Sophie sat down at her computer bay at the FBI offices the next morning and activated her clone rigs. While they whirred into life, she sipped a strong cup of Thai tea from her Thermos mug. The tea was sweet with honey and black as she could make it. The faint scent of jasmine rising from it never failed to remind her of her childhood home in Thailand.
They’d had a large family house, built in the traditional wooden style on raised pier posts with sharply peaked rooflines to handle frequent rain. Inside, the house was all gleaming surfaces of native woods. Inlays, carving and parquet work in shell, coral, and stone-decorated windowsills, and the floors were covered in luxurious matting and carpets.
The main house was divided into a series of mini-dwellings where different constellations of her mother’s family lived. She and her parents had lived in one set of rooms on the side of the terrace facing the Ping River. Her grandparents lived in another subset of rooms, and there was a servants’ suite as well.
The house was on a raised knoll, safe from annual flooding even with the monsoons, and Sophie had loved to sit on a bench in the window and watch flat-bottomed boats poling, sailing, or motoring by on the smooth, fecund, jade-green water.
The family spent time together in the central terrace in the middle of the house. The raised courtyard-like platform was built around the trunk of a huge magnolia tree that provided shade. Chairs, benches, and toys made the terrace a great place to play with her aunt Malee’s children, who shared a nearby suite of rooms.
That early time in her life couldn’t be more different from her current urban, high tech, isolated life. But her computers were all the company she wanted or needed, she told herself firmly, looking at the pile of hard drives on her work station awaiting her attention.
Ken Yamada, crisp in FBI gray, strode through the pneumatic doors of the lab and over to her bay. “Welcome back, Sophie. We have a meeting with Waxman to kick off the day.”
“What about?” Sophie glanced at Yamada, alert.
“Reviewing where we are on the kidnap case. We’re still treating the case as though this situation is part of a bigger network as the tip-off email indicated, but so far Gundersohn and I aren’t finding anything to support that.”
“Okay. I’ll be there shortly.” Sophie wanted to check her query caches before the meeting.
“Make it quick.” He turned and left with his graceful stride.
Sophie turned back to her computers and opened up DAVID.
She pulled up her bank of keywords. She’d set DAVID to keep up its roaming monitoring of the words simultaneous, murder, killing, confession, accusation, shooting, and disclosure. She didn’t remember why she’d thrown simultaneous in there. It stood out from the rest of the keywords like the anomaly it was. And yet, including it had shaken out patterns no one would have put together otherwise.
DAVID had also answered her query about the probability of the three cases having a commonality: 64%.
Not as high as she’d expected, but still a likelihood. Now if she could only figure out what that commonality was. She wished she had more time to come up with something useful for the meeting, but in checking her trace programs, she hadn’t anything to bring to the table except that her kidnapping case was “probably” 64% related to some other interesting cases that DAVID had brought up.
Only she wasn’t supposed to be using DAVID.
Sophie sipped the tea, shutting her eyes. Something had tipped the gangsters off that they were being double-crossed, and they had acted on that information. Someone had done the same with the corrupt stockbrokers. They’d been manipulated into outing each other somehow, as had Anna’s kidnappers.
But how?
She wasn’t going to know until she found out how they’d been communicated with, and how they were all connected to each other. She didn’t have enough in the cache to mount a real investigation to take to Waxman yet, but this situation would certainly qualify as an FBI case if she could find those answers, crossing state lines and even crime genres as it did.
She set DAVID to searching for commonalities between the disparate cases. All this took time, because DAVID could work only with the parameters it had been given, which meant that she had to pause, consider, and look for databases to search and variables to enter.
Sophie plugged the write blockers into the new pile of hard drives from other cases. She would have to work on all this and check on what DAVID had collected on Assan Ang after the meeting.
A few minutes later, Sophie slid into her chair next to Waxman in the conference room. The meeting was underway, but the SAC acknowledged her with a nod. Ken Yamada and Gundersohn sat across from her.
“We’re doing a recap of the kidnapping case so far.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How is your injury?”
