Manny wasn’t quite sure if it was the six-pack he’d downed or the fact that he’d been up all night drinking it, but the front doors of the Palm Beach mansion were starting to blur. He put down his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. They hurt. Everything hurt. Nowhere was the pain as severe as his chest.
Five days. It had been five days since Daria had disappeared. Since she’d stepped out of the doors of the Hilton hotel and vanished. Every police department from Orlando to Miami was actively looking for her. Every police department around the country had been notified via teletype with her photo that she had gone missing under suspicious circumstances. BOLOs had been issued, a missing persons alert had been placed in FCIC/NCIC. But the problem was, no one knew where to look.
The most promising lead they had so far was also potentially the most disturbing. A surveillance camera had captured the tag numbers of all vehicles exiting the parking lot of the Hilton around the same time cameras had caught Daria leaving the hotel with a tall, dark-haired, sunglass-wearing stranger. A check of all those tags had been done. Most of the tags belonged to rental cars, and each renter had been tracked down and questioned. All but one had been found.
A black Ford Flex SUV was rented from Hertz out of Orlando airport the Sunday morning of Daria’s disappearance to a Reid Smith from Uniondale, New York. It was returned the following day at the same location. Nothing remarkable there. But when Nassau County detectives tried to contact Reid Smith at the address on his DL, they found that he hadn’t lived there in years. Even more troubling, though, was where that old address was located — right beneath a long closed and shuttered funeral home that had been the scene of a horrible crime back in 2007.
Kreller’s Funeral Home had made news when the young daughter of its owner, John Kreller, told a pre-school classmate some of the gruesome things she had seen in her daddy’s basement involving bodies that might not have been dead yet. The four-year-old classmate understandably had terrible nightmares that caused him to wake in the middle of the night screaming. Eventually his concerned mommy took him to a child psychologist, who pried out of the little boy the terrible secret he had sworn to keep, and a criminal investigation was reluctantly opened. As the ME’s office worked to identify the owners of the multiple body parts that were subsequently found stored in a plastic tub in the funeral home’s basement, and assess how those owners might have died, John Kreller killed his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Eva, with a shotgun before putting a bullet in his own head. Two teenage prostitutes were identified among the tub victims. The remains of another two bodies were found, but never identified.
Reid Smith was the cousin of John Kreller. Although he was never implicated in the funeral home murders, he was wanted for questioning at one time by the Nassau County PD. He had never been found.
Although his eyes were hidden behind sunglasses on the surveillance tape, the picture on Reid Smith’s driver’s license looked a lot like the dark-haired stranger Daria was last seen leaving the Hilton with. The hotel cocktail waitress who had served the two of them that night agreed. And when Manny pulled out a map of Long Island, he found that Uniondale was only a hop skip and a jump away from Westbury, where Gabriella Vechio’s body was found dumped in a construction ditch back in 2006. Reid Smith also matched the general description of the man last seen talking to Gabby Vechio the night she disappeared.
There was now a BOLO out for Reid Smith. A records search of the DL pulled up little information of value. The man had no criminal history, no military history, no medical history. No DL address prior to Uniondale, no forwarding address since. No surviving family members. His name had not appeared on the passenger lists of any flights out of Orlando. Like Daria, his picture had been sent via teletype to every police department in the country. In the BOLO, he was wanted by the Orlando Police Department simply as a ‘person of interest’ in connection with the disappearance of Miami-Dade County Assistant State Attorney Daria DeBianchi.
While everyone else in Orlando and Miami law enforcement was getting all excited about finding the dark-haired stranger from New York, Manny continued to unofficially plant himself every night in front of Talbot Lunders’s mansion, a pair of night-vision binoculars in his hand, and two six-packs on the seat next to him — one of Coronas and one of Red Bulls. He wanted to drink himself into a stupor, to forget everything his brain had been thinking about for the past 116 hours, but he needed to stay awake and keep watch. Because he knew the man was involved. Despite whatever BS some probation officer had told Vance Collier about Talbot and his hot mami innocently spending the night of Daria’s disappearance in Daddy’s big nine-bedroom mansion, Manny wasn’t buying it. There was no such thing as coincidence. Not in his line of work.
