Moving Target, page 22
part #9 of Ali Reynolds Series
“You’re thinking those two deaths are homicides, even though law enforcement says otherwise?”
“I do,” B. said. “With a killer savvy enough to make sure they don’t look like homicides.”
“How do we find this other team?”
“For the next several hours of this flight, you and I are going to use my computer and iPad and the onboard Wi-Fi to create a comprehensive list of every name associated with all of these supposedly separate incidents.”
“Starting when?”
“Starting at the beginning—with UTI’s tagging project and with Lance’s takedown of the school district’s server. That’s what brought him to my attention. That may be where UTI’s interest started and what put our unknown assailants into the mix as well. Once we’ve created our list, we’ll turn it over to Stuart and have him go to work on it. He’ll toss our collection of names into a cyber soup and run them through several levels of data-mining and relational programs and see what comes out the other end. If there are connections to be made, I have every confidence he’ll make them.”
“Aren’t you worried about someone being able to tap into our search history and know what we’re up to?”
“Not at all,” B. replied. “Not on this plane, anyway. I set up the security system for this aircraft myself.”
“What exactly are we going to do with all this accumulated info? By the time Stuart finishes running it through his blender, I’m guessing it won’t be entirely aboveboard.”
“We’ll do the same thing we did in Oxford,” B. answered. “We’ll help local law enforcement along with a few carefully placed anonymous tips.”
They spent the next three hours working that way, with B. calling up articles from which Ali compiled a comprehensive list of names that she loaded onto the thumb drive. They looked for anything related to Lance Tucker, Lowell Dunn, Everett Jackson, and Marvin Cotton. It turned out Marvin Cotton’s supposedly sealed and expunged juvenile record wasn’t at all difficult to find if you knew where to look. At age sixteen, he had been convicted of setting fire to a barn in which three horses had perished.
“That’s interesting,” B. said after reading that. “You know what they say about arsonists.”
“What?”
“Once a firebug, always a firebug. Which gives us something else for Stuart to go looking for: whether Marvin Cotton and Lowell Dunn had any run-ins while they were both working at the detention center.”
An e-mail alert sounded. Ali had been working on B.’s computer, and a partial message flashed across the upper-right corner of her screen. “You just got an e-mail from Sister Anselm,” she told him. “Do you want me to read it to you?”
“Sure.”
Ali read the message:
LeAnne Tucker just called. Her mother’s gone missing from the house in San Leandro. The local police say that since the mother is an adult, she can’t be declared missing, nor will they do anything to investigate the incident until 48 hours have elapsed. Please advise.
Ali felt her heartbeat speed up. “It’s started, hasn’t it?”
“Looks that way,” B. said. “Do you happen to have any new photos on your phone?”
“I took a few at Stonehenge earlier today. Why?”
“We’ll encrypt our list of names and upload it to one of those. You keep working on the list. I’ll get back to Sister Anselm and tell her to be on full alert. If somebody has already grabbed the grandma, the ransom demand to Lance is going to come in sooner than later.”
“Sooner than we’ll be able to get there?” Ali asked.
“I hope not,” B. said grimly.
While B. used his iPad to send off a series of purposeful texts, Ali went back to surfing the net but it seemed too much like empty-headed busywork. It reminded her of elementary school teachers asking kids to take whatever words they had missed on a spelling test and rewrite them correctly ten times on a piece of paper. Phyllis Rogers had already gone missing. What was the point of gathering all this information? What could Stuart Ramey, sitting at his computer terminal in Cottonwood, Arizona, possibly do with it to keep something terrible from happening to the poor woman?
Then, remembering what Stuart and B. and Leland had managed to do while she had been imprisoned in the trunk of a speeding vehicle, Ali gave herself a kick in the pants and threw herself into the task at hand. As the plane plunged ever westward through the night, this was all they could do.
