Dividing Zero

by Ty Patterson

  ‘They suspect me of arranging her kidnapping.’ Her voice was whispery when Beth kept looking at her.

  They, the cops.

  ‘Who was that man, ma’am? Why does he look like your dead husband?’

  ‘My daughter is my life. Why would I have her kidnapped?’

  Beth went closer. ‘Ma’am, who was that man who lived with you?’

  Amy Kittrell turned her head away from them and didn’t reply.

  She didn’t speak to them again even though they spent an hour in the room.

  Beth looked at her one last time as they were leaving.

  Amy Kittrell was still turned away, her eyes unseeing.

  No. She’s looking at something

  Beth stood on tiptoes and spotted the small picture frame that had been obstructed by Amy Kittrell’s shoulder.

  It had Maddie’s smiling face in it.

  ‘Nothing. She isn’t talking to us,’ she told Chang.

  She listened for a few minutes. ‘I am not surprised,’ she replied. ‘When Meghan and I moved from Boston, we too didn’t have any friends. It took us a long time to make some.’

  ‘They interviewed other parents. All of them knew the man as Josh Kittrell.’ She answered Meghan’s raised eyebrow when she had finished with Chang.

  An idea struck her. She called Chang again and this time turned on the speaker.

  ‘Careful, Beth. My wife will think we’re having an affair,’ Chang’s dry voice came on.

  ‘What happened to the money, Chang?’ She ignored his humor.

  ‘What money?’

  ‘The benefit payment. It was a sizeable amount wasn’t it?’

  Keys clicked.

  ‘It’s still there. A large chunk of it. There are small cash withdrawals. Ten, twenty dollars, those kinds of amounts. Some grocery purchases. But most if it is still there.’

  ‘When was the most recent transaction?’

  ‘Last week. At Trader Joe’s, near her office.’

  ‘How did they fund their home? That must have cost a few million.’

  More keys clicked.

  ‘You know the first home she sold was a ten million dollar one. The second one went for eight mil. Both in her first year of their move to New York.’

  ‘Her commissions funded the down payment? Her salary, the mortgage?’ Beth asked him.

  ‘That’s right. We looked at the finances. Nothing there.’

  ‘No bank account for him?’

  ‘None,’ Chang confirmed. ‘He doesn’t exist.’

  Beth finger combed her hair when they entered their office.

  ‘We can always go to every hotel and every motel in the city. Ask them if they saw Maddie and this dude.’

  Her sister looked at her dubiously. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘What else have we got?’

  The man was no longer in the motel.

  He had booked a bedroom on the Amtrak service for that afternoon and had checked out early in the day.

  He dressed her in a voluminous jacket, hid her blonde hair under a cap, and hurried her to Penn Station.

  ‘It’s an adventure. Mommy will be waiting for us at the end of it.’

  That cheered the girl up and she hopped and skipped, as she kept pace with him.

  He entered the busy station and waited next to a photo booth while he looked over the concourse.

  There were cops. There were a couple of K-9s. None of them seemed to be searching for anything or anyone in particular.

  He took a deep breath, grabbed the girl’s hand and hurried to their platform without looking left or right.

  Two passengers hurrying to catch their train.

  No one gave them a second glance.

  He greeted the train attendant, helped the girl board the coach, and guided her to their bedroom.

  He shut the door once they were safely inside and released his breath.

  The girl was excited. She hopped and bounced on her seat. She explored the bedroom in delight and made to open the door and check the outside.

  He stopped her.

  ‘There’s enough time for that. Let the train start.’

  The train started and something loosened inside him.

  The next part is the riskiest.

  They reached their destination early the next morning. He woke the girl up, bundled their luggage and helped her down the portable steps onto the platform.

  It was deserted; they were the only two passengers in the station.

  The girl looked up and down, yawned, and asked. ‘Where’s Mommy?’

  ‘She’ll be here soon.’

  He waited for the train to leave and then got the girl to do his bidding.

