Two plainclothes officers for Des Moines were in the process of slowly approaching the building to try and peer inside. While they made their approach, Tori was once again evaluating the small proof of life video snippet the kidnappers left with the ransom demand. The footage of Ava was filmed in a darker room but beneath the crib, a grimy cement floor was visible. Looking up, Tori could envision such a floor in the cinderblock building.
The radio buzzed to life, with a whisper of a voice reporting, “We can’t see inside the windows. They’re either painted black or boarded over.”
“What do they have for SWAT here?” Tori asked.
“Des Moines has their Metro STAR team, special tactics and response,” Newsom answered.
“They probably have some thermal imaging gear. Let’s get them down here.”
A STAR team was onsite an hour later. Within fifteen minutes they had their answer. There were five human heat signatures inside the building. Four were in the front and there was one small one, near the floor in the back of the building.
“It’s late. They put her down to sleep,” Tori reported into the radio. “And they may be going down to sleep soon as well.”
“Probably in shifts. Someone will be up.”
Fifteen minutes later they pulled back nine blocks to a staging area in a parking ramp. There was an eight-man STAR team, four Des Moines detectives led by Grimes with additional patrol units nearby and then Tori and Newsom. A map of the immediate area was laid out on the hood of a car. Continued thermal imaging of the building revealed the same number of people inside. “There is little movement,” an officer reported. “Very quiet right now.”
A plan came into focus. Five STAR men would hit the front with three more taking the back. Tori and Newsom would support the other three in the back.
“Let’s gear up.”
Twenty minutes later with everyone in position, the five-man team parked their truck along the street in front of the salvage yard, using the tall fence as cover they approached from the east. The three-man team, with Tori and Newsom following, approached the rear, having worked their way around the perimeter fencing for the meat packing plant to the west. There was an old heavy wood door with a deadbolt along the back southwest corner of the building.
A STAR officer named Cowens carefully approached the door, crouched down and applied a vertical strip of plastic explosive and then a detonator just to the left of the deadbolt. A second officer named Reller had his hand up to his ear. Tori heard him whisper, “Copy,” and then he whispered, “They’re making the approach to the front.”
After another thirty seconds Reller replied “Copy” again and then nodded to Cowens and the third officer, Brooks, who both gave a thumbs-up. Reller then looked back to Tori and Newsom who’d taken a cover position behind a dumpster ten feet from the back door. Tori and Newsom nodded that they were ready.
Reller held up three fingers and held them for several seconds, then held up two, then one, then pointed at Cowens.
Cowens detonated the explosive. It blew a hole in the door to the left of the lock, but the door remained. Reller stepped forward and kicked the door but it didn’t give. “Shit!”
At the same time, in her earpiece, Tori heard the STAR officers in front had the same issue. She shared a quick wary glance with Newsom.
Not good.
“Kick it again!” Cowens yelled.
Reller kicked the door again and it gave in.
Brooks peered into the open doorway. The first shot hit him in the shoulder, sending him down. “Ah fuck! Ah fuck!”
From the cover of the dumpster, Tori shuffled quickly left, peering inside. She could see inside down a narrow hallway. She could see a man crouched down, peeking around the corner, his gun up.
Tori slid left another step, set her feet and had her gun up.
The man peeked around the corner again, this time too far.
Tori fired three times.
The man fell backward, away from view.
“Go! Go! Go!” Tori yelled.
Cowens peered around the corner. With his rifle up, he took a step forward and then fired a burst and then another quick burst. Tori took another step left and she could see another man now down farther inside. Reller fell in behind Cowens and they both moved quickly inside.
Tori looked to Newsom. “I got you.”
Newsom leapt around to the front of the dumpster, grabbed Brooks under the armpits and pulled him back from line of fire.
“We have an officer down back here! We have an officer down!” Tori reported and then looked inside the building again.
“Police! Police! Down! Down! Down! On the floor now! Now!” voices commanded inside.
Then all went quiet.
Tori left Newsom and stepped inside. The man she hit was lying on the floor bleeding, hit twice in the upper left shoulder, a STAR officer standing over him.
A second man, the one shot by Cowens, was lying face down in a pool of blood. He was dead.
The STAR officers had two more people now face down on the floor, one of them a woman. Tori quickly recognized her as Chloe Moore.
Then Tori heard it. A whimpering sound.
Tori looked back to her right and a padlocked door. A STAR officer turned the butt of his gun around and beat down on the padlock. On the third strike, the lock broke apart enough for Tori to yank it out of the clasp. She slowly turned the knob and eased the door open while the STAR officer’s flashlight beam illuminated the room. Standing in the crib in footie pajamas, tears running down her cheeks, frightened at all the noise, was little Ava Taylor.
Tori found a light switch and flipped it up, turning the overhead light on before she slowly approached the crib. She picked Ava up out of the crib. “Ooohhh, sweetie, hi,” she greeted as sweetly as she could. “Oh, you’re okay now, you’re okay. Ava, you’re okay. Shhhh.”
