Rules of Crime (6 page)

The state-run liquor store was tucked into a shopping center and took up less space than a two-car garage. The rows upon rows of colorful bottles made him uneasy. So much poison in such a small space. No one else was in the store, except the man behind the counter, who set down his reading device and looked
up at Jackson. Gray haired with concave cheeks, the clerk looked headed for an early death.

“Detective Jackson, Eugene Police. I’d like to know if you’ve seen this woman.” Jackson set a paper copy of Renee’s photo out on the counter.

The clerk nodded. “Sure. She started coming in regularly about a month ago.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Last week. Maybe Thursday. She always came in around noon. I figured she was on her lunch break.” Concern pinched the man’s face even further. “Is she okay?”

“I can’t say.” Jackson picked up the photo. Renee had been drinking again. That’s all he needed to know here. Still, he asked, “Do you work Saturdays?”

“No. Melissa is here on the weekends.”

“Will you give me her contact information?” Jackson wrote it down but realized the case would probably be resolved before he connected with the weekend clerk. He tapped the photo. “How often did she come in and how much did she buy?”

The clerk hesitated, but only for a second. “I saw her once or twice a week and she bought a fifth of Reyka vodka each time.”

“Thanks.” Jackson slid the photo back and left the store. Renee was still in the phase of moderating her consumption, telling herself it would be different this time.

Now what? During their marriage, Renee had done most of her drinking at home, with occasional nights out with friends. But if she was hiding the booze from her fiancé, Jackson didn’t know how to predict her behavior. He started his car but sat for a minute, trying to get into his ex-wife’s head. Saturday afternoon she’d told her fiancé and daughter she was going shopping, but she’d dressed in jeans, so she wasn’t headed to Macy’s. And she
had been buying fifths from the liquor store, so she likely wouldn’t have gone to a bar. What was on her mind?

Guilt and fear.

This was his ex-wife’s second relapse after an expensive month in an inpatient facility. With a pending marriage to a wealthy man, who thought she was still sober, Renee had more to lose than ever. In a heartbeat, Jackson knew where she might have gone on Saturday. To an AA meeting, hoping for a miracle that would relieve her of her desire to drink. But which meeting? There were so many possibilities. The Jesco Club, where she first attempted sobriety when Katie was seven, had sentimental value. He would start his search there.

Before leaving the parking lot, Jackson checked his phone. No voice mail and no texts. When would the kidnapper text with instructions for the money drop? The deadline was only a few hours away. He drove toward downtown, crawling along Willamette in lunch-hour traffic. The Jesco Club was just west of the city center in the Whiteaker neighborhood. Once considered Eugene’s slum, the neighborhood had experienced a revival in the past few years, with restaurants, breweries, and art shops opening and thriving. Still, the area held a hub of apartment buildings known as Heroin Alley, and many of Eugene’s gang members called it home.

The two-story, boxy Jesco Club sat right off the sidewalk with little parking. Most of its attendees no longer had the privilege to drive, so parking wasn’t an issue for them. Jackson pulled up against the curb and hoped for the best. His dark-blue city-issued sedan was more likely to be vandalized than ticketed.

Inside the building, Jackson heard a meeting in session somewhere in the back, but stepped over to the little office where the receptionist was on the phone. He knew the club was more than just a place for alcoholics to meet, but he didn’t know what else
went on there. While he waited for the receptionist, a thirty-something woman with Raggedy Ann red hair, to end her call, he tried to decide how much he could say. He also worried about how little she would tell him.

Finally, he had her attention. “I’m Detective Jackson, Eugene Police.” He showed his badge, which he didn’t often do. “A woman disappeared Saturday afternoon and she may be in great danger. Her sister thinks she attended a meeting here, right before she went missing. Was there an AA meeting Saturday afternoon? And were you here at the time?”

“Yes, at four o’clock.” The receptionist nodded, her eyes lighting up.

Jackson pulled out Renee’s photo and handed it to her. “Did you see this woman?” He purposely did not use Renee’s name.

The receptionist pressed her lips together and glanced at a poster on the wall. “The meetings are anonymous. I’m not sure if I can say anything.”

“Her life is in danger and I’m not asking you to tell me who she is. I just need to know if she was here.”

The woman nodded.

“Did she stay for the whole meeting?”

“I was only here until five, but the meeting went beyond that. You should talk to Dave Lambert. He runs the Saturday group.” She clicked her keyboard a few times, then jotted down contact information on a blue sticky note. “He works at Fred Meyer and you can probably catch him there now.”

“Thanks.”

On the sidewalk outside, Jackson stood and looked around, again trying to get inside his ex-wife’s head. Where had she parked? Renee was impatient and would leave her car wherever it was most convenient, even if it meant paying a ticket later. She also tended to be late, which exacerbated the parking issue. He
noticed the alley across the street. Had the kidnapper snatched her from this neighborhood? Their suspect, Daniel Talbot, was upper middle class, or he had been before the recession. This neighborhood was not a likely hangout for him unless he’d followed Renee here. Or sent someone to do the dirty legwork.

Where had Renee gone after the meeting? To Market of Choice to pick up something for dinner? And where the hell was her car?

Jackson checked his phone again. No messages. He found the number he’d recently keyed in and called it.

“Agent River here.”

“It’s Jackson. I’ve confirmed that Renee was at an AA meeting at the Jesco Club on Blair Street on Saturday afternoon. I hope to have more information soon.”

“That’s interesting. I don’t know Eugene well yet, but the Whiteaker area has a reputation. Why would she go there?”

“The Jesco Club is respected in the treatment community and Renee had started drinking again.”

