Dangerous Games (17 page)

There was one more book on the shelf, a compilation of nineteenth-century German philosophy—Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hegel. Most of the book was unmarked and probably unread, but the section on Hegel was copiously underlined. She remembered that Kolb was a Hegel fan. This fact didn’t communicate a great deal to her. She barely recollected her Intro to Philosophy course in college. She had a feeling, though, that Hegel would tie in pretty well with the whole natural-elite, social-Darwinist, heroic-strongman tune Kolb had been riffing on.

A philosophical stalker. Maybe a philosophical kidnapper-killer.

“Cool,” she said. It was stuff like this that kept her work interesting.

So far, her search was a big fat zero. No bondage gear, camera, binoculars. No souvenirs, photos, maps, calendars. No weapon, tape recorder, flashlight. She felt frustrated because Kolb wasn’t giving her anything. She had a job to do, and he wasn’t letting her do it. It seemed rude of him, but it also made him a challenge.

Ordinarily she didn’t need a lot of raw data. She could tell a great deal from the artwork and knickknacks a person chose to display in his home. One charming fellow who’d set his sights on a fourteen-year-old girl had decorated his bedroom walls with prints of Munch’s nightmarish painting,
The Scream
. He was still in prison, having been sent away for compiling a cache of child porn on his PC, which was discovered after a CD of the images had mysteriously found its way to the police, with the gentleman’s name and address printed on the label.

Even if a guy’s taste in art was subtler, there was much to be learned from almost any painting, figurine, or curio on display. Trouble was, Kolb had none of the above. His apartment was bare of decoration. She supposed the blank walls ought to be telling her something, but she wasn’t sure what.

What else hadn’t she found? An address book, for one thing. Maybe he didn’t need one if he had no friends. A PC was also conspicuous by its absence. The computer he’d used when sending e-mails to Madeleine had been confiscated, and most likely he couldn’t afford a new one.

The Rain Man had to have access to a computer. The FBI report had said that the bank account number for the ransom money had been computer-printed on an index card. And the electronic transaction itself must have been monitored over the Internet. But there was no computer here, no printer, and, as far as she could tell, not even any index cards.

She checked the bathroom. Sometimes items were concealed inside the toilet tank or taped behind the toilet itself. No luck. She examined the living room carpet to see if it had been taken up at the corners in order to slip something underneath. Again, nothing. And the carpet didn’t match the fibers mentioned in the FBI report—it was a yucky gray-green, not burnt orange.

In the kitchen she found a poorly stocked minifridge and a pile of dishes in the sink. She beamed her penlight into the cabinets, moving pots and pans out of her way. The flashlight beam discovered only dust and dead bugs.

In one drawer she noticed a key half-hidden under a spatula. Funny place to keep a key. She picked it up. Round head, short stem. Looked like a padlock key.

From one of her hidden pockets she produced a key blank and an indelible marker. Carefully she traced the outline of the key on the blank. Then the key went back under the spatula, and the blank went into her pocket for later use.

Of course, the key would be no good to her unless she could find the padlock it fit. Most likely the padlock was used on a storage locker, a rental unit in one of the many self-service facilities throughout the city. If Kolb was renting a locker, he ought to have some paperwork on it. She found a lidless apple crate stuffed with miscellaneous papers and flipped through them. Phone bills, utility bills, auto registration documents, but nothing on any storage rental.

This was getting to be a little more of a challenge than she liked. She decided to switch to a more proactive mode.

Another of her pockets carried an infinity transmitter, a voice-activated bug that could be installed in any telephone. The bug worked off the microphone that was part of the phone’s mouthpiece and would pick up both ends of any phone conversations, as well as discussions taking place in the apartment. Installing the bug did entail a small risk. If Kolb was sufficiently paranoid, he might take the phone apart to check for listening devices. But her search hadn’t turned up a field-strength meter or any other surveillance-detection equipment. She was willing to chance it.

In less than two minutes she’d planted the transmitter. Its range was fifty feet. The receiver had to be stationed nearby, but preferably outside the apartment for easier retrieval.

