The Collective (10 page)

Josh had done his homework. The Bangor P.D. maintained a small storefront in a corner of the domestic terminal, but while the local police would field complaints and help passengers as much as they could—mostly dealing with theft—nearly everything that affected security fell within the TSA’s purview. Tracking murderers with potential terrorist connections had to be pretty high on their list of priorities, but that hadn’t stopped the guy from getting on a plane in Florida and getting off in Bangor. Josh figured their suspect must be on a no-fly list under another name—maybe a lot of other names—but his picture hadn’t set off any alarms.

All of that would change now. No way was this guy getting on another commercial plane in the United States. But that wasn’t going to help them find the missing newborn.

Merritt pulled the car up to a nondescript door flanked by armed TSA agents. These guys were not baggage screeners. They were the rarely seen part of the Transportation Security Administration—the ones who handled the enforcement elements of the job. But Josh wasn’t paying much attention to the guards. His mind was on the mother and father at Acadia Hospital in Bangor whose infant had been taken from them at the very moment they were to begin life as a family.

“I don’t know their names,” he said.

Agent Merritt turned off the engine and opened his door,
either not having heard him or correctly presuming the words hadn’t been meant for him. Chang turned in her seat.

“What?”

Josh looked at her. “The parents—the people whose baby this asshole took. I don’t know their names.”

Chang frowned. For a second Josh thought it was disapproval, but then he realized that she had momentarily forgotten their names herself.

“Kowalik,” she said at last. “The last name is Kowalik. The father is Richard, I think. The mother is Farah. That one I’m sure of.”

“What about the baby?”

A glimmer of pain flickered across Chang’s eyes. “They’d narrowed it down, but as of when I talked to Bangor P.D. before the flight, they hadn’t agreed on a name yet.”

Josh felt a fresh wave of hatred. The bastard had stolen a baby so new to the world that her parents hadn’t even had time to decide on a name.
Kowalik
, he thought, committing the name to memory.
Richard and Farah
.

A Transportation Security Officer awaited them just inside the door. Lost in his own thoughts, Josh followed Chang and Merritt as the TSO led them through a long corridor, through two sets of locked doors, down another corridor, and into a room where monitoring equipment hummed quietly. Screens revealed live images from various security checkpoints and entrances in the airport, empty gates, and people waiting in chairs for their morning flights. Officers on monitor duty sat at several different stations, watching it all unfold, but Josh’s attention was drawn to the rear of the room, where a Maine State Police lieutenant stood with a fortyish, hawk-nosed man in a suit. The cop and the hawk were looking over the shoulders of a young Latina in the TSA uniform as she worked the controls at her station, running back and forth through a particular piece of video surveillance.

The hawk in the suit glanced up at them, muttered something to the cop, and walked over to greet them.

“Agents,” he said, holding out a hand, aiming directly at Josh. “Alfred DeLisle. Federal security director.” That meant
DeLisle was the top TSA official at the airport, but he spent his days supervising the supervisors, distant from the actual work being done by his people.

Josh shook DeLisle’s hand, but narrowed his eyes. “Josh Hart, ICD. But you really want to speak to Agent Chang.”

DeLisle glanced irritably at Merritt, as if blaming the local FBI agent for not giving him enough information to avoid looking foolish. Then he smiled at Chang and shook her hand, as well, as if he hadn’t just insulted her by assuming Josh was in charge.

“Agent Chang,” DeLisle said. “We’re at your service. Whatever you need.”

Chang shook his hand, behaving as if she hadn’t noticed the insult. “What can you tell us about the suspect’s arrival in Bangor, Mr. DeLisle?”

DeLisle flinched at the word
mister
, probably offended at not being called “Director DeLisle”—or whatever he thought his proper title might be—but they weren’t here to assuage egos.

“Well, your people gave us a fairly narrow window to search,” DeLisle replied. “We examined video from all arrivals originating from the southeastern United States, beginning with yesterday morning and ending thirty minutes before the kidnapping from Acadia Hospital. I had three teams on it, but once we found what we were looking for, I sent them home.”

It grated on Josh a little, the way DeLisle kept saying “we,” as though he had done any of the work himself.

“What have you got?” Chang asked.

“He arrived shortly before eleven a.m. yesterday on a flight from Fort Myers, traveling on a Florida driver’s license.”

“Name?” Josh asked.

DeLisle pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and read what he’d scribbled there. “Jamil Nassif.”

Chang glanced at Josh. “Sounds Saudi, but that means nothing. It’s got to be an alias.”

“No doubt,” Josh replied.

Agent Merritt had been listening to all of this in silence. “I
don’t get it. Why would this guy fly from Tampa to steal some random baby?”

“That’s the question we need to answer,” Josh replied. It wasn’t Merritt’s fault that he was playing catch-up.

DeLisle gestured toward the monitoring station where the state cop still loomed over the young Latina.

“I’ve had the video edited together. Come have a look at your suspect. There’s no question it’s the same guy from the hospital kidnapping.”

They gathered together around the monitor and watched it all unfurl on-screen. The man calling himself Jamil Nassif had been flying coach, so he emerged from the gangway amidst a cluster of other people. He wore blue jeans and hiking boots and a white cotton shirt. Though he needed a shave, he was otherwise neatly groomed. His luggage was a small black carry-on suitcase, unobtrusively ordinary.

“Obviously, Nassif had gone through security at the time of his departure from Fort Myers,” DeLisle said as they watched the man in the white shirt make his way from the gate, through the terminal, and then out the door toward where taxis waited for arriving passengers.

