Effrem returned with two large cups of coffee. He handed one to Jack, then climbed into the driver’s seat.
Jack showed him Eunice Miller’s picture. Effrem said, “Sweet old lady?”
“The question is, was she on that train?”
“And did Möller do something to her?” Had she been in the car with Möller, alive and bound, or dead in the backseat?
Shit. Jack chastised himself for not having checked the scrub brush bordering the train platform. If Eunice Miller had been lying there dying, only feet from where Jack had been standing…
“I need a pay phone,” he said.
“There was one a few blocks back.”
Effrem pulled out, retraced their route, and did a U-turn and pulled to the curb beside the pay phone. Jack got out, mentally rehearsed, then dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, Jack put some gravel in his voice and said, “Hey, I was jogging by the train station on Meadow. I thought I heard a woman screaming. Either on the platform or on the train, I don’t know which.”
He hung up.
Please don’t find anything.
At this time of night the roads were largely deserted, so they made the trip to Wolcott in ten minutes. Eunice’s house, what looked like a post — World War II single-story saltbox on Google Earth, sat two blocks behind a bowling alley off the town’s main thoroughfare.
When Effrem pulled up to the stop sign at the head of her block, Jack ordered him to cross the intersection and then pull to the curb and turn off the headlights.
“How are we going to do this?”
Jack didn’t respond immediately. He didn’t have an answer.
“Okay, let’s drive past, see if we spot her car,” Jack said.
Effrem turned the Sonata around, then turned onto Willow.
“Should be the fifth or sixth house on your side.”
Looking out Effrem’s window, Jack watched for house numbers. When they drew even with 6773, Effrem started to slow. “Don’t,” Jack warned.
There was no white Subaru in the driveway, and no garage.
Two houses down, there was a Subaru. The plate matched the one from the train station. Parked ahead of the Subaru was a green Rav4 SUV. The home, which was a duplicate of Eunice’s except for light yellow paint instead of white, was dark save the porch light and some yellow light around the edges of the front-room curtains.
“That’s not her house,” Effrem said.
“No, wrong number.”
“So—”
“I don’t know. Keep going, turn the corner, pull over.”
Effrem did so, easing the Sonata beneath the low-hanging boughs of an elm tree and then killing the headlights.
Jack punched this new mystery address into Enquestor. The deed record came back to Kaitlin Showalter.
Jack had tilted the phone so Effrem could watch. Effrem said, “Kaitlin’s a younger name.”
Jack went to Facebook and searched for her name, then sorted through several of them before finding the profile that listed a hometown of Wolcott, Connecticut. Kaitlin was single; her occupation: insurance agent in Bridgeport. Her last post, prefixed by a smiley-face emoticon, was from two hours ago:
Long day, but almost over! Car wouldn’t start, late for work, missed lunch. Now some General Tso’s chicken and an egg roll for my savior, Eunice.
Kaitlin had borrowed Eunice’s car to get to the train station for her daily commute.
Effrem said, “Could it have been her boyfriend?”
“Maybe,” Jack replied. Then: “No. The guy said ‘wife.’ He was picking up his wife.”
Unless Kaitlin had failed to change her relationship status on Facebook, which seemed unlikely, given how much time she spent there, she was still single.
“So how can we be sure it’s Möller inside?”
The quickest way to answer the question was also the one Jack didn’t like: Break into Kaitlin Showalter’s house and, if Möller was inside, snatch him up. Of course, as before, that approach left him with a captive and all the problems that came along with that. The other option was to wait until Möller moved again and follow. If the man was using Kaitlin’s house as an impromptu safe house/aid station, he was likely to make it brief.
For a moment, Jack reconsidered his approach to Möller. Maybe this was one of those times when violence would solve problems. Kill Möller and be done with it. It would make it harder to find the answers he needed, and if there was such a thing as good luck, Jack had already strained his. Committing cold-blooded murder on U.S. soil would give him a constellation of bigger problems, starting with a moral line he could never uncross.
Jack turned in his seat and reached into his rucksack, rummaged for a moment, then came up with a GPS tracker, the same kind he’d planted in Peter Hahn’s car.
“What’s that?” asked Effrem. Jack explained and Effrem said, “Let’s just hope he doesn’t switch cars again. Plus, we’re making a lot of assumptions about—”
“Welcome to my world,” Jack said. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
17
With the tracker in place, they found another all-night diner off Lakewood Road, ordered a late dinner/early breakfast, then settled in to wait. It was just after three a.m. If Möller didn’t move before dawn, they’d go back to the house.
They sipped their coffee in silence until Jack could feel the caffeine hit his bloodstream. He took a few moments to assemble his thoughts, then said, “Ready for some questions?”
Effrem replied, “As long as they don’t require deep thinking. If I don’t get my usual fourteen hours of sleep a night, I’m not at my best.”
“Tell me how you got onto the Allemand story.”
“I got curious. Of course, soldiers disappear all the time, especially in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. Or Ivory Coast. It’s like your Old West out there. But it struck me that Allemand’s disappearance wasn’t getting the attention it warranted. In French military circles his family is renowned. And it’s a juicy mystery story. No one, not even his father, Marshal Allemand, spoke out very much.”
“Maybe the marshal simply accepted it. It comes with the job.”
“Would you accept it if your son went missing? You would want answers.”
“True,” Jack replied. “So you got curious and then what? Went down to Ivory Coast?”
“Exactly. I tried to get some interviews through military channels but got nowhere, so I managed to track down some of René’s friends that were still stationed at Port-Bouët Airport, Abidjan. That’s where Operation Unicorn was headquartered. What they said about René’s disappearance didn’t add up; he didn’t fit the profile as either a deserter or someone reckless enough to get kidnapped. They all knew the off-limits areas of Abidjan. In fact, René was usually the voice of reason, the one talking others out of straying.”
Jack noted Effrem’s use of Allemand’s first name. It was as though Effrem was speaking about a close friend. The young journalist was invested not only in discovering the truth behind Allemand’s disappearance, but also in finding the man. Did that mean Effrem had lost objectivity? Jack wondered.
“Keep going,” he said.
“In the previous eighteen months two other soldiers had gone missing. One had been kidnapped by COJEP — the Young Patriots, it’s an anti-UN group — and then released. The other deserted and was apprehended a week later in Korhogo.”
“In other words, you found no cases of a soldier simply vanishing.”
“Not one. But here’s where it gets interesting. After I’d interviewed all the military personnel willing to talk, I started visiting social hangouts favored by the soldiers — most of them in Koumassi commune—”