by Elle Gray
It’s a really good point. Burners can be bought almost anywhere these days. And if you’re paying cash for it, that makes it virtually untraceable. So why would the man in the hoodie go out of his way to grab a phone from somewhere else? He’d probably get them where it was convenient for him.
“What about security cameras?” I ask.
He smiles. “Oh, yeah. Got plenty of ’em. My son works for a security firm,” he says. “He hooked me up real good. Got six cameras mounted on the wall that you can see out there. But there’s six more you can’t see.”
“That’s good news for us,” I say. “Is the footage archived?”
He nods. “In the cloud.”
“That’s even better news. Can you possibly pull up the footage from that date?” I ask. “I want to see who our mystery phone buyer is.”
“You got it,” he nods.
He taps away at his computer keyboard and a moment later, a split eight-screen comes up. Four camera shots on top, four below, each one showing a different angle of the store. The entire floor is covered. Nothing that happens goes unseen. Mickey taps a few more keys, and the screen resolves into one image—that from right behind the counter, shooting directly at the customers as they make their purchases.
“Here we go,” he says.
He taps out a few more commands. The screen blinks, and then the timestamp in the corner shows the time and date I wanted. And standing there at the counter is our man in the hoodie. He’s probably in his early-to-mid thirties, with short dark hair and brown eyes. He’s thin and I’d put him somewhere around five-ten, five-eleven, or so. But what draws my eye is the distinctive scar that runs down the left side of his face.
“That is amazing,” I say. “Can you print out that photo for us?”
“Absolutely,” he replies.
I hear the whirr of a printer warming up, and a moment later, I’m holding a photo of our mysterious man in the hoodie. It’s a full-color glossy that should be good enough to get something through facial rec on it.
“Mickey, I can’t tell you how thankful we are for your help,” I tell him.
“Glad I could be of service,” he says.
Astra shakes his hand, then pulls him down and plants a kiss on his cheek. His smile is wide and genuine, his day made.
“You all come on back when you feel the need to frisk somebody now,” he chuckles. “I’ll be here waitin’.”
“You have a great day,” I tell him.
We head out of the store and climb back into the car. “We need to stop by County,” I say. “I want to run the photo by Burton. We need to know if the man who called Tony’s Auto is the man in the hoodie.”
“Here’s hoping Burton’s lucid,” she comments.
I nod. “Here’s hoping.”
The feeling in the pit of my stomach is unmistakable and undeniable. The momentum of the case is propelling us forward. We’re closing in on getting the answers we need. I can feel it down in my bones.
Twenty-Eight
Criminal Data Analysis Unit; Seattle Field Office
I pull up the text messages on my phone and call up the new one from my aunt Annie. She rarely texts me, but given that I’ve been ignoring her calls for the last few hours, she’s resorting to alternative means.
Need to talk to you. Call me ASAP.
The second I close out of my text messages, my phone buzzes with an incoming call. I roll my eyes. I connect the call and press the phone to my ear.
“Annie, I can’t talk right now but the second I have some time, I’ll—”
“Blake?”
It’s not Annie’s voice. I freeze in my tracks. I look at the caller ID and see the number is blocked. I know I don’t recognize the voice, and yet there’s some faint tingle of familiarity in it. I don’t know what’s ringing those bells, though.
“Yes, this is SSA Wilder,” I say in my official voice. “Who am I speaking to, please?”
There’s a loud sniff, as if the person on the other end of the line is crying. I cock my head and listen harder, straining my ears, but can’t hear anything else.
“Hello?” I ask. “Who is this?”
The line goes dead in my hand. Whoever it was hung up without saying anything else.
“What the hell?” I mutter.
“Who was that?” Astra asks.
“No idea. It was a blocked number.”
“Heavy breathing? Did they say perverted things?” she quips.
“No, nothing like that,” I frown, shaking my head. “She just said my name. That’s all.”
“So why do you look as if you’ve seen a ghost?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I almost recognized the voice—or at least some part of my brain did. But I just can’t place it.”
“That’s odd and creepy,” she notes.
I nod. “Yeah. But whatever,” I say. “I don’t have time for it right now.”
I give my head a shake and pull myself back to the present. I fire off a quick text to Annie, telling her I’m in the middle of a case and I’ll call her as soon as I get a moment. She’s not going to like it—she hates being put off more than anything—but I’m not going to stop the momentum we’re building just to go and listen to her ranting about one thing or another.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’d most likely be about my cousin Maisey, who has begun asserting her independence more frequently and forcefully. And although Annie has come a long way in terms of being able to let go and let Maisey be her own person, there have been a few bumps in the road now and then—bumps I have no time for at the moment.
“Rick, can you put it up on the screens, please?”
“Your wish is my command, my liege,” he replies.
“Do you think he’s ever not weird?” Astra asks.
I shrug. “Maybe when he sleeps?”
“No, I’m pretty sure he even sleeps weird.”
“What? Sleeping while hanging upside down like a bat is perfectly normal,” he chirps.
The screens behind me pop to life with the mugshot of the man we’ve been looking for. I take a moment to study him. He’s clean-shaven—face and head—with a strong jawline and piercing blue eyes. There’s a hardness about him that only comes from growing up rough, fast, and having done some time.