A half-hour later Newsom and Tori, following a police escort with lights and sirens pulled into the Taylor’s driveway. Erica and Jake Taylor came running out the front door and raced to Tori, taking and embracing their daughter. For at least a moment in time, the three of them were reunited as a family.
“Does watching that ever get old?” Newsom asked.
Tori shook her head. “No.”
CHAPTER 18
“DOES PISSING PEOPLE OFF COME NATURALLY OR DO YOU TRY TO DO IT?”
A s the noon hour and southern Minnesota border approached on I-35 north, Tori’s mind briefly drifted back to the satisfaction of bringing Ava Taylor home.
She was finally able to break away from the scene at the Taylor’s a little before four a.m. Newsom wanted her to appear for the 7:00 a.m. press conference but she declined.
“We don’t bring her home without you.”
“I just happened to see something is all. Just remember to speak slowly and clearly in front of the cameras. People tend to speak really fast when the bright lights turn on.”
After she left the Taylor’s she completed her after-action interview and then went to her hotel and collapsed face down on the bed in her business suit. She awoke to the buzzing of her phone at 9:12 a.m. “Yeah,” she answered sleepily, not even looking at the screen.
“Tori?” Tracy exclaimed. “You’re still sleeping?”
“Hey Trace,” she answered groggily, slowly flipping onto her back. “It was a long, long night. It’s been a really long few days, in fact.”
“I assume because of that case in Des Moines that’s all over the news this morning?”
“Hang on,” Tori replied as she rolled onto her right side, finding the remote and turning on the television, selecting the local station WHO where they were replaying the press conference. Newsom was front and center, along with the police chiefs of Des Moines and West Des Moines and the commissioner for the Iowa DPS speaking about Ava Taylor’s return. Tori knew the story and muted the television and then thought back to Tracy’s call from the night before. “Twenty-three. Tell me.”
“You’ll f
ind my documentation for all of it in your email inbox, which includes factual summaries of the circumstances and evidence of each case, a profile of each victim and contact information for the investigator in charge. As you’ve surmised, I found twenty-three cases since 1999 that I think fit the profile of your sister and the Lash woman who disappeared a few weeks ago. That includes one case that’s like five days old from Brookings, South Dakota.”
“Five days!”
“Yes.”
“Is that in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and North and South Dakota?” Tori asked in astonishment.
“No. If these are all connected, they’re spread out over a far broader area than that. Think the next ring of states around those five and that’s the area this involves. The scope of this goes as far west as Bozeman, Montana to as far east as Grand Rapids, Michigan to as far south as Manhattan, Kansas. The one thing that seems to ring true about the cases is the women who go missing are either from or live very near college towns. These disappearances are not from major cities, more like college-sized towns. That’s one noticeable trend. Another trend is it usually involves a vehicle in some way. In most cases, the women are never found. However, I included four cases where the women were found in the trunks of their cars, bound and strangled. I included them simply because the other factors seemed to fit based on age, use of a vehicle and college-type town. They might not be a part of all this. In fact, I think that’s likely the case.”
“What else?”
“With the exception of your sister, the victims age range is twenty-two to thirty. The other thing, and you’ll see this, they gradually get older over time. The last six women are in an age range of twenty-seven—Lash in Minnesota—to age thirty.”
“Meaning at the beginning, they were closer to twenty-two and now we’re closer to thirty,” Tori answered.
“Right, they get older as…”
“The killer gets older,” Tori finished the thought. “There has to be something to that. How about physical evidence?”
“Little to none, even on the four cases where the women were found bound and strangled,” Tracy replied with a sigh. “No eyewitnesses to anything. No surveillance footage of any kind. Forensic evidence is nonexistent for your killer, not a hair, a print, anything. The women are last seen leaving work, an event, a party of some kind, always at night and well after dark. The next day, except for the four that were found strangled, the women are discovered missing and their car is either still parked at the event, work, party site or somewhere else that has no relationship to anything in the victim’s life.”
“As if he drove their car to a place where he had another vehicle waiting.”
“That’s a distinct possibility,” Tracy answered.
“And the victims? Besides age range, what do you have?”
“They’re educated and have college degrees with a few exceptions. They’re all attractive, thin and smaller in stature, the tallest being Lash at five-seven. There is a mix of blondes and brunettes and one redhead. There is no rhyme, reason or pattern to the months or the gaps between disappearances, although there is usually several months between them, with the notable exception of Lash and this case in Brookings, which is the smallest gap by far between abductions.”
“That is odd,” Tori answered. “If Brookings is connected, I wonder why he’d move so quickly.”
“Ask him when you catch him,” Tracy replied.
“And we have no forensic evidence, nothing on our killer? Twenty-three women and zip? Even with the four women who were found?”
“No, other than there is one thing that might clinch the deal that the four women who were found strangled are connected. They all had marks, two dots on their lower backs, an inch or two apart.”
“Which could be for what?”
“One medical examiner theorized they could be markings for a stun gun.”
“Interesting,” Tori replied. “Have you discerned any other patterns to the women and their disappearances?”
