Full Tilt (11 page)

“We’re asking you to exercise a little judgment here.”

“Kate.” Kennedy rubbed his chin. “Just to remind you, those charges against you can always be brought back.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No, but consider the ramifications. Kate, it’s dangerous to get too close to a case, especially when it concerns a dangerous fugitive.”

“He’s right, Kate,” Brennan said. “Nelson’s at large, and you’re involved in this. You should dial things down.”

“No, I’m not backing off.”

“All right,” Kennedy said. “I think we’re done here.”

Leaving the town hall with Jay, Kate was stopped by reporters insisting on more comments. Kate kept them short, then headed with Raney to his SUV.

“AP’s shooting still images for the pool,” he said. “Bloomberg will send copy. We should go with the pack to Nelson’s house, see what we can find there.”

“Sure, but I have to file something first. Let’s grab a coffee somewhere and I’ll write.”

At that moment, her phone rang.

“Kate, this is Nicky Green from the library. I found that news story from Denver you wanted, the one about a license plate and missing girl in Canada.”

“Great. Can you send it to me?”

“Just did.”

24

Rampart, New York

T
hree blocks from the town hall, Kate and Raney shared a booth in Sally’s Diner.

Kate was anxious to read the old clipping from Denver, but her deadline was looming. She needed to file her story, and she was hungry.

While waiting for their food, they set up their laptops. Raney selected and adjusted images he’d shot at the news conference. Kate inserted an earpiece, plucked key quotes from her recorder, consulted her notes and wrote, her keyboard clicking softly as she tuned out the noise around her.

By the time the waitress set their burgers down—“My, you two are busy bees”—Kate was well into her story, stopping at each paragraph to take a bite. When she’d finished she’d filed seven hundred clean, solid words to Newslead, just under the deadline.

Raney was on the phone to the photo desk in New York. While he talked, Kate went to her email and the Colorado article. It was from the
Denver Star-Times
, a community weekly that had ceased publication nearly ten years ago. It was a short item:

Police Probe Possible Denver Link to Missing Canadian Girl

By Will Goodsill

Denver detectives are investigating a possible local link to a ten-year-old Canadian girl who recently went missing from a truck stop in Alberta, Canada.

Tara Dawn Mae vanished last week from the Grand Horizon Plaza, along the Trans-Canada Highway at Brooks, Alberta, about 100 miles east of Calgary.

Canadian authorities gave Colorado law enforcement officials a list of partial license plates and descriptions of vehicles that were in the area at the time, with a request to verify them in relation to the Canadian case.

“We’re running them down where we can, eliminating possibilities. A few are promising leads, but it’s a needle-in-a-haystack thing,” a police source told the
Star-Times
.

A stamp-sized photo of Tara Dawn accompanied the article.

Kate reread the piece, drawn to the quote
“A few are promising leads.”
Which few? What happened to them? Who was the source? Did Carl Nelson ever live in Denver?

I need to follow this, but it’s going to take time.

Raney ended his call, then snapped his laptop shut.

“Ready to go, Kate?” He signaled the waitress for the checks.

* * *

A few minutes later, Raney pulled onto Knox Lane and rolled by Nelson’s modest ranch-style bungalow with its tidy yard.

The situation was different from when Kate was last here. The entire property was sealed with yellow tape and Rampart officers had been posted to keep people out. The street was sprinkled with news vehicles. Nelson’s neighbors were giving doorstep and sidewalk interviews, their faces etched with concern. Some held their children close.

Kate and Raney approached a man and woman in their thirties, who’d just finished talking to a TV crew on the sidewalk, two doors down from Nelson’s house. The couple, Neil and Belinda Wilcox, agreed to have their picture taken and to talk about their missing neighbor.

“It shocks you to the core.” Belinda cupped her hand to her cheek and stared at Nelson’s house. “It’s frightening. We had him in our home once.”

“Really?” Kate took out her notebook. “Tell me about that?”

“Well, it sounds cliché,” Neil started, “but Nelson kept to himself. He was a hermit.”

“Yeah,” Belinda added. “With his long hair and beard, he looked like one.”

“Yeah, well, one day in winter,” Neil continued, “he was clearing his driveway and I’d run out of gas for my snowblower. I asked him if I could borrow some. Well, I got telling him how my computer didn’t work and he volunteered to fix it. It took him about two minutes, the guy’s a genius.”

“Another time,” Belinda recalled, “I saw that he had like a ton of groceries in the back of his truck. I asked him if he was feeding an army, because we knew he lived alone. He was kind of startled and said he was donating a lot to a soup kitchen in Ogdensburg.”

The Wilcoxes remembered little else that was noteworthy. Raney indicated an older man and woman across the street, walking a golden retriever, and they went to them.

