“Jake’s booted up the IDOT network to show you real-time video footage from the CCD cameras at a couple of our rest areas.” Landvik addressed his young apprentice, “Right, Jake?”
“Yup,” Saunders replied, and made short eye contact with Kippy, Wabiszewski, myself, and the two detectives before pointing at his right monitor. “I’ve brought up six separate video feeds from the six security cameras at the Rend Lake rest area, mile post 79, on I-57. Note how our various cameras are centrally located in the car parking lots, the truck areas, as well as inside the building. In fact, we have cameras focused on both doors in order to capture video of the entire lobby.”
Sure enough, Saunders’s screen on his right laptop was split into six squares, with each square displaying video from Rend Lake’s rest stop by way of a different angle. In one box we watched cars entering the parking lot, from another we could watch them exit. Still another camera covered the lobby, currently a person was taking a camel-length drink of water from the fountain, others were mingling about a wall map, and one more was off to the side doing leg stretches. Another square covered the walkway and parked cars, while another covered the eighteen-wheelers lined up on the rest stop’s opposite side.
After a few seconds, Saunders continued. “My left monitor has the seven security cameras at the wayside rest on I-90, at mile post 2. These, of course, cover the rest stop from similar angles as Rend Lake illustrated.”
Kippy, her partner, and the CPD detectives studied each monitor as though they were portals into another universe. I tried to feign their level of intensity as I watched an endless procession of automobiles pulling in and a parade of other vehicles exiting, as I watched drivers and passengers rushing in to use the restroom facilities—to take care of their business—and those ambling, more peaceful in nature, back to their cars.
I think Landvik caught on to me as he dived back into his presentation.
“These cameras record to DVRs—digital video recorders,” Landvik continued. “We’re able to remote access in at the request of the ISP—the Illinois State Police—as well as other law enforcement agencies,” Landvik pointed at Detectives Hanson and Marr, “such as the Chicago Police Department. If instructed, we can monitor the rest area in question on a routine basis, like what Jake has set up for us, or we can access specific cameras for, say, when a call box is activated.”
“So if my car is ripped off while I’m in the restroom,” Kippy said, “I can use your call box or 911 it on my cell phone and you can remote in and get a digital recording of who stole it?”
“Exactly,” Landvik said. “And since we’re able to capture license plates on vehicles moving upwards of forty miles per hour, we should also be able to get the plate numbers of the vehicle that dropped off your pesky car thief.”
“How long do you archive these video recordings?” Hanson asked, pointing at Saunders’s laptops.
“Our retention policy is sixty days before the system begins overwriting the old footage. In a perfect world, we’d love to keep a year of video, but that’s cost prohibitive. Quite frankly, Detective, we’re lucky it’s not thirty days considering the number of cameras IDOT utilizes as well as the corresponding quality settings. The higher the video quality—resolution, compression type, etcetera—the more storage space it consumes. The belief is that two months should be more than sufficient time for criminal activity to have been detected and reported.”
Landvik took another hit off his sugar water. “Bear in mind that specific incidents—unpleasant incidents—are exported and therefore stored separately. For example, if an alarm or alert is triggered, we can get the video to the requesting authorities ASAP and that becomes,” he motioned at the two detectives again, “a permanent part of your investigation. To continue Officer Gimm’s example regarding the stolen car, if your Porsche Boxster gets taken while you’re in the restroom, and we’re alerted within a normal timeframe—that is, immediately—life is good and we likely captured the theft on digital. But if you show up three months downstream to inform us of your stolen Boxster, well … quite frankly, you’re shit out of luck.”
“If it takes you three months to report a missing Porsche,” Marr said, “you need to get your head examined.”
“Exactly, Detective. And Jake’ll probably tell them that same thing.”
Kippy raised a hand as though in class. “Any way a person can get around these cameras?”
