by Thomas Perry
Inside the closet was an unopened cardboard box that contained a portable toilet for camping. There was also a plastic water pitcher and some cups that looked as though they’d come from a hospital-supply store. Draped over the clothes rod at the top of the closet were lengths of thick, silvery chains, and clicked onto them to keep them neat and easily stored were padlocks with the keys still in them. Hanging on the pole beside them were two pairs of handcuffs. Other odds and ends were on the shelf and on the floor—rolls of duct tape and a few boxes of electronic gear, including a set of six closed-circuit television cameras with mountings and a couple of reels of coaxial cable.
After about five years in prison and two years of living with first his mother and then apparently with the remains of his mother, Albert Weiss was once again preparing to go into the kidnapping business. As she glanced around her, she realized that he was just about ready. The bed, the chains, the soundproofing were all set. The reels of cable had been used and snipped at the ends with a wire cutter, so he had undoubtedly run the cable for the surveillance cameras under the wall surfaces or ceilings. All he had to do was mount the cameras and then monitor them remotely with a mobile phone or a computer.
And then she had a feeling that was either instinct or a new sense of Weiss’s pace. He was out right now searching for the person who would be chained in this small, windowless scream-proof room while he waited to collect the ransom.
Leah went down the stairs, out of the house, and walked down the street to her apartment. She got into her rental car and began to drive. She had not seen anything that would tell her exactly where Weiss was doing his hunting, but she knew that she had to try to find him right now. He could not go out in the daytime to overpower and kidnap some rich businessman. He was a fugitive. She had been looking for him full-time for weeks and had never caught sight of him until the footage at the bank. It was probably because he seldom needed to go out during the day. He would want to take his victim at night.
10
As she drove, she let her cop instincts begin to take over. Part of being a good homicide detective was putting herself into the mind of a suspect. This time she had to look at the world as a collection of places that were mostly dangerous for a killer and others that were crowded with possible victims. Right now, Weiss wouldn’t be wasting his time in the dangerous places where there were too many witnesses. He would be in the ones where the hunting was easy.
She drove to the beach, parked, and then walked, trying to see every person who passed within range of her eyes. Weiss hadn’t been doing any kidnapping here since he’d been out. Any crime of that sort would have come up during her research and in the FBI reports. In the old days he had worked with two accomplices, and then with three. But his dungeon for kidnapping was new. He hadn’t even completed the finishing touches. He hadn’t taken anyone yet, and she’d seen nothing in his preparations that implied more people would be involved when he did.
He was alone, and he was planning a kidnapping that he could do alone. She felt sure that he was going for the easiest kind of kidnapping—a child or a young woman. She walked along the beach and looked. It was too late for children to be playing, or for their parents to be distracted so Weiss could snatch one. There were four young people, two couples who were probably on a date, strolling along and enjoying the cool air and the beauty of the night and the ocean. She sat and watched. It was too late even for them to be out on the beach. They veered toward the place where the beach rose up to street level and disappeared.
Leah was alone again. She stood and brushed the sand off the back of her pants, went up through the trees to the street, and got into her rental car. She drove along the streets from Twelfth Avenue to Fifth searching for places where she might have lain in wait if she were a kidnapper. As she looked and thought about Weiss, it occurred to her that the trick was like being a spider. He would be in the darkest spot he could find, watching the edible creatures moving around in the lighted spaces until he found one that was alone and off guard.
She kept driving, studying the clubs and restaurants that were still open, and then scanning the curbs and parking lots for the blue Chrysler 300. She parked her rental car among the other cars in each lot, waiting for him in each place while she studied the people coming out of each establishment. Most of the restaurants stopped serving food at ten or eleven o’clock, and the people who stayed to drink and talk tended to be members of celebrations—engagements, birthdays, anniversaries. They were well dressed and mostly happy, and few had obvious signs of inebriation.
The places that were still crowded at this hour were something else. The younger the crowd, the later they stayed and the more they drank. The bars stopped serving at 2:00 a.m., and at the ones she thought were most promising, a last burst of liveliness began around 1:00.
What she was looking for was not somebody who left with friends at 2:00. The person Leah was watching for was not going to be in a crowd. It would be a girl. She would be alone. She would be somebody who probably didn’t have much experience in navigating her way along the far border between tipsy and hammered and had pushed it too far. That meant she was probably going to be on the younger side, either just twenty-one or carrying false identification that said she was. She would be the one who was left behind.
The car that caught Leah’s eye was not the Chrysler 300. It was an Audi convertible. It was white with a tan leather interior and a tan canvas top that was folded down at the moment. To Leah, the open top meant that it hadn’t been driven until after sundown, because the sun today had been too harsh for an open top. But leaving the top down in this parking lot hinted to Leah that the person was not thinking clearly. Rains here tended to come with no warning whenever the right cloud passed overhead.
Leah’s headlights were reflected back by a sparkly frame around the rear license plate. She drove a little closer and saw something that was a familiar sight to cops late at night. There was a pool of liquid on the pavement beside the driver’s door. Most of the time that meant a drink had been poured out, either from a glass or from the driver’s stomach.
