McBride asked Oliver, “What’s up?”
“The company that makes the Stonewalker asks its retailers to send in the names of customers. They use it for direct mail promotions, customer satisfaction surveys — that sort of thing.”
After obtaining a copy of the list, Oliver sorted it by state and time frame, taking only those purchases made within the last month in D.C., Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. He then filtered the list through the FBI’s database. Of the sixty-seven Stonewalkers sold in the last month, two were bought with credit cards that had been reported stolen; of these, one report turned out to be a case of misplacement, the other genuine theft.
As Oliver’s team went to work on the lead, the report on the footprints found on the Dames Quarter road came in. The tires were identified as Bridgestone 225/75R14s, standard equipment for 1999 Ford Econoline vans. A regional check showed theft reports on fourteen Econolines, none more recent than two months ago. All the vans in question had either been recovered or had been identified as having been disassembled at chop shops.
“Rental?” McBride guessed.
“Right,” said Oliver. “However good these guys were with the kidnapping, they got sloppy with their logistics. We checked rental agencies that handle Econolines. Two days ago a Hertz office in Ellicott City outside Baltimore reported one of theirs overdue. The credit card used was reported stolen later that day.”
“Stolen how?”
“That’s the interesting part. Both cards were lifted by pickpockets.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“The Baltimore and Ellicott City police are looking for the van. We’re working on getting the credit slip from Hertz.”
“So what now?”
“Now we hope our luck holds and we get a match on the signatures. Fingerprints would be better, but … Well, hell, if we get prints, I’ll start going to church regularly.”
McBride understood. The chances were good that Amelia Root’s kidnappers had arrest records. Generally, kidnapping is a learned behavior, not something your average law-abiding citizen dives into on a whim. If this lead turned up a suspect’s name, they’d be back in the race. “Jesus, could we be that lucky?”
“A little good luck on our part, a little stupidity on their part … Who knows.”
A minute later the store owner poked his head out the door and waved at them. They went inside. The owner had turned on the lights; lying on the glass counter was a credit card receipt.
“I only touched the edges like you said,” the owner offered.
Oliver pulled a clear plastic evidence bag from his coat pocket, laid it flat on the counter, and nudged the receipt inside. He looked at McBride. “Follow me back.”
The agent from Elucott City arrived at Quantum twenty minutes behind McBride and Oliver, who sat together in a conference room, sipping coffee and staring at the walls as technicians from both Latent Prints and Questioned Documents processed the receipts. Shortly after two A.M. the conference room door opened and the techs walked in. The man from QD laid the two evidence bags on the table and slid them across to Oliver.
“You’re golden,” the tech announced. “Both signatures were forged by the same person. I make him male, right handed, early to mid-twenties — I can give you more once I get it into the computer.”
“And the prints?”
“Eight point match on each,” the Latent man replied. “Same person handled both slips.”
Oliver slapped his palm on the table and whooped. “Hot damn! Did you—”
“Already fed it into IAFIS,” the Latent tech replied, referring to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, pronounced “ay-fis.” The Latent Print Unit and IAFIS — which contains over 38 million individual fingerprints — form the FBI’s Disaster Squad, which responds to both man-made and natural disasters to help local and federal authorities identify victims. “If he’s in the database, we should have a hit by mid-morning.”
“Thanks, guys, you’ve made our day.”
They talked for a few more minutes and then everyone left except for Oliver and McBride.
Joe glanced over at his adopted partner. “So, what’s your denomination?”
Oliver laughed. “You name it, I’m joining it.”
9
Founded in the seventh century by a vagabond Welsh monk named Maclow, the city of St. Malo has been sitting astride the Ranee Estuary on France’s Emerald Coast for over fourteen hundred years, during which time it has been a nexus for war, rebellion, and independent spirit, a history which Malouins and the people of Brittany proudly guard to this day.
During the League Wars of the late 1500s the people of St. Malo rejected the local governor, a protestant, then stormed the castle, routed the local garrison, and declared their independence as a sovereign nation. In the seventeenth century St. Malo grew into one of the richest ports in Britanny, a haven for merchants, pirates, and corsairs plying the trade routes of India, China, and Africa. In the late 1600s Britain’s William of Orange, hoping to break the city’s economical hold on the Emerald Coast, let loose his fleet on the port, but St. Malo escaped nearly unscathed behind its ramparts and thick stone walls.
Finally, after weathering centuries of conflict, St. Malo felt its first defeat as in August 1944, when the German Wehrmacht, unwilling to abandon this critical part of the Adantic Wall to the Allied invasion force, razed it to the ground. The twelve thousand troops garrisoned in St. Malo destroyed the quays, locks, breakwaters, and harbor machinery, then set fire to the town center before retreating to Citadel at St. Servan.
After the war the independent spirit of Malouins reasserted itself as they chose to salvage what remained of the demolished city center. Bricks and cobblestones and timbers were picked from the wreckage and used to lay the foundations for a new St. Malo. Today the skyline is virtually indistinguishable from its medieval self, with narrow, canyonlike cobblestone streets, mansions of sloping granite slate roofs and peaked dormer windows, and castle-like ramparts and baritzans that sit perched atop the 1.5 miles of wall that encloses the intra muros, or “old walled city.”
Though he didn’t yet know the reason behind her flight, Tanner felt certain it was to St. Malo that Susanna Vetsch had come after leaving Paris, and it was toward St. Malo that Tanner and Cahil headed in the early morning hours after leaving the Pigalle, a trip inspired, according to Cahil, by “a cartoon goat and a teenager’s secret code.”
The cryptic graffiti Tanner had found scribbled on the inside of Susanna’s kitchen cupboard was not only a clue to where she’d gone, but also he hoped, a sign that the Susanna he’d once known hadn’t completely lost herself in France’s underworld.
As do most toddlers, when Susanna was a child she’d mangled her share of unpronounceable words and phrases, but the one that found its way into the Vetsch family lexicon was her smushed-together version of the words “go” and “to.” “I want goat the zoo,” she would announce, or “I want goat the park.” The abbreviation stuck and eventually mutated into a simple drawing of a goat. From then on, it became their shorthand for any destination or trip.
As a teenager, the rebellious and inventive Susanna, certain her overprotective parents were spying on her, had developed a code she’d once revealed to Tanner on one of their “uncle/niece” outings. Boys’ phone numbers, rendezvous times with her girlfriends, and party addresses were all veiled from prying eyes by subtracting from them her favorite number, four. Like “goat,” the practice became second nature for her, a fond attachment to her childhood.