The Stranger You Know (Forensic Instincts)

by Andrea Kane

  Leilah was studying Claire’s face. “Old money,” she deduced aloud. “Your ancestors probably came over on the Mayflower.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “That must have been terrible for you.” Leilah’s tone was rife with sympathy. “I come from a big, huggy-kissy family. They supported my dreams even during the endless months when I couldn’t get a single acting role. I don’t know what I would have done without them.”

  “You would have become totally self-reliant,” Claire told her. “That’s what I did. But you didn’t have to. You’re fortunate.”

  “I know.” Leilah traced the stem of her wineglass with one finger. “I admire you. You’re strong and independent. It’s no wonder everyone at Forensic Instincts thinks so highly of you.”

  Claire was about to respond, when a dark, eerie wave swept over her, nearly knocking the breath from her chest. Her wineglass slipped from her fingers, crashing to the floor and spilling merlot everywhere.

  She never noticed. She was inside herself, trying to focus on the cause of her awareness. It wasn’t another murder. But it was creepy and it was ugly. A prelude to something sinister.

  “Claire?” Leilah’s voice seemed to come from far away. “Are you all right?”

  “I...I don’t know.” Claire had one foot in each reality. “Something’s going on. Our killer is preparing, like an animal circling its prey. He’s chosen his next victim. He’s looking at her, making plans. Dammit!” Claire dragged a frustrated hand through her hair. “Why can’t I see his face? Why can’t I get inside his head and wrap my mind around the identity of his next victim? I never connect until the murder is actually under way. And by then, it’s too late.”

  “Should we tell someone?” Leilah asked, visibly shaken.

  “Yes.” Claire nodded. “Let’s go back to the brownstone. The team needs to know.”

  * * *

  Jack shut his apartment door, and opened the envelope he’d just picked up from the Duane Reade photo center. He removed the prints he’d made, sifting through them one at a time.

  Wow. This girl was beautiful. He would have really enjoyed this job.

  Too bad it wasn’t meant to be. She wasn’t his for the taking.

  His uncle Glen had dibs on that.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The building on West 116th Street was becoming way too familiar for Ryan. At this point, the thought of smelling meat and fat scraps made him want to puke.

  He and Marc approached the building. Through the front window, Ryan pointed the blue-green light of his argon laser at the alarm keypad inside. He could see a concentration of oils from the owner’s fingers on the number keys “3,” “4,” “7” and “9.” The last four digits of the meat market’s phone number was 4-7-3-9. Not even a challenge, Ryan thought in disgust. Human beings were too damned predictable.

  Marc fiddled with the lock, releasing the last pin, and manipulated the bolt back inside the door. Depressing the plunger on the handle, he opened the door and they entered the dimly lit market.

  Immediately, the keypad tone began beeping, indicating the start of the alarm system countdown. Ryan calmly entered 4-7-3-9 and silenced the tone.

  Quickly, the two men made their way down into the basement. Ryan would have preferred placing Gecko behind an air vent in the owner’s office, but that wasn’t about to happen. A steel-clad door and Medeco cylinder lock required them to shift to plan B. Fortunately, the utility room was unlocked, so in they went, straight to the air vent. Just to be on the safe side, Ryan cut a square access hole on top of the supply duct, so no one would notice that the duct had been compromised and repaired.

  Then he turned Gecko on.

  He watched as the little fellow whirred to life, and then set him inside the duct. Slowly and methodically, Gecko executed the 3-D navigation plan that Ryan had generated. Both Ryan and Marc listened as the “tink, tink” sound of Gecko moving from duct to duct echoed in the basement.

  Ryan pulled out his iPhone and started the monitoring app he’d created. Marc, always impressed by Ryan’s abilities, peered over his shoulder as Gecko turned on his camera and LED light, illuminating the air vent in the market’s locked office. Ryan could see the desk. On top were a telephone, fax machine and a large black ledger. On the walls were maps of the world with time zones clearly delineated. It looked more like a bookie’s office than a butcher’s.