Leah turned off her headlights and kept her distance while she studied the rest of the lot. She was sure that if she walked over there, she would find a young woman lying in the car, slumped over, her butt in the driver’s seat and her head and shoulders on the passenger seat, just the way she’d been since she passed out. Leah craned her neck and straightened her long legs to raise her body so she could see the car better. From a foot higher, she could see down into the convertible. Between the bucket seats of the convertible she could see a part of the girl’s back in exactly the position Leah had expected. Leah slid back down and stayed there.
Her cop’s mind began to work on the situation. She couldn’t very well drive away and leave this girl lying there. People, particularly small people, sometimes died of alcohol overdoses. And she could easily choke to death. Even sleeping off her intoxication unprotected in a convertible in a dark lot was dangerous. There were sure to be other men besides Albert Weiss in town who would be glad to find a girl unconscious and alone late at night.
But Leah was torn. It was just after closing time, precisely the perfect time to find drunken potential victims. If she left the girl here, she could drive from lot to lot for another fifteen or twenty minutes, scan fifteen more establishments, and maybe spot the Chrysler 300. It was possible she could even get Weiss tonight.
No, she knew. It wasn’t even a decision. Leah would have to get Weiss some other way, some other time. Having discovered this stupid girl, she could not undiscover her. Leah would have to get her to safety and then see what was left of the night. She pulled her car around the corner of the nearest building and parked on the street so the girl wouldn’t see instantly that her car wasn’t a police model. She got out of her car and opened the trunk. She had put a towel and bathing suit in there a few days ago, planning to spend time on the beach watching for Weiss. All she knew right now was that she was probably goi
ng to need the towel. She picked it up, closed the trunk, clicked the lock on the doors, and began to walk around her car in the direction of the Audi.
She stayed in the dark, shadowed area where she was difficult to see. She didn’t want to have a local police cruiser enter the lot and stop so the cops could ask her questions, and she didn’t want to have bystanders watching her attend to the girl and get a good look at her. She walked about halfway to the Audi, heard a car door shut, and then saw another shape moving along on foot from the other direction. Leah stopped and stood beside a parked van, so her silhouette dissolved into its shadowy side.
The man was walking along quietly but not slowly. He was definitely heading toward the Audi. Her eyes found him in the dim glow of light from the cloudy sky. She held her breath. It could be. He was about the right height and the right build. He was wearing a baseball cap tonight, so she couldn’t see the receding hairline if it was there. The bill of the cap came down from his brow so she couldn’t make out much of his face either.
Leah reached into her jacket pocket and extracted the pistol that had been drilled to remove serial numbers. She screwed the silencer onto the threaded barrel. Then she placed the towel over it and began to move.
The man was walking faster. Then, suddenly, he heard the sound of a car engine, louder than most, come up the alley toward the lot. He stopped, and Leah stopped. For a full second, then another, the man remained frozen in place, listening. Leah heard the car turn and pass out a driveway between buildings and onto the street in front.
The man began to move again. Leah let him get a few more steps and calm himself down before she walked too. She reached under the towel and grasped the slide, then pulled to cycle it and put a round in the chamber.
She saw the man stop at the passenger side of the Audi. He leaned over the girl and craned his neck to see her face. Leah still couldn’t be sure it was Weiss, but she was sure she wasn’t going to let this man take the girl. As the man walked around the back of the convertible to reach the driver’s side, Leah began to run.
The man looked up and saw her, then stopped in place. His face contracted into an imitation of a sincere smile. “Oh, good,” he said. “I’m so glad you came along. This girl seems to need help. Do you think you could give me a hand with her?”
Leah kept going until she was about fifteen feet from him, which was when she was sure. This man was Albert Weiss. She stopped and said, “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know for sure. I think it’s probably alcohol. If you can help me get her into my car, I’ll drive her to the hospital and they’ll check her out.” While he was chattering, he reached in and got his hands under her arms, then lifted her.
“Don’t move her.”
“I’m pretty experienced with these things,” he said as he raised the girl to a vertical position.
“Put her down.”
He lifted the girl, holding her in front of him like a doll. One arm was across her body, and the other arm was under her neck. He began to walk backward toward his car, holding her up between them. “What are you talking about? You can’t leave an unconscious person lying there where her own vomit will block her airway.”
Leah let the towel drop from the silencer and aimed the pistol. “Put the girl down, Mr. Weiss.”
His eyes widened, and then narrowed. “Are you willing to shoot me?”
“Of course I am.”
“I can break her neck, kill her before you can—”
Leah fired, and the bullet went through Weiss’s forehead. He fell, his muscles limp, his limbs instantly deprived of strength. “Stupid,” she muttered. Any cop in the country would have taken the shot, and a criminal like him should have known it. Cops were all trained to take the shot, never to let the hostage taker decide.
