Ryba had a system, and it made it nearly impossible to catch him.
But this time he’d made a mistake.
She opened the file and found the video clip.
It was surprisingly clear and crisp, for night footage taken on a mobile phone.
Ryba, wearing the exact clothing that could be seen later in security footage from the impound lot, was standing with his back against the wall of a bar. He had his hands in his pockets and was looking around, monitoring the crowd but never engaging with anyone.
The footage was from one of the bar’s patrons, who had been shooting video of his friends laughing and enjoying themselves. Everyone in the video was a little drunk, save Ryba. He was definitely sober, and as the man who shot the video put it, “A little creepy and uptight.”
Ryba left the scene, walking in the direction of the impound lot, and the man behind the video, along with two of his buddies, decided to follow him.
It had been a lark. They were drunk and being stupid. They thought maybe Ryba was gay—something they thought was funny, for whatever reason—and maybe he was out trying to hire a male prostitute. It happened a lot in that part of town. The guys behind the camera thought it would be funny to get video of it.
They followed from across the street, managing to keep their giggles and conversations low enough to be masked by street noise. Ryba never seemed to notice them, though he did periodically scan the environment, ensuring that he was alone. He must have taken the guys as some drunk imbeciles making their way home from a bar.
And in fact, they stopped at one of the local bars, a dive that had indie band stickers plastered over its windows and an array of neon casting colorful light out onto the sidewalk and the street. The footage shifted for a moment at this point, with the guys holding the phone up, aiming the camera at themselves, arms over shoulders and loudly yelling “Cheeeeese!”
A selfie. Or a pretend selfie, at least. It was clear from the video that the guys thought Ryba had noticed them. This was camouflage. It appeared to work, and Ryba moved on.
The guys followed him again, giggling, making crude jokes, speculating about physical actions that would be anatomically unadvisable. Ludlum turned the volume down and watched the rest of the video with the sound barely audible, just in case something was said that she might need to hear.
When Ryba turned the corner by the impound lot, the three guys hid behind a collection of trash cans and parked cars. They were waiting for Ryba to get some distance on this side road, intending to follow him further. They were pretty sure of what he was doing at this point—the area was known to be a hotspot for hookers.
To their surprise, though, Ryba stopped and looked around. They ducked, hiding, but kept the phone raised, propped on top of one of the trash can lids and still capturing footage.
Ludlum leaned in and enlarged the window, making the video full screen.
In a quick and smooth motion, Ryba raised a silenced pistol. It was clearly visible in the shot, illuminated by the halogen lamp across the street.
In one quick and impressive shot, Ryba took out the light over the impound lot’s gate.
The guys shooting the video were swearing and panicking, but thankfully kept the video running. Even though it was dark, Ryba could still be seen moving quickly across the street. At this point, all details of his features were lost, but it was still obviously him.
The guys were frozen in place, and Ludlum could hear them whispering to each other, deciding what they needed to do. One of them suggested calling the police, which Ludlum thought was their best idea of the night. The others practically whisper-shouted him down, calling him an idiot, claiming that they might get in trouble themselves.
As all of this was happening, the camera eventually picked up the sound of a motorcycle starting, and moments later the flashes of pulsing blue light from the security truck. There was a pause in the activity from the impound lot, followed soon after by the scream of engine noise as the motorcycle flew from the impound gate, out on the street, and off into the night.
Ludlum backed the footage up, pausing it. On screen, only a few feet from the camera, was a man wearing a long coat and a balaclava, straddled on Cameron Ryba’s restored Indian motorcycle.
The figure looked just as he had when he’d grabbed Ludlum. It was him.
She grabbed a screenshot of the frame, sending it to herself. She did the same with footage that showed Ryba’s face.
She turned then to the bolt cutters, recovered from the scene.
These, along with the slugs taken from the security guard’s body were the only physical evidence they had in this case. It wasn’t enough. The video was damning, but a good attorney could punch holes in it. Ryba was implicated, but he could still wriggle out of all of this.
They needed more.
And he was still out there, still gunning for Kotler. They needed more, and they needed it fast.
She looked to the database, combing once more through the evidence, the reports, the statements. She wasn’t a detective. All of this made a kind of sense to her, but some of it just didn’t click. This wasn’t quite the same as examining a body, looking for clues in the anatomy, in the bones. With a body, she could run tests, compare results, find markers and traces that could let her use her experience and background to draw conclusions.
Maybe she could apply that here, but she wasn’t quite seeing how.
Some of the information she had on hand was the comparison of the bullet from the scene with the database. There were no useful hits. The gun had been stolen from a home in Naples, Florida, two years earlier, and had so far never been linked to any known crimes. Ryba could have picked it up from anyone, anywhere, any time.
But the bolt cutters …
Ryba had cast them into the weeds, after cutting through the chain on the side gate. She’d already tested for prints and found nothing. No help there.
But there was some promise in the bolt cutters themselves.
