Disappeared, p.15
Disappeared, page 15
part #1 of Maxwell Knight Series
“Fitness standards have slipped around here, I guess. These fat bastards can’t even catch a cold, a lot of ’em.”
He grows silent again as he thinks some more, then nods his head. “Okay, Knight, we’ve got a deal. You’ll be out of here within the hour, no charges. I’ll keep it on the downlow too, make sure that bitch’s lawyers don’t catch wind of it.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, well, don’t thank me yet. If I don’t have those files on my desk within the next forty-eight hours, then everyone’s gonna know about it, alright? I’m talking CCTV footage on the evening news, know what I mean?”
I nod. “You’re all heart, Bolan.”
He grins at that. “Yeah. And don’t you forget it, okay?”
Eighteen
“Check this out,” Crease says as I sit down in the chair next to her.
Bolan was as good as his word, and got me out of jail within thirty minutes of leaving. I went straight home, showered and changed, and went upstairs to the office. I’d spoken with Emma over breakfast – she didn’t know about my run-in with the law last night, she just assumed I was working – and we managed to get through the meal without mentioning her mother. It’s in the air though, and I guess we’ll be talking about it pretty soon, whether I want to or not.
Jarvis isn’t in the office today, he’s got a covert meeting with his FBI source, and I’m hoping for the best. I spoke to him on the phone earlier, and he’d apologized for leaving me the night before; I told him to forget about it, it would have been stupid to stay. He couldn’t have done anything to help anyway, and there was no point both of us spending the night in the can.
He told me he’d got some intel on the Houstons, too. Nothing too suspicious, although Benjamin Houston had a track record of behavioral problems at school, according to his report cards. Aggressive toward the other children on occasion, and had even slapped a girl from his class the year before. Anger management issues, it seems, and the fact that he’d hit a girl is an indication that this is a line of enquiry worth pursuing. I’ll speak to Jarvis about it when he gets back.
“Okay,” I say to Dinah, “but first, call your friend and ask her to find out anything she can about a site called CBCSCS, it’s on something called the onion, apparently. Stands for Child Buy, Child Sell, Child Swap. And did you have a word with her? About if she can handle it?”
“Yeah, she says she’s okay with searching those sites. She’s not looking at anything directly, if she can help it. She’s got a program, it scans any sites she finds automatically. Searches for facial matches with Katie, plus any reference to her name, address, or anything connected to her, including anything that might be coded.”
“NCMEC said that these sites can disguise the pictures, to defeat that facial recognition software.”
“They can, but Shona thinks that her system can get around that. Doesn’t just rely on pure facial recognition, it’s also other things – skin tone, body posture, checks with any clothing we have on record from other pictures, that sort of thing. Advanced-level shit.”
“Sounds like it.”
Dinah picks up the phone, calls Shona and gives her name of the site I got off Horwood last night. Might be nothing, but it pays to check.
“Now,” I say when she finishes the call, “show me what you got.”
Crease opens up one of the tabs on her computer and I see an image of a car driving down a street at night. “Is that Carmel?” I ask, my hopes rising.
“Yep.”
“What kind of camera is this from? A shop?”
“No, it’s from a dash cam. I got the idea when you asked us to ID Ewing from your car’s camera footage. Turns out there were a few vehicles out during the night Katie went missing. Carmel’s quiet, but it’s not a ghost town. Anyway, Carmel PD had a list of vehicles known to be in the area – seen by witnesses, caught on camera, or people just going in and letting the cops know they were out and about, to get themselves off any future suspect list. Cops interviewed them all, and they were all clear. But I took the car details, then checked to see if they had dash cams fitted.”
“How?”
“I called the owners and asked them.”
“Fair enough. How many?”
“Three cars had them.”
“But they wouldn’t have kept the footage for two years, surely?”
“One of them didn’t. But two of them uploaded footage automatically to the cloud. Still had the info there.”
“The owners let you check it?”
“Not exactly. They don’t even know that I did.”
It is, I suppose, one of the advantages that we have over the cops. We don’t have to follow the rules quite as slavishly as they do.
“So you got this off one of those two?”
“Yeah. Watch this.”
Dinah clicks her mouse, and the screen shifts to a video. The car from the picture she’s already shown me appears from around a corner, turns to face the dash cam, and drives straight past.
“Any chance to get a look at the driver?”
“No, the angle’s not good enough, and with the headlamps on, anyone in the car is obscured.”
It would have been too much to hope for, I suppose. “Where was it coming from?”
“It was making a left turn onto Ocean Avenue, from San Antonio.”
“San Antonio?” I ask, heart beating slightly harder.
“Yes.”
“What time was it?”
“Dash cam footage says seven minutes after two.”
“Shit. This could be something.”
“I know.”
“Why didn’t the cops get this?”
“The owner didn’t tell them about it.”
“Why not?”
Dinah clicks the mouse again, and we watch the footage once more, this time with audio. I can hear a man moaning, and other sounds that lead me to suspect that –
“He’s getting a blowjob?”
