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Sitting in the front seat of his van, he tried to control what he liked to call his original self. It was his original self which emerged when he was doing his special experiments on his specimens back at home. It was his original self which allowed him to ignore the screams and begging of those specimens so he could focus on his important work.
He had to keep his original self well hidden.
He’d been doing it for years, acting normal.
Detective Keri Locke pleaded with herself not to do it this time. As the most junior detective in the West Los Angeles Pacific Division Missing Persons Unit, she was expected to work harder than anyone else in the division. And as a thirty-five-year-old
It all reinforced her feeling that she was marking time more than really living.
The tricky thing with missing persons cases, at least for adults, was that it wasn’t a crime to disappear.
Without some evidence of foul play, law enforcement was limited in what they could legally do to investigate.
You have got to let the system work.
“So what kind of person is so brazen as to snatch someone in broad daylight near a busy intersection?”
She’d pictured Evie locked away in a place like this a hundred times. Next week it would be five years exactly since she disappeared.
She’d been forced to face her ultimate failure: the inability to find the daughter who’d been stolen from her.
The erotic pictures from Photos had been sent one
by one from Ashley to someone named Walker, apparently the guy with the six-pack.
But she caught a glimpse of blond hair and what looked like part of a tattoo on the right side of his neck.
homicide, robbery, and sex crimes. Keri wasn’t a huge fan. To her, Hillman seemed more interested in covering his own ass than putting it on the line to solve cases.
Keri thought a more appropriate nickname was “asshole.” But since she couldn’t call him that, her little rebellion was to never call him by his preferred nickname either.
The difference was that for Ray, law enforcement was a calling. For her, it was a mission with one ultimate goal—to find her daughter.
But as troubling as that offense was, it wasn’t what had them headed to his place now. Instead, it was his van and Denton’s allegation that he was his dealer.
“Exactly,” Keri agreed. “And I’m willing to bet that whoever did all that also sent Cotton those pictures of the little girls. Cotton claimed
they just showed up in the mail, no return address. Whoever it was knew the guy wouldn’t be able to toss them and that we’d find them when we searched the house, making him look even guiltier.”
“No. But that’s not the worst of it. Whoever our guy is has been planning this for a while. He knew Cotton was Denton Rivers’ dealer. He knew he was a pedophile. And he actively tried to undermine Cotton’s alibi by trying to get him to meet at the mall.”
She had to feel the fear but let it pass through her so she could take action when the wave passed.
“She’s always had money—never had to ask for it. She knew her parents wouldn’t give her any if she just took off. So she started to joke about faking her own abduction and ransoming them.”
“I have an old farm up near Piru, west of Santa Clarita.
“Well, it started with him getting a fake ID for Ashley, so she could come to the clubs and watch the band. Then there was drugs and drinking, not a lot, nothing crazy, but, you know, Ashley’s only fifteen.”
“Then they started committing thrill crimes.”
Two weeks ago, they stole a car and went joyriding. They’ve been having a lot of sex in public places where they could get caught.
“He’s in some kind of trouble. I think someone’s after him, and maybe him plus Ashley, I’m not sure. She said it had something to do with Walker losing some drugs he owed to someone. That’s the main thing I wanted to tell you. She might be mixed up in something. I don’t know. I do know that they were planning on running away to Vegas.”
“This is something that you absolutely have to promise to not repeat because Ashley told it to me in the strictest secrecy.”
one outside their inner circle knows that he is actually the blood father. If the public ever found out how their family was created, his political career would be over. Mia confided all this to Ashley, who then told me when she was a little tipsy one night.”
But when Stafford backed her up, it wasn’t because he thought she was the best person for the job. It was because he thought she was the worst.
If someone was going to end up snooping around in their lives and possibly stumbling on some of their secrets, he wouldn’t mind if that someone was a rookie detective, an emotional basket case, someone who’d been reprimanded multiple times in her short career. If things went south, she was the perfect scapegoat. Keri realized she’d walked right into his trap. And she had a bigger problem. She had no idea what else he was hiding.
“No. This guy was much more careful and deliberate than Evie’s abductor. Other than the van, almost nothing else matches up between the cases.”
The Ghost is a professional kidnapper. It’s a business. And a business like this requires clients, and co-workers, and middlemen. It required an entire network of connections.
If I’m going to catch a pro, I need to talk to a pro.
The dark web was an online underground marketplace where buyers and sellers of various criminal endeavors could find each other.
“That narrows things down quite a bit. There’s no way to be sure but the man you described might be someone they call the Collector.
His primary work is the abduction and sale of people, usually children.”
“Be careful with Auggie, Detective. He’s a seriously bad guy.”