Doris Stitz was a retired schoolteacher, and her husband, Harvey, was a retired mechanic. They lived at the corner of the street.

“We came down to see what all this fuss was today,” Harvey said.

“We’ve been following the story in the news,” Doris said. “And it’s just getting worse and worse. It’s so awful. You never expect this kind of thing in our quiet little town.”

“Did you ever meet Nelson?”

“Once,” Harvey said. “He seemed friendly enough, but it felt like it was forced. You got a sense that he wanted to be left alone.”

“How so?”

“Just an air about him. It was last year. Boone, here, got off his leash and chased a squirrel into Nelson’s backyard. I rang his doorbell and asked if I could go get my dog. Nelson just gave off this icy air, like he didn’t appreciate being bothered, or want anybody on his property. Then he said I could go get Boone. I didn’t notice anything back there. It was all very well kept, very neat. On my way out with Boone, Nelson looked at my ball cap, asked if I was a Broncos’ fan. I said damn straight I am, then Nelson smiled and that was it.”

“The Denver Broncos, the NFL football team?” Kate made a quick note.

“Yes.”

“Did Nelson ever say if he lived in Denver?”

“Heck no, that was the extent of our conversation,” Harvey said. “I don’t think that guy ever really talked with anyone.”

* * *

During the drive to the Syracuse airport, Kate updated her story. Along the way she called Grace, who was happy she’d be home later that night.

“Did you get me a present?”

“Sure did.”

“What is it?”

“A surprise.”

Kate then used the drive time to continue looking into the
Denver Star-Times
story. She needed to talk to Will Goodsill, the reporter. Maybe Goodsill could get in touch with his source, prompt him on what became of the “promising leads.”

Online she found scores of listings for Goodsill across the country, a few in Denver, none for a Will Goodsill. She started making calls and leaving messages, knowing it was a long shot. The story was fifteen years old. Memories fade, people move and people die.

* * *

After Raney dropped Kate off at the airport she checked her bag, went through security and on to pre-boarding. At her gate, TV screens suspended throughout the area, were dialed to news networks with pictures of Carl Nelson flashing across them.

The Rampart case had exploded into a national story.

Again, Kate met the cold eyes that glared from the face of a fully bearded man with wild hair, in his forties.

Carl Nelson.

Is this the last face my sister saw?

This was her enemy.

If you killed my sister, then I’ll find you. I swear to God, I’ll find you.

Before boarding, Kate downloaded every fresh news story she could find so she could go through them during the flight.

On the plane, Kate studied the news reports. The TV items carried pictures of Nelson, accompanied by the pool images of the razed barn and investigators in white coveralls sifting the earth for human remains in a remote corner of the isolated property.

Network graphic headlines called the case:

Horror in Upstate NY

NY Body Farm

Hunt for a Monster

All day long Kate had struggled to push one supreme fear out of her mind, but now it hit her full force, the old agony tearing at her with renewed ferocity. She turned from the laptop to her window. Somewhere down there were either the ashes of her sister’s prison or the remnants of her grave.

Oh, God, I don’t know if I can do this.

Kate turned back to her monitor to see it filled with Carl Nelson’s face glowering at her above the new headline:

Face of Evil: Who Is Carl Nelson?

25

Gary, Indiana

T
he toilet ran on, the mattress sagged and brownish stains webbed down the cracked walls of the motel room at the city’s fringe near the interstate.

The guest in Unit 14 didn’t care.

The
Slumber Breeze Inn’s customers were chiefly addicts, hookers and deviants. But Unit 14 considered himself well above that stratum. What mattered was that the motel accepted cash while providing anonymity and indifference.

Working at two laptops on the room’s desk, was Sorin Zurrn. But nobody—
nobody living
—knew him by that name, a name that resurrected undying pain for him. At this moment, he was Donald W.R. Fulmert, age thirty-two, a professional driver from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In the darkness, his clean-shaven face and bald head glowed spectrally in the bluish light of his computer screens. He glimpsed himself in the room’s fractured mirror, satisfied that he bore no resemblance to Carl Nelson.

That man had never really existed.

Zurrn had grown comfortable living in Nelson’s skin, quietly tending to his collection over the years. But he’d never intended to reside there forever. He’d grown restless and proud of what he’d achieved.

But Rampart was such a small stage.

He deserved adoration for his accomplishments.

Although it was dangerous, he yearned for the world to be aware of his power; he ached for his life to be bigger, something grandiose and magnificent. He had to move on to the next stage of his evolution.

Over the past few years, he’d planned it all with such attention to detail, he thought, admiring the photographs of his new property. This would be his Asgard, his Valhalla; his Palace of Supreme Perfection. He could almost touch it, but it was still over a thousand miles and several states away, a vast expanse of isolated land.

