“What are you saying?”
“What if he knows? A guy like that. He works hard, regular travel and long hours. You’ve been inside the house. Everything is designer. They have splashy cars. A swimming pool on the drawing board. And while he’s out on the road grinding away to pay for all of that—”
“His wife is at home banging the out-of-work neighbor,” Newsom finished, snorted and shook his head. “Man, it sure as hell would piss me off.”
“Enough to want a divorce?”
“Hell yes.”
“And what happens to the familial assets should you get divorced? The majority of which you’ve worked hard to accumulate.”
“They get…split in half,” Newsom answered haltingly, suddenly understanding where Tori was going. “You don’t think?”
“It’s bothered me that the kidnappers knew what the Taylors have for assets. And to only ask for a million dollars for ransom? Who risks life in prison for a million dollars? You don’t. A million isn’t going to get you very far these days.”
“You think a father could do this?”
“This is nothing,” Tori replied dismissively. “I think it is entirely possible that Jake Taylor had his daughter kidnapped. Think about it for a second, because I think Jake Taylor has. The ransom is a million dollars, which is pretty much all their assets, give or take $50,000. The ransom gets paid and Ava comes home safe and sound. Once that happens, phase two of his plan kicks into action. He knows, and therefore will convincingly allege, that his wife is having an affair with the neighbor. So, what does he do? He files for divorce and moves for full custody of Ava, and who knows, he might get it. At worst, he gets joint custody and if I’m right, he does it with a million dollars in his pocket. Hidden, of course, but he has the money, nonetheless, socked away somewhere to be accessed ten, fifteen years down the road.”
“You think a father, any father, would stage a kidnapping of his daughter just to get all the money? Really?”
“Come on,” Tori replied with some exasperation. “When it comes to money people do irrational, stupid, mendacious things all the time. I’ve seen parents use their children as pawns in all kinds of ways to get at one another. This isn’t that much of a stretch, even here in supposedly genteel Iowa.”
After a moment, Newsom exhaled. “Man, when you speculate, you speculate.”
“I prefer to view it as speculation worthy of exploration. Let’s ask the question a different way to show it makes logical sense. Examine the kidnapping. The Taylors live on a quiet street in an upper-class neighborhood. In the middle of the afternoon, someone kidnaps a two-year-old girl out of the family room. How do they get in the house?” Tori knew the answer to the next question but asked it anyway. “Any signs of forced entry?”
“Nope,” Newsom replied, shaking his head.
“So, the door is either unlocked or they had a key. You can’t sit there for a minute or two and pick a lock in broad daylight in a suburban neighborhood, even if it’s on the back deck. Too risky, too much exposure. And besides, would your average kidnapper really know that the Taylors have a million dollars in assets?”
Newsom shrugged. “It’s a nice neighborhood, really nice.”
“Yeah,” Tori replied with a dismissive wave, “but it’s not that extraordinary. If you’re a pro looking to pull something like this off you do it for more, a lot more than a million dollars. But if you’re Jake Taylor, a million dollars sounds pretty good, and if he had his daughter kidnapped, he knows she’s safe. Heck, if he did it, is it even really a kidnapping?”
“That would be one for the lawyers,” Newsom replied and then, after a moment offered, “Let’s say hypothetically that Jake Taylor arranged this. He was in Kansas City when it happened, so he didn’t do it.”
“You checked that?”
Newsom nodded. “He was in a meeting starting at one-thirty p.m. and didn’t get out of it until Erica Taylor called him. Five witnesses. So, if he put all this together, who did he have kidnap Ava?”
Tori turned and leaned back against the sedan, going back through what she’d seen Erica Taylor doing, and how she’d awoken in the chair, made her way to the kitchen and then she stopped and thought back to the bookcase, the family photos. “You know, the kidnapper might do it for free if they were family,” Tori replied. “Where’s Jake Taylor’s sister?”
CHAPTER 16
“IN COLLEGE TOWNS.”
“Will? Will? Will, wake up,” Sheila said as she tapped his shoulder. “Wake up!”
“What? What?” Braddock sprung awake, sitting up quickly off his office couch, papers flying off his body onto the floor. Sheila was standing in front of him, hands on her hips with a severe look of disapproval.
“Will Braddock, did you sleep here last night?”
“I guess I did,” Braddock replied slowly, wiping his face with his hands and then rubbing his eyes before sitting back on the couch. It was seven a.m. or just shortly after that because Sheila was standing in front of him and she was punctual. He leaned forward and picked up the papers off the floor before looking up. “Would you be willing to make me a…”
“Cup of coffee?” Sheila replied, stepping back to his desk and reaching for a cup, which she handed to him.
“Thanks.”
“Since when do you sleep on the office couch?”
“Quinn is gone for three weeks, so I was here late. I got tired of sitting at my desk so came over here to lay down and read and must have dozed off.”
“What time?”
“Good question,” he replied, taking a drink of coffee. “Last time I remember looking at my watch was a little before three, I think.”
“Three a.m., I see.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Will replied sheepishly, looking up to his assistant. “How’s your project coming?”
