Lost Light

12

The file was marked with Martha Gessler’s name on the tab. I took out my notebook and wrote that down at the top of a fresh page before opening the inch-thick file folder and seeing what Lindell had left me. I figured I had maybe fifteen minutes tops to look through the file.

On top of the documents stacked in the file was a single page with nothing on it but a phone number. I figured this was left specifically for me so I folded it and put it in my pocket. The rest of the file was a collection of investigative reports, most of which had Lindell’s name and signature on them. It listed him as working for the OPR. I knew that was the Office of Professional Responsibility, the bureau’s version of Internal Affairs.

The file contained the reports detailing the investigation into Special Agent Martha Gessler’s disappearance without a trace on March 19, 2000. This date was immediately significant to me because I knew Angella Benton was murdered the night of May 16, 1999. This put Gessler’s disappearance roughly ten months later, about the same time that Cross said the agent had called Dorsey about the currency number.

According to the investigative file, Gessler was working as a crime analyst, not a field agent, at the time of her disappearance. She had long since transferred from the bank robbery unit where she had known my wife and into a cyber unit. She worked Internet investigations and was developing computer programs for tracking criminal patterns. I assumed the program Cross told me about was something that came out of this assignment.

On the evening of March 19, 2000, Gessler left work in Westwood after a long day. Fellow agents remembered her being in the office until at least 8:30 p.m. But she apparently never made it to her home in Sherman Oaks. She was unmarried. Her disappearance was not discovered until the next day, when she did not show up for work and did not answer phone calls or pages. A fellow agent went to her home to check on her and discovered her missing. He found her home partially ransacked but later determined her two dogs, crazed with hunger and inattention, had spent the night tearing the place apart. I noticed in the incident report that the fellow agent who made this discovery happened to be Roy Lindell. I wasn’t sure if this meant anything. Possibly as an agent assigned to the OPR he would be sent to check on a fellow agent’s well-being. Nevertheless, I wrote his name under hers in my notebook.

Gessler’s personal car, a 1998 Ford Taurus, was not found at the house. Eight days later it was located in a long-term parking lot at LAX. The key was left on top of one of the rear tires. The rear bumper showed an eighteen-inch surface scratch and a broken taillight, damages acquaintances of the agent said were new. Again, Lindell was listed in the reports as one of these acquaintances.

The trunk of the car was empty and the interior offered no immediate clues as to where Gessler was or what had happened. The briefcase containing her laptop computer that she was known to have left the office with was gone as well.

Forensic analysis of the entire car found no evidence of foul play. No record of Gessler taking any flight from LAX was ever found. Agents checked flights at Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario and Orange County airports and also found no flight with her name on the passenger list.

Gessler was known to carry an ATM card, two gas credit cards as well as American Express and Visa cards. On the night of her disappearance she used the Chevron card to buy gas and a Diet Coke at a station on Sepulveda Boulevard near the Getty Museum. The receipt indicated she purchased 12.4 gallons of midgrade unleaded gasoline at 8:53 p.m. Her car’s tank held a maximum of 16 gallons.

The purchase was significant because it placed Gessler in the Sepulveda Pass -her normal route home from Westwood to Sherman Oaks-at a time that coordinated with her leaving the bureau offices in Westwood. The night-shift cashier at the Chevron also identified Gessler from a photo lineup as a regular customer who had bought gas on the night of March 19. Gessler was an attractive woman. He knew and remembered her. He had told her she didn’t need to drink Diet Coke and she seemed pleased by the compliment.

This confirmed sighting was important for several reasons. First, if Gessler was going from Westwood to LAX, where her car was later found, it was unlikely that she would have traveled north into the Sepulveda Pass to buy gas. The airport was southwest of the bureau office. The service station was directly to the north.

The next significance was that Gessler’s Chevron card was used a second time the same night at a Chevron service station off Highway 114 in the north county. The card was used at point of purchase to buy 29.1 gallons of gasoline, more than Gessler’s and most other cars could hold. Highway 114 was the main route to the desert areas of the northeast county. It was also a major trucking route.

