James Swain - The King Tides

“That’s the Montague lacrosse team circa 1988. Mates was the team captain. He’s standing in the front row on the very left. Look at his right eye.”

She raised the phone to her face. “He’s wearing an eye patch.”

“If you read the posts, his teammates mention him getting hurt during the final game of the year. Mates took a stick in the eye.”

“That still doesn’t prove anything.”

“There’s more.”

He took the cell phone and pulled up Mates’s graduation photograph. He put the cell phone in front of her face. In the photo, Mates’s right eye was scarred, the discoloration rectangular-shaped in the lower part of the iris.

“Is that the bad eye you saw?” he asked.

Her hand came up to her mouth. “Oh my God.”

Her face was pale, and she was at a loss for words. She’d looked the murderous bastards right in the eye and not recognized them. It was going to haunt her, and he hoped she was strong enough to recover from it.

“I found Mates’s and Holloway’s Facebook pages and searched the postings. Mates relocated to Fort Lauderdale eight years ago, while Holloway followed a month later. They must work out of one of the FBI’s Miami offices.”

“Do you think they’re a couple? The FBI has an open policy on gays, lesbians, and bisexuals becoming agents, so it wouldn’t be unusual.”

“I think they’re both straight. A coworker at the Bedford office posted a photo from Mates’s going-away party. There was a hand-painted sign that said TO THE LAST CONFIRMED BACHELOR. I think Mates and Holloway are serial killers who realized they were less likely to get caught if they stuck together. I found their address on the DMV database. They share a house in an area called Sistrunk. It’s a slum.”

“They live in a slum?”

“They’re not the first serial killers who’ve done that. Your neighbors are less likely to bother you in a bad neighborhood. We need to take a ride over there and case the place. If my hunch is correct, they’re holding a girl there now.”

“What are you basing that on? Because I’m expecting a new set of photos? If we show up and start snooping around, they’ll get suspicious and get rid of any incriminating evidence. We need to handle this by the book.”

“There’s no time for that. We need to move fast.”

“Why? What did you find?”

“The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children keeps a database of all children that are reported missing. I have access through Team Adam, and reviewed the most recent cases. One stuck out. An eighteen-year-old girl named Ryean Bartell was reported missing yesterday. Ryean works as a server at the Jamba Juice in the Coral Ridge Mall. When she didn’t show up to work, her manager contacted the sheriff.”

“She’s only been gone a day. How can you be sure it’s an abduction?”

“Yesterday was payday. The manager thought it was strange that Ryean didn’t come in to collect her paycheck, so she called Ryean’s roommate to see if there was a problem. The roommate said that Ryean didn’t come home the night before and had disappeared.” He paused and then said, “She fits the profiles of the other victims. Mates and Holloway abducted Ryean after she got off work two nights ago, and took her to their house in Sistrunk. They’re going to go through their ritual, then kill her and snap photos and drop them off at a local pharmacy so they can keep torturing you. Or, we can stop them.”

He rose from the couch and pulled out his car keys.

“Come on. Maybe we’ll get lucky and save some poor girl’s life,” he said.

Broward County was a vast place, with two million inhabitants spread across 1,320 square miles and thirty vastly different communities. Of those neighborhoods, none was more dangerous than Sistrunk, in the central part of the county.

Sistrunk was a slum filled with crack dens, Section Eight housing, and badass drug dealers staking out their turf on every corner. Of the cops that Lancaster had worked with, he did not know a single one that would answer a distress call from there at night.

The address showing on the DMV site for Mates and Holloway was on NW Ninth Street in an area called Washington Park. Northwest Ninth was a four-lane road with residences taking up one side and a line of businesses on the other. The most prominent was a Fast Stop Food Store that also sold hard liquor and lottery tickets.

It was late morning when they grabbed coffee from McDonald’s and sipped it while sitting in the Fast Stop’s lot. They were both running on fumes and knew that a jolt of coffee would trick their bodies into staying alert for a few more hours. They had a clear view of their suspects’ residence, a one-story concrete-block house with iron bars on the windows and a fenced-in yard. It was a depressing place with equally depressing neighbors.

“This is a rat hole,” Daniels said. “Are you sure it’s the right address?”

“This is the place,” he said. “Let’s wait and see if anybody’s home.”

“Why would they live here? It’s dangerous.”

“It is dangerous,” he admitted. “But it also offers them protection. Team Adam did a study of abductors who held their victims for extended periods. This included Jaycee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, and the three women held in a house in Cleveland — Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus. The study concluded that these women’s abductors had chosen to live in economically depressed communities because people who lived in those areas often have criminal records. Neighbors won’t call the police if they see suspicious activity because they don’t trust the police.”

“You’re saying the neighbors know something bad is going on inside the house, but don’t want to get involved.”

“That’s right. Jaycee Dugard was a good example. Her abductor kept her imprisoned in a tent behind his house for eighteen years. The neighbors on either side could clearly see Jaycee, and the two children she had by her abductor, but they never raised a stink or called the police.”

“Do you think Mates and Holloway’s neighbors know what they’re up to?”

“I’m sure they’ve had their suspicions. Mates and Holloway have been abducting and murdering young girls for over seven years. Someone must have heard something.”

“The FBI received the first photos from Houston and the second set from Atlanta. How do you explain that?”

“I think they did that to throw the FBI off the scent. They flew to Houston and Atlanta for a long weekend, killed the girls in a rented house, took photographs of them with their camera, and dropped the film off at a Walgreens to be developed. Miami is their home base.”

“That’s a lot of work, don’t you think?”

He turned in his seat and stared at her.

“It worked, didn’t it?” he said.

They finished their drinks in silence. Movement on the other side of the street caught his eye.

“Looks like we’ve got some activity,” he said.

A pair of binoculars lay in Daniels’s lap. She lifted them to her face and had a look. “I see a white male wearing cargo pants and a sleeveless T-shirt coming out the front door. He’s walking down the front path.”

“Is it Mates or Holloway?”

“It looks like Mates. Same haircut, but grayer. Looks like he still works out. He’s crossing the street. His destination appears to be the Fast Stop.”

Mates came into view. His arms were tight, and he had a weight lifter’s thick neck. They watched their suspect step onto the sidewalk and enter the grocery store. Daniels started to get out of the rental, but Lancaster stopped her.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I want to tail him, see what he’s doing.”