The brand was a store brand, specific to a chain of home improvement stores. It happened that there was only one of the stores in all of the state of New York, near Manhattan. A lucky break, in Ludlum’s opinion.
She made a call to the store, identified herself as a Lead Forensic Specialist for the FBI, and made fast progress on requesting video as well as sales records.
She got lucky.
Only one set of those bolt cutters was sold within the past month. And in fact, it had been sold just a couple of days before the incident at the impound lot. They had a specific time and date for the sale, and with this Ludlum was able to narrow down her video search.
The head of store security was more than happy to send her a file, via email. She opened it while still on the phone, and watched it with him listening. She then thanked him profusely.
It was Ryba.
He was even wearing the same coat. And in his hand was the stubby set of bolt cutters that now had a spot on Ludlum’s examination table.
She had him.
Now she just had to find him.
She wrote up her findings, included her photo evidence, and updated the case file. She emailed both the lead detective from the NYPD and the FBI agent running the investigation from their end. Everyone was pleased, even excited. She was getting congratulatory emails and text messages at a high volume.
But Ryba was still out there and was still on the hunt for Kotler. He was highly trained and relentless. He was also highly motivated by the death of his brother. His honor would demand that he take out Kotler.
Ludlum had brought this on Kotler by killing Cameron Ryba. This was on her. She had to do something. Something more than link Ryba to the crime.
She sat back from her computer, rubbing her eyes, yawning. It had been a very long day. She stood, taking her empty coffee cup with her, and wandered to the break room. She took note that outside the windows of Historic Crimes the city had darkened, night had fallen. It was late.
She poured the last of the c
offee into her mug, splashed some cream into it, and sipped.
People were hunting Ryba. She could trust them to find the man. That security guard he’d murdered was retired NYPD. The Blues had a stake in this, and they’d do whatever they could to find the guy. The FBI also had a keen interest in Ryba, for more reasons than Ludlum could count.
She didn’t have to worry about this.
But she felt it as her responsibility. And that meant she had to do something.
What did she know about Ryba?
If Ludlum were examining a body or a blood stain or any evidence collected from a crime scene, she’d start by looking at the knowns. If the splatter formed this pattern, it meant this sort of injury, this angle, this timeframe. If there was a bullet, the striations could be measured and matched to a database, the angle of entry could tell her the shooter’s position. If a victim was stabbed, the cut could tell her the shape of the blade, the angle of attack, the force of the thrust.
The knowns were details that could let her make intuitive leaps. She could piece together the rest of the story from these tiny shards, by examining the end result and working backward.
What did she know about Ryba’s hunt for Kotler?
She had details on the man, from his file. She knew his background and his training. These might be helpful, but she wasn’t entirely sure how. She wasn’t a profiler. She couldn’t really discern what Ryba would do based on what he’d already done. Not really.
But that wasn’t the way things worked for her anyway. She was a forensic anthropologist. She dealt with end results. She worked backward, building the story from its end to its beginning.
What was the end of this story, as Ryba would have it?
She realized that was an easy question.
Ryba intended to kill Kotler.
And the only way he could get that result was to get to Kotler when he least expected it. Isolate him. Take him out in such a way that he’d never see it coming, that Kotler would have no means of escape, and that Ryba could disappear, unseen and unconnected.
Ludlum froze.
She knew how to find Ryba because she knew what he was after. She knew, as well, that he wasn’t going to just give up on this. He had a code, and that dictated that he get the job done. A 100% success rate. Even if Ryba were being his own client at the moment, he’d want to keep that record.
Kotler was with Agent Denzel. The two of them were on their way to Dr. Wiley’s lake house.
That was where Ryba would be.
She put her coffee mug in the sink and raced back to her office, grabbing her phone. She dialed Kotler and got no answer. She dialed Denzel, and it went to voicemail. The area they were in was remote. They might not have a signal.
She needed to warn them.
She raced out of her office and went straight to the elevator. On the ride to the ground floor, she called for an Uber, and then made arrangements for a rental car. Before she reached the lobby, it was done.
From the backseat of the Uber, she pulled up a map to the lake house, based on the address in the file Denzel had compiled.
It would take four hours to get there, if she obeyed speed limits. But they were only two hours ahead of her. She might be able to catch up. And she could also arrange for some backup.
She called another number on her phone. “Detective Holden?”
“Liz?” Detective Peter Holden was an old friend from the force, and knew both Kotler and Denzel, having worked with them on the Ashton Mink murder investigation.
“I need your help,” she said. “I need you to make some calls. And I need to run some lights.”
34
ADIRONADACK LAKE, NEW YORK
The drive to Adirondack Lake had taken almost four hours. Kotler tried to admire the scenery as they closed in on the lake house of Dr. Wiley, though there wasn’t much to see in the dark. Still, the lights from the homes here made the place seem warm and inviting. The reflection of moonlight from the lake gave the whole area a mystical energy. It was beautiful here. The kind of place where evil things should never happen.
