Drained, page 11
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Beth and I had just dropped off Jasmine Thomas’s laptop computer and Kennedy Taylor’s tablet with the Chicago branch’s tech department. They wouldn’t be able to get to them until later in the evening or, worst case, the morning. We met shortly with Agent Andrews and grabbed the file on Rebecca Wright, the latest victim. He said he still hadn’t spoken with her family but would call us as soon as he made contact. We left the FBI building around six thirty. Beth drove us toward Chicago Police District Sixteen. My phone rang in my pocket—I pulled it out and hit Talk. The call was coming from Agent Ball.
“Rawlings,” I said.
“It’s Ball calling back.”
“Anything?” I asked.
“I had Marcus in the tech unit get me the name and number for the founder of Classified OD. The guy also happens to be listed in the company database as the chief website developer. I figured if we had any chance of getting a little friendly cooperation, it would come from him. I left a message with his secretary and was contacted shortly after by their legal department, letting me know what would be required as far as subpoenas, et cetera to get the information released to us. Basically, they’ll want a subpoena per user. I was about to call you back when I got another call from the founder himself, asking if the legal department answered my questions.”
“So we got nothing from them is what you’re saying?”
“Exactly. We need that sworn statement before we can get the subpoena, and that will just be for her transcripts. Any news on getting anything from the computer or tablet?”
“The tech guys here won’t be able to get to them until a little bit later. Beth and I are heading toward the airport area now. We’ll probably grab something to eat quickly and then meet with the local PD. They are going to take us to view the dump sites of Jasmine Thomas and Kennedy Taylor.”
“The two that were in the same precinct?” Ball asked.
“Correct. Not sure how much good it will do, but it’s something.”
“Are those tech guys calling you if they get anything from the computer and that tablet?”
“They said they would, yeah.”
“Okay. If you guys get anywhere with anything tonight, give me a call. Otherwise, we’ll touch base in the morning.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
Ball hung up.
“News?” Beth asked.
“Not really. Ball left a message with someone there and got a return phone call from a lawyer telling him to get a subpoena per girl, basically.”
She nodded.
We neared the airport area around seven o’clock. We stopped for a bite to eat at a fast-food chain and made our way to the Sixteenth Precinct building. Beth pulled past a handful of marked and unmarked cruisers parked in front of the two-story tan brick building—she pulled to the curb and parked. Beth shut the car off, and we stepped out.
“Do we have someone we’re supposed to be meeting?” I asked.
“The patrol sergeant I spoke with told me to ask for an Officer Ricodati.”
I took the building in as we walked up to the front doors. The two-story glass center section had multicolored windows to break up the space. Beth reached out and pulled the front door open. We walked through the small lobby, passed a pair of benches on each side, and approached a window in the wall separating the actual police department from the lobby.
A man lifted his chin to acknowledge us and spoke from behind a pane of safety glass. “What can I do for you tonight?”
“Agents Beth Harper and Hank Rawlings to see an Officer Ricodati,” Beth held her credentials up to the glass.
“Sure, I’ll get him paged for you. Should just be a moment.”
We left the glass and found one of the benches we’d passed walking in. A minute later, we heard a buzz from the door beside the counter opening.
A patrol officer appearing in his early forties exited the door. He was heavyset, bald, clean shaven, and uniformed. “You’re my two agents looking to view the dump sites?”
Beth and I stood.
“We are,” Beth said.
We went through a round of introductions with the patrol officer.
“Were you on the scenes?” I asked.
He nodded. “Both.”
“Did anything stand out at you?” I asked. “Maybe talk around the station of anything that someone noticed or thought was odd?”
He turned the corner of his mouth to the side and slowly shook his head. “Both were free of anything that could tell us who did it. Both Dumpsters were empty when we found the women. No cameras in the areas—just two women in two different Dumpsters.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m going to grab my cruiser from the lot and meet you out front.” He headed for the front door.
Beth and I followed him outside.
“Where are you parked?” he asked.
Beth nodded toward our rental. “That’s us there.”
“Great. I’ll pull up, and you can follow me over to the first. The second site is only a few miles further. It shouldn’t take us too long to get over there. A couple minutes,” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
He made a left for the station’s parking lot, and Beth and I got in our car. A minute later, Ricodati pulled alongside our car in his cruiser and waved at us to follow. Beth pulled from the curb, digging in her pocket for her phone. She glanced at the screen.
“It’s the local office calling,” Beth said, swiping the screen on her phone to answer. “Agent Harper.”
I heard the faint sound of someone on the other end of the phone.
“I’m going to give you to Agent Rawlings. I’m driving at the moment.” Beth handed her phone off to me. “I don’t like to talk and drive without my Bluetooth,” she said. “It’s Agent Andrews.”
I nodded and took the phone.
“This is Rawlings,” I said.
“Hey, it’s Andrews. I just got off the phone with Rebecca Wright’s mother.”
