Someone came into your house and abducted your daughter in the middle of the day in an upscale suburban neighborhood. That is only done if the kidnapper had a good idea of your schedules and patterns, yours and your wife’s.”
Tori flipped through her notes and looked over to Erica Taylor. “Now yesterday, you put Ava down at two o’clock for a nap, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“And was that the usual time she went down?”
“Yes.”
“And she would typically nap for how long?”
“Ninety minutes to two hours.”
“And you laid her down where?”
“Right here in the family room in her portable crib. Then I went upstairs to take a nap of my own. Ava isn’t a great sleeper at night. She usually wakes up a couple of times and I get up with her.”
“Does Ava have a bedroom upstairs?”
“Yes,” Erica replied.
“Is there any particular reason you have her nap down here and not up in her room?”
“Ava just seems to nap better in the portable crib, so I’ve taken to having her take it down here.”
“And how long has that been the case?”
“Two, maybe three months.”
The house phone rang.
The Taylors bolted to the home office, with Tori and Newsom right behind them.
“We want proof of life,” Newsom counseled as Jake Taylor picked up the phone. Tori held an earphone to her right ear to listen in on the call. “Keep them talking, string it out.”
“Hello?”
“We have your daughter,” a disguised voice stated.
“I want to speak to her.”
“No. Yancy Road, northeast of Adel between Quinlan and R Avenues.” The voice answered. “There’s a mailbox, 17645. You’ll find a package inside.”
Click.
Tori looked to the agents monitoring the phone. They both shook their heads. “Too short,” one answered.
“Adel is twenty minutes away,” Jake declared.
Tori jumped into a car with Newsom and Fry. A DPS unit was right behind. “What’s the story on the Taylors?” Tori asked as they sped along I-80 west of Des Moines.
“Married six years. First marriage for both,” Newsom answered while Fry drove.
“Are they native Iowans?”
“He is, born and raised in Des Moines. Went to Iowa State University. She’s actually from Oklaho
ma, went to Tulsa for college and moved here eight years ago for a sales job.”
“What about family?”
“She’s an only child. Her father is still alive, although he’s in his seventies and lives down south of Tucson, Arizona. Jake Taylor’s parents are both deceased, but he has an older sister named Cindy.”
“I take it she doesn’t live here?”
“No, she does,” Fry replied, glancing back.
“Why isn’t she at the house?”
“Cindy and Jake had a falling out a few months back,” Newsom replied. “Apparently they haven’t spoken since.”
Even with lights and sirens, it still took nearly twenty minutes to reach the mailbox. The gray dented rusted mailbox was at the end of a gravel driveway for what appeared to be a long-abandoned dilapidated farmhouse. There was another farmhouse visible, perhaps a half-mile down the road.
Inside the mailbox was an unmarked plain yellow envelope. The forensic tech extracted the envelope and carefully opened it. Inside was a flash drive, which was immediately plugged into a laptop. There were two files on the drive. The first file was a video. The tech clicked on the icon. The footage was of an otherwise dark room that showed Ava Taylor alive, resting in a small crib with a blanket, doll and juice cup. The time display in the upper right corner read 5:02 a.m. The footage lasted for one minute.
The second file contained ransom instructions. It was straightforward.
$1,000,000 cash.
In a mix of non-sequential one-hundred dollar and twenty-dollar bill denominations.
Have ready by 10:00 p.m. Friday night.
Drop instructions to follow.
Newsom, Fry and Tori sped back to the Taylors. Tori replayed the video and then opened the ransom note for them to see. Tori looked to the Taylors. “Do you have that much money?”
Jake and Erica Taylor looked to one another with raised eyebrows, both doing the mental math.
“Just barely, I think,” Jake finally answered. “We’ll have to liquidate our investments. My 401k through work is around $550,000. Erica’s retirement account from her old job, the last time I looked, was $225,000ish. We have that, plus we have a few stray mutual funds.” He looked to his wife. “There’s your inheritance.”
Erica nodded, and looked to Tori, “I received some money when my mom died a few months ago. It’s a little over $200,000. We’ve been trying to decide what to do with it.”
“And we have around $30,000 in our checking account,” Jake noted. “So, I think we can make it. It’s close, anyway.”
Tori looked to Agent Fry, “Let’s get our people involved. You can’t liquidate a 401k if the person hasn’t terminated employment, but we have exigent circumstances. We’ll need to facilitate the withdrawal and coordinate with the IRS, so no tax penalties are imposed on the Taylors or the employer’s retirement plan for permitting the immediate withdrawal.”
“I’m on it,” Fry answered, reaching for his cell phone.
The timeline left them two days to figure out what happened to Ava Taylor. Tori pulled Newsom aside. “This is all over a million dollars?” she asked skeptically.
“A million is a million.”
“But…one million dollars?” Tori shook her head, looking to Newsom. “That isn’t that much these days. It’s not a worth life in prison amount.”
“What are you saying?”
“And these guys seem to know exactly how much the Taylors can pull together.”
“They did their research. They got in and out of the house, after all.”
“Maybe,” Tori replied, lightly shaking her head. “Maybe.”
He spent the morning buried in his office, researching on his computer and making phone calls to jurisdictions with open missing women investigations that fit their victim profile. His first two calls to investigators in Springfield, Missouri and Decatur, Illinois proved to be dead-ends, the characteristics seeming too dissimilar to Jessie Hunter and Genevieve Lash.
Just after lunch, he found a possible match when he spoke with the police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin about a case that was nine years old that had similar characteristics to the Lash and Hunter disappearances. Now he was finishing up with the police chief and lead investigator with the Bismarck, North Dakota police department on a similar case.