“You could come in on foot, I suppose. Let’s say you walk in from the woods or someplace behind the building, sit back on the grass, and wait for the Porsche Boxster to arrive. Then put a bag over your head or wear a Halloween costume as you hotwire it.” Landvik thought for a second. “But five minutes later the state police will have the plate number on the stolen Boxster and be out looking for it.”
Kippy followed up, “You ever get calls about anyone looking suspicious, loitering or casing the joint?”
“The state police answers those types of calls, of course, and they’ll send a car. But if anything seems amiss—or if a crime has in fact been committed—they’ll contact us and, like referees in a football game, we’ll go to the tape.”
“What about in cases of abduction?” Kippy pursued a new line of inquiry. Hopefully, Hanson and Marr could recognize a detective in the making. “A girl drives in, the place appears deserted, but she gets taken—either driven away in her own car or the abductor has a partner who leaves with the girl’s vehicle.”
“Unfortunately, that situation could very well occur, but remember, these places maintain a constant stream of traffic, a constant stream of eyewitnesses—ninety-nine percent with cell phones at the ready. And many of these rest stops have a variety of trucks parked there day or night for hours at a time.”
“But if there are no witnesses, and sixty days go by,” Kippy had dug in, “the video recording gets overwritten and no one will ever know.”
“If a person disappears—goes missing—and an officer like Detective Hanson or Detective Marr finds reason to believe the person may have been abducted at or had passed through a particular rest area, we will by all means go to the tape.”
Landvik sipped at his Dr Pepper and glanced about the room for additional questions.
“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever recorded?” I finally asked, assuming it was on the tip of everyone’s mind, but the looks I received from Kippy and the others informed me otherwise.
Saunders said, “Tell him about the sex videos.”
“Great. Thanks a lot, Jake,” Landvik said. “Okay, as bizarre as it sounds, and on more than one occasion, we’ve come across a couple getting passionate in the lobby of one of the rest areas.”
“You’re kidding,” Marr said. “And here I thought I was a cheap date.”
“I guess the heart wants what the heart wants,” Landvik replied.
“They weren’t very explicit,” Saunders said. “No major close-ups or anything. Not even NC-17, maybe an R rating.”
“Jake and I thought of selling the videos to Cinemax or Showtime for their after-midnight fare, but realized no one would want to watch.” Landvik put down his can of pop. “Alas, the people who have sex at rest stops look exactly like the people you’d imagine having sex at rest stops.”
CHAPTER 43
“Going back an arbitrary three years, I’ve got a list of fourteen travelers that have been reported as missing. And none of these were teenage girls running off to LA or New York. All fourteen travelers were on road trips and never made it either to or back home from their destinations. What do these fourteen travelers have in common?” Kippy had been working this angle in all her free time for the past day and it was now time to share. Her partner and I were handed a two-page printout. “Each and every one of the fourteen was making their way through Illinois.”
It was after midnight. The two CPD officers had come over to casa-de-safe-house after their shift with a twelve-pack of beer. We were in the kitchen—five times the size of the one in my trailer
home—drinking Heineken, eating pretzels, and listening to Kippy lay out her case.
“That’s a pretty big net you’ve tossed out,” Wabiszewski said.
“Based on the police reports, interviews with family and friends, and locations of last phone calls made, all fourteen were traveling, or were soon to be traveling, through some part of Illinois.”
“The Land of Lincoln is what? Sixty thousand square miles? So we each take twenty thou and meet back here in a hundred years.”
“Don’t be such a wiseass, Wabs,” Kippy said. “You know where I’m heading.”
Kippy was a gunner and, unlike the vibe I got off her partner, wouldn’t be content with the natural advancement through the CPD ranks to field training officer to sergeant to—maybe someday—lieutenant. We’d not talked specifics, but she’d once mentioned that she aimed to be a detective.
I thought Kippy would make a great investigator.
