The Stolen Ones (30 page)

The eight detectives crowded around a huge map of Philadelphia, posted on the wall in the duty room. Dana Westbrook put four pushpins around the area that included the Priory Park Station. Around them she pulled a length of string, and cordoned off the area.

‘We’re going to deploy here, here and here,’ Westbrook said, indicating the northern, eastern, and western ends of the station. ‘Is anyone familiar with the station up there?’

No one answered.

Westbrook turned to Maria Caruso. ‘Get someone from SEPTA down here. Tell them to bring maps showing any access tunnels, as well as all the tracks leading to and from that platform.’

Maria Caruso rolled her chair over to a desk, got on the phone.

‘I think I need to go in alone,’ Byrne said. ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt that he’s going to carry out these threats.’

Westbrook thought about this. ‘Obviously we’re not going to give him the girl,’ she said. ‘But we’ve got to make him think we are going to.’

‘I’m not sure how we’re going to do that,’ Byrne said. ‘I think he’s a little too smart for any tricks.’

‘If Luther calls again, can we track him?’ Westbrook asked.

‘If he calls using Joan Delacroix’s iPhone, we can locate him with the Find My iPhone app.’

Westbrook looks at Mateo. ‘Are we set up to do that here?’

‘We can do it from any computer terminal, but we need to know the Apple ID and password.’

‘Do we have that?’ Westbrook asked.

Jessica shook her head. ‘James Delacroix is the only one who has it. I’ll call him.’ Jessica walked across the duty room, took out her phone. She scrolled down to James Delacroix’s number, called him. She got his voicemail, left a message, stating only that it was very important that he give her a call back. She clicked off, waited a few moments, tried again. She got the same result.

Jessica crossed the duty room. ‘No answer,’ she said.

‘If we don’t get that information, is there a way to pinpoint his location?’ Westbrook asked.

‘We might be able to,’ Jessica said. ‘If he stays on for a while, I think we can track him.’

Westbrook thought for a few moments.

‘Jess, I want you to get over to RCFL,’ Westbrook said. ‘They are a lot better equipped to handle things like this than we are here.’

The Regional Computer Forensic Lab was near Villanova University.

‘I’ll get on the phone and talk to the commander of the unit,’ Westbrook said. ‘I’ll see if we can scramble their best tracker. In the meantime, keep trying James Delacroix’s number.’

‘I think Kevin should have my iPhone and his, plus a TracFone,’ Jessica said. ‘If Kevin takes my iPhone we’ll be able to track him through GPS. If our guy calls Kevin again, he can talk to him on his phone.’

‘Write down all these numbers before you leave,’ Westbrook said. She turned to all her detectives. ‘Are we clear on our assignments here?’

Everyone nodded.

‘We’re going to have SWAT deployed at four vantage points. Jessica, you’re at the computer lab. Josh, you will be point man here. Maria, I need you to monitor radio. There’s going to be a lot of chatter in the next hour or so. I need you to hear everything I don’t.’

Westbrook turned to John Shepherd. ‘John, I think you should get down to the little girl’s foster home. We don’t know what this guy knows, or what he might find out. Go pick up the girl, and bring her here.’

‘Got it.’

Once again Byrne went through his notes. He scribbled the address of the emergency foster home on a blank page, tore it off, handed it to John Shepherd. Shepherd grabbed it, and left the duty room.

Westbrook looked at her detectives.

‘We don’t negotiate,’ Westbrook said. ‘We take this man down, and we come back safe.’

As Jessica grabbed her coat, and one of the two-way radios from the charging rack, she glanced at the clock over the door leading out of the duty room. It was 9:22. If they were to take this killer at his word, someone was going to die in thirty-eight minutes.

Byrne put on a Kevlar vest. As he was pulling the Velcro tabs tight he thought about Luther’s victims. Robert Freitag, Joan Delacroix, Edward Richmond. They were three of the four people who made up the Dream Merchants, a research group that had implanted evil from one man to another.

When the leader of the group died in that fire, and the man who now calls himself Eduard Kross had been loosed into the world, Byrne wondered if Godehard Kirsch’s dying thoughts had reconciled what he had done with what was to come.

Had he known? Was Luther the first? Have there been other patients along the way who did not have the potential, or were not as receptive as Luther?

And why now?

Life is a ladder of regret.
 

As Byrne checked the action on his Glock 17 and replaced it in his holster, it came to him. The answer was in that dusty shoebox in the ceiling of Robert Freitag’s row house. That’s what that page from the
Inquirer
was all about. The only article that mattered was the one about the condominium construction in the Northeast.

