Abandoned: A Thriller (29 page)

“I use a Glock,” I tell him, pulling my jacket aside so he can see it.

He nods in approval. “Nice weapon.” He squints at me. “You any good?”

“Good?” Callie says. “Honey-love, she’s a natural gunfighter.”

“That a fact?”

“I’m competent.” Shooting is one of the few things I don’t bother to be modest about. “I did some comparisons based on my own scores at the range. I’d probably rank within the top hundred in the world if I competed.”

“For women?” he asks.

“Top hundred, period.”

He grins again, delighted. “That’s something I’d like to see! Most of the boys involved in the gun game are good enough, but there’s a few that’d be pretty upset to be bested by a woman. You should compete sometime.”

I grin back. I like Earl Cooper. “Maybe I will.”

“Have we had enough bonding time?” James asks, rancorous and impatient, as always. Maybe we dislike James, when we dislike him, because he’s our conscience. “Can we get to the matter at hand?”

Earl curls his mouth down. “Curb it a little, son,” he says.

“I’m not your son,” James retorts. “And there are other women locked away in the dark out there, just like Heather Hollister was.”

Earl sobers at this and nods. “Ah yes,” he says, his voice soft. “The
impatient hunter, the one who can never put down his gun or take his boots off. I used to be just like you, son. You better learn to turn it off or one day you’ll burn out.”

“The business at hand,” James says, practically grinding his teeth.

“Give it up, Earl,” Callie opines. “This is who James is, sad but true.”

“I guess I knew that. Fair enough, young Jim, we’ll get to the meat of the matter. What can I do for you all?”

I brief him in detail on the case. He listens intently, rolling his mustache at times, asking questions at others. When I finish, he is silent for a while, staring at our Sanskrit scribbling on the whiteboard.

“Well,” he drawls finally, “I’m not sure how much help I can be, but I’ll tell you what I see and then I’ll take all the data home and give it a figure.”

“That’s all we’re asking,” I say.

“What do you know about what I do?”

“Just the broad strokes. Callie is our criminologist. She’s pretty conversant in general forensics, but we bring in experts like yourself for the specialized fields all the time.”

“Fair enough. Geographic profiling is the bastard stepchild of profiling,” he says. “In other words, for many, the jury’s still out. With good reason. There are a lot of factors that can throw a wrench into the works. The main one, in your case, is a lack of data. Geographic profiling is all about data. Number crunching, variables. Your boy has dropped four people in three different states. He selects his victims via the Internet. That’s unhelpful.

“We operate with four basic types in geographic profiling, when it comes to offenders. We have the hunter. He looks for his victims in his home territory. He’s the one my kind of profiling works best for. We have the poacher. He travels away from his home to hunt. He’s smarter, he knows you don’t shit in your own backyard. You have the troller. He’s an opportunist. He’s most likely your disorganized offender. He sees what he likes while he’s out doing something else and he acts on the impulse. Then you’ve got the trapper. He lures the victim to him, controls the situation.”

“There’s a lot of overlap there,” I observe.

He nods in agreement. “Very good, Agent Barrett. That’s correct. The troller can operate in his own home area, like the hunter, or he
could only troll when he’s away from home. The traveling salesman as rapist, so to speak. The poacher can create a kind of ‘new home territory.’ He thinks he’s being smart by choosing his victims from somewhere else than where he lives, but then he gets comfortable with that particular area and only draws from it. He could also be unconscious of the decisions that drove him to choose that ‘away’ spot.

“That’s one of the principles that underpin geographic profiling: We tend to operate in our comfort zones, knowingly or not. The theory, then, is that location—both of abduction and dumping—tells us something important about where an offender lives. A famous and simplistic example is the case where bodies were always being found near railroad tracks. It pointed to an offender with an on-the-move, drifter mentality. That helped narrow the search and, though it wasn’t the only factor, contributed to finding the perpetrator, an illegal immigrant who’d been deported numerous times before.”

Listening to him, I guess that Cooper is probably a lecturer in demand. He has a laid-back but engaging way of speaking that makes you feel as if you’re just having a conversation. Sitting in the living room, feet up on the coffee table.

“The key with your boy and me, if I’m any help at all, is going to come down to distance. There’s a difference, you see, between perceived distance and actual distance. If any of you have ever walked toward the mountains on a horizon or tried to swim across a lake to the other shore, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. They look close, but you could walk for days before you reached those mountains or swim ’til you drowned and never reach that other shore.

“It works in reverse too. A killer might think something is just too far when it’s actually too close to home. It helps to know method of transportation—in this case a car—as that gives us an idea of his mobility range.”

“It sounds like a drifter is easier to catch with geographic profiling than a man with a car,” Alan says.

“That is a fact,” Cooper agrees. “It’s unhelpful that your boy is operating in different states. Still, the distance factor might turn up something. In relation to the abductions, I mean.”

“How’s that?” Alan asks.

“Where he took them, how he took them. He’s a pragmatic man. What does that tell you?”

I nod, seeing it. “That he’s not going hundreds of miles away,” I say. He smiles. “Kee-rect.”

“But that’s not always going to be under his control,” Callie says doubtfully. “His victim choice is limited by need—the needs of his clients. He can’t know where they’re going to be located.”

“Good thinking,” Cooper says, “but not so fast. Los Angeles proper—the city, I mean—is somewhere around forty miles wide. Hell, Portland is only about a hundred forty-five square miles to Los Angeles’s four hundred seventy, and it’s not long after you leave the city that you can be out in the middle of the woods.”

He turns to the whiteboard.

“The parking-lot angle is a good one. I think you’re right. He’s taking them there because he needs to feed his little sexual sideline of making the cars crash. That’s behavior. Combined with geography, it tells us what? What are you missing there?”