Sue had wandered into the kitchen not long ago, licked at Kippy’s hand, remembering the jar of peanut butter she’d previously given him and wondering why she’d not brought him a replacement. After scoring a pretzel, Sue walked over to Kippy’s partner and looked at him as though to ask if he could borrow his sidearm. When Officer Wabiszewski refused to surrender his weapon, Sue sauntered back to his perch on the living room sofa.
Some things never change no matter where you live.
Kippy held up a forefinger. “Two winters back, Emmett and Rose Thompson, retired Wisconsin snowbirds, were heading south on I-57 to Florida for the winter months, and would have passed the rest stops at mile post 268 and 222 and 165 at Green Creek as well as several others on their trek through Illinois. The two were never seen or heard from again, but their Hyundai Santa Fe turned up at an Aurora strip mall a few days later.” Kippy held up a second finger. “May of last year, Jackie Koepp was on her way from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Kansas City on I-70 for a third interview as an art director at a Kansas City ad agency. Koepp thought she had the job in the bag and took her car so she could scout out places to live. Koepp would have passed the stops at mile post 149 at Cumberland Road and mile post 27 at Silver Lake on her way to a job interview she never made. Her MINI Cooper turned up the following week in Louisville.”
“But you’re taking missing persons reports and connecting the dots to your assumptions.”
“Not true, Wabs. Nicky Champine connected the first dot when he crossed paths with his visitor on I-57, when he was abducting Ashleigh Mueller at mile post 333,” Kippy said. “To your point, though, some of these dots could be bullshit—some could be coincidence—but not all fourteen.”
Wabs and I were bright enough to keep quiet.
Maggie and Delta shared a secret. They both kept sneaking down into the split-level’s lower level and whenever they came back up, they snuck glances at each other and looked all sheepish. I smelled their breath at one point to make sure they weren’t getting into something they shouldn’t be. They weren’t. I figured the two were gaslighting me again as they’re wont to do, but I’d go downstairs after the officers left to discover why all the clandestine behavior. Had they discovered a toy left behind by a previous tenant? A hidden dog park?
The portal to hell?
“About half of the cars disappear along with their drivers as though they’d passed through the Bermuda Triangle,” Kippy continued, “but the other half of the cars turn up in other cities.”
“If our guy winds up with a victim’s vehicle, he wouldn’t want anything to do with it,” I spoke the obvious, like a kid in class hoping to score participation points. “Wouldn’t he just dump it in a crappy part of town with the keys in the ignition and let nature take its course?”
“This is Chicago,” Wabiszewski offered, “car parts paradise. Home of a couple dozen chop shops, which could explain the vehicles gone missing. The other ones could have been ditched after joyrides.”
Vira was the only one of my troop that remained in the kitchen with us, on the floor near Kippy, an ear in the conversation and an eye on the pretzel bag, hoping for one of us to turn clumsy with drink and initiate an avalanche of her favorite salty snack.
Vira’s money was likely on me.
“That’s basically what I was thinking,” Kippy said. “Anyway, the list goes on but let me focus on a specific traveler, a missing person by the name of Christine Dack. Dack was on her way back to Minneapolis after a friend’s wedding here in Chicago last year, and she’d have passed the Egg River rest area off I-90 on her way home. Dack goes missing but her car turns up later in Milwaukee. Now the reason I bring up Christine Dack from last year is because of what happened six weeks ago.”
“Denise Nieland?” I’d read ahead in Kippy’s briefing.
“Absolutely. Denise Nieland was driving back home to Chicago from Madison, which would have also put her on the I-90 Egg River rest area. Now unfortunately for Christine Dack, the retention cutoff date on the video feed has long expired, nothing was reported last year and the digital recording is deleted or recorded over. But Denise Nieland was under fifty days ago, so there may still be a trace.” Kippy looked at me and I knew I’d been assigned the task. “We need to get Egg River IDOTed as soon as possible.”