“This is Alex Dansby, thirty-nine years old,” I say. “He’s a two-time loser, having done a nickel for aggravated assault and another nickel for attempted robbery of a bank—he was the wheelman.”
“The wheelman who crashed into a city bus during the big getaway,” Astra adds, drawing a laugh from everybody.
“Alex Dansby, as we confirmed with Sergeant Burton, who is currently residing at County, is the man in the hoodie. This is the man who gave Burton the debit cards and the instructions to bleed the accounts,” I continue. “This is also the man who is the layer of insulation for our trafficker.”
“Are we sure of that?” Mo asks.
“As sure as we can be,” I nod. “What we are fairly certain of is that Dansby is not the mastermind—he’s not the one trafficking the girls. He’s the one doing the dirty work, such as running the bleeders and ditching the cars. I’m almost positive the person actually behind the scheme wouldn’t risk himself that way.”
“But why would Dansby take on that kind of weight for somebody?” Mo asks. “We can tie him to the missing girls via the debit cards. That means he’s taking the weight for them—and with Stacy Burkett turning up dead, he’s looking at twenty-two murder charges, bodies or not.”
“It’s a question I’ve asked myself a thousand times already. The only reason I can come up with is loyalty,” I say. “For some reason, Dansby is so loyal to our trafficker that he’s willing to take the bullet for him. In my experience, he’s only going to have that sort of loyalty for a lifelong friend or a relative. Maybe a brother. His father. Somebody closer to him than his own skin. So, we need to do a deep dive on him. We need to figure out who engenders that sort of loyalty in him.”
“On it,” Rick says. “I’ll get into every nook and cranny on the guy.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound disgusting and wrong,” Astra says.
Rick chuckles. “Sounds like a typical Friday night for you.”
“Children, let’s focus,” I say, laughing to myself. “Mo, have you had any luck cross-referencing the employment histories at the schools?”
“I’m so glad you asked,” she says. “As a matter of fact, I have stumbled across an interesting nugget of information.”
“Do tell,” I say.
“As it turns out, your dreamy philosophy professor, Dr. Crawford, was an instructor at each of the institutions where some of these girls went missing,” she says. “It took some doing, because he’s never been part of the official full-time faculty anywhere but Marchmont—he was at those other schools as a part-time professor and guest lecturer. So, while he wasn’t necessarily there at the exact times the girls disappeared, it’s curious that he was at each of the schools where girls went missing. Only instructor I’ve found who was.”
I nod, feeling my stomach starting to churn even more wildly. I can see the pieces lining up in some semblance of order. They’re not quite falling into place just yet, but I think we’re starting to get somewhere.
“That’s great work, Mo. Really great work,” I tell her. “But do me a favor and go deeper with that. I want to know if these girls had classes with him.”
“For this theory to work out, if Crawford is our trafficker—which I assume is where you’re going with this—what’s the connection between him and Dansby?” Astra asks.
“That’s a great question,” I say. “Why don’t we go ask him?”
“Should we do that?” Astra asks. “I mean, we risk tipping him off if we do, and if we spook him—and assuming the girls are still alive—we could force him to liquidate.”
“Liquidate? That’s really disturbing and dehumanizing,” Rick chimes in. “Why can’t you say something normal like ‘murder everybody he’s holding’? It’s terrible, but sounds a lot better than liquidating people.”
“You’re such a wuss,” Astra says.
“I prefer the term, ‘gentler of constitution.’”
“Yeah, so you’re a wuss,” Mo cracks.
As they banter back and forth, I’m forced to think about Astra’s point, and I come to the conclusion that she’s right. I mean, we don’t really have the evidence to confront him. The fact that he has been at each of the schools where the girls went missing is an anomaly, but it’s far from damning. And she’s also right in that if we spook him, he could kill the girls who are still alive—if there are any.
But the other side of that coin is that if we give him a clue that we’re looking at him, it could force him to slip up. He seemed very calm and in control of himself when we last spoke with him. But I’m curious to see how he’d react to having a little pressure put on. How he would react if we started to squeeze him—if only a little bit. We could do that and then put somebody on him. We tail him everywhere and see where he goes. With any luck, he might just lead us to the girls.
It’s a gamble, no question about it. But if we’re ever going to blow this case open and find these girls—or find where they’re buried—we’re going to need to take some risks. It’s the only way this is going to happen. But—perhaps we could help mitigate those risks.
“Astra, let’s go,” I say. “Let’s go scoop Dansby up.”
“On what charge?”
“If nothing else, we have him on the fraud charge,” I say. “That’s good enough to hold him for a little while. Hopefully long enough to squeeze him until he cracks. I want to know if there’s any connection between him and Crawford. Because if there’s not, we need to find out who he’s taking his orders from.”
“Or find out that he’s the head of the snake.”
I shrug. “Whichever. As long as we can figure out the whos and wheres,” I say. “I just want to find these girls and bring their families a sense of peace, one way or the other.”
“All right,” she says, even though I can tell she’s not convinced. “Let’s do it.”