  With Gecko in place, Ryan turned off the little critter’s LED light, and put him in “vigilant” mode, where Gecko would conserve power waiting for noise, light or motion to trigger a status change to “active.” When that happened, all sensors would go on and data streamed in real time to FI’s offices.

  Ryan sealed up the duct, closed the utility room door and he and Marc headed upstairs. Marc stood outside while Ryan pressed 4-7-3-9 to reactivate the alarm and then exited. Marc expertly relocked the door and the two men walked toward their truck.

  * * *

  The whole FI team knew that Ryan treasured his sleep, and how miserable he was when he didn’t get his eight hours. But tonight, he had no thought of hitting the sack—not until he’d done some heavy-duty digging into Jack Fisher.

  He pulled up the information Yoda had compiled. Jack’s parents’ death certificates. Trust fund documents. Glen Fisher being appointed Jack’s guardian after his parents were killed in a car accident. Jack disappearing when he was sixteen.

  He’d been a minor back then. Therefore, Ryan’s normal background search procedures wouldn’t work. Usually he would access credit reporting, criminal and other databases. But a disappearing teenager presented a unique challenge.

  Ryan started by using school districting maps to determine what elementary school Jack had attended. He then followed the boy’s progress from elementary school P.S. 59, to Simon Baruch Middle School and finally the Honors Academy at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn.

  Assembling the assorted pieces, Ryan determined that Jack had disappeared sometime between his sophomore and junior years in high school. That was consistent with his death certificate, which listed him as seventeen when he died.

  “Bullshit,” Ryan cursed at the monitor. “The fucker’s still alive.”

  Time for some real investigative work. Using the dates he now had, Ryan dug up yearbook and other intermittent pictures. He fed the time-sequenced images into the system, and used photo-aging algorithms to project a current picture of Jack at age twenty-four.

  He printed copies of Jack’s photo on FI’s high-resolution color laser printer, and then continued his research.

  A decade ago, blogs and social media were in their infancy. Ryan searched the local newspapers around the time of Jack’s disappearance for any clues.

  One story popped up and Ryan’s antennae rose.

  It was an article about a sixteen-year-old girl being molested outside a nightclub on 88th Street in Bay Ridge—The Suite, which was today known as the Capri. The girl, Angela Minutti, was the daughter of local mobster Paul Minutti. Two male teenagers were found the next day, beaten to death and dumped in front of the nightclub. Another boy was missing and presumed dead.

  Angela Minutti was in shock and uncertain who’d attacked her and who’d rescued her. There were ski masks, brutality and finally the police. One thing she did recall—and that was that Jack Fisher was on the scene. But she couldn’t remember if he’d helped her or hurt her.

  Ryan found an interesting video taken the day after the attack. Angela had just been helped into an ambulance, where she was huddled, wrapped in a blanket and shaking. There were visible bruises around her neck.

  Ryan paused the video, extracting and enhancing the frame he was interested in. Then he made a snap decision. He needed Hutch to weigh in on this.

  Quickly, he composed an email to Hutch detailing the key points of his research, including a link to the video. He attached the still video frame he’d extracted and enhanced. Then he pressed Send.

  It didn’t take three minutes
before his cell phone rang.

  “I got the email,” Hutch said. “I’m reading your points right now.” A pause. “Looking at both the video and the picture.”

  “And?”

  “And those are definitely choke marks on her neck.”

  Ryan cleared his throat. He was getting into dicey territory. He couldn’t reveal the fact that Jack Fisher was alive—not without telling Hutch how he’d found out. Illegally.

  “Hutch, let’s say this incident happened before Jack Fisher died. Let’s say he was responsible. What can you read between the lines here?”

  Hutch’s silence told Ryan that he was in think-mode. But he must have sensed that Ryan was hiding something. Whatever it was, he obviously didn’t want to know. So he just addressed Ryan’s question.

