WE SAT THERE, staring at the phone. It just didn’t make sense. The kidnapper should have called back by now. Every other time, he’d called to let us know where the body was. Was not telling us and leaving the parents hanging his latest method of torture? If it was, it was working like a charm.
The only whiff of a lead came when Verizon Wireless called back with a cell site triangulation of his first call. It had come from somewhere in the vicinity of Gateway National Beach, on the south shore of Staten Island. But not surprisingly, when detectives from the 122nd Precinct had raced to the scene, they found nothing but gulls. The killer could have been in a car when he’d called-or who knew? A boat maybe. Another stone wall. Another dead end.
When I went to the window for about the thirtieth time, I noticed a funny thing happening on the sidewalk out in front of the Haases’ brownstone. A crowd had formed. It looked like a block party.
I went outside, thinking at first it was the press, but then I spotted a Brearley sweatshirt. Mary Beth’s friends. They were holding candles beside a pile of teddy bears and flowers and a signed volleyball. Almost every member of the Brearley senior class showed up to the vigil. They were crying, smoking, holding pictures of her.
I thought about breaking it up but then decided, why? If the kidnapper was watching the house, maybe the outpouring of love might make him see Mary Beth as a flesh-and-blood valuable person instead of the symbol of his hate.
I stared at the young, solemn faces as a guitar started playing. The vigil was oddly beautiful. The flickering flames from the candles seemed to merge with the lights of Manhattan across the dark bay. Mary Beth was obviously a great kid who had affected many lives.
It set my teeth on edge that I couldn’t find her. Even after all this time, we were as baffled by everything as anyone, completely useless.
Ann Haas came outside and was embraced by her daughter’s friends. She ordered pizza. Emily and I joined her in handing it out. I have to say, I was pretty overwhelmed by the emotional reactions of everyone, the genuine outreaching to comfort one another. Too bad it so often has to take tragedy to bring out the best in people, I thought.
Emily and I used the opportunity to learn more about Mary Beth. Ann Haas introduced me to Kevin Adello, a tall, mop-headed basketball player from Collegiate, Brearley’s exclusive brother school. He told us he’d dated Mary Beth off and on.
“She’s going to Bard, and instead of going to Princeton, I decided to go play for Vassar so we could be near each other. She isn’t like any other girl at Brearley, I’ll tell you that. Mary Beth is real. She’d puke seeing all these debutantes here in their just-so Seven jeans. I’m sorry. I’m being too harsh. I guess it’s nice that they showed. I just wish I could do something.”
I wheeled around as a cab slowed in the street. The crowd converged on it. My blood went cold as a ragged cry rang out.
“Move!” I yelled as I forced shocked teenagers aside.
A scared-looking girl in a wrinkled Brearley hoodie opened the door of the cab as I arrived beside it.
“It’s okay,” Mary Beth said, holding her hands up. “I’m okay.”
What? I couldn’t believe it. Another twist. The first one in the case that was actually welcome. Mary Beth’s bowled-over friends clapped and whistled as I guided her toward the brownstone stairs and her joyfully crying mother.
He’d let Mary Beth live?
Chapter 61
BACK INSIDE UNDER the kitchen high hats, Emily and I stood back as the mother and daughter embraced. I couldn’t tell which of them was crying the hardest. It even looked like Emily was about to join in.
“Something in your eye there, Detective Badass?” she teased.
“Hey,” I whispered to her, blinking back the moistness. “I guess I must have a heart or something, huh? You breathe a word about it to Schultz or Ramirez, we’ll be exchanging gunfire.”
“Toss me a block now, Mike,” Emily said, taking a deep breath. “We need to debrief the girl while she’s still fresh. I need to get Mary Beth alone.”
“Mrs. Haas? Can I talk to you for a moment?” I said, tapping the mother on the arm. “We need to start thinking about a media strategy. It’s very important.”
“Now?” she said as I ushered her into the hall. “Can’t it wait? I have to get my daughter cleaned up now. She needs me. Nothing is more important than that. In fact, why are you still here? I’d like you to leave so we can all get back to normal.”