As Ali worked through the articles, many from the San Leandro Lariat and some she had already seen, Ali noticed that, like small-town papers everywhere, the Lariat was big on publishing names: School events, community events, board meetings, and church events all came with full listings of attendees.
As the aircraft began its descent into Reykjavík, an item about that year’s homecoming celebration caught Ali’s eye. San Leandro High’s homecoming king and queen that fall were listed as Andrew Garfield and Jillian Sosa. Ali remembered seeing those names listed together in another article. It took a while for her to track it down, but at last she did. In addition to being homecoming royalty, Andrew Garfield and Jillian Sosa had been co-captains of the team that had walked away with yet another Longhorn computing trophy.
“That’s interesting,” she muttered.
“What?” B. asked.
“You were a nerd in high school,” she said. “Did anybody ever nominate you as potential royalty for a homecoming dance?”
“Are you kidding?” B. said. “I never got invited to a homecoming dance, to say nothing of being elected royalty.”
“Andrew Garfield and Jillian Sosa, the kids who became co-captains of the computer science club after Lance left, not only won the competition, they also were voted king and queen at homecoming.”
“I guess times have changed,” B. said.
A bell chimed signaling their descent. Ali looked away from the computer screen and rubbed her eyes. “I’m done,” she said. “I can’t do any more. At least not tonight. Is there anything you want me to add before I encrypt and punch Send?”
“Yes,” he said. “Here is a list of phone numbers.”
Ali typed them in as he read them off.
“Whose phones are those?” Ali asked. “And what’s Stu supposed to do with them once he gets them?”
“That’s every phone connected to the Tucker family,” B. explained, “including the landline in Lance’s current hospital room. Tell Stu I want a tap on every one of them ASAP.”
“These are warrantless wiretaps, you know,” Ali pointed out. “That means you’re coloring outside the lines again.”
“Yes, I am,” B. agreed. “And I hope to God it works.”
Angered by what LeAnne saw as Sister Anselm’s unwarranted interference, she had stormed back into Lance’s room to argue her case. He was lying on the bed amid a scatter of brightly colored Transformers and holding one, much smaller than the others, in his hand. “Did you call Grandma?” he asked.
LeAnne recognized it as a teenage ploy of changing the subject. If they talked about LeAnne not calling her mother, then they wouldn’t be talking about Lance’s opposition to calling the cops.
“I need to talk to her about this in person,” LeAnne said. “If I call her up and tell her over the phone that someone may be after Thad or Connor, she’ll freak out. I’m going to drive back home and talk to her about it.”
“But not to the cops, right?” Lance said.
“Look,” LeAnne said, “I agreed to let Sister Anselm call that High Noon guy. How about if you meet me halfway and let me talk to the cops in San Leandro? Maybe they can put some extra cars in our neighborhood and keep an eye on things.”
“No,” Lance said.
“Why are you being so stubborn?” she asked. “The cops are supposed to be on our side.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he said quietly. “You haven’t spent the past six months in jail.”
LeAnne’s phone rang while the nurse was in changing the bandages. Watching the process was so painful that it left LeAnne almost sick to her stomach. When her phone rang with a blocked call, she used the interruption as an excuse to flee the room before she answered.
“Mrs. Tucker?”
“Who’s this?”
“B. Simpson with High Noon Enterprises. Sister Anselm gave me your number.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said, poised to hang up. “You’re one of the people who helped send my son to prison.”
“Wait, Mrs. Tucker,” he begged. “Please hear me out. The San Leandro school district is one of my company’s customers. When the server disruption happened, it was my job to track down the source, and that led back to your son. So you’re right, my company provided some of the evidence used against him, but we’re not responsible for the high-handed way the local prosecutor used it. Your son is a bright young man. While my investigators and I were dealing with the case against him, I had the opportunity to see samples of Lance’s code writing, and they are nothing short of brilliant. I understand that when he received threats against your family, Lance requested that Sister Anselm contact me and ask for my help. I’m more than happy to give it.”