“So Talbot could have followed her there. Or a desperate drunk could have grabbed her after the meeting, hoping to score a big payoff from her rich boyfriend.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Or maybe Talbot hired someone to abduct her.”

“Can you find out who else was at the meeting?”

“Probably not without a subpoena. I’m heading over to talk to the group’s leader now.”

“Keep me updated.”

“Any word from the kidnapper?”

“Not yet, but Anderson is signaling me now.”

CHAPTER 7

Monday, January 9, 12:55 p.m.

Anderson had just walked into the room, carrying two zippered bank bags. Agent Fouts had followed, then stepped outside to the patio. Anderson’s mouth was open in distress. River clicked off her call, assuming he’d heard from the kidnapper.

Instead, he yelled, “What do you mean ‘a desperate drunk could have grabbed her’? What was Renee doing in the Whiteaker area?”

“Jackson says she attended an AA meeting. You weren’t aware of her, um, participation?”

“No.” Anderson’s face tightened and his eyes registered pain. “But I wish she had told me. I would have supported her.”

“I’m sorry.” River was reminded that no matter how much money people had, it didn’t shield them from bad news or diminish the anguish of being human and caring for other imperfect
people. “The good news is that we know where she was before she was abducted. It might help us locate her.”

They were in Anderson’s office and the space was larger than the living room in her new house. The vaulted wood ceiling, high-end French doors, and Persian area rug made River think a hundred grand to a kidnapper probably wouldn’t devastate Anderson’s finances. She respected him for being willing to pay the ransom.

The cell phone on Anderson’s desk beeped and they both jerked in surprise. Anderson grabbed it. “Another text.” He tapped the phone, then studied the message. “He wants the money now.”

“What? It’s only one o’clock.” A surge of worry. “I thought we had two more hours.” River grabbed the device and read the message:
Put the money in a plastic bag. Put the bag in a backpack. No tracking devices or she dies! Get in your car and start driving toward town. More instructions soon.

Damn!
She wasn’t ready. The pen register that would record all numbers and calls on Anderson’s phone was with the tech people, who weren’t here yet. Portland to Eugene was nearly a two-hour drive, even at eighty miles an hour.

Live in the moment
, River reminded herself.
This is the new reality.
She forced herself to look and sound calm. Inner peace would follow. “Let’s do what he says. Do you have the cash?”

“Yes. But it wiped me out.”

River didn’t have a response. She opened the French doors and said, “Time to move, Fouts.”

As she turned back, Anderson announced, “I’ll get a backpack,” and rushed into the hall.

River sat down on the couch, hit reply, and keyed in,
I need more time. I don’t have all the money yet
. She had to stall as long as she could. A standard crisis-negotiation tactic.

Fouts rushed in, smelling like a cigarette butt. She showed him the ransom text rather than summarize.

“We have to use a tracking device.” He handed the phone back to her.

“Of course. I brought one with me. We’ll put it inside a bundle of cash in case the kidnapper transfers the money right away.”

Anderson’s phone beeped in her hand. A new text:
No more time. Get moving!

River didn’t bother to respond. She opened her laptop and clicked open fonefinder.net. She keyed the kidnapper’s number into the search box and waited. It was a different Cricket phone. She’d done a similar search earlier with the number the perp used for the first contact. A call to the Cricket office revealed the service had been paid for in cash on Friday, then disconnected this morning, leaving her no way to trace the phone. The perp had obviously purchased several burner phones and was likely moving around, using different towers. They were dealing with someone smart and careful.

Using her own cell phone, she called the manager at Cricket again while keeping an eye on Anderson’s device. “Agent River. I have another service that needs a ping immediately.” She read the number slowly.

“This will take a minute. I’ll get back to you as soon as we have it.” The manager didn’t ask any unnecessary questions. She’d discussed the kidnapping with him earlier and he’d promised to be available to her all day.

“I’m staying on the line until I get it.”

“Okay. Excuse me for a second.”

She heard talking in the background so she looked down at Anderson’s phone. No communication. She stood and began to pace.

Anderson rushed into the room with a hiking backpack. “Will this work?”

She nodded and touched her earpiece to indicate she was on the phone. “Agent Fouts will help you pack it.”

Anderson set the backpack on his desk, grabbed one of the bank bags, and started pulling out bundled stacks of cash. River had never seen so much money, let alone handled so casually. Early in her FBI career, when she’d been Carl instead of Carla, she’d worked a few drug busts that netted cash, but the largest take had been thirty thousand.

She watched Fouts place a palm-size tracker into the middle of a stack of hundreds and hoped he knew what he was doing.

The Cricket manager came back on the phone. “We sent the signal, now we’re waiting for the bounce.”

“Good. Can you find out if other phones were purchased at the same time as these two? And if they were, let’s ping those numbers as well.”

“I’ll check.”

River paced the room, which now felt smaller than she’d first thought. This was happening so fast. She’d never worked a ransom kidnapping before. What if she messed it up? Anxiety exploded in her chest, like little firecrackers going off, and she felt paralyzed. It was like being frozen in that moment right before your car plows into another one on an icy road. She took two long deep breaths and repeated her new mantra several times:
I can only do my best and control my part in this
. The thoughts calmed her and her body relaxed. She hadn’t experienced a prolonged episode of anxiety since her operation and she hoped the worst of it was in her past—shed like the false male exterior she’d worn for nearly forty years.

She glanced over to see if anyone had noticed her bad moment. They were still bundling cash and stuffing it into the pack.

The Cricket manager’s voice was suddenly in her ear. “We got a signal off a Sprint tower at 1810 Chambers.”

“Thanks. Ping the number every five minutes and text me the tower locations.”

She started to hang up, then remembered her other request. “Were there more phones bought with cash at the same time?”