Twenty-Nine
Interrogation Suite Charlie-3; Seattle Field Office
“You had no right to pick me up like that,” he snaps. “You had no cause to bust into my place of work and drag me out of there.”
“Sure, we did,” I reply. “You’re on probation, and your name came up in our criminal investigation. A federal investigation, just so you know, so depending on what you tell us versus what we figure out on our own, you could be in very serious trouble.”
“What she’s saying is that because you’re out on parole, your leash is especially short,” Astra says. “So the choice is yours. You can either loosen it with us—or we can tighten it.”
“But you should know that by now, as this isn’t your first rodeo, cowboy,” I add.
Dansby sits across the table glowering at us. “Lawyer,” he sneers.
I shrug. “That’s your right, of course. But I should tell you now that we already have you on bank fraud. That’s federal weight,” I tell him.
“We’ve also got you on the murder of Stacy Burkett,” Astra adds.
I watch him closely, looking for a tell. But Dansby is well versed in keeping his features controlled. He gives me absolutely nothing. We obviously don’t have him on the murder, but we were hoping to rattle him enough that he would give something away. It’s a gambit we use all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This time, unfortunately, it’s falling into the latter category.
“Who?” he asks smugly.
No choice but to play it out now. “The girl found out on Highway 12. Beaten within an inch of her life,” I tell him. “But you already knew that. Died of her injuries, by the way.”
“What did you use?” Astra presses. “Baseball bat? Steel pipe? Your fists?”
“I got no idea what you’re talkin’ about,” he says.
“We can tie you directly to twenty-two girls who’ve gone missing,” I tell him. “One of whom is dead. Think it’ll take a jury long to connect all the dots?”
“This won’t get to a jury,” he says.
He’s looking at us with a smug smirk on his lips that I don’t like. He’s acting as if he’s got an ace up his sleeve. It reminds me a lot of the night Stephen Petrosyan got his bodyguard to fall on his sword for him. We had Petrosyan dead to rights, but I had to watch him waltz out the door, anyway. This is definitely feeling a lot like that.
“And what makes you think that?” Astra asks. “We’ve got you dead to rights, Alex.”
“You’ve actually got nothing.”
“We can prove you hired Leonard Burton to withdraw cash from the bank accounts of the twenty-two girls who went missing and funnel it to you. We can prove that you turned Selene Hedlund’s Tesla—she’s another girl who’s missing—over to a chop shop in the Othello district,” Astra says. “We can connect you directly to Stacy Burkett—that’s the dead girl, just in case you forgot. How am I doing so far?”
He laughs slowly and shakes his head. “You people don’t know anything, do you? This ain’t what you think it is.”
“No?” I raise an eyebrow. “Then educate us. Tell us what we’re missing.”
“I’d be glad to,” he says. “In the presence of my lawyer.”
“If you lawyer up, we can’t help you.”
“The only help I’ll need from you is when you hold the door open for me as I walk out of here,” he fires back.
“You do realize that’s not going to happen, right?” Astra says. “We’ve got you cold—”
“You’ve got nothing. Nothing but a lack of understanding,” he says. “You don’t know nothin’. You may think you do, but you don’t.”
“Then educate us,” I press.
“I will. Once my lawyer gets here,” he says. “I’m takin’ a temporary vow of silence now. I ain’t gonna say another word ’til my lawyer gets here. Got i
t? Run along now and fetch my lawyer.”
Astra and I exchange a frustrated glance but get to our feet, head out the door, and step into the pod. We stand in silence for a moment, glaring at him through the glass. Through the speakers on the tech’s control board, we hear him humming to himself.
“Turn that off,” I snap.
The tech does, plunging the room into silence, and I turn to Astra. “What are we missing here?” I ask. “He’s way too smug to not have something up his sleeve. This is like dealing with Petrosyan all over again.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” she replies. “I have no idea what he’s got. I mean, he doesn’t have the money Petrosyan’s got, so he’s not going to be able to buy his way out of this. The money he bled out of those accounts isn’t nearly enough for a lawyer of that caliber. But…”
“But he’s acting as if he’s got us by the shorts,” I say. “It makes no sense whatsoever.”
It’s then that the door to the interrogation room opens and we watch as uniformed security lets a man enter the room. And when we see who walks in, I turn to Astra, my eyes wide and my mouth practically scraping the floor.
“What in the hell is going on?” I ask.
We watch as Palmer Tinsley, one of the slimiest—and most expensive—criminal defense attorneys in all of Seattle, quietly confers with Alex Dansby, who is apparently his new client. Astra and I open the door and step into the interview room again. Tinsley stands up, a wide grin on his face.
“Agents Wilder and Russo,” he greets us. “How lovely to see you again.”
He holds out a hand for me to shake, but I leave him hanging. I don’t want to get contaminated. Tinsley plays it off by sticking his hand back in his pocket and clearing his throat. I’m reminded of the old joke about the difference between a catfish and a lawyer: one’s a scum-sucking bottom feeder, and the other’s a fish.
“What are you doing here, Tinsley?”
“Well, right now I’m conferring with my client,” he says.
“Your client?” Astra asks. “Him?”