“I can’t understand why he thinks you’ll be more help to him than the cops will,” LeAnne grumbled.
“I don’t understand it, either,” B. agreed. “With a threat of this kind, you need feet on the ground to counter the bad guys. That means you have to have the local police jurisdictions in your corner.”
“What if they won’t agree to help?” LeAnne asked. “What happens then?”
“We’ll deal with it,” B. said. “Until they do, I hope you’ll consider bringing the boys and their grandmother to Austin with you. If whoever is targeting you is San Leandro–based, it’ll be more difficult for them to succeed if they’re dealing with a moving target in a situation where their intended victims are somewhere other than at home, going through very predictable routines.”
In spite of herself, LeAnne burst out laughing. “Bring them to Austin?” she said. “Are you serious? I don’t know what planet you live on, Mr. Simpson, but I was barely keeping a roof over my children’s heads before all this happened. Now with Lance in the hospital and me not working, you expect me to bring the whole family, including my mother’s two dogs, to Austin? Where are they supposed to sleep—in my car in the hospital parking garage?”
“I already told you, Mrs. Tucker, I’m prepared to help in whatever way seems necessary. If you would like, have Sister Anselm call over to the Omni and add another room or two to her reservation.”
LeAnne thought about the check Sister Anselm had handed back, insisting that there was more money out there to be had. Was this the same thing? “How do I know I can trust you?” she asked.
“You don’t,” B. conceded, “but actions speak louder than words. Let me show you instead of telling you.”
Forty-five minutes later, LeAnne was in her Taurus, headed north on I-35, and cursing herself for letting B. Simpson convince her that he was a good guy. Still, the man had given her the impetus to go against Lance’s wishes. After all, nothing in the supposedly threatening note said specifically that the police were not to be notified. Her intention as she approached the second San Leandro exit was that she’d stop by the San Leandro police headquarters and let them know what was going on. As she neared the turnoff, however, she noticed that the energy provided by her mother’s breakfast had diminished. Knowing she needed to eat, she changed her mind and stayed on the freeway for one more exit. It would be cheaper to make a lunch at home than it would be to eat at a fast-food joint along the way.
At the house LeAnne found her mother’s car was parked in the driveway, and the pugs, Duke and Duchess, were barking like crazy inside the house. When she let herself into the kitchen, she noticed her mother’s purse on the counter. The dogs, locked behind a baby gate in the dining room, let loose with another round of racket. “Quiet, you two,” LeAnne ordered, then she called out, “Mom, I’m home.”
There was no answer.
She ventured as far as the dining room door and opened the gate, allowing the dogs into the kitchen. Just inside the dining room, she almost stepped in a mess that one of the dogs had left on the floor. LeAnne rounded on them. “You bad dogs,” she exclaimed. “What have you done!”
Knowing they were both in trouble for what one of them had done, the dogs shut up at once. That was when LeAnne noticed how quiet the house was. Her mother was more than slightly hard of hearing and always had the radio blaring out country music at full volume from one end of the house to the other. There was no music playing.
“Mom,” LeAnne called again. She went back to the kitchen and checked Phyllis’s purse. Her phone was there, tucked in the outside pocket. So were her car keys. Wherever LeAnne’s mother had gone, she was most likely on foot.
Grumbling under her breath, LeAnne armed herself with a fistful of paper towels and returned to the dining room to clean up the mess while the dogs watched her warily from the sidelines. It turned out that pile wasn’t the only dog-related problem in the house. In the living room, she found the chewed remains of her beloved jade plant. Grown from leaves from her grandmother’s plant, it was the only potted plant of any kind that LeAnne Tucker had managed to keep alive, and she had carefully moved it from Phoenix to Austin when she and the boys left Arizona. Now the plant’s stem stood utterly denuded while remains of the chewed leaves lay scattered around the room. “You bad, bad dogs!” she screeched. “Bad, bad, bad!”
