“There were no security cameras in the parking structure, but there are many inside the mall,” Brecht explained. “We scoured them and found some images of Jacqueline and Christine. In one of them, we see this man following them for a brief time.”
Takaki brought up a single video image from a ceiling-mounted security camera inside the mall. It showed Christie and Jackie walking past shop windows. The man with the mustache followed. The computer retraced the facial recognition points on his face in this video. The words “CONVERGENCE: 0.97” appeared at the bottom of the screen.
“Same guy,” Kenehan said.
The girls went into a shop; the man waited several paces away from the entrance. He continued to follow them when they emerged.
More clicks, and a third image appeared. “This is the same man, and this video is clear enough to allow facial recognition software to match with photos on file with CDOT,” Kenehan explained.
“CDOT?” Jensen asked.
“The Colorado Department of Transportation. Driver’s license pictures.”
The girls and the man strolled out of the security camera’s view, and the enhanced close-up of the man replaced the video.
Janet sniffled, reaching into her purse for a tissue. “Should we give this to the police? Maybe they can pick him out of a mug shot book or something.”
“Bring up the result,” Brecht ordered.
A driver’s license appeared beside the enhanced facial shot.
Jensen studied the photo in the license. It was obviously the same man. He seemed a little younger, but there was no mistaking his features. The words “CONVERGENCE: 0.93” appeared at the bottom.
“This is a ninety-three percent convergence,” Kenehan explained. “The computer identified this as the best match from the CDOT database. It’s clearly the same man. Now we know who is.”
Jensen read the name on the screen. “Antonio Pessoa.”
“He is a chauffeur,” Brecht said. “He drives for Denver Executive Limousines, Inc. We have his home address, his cell phone number, his blood type, his age and his shopping preferences on Amazon. We’ve also dug up a lot of his employment and legal history, and we’ve identified his next of kin.”
“His family?” Janet asked.
“We know where his parents and sister live.”
Jensen took Brecht by the arm. “Do you know where he is now?”
“We thought we’d drop by his house,” Kenehan said. “See if he’s home.”
“We’ve got to take this to the police,” Janet insisted. “We can’t just take the law into our own hands and barge in on this hoodlum.”
Everyone stared at her.
“Or you could just kill the fucker,” she said.
“There’s not a chance in the world Denver PD or any of their SWAT teams are trained as well as my men,” Brecht said, pointing to Kenehan and gesturing toward Partridge and his teammates in the rear conference room.
Kenehan nodded in agreement. “They have rules, procedures, red tape. Restrictions and delays and barriers we don’t have to deal with. Politics, jurisdictional disputes, team briefings. Mobilizing a law enforcement squad would take hours or days. My team is ready now. This is what we do.”
Takaki brought up a satellite view of Pessoa’s home. “A rented house. The title’s in the name of a Maureen Wilkins, age forty-eight. Widowed and currently residing in Park City, Utah. No known relationship to Pessoa other than that of landlord and tenant.”
“Registered firearms?” Sand asked.
“None,” Kenehan answered.
“Now or at any time in the past?”
Kenehan shook his head. “Neither. No indication he’s had any tactical or military training. No security clearances. He’s never tried for a government job, never been in a serious motor vehicle accident and never been a suspect in a major crime.”
“Court records?” Jensen queried.
“One temporary restraining order from 2013. Complainant was a woman who claimed Pessoa had been stalking her. Pessoa denied it but consented to the TRO. He was pro se, no lawyer, and no criminal charges were involved.”
“So he’s a nobody,” Jensen said with a shrug.
“Nobody’s a nobody,” Sand observed quietly. “The deadliest men in the world are nobodies. Right, Roady?”
Kenehan asked, “Who’s Roady?”
“Can you locate his cell phone?” Jensen asked.
“Not presently,” Brecht responded. “Last recorded position was the mall. He turned it off after taking the women, before they left the parking structure. We’re still digging up his messaging history.”
“Pets at the house?” Sand asked. “Dogs?”
Kenehan shrugged. “Unknown. But another great question.”
“Education?”
“Two years in college. No declared major.”
“Where?” Sand asked.
“Arapahoe Community College.”
“That’s in Denver?” Jensen asked.
“Littleton, south Denver area. He took entry-level classes in accounting.”
“Does he make much money as a driver?” Janet asked.
“His tax returns say less than thirty grand. So kidnapping for ransom could be a motive.” Kenehan cleared his throat. “But the manner of the abduction suggests it occurred on a spur-of-the-moment choice. It doesn’t look like they targeted the girls individually.”
“How do you know that?”
Kenehan shook his head. “We don’t. Just a sense I got from the videos inside the mall and the location where it took place, which they couldn’t have planned in advance. I could be totally wrong.”
“Bank accounts?”
Takaki scrolled to a new file. “One checking account with a debit card. His credit rating is shit. Debit cards only. Lots of outstanding loans and balances in default. He has a whopping $847.39 in the one account we’ve found so far—Bank of the West.”