It’s a gentle probe, a teacher’s insistence to look. We all stare at the whiteboard, James and I most of all. I see it first, a forehead slapping moment.

“How does he see the crash?” I say. Cooper smiles.

“Right,” James says. “He has a victim. He can’t very well sit there and wait all night for the crashes to occur. He can’t count on the media—too many variables, might or might not be newsworthy.”

“So?” Callie asks.

“So,” I reply, “he’d set up a way to record it.”

Cooper tilts his head at me in acknowledgment. “I’m no gadget genius,” he says, “but I’d think his options in that regard would be limited. How long would a battery-operated system last? If no Internet’s available to pipe it to his computer, how many hours can a stand-alone system record? I’d look for local hotels and neighborhoods nearby with wireless capabilities—on the most recent crimes. The older ones …” He shrugs. “I can’t say. You’ll have to ask one of them tech boys I’m sure you have on the payroll.

“As far as my neck of the woods goes, get me copies of everything. Here, the Oregon and Nevada cases. I need your notes too, anything that might or might not be relevant. I’ll stir it all up together and add some eye of newt and a little finger-crossing, and we’ll see what I come up with.”

“You’ll have it all today,” I tell him. “We really appreciate your assistance.”

He tips his hat at me. “No promises.”

“You’ve already helped,” I tell him. “You’ve given us some new things to look at.”

After Cooper leaves, I give James the job of gathering copies of everything Cooper needs. He accepts this task amiably enough, for James.

“The spatial-distance angle is interesting,” he allows. “As is the linkage with the theory of symphorophilia.”

“Interesting,” I agree. “Now let’s turn it into something we can use. Callie, you help James with this. Alan, please give Leo a call and find out where he’s at with the LAPD.” I glance at my watch. “I’m going to bring the AD up to date.”

Not just on this, I think. I need to talk to him about the other thing. It’s time to let someone in on the secret, now that I know the changes the future will bring.

AD Jones regards the ceiling of his office, pondering everything I’ve just told him.

“So you think he was telling the truth?” he asks. “You think he has more victims stashed?”

“I think it’s likely, sir, if we operate on the theory that it’s a financial model. No victims, no money.”

“Probably not a shitload, though,” he muses. “He wouldn’t want to risk drawing too much attention.”

“Perhaps,” I agree. “Then again, there’s kind of a mutual code of silence. He probably records and keeps copies of everything that goes on between him and his ‘clients’ in case something goes wrong.”

“A dead man’s switch.”

“Sure. That and the whole I’ll-ruin-your-life-if-you-renege thing. Douglas Hollister tried to screw our perp, so he got buried. That’s a pretty convincing deterrent.”

“How’s Heather Hollister?”

“Not good. Some part of me wants to say she’s better off than Dana, or Jeremy Abbott, but I don’t know.”

“She’s better off.” He says it flatly. “You should know that better
than most. If she’s tough enough, she’ll pull back from the edge. If she’s not, she won’t. At least she’s got the chance.”

“You’re right,” I say, “I guess it just creeps me out. My two biggest fears as a kid were getting locked in the dark forever and going crazy but not knowing I’d gone crazy.”

He smiles. “Maybe you’re already crazy now, and you just don’t know it.” He indicates his office with a sweep of his hand. “Maybe none of this exists, and you’re sitting in a padded room somewhere in a straitjacket, imagining it all.”

I give him a withering glare. “Not funny, sir.”

His grin tells me he feels otherwise. “And the other boy?”

“He’s alive. He’ll probably be turned over to social services, until and if Heather comes out of her funk enough to claim him.”

“So what’s the plan of attack?” he asks.

“Maybe Earl Cooper will help, but at the moment I think our best leads are the Internet aspect and the car crashes.”

“I assume you’re planning a sting on the Internet end of things?”

“I’m considering it, sir. I’ll know better when Leo gets back.”

“And the crashes?”

“If James is right and it’s a sexual need, he probably won’t have been able to limit himself to feeding it only when he’s performing an abduction. There should be other instances. I think it’s important. In most ways this offender appears to be incredibly disciplined and careful. The paraphilia is a deviation from that. It could be one of the places where he makes mistakes.” I shrug. “It’s a stretch, but it’s what we have.”

He thinks about it. “Good,” he agrees. “You should also look into Internet communities on the car-crash angle.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every fetish and weirdo perversion out there probably has a community of some kind connected to it. Pedos do. Places to share photos and experiences. If Cooper is right and he records his exploits, maybe he shares them too.”

I blink, surprised. “That’s a good idea.”

“I still have a few. Your current plan of attack sounds good. I agree with assuming that his motivation is money. It might not be the only reason, but Hollister’s testimony and everything else we know supports the concept. Proceed as planned.” He leans back in his chair and laces
his fingers over his stomach, gazing at me. “Now, tell me why you’re really here.”

“Sorry?” He’s right, but I resist being readable as a reflex action.

“Come on, Smoky. I know you. I can tell when you’re distracted. You had something else on your mind the whole time you were briefing me.”

I meet his gaze with a miniature defiance, then I look away and sigh. “I told Director Rathbun I’d take the job.”

“I know. I think it was a good decision.”

I still am not looking at him. “I think so too. But there’s a complication. Well, I don’t know if
complication
is the right word. Let’s call it a variable. I need your help. Your advice on what to do about it in context.”

“If I can help, I will. What kind of variable?”

I feel myself shiver inside, a mix of nervousness and fear along with a yearning. It’s a secret. I’ve felt that way about it from the first. I’m not sure why I felt that way, but it was too visceral an emotion to ignore.

I force myself to meet his gaze again, and then I force myself to say the words, the words I haven’t said to anyone yet, not even Tommy.