“No,” Tracy answered. “Not beyond what I’ve told you and, to be honest, I’ve put into this about as much as I can without being too noticeable, although Graff has figured out that I’ve been digging into something. Hell, he’s staring at me right now. It’s only a matter of time before he asks.”
“You’ve done more than enough, Trace,” Tori replied. “Do me one last favor. I need you to email this to a Manchester detective named Will Braddock. Send it in twenty minutes, I want to call him first.” She recited Braddock’s email address, double-checked it and then thanked her and hung up. Her next call was to Braddock.
“I thought I might hear from you,” Braddock said as he answered his phone. “I saw the news about Des Moines, congratulations.”
“Thanks, heck of a case.”
“You’ll have to tell me all about it later. I’ve been doing some research since you left. I think I’ve found six other cases that might match your sister and Lash. We have a serial.”
“You’re not the only one still working the case,” Tori answered eagerly, explaining what she’d had Tracy Sheets doing. “Tracy pegs the number at twenty-three missing women that fit the profile of our victims who have gone missing since my sister did. I’m not sure the number is that high. She included four women that were found, bound and strangled in the trunks of their cars, but they fit our victim profile. That, and interestingly, all four have a similar marking on them which might be for a stun gun...”
She stopped talking for a moment.
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Braddock? Will? Are you still there?”
“Uhh…did you say…twenty-three?”
“If you include those four, yeah. Plus, you add in Jessie and Lash, you get to twenty-five. Katy doesn’t fit the profile, but she figures into this somehow, so that gets this up to as many as twenty-six.”
“Cripes,” he sighed. “Are you coming back up here?”
“I just woke up. I’ll be in the car in twenty minutes. I should be to Manchester later this afternoon.”
“And the FBI is good with that?”
“They will be. I have a lot of unused leave time.”
“Color me shocked at that,” Braddock replied dryly. “I’ll keep an eye out for the email. Lord have mercy, twenty-three.”
Tori hung up from the call with Braddock and jumped in the shower. When she got out her phone rang. It was Special Agent-in-Charge Richard Graff, her boss in New York City.
Graff was far from on board with Tori going back to Minnesota. “Agent Hunter, I have work for you here.”
“I’m not done with this yet.”
“Tori, you know as well as I do that this is not how it works. Agents don’t get to fulfill their own personal agendas on cases. And given your relationship to that case in Minnesota, you shouldn’t be within one-hundred miles of it.”
“I’m going back to Manchester,” Tori replied simply.
“Tori, if you don’t come back, I can’t guarantee you’ll have a job when you do return. I have people to answer to as well.”
“Because of my dedication to the job I have months and months and months of unused paid time off, Rick. The Bureau owes me, not the other way around. Apply my unused paid time off or grant me an unpaid leave of absence.”
“On what basis?” Graff asked, stunned by the pushback he was receiving from his subordinate, even if it was Tori.
“I don’t know, make one up,” Tori replied brusquely. “Or fire me.”
“Tori…”
“You know what—I’m fine with any of the three options. You choose, but I’m not coming back right now.”
Click.
“I can’t believe I just did that,” she muttered, admonishing herself. She was self-aware enough to understand her combative nature to be what it was. Nevertheless, even she was surprised at how short she was with Graff, a demanding but exceedingly fair boss. She would have to call him back and smooth things over, if for no other reason bec
ause of the respect she had for him. Her brusqueness, however, was a sign of something she needed to remedy soon. “Tori, you need more sleep,” she muttered, staring at the lengthy drive back to Manchester.
She wasn’t the only one who lacked rest.
Seven hours later upon arriving in Manchester, she found Braddock in his office. Will Braddock, the detective who said he didn’t bring work home, that he didn’t let it eat away at him, was the picture of something entirely different. He was unshaven, rumpled and visibly weary.
“When’s the last time you slept?” Tori asked with just a slight hint of concern in her voice.
“I should probably ask you the same question,” Braddock answered. “But for the record, I haven’t really been sleeping.” Then quietly, with his voice low, he gestured to his computer screen and a map of the Upper Midwest. “Nobody else around here knows about this—yet. At least not about twenty-three.”
“What do you think?” Tori asked as she walked around behind Braddock’s desk and leaned in close, looking over his shoulder. The two of them examined the map on his computer screen and quickly scanned the mass of information they now had on each of the cases. In total there were twenty-three dots on the map. The FBI’s list included the six that Braddock had found on his own.
“These nineteen cases feel connected,” Braddock answered. “There are so many consistencies with the age of the women, their look and background. And then you have the circumstances of their disappearances, the involvement of a vehicle, college-type towns and so on. It definitely feels like something is there.”
“What about those other four?”
“They were found. The other nineteen weren’t, so they don’t fit our guy’s pattern. But these nineteen? I think they’re the same guy.”
“It’s amazing that nobody picked up on it before now,” Tori remarked.
“Yeah, but they’re all so spread out,” Braddock replied. “Over such a wide area, over a long period of time and there is just enough of a difference in the cases that unless someone was really motivated to go hunting for the connections, they wouldn’t make it.”
Tori nodded. “But we are really motivated.”
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