event would start later that morning. Over one million participants were expected for the full slate of music and addresses from global celebrities, including the president.
“Over a million people-my, isn’t that perfect?” She smiled at the baby. “It’s more than perfect. It’s beautiful.”
Sutsoff noticed a new e-mail.
One of the couples was having trouble. They’d lost their floater pen. They were at the Tellwood, only four blocks away. Sutsoff had prepared extra pens.
She typed an e-mail to them.
“All finished eating, Will? Let’s take a little walk before we head to the park.”
She got him dressed, collected her laptop and some other things in a bag and loaded her stroller. Before she left, she took some more medication.
Nothing would stop her now.
68
Nassau, Bahamas
In the predawn darkness, a police car crept through Nassau’s Over-the-Hill district.
The faint yelp of a distant dog sounded a warning as a flashlight beam shot from the car’s passenger door. Light raked across the dilapidated shops with barred windows, the boarded-up canteens, eviscerated cars and tumbledown houses.
Royal Bahamas Police Detective Colchester Young and his partner Angelo Morgan had worked their street sources. An angry ex-girlfriend had tipped them to their subject, hiding at his aunt’s place in Over-the-Hill.
“He said he had to lay low,” she’d told them, then added, “he carries a gun all the time.”
The car rolled up to a neat home with pretty flower boxes.
In a heartbeat, Young and Morgan, armed with a crow-bar, semiautomatic pistols and a warrant, entered the house and found Whitney Wymm struggling to get up from the couch.
Wymm reached for the gun he’d stashed under the couch, but his wrist was crushed under Morgan’s boot. Young slammed Wymm to the floor, rolled him on his stomach, put his knee in his back and cuffed him.
Wymm was one of the top document counterfeiters in the West Indies.
Young and Morgan had effective methods of extracting information and within an hour of his arrest, Wymm admitted that he’d created new passports for the woman in the photograph the detectives had shown him.
Gretchen Sutsoff.
Wymm gave them all the photos he’d used to create new passports for her in the name of Mary Anne Conrad and for the baby she had with her, William John Conrad.
By the time the sun rose, the detectives had alerted their supervisor to the vital new information. The supervisor alerted his bosses, who saw that the update was immediately rushed through official channels to the FBI in Washington.
The FBI passed it to the FBI Field Office in Manhattan and the New York Police Department, and it was circulated to every law enforcement officer tasked to find Gretchen Sutsoff.
Early that morning in Manhattan, Art Wolowicz and Clive Hatcher were among the teams of NYPD detectives assigned to that aspect of the case. They were canvassing hotels when the new alert beeped on the mobile computer in their unmarked Chevy Impala.
“A new picture and alias-this one’s a freakin’ chameleon. Where we goin’ next?” Wolowicz asked.
Hatcher pried the lid off his takeout cup, blew on his coffee and said, “LaQuinta, then Comfort Inn, then let’s go back to the Tellwood.”
69
New York City
“We’re close to Tyler, I can feel it, Jack.” Emma Lane’s concentration never strayed from Gannon’s computer monitor.
The memory card she’d obtained from the Blue Tortoise Kids’ Hideaway held hundreds of files. Gannon and Emma continued studying them now at Gannon’s desk in the World Press Alliance headquarters.
They’d first read the files yesterday, during their flight from Nassau.
Tears had rolled down Emma’s face when she’d found Tyler’s case among them. It contained his health records from his doctor and the clinic in California, Emma and Joe’s personal information, their photos, articles on their crash from the Big Cloud Gazette, even Joe’s obituary. Then separate information about “adoptive parents” Valmir and Elena Leeka, and something about Tyler’s birth parents having died in a car accident.
“Why are they doing this?” Emma had asked over and over.
Gannon didn’t have the answer
Today, he zeroed in on the data related to seventy couples or families located around the world.
“There seems to be a pattern.”
Earlier that morning, after Gannon had brought Melody Lyon up to speed, she’d assigned other reporters to help. They’d taken the names Gannon had mined from the files and started calling New York hotels to see if any people named in the files were registered.
In studying the files, Gannon had discovered that each case involved a small child, usually under three years old. Each case also seemed to involve an adoption through law firms or agencies in Brazil, South Africa, Eastern Europe, Malaysia, China or India. And each case involved name changes and exhaustive health records.
In the more recent files, Gannon found that names of the “families” or “couples” had been removed or changed. But a few files contained notes about traveling to New York for the Human World Conference. Gannon had managed to pull some of those names from those files. He was reviewing them when he got a call from a WPA reporter who was helping them.
“Jack, it’s Linwood.”
“You get anything with those names I gave you to check?”
“Zip.”
“Keep checking.”
Gannon kept poring over the files. His focus sharpened when he found one he’d overlooked. It contained two names: Joy Lee Chenoweth and Wex Taggart out of Vancouver, Canada.
There were photos of the couple with a boy about three years old and recent notes suggesting that they would be going to the Human World Conference and staying at the Tellwood Regency Inn.
Gannon picked up his phone and called the hotel.
“Tellwood Regency, how may I help you?”
“Yes, I’m trying to reach two guests, Joy Lee Chenoweth and Wex Taggart. Did they check in yet?”
“One moment, sir.” Keys clicked. “Yes, Wex Taggart from Vancouver, British Columbia.”
“That’s right.”
“We have them. Would you like me to connect you, now?”
“Yes, please.”
The line switched and rang twice before a woman answered.
“Hello?”
Gannon hesitated while looking at the file photos. The voice on the line seemed suited to the pretty young Asian woman staring back at him.
“I’m sorry. I think I’ve got the wrong room.”
Gannon hung up and turned to Emma.
“We have a lead at the Tellwood hotel.”