  Seven days from Maddie’s disappearance, the message blinked on the twins’ phones, waiting to be seen.

  The twins were on their early morning run in Central Park and neither of them carried their phones.

  Meghan got the first inkling that something was wrong when her sister pounded her door and yelled loudly at seven a.m.

  ‘For chrissakes,’ she flung open the door, ‘you’ll wake the neighborhood.’

  Beth brushed past her, entering her apartment, and hunted for Meghan’s phone.

  She spied it in her charging cradle. She grabbed it and tossed it to Meghan.

  Meghan caught it, ‘What…?’

  She sat heavily on a couch and stared at her cell phone.

  Madison Kittrell smiled back at her.

  Chapter 20

  ‘You need to get here. Pronto,’ Beth told Chang.

  She cut off his protests. ‘Yeah, I know it’s seven thirty a.m. and you’re gulping your cereal in One PP. However, you and your partner need to get your asses here. Now.’

  She tossed her phone at her desk and looked at her twin. Meghan still wore a shell shocked expression. She was still looking at her phone, not touching it, as if it would explode.

  Beth groaned in exasperation and snapped her fingers in her sister’s face. ‘Wake up. Get over it. Start working.’

  She went to the kitchen, brewed two cups of coffee and when she had returned, Meghan was alert.

  ‘Identical messages?’ she asked Beth after taking a grateful sip.

  ‘Yes.’

  She dialed the number, held the phone to her ear and grimaced immediately.

  ‘It’s dead. Probably sent from a burner phone. The sim card’s trashed.’

  She stared at the picture again as if it could tell a story. ‘How did he or whoever sent that, get our numbers?’

  Beth frowned. ‘That’s one part of the puzzle. However, have you looked at that picture properly?’

  Meghan connected her phone to Werner and transferred the image to her computer.

  She brought it up on the larger screen and sucked in her breath when she saw it in greater detail.

  ‘Where the heck is Toccoa?’ Pizaka paced their office.

  Chang and he had reached the Columbus Avenue office in the ‘shortest time ever taken by the NYPD,’ according to Chang.

  They had hurried up and as soon as they had stepped out of the elevator and taken a step, Beth had hit them with the picture.

  Maddie was posed on a train station platform, with the building behind her. It seemed to be a wooden frame structure, its walls yellow with a red brick skirting at the bottom. Its sloping roof was tiled.

  Behind Maddie’s smiling face, beyond her right shoulder, a signboard was visible.

  It had blue lettering on white and a distinctive logo on the left. It had been defaced by graffiti; however, the name was legible.

  The board read Toccoa, GA.

  ‘It’s in Georgia, obviously,’ Chang wore a bemused expression on his face as he watched his partner pace.

  Chang was relaxed, sprawled on a couch, a coffee mug in his hand. It was the twins’ office. They would do the work for a change. A NYPD cop needed to grab his rest wherever he could find it.

  ‘It’s northeast of Atlanta. Ninety miles from it. About eight thousand
people. In Stephens County.’ Beth read from a screen.

  ‘When was the photograph sent?’ Pizaka again. Still pacing. Shades glaring at nothing in particular.

  ‘We got it at six forty-five a.m. We saw it at seven-fifteen. We called you at seven-thirty.’

  Pizaka glanced involuntarily at Mickey Mouse. Eight-thirty.

  ‘When was it taken? Who sent it?’

  ‘The who is easy. From a throw away phone. Werner is working on it.’

  ‘The when is more difficult.’ Meghan this time, curling a tendril of hair behind her ear. She was at another screen, giving instructions to the supercomputer. ‘Werner will try some algorithms.’

  ‘Send it to –’

  ‘Done,’ Beth interrupted Pizaka. ‘I have forwarded the message to your team.’

  Chang wriggled on the couch and settled more comfortably. ‘Maybe we should move here,’ he directed a hopeful glance at his partner.

  The shades turned on him. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Watching you at work. Very inspiring.’

