'Why?'
Darby grinned slightly, enjoying the easy banter she had with him, missing it. For a moment it took the grief and severity of her previous conversation with Casey and Sergey and muted it.
She returned to her seat. 'The Cavanaugh home used to be the site for this Irish family's lumber company. They used the house as an office and sold their lumber there, so it was a perfect spot to pick up the illegal booze. Trucks pull into a lumberyard all the time, right? But in the driveway of a home, not so much.'
Coop raised his hand. 'Question. How do you know this tunnel is still in service?'
Darby turned to Sergey.
'Virginia Cavanaugh,' Sergey said. 'Woman's in her eighties and told me her home — the aforementioned site of the lumberyard — has stayed in her family for the past three generations. They will it free and clear to the surviving family members, the only stipulation is that it can't be sold.'
'Clever,' Coop said.
'Cavanaugh told me her uncle took her through the tunnel once, you know, part of a history lesson or something,' Sergey said. 'As far as she knows, you can still walk through it, but you won't know until you're actually there.'
Darby said, 'So she agreed to let us in.'
Sergey nodded.
'What about the other part?' she asked.
'No problem there,' Sergey said. 'I think it gave the old bird a thrill, getting a call from the FBI to help assist an investigation. That plus I don't think she's real fond of her neighbours.'
'What gave you that impression?'
'She called them 'chinks'.'
Coop said, 'That's one clue, sure.'
Darby leaned forward and with her eyes on Sergey said, 'Tell me the rest of it. How Casey found this group.'
'The short version is this,' Sergey said. 'When Casey was working as a profiler, he was sent to consult on a series of abductions that occurred in and around Los Angeles over a seven-year time period. This was back in '81. Eleven victims, all kids. The youngest was six, the oldest twelve. They came from different backgrounds — poor parents, rich ones, middle class — and the racial backgrounds were different. Black, white, you name it. Each boy or girl was snatched somewhere outside their home, and each abduction was quick and clean, no witnesses.
'Reviewing the cases, Jack discovered that each vic was the youngest family member. Eleven victims, many of whom had older siblings, and each vic was the youngest. What were the odds? That was the only unifying thread he found.'
The wall phone rang. Sergey took the call, listened for a moment then said 'Okay' and hung up.
'On the ninth abduction,' he said, 'the one near Chino Hill Park, a witness saw a van pull up next to a kid riding his bike. Kid's name was Mathew Zuckerman. He's ten, pretty good-sized boy for his age, lots of weight, and the van pulls up to him and pauses just a moment and then speeds away, leaving the bike bouncing across the dirt road.'
'So you're talking two people,' Darby said. 'The driver and whoever was in the back of the van.'
'At least two people. The boy wasn't light, so you'd need at least two to pull and lift the kid from the bike that fast.'
'And that's when Casey came to the conclusion this was a group rather than a single serial killer.'
Sergey nodded. 'That was his theory, yes. Now the detective who caught the Zuckerman case, he was this young guy probably looking to make a name for himself because he forced the forensic guys to collect and bag into evidence every piece of trash along the entire stretch of road. We're talking about a good mile before you can turn. Thank God this guy was that thorough; otherwise he wouldn't have found the empty syringe tube.
'The state lab did a good job with the people and resources they had, and Jack convinced them to send everything to our lab, including the bike. We managed to lift a print off the tube and got lucky. The print, we later discovered, belonged to a ten-year-old boy named Francis Levin who disappeared on his way home from school in '54.'
'Wait,' Darby said. 'Your fingerprint database wasn't operational until '99. How did Levin's prints get into the system?'
'When Casey stopped working the original cases, a different task force took over before it was finally blended into CASMIRC. Any only or youngest child who was either abducted or who disappeared under mysterious circumstances — the task force made sure that hard copies of their prints were on file. When the IAFIS database went operational, the task force simply loaded and coded their prints.'
'So you didn't find out Levin was behind the abduction until '99.'
'Correct. We don't have prints for every missing kid. We got lucky with Levin because the police had lifted prints from his bedroom after he was abducted.'
'Was Levin one of the California abductions Casey investigated?'
Sergey shook his head. 'Levin was born and raised in Oregon. Jack had Behavioral Sciences pull up every missing person case where the vic was either an only child or the youngest child in the family, and the entire West Coast lit up like a Christmas tree.'
'How many kids?'
'Eighty-six,' Sergey said.
Coop mumbled, 'Jesus.'
'And that's just the West Coast,' Sergey said. 'This group or cult — I still have no idea what to call them — they've been travelling across the country all this time, snatching the youngest child of families.'
'How many?' Darby asked again.
'The last time I checked,' Sergey said, 'the number was just over three hundred.'
51
Darby's gaze dropped from Sergey's face to the tops of the man's polished black Oxfords, her head dizzy with calculations.
Francis Levin disappears in '54 and shows up in '81 when he snatches this kid named Zuckerman and Levin's prints are found on a syringe. That's twenty-seven years. And now Casey is here and he's saying the same group is responsible and that's fifty-six years, they've been snatching kids for at least fifty-six years.
Sergey was saying something to her.
'I'm sorry, can you repeat that?'
'I said the only thing we know with any degree of certainty is that they abduct the youngest child of the family. For example, Charlie Rizzo. We know he was the youngest member of his family, so when he was abducted, we made sure his prints were entered into the IAFIS system. Now, I'm not suggesting all of these missing kids who are the youngest family members can be attributed to this group, so that three hundred number could be lower.'
'Or much, much larger,' Darby said. 'There's collateral damage, the people they killed, like John Smith and his wife.'
And your wife, she added to herself.
'Yes,' Sergey said, 'you're correct. But I'm focusing on just the missing children. The fact is we don't know anything about this group. Who they are or what they do. Why they snatch the youngest kid from the family.'
Darby was thinking of what Charlie Rizzo had said to his father — Tell her, Daddy. Tell her what you did — and said: 'The parents of these missing kids, you mean to tell me you found absolutely nothing in their backgrounds?'
'Nothing that can tell us why their kids were taken, no.'
'I find that hard to swallow.'
