Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 6 Dirt

  Upon reading the details, Legacy knew why they needed him. The group that the case file called “the Vinyl Men” knew how to commit a crime. Their activities and methods were self-consciously unique, meaning they took great pains to protect themselves from the very organized methodical authorities by purposefully being random and unpredictable.

  Precedent being the ground rod of investigation and profiling – there wasn’t a lot to go on. Criminals who break new ground usually get away with it for a long time before their methods become familiar enough to constitute a pattern. Getting in front of them was not going to be easy.

  Legacy recognized that his special ops training as an interrogator made him very good at deciphering behavior, but patience would be the single attribute that he would point to as the reason he cracked cases that nobody else could. He waited for the motives to fall in place behind the profile he created of the criminal. He didn’t mind waiting years, he knew who his man was; it didn’t matter if a few harmless decades passed by before he got him.

  Decades were turning into days, and the minute hand on his watch was suddenly vying for his attention too, he had to concentrate.

  The first file told the story of a prom queen, a pom-pom girl fresh off a parade float getting abducted and held captive for two weeks. Missy Anne Naverlau, a senior at a Burgess Florida High School vanished, tiara and all, only to reappear two weeks later in Maine on the campus of the college that she had been accepted to and planned to attend. Her original story triggered the investigation, but she had since recanted, telling the investigators that it was all an act of teenage rebellion.

  A transcript of her first interview ran through Legacy’s ears. Legacy concentrated, put himself in the room – walked around the environment as the girl was questioned, in his mind

  “So you were walking to your car – “

  “Yes, if I’d changed after – I could have walked faster, but the dress was dragging. At first I thought I’d snagged it on a car or something, but then I turned.”

  “What did you see?”

  Her voice trembled, “A man – a man in a leather suit.”

  “Go on.”

  “I should have yelled, someone would have heard me. I should have called for my dad, he would have come.” She broke down in sobs.

  “We don’t have to continue.”

  She snapped her head up like somehow the policeman’s reluctance to hear her story meant that he doubted her.

  “I felt someone come up behind me then a prick in my neck. A sting or something, like a needle. And the man in front of me said that if I turned around it would leave a scar. They must have been working together.” She paused lost in thought.

  Legacy could tell that she hadn’t thought much about the experience. She pieced it together as she spoke in a way that made sense.

  It happens when reasonably sheltered people go through an unreasonable, unsheltered experience. The details make no sense combined so the mind stops looking for rational connections. It compartmentalizes the moments. It’s easier to think that everything about the situation is wrong and makes no sense. Her slow breathing, in and out– her shirt riding up her stomach, the fold of her capri pants brushing her leg hairs - she was close to recognizing reality again. A couple more seconds of thought was all that she needed for a breakthrough. But what she got was a dour officer asking the wrong question.

  “Have you used needles in the past?” The officer broke into the silence.

  Another heavyset agent chimed in “What I think Officer Dunn is asking is if you know the feeling well.”

  “That’s a much nicer way of putting it, Officer Dumm.”

  “I’m O’Conell, he’s Dunn, with an “n” D-U-N-N.”

  She continued, “It’s hard to tell you apart, my apologies officers. After the prick, I felt weak. I fell back and someone caught me. And even though the man in the leather suit had a hat brim tucked down around his eyebrows I saw him do something – I can’t forget it – he smiled. It was like everything in the world was going his way, on the day that I was going to regret for the rest of my life. The thrill he exhibited was sickening.”

  Legacy followed the accounts of the next couple of days closely, reading more for the moments like the capture.

  She woke up from her drugged state in a room. There was dried vomit in her mouth and nose, but her dress was clean and pressed. There was a mini bar in the room and a sink with a toilet. No windows or natural light leaking in from anywhere. Every ten minutes or so, footsteps on the roof would inform her that she was guarded and not alone. The bed was flophouse quality and the springs creaked as she lifted herself from the sweat-stained sheets.

  The noise must have brought attention, because someone walked in the door only a moment after.

  It was Legacy, or really it wasn’t. But Legacy had burrowed far enough into the story that he was standing in the doorway when the figure that really entered brushed by. Watching what followed, he wished he were farther away. The man, his face hidden by a leather mask, body covered in a royal blue acrylic or vinyl mixture that looked like rubber and conformed like paint.

  The report stated that he was “quite kind.” Legacy watched as the Vinyl Man mimed a conversation with the girl. When he was done talking brushed his fingers through her hair.

  Missy pulled back and the man kindly patted her knee instead. He walked to the door and knocked three times. Three more Vynil Men entered the room: Orange, Brown and Yellow. They wheeled in a metal frame nearly as tall as the doorframe, cubically geometric in form. It looked like it was some kind of fitness equipment, but seconds later they had her hands clamped to the corners, back arched over a center support, stretched out and immobile.

  The three men were out the door with a gesture from Blue. Missy gathered a breath to scream, and it was only then that she found a very thin membrane over her mouth. It flexed to allow air in then sealed completely against outward pressure. All of the air leaving had to be expunged through the nose. There would be no screaming.

  Legacy studied the device on her mouth. It was homemade; the design was simple and effective. It was the exact opposite of what an interrogator would develop. He was up against more than just a group of criminals; they were engineers, circus conductors and drunken stationmasters. He could have really enjoyed the chase if it were not for what came next, the sickness that ensued with him as a helpless observer – the video images were living in front of him.

  Blue approached Missy face to face, he told her not to look down. His hand went under her dress and he flipped a switch then came a humming sound. Pubic hairs began to drop out from under her dress. He leaned in to ask a question at intimate range.

  Missy watched the officers in the interrogation room carefully. “He asked me if it tickled. He didn’t hurt me. He was the nice one.”

  Dunn asked, “And two weeks later they let you go? That was it?”

  Missy’s eyes darted up and left, lingering in a memory. “Two weeks of hell.”

  Legacy would have handled the questioning in a completely different manner. If he had gotten to her, right after she’d been released, he might have found details that she would never admit to knowing now.

  “This was the point in the questioning that she went inside herself and never came out again,” Legacy thought. There were more questions on the transcript. Legacy stood at the edge of the light watching the interrogation, scuffing his shoes on the grey-flecked industrial tile. They’d lost her. Her body language was closed off and her voice seemed distant and hollow in the microphone.

  Legacy pushed stop on his tape player and the recording came to an abrupt halt. He was back in his office. There was nothing more of use on this tape. He scanned down the paper transcript and saw that the policemen peppered her with more questions but the answers became more and more vague. She’d realized that she was being humiliated, and then the use of the wrong tone, or the wrong words had
seemingly put the police in fraternity with those who had watched her.

  “How much did their incompetence cost?” Legacy was furious. He knew that his best chance lay with getting inside the first victim’s head. The first was where a criminal organization made all of its mistakes. This girl had retreated.

  This was supported by the fact that two weeks later she recanted her testimony, saying that she’d spent the two weeks with her boyfriend on a cross-country trip. The pictures of her on the Internet? They weren’t her.

  Legacy’s nails dug into the transcript, he was ready to push the file into the trash when his eye was drawn to one line at the beginning of the interview. How had he missed it before? He was so busy putting himself into the scene, he hadn’t noticed a very basic behavior. He hadn’t learned anything from the details of the abduction, but rereading what they had said, it was clear that this was not the case for the men who took her. The men had learned something from an earlier attempt, and they had to brag. He drew a line under a sentence of the transcript:

  And the man in front of me said that if I turned around it would leave a scar.

  There was another victim out there; they hadn’t found the first abductee of the Vinyl Men yet.