She wasn’t sure what she expected to pick up, since Kolb certainly would not use his home telephone to contact the authorities. Still, there was an idea that had occurred to her last night when she looked through the FBI report. It seemed unlikely that Kolb could have raised the cash or worked out the details necessary to open multiple secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. If he was good for the kidnappings, then he probably had help. A partner.

She’d almost raised the possibility with Tess, but the idea was too speculative and didn’t fit what she knew of Kolb’s paranoid, antisocial personality. Even so, she couldn’t quite convince herself to drop the notion. She didn’t see Kolb pulling off something this complicated all by himself.

If there was a partner in the picture, then bugging the phone could prove to be an investment that paid big dividends.

She took a moment to stand still and simply absorb the atmosphere of Kolb’s home. Every residence had its own aura, not in any metaphysical sense, but simply as a result of the accumulated detritus of someone’s life. The sparse furnishings and closed window shade and general air of neglect told her a lot about Kolb. They spoke to her of disappointment and frustration, of anger and desperate rationalizing. Though the apartment was bare, there was a lot of ego here. Kolb’s ego, undeveloped past the stage of late adolescence, the stage when intelligent but alienated youths cultivated a liking for German philosophers and antisocial elitism.

Maturity, she’d learned, was a gradual process of discovering and then disowning the ego. An infant had no ego, no sense of self. By age two, the child had formulated a personal identity, but no empathy—hence, the “terrible twos,” when most kids ran amok. Slowly this naked narcissism was suppressed by social conditioning, and the child was taught to think of other human beings. But egocentricity, still the dominant theme, persisted through the teenage years. For a teenager, every setback was a crisis, and every disappointment was a tragedy. The world orbited around the fragile, frightened self.

Most people outgrew that phase in their twenties or thirties, but arrested adolescents were narcissists for life. They never gained perspective on their problems. They continued to imagine themselves the center of the world, and when the world ignored or abused them, they would respond unpredictably. Some would retreat into solipsistic fantasies. Others would join cults. Others would seek power to avenge themselves against a universe that did not take them seriously. The ego—vain, defensive, covetous, angry, needy—would puff itself up into a monster, transvaluing its defects as virtues, its weakness as strength.

Kolb was one of the power seekers. Anger and ferocious self-absorption drove him. He nursed grudges and spun schemes for revenge. Possibly he was putting one of those schemes into practice. Possibly he meant to show the city, and by extension, the world, that he was not to be trifled with. Possibly he was the Rain Man. She couldn’t prove it, not yet. But—

Outside, a noise.

The chug of a motor, a faint rattling sound.

Kolb’s Oldsmobile. She recognized the clatter of the damaged front end.

She peeled back the window shade. The tenants’ carport was directly outside. Kolb was pulling into his assigned space, number six.

He was back from work, much too soon.

She quickly left the apartment, locking the door behind her. The stairwell was only a few steps away. She started to push open the door, then froze with a thought.

In her stakeouts on Sunday and Monday, she’d watched the front entrance. But Kolb hadn’t come out that way. Both times he’d gotten from his apartment to his car without using the lobby exit.

She hadn’t seen any back door to the building, but a side door was possible—and it would open onto the stairwell.

She looked inside the stairwell, and yes, there it was, a door that must lead to the parking area. If Kolb had gone out that way, he would most likely reenter through the same door.

He would walk right into her.

She glanced up the stairs, thinking she could hide on the landing. No good. The stairs were metal treads without risers, and the landing was a metal mesh. If Kolb looked up, he would see her. And she didn’t think she had time to escape into the second-floor hallway.

She retreated from the stairwell. Make a run for the lobby? Two problems with that plan—number one, he might surprise her by returning that way, and number two, she didn’t think she could make it there in time.

Directly across from Kolb’s apartment there was a door with no number on it. Not an apartment. A storage room, janitor’s supply closet, something like that. Unlike an apartment, a closet wasn’t likely to have much of a lock on the door.

She whipped out a plastic shim, flat and flexible, and swiped it along the crack between the door and the jamb.

The latch popped. She opened the door, exposing a deep, narrow room crowded with slop buckets, brooms, mops, and bottles of cleaning solvent.