  “Glen became Jack’s guardian when the boy was nine,” he said. “In my experience, those are formative years. Who knows what Glen exposed his nephew to during that time? Violent porn? Maybe more. There’s also growing evidence that psychopathy is inherited. But even if the Fisher DNA has a predisposition toward violent psychopathy, my guess is that Glen probably triggered those impulses in Jack, the way someone or something did the same for him.”

  Hutch paused, skimming the material again. “Anything else?”

  “Nope,” Ryan replied. “After this, the story ceased to exist. Media silence.”

  “I’m sure Angela’s father took care of that.”

  “Agreed.” Ryan was already eager to get back to work. “Thanks, Hutch. You’ve been a big help.” He ended the call.

  Yeah, he thought, still staring at the screen. The story had ceased to exist.

  And so had Jack Fisher.

  Glen had convinced a court that his nephew had been killed, the victim of a no-body homicide—the third boy in the videotape. Once Jack had been declared dead, Glen must have absorbed whatever remained of Jack’s inheritance and kept the whole damned legal proceedings—including Jack’s supposed death—from Suzanne.

  Ryan sat back in his chair, lips pursed in thought. It was no wonder Jack had wanted to disappear. If he resurfaced, word would go out and Paul Minutti would make sure he was dead within a week.

  But Glen Fisher had had other plans for his nephew’s future.

  So Jack Fisher was alive—somewhere. In Brooklyn. Hiding.

  It was up to Ryan to figure out where.

  He took his printed pages over to the futon and settled down to scan them for clues.

  * * *

  The next thing he knew, Marc was standing over him, shaking his shoulder to wake him up.

  Jolting awake, Ryan found himself crumpled on the futon, where he must have collapsed out of sheer exhaustion.

  He whipped his arm around so he could see his wrist and check out his watch—5:00 a.m. He’d slept for an hour. The owner of the meat market should be arriving any minute.

  Sure enough, it wasn’t fifteen minutes later that Gecko “woke up.” The audio channel came alive with the sound of a key being inserted into a lock, followed by a loud “thunk” as the bolt slid back into its place in the door. The heavy door creaked open. Then a brief hum of a fluorescent ballast and the office was bathed in a bluish light.

  Sensing the video opportunity, Gecko’s camera activated and Marc and Ryan watched. The face of the owner appeared on the large monitor as he walked toward his desk.

  He sat down, obscuring the phone keypad with his body. All Marc and Ryan could see was the back of his head and shoulders. His arm reached forward, dislodged the receiver from the cradle and punched in eleven digits.

  When the receiving party answered, the owner identified himself in Arabic.

  “Shit,” Ryan muttered, hitting pause. “Where’s Leilah?”

  “My guess?” Marc replied wryly. “Asleep in her bed. It’s five-something in the morning.”

  “Yeah, right.” The ramifications of that were lost on Ryan. He picked up his iPhone and punched in her number.

  Leilah’s groggy voice answered. “Ryan? What do you want?”

  “I need you to translate for me.”

  “Fine. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

  “Now.” Ryan’s was gripping his cell phone, his mind singularly focused.

  Leilah was getting pissed. “I’m in my nightshirt, in my bed. I worked more hours for you yesterday than I ever have studying lines. I’ll come in later.”

  “Wait.” Ryan stopped her from hanging up. “I’ll let you hear the one-sided conversation through the phone. It’s the meat market owner. Please, Leilah. This is urgent.”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “Play the conversation for me.”

  Ryan put the phone on speakerphone and pressed the pause button again.

  The shop owner’s voice resumed, speaking in a transactional way. His conversation was brief.

  The instant he hung up, Ryan hit Pause again, and addressed Leilah. “Did you get that?”

  “Uh-huh.” Leilah began translating. “The owner told whoever’s at the other end to give a man named Jack five thousand dollars. He told him that, as they’d previously agreed, he would receive a handling fee of two hundred and fifty dollars. The owner ended by saying that Jack would be there this morning to collect his money, so to keep an eye out for him.” She broke off. “Is that what you were looking for?”

  “Exactly. I owe you a steak dinner.” Ryan was watching the screen again. “Just wait two minutes until I’m sure he’s finished talking. Then you can go back to sleep.”