“We get it,” Chang said. “Domestic passengers don’t get a lot of attention when they’re arriving. Why would they? You’re not on the hook for this, Mr. DeLisle. But he’s going to leave Bangor at some point, and if he tries to do it through this airport—”

“We’ll detain him,” DeLisle said quickly.

Chang nodded. “And don’t be gentle about it.”

As the tech ran the footage again, Josh studied the suspect closely. He moved with a calm determination. He knew precisely why he was in Bangor and what he had planned. A sick feeling uncoiled itself in Josh’s gut—a cold certainty that they would never find the Kowalik baby, or if they did, the child would already be dead. He shuddered, watching the impassive face of the killer as he exited the terminal.

“There must be a camera outside, picking up the taxi stand,” he said.

The state police lieutenant, who had been silent thus far,
grunted in agreement. “You’d think. But they relocated the taxi line in the spring and haven’t gotten around to moving the camera.” The cop gave DeLisle an aggravated look. “As for the Amber Alert, it hasn’t turned up a damn thing yet, but I have people questioning all the cabbies who were on duty yesterday morning. At least we’ll be able to find out where he went from here. It’s just a matter of time.”

Time the Kowalik child doesn’t have
, Josh thought. But he kept it to himself. These people were all doing their best.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Chang said. “Agent Merritt tells me you’re loaning us some space to work out of.”

“We’re setting up a command center for you, yeah,” the cop said. “It’s not much, but you’ll have secure computer access.”

“That’s great. Thanks.”

“Happy to do it,” the cop replied. “We’ll take all the help we can get on this one. I am curious, though. I mean, yes, if the guy takes the baby across state lines, kidnapping is a federal crime. But you’re not waiting for evidence of that to get involved.” He looked at Josh. “And Homeland Security … is this guy a terrorist or something?”

Josh looked at Chang, but she gave him a nod that indicated he should answer.

“Technically, we’re not supposed to answer that,” Josh said, looking at DeLisle and the tech before turning back to the cop. “And the truth is, we’re not one hundred percent certain what we’re dealing with yet. Whatever we find, though, you need to run it through Agent Chang and her supervisor before you discuss anything publicly.”

“Of course,” the lieutenant said, apparently irked that Josh felt the need to caution him. “I was just wondering. I mean, this sort of thing happens all the time. Not babies being snatched outside of hospitals, but kids being abducted. Parents snatch kids when they’re unhappy with court decisions about custody. Perverts and crazies steal them off the streets. At some point, I’d love to know what makes this case so special.”

So would we
, Josh thought.

But the question stayed with him. Obviously the murders
in Fort Myers and the baby-snatching in Bangor were connected by the suspect, this man who called himself “Jamil Nassif.” But what if the cop’s instincts were right and the fundamental similarity between the two—the children—was the more important connection? Was this actually about the kids? And what did the kids have in common?

Josh would have to ponder the question, but he knew that the place to begin answering it was Acadia Hospital, where Richard and Farah Kowalik were camped out, waiting for news of their stolen child.

Voss started Sunday morning with the biggest cup of iced coffee in the world—at least according to a poster in the window of the café—laced with a double shot of espresso. The night before had been a long one. The news had started running enhanced images of the two suspects who had approached the realtor to get a tour of the Greenlaws’ house. The murders at Manatee Village had become the hottest story of the current news cycle, and the media vultures were already picking at the bones. Voss knew it was their job, but somehow could never quite forgive them for the way they seemed to relish reporting the ugly news.

But fortunately, though the image from the security camera outside the hospital in Bangor showed his profile fairly clearly, the abductor in Maine had not been identified by media as one of the suspects in the quadruple homicide in Fort Myers. It wouldn’t last, but for now they had a little breathing room in which to get their job done.

The news reports had included a call-in number for the Fort Myers P.D. State and local cops were manning that line together, but Turcotte had wanted to give the media an FBI call-in number as well. He had spent the night butting heads
with a captain from Fort Myers P.D. and a Florida State Police captain named Wetherell, who hated the idea because it would tip reporters off to the terrorist connection, and he didn’t want the people of Florida to panic—as if they weren’t already panicking, thinking there were cold-blooded killers out there murdering families in their sleep.

With Josh in Maine with Special Agent Chang, Voss felt even more of an outsider in this investigation, and she fought the impulse to assert her authority at every step. Until Turcotte screwed up, it was his case to run. For the moment they had one suspect somewhere in Maine, and three others in the wind. The public had seen only pictures of the guy in Maine and one other, but thanks to the lease agreement on the place where the suspects had been living, they had now managed to track down aliases for and photographs of the other two. The two Iraqis had not only driver’s licenses, but local gym memberships that required photo ID.

Amateurs
.

But they were amateurs willing and able to murder children. The investigation had turned up only circumstantial evidence to suggest that these men were terrorists, and if they were involved in terrorist activity, she had no idea how that connected to the Greenlaws, or how they might benefit from abducting a baby in Maine. But at the moment, those were merely details. All Voss needed to know was that they were baby-killers.

Emerging from the café, she blinked the sun’s glare from her eyes and lowered her sunglasses, gazing at the Days Inn across the street, where Turcotte had set up the command center for the case. Neutral territory. If he had tried to camp out in the break room at a Fort Myers police station or with the state cops, one or the other would have gotten their feathers ruffled. At least this way, they were all irritated.

And no one could irritate people as well as Ed Turcotte. As long as it wasn’t her toes he was stepping on, she didn’t mind at all. In this case, he had done exactly the right thing. Nobody came to Florida in August for fun, so there were very few guests at the Days Inn to be intimidated by the presence of so many cops, agents, and imposing guys in suits, and the
management had been more than happy to fill its rooms with people paying on a government tab.