Apex Predator (7 page)

He went through the information carefully. Before the two girls that knew each other, there had been no common thread to link any of the families or any of the girls.

Carl was right, this was a mistake; the guy had made a mistake. He was sure the police were going to cast a net around both families and they were going to tighten it until they had a short list.

Now that they had gotten the profile back from the FBI, they would use it to make the list even shorter.

How the hell did Carl get this stuff? Steven had always wondered, but the truth was he didn’t really want to know.

The profile Steven had in his hands right now wasn’t too different from the one he had already come up with on his own. Single, white male, between his late 20s and early 40s, very unassuming, very unremarkable in his physical appearance, he had to blend in to be able to take them in broad daylight.

The FBI profilers had also come up with a couple of things he hadn’t thought about, but which made perfect sense. He was most likely very meticulous in whatever his job was. He probably worked a white-collar job. These weren’t crimes of opportunity, he knew what he wanted and he went out to hunt for them. They’d also come up with a theory that he was probably taking them somewhere other than the place where he lived.

According to their file, this was probably ritualistic in nature for him and his home wasn’t the place for it. Steven wasn’t sure about these last couple of theories, but they did make sense, as much as anything like this could make sense.

The last paragraph was hard for him to read, even though he had already come to the same conclusion. It was likely that if the girls weren’t found within 24 hours of being taken, they would most likely not be found alive. The father side of him was going through the emotions of the situation again. He wiped his eyes with one hand and exhaled. Focus, he had to focus now.

The first thing he had to do was to go through all his projects, even if they were in check he needed to clear his head and bring a fresh perspective to the situation.

As much as he wanted to keep himself under control, he had to admit that he was torn. All the training in the world and all the black operations he might have been a part of could not erase the memory of his little girl’s smile.

He turned his chair to his side table where there was a picture of his beautiful daughters, his wife and his baby boy. He picked it up and stared at it, and as he was looking at the picture he felt something shift within him. It was a feeling that was barely recognizable, but still familiar to him.

It was a coldness, an element of detachment from the huge grief that was welling up within him. It was something that he had learned after losing many friends on many fields over many years. You had to develop that element of detachment if you were going to move on and execute the next mission. The difference was that this wasn’t an operation and it wasn’t a friend or one of his men, it was his little girl, and the conflict he felt, the rage that was broiling just under the surface, was definitely something new.

Whatever level of detachment he would apply to this situation, Steven Loomis knew this was intensely personal and that was something new too.

He knew he would be able to see this from a more detached place than anyone else in his family, but now he also knew the grief and pain would be there forever. And he was beginning to realize that to do whatever he ended up doing, he was going to have to find a place for this anger the way he had found a place for his anger before.

He set the picture down, turned back around and went through the file again, this time formulating a plan for what he would do next.

Like the police, he knew that after these two last girls went missing someone was going to leak it to the press or some reporter that had already been putting things together would finally put it down on paper or on the Internet.

Once the story got out, trying to catch this guy was going to get much harder. He would cover his tracks and just move to new hunting grounds. They would catch him eventually because he would make another mistake, but it would be a while.

Steven decided he would go see Detective Grady to see where they were on this. If he had read the man correctly, it would not surprise him to see Steven showing up to ask questions about the case.

Detective Grady was in the process of building a list of people he needed to talk to about the last two girls that had gone missing.

The story would pop any day now and he had to get through the best prospects before the rest of New York started speculating on what had happened to the nine little girls, and little girls like his own daughter started seeing the boogeyman under the bed every night.

He had pulled everyone in his own precinct – beat cops to senior detectives – from the other missing girl cases in their jurisdiction and had asked for help from other precincts where girls had gone missing.

Everyone now agreed that the cases were related. All the other theories about every one of the other girls had been explored, but as all the law enforcement agencies involved looked at each of the cases, a very distinct pattern began to emerge. It was the last three cases that had really sealed the deal for everyone.

As much as everyone dreaded to admit it, they had a serial kidnapper/killer loose in New York and he was targeting little girls. It just couldn’t get any more nightmarish.

They also agreed that these last two gave them the best opportunity to catch this guy, so everyone agreed to help. They would keep their own investigations alive running in parallel with that of the last two girls, but they all agreed to provide resources to help with the interviewing of everyone related to their disappearance.

He also had the profile developed by the FBI to help narrow down the list. The profile was relatively helpful in that it helped to eliminate some possibilities that were almost certainly not the type, but the profile also described roughly a third of all males in New York. They would have to be careful to not rely on too many generalities and to focus in on some of the things that their own profile had in common with the FBI’s.

There were three principal groups that had to be interviewed, the families of both girls, their school teachers and all other school personnel, and anyone who could be identified as having been with or somewhere near the two girls outside of school hours and away from home.

Grady had decided to take Mia Reynolds’ family including all extended family on both sides that knew or had met Emily Wu, and he had asked Mark Mullins to take Emily Wu’s family and extended family on both sides who knew or had met Mia Reynolds. The same scenario was being repeated with their schoolteachers, ballet or piano instructors, anything the two girls had in common, any time they spent together was being meticulously scoured for information.

Everybody had the police and FBI’s profiles and would filter their people through them.

All agencies had agreed to meet at the end of the week to compare notes and eliminate as many people as it made sense to. Grady had also been coordinating with all the other lead investigators from the other precincts and the NYPD public information division just in case something did break or some reporter started asking questions.

Some of the investigators from the other precincts had already begun to mention that there were reporters sniffing around, asking questions about the missing girls.