“Just a bruise, sir, and I’ve had plenty of those.”
“Excellent. Ken, would you put up notes for us on the whiteboard.”
Ken stood and straightened his lapels, uncapping a pen. “Initially we focused on evidence collection at the scene and tracking the lessee of the apartment where the kidnapping was staged. Through interviewing the building manager, we determined that the apartment had been rented on a month-to-month basis with cash. The whole building is owned by a corporation, Takeda Industries. A real estate company manages the units.”
“We are still operating under the assumption that the tipster who emailed this kidnapping in is telling the truth, that there’s a network of professional kidnappers,” Gundersohn said. “Which is going to guide our decisions to probe deeper than just the suspects that died at the scene.”
“Speaking of, it would have been nice for you all to leave at least one of them alive so we could interview him.” Waxman smiled, a humorless twitch of the mouth.
“Couldn’t be helped,” Gundersohn rumbled. Sophie was glad he’d chimed in on that. Next to Waxman, Gundersohn was the most senior agent of the Honolulu team and Waxman had never questioned his judgment that Sophie was aware of.
“Well, the other great thing would be to have a lead on this mysterious tipster, or even what set the kidnappers off in the first place. Agent Ang, got anything for us?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.” Sophie fiddled with the controls on the monitor that marked her seat at the table. Crime scene photos of the dead kidnappers filled the screen, sprawled in the graceless poses of the unexpectedly dead. “I’ve explained to the team before about source information concealment in online tracking. Whoever sent us the tipster email knew what he was doing. I also extracted any relevant information I could find off the kidnappers’ phones and identified that they received simultaneous text messages, telling each of them that they’d been betrayed, and that others had been paid off. I did retrieve the source number of that text message off the phones, but it led back to a burner.”
“What I wonder is: who sent those kidnappers text messages at the same time? And who’s our anonymous tipster?” Ken said.
“Do you think it could be the same person?” Waxman asked.
“But how would the tipster, who knew about this operation somehow, maybe through a connection to the family or some other way—how would that person have the kidnappers’ numbers?” Sophie said. She was thinking of the coincidental cases—a connection she hadn’t narrowed down yet, and couldn’t disclose anyway. “Maybe someone monitoring the situation is the tipster,” she said, thinking aloud.
“But even if he were, one presumes he notified us out of an altruistic motive to save the child. Why would he then endanger that child by sending those text messages to the kidnappers? If you hadn’t been exactly where you were and thought of a quick way to rescue her, Anna Addams would be toast right now,” Ken said.
“I know. It doesn’t make sense.” Sophie inclined her head.
“The ransom drop wasn’t completed, so we have no further leads than the bodies and the evidence in the apartment,” Waxman said, rolling a pen between his fingers.
“If I may, I’d like permission to go see the victim’s family whenever someone from the team is going out to interview them.” Anna’s face had been on Sophie’s mind more than she wanted to admit. She wanted to see how the little girl was doing, and return the rabbit to her.
“I’m going out to the victim’s house today.” Ken was making notes in a column of Tracking Leads. So far there wasn’t much in the column. “I’ll let you know when I go. Gundersohn is meeting with the medical examiner to go over the bodies of the kidnappers and see if they tell us anything, but we don’t expect much since we know how they died.”
“What about the trace in the apartment? Anything there?” Waxman had a line between his brows.
“Nothing that doesn’t go back to the three kidnappers,” Gundersohn said. “But we’ve found their prints in the system, so after the ME’s and home visit, Ken and I plan to visit their addresses.”
“Let me know if you need any help with that,” Sophie said.
“The prints of the deceased are loaded into the case file already,” Gundersohn told her. “They had false identification with them but the prints came back to solid IDs in the system. Career criminals, all three, with sheets ranging from breaking and entering to armed robbery. None of them busted for kidnapping before, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t done it before.”
“So to conclude, there’s no indication that this particular kidnapping is part of a larger network.” Ken capped the dry erase marker with an air of finality.
“Let’s check in tomorrow and see where we are then.” Waxman retracted the screens with the press of a button. “Dismissed.”