“I appreciate it, Chief. I’ll keep an eye on my inbox,” Braddock replied. “And I’ll forward you what I have as well. Let’s stay in touch.”
Will moved the mouse to his inbox, as the file from the Oshkosh had just arrived. Just as he was going to click it open there was a knock on his door. It was Cal. “Can you come down to my office?”
“Sure.”
Braddock followed Cal back to his office to find a large group awaiting his arrival: Kyle Mannion, Mayor Miller, Skip Sauer, the president of Steamboat Bank, Walter Johnson, president of Manchester State, Jeff Warner, Shepard County Attorney George Backstrom, and a few others. Huddled in Cal’s office were the business, political and educational leaders of Manchester.
“I know what this meeting is,” Braddock remarked guardedly as he leaned back against a wall with his arms folded, able to eye up everyone in the room.
Cal took his seat behind his desk.
Everyone had a position in the room, either standing or sitting. The powers that be looked around to each other to see who would speak first.
The mayor finally shrugged and broke the ice. “Will, a couple of hours ago I got off the phone with an investigative reporter from the StarTribune down in Minneapolis.”
“That guy has been pestering me, too.”
“But you haven’t spoken to him?” the mayor asked.
“No, he hasn’t,” Cal replied, folding his right leg over his left. “But I have.”
“You have?” Will asked.
“Yeah, to keep him from you. You’ve got enough to worry about,” Cal answered. “But he’s planning a big article for the upcoming Sunday paper about the case, about the Jessie Hunter disappearance, about Katy Anderson, about how women seem to disappear from Manchester.”
“I see. And I imagine that makes everyone in this room nervous.”
“It should make you nervous, too,” Skip Sauer popped off.
“Will,” Kyle Mannion started, “we’re just…well, we’re all just worried about the case, the investigation, the…”
“Media attention?” Braddock asked, his arms folded.
“Damn right,” Sauer snarled again from his seat on the couch. “It’s abated some, but still, we’re on the news a lot here lately and the coverage is hardly positive.”
“Tragedy rarely is.”
“This isn’t about us questioning you,” Mayor Miller stated.
“Oh, well, that’s great to know,” Braddock replied sarcastically.
“I know it probably feels like it, but it’s not. It’s not.”
“Will, it’s not,” Kyle Mannion added, nodding. “I know…we know you’re doing everything you can.”
“It’s just that,” Jeff Warner started. “We’ve worked so hard the last ten to fifteen years to build the town, to get past the Hunter Girl abduction and the reputation it gave us. And now…”
“It’s all back again,” Walter Johnson stated.
“Now Will,” Cal started, leaning back in his chair, “I’ve been explaining to these fine folks that we’re doing everything we can to figure out what happened to Genevieve Lash.”
“We are. Katy Anderson, too.”
“Do you have any idea, any idea of an idea, as to who is doing this to our town?” Kyle Mannion asked.
“I’m trying to figure that out, Kyle,” Braddock answered. “It’s the only thing on my plate these days. It’s all I’m working on.”
“You’re trying?” Sauer inquired, gesturing to Braddock, clearly the one person in the room not inclined to grant him any slack. “I was under the impression Tori Hunter was assisting you.”
“Victoria was assisting,” Cal responded.
“But now sh
e’s not?” Warner asked, eyebrows raised.
Will shook his head. “She was called away to Des Moines last night by the FBI to work a child kidnapping, which is, after all her specific area of expertise. She wasn’t assigned here by the FBI, she was here of her own accord.”
“With Tori Hunter gone do you have the resources you need?” Mayor Miller asked.
Braddock nodded. “Yes, Mayor. I know you don’t see the BCA swarming around like they were, but that changes with a phone call. The FBI office down in the Cities checks in with me every day. But, to be honest, right now we have no solid leads, so we don’t have anywhere to deploy those resources here.”
“Then what are you working on?” Sauer asked pointedly. “I mean, if there are no leads.”
“Working on finding one.”
“By doing what?”
“Investigating,” Braddock replied opaquely but testily. Sauer was clearly there to grind his gears.
“Investigating what?”
“Well, Skip, unless you’ve been elevated to sheriff, county attorney or mayor, I don’t answer to you.”
“Huh, I see,” Sauer replied just as curtly. “Maybe you shouldn’t answer to anyone around here.”
“Fuck off.”
“Hold on! Hold on!” Kyle Mannion interjected calmly, stepping into the middle of the room, giving Sauer a stern glare, backing the banker down before Braddock put him through the wall.
“Skip, I think it would be a good idea if you and I stepped into the hallway,” Warner suggested, having stood up, a little wry smile on his face. “Come on.”
Sauer glared harshly at Braddock before he pulled on his shirt cuffs and followed Warner to the door and out of the room.
After the door closed, Kyle shook his head. “Sorry about that, Will.”
“Yeah, well…”
“He had it coming, don’t apologize. However, Skip and I are on the phone daily with Jerry Lash. Jerry is going through hell right now, as any parent would.”
“I understand. I wish I had more to report.”
Kyle nodded in understanding. “Will, we’re here to convey the message and let you know that all of us in this room would provide any assistance we could, anything. I don’t know what that would be. Speaking for myself, if there is something I can do, my company can do, if there are any resources that I have at my disposal that could be helpful or that I could get for you, I hope that you won’t hesitate to call me. Manchester is your home and it’s my home, too. You and I, all of us, want it safe for our families and, to be perfectly honest, we want it safe for our businesses, too. So again, if there is anything you need.”
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