Jensen rubbed his chin. It was amazing how fast they’d built a dossier on the man. “Anything in his shopping history that sheds light on—”
“He bought two Tasers from a surplus military website. Paid with PayPal backed by his debit card. Lied on the order form about his employment and his military history. Claimed to be ex-Army, but we know that’s not true. He ordered it in his own name. No one checked, and they shipped the Tasers.”
“When?”
“About a month ago.”
So that was how he had taken down the girls.
At least no one had shot or stabbed them when they dropped out of the frame, Jensen told himself. Or so I hope. Dear God, let me be right.
“When do we leave?” Sand asked.
“Soon,” Kenehan said. “First we plan and run through ops review.”
“Of course,” Sand said, with a rueful shake of his head. “Guess I’m getting old.”
“Not as old as that Colt Commander in your waistband,” Kenehan chided. “You were probably better at winging it when you worked alone, without satellite intel or comms. Different times now.”
Sand reached back and touched the small of his back. “Saw that, did you?”
Kenehan shrugged. “Only a flash, when you were climbing out of the car.”
Sand smiled. “An oldie but a goody. Mind if Mark and I ride along?”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Chapter 34
Kenehan rang Antonio Pessoa’s doorbell and waited. He had his right hand tucked inside the right flap of his light cotton jacket, gripping the handle of a Wilson Combat Ultralight nine-millimeter 1911 pistol. Once his hand was on the grip, Kenehan could clear leather and start landing head shots on moving targets at up to ten yards in less than eight-tenths of a second. Ironically, his pistol was not very different from the relic Sand carried, but it was almost certainly better tuned, with a 2.5-pound trigger, a disabled grip safety and Novak fiber optic sights.
For Kenehan, a tactical knife was still a deadlier weapon than a gun in many close-quarters comb
at scenarios. A razor-sharp tactical blade made more gruesome wounds than pistol rounds, instantly severing arteries, veins, tendons and ligaments like butter. Knives were quieter than guns, and they never ran out of ammunition. In the hands of someone with the physical, mental and emotional capacity to slash and stab other humans with speed and precision, the only drawback of a knife was its range.
Kenehan had picked up a few tidbits from Albert Brecht about how Sand had worked with a blade, long ago. A real tanto, a short sword of the kind samurai in feudal Japan had once carried. Sand’s old—but still restricted—file jacket said he’d opened up more than one or two bad guys with that antique weapon. He’d appeared mostly at night, seemingly out of nowhere, after climbing walls, bypassing locked doors and alarms and bringing the battle to terrible men who created problems that needed permanent solutions.
A minute passed. He rang the bell again, listening carefully.
Silence from within the house.
The only sound that came to his ears was the very faint wop-wop-wop from the Brecht Group’s restored Black Hawk holding station ten thousand feet above. If Pessoa dashed from the house by car, the bird would be able to follow him anywhere, vectoring chase cars.
Partridge, Jensen and Sand waited in one of the two cars parked at the curb behind him. Two more Brecht field operators, Jim Evans and Chuck Sullivan, were in a second car, and two additional men waited in a third car, idling in the alley behind the house. All the operators wore voice-activated earpieces with integrated jawbone microphones. The gear would digitally encrypt and stream everything they said and heard real-time to the mobile tactical operations center, or MTOC—the lead motor coach waiting at the airport.
All the team members were trained medics; three of them carried battlefield medical pouches known as “blow-out” kits.
Before pulling to a stop along the curb in front of Pessoa’s house with one car blocking his driveway, all three cars had driven past the house twice. The curtains were drawn; they could not see into the dwelling. Kenehan had twice dialed the landline registered to the house. Both calls had gone unanswered.
Jennifer Takaki had phoned Denver Executive Limousine, Pessoa’s part-time employer, and asked if he was working. The dispatcher had said no and asked if someone else could be of assistance. Jennifer had answered that she was a friend, just trying to find him with some great news. The operator volunteered that she’d received two other calls that same day from people trying to find Antonio. “Must be something special,” the woman had added.
“Oh, that was probably my mom,” Jennifer had said, fishing. The operator clarified that both of those calls had been from men.
Now Kenehan crouched and examined the deadbolt, noting the brand name stamped into the housing. An old Schlage, easy to pick.
Taking his hand from his pistol, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a small mechanical device that looked like a toy pistol with steel pins sticking out of the barrel. In a few seconds, he had the door unlocked. Partridge, Evans and Sullivan got out of their cars and moved quickly up the walk to join him.
Sand and Jensen had reluctantly agreed to remain in Kenehan’s car during the entry. Jensen had no tactical training; Sand had never trained with this team and admitted it had been a long time since he’d been operational. He understood all too well that in a house-clearing operation, a stranger with a trained team could create more danger than help. Sand and Jensen could listen to the encrypted transmissions with a handheld radio.
The four men positioned themselves in the choreographed positions used universally by hostage-rescue and counterterrorism specialists. Kenehan got down on one knee, with Partridge crouching just above and behind him. The remaining two men stood on either side of the door, ready to move into the room, weapons raised to fire on any hostile targets. All wore skin-colored latex gloves, baseball caps and lightly tinted Ray Ban shooting glasses.
“Weapons ready?” Kenehan asked.
