Full Tilt

32

New York City

After Kate got Grace to bed she made fresh coffee and called Goodsill back so they could work on the Colorado link to the abduction in Alberta.

Could this lead me to Carl Nelson and information about Vanessa?

Kate needed to follow this through.

“Good news, I found my old files,” Goodsill said over the phone. “Fifteen years is a long time but when I read over my notes, it all came back to me, and I found some interesting stuff. I just sent it to you.”

Kate set her phone to speaker, turned the volume low then started downloading the attachments of scanned documents arriving in her in-box.

“Strange thing is,” Goodsill went on, “that clipping you found is the only story that I wrote on the case, but I put in a lot of time on it.”

“What do you mean?” The documents blossoming on Kate’s screen were crumpled, torn and stained bills, invoices, along with other records. “I don’t understand what I’m looking at here. Walk me through everything”

Goodsill took Kate to the beginning. His cousin was married to a Denver detective, Ned Eckles, and the two men got to talking at a family gathering. Goodsill had learned that Ned was looking into a query from Canadian police to run down a partial plate possibly connected to an abduction.

Ned’s supervisors said that the plate info was so vague it could’ve applied to about twenty-five other states, meaning that without something more specific, they didn’t want him investing much time in the check. Using the vehicle description and the plate’s partial sequence, Ned had the records people do an analysis and they came up with five possibilities for Denver.

“Ned ran them all down, made personal visits and questioned the vehicle owners. Four were easily ruled out. And although he’d ruled out the fifth, Ned told me the vehicle owner gave him a bad vibe.”

“You’re talking about this Jerome Fell.”

Kate looked at her monitor and saw notes for Jerome Fell, aged 30, of 2909 Falstaff Street, Denver. Goodsill had scanned in Fell’s driver’s license with a photo of a clean-shaven man with an expression of indifference staring from it. She touched her fingers to the lower part of his face, covering it and visualizing him with a beard. He could resemble Carl Nelson. She couldn’t be sure. There was a time difference of at least fifteen years.

“Yes. Ned had said that before he visited Fell he already knew from US border people that Fell had been to Canada around the time of the abduction and that he’d returned through Eastport, Idaho. But Fell was never detained at the border and never searched.”

“Why?”

“Border people claimed that they never had any alerts about a van and partial plate, at that time. That’s something the Canadians disputed.”

“But Ned met with Fell?”

“Yes.”

“And had a bad vibe about him, yet he still ruled him out? Why?”

“When Ned questioned Fell cold, about his whereabouts for that time period, Fell acknowledged right off that he’d been to Canada on vacation. He said he’d been in British Columbia but not Alberta and even showed Ned motel receipts to prove it.”

“So then what?”

“Ned cleared him, but something about Fell niggled at him. Ned told me later that Fell seemed unusually well prepared, almost as if he were expecting to account for his travels for that period. Still, Ned’s supervisors, citing the partial-plate business, were satisfied and pulled Ned away to other investigations.”

“Was that the end of it?”

“Not quite. Ned was still bothered by Fell and not long after that suggested I do some quiet digging on him.”

“What’d you do?”

“I never talked to Fell. I didn’t want him to get suspicious. I talked to his neighbors, kept an eye on his place. I learned that he was a computer expert, a contractor, that he lived alone, kept to himself and kept up his property. See the pictures. He had a tidy little bungalow with a garage.”

“What did you find out?”

“Not much, but I figured that if this guy had kidnapped a Canadian girl and was living in Denver, this would be a huge story, so before letting it go, I decided to do a trash hit.”

“You stole his garbage from the curb?”

“Yup, I think I did it about six times under cover of night. You ever do that, Kate?”

“A few times.”

“Dirty, messy work, but the Supreme Court says it’s not an invasion of privacy once it’s on the street,” Goodsill said. “You can find out a lot by going through people’s garbage. At first, there was nothing that stood out in Fell’s trash.”

“Did you find anything suggesting that Jerome Fell was an alias?”

“No.”

“You’ve seen the pictures of Carl Nelson. Do you think Nelson and Fell are the same person?”

“Well, fifteen years is a long time, but I thought about that when I saw the stories out of New York and I got to thinking that it sure is possible.”

“Did you find anything with the name Carl Nelson, or anything linking him to Rampart? I don’t see it in the samples you sent me, in the ones I’ve opened so far.”

“I’m afraid not. A lot of junk food wrappers, empty take-out containers, pizza boxes, some bills for cable, for utilities, all to Jerome Fell, or J. Fell. A few items of mail for neighbors sent to his address. I saw that he was not kind. Instead of giving them to his neighbors he opened them and tossed them. It’s all there. I’ve got more coming your way, maybe forty in all.”

“I’m not surprised you didn’t find anything. I know it’s possible he could’ve missed something. But I think he would’ve been careful not to miss anything. You think he would’ve used a shredder.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Maybe he shredded stuff, maybe he burned stuff, but all in all, I found nothing unusual and dropped it. Then my wife noticed something, I’d missed-a couple things actually.”

“What?”

“See attachment number sixteen, the stained receipt for a bracelet kit, a Spirograph set, a bead art kit and a colored pencil set?”

“My wife thought those are items or toys you’d buy for a young girl, especially one who might be bored.”

Kate’s concentration sharpened on that point and she agreed.

“Then my wife noticed another one. That’s number twenty-two, a small ripped receipt from a drugstore for sanitary napkins and whatnot, excuse me, but see?”

Kate moved her mouse to number twenty-two and opened it.

“Yes.”

“Now, I looked into this and most American girls get their period when they turn twelve or so, and this Canadian girl, who could’ve been your sister, was about ten when she was abducted, right?”

“Actually, my sister would’ve been closer to eleven and a half.”

“Those two factors were kind of disturbing, but I said to my wife, Fell could’ve had a girlfriend, who had a daughter, you know? There could be explanations. Besides there are privacy issues and I was thinking, how do I challenge him? So I gave it some thought over the next few weeks, thinking the best thing to do was talk to Ned.”

“What happened?”

“Ned suffered a heart attack and stroke. That was a big scare for my family and it took me away from things for a while. By the time I went back to check on Fell a month or so later, he’d moved away. I couldn’t get a new address for him.”

“What about the Realtors, neighbors, his employer, the post office?”

“I tried them all, Kate, and got nothing. It was like he’d vanished.”

Kate sat there staring at the items on her monitor. Several moments of silence passed before she thanked Goodsill and hung up.

For the next hour or so, Kate clicked on every attachment, examining each one for clues, anything Goodsill missed. But he’d been thorough. He’d done everything that she would’ve done and as she clicked from item to item, she considered herself lucky he’d helped her.

When Kate came to pictures of Jerome Fell’s house, her thoughts darkened.

Was Vanessa held captive here? Was Fell actually Carl Nelson? Or was she chasing another mirage?

Kate pulled up the FBI photo of a Nelson Wanted poster and positioned it next to the Jerome Fell’s Colorado driver’s license. There was about fifteen years of time between the two images. Kate placed her notebook against her monitor so that only the eyes and top of the head of each photo were visible.

Are his eyes the same?

In both cases they had the icy veneer of a deep-seated resentment. Definitely a guy who wouldn’t return your misdirected mail, Kate thought before looking at the miscellaneous attachments again, the invoices, the bills and what appeared to be a misdirected invoice or note.

What’s this?

Something from Chicago about a burial site of Krasimira Zurrn.

What could that be? Who is Krasimira Zurrn?

She’d check that out later. It was 3:45 a.m. She had to get to bed.