  Werner came back with an approximate time. It had looked up light readings in Toccoa, compared the light in the photograph, and checked out angles, distances, brightness, and presented a time.

  Six-thirty a.m.

  ‘When?’

  Pizaka stopped pacing for the first time.

  ‘No clue.’ Beth curbed her irritation at the cop’s staccato questioning.

  It’s the first break we have. All of us are buzzing. Cut him some slack.

  ‘The sim card was bought at a Best Buy in New York, two days ago.’ Meghan called out and ratcheted the buzz further.

  ‘Who bought it?’

  ‘Werner’s got the where. For the who, it’ll have to hack their system.’

  Chang burst into a coughing fit and when he had finished, he sat straight, wiped his face and wheezed. ‘No hacking. We’re New York’s finest. We can get the details.’

  He spoke softly in his cell phone, and when he had finished, Meghan had a further update.

  ‘There’s an Amtrak train, the Crescent, that arrives Toccoa at six fifteen a.m. Every day service. It originates from Penn Station. New Orleans is last stop.’

  ‘Check –’

  ‘On to it.’

  Chang spoke in his phone again, giving further instructions. A team of cops would check out ticket purchases, would look up CCTV images at Penn.

  Beth looked up a number, dialed it, and put the phone on speaker.

  It rang several times and then a voice came on. ‘This is Toccoa Police Department. If you have an emergency –’

  Beth hung up.

  ‘We do have an emergency.’ Meghan raised her head from her screen.

  Something in her voice made them look at her.

  She turned the screen toward them, highlighted a section of the photograph, and enlarged it.

  It was a newspaper on a bench behind Maddie, a local one.

  She enlarged the newspaper. ‘Today. The photograph was taken today.’

  ‘No other trains to or from Toccoa, other than the Crescent.’

  Beth was rising even before she had finished. She grabbed her jacket, tossed Meghan’s to her, and by the time they reached the elevator, the cops were behind them.

  No other trains meant the chances were high that Maddie was either in or near Toccoa.

  Fifteen minutes later they were speeding toward JFK where their Gulfstream was, Chang and Pizaka busy on their phones.

  Beth waited for the cops to finish and then asked a question which stumped them all.

  ‘Why send it to us?’

  Chapter 21

  It was eleven a.m. on the seventh day of Maddie’s kidnapping when their Gulfstream parted company with earth.

  Pizaka and Chang had been on their phones constantly on the drive to the airport, talking to their team, calling the Toccoa PD, and the Sheriff’s office in Stephens County.

  Progress had been made when the aircraft reached cruising height.

  The Toccoa Police Chief would put up police tape around the signboard, to prevent tampering of any evidence.

  The name board would be dusted for fingerprints and checked for DNA, as would the immediate surrounding area.

  ‘We don’t have John Doe’s prints on record,’ Chang objected to Pizaka’s report.

  Pizaka brushed that off by lifting a shoulder. They would cross that bridge when they came to it. Finding prints was the first priority.

  Chang leaned back in his leather seat took an appreciative sip of the juice Beth had handed out from the on-board kitchen.

  He took in the luxurious appointment of the aircraft, turned to his partner and tried again. ‘I could get used to this. Why don’t we get seconded to Beth and Meghan?’

  Pizaka’s baleful stare brought him back to business.

  ‘Good news is that we traced the phone’s purchase. Bought at another Best Buy on the same day as the sim card.’

  He mentioned two stores in Queens. ‘Nowhere near the law firm or Amy Kittrell’s house.’

  ‘Who –’ Meghan burst out.

  ‘Who is unknown. Buyer paid in cash. No store cameras captured him.’

  Three pairs of eyes sharpened when he continued. ‘I have better news.’

  ‘We triangulated the location of the phone when the message was sent.’

  ‘The phone was in the vicinity of Toccoa.’

  He let the suspense build and ducked when Beth threw a cushion at him.

  ‘This morning. It came online at six a.m.’

  ‘Where is it now?’

