The Missing (16 page)

‘Got something,’ Pappy said.

Lying on the white paper, mixed in with the dirt and flecks of rust, was a single tan fiber. Darby grabbed it with a pair of tweezers and tucked it inside a glassine envelope.

Next, she moved the light magnifier over the trace evidence.

‘I have a black speck here, could be a paint chip,’ Darby said. ‘There are several of them.’

It was coming up on five. Evan had people standing by the federal lab for another hour. She gathered the glassine envelopes and distributed them through the lab before heading to check on the fingerprints.

Coop had used ninhydrin on the mailer. The paper was a dark purple. The mailer had been carefully cut open along the seams.

‘The outer shell is a mess of fingerprints,’ Coop
said. ‘I have comparison samples from the woman who picked up the mailer. The inside of the mailer is clean. No fingerprints, but he did use latex gloves. I found a tiny piece of it stuck on the mailer’s self-adhesive lip but I didn’t find any prints.’

‘What about the pictures?’ Darby asked.

‘They’re absolutely clean. I may have some luck with the adhesive sides of the tape and the labels. I’m about to do that next.’

‘Okay, you have anything else?’

‘Just the name of the mailer – Tempest,’ Coop said. ‘It was stamped under a fold. That’s all I’ve got. Mary Beth just called. She’s down in Missing Persons. She has something on the two names Rachel Swanson mentioned.’

Chapter 35

Stomach grumbling from hunger, Darby pushed open the conference room door.

‘– wasn’t able to trace it,’ Banville was saying to Evan.

‘Trace what?’ Darby asked. She took the seat next to Leland and handed him a file folder.

‘Dianne Cranmore received a call at her home an hour ago,’ Banville said. ‘The answering machine picked it up. It was a message from Carol saying she needed to talk to her mother and would call back in fifteen minutes. She did but didn’t stay on long enough for a trace. Dianne Cranmore confirmed it was her daughter. One of my guys dropped off a copy of the tape. We were just about to listen to it.’

Banville hit the PLAY button on the tiny micro-cassette recorder and leaned back in his seat. Evan finished typing on his laptop. Darby folded her hands on the table and stared at the recorder sitting a few inches away.

On the tape, the phone picked up. ‘Carol? Carol, it’s me, are you okay?’

Darby heard stifled tears, the clearing of the throat.

‘Carol, honey, is that you?’

‘Mom, it’s me. I’m… He hasn’t hurt me.’

Swallowing. Rapid breathing.

‘Where are you?’ Dianne Cranmore said. ‘Can you tell me?’

‘I can’t see anything, it’s too dark.’

‘Where… What can I – Carol, listen to me –’

‘He’s here inside this room. He’s got a knife.’

‘You need to protect yourself, like I showed you.’

Click.

Banville shut off the recorder.

Evan looked to Leland. ‘With your permission, I’d like to send this tape to our lab. We can enhance the background noises, see if there’s anything there. I’d also like to send the mailer and pictures. Questioned Documents can identify the type of typewriter used on the mailing labels and see if it matches another case.’

Darby could tell Leland wanted to say no, but he was boxed in a corner where he couldn’t. The FBI’s Document Section was composed of seven different units that investigated anything to do with paper. The Boston lab simply couldn’t compete.

‘As long as we share everything,’ Leland said. ‘I take it the federal government has improved its communication.’

‘See for yourself Evan reached across the table and dialed the number on the conference phone.

The sound of the phone ringing echoed over the speakerphone.

A voice picked up: ‘Peter Travis.’

‘Peter, Evan Manning. I’m calling from the Boston lab. I’m with lab director Leland Pratt and the forensic investigator on this case, Darby McCormick. Also joining us is the lead investigator, Detective Mathew Banville, from the Belham police. They may have a question or two for you, so I’m going to tell them to just jump right in.’

‘Absolutely,’ Travis said.

‘Did you get all the digital pictures I sent you?’

‘I’ve got them loaded up on my screen. The quality of the writing on the mailing labels isn’t all that clear. I’ll need the originals if you want me to identify the typewriter.’

‘You’ll have them. Let’s start with the pictures first.’

‘HP one-seven-nine is the brand of photo paper published by Hewlett-Packard. The paper is manufactured specifically for digital photo printers. You slip the memory card in, or you download the digital pictures from your computer or disc key, and it prints out a three-by-five picture.’