“Mom!” Mary Beth yelled. It was the first time she’d spoken since she’d come inside. “They need to talk to me. Is that so insane? Ugggh. Stop treating me like I’m three. I’m fine.”
Ann Haas’s eyes widened in surprise as I was finally able to get her out into the hall. I was starting to like the feisty teen more by the minute. Emily began questioning the girl.
“Hi, Mary Beth. My name is Emily Parker. I work with the FBI. I can’t tell you how happy we are that you’re okay. But right now, I need you to answer some questions to see if we can catch the person who abducted you.”
“If you’re going to give me a speech about rape kits and stuff, don’t bother. He didn’t touch me.”
“Good. That’s very good. In that case, Mary Beth, can you describe him? How old is he? What does he look like?”
“He’s in his late fifties maybe. Broad-shouldered, about six feet tall. He has salt-and-pepper hair. He’s actually pretty handsome. He reminded me of that actor, the father from The Day After Tomorrow. Dennis Quaid. Only paler and with glasses. He also wore an expensive suit.”
Parker scribbled it down. Why wouldn’t this guy wear a mask or something if he was going to let her go? she thought. Was it sloppiness? Another trick?
“He’s actually not that bad a guy,” Mary Beth continued. “I know it sounds weird, but he cares about stuff. Probably too much. After everything, I guess I feel sorry for him more than anything else.”
What?
“How do you mean?” Parker said instead.
“He gave me a list of questions about the horrible direction this world is headed in. Like a test, I guess. Every correct answer I gave made him happier and happier. He was actually crying at the end. He told me how proud he was of me. Told me to try to learn everything I could at Bard. Said that the world was really going to need me. He apologized for having put me through the whole thing and then he drove me to a corner and put me in a cab. He even paid the cabbie.”
Parker had to use effort not to shake her head in bafflement. This guy really was nuts.
“You didn’t happen to get his plate?”
“No,” she said. “It was a light-colored van. Yellow, I think.”
“Anything else at all, Mary Beth?”
“He hand-rolls his own cigarettes. He made a cross with the ashes on my forehead right before he let me out. Look,” she said, reaching up to touch it.
Parker grabbed her wrist tightly as the girl went to wipe it off.
“Mike! Get in here!” she yelled triumphantly. “I think we got a print!”
BECAUSE WE DIDN’T have time to wait for the Crime Scene Unit to arrive, we lifted the print ourselves. And when I say “we,” I mean Emily.
I stayed with Mary Beth while Special Agent Parker went to the G car and came back with some surgical gloves and 3M fingerprint tape.
“This will just take a second, hon,” Emily said as she laid the tape meticulously across the teen’s forehead. With a light, deft motion, Emily flattened out the tape and peeled off the print.
I had to contain a whoop as she laid the tape on the white fingerprint card. It was perfect. Even taking a print off a pane of cold glass can sometimes be difficult, but Emily had lifted this print as well as any CSU pro. Was there anything this Bureau chick couldn’t do?
Afterward, we headed back to the G car’s trunk, and Emily took out a large gray box. It was a LiveScan 10 printer, a portable fingerprint scanning machine. She connected it to the Fed car’s Mobile Computer Terminal and with one small scan, the print was fired down to the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
If our boy’s prints were among the fifty million the IAFIS contained, we’d get a response within two hours. This was by far our best lead yet. I was stoked.
“We need to get this down to the lab in DC as well for synchrotron infrared microspectroscopy,” Emily said, dropping the print card into an evidence envelope.
“A syncro infra what?” I said.
“It’s brand-new. See, in every print there’s little traces of sweat. The lab techs can now look at the sweat and detect chemical markers. The markers reveal whether a suspect uses drugs and even detect the hormones that indicate the suspect’s sex. If we don’t get a hit on the print, we need to obtain as much info as we can. You’re telling me you never heard of it?”
“Of course I’ve heard of it. Are you kidding me?” I lied. “I just wanted to see if you knew.”
Chapter 63
MARY BETH WAS sitting down with the just-arrived police sketch artist when we left the brownstone. That’s when I noticed that the crowd outside the Haases’ had
