“Neither makes sense,” Oliver said. “They put a lot of preparation into this. We know they were out of the house by midnight, and the trip across the bay’s only a few miles. Even with a small trolling motor it wouldn’t have taken more than an hour. Then again, who knows? Maybe they got lost in the fog.”
“Or they scuttled it to lose physical evidence.”
Like blood, McBride thought. This wouldn’t be the first time a kidnapping had gone bad right out of the gate. Blood in the boat would likely mean Amelia Root was dead; otherwise there would be no reason to hide the evidence, for if pushed during negotiations the kidnappers could provide proof she was still alive. In fact, McBride had found a little blood left at the scene tends to put the spouse or parent in a more … malleable state of mind for a ransom call.
“They don’t strike me as either sloppy or crude,” McBride said. “She’s too valuable; they wouldn’t have let anything happen to her.”
“I agree. Then what the hell is the deal with the boat?”
“I don’t know.” Something else, maybe, something we’re not seeing, McBride thought.
Twenty minutes later, the lead technician called them over to the dock. The team on the fire road had found something. With Steve in the lead, they walked across the meadow, through a copse of maple and oak, and emerged onto the fire road to where another of the technicians was kneeling in the dirt.
“Tire tracks,” he called. “A van or truck, probably. We’ll get elimination casts from the neighbors.”
“How far’s the boat ramp?” Oliver asked.
“About a hundred yards that way.”
“So, let’s put it together: They park here and split up. Three go to the dock to steal the boat, three more to the ramp to wait. They link up, do their business at the Roots’, come back to the ramp with Mrs. Root, and put her in the vehicle.”
McBride picked up the narrative. “While they’re doing that, a couple of them take the boat into the bay, scuttle it, and swim back.”
Oliver looked to the tech who’d found the tire tracks. “How soon will you know something?”
“There’s not enough to cast, but I can high-res the digital pictures. By the end of the day I should have a generic match. I’ll take grass samples, too. See how it’s crushed along here?”
“Yeah.”
“Depending on the rate of drying, I might be able to nail down the time.”
“How close?”
“No more than an hour.”
McBride whistled through his teeth. “You can do that?”
“Quamico’s got a greenhouse with over six hundred varieties of grass. If you mow it, we’ve got it. Between weather conditions, soil type, chlorophyll content, we can tell a lot.”
“Can you help me get rid of my dandelions?”
“Sorry.”
Oliver’s cell phone trilled. He answered, listened for a minute, then disconnected. “Quantico. The boot casts from the Roots’ are ready.” He turned to Steve. “How long do you need for your casts?”
“Another half hour and they’ll be ready to move.”
“We’ll meet you there.”
Three house later they were standing in one of the FBI’s laboratories at Quantico staring at a computer monitor. Displayed side-by-side on the screen were digital pictures of boot print casts taken from the Root estate, the dock in Dames Quarter, and the fire road.
“No doubt about it,” said Steve. “Same boots. We were even able to match the stride pattern and heel pivot on most of them. These are our guys.”
“Did you match them against the guards?” asked Oliver.
“Yeah, they’re all eliminated. Here’s the interesting thing: See how the tread patterns on the first five look random — chaotic?”
“Yeah.”
“They cross-hashed the soles — my guess is with a hacksaw blade. It’s gonna make identifying them a bitch.”
“You said five,” McBride replied. “What about the sixth?”
“The sixth is a whole different story. It was cross-hatched like the others, but not as heavily, and the underlying tread pattern is different. It looks new, too.”
“How new?”
“A couple weeks, I’d say.”
“And the tread pattern?”
“A gem. See the overlapping dollar sign shape to them? That’s pretty uncommon.”
Oliver said, “Uncommon enough to—”
“Yep,” Steve replied, then tapped the keyboard. A website’s homepage popped up on the screen. In the center was an animated GIF of a rotating boot. “Meet the Stone walker, gentlemen, the Cadillac of hiking boots. Starting price: three hundred bucks. Number of retailers within a hundred mile radius: twelve.”
Oliver clapped Steve on the shoulder. “Great work.”
“Now what?” McBride said.
“Now we canvass and pray our guys did their shopping locally.”
7
Paris
Whether by choice or by assignment Tanner didn’t know, but Susanna Vetsch had chosen to live in Paris’s worst neighborhood. Called the Pigalle, it was located in the Montmartre quarter, north of Rue de Provence and south of Boulevard de Clichy. Though safer than it once was, the Pigalle was still considered the city’s red light district, with block after block of burlesque clubs, sex shops, and heavily made-up — and often heavily medicated—putain only too happy to service customers in the Pigalle’s warren of shadowed alleys and deep doorways.
However Susanna had come to the Pigalle, the choice did make sense. Not only was it the home of all things carnal, but the Pigalle also boasted the city’s highest rates in street narcotics traffic, strong-arm robberies, burglaries, sexual assaults, and gang violence. If Susanna had been trying to submerge herself in the underworld of Paris, this was the best place to do it.
As dusk settled over the city, Tanner and Cahil left the St. Beuve and boarded the 13 Metro at the Sevres Babylone exchange and rode it north across the Seine to the Gare St. Lazare exchange, where they got off. They were at the southern edge of the Pigalle and Tanner wanted to walk the area as evening fell. Nothing spoke better of a neighborhood’s subculture than how its character changed from day to night.
They walked up Rue St. Lazare to Square de la Trinite then turned north onto Rue Blanche. One by one the streetlights began to flicker on, casting the sidewalks in pale yellow light. Garish neon signs above the clubs and taverns glowed to life. The apartment buildings were tall and narrow, looming over narrow sidewalks and blackened doorways. The alleys were dark slits between the buildings, most no wider than a man’s shoulders. Trash and empty bottles littered the gutters. Echoing up and down the streets, voices called to one another, mostly in French but with a smattering of Arabic, Chinese, and English thrown in.
As Tanner’s eyes adjusted he could see movement in the darkness of the alley two figures joined together, pressed against the brick; the scuffed tip of a gold sequined boot. From behind the glowing dot of a cigarette a voice called, “Veut quelques-uns?” Want someone?
“Je n’ai pas envie,” Tanner called back and kept walking.
“What’d she want?” Cahil asked.
“I’m not sure she was a she.”
“What did it want?”
“I think it liked the cut of your jib.”
Cahil grimaced. “Oh, man.”
Tanner chuckled.
As they turned right onto Rue Pigalle proper, a half dozen smiling and waving Gypsy teenagers skipped across the street toward them. “Don’t let them put their hands on you,” Tanner whispered to Cahil. “They’re the best pickpockets in Europe.”