Last but not least in terms of significance was the fact that none of Gessler’s credit cards were ever found or used again.

There was no summary or conclusion in the reports I scanned. This would be something the investigator-Lindell-would draw for himself and keep to himself. You don’t write a report concluding that your fellow agent is dead. You don’t say the obvious and you always speak about the missing agent in the present tense.

But it was clear to me from what I had read what the conclusion had to be. Sometime after Gessler pumped gas into her car in the Sepulveda Pass she was stopped and abducted and it didn’t look like she was coming back. She had probably been rear-ended. She then pulled to the side of the road to check damage and possibly to exchange insurance information with the other driver.

What happened next was unknown. But she was likely abducted by force and her car was dumped at the LAX lot-a move that probably guaranteed it would not be located for several days, thereby allowing the trail to go cold and the memories of potential witnesses to fade.

The second gas purchase was the curiosity. Was it a mistake, a clue pointing to the direction of the agent’s abductors? Or was it misdirection, an intentional move by the abductors to point the investigation the wrong way? And the amount of gasoline purchased raised a whole other question. What kind of vehicle were they looking for? A tow truck? A pickup? A moving van?

Bureau agents descended on the station but there were no exterior video cameras and no credible witnesses to the use of the credit card because it had been a pay-at-the-pump purchase. It was the last blip on the radar screen, but nothing more than that.

Nevertheless, an agent was still missing. There was no choice. The file contained the short summaries of three days of aerial searches over the desert of the northeast county. It was a needle-in-the-haystack operation but it had to be done. It proved fruitless.

Agents also spent several days on the likely routes that Gessler would have taken through the Sepulveda Pass on her way home. The Pass cut through the Santa Monica Mountains. While the south slope offered few choices besides the 405 Freeway and Sepulveda Boulevard, the northern slope offered a network of shortcuts pioneered over fifty years of rush hours. Agents traveled all of these roads looking for witnesses to an accident involving a blue Ford Taurus, an accident scene that might have seemed routine but was actually the abduction of a federal agent.

They got nothing.

The Sepulveda Pass had been the location of similar crimes in the past. The son of popular entertainer Bill Cosby had been robbed and murdered on the dark side of the road one night just a few years before. And over the last decade a handful of women had been abducted and raped, one of them stabbed to death, after pulling off the road when their vehicles were rear-ended or became disabled. These incidents were not thought to be the work of one person. But rather that the Pass, with its hillsides, dark, winding roads and anonymity, was a place that drew predators. Like lions keeping watch on a water hole, the human predators would not need to wait long in the Sepulveda Pass. The cut through the mountains was one of the busiest traffic corridors in the world.

It was possible Gessler was the victim of a random crime, the very thing she sought to categorize and make sense of in her job. She could have drawn a predator at the service station, maybe opening her purse too wide when she pulled out her credit card. Maybe drawing a tail for some other unknown reason. She was an attractive woman. If a service station attendant had noticed it and acted on it in a subtle way, a predator could have just as likely seen what he needed in her as well.

Still, the team of agents initially assigned to the case had doubts about Gessler falling into the profile of prior victims in the Pass. Gessler’s car advertised no personal riches. And she would have been a formidable opponent. She was a highly trained federal agent after all. She was also tall, standing almost six feet tall and weighing a hundred and forty pounds. She worked out regularly at the L.A. Fitness Club on Sepulveda and had been taking Tai-Bo training for several years. Her charts at the club showed she had four percent body fat. She was mostly muscle and she knew how to use it.

Gessler was also known to wear her service weapon while off duty. On the night she disappeared she had been wearing black slacks and blazer with a white blouse. Her pistol, a Smith amp; Wesson 9mm, was holstered on her right hip. The service station attendant recalled seeing the weapon because Gessler was not wearing her blazer when she put gas in her car at the self-pump station. The blazer was later found on a hanger hooked above the rear driver’s side window in the Taurus.

All of this meant that when Gessler’s car was rear-ended somewhere in the Pass that night, she got out of the car with a weapon clearly showing on her hip. She got out of that car a woman who was competent and confident in her physical skills. It was a combination that would have likely been a high deterrent to attack, that would seemingly convince any predator to find another victim.