  “If I’m lucky,” Leilah muttered in a grouchy voice.

  Ryan and Marc watched as the owner opened the large ledger book, scribbled something inside and closed the book with a loud thud. Then he rose from his chair, walked toward the door, flipped off the light and closed the door behind him.

  The last sound they heard was the locking of the door.

  “We’ve got to get moving,” Ryan told Marc. “We have no idea how early this morning Jack will be showing up to get his money.”

  “Good night, Ryan,” Leilah called out.

  “Sleep tight. Dream of steaks.” Ryan punched off the call.

  “What now?” Marc asked.

  “Now we find out where Jack is headed so we can beat him there.”

  Ryan got on his computer and fired up his audio analysis toolkit. First, he extracted the initial portion of Gecko’s audio recording—the exact timespan during which the owner was dialing the phone. Using a spectrum analyzer and applying different Fourier transforms, he isolated and then amplified the touch tones generated during the dialing process.

  The first set of dual tones corresponded to a frequencies of 697 Hz and 1209 Hz. Ryan checked his table, which translated DTMF key presses into pairs of tones. Frequencies 697 and 1209 together was the number 1. Next was 852 and 1209 Hz. Number 7. Frequencies 697 and 1209 Hz again. Number 1. Soon Ryan had decoded the phone number from the touch tones: 7-1-8-8-3-6-6-6-1-3.

  A quick Google search revealed that the phone number belonged to a Kwik Pik Convenience Store at 8595 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn. Ryan switched to Google Maps, locating the store in the Bay Ridge section, not far from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

  That was going to present a problem. Rush hour was already under way.

  “I’ll take my bike,” Marc said, referring to his motorcycle. “I drove it here this morning. It’s the fastest option.”

  Ryan agreed. “And you know the turf.” Marc lived in Brooklyn, so he’d know just where he needed to go.

  “I’m outta here,” Marc announced.

  Leaving the brownstone, he jumped on his motorcycle, revved it up and turned on West Street. From there, he drove toward the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel.

  Once through the tunnel, he took the first exit and zigzagged his way through Red Hook, avoiding the Gowanus like the plague. Finally, he turned onto Fourth Avenue and headed south to 86th Street.

  * * *

  Jack Fisher exited the Kwik Pik, his elbow guarding his zippered jacket pocket—and its con
tents—carefully. He hurried down the stairs into the 86th Street subway station.

  As he did, he could hear the whine of an approaching motorcycle at full throttle heading in his direction.

  * * *

  Marc parked right outside the Kwik Pik, facing the convenience store. Time to activate his helmet cam. Ryan had wirelessly connected it to Marc’s iPhone. As he saw a person appear on his iPhone screen, one tap and the image from his helmet cam along with a time stamp was saved on the smartphone and simultaneously uploaded to Intueri, where it was processed through facial recognition by Yoda. In a matter of seconds, Yoda’s voice would report the results to the Bluetooth-connected speaker in Marc’s motorcycle helmet.

  Great idea in theory.

  A bust in reality.

  A few hours later, Marc was tired of hearing “unknown,” “traffic offender,” “felon on parole” and “pervert.” His balls were killing him from the pothole-ridden Brooklyn streets taken at breakneck speed. Not to mention that he was starving and had to pee something wicked.

  None of that would have broken his resolve and made him leave.

  What made him do that was the fact that his gut told him he’d missed Jack. Son of a bitch, but he’d missed him.

  Disgusted, Marc called Ryan and filled him in.

  Then he went home. He wanted to grab a shower and a few hours’ rest while he could.

  * * *

  Suzanne Fisher arrived home, hung up her coat and put her purse neatly on the end table—just where Glen wanted it. He insisted that everything had its place.

  Then she took out her cell phone and punched in a number.

  She had no way of knowing it, but the NYPD had legally secured a wiretap on her phone, and a stakeout team was perched in their car across the street. From that vantage point, they watched through a pair of binoculars, hoping that Suzanne would make a phone call.