‘That’s the same size we have here.’

‘I can take ink samples from the picture and try and narrow down the type of printer cartridge, but you’re talking about a very big market,’ Travis said. ‘You’re not going to find Traveler that way.’

‘Traveler?’ Darby asked.

‘We’ll get to that in a moment,’ Evan said. ‘Go ahead, Peter.’

‘I can match the photo to the printer, if you have the printer.’

‘I don’t have a printer, I don’t have a suspect, and a seventeen-year-old girl is missing. What about analyzing the pictures using digital image processing techniques?’

‘It’s not a bad way to go. The problem is digital photography has evolved to such a point where you can doctor photographs without leaving any evidence.’

‘Meaning our guy could have, say, erased a window from the photograph.’

‘He could have erased a window, added a window – he could add and delete whatever he wanted if he knows how to operate the software. Given our past experiences, I doubt he’d leave anything in there that would lead us to his doorstep. I did find a new piece of evidence you can add to your list. Hold on a moment.’

A brief sound of pages being snapped back. ‘Okay, here it is,’ Travis said. ‘The mailer he used most likely belongs to a small paper company named Merrill, based out of Hollis, New Hampshire. The company went under in ninety-five. They don’t make them anymore.’

‘So our guy has a stockpile of them in his house.’

‘It’s a strong possibility. I’d add it to your list. However, I’d like to reserve my final judgment until I’ve had a chance to examine the mailer.’

‘You’ll have it on your desk tomorrow morning,’ Evan said.

‘The footwear impression recovered from the Cranmore home belongs to Traveler. It’s manufactured by Ryzer Gear, their Adventurer model.’

‘And the paint chip?’

‘We struck out. The sample is not in our system. That’s all I’ve got on my end. How did you make out with the shirt?’

Evan looked to Darby.

‘We’ve recovered one tan fiber,’ Darby said. The fiber matches the one we found in the foyer of the Cranmore house. The hair taped to the back of the picture is a similar match for Carol Cranmore. Fortunately, a root bulb was attached, so we can get a DNA sample. We struck out on the fingerprints on the mailer. It’s a wipe.’

‘Any questions for Peter?’ Evan asked the room.

There weren’t any.

‘Peter, I need you to contact Alex Gallagher, tell him to analyze an audiotape,’ Evan said. ‘It will be in the package I’m sending out today. You have my cell phone?’

‘I do. I’ll be in touch.’

Evan hung up.

‘I have some information on the two names Rachel Swanson mentioned at the hospital,’ Darby said. ‘Missing Persons did a search and came up with two possible candidates from New England.’

Leland handed her the folder. Darby removed the first sheet, a printed 8 × 10 color college graduation picture of a woman with plain features and curly blond hair. She placed it on the table.

‘This is Marci Wade from Greenwich, Connecticut,’ Darby said. ‘She’s twenty-six, lives at home with her parents. This past May, she drove to meet a former high school friend who was attending the University of New Hampshire. This friend lived about two miles from the campus. Marci drove home on a Sunday night and her car broke down on Route 95. She hasn’t been seen since.’

The second sheet Darby placed on the table was a printed picture of a good-sized woman, with round cheeks and a small port-wine stain on her flabby chin.

‘This is Paula Hibbert, a forty-six-year-old single mother and schoolteacher for a public high school in Barrington, Rhode Island. She asked her neighbor to watch her son so she could go and pick up a prescription for his asthma. She made it to the pharmacy but didn’t make it home. They never found her or her car. She disappeared in January of last year.

‘I don’t know any details about the cases, or what they found for evidence,’ Darby said. ‘Both labs are closed for the day. We’ll be on the phone first thing tomorrow morning. That’s all I have. Now, Special Agent Manning, why don’t you tell us about Traveler?’

Chapter 36

Evan swung his laptop around so it was facing the room.

On the screen was a picture of a Hispanic-looking woman with bleached blond hair.

‘This is Kimberly Sanchez, from Denver, Colorado,’ Evan said. ‘She disappeared in the summer of ninety-two. Went out for a jog and never came back.’

Evan clicked through the photos of eight more women. They were all Hispanic or African American, all in their mid-twenties to early thirties. They were all last seen last seen alone, driving away in their own cars, leaving a bar or their place ofwork late at night. The last trait they shared was that their bodies had never been recovered.