Leah stared at the scene for a moment as she made some decisions. While she walked toward Weiss, she removed the silencer and put it and the gun in her jacket. She lifted the girl off Weiss’s body and carried her to her own rental car. She laid the girl across the back seat and then rolled the towel and put it under her head like a pillow.
She moved to Weiss’s body and patted it down to find his keys, then got into his car and drove it close to Weiss’s body. She opened the trunk, strained to hoist the upper part of Weiss’s body into it, then pushed the legs in, closed the trunk, and parked the car back in its spot.
As she walked past the girl’s car, she picked her purse off the seat, took it to her rental car, then opened the wallet to find the license. She used the map on her phone to get directions to the address on the license, then drove the girl to her house.
The house was a sprawling single-story building at the end of a curved drive. She opened the back door of her car, lifted the girl, and walked with her to the front lawn. She placed the girl on the grass a few feet from the front steps with her head still propped up, rang the doorbell until she saw a light come on, got into her rental car, and drove back to her apartment.
She parked in the carport, walked along the alleys back to the lot where she had left the Chrysler 300 with Weiss’s body in the trunk, and cautiously studied the area from the street. She saw no signs of cops. She could see that two buildings in the alley had surveillance cameras, but their servo controls had aimed them up at the sky. That had to be Weiss’s work. She got into the Chrysler 300, drove it to Alma Weiss’s house, put it into the garage beside the old Toyota, and closed the door. She walked around the outside of the house to the back.
She entered through the slit in the pool screen and the sliding door into the living room and began to search. The prison break at Weldonville had been one of the most carefully rehearsed crimes she had ever seen. Was it possible that they had all simply turned their backs on the others that night and driven in twelve different directions, never been in contact with each other again, and all successfully avoided a national manhunt?
She put on her surgical gloves and began to look for anything that might give her a lead on any of the other escapees. She looked for phone numbers, addresses, computers, thumb drives or discs, or anything else that might hold a list. She had searched a thousand homes in her career, and she looked everywhere in this one. This was going to be her last visit to this house. She whispered to herself, “Find it now or it doesn’t get found.”
There were hardly any books in the house. There was Alma Weiss’s old family Bible, but it had no marks in it other than the print and a register of births, and nothing was stuck between the pages. There was also an old photograph album that started with Alma’s parents and ended when Albert Weiss was about thirteen. Leah looked behind each photograph to see if anything was written in the book or on the backs of photos.
She found a den with a desk in it, and among the papers found the answers to questions she had no interest in asking anymore. Albert Weiss had been living for most of the past two years by using Alma Weiss’s checking account to pay the bills. At some point she had died, but he had never notified anybody. Her social security and pension payments kept appearing electronically in her account, and he kept writing checks in her name to pay bills. When he ran out of checks, the bank sent more. The reason he had begun to think about returning to kidnapping must have been that the payments hadn’t been enough. He had nearly finished depleting her savings and soon would have been living month to month.
Leah found nothing that could be a list of the names, phone numbers, or addresses. But she did find something that Weiss had left in the closet of his new dungeon upstairs. It was a list of tasks to accomplish in preparation for his return to kidnapping. On his list were things to buy: “gloves, insulation, soundproofing, cameras, cable, chains, duct tape, hats, glasses.” There were also reminders: “Get cash from bank, keep tank full, Buffalo ID, burner phones.”
She had what she had hoped for. Even if she was wrong, the time she had allotted to searching was gone. She was done. She had to get moving before first light. As she walked back to her apartment just before 5:00 a.
m., it started to rain. In ten minutes, the town was in the midst of a full-fledged rainstorm. Leah was glad. The rain would wash away the pool of Albert Weiss’s blood in the parking lot.
11
Leah made a reservation for a late-afternoon flight from Tampa to Buffalo, New York. While she waited, she cleaned her small apartment, throwing into trash bags anything that she didn’t expect to need again. She vacuumed the floors and emptied the dirt into the trash bags too. She packed her suitcase as she cleaned. She wiped off every doorknob, every faucet, every light switch, every flat surface. She poured drain cleaner in every drain and ran hot water afterward to be sure every hair was altered and sent to the local water treatment plant. She washed the sheets, pillowcases, towels, washcloths, and cleaning rags, folded them, and put them in the linen cupboard. When she had finished, she locked the door and left the key and a note in the rental office mailbox saying that she’d been called away and that she understood she had to forfeit the rest of her rent for the month.
She drove to Tampa, returned her rental car, and waited for her flight to Buffalo. While she waited, she thought about her decision to go to Buffalo. To most people, Albert Weiss’s to-do list would have seemed insane. But Leah had seen these lists before. All homicide cops had seen them. Many killers would write them out in the days before a murder, and sometimes she had wondered whether any of them had seen the grim humor in them. They would actually write down a list that read, “Duct tape, hunting knife, sharpener, hacksaw, chlorine bleach, spade, three bags of lye, plastic tarp,” and sometimes even include “gun, ammunition.” They would leave the list lying around their houses or in their cars, often with the receipts for these items.