Grady would be talking to Mia’s family later today. Her mother, her father and her 12-year-old brother were coming down to the station along with any other family member that had seen or been around the girls together.

After spending 10 years or more in homicide, most detectives could sense when there was a window of opportunity, and every investigator on this case could sense this was it.

As he was organizing his notes and related materials, Bob Grady heard a slight knock at his door. He looked up to find Steven Loomis standing in his doorway.

Loomis looked tired and weary, but there was an intensity to the man that was unmistakable. It was the eyes more than anything. Grady had seen eyes like that before, eyes that had witnessed death and had peered into hell only to come out on the other side with a certain calculated coldness. The difference was that Loomis wasn’t a psychopath or a sociopath. He was clearly an extremely intelligent and controlled guy with no tolerance for bullshit and the highest level of motivation anyone could have.

Grady sat back down in his chair, “Mr. Loomis, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Loomis came into the office without being invited and sat down in the chair in front of Grady’s desk. He smiled a thin, knowing smile, “I ran into Detective Mullins on the way in. He mentioned you guys might have caught a break.”

Grady gave Loomis a deadpan look and took his time responding. Loomis was testing him; he was trying to find out just how much they would be willing to share with him.

If Grady had read this guy correctly, he already knew they had caught a break and knew just what that break was. “Yes, yes, we did. Well, I don’t really like to think about the disappearance of two little girls as a break, but yes, two girls went missing that had a clear link between them.

“They were friends and schoolmates. Their families know each other and have attended a lot of recitals and school activities together.”

Loomis was nodding, pleased that Grady was not going to try to shut him out. It was the smart play; their way of keeping him informed just enough for him not do anything on his own. “So you are working off of a hypothesis that whoever took them had to have been around both of them at some point and that narrows down the list, yes?”

It was Grady’s turn to nod, “That’s right. You’re in the business, do you believe it is just coincidence?”

Loomis answered, “No, not in something like this. I get it. The other girls were completely unrelated to one another, they had nothing in common.” He had to fight through the rage that welled up when he referred to Tracy as one of the other girls, and Grady could see it in his face.

The jaw clenching and the eyes becoming colder, Loomis went on, “So there was no pattern to follow, they all seemed like they had been taken during a hunting expedition when the opportunity presented itself, when he saw what he wanted, and with Mia Reynolds and Emily Wu, he had to have seen them together or somehow know both of them. I get it.”

Grady folded his hands on his desk and leaned forward, he knew why Loomis had explained it to him.

He wanted Grady to know exactly how good his sources were, “Very good, Mr. Loomis. I’m not going to ask how you have the names of the two missing girls or how you came to formulate your scenario, because to be honest I don’t want to know.

“I would just ask that you do not in any way interfere or compromise any part of this investigation. If you can do that, I can guarantee that I will be absolutely honest with you and will keep you informed as much as it is legally possible.”

Grady got a sideways response, “As much as it is legally possible?”

Grady held up his hands, “Hey, I told you what you find out on your own and how you find it is none of my business, I don’t want to know.”

Loomis leaned back in his chair. They were on the same page. “Fair enough. Thank you for your time, detective.”

As Steven got up to leave, Grady threw out another caveat, “And I will expect the same courtesy from you, Mr. Loomis. You’ll let us know if you happen to run across something interesting, right?”

Steven turned around, “Sure, but I thought the NYPD wasn’t too keen on civilians being a part of the investigation.”

Grady crossed his arms and smiled, “The NYPD doesn’t like civilians involved in a criminal case, especially one like this one, but me, I don’t give a shit where the information comes from. I just want to shut this guy down.”

Loomis was starting to like Detective Grady, something rare for him.

He nodded and just before turning back around to leave, he paused and without looking back said, “We have a computer we use to do geographic profiling. It uses a mathematical formula, which takes the locations where the girls were taken and develops a statistical, geographic model of where the subject is likely to live. I’ll have the results of what we’ve come up with couriered over to you, personally.”

Grady didn’t say anything. As he was walking out the door, Loomis turned back to make one last comment, “And you can call me Steven.”

As he was walking down the hallway, Loomis heard Grady respond from inside his office, “Yeah, well you can call me Detective Grady.” Yes, Steven Loomis was definitely beginning to like Bob Grady.

Felix Garcia had been a beat reporter for the
New York Chronicle
for five years now. He was assigned to cover the police blotter from three precincts in Manhattan. Born and raised in Spanish Harlem by a white mom and a Hispanic father had provided him with more of a street education than he cared for, but for which he was immensely thankful.

He smelled bullshit a mile away and could think on his feet better than any of the other young reporters at the
Chronicle
. That was why he had been assigned his own beat covering three precincts over the complaints of the Ivy League whiners stuck with covering the social pages. Not bad for a kid that had taken six years to graduate from NYU’s journalism program.

He was by no means the only reporter of mixed heritage in New York, but his tall lean body, light brown skin, dark curly hair and light aqua eyes made him hard to forget. He spoke both Spanish and English fluently and had learned to seamlessly move from one culture to the other in order to fit his purposes. Unlike many of the other young journalists at the
Chronicle
who concentrated almost exclusively on their online persona, Felix had an old-school mentality that harkened back to Woodward and Bernstein.

He believed that good journalists kept their nose in the story, in developing sources and in looking for things deep under the surface, not worrying about how many ‘likes’ they got or how many Twitter followers they had. To Felix’s way of thinking, it was the story that should win fans, not the person who wrote it.