“Go clean up and I’ll run through it.”
He went to the locker room, changed clothes, washed his face, brushed his teeth, straightened out his hair and was back in his office ten minutes later, by which time Sheila had a laptop set up on his desk and was sitting in a guest chair waiting for him.
He sat down at his desk, took a long drink of coffee. “Show me.”
“This database has every male now aged thirty-five to sixty-five, just to go with round numbers. The population of Shepard County and the five surrounding counties is a little over 263,000, as official residences. You add in cabin folks, and we get to just north of 408,000.”
“Huh. I would have thought it was more.”
“That’s based on ownership records, Will,” she responded. “If we need to get into family members of these people, that might require more horsepower than I can provide.”
“Understood. Keep going.”
Sheila moved the cursor to the top of the screen and hit a tab. “Out of a little over four hundred thousand there are one-hundred eighty-nine thousand males. Whittled down, there are just over sixty-seven thousand males who fit our criteria. If you want to break it down on race, you can. You just need to set some filters, although up here it’s going to be predominantly Caucasian.”
“Okay, I’m following so far.”
“If you screen it down to criminal records, we get down to a little over eleven-thousand two-hundred.”
“That many have criminal records?” Will asked, mildly surprised. He then thought to a statistic he’d seen from the FBI recently that one in three adults have some sort of criminal record, especially if you included arrests. “I presume that number includes arrests?”
“Yes,” Sheila answered. “If it’s narrowed to just convictions, the number is considerably less. From this point you can filter out drug charges and convictions, weapons charges and convictions, robberies, and so on. If I pull records with either a domestic assault or a sex crime, we get down a little lower, 1,325, at least in Shepard and the surrounding counties. This also has vehicles, residential, employment, tax, education and other miscellaneous records as well.”
“And that�
��s based on property ownership records. There could be people leasing property or family members we can’t account for.”
“Correct, but it’s easy enough to add more data if you tell me what to add or where I can access it. Now, you said something about data points that could help narrow this down. Where are you on that?”
“Five possible connections,” Braddock answered as he sat back in his office chair.
“Five now? It’s a serial?”
“That’s why I was up late. I think I have two more. One in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then maybe one from Brookings, South Dakota, from that call you transferred to me yesterday.
“In the Lincoln case, the victim’s car was found with a flat tire. In Brookings, a young woman named Joanie Wells’ car was found keyed the entire length of the driver’s side of her VW Jetta.
“In the other cases, cars again were tampered with. In one case, the woman’s car was found with a huge pool of antifreeze under it having leaked from a big puncture wound to the radiator. There was one where the driver’s side window was smashed, the glass all found inside the car on and around the driver’s seat. In still another, the car wasn’t damaged but was found with the door open and a small blood smear that was blood of the victim.
“Take Jessie Hunter and Genevieve Lash, tires tampered with. We have a pattern developing. Put the vehicle in distress and then attack.”
“In college towns,” Sheila noted quickly.
“I noted that as well,” Braddock answered. “And the women often fit the profile of college or post-graduate students or they worked in a college town or near one, so if these are all connected, our guy travels to those kinds of towns. If we get some more information, we may eventually shave these lists down more, finding some sort of connection between here, these towns and someone on the list you’ve built,” he noted. “Good job.”
“Thanks. Now find this guy, would ya?”
Tori returned to the Taylor house to find everyone awake and Special Agent Fry on a conference call, coordinating the completion of the liquidation of the Taylor’s assets. Jake Taylor and two other agents were gathered around the desk in the office.
Erica Taylor was sitting by herself at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea. She was the picture of a distraught mother. Her beautiful little two-year old daughter was missing, abducted while she was upstairs. For all anyone knew, she was simply taking a nap. But given her completely devastated appearance, Tori was convinced Erica Taylor felt an even heavier burden of guilt because of what she was doing when her daughter was taken.
“If we get to the point where we have to pay the ransom, do you think we’ll get Ava back?” Erica asked Tori, staring into her cup of tea.
“We’ll do everything we can.”
“Have you ever been involved in a case where ransom was paid?”
“Once,” Tori answered.
“And did you get the child back?”
Tori nodded. “The good problem with a ransom is the kidnappers have to try and get it. That works in our favor.”
Erica was an emotional wreck. Jake Taylor, while clearly worried remained calm, almost stoic. She couldn’t get a read on whether he felt any guilt. Instead, he was acting like the executive that he was, all business, on task and laser-focused on the liquidation of assets. In the three hours she observed him, he never made a move toward or spoke with his wife.
By close of business for the day, the liquidation was complete. The assets would be converted to cash and would be delivered to the house in the morning.
One thing gnawing at Tori, though, was why the long wait on the next step? Did Jake Taylor miscalculate how long the liquidation would take? Maybe that was it, that he thought it might take longer. However, as she observed him, he was now more pensive and fidgety, as if now that the money was addressed, he just had to wait twenty-eight hours until ten p.m. tomorrow night. She watched as he stared out the window when his cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket, stared at the name for several seconds before tapping the screen with his thumb and answering. “Cindy? Yeah…I’m okay, hanging in there. The sound of your voice is garbled. Where are you?”