They slowed.
“The address is up ahead,” Denzel said, checking his GPS. “I don’t want to alert him to our presence, if he’s here.”
Kotler nodded.
His phone vibrated, and he looked down to see he had a voicemail from Liz Ludlum. There was no sign of a missed call, so it was likely she had tried reaching them while Denzel and Kotler were in a dead zone. Out here, as they’d closed in on the lake, service had gotten spotty.
Denzel had taken his own phone out. “Ludlum,” he said.
“She called me, too,” Kotler said, looking up. “We’d probably better check.”
They each played their voicemails, holding their phones to their ears and then turning to each other.
“Ryba?” Denzel asked.
Kotler nodded, then looked out of the windows into the dark, as if Ryba might appear and take his shot. For all they knew, that was precisely what the man had in mind.
“We’ll have to keep an eye out,” Denzel said. “But there isn’t much we can do about it now.”
Kotler agreed.
Denzel paused for a moment, then opened his door and walked to the trunk of the car, popping it open. Kotler joined him.
Denzel opened the locked case in which he carried a veritable arsenal. He pulled on a vest, and then handed one to Kotler, minus the large yellow “FBI” insignia.
“You still have the weapon Coben gave you?”
Kotler shook his head. “Confiscated when you brought me in.”
Denzel nodded, then reached into the case and took out a .45 EAA Witness, handing it to Kotler along with a hip holster.
Kotler turned, checked the clip and the chamber. “This is a switch,” he said.
“You’re apparently cleared for a weapon,” Denzel said. “The NSA says it’s so.”
“Not exactly a source I’d trust,” Kotler said.
“Good enough for now. And we don’t know what we’re walking into here. With Ryba in play, it’s better to be safe.”
Kotler agreed. “Should we call for backup?”
As if on cue, suddenly a pulse of red and blue appeared. They turned, and both put their hands out and to their side. Kotler hoped the large “FBI” emblazoned on Denzel’s vest would be enough to keep any local deputies with itchy trigger fingers from shooting them out of panic.
To Kotler’s relief, the officer stepped out of his cruiser and immediately greeted them.
“Agent Denzel?” he asked.
“That’s me,” Denzel replied.
“We got a call from a Detective Holden, with NYPD?”
“Holden?” Kotler asked, leaning toward Denzel.
Denzel put his hands down and walked over to the officer. Kotler followed.
They talked for a moment, exchanged information. Ludlum had made some arrangements, it seemed.
“We have a couple of units on the roads going in and out of this area,” the officer said. “Looking for anything suspicious. We have a description of Ryba. We’ll keep our eyes open.”
“I appreciate that,” Denzel said.
“Agent Ludlum is on her way,” the officer said.
Kotler’s eyebrows raised, and he looked to Denzel. “Agent … Ludlum.”
“That’s good,” Denzel said. “And I’m glad you’re here. Can you cut the lights?”
The officer reached into his cruiser, and a moment later the lights were off.
“We think our suspect is in a lake house less than a mile from here. I was planning to go in on foot. It would be helpful if we could keep anyone from driving through here for the next couple of hours.”
The officer nodded. “I can head back up the road, block it further up the shore. There are only three houses out here, and this is the only road in or out. It ends in a turnaround a couple of miles past the Wiley place. I can’t say for sure if anyone is home, down the way.”
“Do you know them?” Denzel a
sked.
“One of them. I can have Dispatch put me through to the other. I’ll make sure they stay put.”
Denzel nodded, then turned to Kotler. “Ready for a hike?”
Kotler smiled. “Are we sure we don’t want to wait for Agent Ludlum?”
“We’ll fill her in later,” Denzel said.
Ludlum saw the flicker of police lights up ahead, and took a breath. She patted her pocket, found her ID, and had it ready as she pulled to a stop and rolled down her window.
“Agent Ludlum,” the officer said.
Ludlum blinked. “Y-yes,” she said, smiling. She hadn’t claimed to be an agent, but it was easier just to let him assume.
“The other two are already at the property,” he said, smiling. “I have this route blocked for incoming traffic. If you pull over to the shoulder, you can pass by.” He pointed to the rear of his cruiser, where the shoulder was indeed wide enough for her to drive.
“Has anyone else come through?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No ma’am, not since I’ve been here.”
She thought for a moment. “Is this the only road in?”
He nodded. “This is the only way to get a vehicle to this part of the lake, unless you’re on an ATV.”
“ATV?” Ludlum asked.
“Four-wheeler,” the officer explained. “Or a dirt bike. Something small enough to get through the forest trails.”
Ludlum felt her pulse quicken. “How public are those trails? Are they on a map?”
The officer frowned, thinking. “I’m not sure.” He straightened then and picked the radio from his lapel. He spoke into it while Ludlum picked up her phone and once again tried Kotler and Denzel. Again, it went straight to voicemail. If they were making their move on Wiley, they’d have the phones off.
The Stepping Maze Page 20