The cost was unimportant.

Obtaining money was easy for him.

He knew the electronic security gaps with retailers and banks. Three months ago, he’d siphoned more than nine hundred thousand dollars in unmarked, nonsequential bills from cash advance kiosks at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. He had access to an eternity of credit cards and identities, enabling him to be anyone he needed to be, with access to just about anything.

And he could do it all without leaving a trace.

As he continued looking at pictures of his sweeping new property, envisioning how glorious his new kingdom would be, one of his laptops trilled with a message from Ashley.

He’s so hot. Totally crushing on him! IDK! Help!

The pretty fourteen-year-old from Minnesota was breathless about a boy named Nick. Zurrn had been cultivating her online for the past six months, convincing her that he was Jenn, a sixteen-year-old girl from Milwaukee. He’d drilled deep into Ashley’s life. He knew everything about her and her family—their home address, all their bank and credit card information, their medications, Ashley’s grades, her habits and daily routine. He’d done a little work to get a feed off her phone and laptop so he could remotely watch her undetected.

He responded to her plea:
Tell him, Ash! GTG! BFF!

BFF!

Best Friends Forever.
Poor little Ashley might find out what forever really means, for Zurrn had her believing that Jenn’s parents were taking her to the Mall of America soon.

Now, Ashley was dying to meet her BFF.

Wait, what’s this?

In the corner of the room, a muted TV was tuned to an all-news channel. Images of the crime scene at a farm in Rampart, New York, appeared, prompting Zurrn to reach for the remote.

Carl Nelson’s face filled the TV over a graphic that read, “Wanted by the FBI.” As Zurrn listened, he went online, checking major news sites, devouring the breaking story.

What the hell’s this?

In the past few days, he’d monitored the initial coverage of the Rampart story. As expected, early reports portrayed it as a local murder-suicide. Coverage was contained to the region. That’s how it was designed and executed to play, with “Carl Nelson” and the woman dead, allowing Zurrn to disappear.

A perfect crime.

What happened?

Now, a woman named Kate Page was telling reporters of her search for her sister. A series of photos appeared from the cold case of a ten-year-old girl missing for fifteen years from Alberta, Canada.

“In my heart I feel my sister’s case is linked to the Alberta case and these events in Rampart. I want to find the man who did this. I want to know what happened. I’d give anything to see her again.”

Zurrn locked on to Kate Page, his face burning with contempt.

Long after the news ended, Zurrn sat motionless in the near dark, his neck muscles pulsating as he processed the news over the quiet hum of interstate traffic. Then loud music began throbbing from several rooms away, with the roll of drums hammering along the motel as if to signal war.

He went to one of the online news stories and examined the accompanying photo of Kate Page.

Who the hell’re you? Do you think you’re going to stop me? Me?

Zurrn put his hands together, steepled his fingers, touched them to his lips, his nostrils flaring. Then he shut off his computers, took them with him, got into his van and headed into the night. He drove along a stretch of strip malls, car washes and warehouses, coming to a Burger King with a twenty-four-hour drive-through.

After collecting his order, the aroma of onions and French fries filled the interior. As he threaded his way through a light industrial no-man’s land, he took stock of his situation.

Where’d he screw up? He’d been careful. Yes, he’d made mistakes long ago when he was young, but time had buried them. He’d perfected his technique.

Calm down! So my perfect crime in Rampart was not so perfect. It doesn’t matter what police think they know. I’ll adjust. They can’t touch me because I’ll always have the upper hand. I’ll always be in control.

He stopped at the gate of JBD 24-7 Mini-Storage. He inserted his card with the chip, then touched his code on the security keypad. The gate opened. He drove slowly through the facility’s neat rows of garage-sized units. It was late, the grounds were deserted. When he found Number 84, he carefully backed the rear of his vehicle to the door, blocking the security cameras from clearly seeing inside.

He pressed the unit’s password on the keypad, then inserted the key into the lock. Metal grumbled as he lifted the unit’s steel door and switched on the light. It was clean and dry inside.

He closed the door.

In the unit’s center, there was a large rectangle shape covered by a sound-absorbing tarpaulin. He pulled it back, revealing two oblong matching wooden crates, each large enough to hold a coffin. Each crate had a small, hinged inspection door, about the size of a hardcover book. His keys jingled as he unlocked the steel lock and opened the first one.

He dropped fast food into it, then locked the door.

Then he unlocked the second one, opened it and hesitated.

“Please! I’ll be good, please! Please!” A soft voice rose from the darkness.

Ignoring it, he dropped the food and locked the door.

Then he sat in the corner and as he listened to the small movements of life coming from the boxes, he stared at them, thinking.

Thinking hard about what he was going to do.