“Yeah, if you listen to the whole thing, it’s pretty clear that’s what’s going on. Not from his wife, either.”
“Ah.” Suddenly, the man’s reluctance to tell the cops about the dash cam footage becomes clear. “But he didn’t tell the cops about the other car, either.”
“Come on, Max, he probably didn’t even notice it.”
“Yeah, I guess not. I’m surprised he didn’t delete it.”
“He probably did, from the camera at least. But a lot of people don’t even know this stuff gets uploaded automatically.”
“Okay. Show me the still again.”
The still image flips back on, and I look at the car. “That a Honda Civic?”
“Yeah, silver Civic, two-liter petrol model.”
Not V6 “smooth”, but not race-car loud or diesel pick-up rough, either. It could be the car that Gleason heard that night. And the time frame fits exactly.
“Who owned that car?” I ask.
“Well, that’s where it gets even more interesting,” Crease says.
“Go on.”
“The car was a Hertz rental.”
“And who rented it?”
“A company called MetaTech Design.”
“Name of the driver?”
“Not mentioned – it was open, so anyone from the company could drive it.”
“Name of the person who made the booking?”
“Paul Lucas.”
“What have we got on him?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“He doesn’t exist. And neither does MetaTech Design.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I’m not.”
“It’s a front company.”
“Looks like.”
I sit and think about this for a few moments. My immediate reaction is that this is good evidence that Katie was abducted by a professional group. It could be something connected to the website Horwood told me about, or it could be that she was stolen to order for somebody else altogether. Either way, it’s unlikely that her parents would have gone to such lengths, and certainly doesn’t tie in with the theory that she was killed accidentally. Maybe they really did have nothing to do with it? On the other hand, all we have is circumstantial evidence. A car hired by a dummy company, that was seen coming off the road that the Morgans’ house was on, a few minutes after the neighbor heard a car outside that house, is highly suspicious; but there’s no concrete proof that the car was involved.
Still, the odds would seem to favor a link, and it needs looking into.
“Great work, Dinah,” I say, “really great work. This could help us a lot. I want you to keep on with this, okay? See what you can find out about that dummy corporation. There’s got to be a paperwork trail somewhere.”
“Got it.”
“And look at the video again. Maybe there is an angle that works. In fact, let me see it again. You can keep the sound off though.”
Crease laughs and rolls the video again, and I watch as the dash cam picks up the Honda’s headlamps shining onto the dark street, before we can see the car itself.
The owner’s car is probably a hundred yards or so from the junction, although the distance is closing; by the time the Honda is heading down Ocean, there’s only sixty or seventy yards left. The car gets closer and closer, headlamps obscuring the driver, and then it is gone.
“Back it up,” I say, “show me the turn again.”
Dinah does as I ask, and I watch as the car emerges from San Antonio and makes the left onto Ocean. “Stop. Go back.” Dinah goes back slowly, frame by frame, until I see it. “There,” I say, pointing. “The car’s almost side on, headlamps aren’t blinding the camera yet. It’s a distance away, I know, but can you enhance that? Maybe get a shot through the side windows at the driver, or anyone else in the car?”
If we can see Katie Morgan there, it will be a breakthrough of monumental proportions. I’d settle for the driver though.
“I won’t be able to do it,” Crease says, “but I know someone that’s good at this sort of thing, I’ll see if he can enhance it. Maybe we’ll get something.”
“Okay, great. Let me know if you get anything. Shona, too.”
“Will do, Max.”
I go into my own office, then have a sudden thought and go back to see Crease. “Hey Dinah,” I say, “you or Jarvis had any luck tracking down properties owned by the Morgans, or anything rented in their name?”
“No, nothing so far that we can see. The Morgans have an apartment over in Manhattan, but that’s all. NYPD checked it out, no evidence that it was used for anything suspicious.”
I nod my head. “No last-minute rentals either?”
“Not that we could find.”
“Okay, I want you to have a look at anything owned by, or rented by, MetaTech Design, or Paul Lucas. Might be worth a shot.”
“Good idea. I’ll get on it.”
I go back to my office, sit down behind the desk and get Google open on the computer. I type in Pamela Kline, and wait to see if Horwood was bullshitting me.
Moments later, it looks like the guy was on the level. There’s story after story about the woman’s death, and I click on the first one, a piece from the newspaper she worked for.
LA Times journalist killed in hit-and-run in Carmel, reads the headline, and underneath, there is a picture of Ocean Avenue, cordoned off with police tape, emergency service vehicles filling the area, uniforms everywhere.
Pamela Kline, a well-respected reporter for the LA Times, was tragically killed in a hit-and-run yesterday in the beachside town of Carmel-By-The-Sea.
Ms. Kline was crossing Ocean Avenue when the Toyota pickup hit her at what witnesses describe as “high speed”.
“It just came out of nowhere,” says resident Clara Walker. “Whoever was driving must have been out of their mind, maybe drunk. The pickup hit her and I saw her body fly about twenty feet through the air. The driver didn’t even stop.”