It was on the site where Cold River once stood.

They were going to dig up the bodies.

Luther, or whatever his name really was, was getting rid of people who knew the secrets buried in that park. And that meant not only the people who were members of the research team –
Die Traumkaufleute
– but perhaps any other members of the administration staff at Cold River.

Byrne didn’t want to do it, but there really was no choice.

He ran back to the duty room, found Dana Westbrook, proposed his plan. After a few long moments, she agreed to run it by the brass.

On the way down to the parking lot behind the Roundhouse, Byrne sent the text message.

Rachel awoke in darkness. Her head pounded.

She had not had the dream in years, the dream of walking through tunnels, hand in hand with the man in raggedy clothes. There was a time in her life, a time when she dreamed about nothing else. In each of those dreams she had tried to see the man’s face, but every time she looked at him, his face was blank – no eyes, no mouth. Just his soft voice, speaking a language she did not understand.

Her head milled, her eyes throbbed.

She was sitting on the floor. She felt around. The floor was concrete, cold, pitted.

Beyond this, she dared not move, not yet. She could tell by her breathing that she was in a small room, a
very
small room.

‘Marielle,’ she said, softly, just to get a gauge on the echo. There was none. She slowly lifted her right hand, touched something soft. She closed her hand around it. It was a forgiving material, maybe wool. A coat.

She was in a closet.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that there was a line of dim light coming from under the door. To her right were a few pairs of shoes, small shoes, lined up against the wall. She could not see colors, but she could see that two pairs of the shoes were sneakers; two were hard soled.

On one of the hooks above she could barely make out a few shapes. One of the things hanging from a hook looked like a terry-cloth bathrobe. Another hook had something shiny hanging from it. Rachel reached out, touched it. It was a rain slicker.

No
, Rachel thought.
It can’t be.

She then heard sounds coming from the room beyond the door, the faint sounds of a television, an old show that she used to watch when she was small.

Rachel slowly reached up, found the door knob, turned it to the right. It was not locked. She stood, opened the door slowly, and stepped into the room.

The room was white, brightly lighted, and it took a few moments for her dark-adapted eyes to adjust. To the right she saw a white dresser and a hope chest. She saw two single beds, both aligned along the far wall, the low headboards meeting at a single night stand. On the nightstand was a lamp, a few small knickknacks in the shape of turtles. There was also a book.

The tears began to well in Rachel’s eyes before she crossed the room to the nightstand. She picked up the book. It was
Goodnight, Moon
by Margaret Wise Brown.

It wasn’t possible, but it was all here. All of it.

She was in her bedroom, the one in which she and Marielle had grown up. It was their room, right down to the last detail.

The faint noise of the television continued. After a few moments Rachel heard something else, the sound of a voice coming from behind her.

‘Once upon a time there were two little girls named Tuff and Bean,’ came the voice, a voice Rachel knew well, a voice she had not heard in many years.

It was her mother.

Byrne stood on the upper level of the platform at the Priory Park Station. The rain fell in torrents, rolling off the roof of the shelter in waves. Because of the storm, SEPTA had suspended service. What street traffic there was crawled along.

The train platform, on both levels, was deserted.

From his vantage point on the upper level, Byrne had a visual on the drop-off point, that being the bottom of the steps on the street level. Every few seconds he checked to make sure all his devices were on, and online. Luckily, they all showed almost fully charged batteries.

On the way to the train station Byrne was told that a patrol car from the 3rd District had taken Colleen up to Sunnyvale to meet with Miriam Gale. Because of the urgency of the moment, and the possibility of blowback if something went terribly wrong with the operation – and there was a good chance that might happen – Dana Westbrook had to run the idea of bringing a civilian into the operation a few rungs up the chain of command. A call had first gone out to the department’s handful of connections who spoke ASL. None were immediately available.

The one thing in favor of the plan to enlist Colleen Byrne was that she had a connection – albeit brief – with the old woman.

As Byrne huddled against the wall in the train station, he checked his watch.

It was 9:50.

The Regional Computer Forensic Lab was a state-of-the-art facility in Radnor, Pennsylvania. Funded by the FBI, its purview was to support state and local enforcement with the examination of digital evidence – computers, GPS devices, cell phones, PDAs, video.

A good deal of the work done at the lab was extracting deleted data from computer hard drives, as well as data on cell phones.

Instead of driving herself in a department car, and taking the chance of getting caught in traffic, Jessica rode in a sector car, lights and siren all the way. They took the Schuylkill Expressway north, having to slow down a few times due to flooding.