“Okay. Get something?” I asked.
“A couple of things. First, her vehicle isn’t accounted for. I’m going to get an alert put out on the tags. I did the same with Kennedy Taylor’s vehicle. The more important bit I got was that her mother said she was going to meet with a guy for coffee on Friday during lunch. Her mother spoke with her Friday morning. It was the last time the two talked.”
I rested Beth’s phone on my shoulder and pulled my notepad from my inner suit-jacket pocket to jot down what Andrews was telling me. “Define ‘met with a guy for coffee.’ Was this a lunch date? Did she know him? Do we have a name?” I asked.
“Everything I asked her mother. From what I got, she’d spoken with this guy—named John, no last name—online a number of times and then planned to meet with him on her lunch break from work. She worked in Skokie.”
I wrote that down. “Where is that?” I asked.
“Northern Chicago suburb. I called her employer. She did return to work from her lunch break.”
“Do we have a name of where they went to get coffee?” I asked.
“No. But her lunch break was an hour, and she was back on time. That tells me that the furthest she could have probably traveled from work would be about twenty minutes, I’m giving it about a five-mile radius at the most. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that driving ten miles anywhere in the Chicago area takes forty minutes.
I thought about it for a moment, and he was right.
Beth slowed for a yellow light that Ricodati, in his cruiser a few lengths ahead of us, had made. He pulled to the curb ahead and waited for the light to change so we could catch up.
I glanced out my window to see a coffee shop on the corner. I thought about the one right in front of our hotel and the countless others I’d seen, and I let out a breath. “That’s literally got to be hundreds of places.”
“Well, I didn’t say that there wasn’t going to be legwork involved, but it could be our best lead. I’m having my guys pull up and contact every coffee shop in that area. Her lunch break was at one p.m., so we should have a pretty good time frame to look into.”
I wrote down the time she’d taken lunch. “This is all provided that she actually met with the guy we are searching for.”
“True. I also already put in for her bank records to see if we can get a charge to a coffee shop.”
“Okay. Did her mother mention how exactly she’d met this guy, other than online?”
“She didn’t know. I asked. But she gave me a few phone numbers for friends that are on my to-call list. I’m going to try to knock those out before I leave for the evening.”
The light turned green and Beth started forward. Ricodati pulled from the curb ahead to continue leading us.
“Okay. Keep me updated on that. When we get back to the hotel after viewing these dump sites, I’ll get into the bank records from the prior victims. Maybe there is a coffee shop charge in those.”
“Sure. I’ve been through them and don’t necessarily remember any, but it’s worth a second look,” Andrews said. “Did you guys get anything on your end?”
“Right now, we’re on our way to view the two sites out by the airport. We’ll see if we get anything there. Aside from that, our supervisor back in Manassas got in contact with a few people at Classified OD.”
Andrews interrupted. “Classified OD?”
“There’s a chance that is how these women were in contact with our killer. We’re meeting with a friend of Jasmine Thomas tomorrow. She’s going to go on record that Jasmine met a man through the personals section of the site. We also have the sister of Kennedy Taylor saying that Kennedy met a man through that site, but she can’t swear to it. We’re thinking there is something there. I wanted to get the information from the website to see if, in fact, all the women were members and also the transcripts of their messages if they were. If we have a similar person they were all in contact with, well, that’s probably our guy. Right now, it doesn’t look like we have enough to get the proper legal docs to get them to release the information to us until we get that sworn statement.”
“And they won’t give us anything voluntarily, I’m assuming.”
“Right. Someone from their legal team called our supervisor back and told him they’d need subpoenas.”
“Okay. You know they have an office here in Chicago, right?”
“They do?” I asked.
“It might actually be the headquarters. I’ll look into it,” Andrews said. “Let me get on making these calls. I’ll see if the classified site rings any bells with any of her friends.”
“Sure, let me know.”
“Yup. I’ll be in touch,” Andrews said.
I clicked Beth’s phone off and handed it back to her.
“What did he say?”
I gave her the highlights from my notes. “He spoke with the mother of the victim that was found this morning. She said her daughter, Rebecca, met with someone for coffee the Friday before she was found deceased. He has his guys looking into coffee shops around her workplace. I guess she did this on lunch and returned back to work. Aside from that, he has a list of her friends that he is going to try to make contact with.”
“Where did she work?” Beth asked.
“Skokie. He didn’t give the business name.”
“We need to find out and get in contact with her employer. Maybe she came back to work with a cup of coffee from the place. Maybe it’s in a garbage can next to her desk. Maybe the man she met with bought it for her and his prints are on it.”
Beth had a number of plausible points. “Let me call Andrews back,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We didn’t get back to the hotel until after ten o’clock. Both crime scenes were in low-traffic areas of town, and aside from staring at Dumpsters and hearing Ricodati rehash how the two investigations had played out, we found nothing new. Andrews gave us Rebecca Wright’s employer, the public works office for the city. We wouldn’t be able to get into the building or meet with anyone until the next morning—our Thursday was quickly filling up with interviews and places we had to stop at. We put together a schedule, and Beth headed off to her room. I figured she was calling it a night.