  Chang shook his head regretfully. ‘It’s disappeared again.’

  Silence fell, broken by a sound, a sharply drawn breath, by Meghan. She turned her screen around to her sister and the cops.

  On it was an image of a man and a girl, their backs to the camera. They were heading to a train, to their left.

  ‘Werner got this from the cameras in Penn Station. Heights match those of John Doe and Maddie.’

  The time stamp on the image, one forty-five p.m. on the previous day, prompted the cops to pull their phones and make another round of calls.

  Meghan held up three fingers. ‘Ticket counter staff. Train personnel. Station staff.’

  Chang got what she meant. All those people needed to be interviewed and instructed by his detectives. He nodded without breaking off from the messages he was relaying.

  More time passed. Sunlight streamed through the Gulfstream’s windows and turned Pizaka’s shades to gold.

  His phone rang. He listened, thanked the caller and hung up.

  His sunglasses turned toward Meghan and Beth. ‘No man and daughter on the Crescent. A Viewliner bedroom is empty. It had a man and a young girl. No one saw the man well enough to describe him. Girl resembles Madison Kittrell.’

  Meghan turned back to her screen, electrified. No sighting on the train meant the pair could still be in the town.

  Or they could have rented a getaway vehicle.

  She commanded Werner to talk to various databases and check rental vehicles. To her left she heard Chang whisper into his phone. He was relaying near identical instructions to the Toccoa PD.

  The Gulfstream was scything through air, sky, and cloud when she finished typing. Far below, she could see the browns and greens of the planet as it rotated, as it had for billions of years.

  Hang on Maddie. We’re close.

  It was two p.m. when they landed on the sole runway at Toccoa Airport. Bright sunshine and heat fueled their urgency as they taxied, disembarked, and headed out of the small building that made up the terminal.

  A man with limp hair was lounging against a black Tahoe. He straightened when he spotted Meghan, and strode swiftly to her.

  He handed her the Tahoe’s keys and walked away without a single word to a waiting Toyota.

  Meghan felt the cops’ bemused eyes on her. She didn’t explain. She climbed into the driver’s seat, fired up the vehicle and rolled out when the rest of th
em had been seated.

  Zeb had similar vehicles in major cities across the country, as well as in several international cities. The vehicles were stored and maintained in auto garages that were owned by ex-military men, all of them vetted by Zeb and Broker.

  Each vehicle was reinforced with Kevlar, had armor glass windows, run flat tires, and had several other defense and offense capabilities.

  A driver from the nearest auto garage delivered an SUV to the point of use, and collected it after a mission. The garage serviced the vehicle, repaired any wear and tear, and kept it ready for the next mission.

  Meghan lit her turn signal, and turned right on East Tugalo Street and seven minutes later, drew up in front of Toccoa station.

  She hopped out and opened the doors for Pizaka and Chang.

  No need for them to know there is an arsenal under their feet, beneath the floorboards.

  A uniformed police officer stepped out from the station and walked towards them.

  Roy Pickett, his name plate read, Police Chief.

  He was short, stocky, and sweating. His eyes were sharp as they took in Meghan. They lingered for a second on Beth and then glanced over to the cops.

  Pickett shook their hands and drew a finger across his forehead. It gleamed with sweat.

  ‘They aren’t here. They have disappeared.’

  Chapter 22

  Pickett’s officers had searched the station and the surroundings thoroughly. There was no trace of John Doe or Maddie.

  They had interviewed all the car rental agencies in Toccoa. No one matched John Doe’s description.

  They had even spoken to several store owners on Main Street. Madison Kittrell hadn’t been seen in town.

  His officers had finished dusting the signboard and the bench where the newspaper had been lying. They would analyze it for results and inform the NYPD.

  The newspaper was in his custody and it too would be dusted.

  No one had boarded the train that day. His men were still working on who else had disembarked.

  He waited after he had finished briefing them, the sun beating down on them relentlessly as if mocking their wasted flight.