I’d already volunteered—truth be told, I’d demanded—the IDOT assignment. The detectives as well as Kippy and Wabiszewski would rather I remain in the safe house, gathering dust, but I couldn’t spend the days sitting around and rotting like old fruit. A case could be made that I’d be truly safe if I spent my time driving about aimlessly. If the killer was able to follow me from the safe house to a car wash or a Burger King, it wasn’t much of a safe house to begin with.
I nodded at Kippy and asked, “Have you run any of this past Hanson?”
“A truncated version.” Kippy shrugged. “The detective told me to pursue it and let him know if anything cropped up, but I think he was humoring me.”
Technically, though they appreciated our help in getting Nicky Champine to open up, we weren’t part of the official investigation. Untechnically, they couldn’t tell Kippy or Officer Wabiszewski what to do in their free time. Even more untechnically, Hanson and Marr wanted to be kept appraised of what we were up to just to confirm we’d not be stepping on any toes in CPD’s Bureau of Detectives or the investigators working the case out of Lansing PD.
In Kippy’s words, they were humoring us.
“Hanson said I should be wary of forcing statistics into a pattern—kind of like what Wabs brought up—and that many of these incidents were likely the result of carjackings gone bad.”
“But carjackers don’t normally kill,” Wabiszewski said, “or waste time hiding bodies.”
“On a practical level, how would all this work?” I said, risking to be thought a fool. “I hide in the bushes until an opportunity presents itself—say an old man pulls in to use the facility and no one else is around ’cause it’s a Tuesday morning—and I somehow subdue him and drive him back to my lair in his own vehicle.”
“Drive him to your lair?” Wabiszewski said, doing nothing to hide a smirk.
“You know … where I do my thing. Anyway, once I’ve got him tethered or bludgeoned or whatever the hell the proper sequence is, I’m now stuck driving the old guy’s car to Detroit and taking a long bus ride home. Either that or I drop his car in not the most savory of neighborhoods, leave the doors unlocked and the keys on the seat, and take a shorter bus ride home.”
“Our perp knows he’s got at least a day before the local and state police get a BOLO or ATL on the missing vehicle,” Kippy said, “but from a strictly pain in the ass point of view, it’d make more sense to dump the car in the city.”
“But also from a strictly pain in the ass point of view, he’s left his own vehicle at the rest stop,” I said. “So he’s taking a cab or Uber back to the site of the abduction in order to retrieve his car.”
“That would leave him highly exposed. A state trooper will ticket and tow anything that appears abandoned or looks susp
icious,” Kippy replied. “And maybe that triggers IDOT going to the digital recording to see what in hell happened.”
“He’d be an idiot to leave his car there for however long it takes him to return and fetch it from,” Wabiszewski tossed a glance my way, “his lair. And if he’s pulled this off repeatedly, he’s not an idiot.”
“Aren’t most of these rest areas surrounded by woods or forest?” I said. “It’d be smarter to never drive your car into the facility’s parking lot to begin with, rather pull onto some back road and park among the trees. Then you can monitor the facility—maybe you’ve got binoculars—until an opportunity arises and jog over. Then you can retrieve your vehicle later, at your own convenience.”
“But if you take an Uber or cab to a hidden spot in the trees, half the drivers will be calling the cops as soon as they pull away,” Kippy said. “And those little side roads are always used by locals—folks who would notice an abandoned car in the tree line and call the police.”
“Maybe he’d take a bike or motorcycle. Either would be easier to hide in the woods and he could come back for them later with a truck or van.”
“So our serial killer’s managed to combine two favorite hobbies,” Wabiszewski said. “His enthusiasm for biking along with his need to beat travelers to death.”
“I don’t know,” I said, throwing in the towel. “I guess you don’t see a lot of bikers on the interstate highways.”
“This is where the theory falls apart,” Wabiszewski said. “Retrieving whatever it was that got him to the rest area—a car, a bike, a fucking pogo stick—is ripe with its own set of risks. Christ, getting rid of the victim’s vehicle and then going back for your own car would take all the fun out of choking the shit out of someone.”
The Finders Page 17