Partridge visually confirmed this and slapped Kenehan on the shoulder. “Your count.”
“Three … two … one.” Kenehan intoned quietly. “Go, go, go!”
He shoved the door open, sweeping the barrel of his 1911 up and across in a wide arc as he shuffled quickly through the doorway, still in a deep crouch. Partridge swept his weapon over Kenehan’s head in the opposite direction. The other two slipped in quickly behind him, turning and sweeping their weapons along the opposite front walls and back to the center to cover preplanned fields of fire.
The front room was unoccupied.
The men split wordlessly into two teams of two and proceeded to clear the house, room by room, moving silently, working around corners with care, clearing the angles a few degrees at a time from as far back as possible, a tactic known as “pie-ing.”
“Master bedroom clear.” The whispered words came to Kenehan through his earpiece. “Master bathroom clear. Den clear.” Then a few seconds later: “Guest room and guest bathroom clear.”
Kenehan added his part. “Kitchen clear,” he said as he finished the central portion of the house with Partridge beside him. “Back patio and yard clear.” Then he cleared the half-basement that was, statistically, the most dangerous part of a one-story threat-occupied house. “Basement clear. No signs of the women.”
The entire process had taken less than thirty seconds.
The interior of the house was empty and dark. The air was hot, with air conditioning either not installed or turned off. The house smelled rancid. No sounds from pets or machinery. The carpeting was worn and stained. The walls were marred with watermarks and a few holes. The only furniture in the living room was a threadbare sofa and a marred wooden coffee table on which a water pipe sat on its side beside a lighter and a baggie of weed. A flat-panel television sat on the floor, leaning against the opposite wall.
The men converged in the living room, continuing to scan vigilantly; complacency could be fatal. An image flashed unbidden through Kenehan’s mind: when the armed first officer aboard the MV Cogliano had caught him while searching the captain’s cabin. That had nearly been the end of him.
He heard Dave Thomas’s voice coming into his earpiece via encrypted satcom from the MTOC.
“All clear acknowledged.” Thomas intoned. “Check the attic and garage and then search everything and everywhere. Paper and electronic intel; any other evidence. Get what’s there and get out. We’ll leave surveillance in place.”
Two minutes later, Kenehan radioed that the garage and attic were clear.
“Cars in the garage?”
“No room,” Kenehan replied. “Full of boxes. Too many to go through quickly. But I don’t think they’re Pessoa’s. They’re old, marked with the house owner’s name.”
“Then skip those,” Thomas ordered. “Concentrate on the interior.”
Each man took a different room, quickly rifling through drawers, checking underneath furniture and likely hiding places, scanning for documents, computers, phones or other clues as to the girls’ whereabouts.
Kenehan searched the small den, which contained an old desk and two chairs, quickly fanning through the contents of the desk’s file drawer. It contained bills and other household records. He found a battered Dell laptop in the center drawer. He pulled out the machine and moved aside to allow Partridge to comb through the paper files more thoroughly than he had done.
“We’ve got a laptop and some files,” he reported.
“Skim the paper for relevant matter,” Thomas came back. “Take the laptop with you.”
Partridge hesitated. “But if we do, the evidence will be—”
Sand chimed in from the car. “Just take the fucking thing!”
“Acknowledged.” Kenehan closed the laptop without turning it on.
“Sir?”
Kenehan turned as Evans entered the room with several sheets of paper in his hand. “We found these in his nightstand along with a pile of really old porn mags.”
Evans handed the papers to Kenehan. They w
ere color printouts from an inkjet printer. Flipping through them, Kenehan guessed there were about thirty sheets. Each depicted attractive young women, most wearing tight shorts or short skirts, taken covertly in various shopping malls. All the women were young and pretty Caucasian women. None were over the age of thirty; most were teenagers.
The cropped and enlarged shots created a telephoto effect, grainy and pixilated. Clearly none of the women knew that someone was taking their pictures. The images reminded Kenehan of the familiar, vaguely voyeuristic experience common to a soldier who views the world through a sniper-scope on overwatch, putting crosshairs on subjects who did not know they were two pounds of finger-pull from death.
Many of the photos were from the Cherry Creek Mall. Most of the photos had penciled-in dates below them; they dated from the weeks leading up to the abduction.
Had Christie and Jackie been the first women Antonio Pessoa and his mysterious co-perpetrator kidnapped, or were they merely the latest victims of serial predators? If so, how long had the pair been harvesting young women from local shopping malls?
He went back through the photos, trying to absorb a sense of the man who had taken them. Pessoa clearly spent days prowling shopping malls, capturing visual samples of potential prey. He’d learned to be a hunter of women. It had obviously entertained him to capture images of women without their knowledge or consent. Many of the photos featured close-ups of the women’s chests and backsides—a tawdry collection of self-made, soft-core Peeping-Tom porn. Not erotic as much as revealing. This is where the man’s mind lived: in the folds and tucks of women’s anatomy, stolen on hot summer days to fuel the dragon of the man’s unrequited libido.
He handed the pictures to Partridge, who looked them over and furrowed his brow in disgust. “Hunter,” he said. “On some kind of sick safari.”
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