‘The Colorado task force caught one lucky break,’ Evan said. ‘A witness leaving a nightclub saw the last victim getting inside a black Porsche Carrera with Colorado license plates. The same witness also recalled that the back bumper was dented.

‘Police narrowed down the search of Porsche owners in the Colorado area. One of them, John Smith, was from Denver. When police went to
question him, Smith wasn’t home. Four days later, when Smith still hadn’t returned home, police searched the house he was renting. Smith was already gone. He wiped the place clean before he left, but forensics managed to recover two key pieces of evidence – a small blood sample in a trash can and a boot print belonging to a Ryzer hiking boot, size eleven. It was an identical match to the boot print found in the dirt next to one of the victims’ cars.’

Evan clicked a key and on the screen was a picture of a white man with an overgrown beard and mustache. He had piercing green eyes and the kind of painfully thin face generally seen on heroin addicts.

‘This is a picture of John Smith taken from his Colorado license,’ Evan said. ‘Neighbors said the back bumper of Smith’s Porsche had been dented from a recent accident. They also filled us in on some other details. Smith went out a lot at night, was somewhat antisocial. Nobody knew what he did for a living, and nobody had been inside his house. Several neighbors recalled spotting the same crude tattoo on his forearm – a shamrock with the numbers six-six-six.’

‘The tattoos used by members of the Aryan Brotherhood,’ Darby said.

Evan nodded. ‘The ethnic backgrounds of the Denver women suggested a tie to the Aryan Brotherhood. Naturally, Brotherhood members claimed they
didn’t know Mr Smith. The name isn’t listed on any of our computers. We don’t even know if John Smith is Traveler’s real name.’

‘The blood sample you found,’ Darby said. ‘Did you find a match in CODIS?’

‘We did. It belonged to one of the missing Denver women,’ Evan said. ‘After Denver, Smith set up shop in Las Vegas. This was toward the end of ninety-three. Here he changed his selection process. Over the next eight months, twelve women and three
men
vanished. The Vegas police didn’t pay much attention to the cases, since people disappear from Vegas all the time. People go there down on their luck to indulge whatever vices they have; everyone comes and goes.’

‘What were the ethnic backgrounds of the victims?’

‘The women were mostly white,’ Evan said. ‘The men were Jewish. One of the female victims, her car was left on the road. Someone messed with the ignition wires. Fortunately, a piece of evidence had been left behind – the Ryzer boot print.

‘By the time I got involved, Mr Smith had already moved on to Atlanta, his third stop. This was in ninety-four, and we had given his case a name: Traveler. The boot print was listed on VICAP and we were called in.’

Evan shifted in his chair, springs squeaking. ‘Carrie Weathers, Traveler’s fourth victim in Atlanta,
was spotted getting inside a black Porsche Carrera. The witness said the car had a busted fender and Maryland license plates, but she didn’t get a good look at the numbers. It was the first real break we had, so we asked local gas stations and garages to be on the lookout for a black Porsche with a dented fender coming in for fill-ups, repairs, whatever.

‘We were in the process of running down registrations when a call came in at night from a gas station attendant working at a local Mobil station. A Porsche matching our description had just come in. A blond woman was in the passenger’s seat. She was sleeping. She had too much to drink, the driver had said. I asked the attendant to secure the pump. I went to the station along with someone from the lab.

‘The gas station attendant was very relaxed, very cooperative,’ Evan said. His voice sounded oddly detached, as though he were reading from a script. ‘He said he wrote the license plate down on his pad next to his phone. I followed him through the garage. When I entered his office, he was standing behind me. He hit me on the back of the head. That was the last thing I remembered.

‘When I woke up at the hospital, I was told he used the gas from the pumps to set the fire. At some point, I managed to crawl away, but I don’t remember it because of the concussion. They identified the lab tech and the real owner of the gas station through
dental records. They had both been shot with a Colt Commander.’

‘The same weapon used to kill Carol Cranmore’s boyfriend,’ Darby said. She had the ballistics report in her folder. ‘You didn’t recognize the gas station attendant?’

‘This man was heavier, clean-cut with a shaved head,’ Evan said. ‘He looked nothing like John Smith. He was wearing a jacket, so I didn’t see any tattoos. And he didn’t fit the profile. He didn’t ask many questions about the investigation, which psychopaths generally do. Obviously, I was wrong.’