“Do you have any proof that this happened, Nicki?” he said. “Is there some evidence that you can show me?”
A dark cloud passed over the teenager’s face.
“You don’t believe me,” she said.
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I just want to see some proof.”
“You think this is all bullshit, that something else happened,” she said.
“Nicki!” her mother scolded.
“Jon is trying to help us,” her father reminded her.
“He doesn’t believe me,” Nicki said.
Her parents’ silence was deafening. Nicki pushed her plate forward and rose in her spot. Her mother slipped out of the nook, and Nicki came right behind her.
“I’ll show you,” the teenager said.
Nicki stormed out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the study with Lancaster and her parents hurrying to catch up. An iPad sat on the desk, and Nicki took her father’s leather chair and let her fingers play across its keyboard. Lancaster stood behind her, wanting to make sure she didn’t erase anything. Nicki went into a folder called “Pictures” and pulled up a series of images that were time-stamped seven months ago.
“See for yourself,” the teenager said.
On the iPad’s screen was a photograph of Nicki lying in a hospital bed with a nurse attending to her. Her face was white, and her hair was matted down.
“Mandy took that in the hospital,” Nicki said. “I was looking a little rough.”
The next photo showed Nicki lying in a bed in a hotel room, flashing the peace sign to the camera. Two of her school friends flanked her.
“Mandy took that on the day I came back to the hotel.”
Nicki took them through the rest of the photos of her recuperation. They showed each day of Nicki’s recovery in which she seemed to regain her strength and facial color and included her friends from school and her chaperones, all of whom were female. Whatever doubts that Lancaster had harbored about Nicki’s story were put to rest.
The last photo showed Nicki and her classmates at Charles de Gaulle airport, preparing to board their flight home. Nicki looked better than in the previous photos, but she had yet to fully recover. The booze had done a real number on her, and Lancaster didn’t doubt the claim that she hadn’t had a drop to drink since.
“Do you believe me now?” Nicki asked.
He was beaten, his theory of what had happened in Paris in flames.
“Yes, Nicki. I believe you,” he said.
“Can I go upstairs to my room?” she asked her parents.
Melanie said yes. Nicki exited the collection of photos and left the study. Lancaster could feel the weight of her parents’ stares. They wanted to know why he’d put them through this torture. He didn’t have a good answer and decided to stall them. An image on the iPad’s screen caught his eye. He sat down in the leather chair and clicked on it. The photo was of Nicki taken several years ago, when she was maybe nine or ten years old. With her was a woman who could have been Nicki’s identical twin, aged twenty years. The resemblance was uncanny. They were facially the same, right down to their smiles. The older woman wore a black windbreaker with the initials FBI stenciled in white above the breast pocket.
“Who is this?” he asked.
He got no answer, and lifted his head to see that he was alone. He picked up the iPad and went into the foyer. Melanie had gone upstairs to talk to her daughter while Pearl stood at the foot of the stairs wearing a worried expression.
“This is very upsetting,” Pearl said. “I’m not sure what we accomplished here.”
“We’ve actually accomplished a great deal.” He pointed at the female in the black windbreaker in the photo. “Who is this woman with your daughter?”
“That’s my sister-in-law, Beth.”
“Is she with the FBI?”
“That’s correct. She works out of Quantico.”
“Excuse me, but why didn’t you ask for her help with this situation? The FBI’s resources are unlimited.”
“Melanie and Beth don’t have much of a relationship. Beth was interning with the FBI when she was a senior in college. She was at the Pentagon on 9/11 and lost several friends. She took exception when I took the job in Dubai.”
“Do she and her sister talk?”
“Not in years.”
“What’s your sister-in-law’s full name?”
“Elizabeth Daniels. Everyone calls her Beth.”
Melanie appeared at the top of the stairs and beckoned to her husband to join her. Pearl started up the stairs and turned to him. “If Nicki didn’t create these pornographic videos, then who did?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Pearl. I thought Nicki filmed herself and put them there, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Then where did they come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nolan, please,” Melanie called from the second floor.
Pearl hurried up the stairs. Lancaster returned the iPad to the study and went outside to his car. He knew that he’d found something important, even if he didn’t entirely understand what it was. Sitting behind the wheel, he used his cell phone to get on Google and did a search on Elizabeth Daniels, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Several dozen links came up, mostly of cases that Daniels had worked on that had been covered by the media. She’d had a spectacular career with arrests of serial killers and human-trafficking rings. An article from the Boston Globe dated seven years ago caught his eye, and he clicked on it. It featured a photo of Daniels leading a group of FBI agents in a bust of a child-trafficking ring. The article stated that underage girls were being trafficked from Mexico to Boston to be used as prostitutes, the operation generating $1 million a month. Daniels was quoted in the article thanking the Boston police for helping bring the traffickers to justice. Her title was mentioned, and his eyes grew wide. Special Agent Elizabeth Daniels ran the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children unit, and was responsible for the FBI’s ongoing fight against sexual predators.
Chapter 25
The One That Got Away
He went home and did a deep dive on Beth Daniels.
Outside of the newspaper articles chronicling her FBI busts, there wasn’t a lot of information about her. She didn’t have a Facebook page, and her name didn’t come up on any of the public record search sites. He checked to see if she owned a home in Virginia near Quantico where she worked. That also drew a blank.
He read the many newspaper articles in hopes a nugget of information might turn up, but they weren’t much help. He supposed he could have called Melanie and started asking questions, but couldn’t make himself do it. He’d been hired to figure this damn thing out, and asking her sister to fill in the blanks was cheating.
Several of the newspaper articles contained dramatic photographs of Daniels standing at a podium fielding reporters’ questions. She had a real presence, and it came through in every shot. She was a force to be reckoned with.
Daniels was not the only FBI agent in the photos. She had a team, and they stood behind her in each of the shots. Three men and one female. No names were given. If he could find out who one of them was, perhaps they’d lead him to Daniels.
He went back through the articles to see if any of the agents were quoted. After many hours of looking, he finally found a name. In the Boston Globe story about the bust of the child traffickers, Special Agent Heidi Winkler gave a brief statement. He decided that Winkler was the lone female he’d seen in the newspaper photos.
He did an online search on Winkler, hoping she’d lead him to Daniels. She, too, had her information hidden, except on her Facebook page. Winkler had two toddlers, a boy and a girl, and posted cute photos of them at every opportunity. There was no mention on her Facebook page that she worked for the FBI.