From the stairwell came the sound of the outside door squealing open.

She threw herself into the closet and quietly pulled the door shut, sealing the room in darkness.

Footsteps in the hall.

He must have entered through the hall door just as she’d shut herself in the closet. It was possible he’d seen her slip inside.

Carefully, working in the dark, she undid the clasp of her purse and found her gun, curling her finger over the trigger.

Then she heard a jangle of keys and a creak of hinges. The door to his apartment opened and shut.

“Close one,” she breathed.

Now that it was over, she decided it had been kind of fun.

And it had delivered a fringe benefit. She’d found a place to conceal the receiver.

She tugged the pull chain that turned on the bare ceiling bulb. At the back of the closet, behind a row of paint cans overgrown with cobwebs and littered with insect carcasses, she cut away a section of the drywall with an X-Acto knife. She concealed the receiver inside and replaced the cutaway panel. The device would receive the infinity transmitter’s intermittent signal and record a maximum of twenty hours of audio on a memory card. It had no moving parts and used little power. The fresh battery she’d installed this morning would keep it running until sometime tomorrow, eliminating the need for her to hardwire the device into the main current. When she returned tomorrow, she would do a diaper change—replace the card and the battery.

She left the closet and exited via the lobby, taking a long detour back to her car so she wouldn’t pass in front of Kolb’s window. Probably he kept the shade drawn, but she couldn’t count on it—and she’d taken enough chances for one day.

14

The morning meeting was held in the ADIC’s conference room, where a dozen squad supervisors gathered before nine o’clock to await Michaelson’s arrival. No one spoke to Tess. She felt hostility radiating at her from every seat around the long conference table. She wondered if it was possible to spontaneously combust under the pressure of so many hot glares.

To distract herself, she fixed her gaze on a large pad mounted on an easel at the front of the room. Across the top sheet the word STORMKIL was written in black marker. The rest of the sheet was blank. It seemed like an appropriate metaphor for the case.

Michaelson entered on schedule, preceded by Larkin and by someone who apparently was with the media-relations office. Somehow it wasn’t surprising that the AD would have his mind on the media even during a strategy session.

As he passed her, Tess searched Michaelson’s face for any indication that Crandall had informed him of her unauthorized activities. She caught no sign of it.

Michaelson sat at the head of the table, the media rep at his side. Larkin positioned himself by the easel.

“Go,” the AD said with a finger jab at the nearest supervisor.

The man delivered a weather forecast. Heavy rains were expected to fall by ten P.M. The killer had snatched his first two victims roughly four hours before the storms broke. If he stuck to his previous pattern, they were looking at an abduction by six o’clock, an hour after sunset. That was nine hours from now.

Larkin leaned over the easel and wrote 1800 HRS: ABDUCT. The words seemed to shout at the room.

The next supervisor reported that all agents were working staggered shifts today—sixteen hours on duty, eight hours off.

The head of Communications said that the scrambler of every agent’s Handie-Talkie unit had been reprogrammed, eliminating any possibility that the Rain Man could eavesdrop on FBI radio exchanges.

Someone else summarized a psycholinguistic analysis of phrase selections from the two ransom notes and Paula Weissman’s tape recording. It was presumed that the wording of all three messages closely reflected the Rain Man’s original text. The analysts believed the unsub was a Caucasian male with some college education, in his late twenties to early forties. Tess noted silently that, from what she knew, William Kolb fit the description.

Then there were the phones in the mayor’s office, where the Rain Man was expected to call, if and when his latest ransom demand was met. A trap-and-trace had been installed on every line, allowing an instant trace if the killer called from a landline. If he used a cell, as he had last time, then a trace became more difficult.

“We’re anticipating he’ll have a new phone,” the super said, “or at least a new number programmed into the existing phone.” Working cell numbers could be snatched out of the air during cellular transmissions, or purchased at black-market Internet sites. “We need to identify the cell phone number, match it to the owner’s account, then get the location of the cell tower at the point of origin. We’ve made arrangements with every major cellular provider in the area to have technicians on standby.”