Talk had been thrown around that it could be Cupid. That somehow Bantling had found out the conference Daria was going to be speaking at and where she was going to be that night, and he’d waited for her at the Hilton in the lounge. In a bar full of law-enforcement personnel in town for a conference on how to catch predators like himself, he had waited for her, perhaps dressed in disguise. It did, after all, match Cupid’s MO. The cocktail waitress wasn’t 100 percent sure the man who had chatted up Daria was the man pictured on Reid Smith’s DL. She was more like 75 percent sure.
But Manny didn’t think Bantling was involved in Daria’s disappearance. At least, not in the way the talk was going. And that was what scared him the most. Twisted thoughts of a snuff club returned to his aching head. Images of Gabriella Vechio’s vicious murder was what he saw when he closed his eyes, except it wasn’t the pretty accountant’s terrified face he saw, twisting about, her arms tethered to the ceiling. It was Daria’s. Those were the thoughts he wanted to banish with alcohol. What if it was a worst-case scenario? What if Daria had been abducted by a snuff-club member? What if she’d been scouted, and then taken someplace, kept alive and tortured for days by predators that Bantling had called ‘players’? What if she wasn’t dead yet? What if every day she inched closer to death? What if that was what was happening to her right now while sick men called ‘watchers’ watched and he sat uselessly in his car downing beers and Red Bulls? Manny knew the stats. With every day that passed, every minute that ticked by, the odds decreased dramatically of finding Daria alive. If she had been taken by the snuff club that had done those terrible things to Holly Skole and Gabriella Vechio and others, he knew she would wish those days and hours and minutes passed by even quicker. She would welcome death. Yes, he had considered Bill Bantling’s involvement. And he, no more than anyone else besides perhaps C.J. Townsend, wanted the psychopath found. Because aside from Talbot Lunders — who was never talking and no longer had any reason to — Bantling was the one person who could lead them to the snuff-club members. He was the one who supposedly knew the names. He potentially held the key to finding Daria alive. And no one knew where he was, either.
He closed his eyes. Now he would beg Vance Collier to make that deal.
He’d spoken with Dom and there was nothing new to report. He had talked to C.J. She had not been contacted by Bantling. There was no indication he was in her area, wherever that was. She was coming back to Chicago in a few days. He was in talks with the federal witness protection program. Dom was hoping that things would turn around for them now. Good luck with that, Manny had said.
How ironic. The rapist who had torn Dom’s relationship with his wife apart might just be the one responsible for reuniting them. A happy ending of sorts. Manny wasn’t sure how happy it would ever be though, given that Bantling was still out there. How happy can one be in witness protection?
The front door opened then. As his mother watched from the doorway, Talbot Lunders walked out, keys in hand, and got into the Benz. The same car that probably still had dust from where crime-scene techs had lifted Holly Skole’s fingerprints off the interior door handle. The same car that had driven her to her death. Manny gripped the steering wheel hard. It took all his strength not to get out of the car and beat the information he knew was in that piece of shit’s good-looking head while his weird mother watched. The mother who he suspected Daria was right about all along. The anonymously emailed video clip of Gabby Vechio’s murder was a ruse. A diversion to get them to start looking in other directions at other possible suspects. A perfect set-up for a reasonable doubt argument if the case went to trial. The fact that it had led to a Brady violation and Talbot’s release on bond was a bonus. There was just no way to prove it.
As the gates opened and the Benz slowly backed out of the long driveway, Manny started up his car and popped a Red Bull. He waited until Talbot had zipped off down the block and the front door had closed before heading out behind him, hoping, as he had for the past five sleepless nights, that the bastard might eventually lead him to Daria.