That piqued Tori’s attention as her phone buzzed. It was Newsom.
“I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
Ten minutes later Newsom pulled up to the Taylor house. Tori jumped in. “What’s up?” she asked as he pulled away.
“Let’s get away from the house first,” Newsom answered, driving them back to the Kum & Go. Drinking waters, they leaned against the side of the car.
“So?” Tori asked.
“David Hutchinson is most likely having an affair with Erica Taylor, but I’m not so sure about the second part of your theory,” Newsom stated. “I don’t think Jake Taylor is behind this.”
“I think his sister just called him.”
“I’m not surprised,” Newsom replied. “We tracked her down. They are currently estranged. However, she and her husband are on a Mediterranean cruise. We reached her on the cruise ship. Cindy Taylor McCaffrey was stunned to hear the news of Ava’s abduction. I suspect she called right after we were done with her.”
“It could still be…”
“Jake Taylor?” Newsom finished and then shook his head in disagreement. “We’ve been looking into him, and we still are, but I think your discovery of Erica Taylor and David Hutchinson may have triggered us to find something else to look at.”
“What?”
“David Hutchinson. He has an interesting history starting with his name is not David Hutchinson.”
“Excuse me?”
“We think it’s Thomas Martens and he has an interesting backstory. Mr. Martens previously worked for a company called Spinal Intelligence. They make certain devices used in back surgeries, like fusions. He left their employ eighteen months ago. Spinal Intelligence is a direct competitor of Jake Taylor’s company, Internal Medical Solutions.”
“Okay,” Tori replied, “He worked at a competitor. Is Spinal Intelligence based here in Des Moines?”
Newsom shook his head. “Cleveland. They have nothing here. Nothing. And Martens is not from Des Moines. He has no known history here. So, the idea he’s spending his summer looking for a job here is looking spurious.”
“What about his wife?”
“He’s not married.”
“There’s a plot twist. Who is the woman listed in the case file then?”
“We don’t know yet. He introduced her when we were interviewing neighbors as Avery Bronson, his wife, but there is no record of her that we found. We’re efforting an identification on her now.”
“But she left in the morning. I wonder who she’s working for?”
“Perhaps Spinal Intelligence, as well.”
Tori knew where Newsom was headed. “Spinal Intelligence plants this guy next door to the Chief Information Officer of a rival. What are they after?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Let’s go ask Mr. Hutchinson, or this Mr. Martens.”
Newsom grimaced. “Yeah, about that.”
“What?”
“Martens seems to have gone missing. He and the woman left in a car together this morning. You and I had talked about the affair, but we didn’t know about his fake name or his employment history with Spinal Intelligence at that point, so we didn’t think anything of it. However, now knowing what we know, it obviously would have been prudent to pay him a little more attention.”
“Then we need to go to Erica and Jake Taylor. Let’s put it to them, all of it, and see what we come up with.”
CHAPTER 17
“YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’VE JUST SEEN A GHOST.”
T ori and Newsom drove back to the Taylor house. As they walked up the front steps, they could hear shouting inside. Newsom opened the front door. The shouting was from upstairs; Jake and Erica Taylor were arguing.
“How long have they been doing this?” Tori asked Fry in the front entryway for the house.
“About ten minutes
,” the FBI agent replied. “But it’s been escalating.”
“What started it?” Newsom asked.
“The two of them were in the kitchen. She was trying to engage him, but he didn’t really respond, kind of ignored her. Then she said…”
“You blame me for this,” Tori anticipated.
“Exactly,” Fry answered. “And Mr. Taylor exploded with, ‘You’re damn right I do’.”
“Oh boy,” Newsom replied.
“Then the donnybrook started as he chased her upstairs. They’ve been barking at each other nonstop ever since.”
Tori and Newsom made their way up the steps to the second level. Tori could hear Erica Taylor crying and Jake berating her. Tori couldn’t help but think theirs was a marriage not long for the world as she knocked on the door. “This is Agent Hunter.”
“What?” Jake Taylor growled.
“Agent Newsom and I need to speak with you both—now.”
Jake Taylor yanked open the door. “We’re having an argument. It’s none of your business.”
“That’s not why we’re up here,” Tori replied, pushing her way into the room to find Erica Taylor crying, standing in the doorway to the master bathroom on the far side of the bed. Tori took a position on the far wall, her hands on her hips, pushing back her blazer, exposing her service weapon on her right hip. She often found just the exposure of the gun had a calming effect when people were heated. Newsom remained by the bedroom door to the hallway, leaning against the doorjamb. Fry and two Iowa BCA agents were positioned halfway down the stairway to the main level, listening in and ready to jump in, just in case.
Tori looked to Jake Taylor severely. “For the next few minutes, you’re going to need to be calm.” She then looked to Erica Taylor. “And for the next few minutes, you need to be honest.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Erica replied, offended.
“Have you been having an affair with David Hutchinson?” Tori asked coldly.
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