The Toyota is owned by Telford Construction, although it was reported stolen the previous day by the company. The truck was found the evening of the accident, in Pacific Meadows by Jack’s Peak Park. “The Toyota was burned out,” said a police officer working the scene, who asked not to be named. “It was completely gutted, we can’t get prints, or anything else.”
The police investigation is ongoing, and anyone who witnessed the event, or saw the Toyota at any stage over the past two days, should contact the Carmel Police Department.
Ms. Kline is survived by her husband, Jim Kline, and their two children, aged 8 and 5. A private memorial service will be held in Los Angeles next week.
Two young kids. Damn. It’s a real shame, and my heart goes out to them. It’s not easy to lose a parent. Not easy at all.
There are other pictures attached to the article. One is a stock photo of Pamela Kline, probably the one used for her by-line. A pretty woman, her features Latina despite the name. Mid-forties, brunette, tortoise-shell spectacles.
Another shows the burned-out pickup, at the edge of a parking lot next to the tall trees of Jack Peak’s Park. The cop had been right; the thing was a mess, almost unrecognizable. Whoever did it, wanted to be damn sure there was no evidence. Gelled with what Horwood told me. But then again, if the truck had been stolen, and then the thief had accidentally killed a woman, then they would probably want to get rid of the evidence too.
I note that there’s nothing in the article to suggest what she was working on, or why she was in Carmel.
I scan through some of the other articles and add pieces to the story. There are suggestions that she was working on a story connected to the Katie Morgan case, although the LA Times refused to elaborate. One of the articles did mention the name of her editor though – Herbert Goldstein, a name I recognize as one of the most respected of the old-school newsies still working in the industry. I check the Times website, see that Goldstein is now one of the Deputy Managing Editors. I pick up the phone and dial Shelby Yamato, a friend and a staff writer on the crime desk. We’ve known each other for years, and often do favors for one another. I sometimes feed her details from my investigations; for some people, the most effective punishment is their crime being aired in public.
“Shelby Yamato,” she says.
“Shelby, it’s Max.”
“Max? How you doin’ sweetheart, what you got for me?”
“Nothing at the minute, but if you can get me in there to see Herbert Goldstein today, I’ll be sure to give you the story once it’s cracked.”
“You’re working the Katie Morgan case, right?”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s a small town, Max.”
That’s true, I suppose; LA might have four million people living in it, but somehow it still feels like a village where everyone knows each other’s business. Keeping a secret here is never easy.
“So, let’s say I am.”
“And you’re going to ‘crack’ the case, Max?”
“Where’s your faith?”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You’ll be one happy little bunny if I do crack it, and give you the goods though, won’t you?”
“It’s a big ‘if’.”
“It’s a big story, if you get it.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. I’ll get you the meet. But why Goldstein? What does he have to do with Katie Morgan?”
“You reporters are real nosy, aren’t you?”
“That’s our job, right?”
“I guess so. But I’ll tell you all about it when the time is right.”
“Fair enough. I’ll speak to him and call you back.”
“Thanks, Shelby.”
I put the phone down, and do a Google search for Telford Construction, the owners of the Toyota.
The company was incorporated back in 2004, employs a couple of hundred workers directly and subcontracts out to hundreds more, and engages in various building projects throughout LA County. I find a couple of stories about alleged payoffs to the city in order to win bids, but nothing has ever been proved. There was also one scandal when an apartment block wasn’t built to regulations and had to be pulled down before it was even finished; due to some legal wrangling, Telford Construction managed to avoid paying any damages, and the city picked up the tab. All in all, pretty much what you’d expect from a company like Telford, and nothing that stands out from any of its competitors.
Might Kline have been investigating Telford, and not the child abuse ring? Did the company find out, and kill her? But I presume the cops would have checked that angle. And why would they use one of their own trucks to do it? It just didn’t make much sense.
The phone rings, and I pick up instantly.
“Goldstein will see you in his office at eleven,” Shelby says without preamble. “Don’t be late, and don’t forget that you owe me one.”
“Thanks Shelby. I won’t forget.”
I hang up and check the time. Damn. It’s already half past ten, and the drive over to the LA Times on East Imperial in El Segundo is going to take at least twenty-five minutes.
I grab my car keys and run.
Nineteen
“You look a little hot there,” Herb Goldstein says, as we shake hands and then sit down on opposite sides of his desk.
He isn’t wrong, either. I’d run down the stairs back at the office, run through the baking heat to my car, driven at breakneck pace through the traffic, parked it in the lot, then run upstairs to make the meeting on time. I got there with about thirty seconds to spare.
“This summer’s a real killer,” I tell him, and he nods.
“You got that right. Literally. Three old timers died just yesterday from the heat. Not been like this, in as long as I can remember. Now, Mr. Knight, how can I help you?”
“You were Pamela Kline’s editor, when she was killed a couple years back, right?”
“Right,” he confirms, his eyes narrowing slightly. “What’s your interest?”
“I’m looking into the disappearance of Katie Morgan,” I tell him, presuming that he probably knows anyway. “I heard that Kline was possibly investigating rumors of a child abuse ring focused around sites on the dark web.”