I sat in the office chair at the small desk in my room and dialed Karen, having just finished making myself an eighteen-dollar gin and tonic.
“Hey, hon,” she said.
“Hey. Sorry I didn’t call sooner. We actually just got back to the hotel a little bit ago.”
“That’s a long day,” she said.
“A long day of not really getting anywhere. Ah, I shouldn’t say that. I guess we know a little more than when we got here and have a couple of guys working on a few things. It just seems like a hell of a lot of running around for not much. Interview after interview, meeting after meeting.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe that’s the job.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that whoever is doing this hasn’t been caught by the local police or the FBI for years, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Well, if you’re getting anywhere, I’d say that’s a good thing.”
Leave it to Karen to nail the voice-of-reason role.
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
“I take it you’re done for the night?”
“Um, I might poke around at these bank records we have on the victims. I just want to see if I can find one thing specifically. After that, I’m shutting it down until tomorrow. I have another meeting with a family member at ten in the morning. Are you getting ready for bed?” I asked.
“I’m in bed. Watching television. Chop is lying next to me, slobbering up your pillow.”
I smiled. “Great.”
“Call me in the morning,” she said.
“Okay. Love you.”
“I love you too. Have a good night.”
“You too. Bye.” I hung up and tossed my phone onto the desk. Then I opened the file box of the victim’s records and started thumbing through the folder containing the banking information from Kennedy Taylor.
A shave-and-a-haircut knock came at my room door. I walked over and opened it up.
“Two bits,” I said.
Beth stood in the hall, looking back at me, confused. She wore a T-shirt and what looked like pajama pants. Her hair was no longer pulled up but resting on her shoulders. She wore a pair of dark-rimmed glasses.
“Shave and a haircut,” I said.
Her face said she still didn’t get it.
“Forget it.” I motioned to her glasses. “Nice goggles,” I said.
She smirked. “Oh, yeah, I took my contacts out. What’s up with those banking records? Are you planning on going through them or are you done for the night?” she asked.
“I actually just started looking through them,” I said.
“Want me to come in and lend a hand?” she asked. “Otherwise, you could just give me one or two of the girls, and I’ll take them back to my room and go over them there if you wanted some private time or something.”
I stepped to the side and waved her in. She walked to the box on the desk, grabbed a file, and went to the wingback chair. She sat, placed the folder on her lap, and opened it. She looked up at me. “How far into these did you get?”
“Just started on Kennedy Taylor,” I said. I headed back over to the desk and sat down. “Keep your eyes peeled for coffee shops,” I said.
“I’m actually just going to write down all purchases that aren’t bills. You should do the same. Maybe we can match something up,” Beth said.
“Good idea.”
I took a sip from my drink and continued reading through the banking records. From all appearances, Kennedy had been pretty smart with her money. The records went back five months. I didn’t find any frivolous spending. Most of the activity was deposits—every few days. Her checking account balance seemed to hover around ten thousand, and it looked as though she made regular transfers to a savings account. My assumption, from what her parents had said, was that the savings account was where she was keeping the money she was saving for a house. It looked as though her only semiregular purchases were from a gas station near her house—they all seemed to be around forty dollars, so my best guess was that she was filling up her car with fuel. Through five months of records, she’d only made five or six purchases with her debit card that I’d wrote down.
“Kennedy Taylor worked in a restaurant, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, a place called The Pub if memory serves,” Beth said.
“Okay. I’m almost through with her records here. She didn’t use her debit card for much of anything, but working in a restaurant and getting tips would account for that, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that she’d always have cash on her.”
Beth nodded.
“Well, for someone with not a lot of money, Jasmine sure liked to spend it. Not that there are any significant charges here, but she used her debit card about five times a day. This is going to take a bit.” Beth adjusted her glasses on her nose. “She charged things for less than a dollar.”
“Some people are like that. They just don’t carry cash.”
“I guess,” Beth said. “Seems a little extreme, though. I mean, if she took sixty dollars out of the bank a week, she would have been able to cover all these little charges.”
I shrugged and reached into the box for the banking records on Angela Wormack. “See any charges from a coffee shop?”
“No.”
I set Angela’s banking file before me and started in. Beth’s phone buzzed from across the room.
“Who is calling me this late?” she asked.
I didn’t respond but turned to see Beth staring at the screen on her phone.
“Local number.” Beth swiped the screen on her phone to answer. “Agent Beth Harper.”
I couldn’t hear who was on the other end.
“Yes, what did you get?”
Beth reached for the pad of paper and pen on the table next to her and jotted down a few things. “Really? What a coincidence.” She gnawed on the end of her pen while she listened to the caller.