Duke and Duchess slunk away together. It was only while LeAnne was cleaning up the second disaster that she began to worry. She remembered her mother telling her that Duke, a rescue, was afflicted with a serious case of separation anxiety; that was why she had brought Duke and Duchess along rather than leaving them in a kennel or with a dog sitter. It was also why the dogs rode in the car with Phyllis when she drove back and forth to the hospital from San Leandro.
If Phyllis had been gone long enough for the two dogs, or even one of them, to get into this amount of mischief, she must have been out of the house for some time. So where was she? What had become of her?
By the time LeAnne had cleaned up the living room, she was no longer thinking about eating a sandwich. She located the dogs’ leashes, put them on, and took them out for a walk. Then she loaded the dogs into the Taurus and spent half an hour driving up and down the streets of the neighborhood.
When there was no sign of her mother anywhere, she went back to the house, where she pulled her mother’s phone out of her purse. There were no clues. The last outgoing call on Phyllis’s phone was to LeAnne as was the last incoming call. Even more worried, LeAnne phoned the high school and had them call Thad to the office to speak with her, but he was no help, and neither was Connor. Neither of the boys could shed any light on their grandmother’s plans or whereabouts.
LeAnne’s next call was 911, where the emergency operator was less than helpful. How old was her mother? Seventy-two. Was she in good health? Yes. Did she have any mental deficits? No. Had LeAnne checked with local hospitals to see if she might have been taken to an emergency room and admitted as a patient? No. Right now what she wanted to do was place a missing persons report.
“That’s not possible,” the operator told her. “You’ve already told me that your mother is an adult in good mental health. The San Leandro Police Department doesn’t accept missing persons reports until after an adult has been out of contact for at least forty-eight hours. You’ll need to call back then.”
Fighting off panic, LeAnne called all five hospitals in San Leandro. No dice. It was only then, almost three hours after arriving home to find her mother missing, that LeAnne Tucker broke down and called Sister Anselm.
“The cops won’t even talk to me about this,” she sobbed into the phone. “The emergency dispatcher said it’s too soon to try calling them in, so what do I do in the meantime? If this is related to that threat, what are we supposed to do about it if the police won’t lift a hand? The card said whoever it was would be in touch. Has anyone tried to contact Lance?”
“Not that I know of,” Sister Anselm said. “At least I haven’t seen anyone come through here. Let me get in touch with Mr. Simpson and see if he has any suggestions. I’ll get right back to you.”
While she waited for Sister Anselm to call back, LeAnne took the dogs and went to collect Connor and Thad from school. Thad was annoyed because he didn’t want to miss basketball practice while Connor was overjoyed to ride in the backseat with Duke and Duchess. Back at the house, Thad slammed off into his bedroom, while Connor parked himself and the dogs in the family room to watch Scooby-Doo!. When Sister Anselm called, seemingly an eternity later, LeAnne took the call in her bedroom.
“Sorry,” Sister Anselm said. “For some reason, Mr. Simpson’s phone went to straight to voice mail. There’s at least a seven-hour time difference between here and Zurich, so he may have turned off his phone overnight. I sent him an e-mail and a text. I’ll get back to you as soon as I hear anything.” There was a pause. “Wait. I’m hearing from him now.”
LeAnne waited. Eventually, Sister Anselm came back on the line. “He can’t use his phone right now, but he’ll send you a text.”
LeAnne sat on the edge of her bed, feeling helpless and clinging to her phone like a lifeline. Soon the text came in.
Sister Anselm says your mother is missing and that the 911 operator wouldn’t take the report. Did you speak to anyone about the earlier threat?
LeAnne stared at the screen and flushed with guilty embarrassment before she replied, fumbling with clumsy fingers on the screen.
No. I wanted to have a sandwich before I tried talking to them. That’s when I discovered Mom was gone. I got both boys from school. They’re here with me. I don’t know what to do.