Jessica was met at the door by the deputy directory of the lab, Lt. Christopher Gavin. Gavin whisked her through the night security station.

‘Have you been briefed?’ Jessica asked on the way.

‘I have,’ Gavin said. ‘I just got off the phone with Sergeant Westbrook. This guy sounds like a piece of work.’

Jessica had worked with Chris Gavin in her rookie year in the 6th District, and then again when she was working with the Auto Theft Unit.

Gavin began his career as a radar man in the Navy, then became a patrol officer, making his bones in the tough Richard Allen projects in the 1980s when Philly was burning due to the crack wars. He rapidly advanced to Sergeant and, in the late 1990s, when the need arose, started the computer unit, then housed in the basement of the 1st District headquarters. In 2006, when federal funding came through, he established the RCFL. Since that time his lab had been instrumental in the investigation and prosecution of every aspect of computer crime.

‘How’s your father?’ Gavin asked.

‘He’s good,’ Jessica said. ‘Thanks for asking.’

They walked into the computer lab at ten minutes to ten. The room was large and dimly lighted, with a dozen work stations. At this hour there were only three analysts at work.

‘What do you know about the process?’ Gavin asked.

‘Not much. We’ve used it a few times, but that was back in the stone age.’

‘You mean like three years ago?’

Jessica smiled. ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘Back when cell phones were tracked by triangulation.’

The process of triangulating the location of a cell phone was based on signal strength and, as the name implied, three cell towers. While accuracy with triangulation was accurate – sometimes within a few hundred feet – GPS tracking could often pinpoint a signal with extreme precision.

‘We still do some triangulation,’ Gavin said. ‘But you’re right. Almost everything is GPS now. Most smartphones have it built in.’

‘What do we need for this to work?’

‘There is only one must, and that is that the cell phone must be turned on. If the cell phone is turned off, or the battery is removed, we’re sunk.’

Jessica related the details of tracking Joan Delacroix’s cell phone to Priory Park.

‘This is good,’ Gavin said. ‘Are you sure your subject is using that phone now?’

‘Yes. My partner entered the woman’s contact information on his phone, and when our guy called earlier it came up. It’s the same phone.’

‘Also good. Keep in mind, if he swaps out the SIM card, he’s gone.’

‘We wouldn’t be able to track it if he does that?’

‘No,’ Gavin said. He sat down at a computer terminal, one with a thirty-inch HD monitor. Jessica pulled up a chair next to him.

‘What is the Apple ID?’ Gavin asked.

‘For my phone?’

‘The other user,’ Gavin said. ‘The subject.’

‘I don’t know it,’ Jessica said. ‘When we initially tracked her phone to Priory Park, it was entered by the victim’s brother. I put in two calls to him, but he hasn’t called back.’

‘Well, we’re going to need it to track the phone.’

Jessica took out her notepad, frantically flipped the pages. She found what she was looking for. James Delacroix’s phone number. She called it, but within four rings she got his voicemail.

‘Mr Delacroix, this is Jessica Balzano again. I need you to call me immediately.’

Jessica left all pertinent phone numbers, starting with the phone number to the direct line on the desk at which she was sitting.

‘What can we do while we’re waiting?’ Jessica asked.

‘We can set up tracking on both your iPhone and Detective Byrne’s iPhone.’

Jessica wrote down the information in her notebook, handed it to Gavin. He keyed in the information. Jessica was amazed at the speed of his typing. Within a minute there was a split screen on the LCD monitor in front of them. Gavin typed a few more entries. Now there were identical street maps on both sides of the screen. A few more keystrokes brought the images closer, showing maybe a five-block area on each side. A small blue icon was positioned in the same place on both maps.

Gavin tapped the screen on the left. ‘This is Detective Byrne’s position, tracking your iPhone.’ He tapped the screen on the right. ‘This is his iPhone. As long as he keeps them both on, we’ll be able to track his movements. If, for some reason, the two devices begin to move in different directions, we’ll be able to see where they’re going.’

Jessica called James Delacroix’s phone again. Once more she got his voicemail. They couldn’t wait any longer. She called the Comm Unit, gave them Delacroix’s address, and instructions to send a sector car there.

Gavin stood up. ‘Want some coffee? It’s fresh.’

Jessica thought about it. Her nerves were completely jangled already. But now was no time to go on the wagon. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That would be good.’

As Chris Gavin walked across the computer lab Jessica turned her attention back to the screen.