So while the bureau never gave an inch on the possibility that Gessler was the randomly chosen victim of a crime, Lindell headed a parallel investigation into the possibility that Gessler had been specifically targeted because of her job as an FBI agent.

The reports on this branch of the investigation accounted for more than half of the documents in the file in front of me. Though I could tell that I did not have the complete investigative file, it was clear that agents on the case left no stone uncovered in seeking a possible link to Gessler’s disappearance. Cases ranging back to Gessler’s first years in the Los Angeles field office were examined for potential links to the investigation. Partners and colleagues from all her years in the bureau were questioned about potential enemies and threats she might have received. Among these reports was a summary of an interview with former agent Eleanor Wish, my former wife, conducted in Las Vegas. She had not spoken with Gessler in nearly ten years before the disappearance. She had no recollection of any threats or anything else that might help in the investigation.

Every criminal Gessler ever put in jail or testified against was run down and checked. Most were cleared through alibis. None surfaced as a prime suspect.

According to the reports, Gessler had become the go-to agent in the L.A. field office for any and all requests for computer-related searches and investigations. It was to be expected in a giant bureaucracy like the FBI. Most requests by L.A. agents for computer-based expertise would be shipped to bureau offices in Washington and Quantico, sometimes taking days before being approved and then weeks before any results were shipped back. But Gessler was part of a growing breed of agents with high computer skills who liked to do things for herself. The special agent in charge of the L.A. office became aware of this and, consequently, Gessler was taken off the street, where she had worked for several years in the bank robbery unit. She was placed in a newly formed computer unit, where she handled requests from street agents while developing her own computer programs.

This meant Gessler had her finger in a lot of investigative pies at the time she disappeared. I checked my watch and quickly skimmed through dozens of reports detailing work she had done on different cases in just the month before her disappearance. Lindell and other agents working for him backtracked on these jobs, looking for anything that was a clue to why Gessler had disappeared. The closest it appeared they came to finding something was when they reviewed Gessler’s work on an investigation of an escort service that advertised women for hire on a website. Gessler’s work was part of the organized crime unit’s investigation into the eastern mob’s ties to prostitution in Los Angeles.

According to what I read, Gessler was able to find Internet connections between websites advertising women in more than a dozen cities. Women were being moved from city to city and client to client. Money generated by the escort services flowed to Florida and then to New York. Seven weeks before Gessler disappeared a grand jury indicted nine men under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. Exactly one week before her disappearance, Gessler testified about her part in the investigation during a pretrial hearing in the case. Her testimony was described as effective and it was assumed she would testify when the case went to trial. She was not, however, a key witness. Her testimony was seemingly part of the linkage between the websites and the defendants. The key witness was one of the members of the ring who had cut a deal with prosecutors to escape a stiff sentence.

The possibility that Gessler was targeted because she was a witness was a long shot but it seemed to be the best thing going. Lindell worked it hard, judging by the number of reports and the details they contained. But apparently nothing came of it. The last report in the file pertaining to the RICO case described this branch of the investigation as “open and active but without substantive leads at this time.” I recognized it as bureauspeak meaning this path of investigation had hit a dead end.

I closed the file and checked my watch again. Lindell had been gone seventeen minutes. There was nothing in the file about Gessler filing a report or notifying a supervisor or colleague that she had run a computer cross-reference check on the currency numbers contained on the flier put out by Cross and Dorsey. Nothing that said she had gotten a hit and had called the LAPD to report that one of the numbers on the currency report was bad.

After putting away my notebook I stood up and stretched my back and paced a little bit in the small room. I checked the door and found it unlocked. That was good. They weren’t holding me like a suspect. At least, not yet. After a few more minutes I got tired of waiting and stepped out into the hallway. I looked both ways and saw no one, not even Nunez. I went back into the room and picked up the file and then started walking out the way I had come in. I got all the way to the front waiting room without anyone stopping me or asking where I was going. I nodded to the receptionist through the glass and took the elevator down.