Which one, and how?
A soft cry rose from one of the boxes.
“Please.”
CHAPTER 32
New York City
After Kate got Grace to bed she made fresh coffee and called Goodsill back so they could work on the Colorado link to the abduction in Alberta.
Could this lead me to Carl Nelson and information about Vanessa?
Kate needed to follow this through.
“Good news, I found my old files,” Goodsill said over the phone. “Fifteen years is a long time but when I read over my notes, it all came back to me, and I found some interesting stuff. I just sent it to you.”
Kate set her phone to speaker, turned the volume low then started downloading the attachments of scanned documents arriving in her in-box.
“Strange thing is,” Goodsill went on, “that clipping you found is the only story that I wrote on the case, but I put in a lot of time on it.”
“What do you mean?” The documents blossoming on Kate’s screen were crumpled, torn and stained bills, invoices, along with other records. “I don’t understand what I’m looking at here. Walk me through everything”
Goodsill took Kate to the beginning. His cousin was married to a Denver detective, Ned Eckles, and the two men got to talking at a family gathering. Goodsill had learned that Ned was looking into a query from Canadian police to run down a partial plate possibly connected to an abduction.
Ned’s supervisors said that the plate info was so vague it could’ve applied to about twenty-five other states, meaning that without something more specific, they didn’t want him investing much time in the check. Using the vehicle description and the plate’s partial sequence, Ned had the records people do an analysis and they came up with five possibilities for Denver.
“Ned ran them all down, made personal visits and questioned the vehicle owners. Four were easily ruled out. And although he’d ruled out the fifth, Ned told me the vehicle owner gave him a bad vibe.”
“You’re talking about this Jerome Fell.”
Kate looked at her monitor and saw notes for Jerome Fell, aged 30, of 2909 Falstaff Street, Denver. Goodsill had scanned in Fell’s driver’s license with a photo of a clean-shaven man with an expression of indifference staring from it. She touched her fingers to the lower part of his face, covering it and visualizing him with a beard. He could resemble Carl Nelson. She couldn’t be sure. There was a time difference of at least fifteen years.
“Yes. Ned had said that before he visited Fell he already knew from US border people that Fell had been to Canada around the time of the abduction and that he’d returned through Eastport, Idaho. But Fell was never detained at the border and never searched.”
“Why?”
“Border people claimed that they never had any alerts about a van and partial plate, at that time. That’s something the Canadians disputed.”
“But Ned met with Fell?”
“Yes.”
“And had a bad vibe about him, yet he still ruled him out? Why?”
“When Ned questioned Fell cold, about his whereabouts for that time period, Fell acknowledged right off that he’d been to Canada on vacation. He said he’d been in British Columbia but not Alberta and even showed Ned motel receipts to prove it.”
“So then what?”
“Ned cleared him, but something about Fell niggled at him. Ned told me later that Fell seemed unusually well prepared, almost as if he were expecting to account for his travels for that period. Still, Ned’s supervisors, citing the partial-plate business, were satisfied and pulled Ned away to other investigations.”
“Was that the end of it?”
“Not quite. Ned was still bothered by Fell and not long after that suggested I do some quiet digging on him.”
“What’d you do?”
“I never talked to Fell. I didn’t want him to get suspicious. I talked to his neighbors, kept an eye on his place. I learned that he was a computer expert, a contractor, that he lived alone, kept to himself and kept up his property. See the pictures. He had a tidy little bungalow with a garage.”
“What did you find out?”
“Not much, but I figured that if this guy had kidnapped a Canadian girl and was living in Denver, this would be a huge story, so before letting it go, I decided to do a trash hit.”
“You stole his garbage from the curb?”
“Yup, I think I did it about six times under cover of night. You ever do that, Kate?”
“A few times.”
“Dirty, messy work, but the Supreme Court says it’s not an invasion of privacy once it’s on the street,” Goodsill said. “You can find out a lot by going through people’s garbage. At first, there was nothing that stood out in Fell’s trash.”
“Did you find anything suggesting that Jerome Fell was an alias?”
“No.”
“You’ve seen the pictures of Carl Nelson. Do you think Nelson and Fell are the same person?”
“Well, fifteen years is a long time, but I thought about that when I saw the stories out of New York and I got to thinking that it sure is possible.”
“Did you find anything with the name Carl Nelson, or anything linking him to Rampart? I don’t see it in the samples you sent me, in the ones I’ve opened so far.”
“I’m afraid not. A lot of junk food wrappers, empty take-out containers, pizza boxes, some bills for cable, for utilities, all to Jerome Fell, or J. Fell. A few items of mail for neighbors sent to his address. I saw that he was not kind. Instead of giving them to his neighbors he opened them and tossed them. It’s all there. I’ve got more coming your way, maybe forty in all.”
“I’m not surprised you didn’t find anything. I know it’s possible he could’ve missed something. But I think he would’ve been careful not to miss anything. You think he would’ve used a shredder.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Maybe he shredded stuff, maybe he burned stuff, but all in all, I found nothing unusual and dropped it. Then my wife noticed something, I’d missed—a couple things actually.”
“What?”
“See attachment
