James Swain - The King Tides

On his Kindle, he ordered the e-book edition of The Hanover Killers . A message on the page thanked him for his purchase and told him that the book was in the process of downloading.

He tucked his Kindle under his arm and went to the kitchen and poured himself an iced tea. He’d lost track of the time and saw that it was five o’clock. He’d spent the better part of his day trying to figure out how Special Agent Beth Daniels fit into this confusing puzzle, and his instincts told him he was getting close. In the living room, he put his drink on the coffee table, sat down on the couch, and started to read.

Dartmouth was one of the country’s most prestigious research universities and a member of the Ivy League. Tucked away in the sleepy burg of Hanover in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley, it was a leader in medicine, engineering, and business, a place of higher learning where nothing exciting ever happened.

That had all changed on a bitterly cold Saturday evening in late January 1999. An eighteen-year-old student named Phoebe Linkletter was working a part-time job at Banana Republic at the local mall, and phoned her roommate to say she’d meet her at a popular watering hole called the Canoe Club after she got off work. When Phoebe didn’t show up at the arranged time, her roommate called the police. Three days later, Phoebe’s naked, mutilated body was found in a wooded area on the outskirts of town. The Dartmouth police conducted an investigation and hauled in Phoebe’s boyfriend, whom she’d broken up with right before the holidays. The boyfriend had a rock-solid alibi for the night of the killing, and was released.

One week later, an eighteen-year-old exchange student named Naseema Agarwai went missing. Naseema had gone to her part-time job at a yoga studio in a strip mall, and never returned to her apartment a half mile away. Two days later, her naked and disfigured body was found in a field behind the Hood Museum of Art. The crime scene was identical to the Linkletter killing, right down to the way Naseema’s body was displayed like a snow angel on the frozen ground. Believing they might be dealing with a serial killer, the police contacted the Manchester office of the FBI and asked for their help. The FBI sent two seasoned field agents to work the investigation. While the agents were on campus conducting interviews with friends and classmates of the victims, a third student was abducted. She was a sophomore named Beth Daniels, and her miraculous escape from her kidnappers would earn her the title of “The one that got away.”

Daniels was walking from class to her apartment complex when two men wearing black ski masks jumped out from behind a hedge. They began wrestling with her and tried to tie her up. Beth put up a hell of a fight, and she landed some serious blows before being subdued and thrown in the trunk of a dark sedan. In their haste to escape, her abductors did not slam the trunk with enough force, and it did not properly close. It had been a harsh winter with lots of ice, and the roads in Hanover were filled with potholes. Several miles outside of town on a quiet two-lane road, the sedan hit a pothole so hard it popped the trunk open. The jolt also woke Beth up.

“At first, I didn’t know where I was. All I could see was bright blue sky, and I started wondering if I’d died and gone to heaven,” Daniels later told the newspaper. “Then the trunk started to close and the sky disappeared. It was so scary.”

Daniels stuck her foot out and stopped the trunk from closing. The sedan had slowed down, and she decided to take her chance. Her wrists were tied behind her back, so she struggled to pull herself to a sitting position, then managed to get her feet beneath her. With the sedan still moving, she jumped out and rolled across the macadam, dislocating her shoulder and chipping two front teeth. Then she got up and fled into the woods. The sedan had pulled over, and her abductors ran after her.

“They chased me for a while, and I could hear their breathing,” Daniels was quoted as saying. “Whenever the breathing got closer, I made myself run faster. The ground was slippery, and I heard one of them fall and his partner fall on top of him. I stopped and turned around. I looked right at them, and I cursed them. Then I took off.”

With that, the killings at Dartmouth had ended. No more coeds disappeared, and life returned to normal. The FBI sent a special team to Hanover to take over the case. The team had a profiler who determined that the killers either lived in the area or had spent a great deal of time in town. This conclusion was based upon the killers’ use of back roads and geographical knowledge of the campus. Hanover had a population of seventeen thousand, and two strangers would have been noticed. The killers were local.

This revelation had sent a chill through the community. If the killers lived in the area, who were they? Did they work at the campus or in town? Perhaps they were public employees and worked at the post office or sanitation department. Or maybe they were students or teachers. It could have been anyone.

During her tussle with her abductors, Beth had managed to rake her fingernails across one of the men’s faces. The police forensics department had gotten a tiny piece of this skin from Beth, and turned it over to the FBI, who had run it against a database of known serial killers. It had turned up nothing, and everyone had forgotten about it. But then an unusual thing happened. Men living in Hanover came to the police department and gave samples of hair or saliva so that their DNA could be run against the abductor’s. The men did this to clear themselves so that their friends and family would know they were not one of the monsters that had taken two innocent young lives.

Within a week, over a thousand men were cleared. At the end of two weeks, the number was three thousand. And by week three, every single male in Hanover who wasn’t in a nursing home, lying in a hospital bed, or in jail had been tested and cleared. If the killers were locals, they had done a good job of rendering themselves invisible.

And that was how the book ended, with a giant question mark hanging over the town and its people, the case unsolved, the killers never brought to justice. In the epilogue, the author had speculated as to who the killers might be. He’d also interviewed Beth Daniels, who was a senior at Dartmouth at the time of the book’s writing. Her life had gone back to normal, except for one thing. She no longer wished to be a research scientist, and had decided to study criminology and enter into law enforcement.

He’d found Special Agent Beth Daniels.

He placed his Kindle on the coffee table and stared into space. The pieces of the puzzle were swirling around, and he was having a hard time fitting them together. Daniels looked like Nicki, just older, and she also looked like Cassandra on the lewd videos he’d watched. He’d come to the conclusion that Nicki hadn’t created the videos because there was no time in her young life to have slipped away from her parents and done so. Someone else had created and posted them on the internet sites visited by perverts.

It felt like a cleverly constructed sting. Put tantalizing videos of a pretty teenager on the internet and draw the scum out from beneath their rocks. The FBI was masterful at setting up stings, and he could see them orchestrating this. If that was true, then Beth Daniels was certainly behind it, since this was her turf. But why had she gone and used her niece as bait? Daniels was in the business of catching sexual predators, and would have surely known the danger she was putting Nicki in.

He didn’t know the answer and decided to find out. Soon he was on his laptop searching the internet for a phone number for the FBI’s offices at Quantico. The FBI was massive, and Quantico housed several divisions — including the Violent Crimes Against Children/Online Predators unit. He called a general information number, and an automated voice answered. He listened to the directory and punched the number that would allow him to dial by name. There were a lot of agents, and he was happy that Daniels was at the beginning of the alphabet. Her extension was #167. He punched it into his cell phone’s keypad and heard the call go through.