Forgive Me (16 page)

“Did you say he’s in a truck?”

“Good-bye, Mike.” Angie ended the call.

The only news she had to share was that she wasn’t alone on the assignment. Vincent had circulated the man’s photograph to everyone in mall security, as well as Amtrak police and the TSA and DHS security teams assigned to the station. He also sent a group e-mail to all the merchants to be on the lookout for the man in the attached photograph. He said only that the man was a suspect in an ongoing shoplifting investigation. Vincent believed that would get as much attention as the truth, and wouldn’t start a panic about a possible predator running loose.

Angie trailed a willowy girl in a strappy dress into The Body Shop, and then into Papyrus, then over to Nine West. She remembered how much she hated shopping. The joy of trying on a pair of jeans just for fun was utterly lost on her. She got her high from making a break in a case, not saving 10 percent by opening a new J.Crew credit card account. Shopping to her was long lines, annoying environments, and clothes that didn’t fit quite right.

By four o’clock, she was feeling low on energy so she got a green drink at Jamba Juice and sat in an Amtrak waiting area to recharge. She called Bao to check in.

“What’s going on?”

“Just home working on that code.”

“And?”

“And I’ve tried everything. Got some crypto guys who are better at this than me to take a few swings. There are all sorts of ciphers and codes terrorists use that we’re trying.”

“Bao, my mom was not a terrorist.”

He gave a little chuckle. “Yeah, yeah, for sure. But the tricks are still good, so we’re trying ’em all on for size.”

“How’s it going?”

“Slowly. It could be a substitution pattern. That’s a pretty basic technique. Since we’ve established your mom was not a terrorist, it makes sense the code wouldn’t be too sophisticated.”

“What’s substitution?”

“Basically it’s two alphabets, and you shift one or more characters to the right or left. But these can be super tricky to crack if the alphabet is scrambled.”

Angie took out the photograph, spent a moment looking at the girl’s face, and turned the image over to see the words on the back. There was that code—IC12843488. Most of the coded message was numbers, which made Bao’s efforts a little confusing and perhaps misplaced. “There’s hardly any letters here,” she said.

“Well, what if
May God forgive me
is in code?”

That made more sense. “So we think the message says one thing, but it really means something else.”

“If we can figure out the key, perhaps. But we don’t have a lot of text to count letter usage or help us look for patterns. That kind of makes it uncrackable.”

“Is there another technique my mom could have used?”

“If I focus on the numbers, it might tell us a different story.”

“What kind of story?”

Bao made a hmmm sound. “Think about a telephone keypad. A keypad has numbers associated with letters, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So then it’s a game of matching. Can we make any words out of the different combinations? There’s also the Caesar Shift cipher.” Bao was in full brain dump mode, but Angie’s focus was too fragmented to let her concentrate.

She gave him a half listen, keeping her eyes out for any youngish girls traveling alone, apart from their pack. Girls who looked like they were lost among the crowd. Girls who seemed unsure of themselves. The streets were a Darwinian place, and hunters like the handsome bald guy were experts at spotting the weak ones.

Angie tried to follow Bao’s description of the Caesar Shift, making a drawing on a napkin to keep up. Angie’s big takeaway was that Bao had his work cut out for him.

“Keep it going, Bao. I appreciate all you’re doing.”

“Working hard. What’s the story there?”

“Keeping my eyes open. We sent a picture of the guy from the surveillance tape to the DC police, so that’ll give us extra eyes on our prize.”

“Good deal. Hang tough, Ange.”

“You too, Bao.”

She ended the call and took a big slurp of her green juice made from kiwi, banana, mango, pineapple, green apple, spinach, and kale. She suspected this “healthy” drink had more sugar than an ice cream sundae, and damn if it didn’t taste as good. She stood up and tossed away her drink.

Back to the hunt. The crowds were as plentiful as locusts. Everywhere Angie looked, she saw targets—young, vulnerable girls—but few roamed alone. Safety in numbers. Smart chicas. She didn’t feel discouraged. She knew this was the place to be. She also knew that before the stakeout was over, she’d run out of clean clothes and have to go shopping after all.

CHAPTER 21

G
reg Jessup might have been an absentee father, but he was not skimping on the cash when it came to finding his daughter. It was obvious after a few days that the stakeout at Union Station was going to be a long one. Angie had no other leads, and she felt confident the man on the surveillance video would eventually stalk the place again.

But when?

Angie, Mike, and Bao took shifts spending day after day at the mall, racking up per diem fees for hotel rooms and meals, without success. It was a waiting game, and she had committed to the strategy. Eventually, she would find her mystery man. It was just a matter of time.

Things at home were fine, no radical shifts in the landscape. Gabriel DeRose went to work, and Angie continued to get new cases, some of which she assigned to Mike and Bao while she took the brunt of the surveillance duty. The long-term stakeout had been her idea, so she felt obligated to take on the lion’s share of the suffering. Bao continued to try and crack the code on the back of the photograph without success. Angie remained hopeful and checked in with him every day.

She called Bao after lunch, which she ate in the now dreaded food court. If she never saw another food court again, it would be too soon.

“How’s it going, Bao? Making progress?” Of course, she was referring to the code.

“Working on the Flip 5-0 grind as we speak.”

“Is that a type of cipher?”

“Um, no. It’s kind of a skateboard move. Flip the board up and then the back truck grinds the edge.”

“Hmmm. Sounds difficult.”

“You know I’ve been trying to crack your mom’s code. If I work on it anymore, I think my head is going to explode. I had to get out and skate.”

Angie understood. If she didn’t catch a break soon, her head might explode, as well.

The seventeenth day of the stakeout occurred on a Sunday, and it was going to be the last day of her surveillance effort. Angie was ready to try a new approach, though she had no definite plan for what that might be. Days had stretched into weeks, and the end of April became mid-May. After a dreadful night’s sleep at the new Hilton Garden Inn, a block’s walk from Union Station and her home away from home, she arrived at the mall before the stores opened. Nightmares had plagued her, the kind she hadn’t had since childhood.

As a young girl of four or five, she had experienced night terrors. It wasn’t something people talked openly about. She’d learned of her bloodcurdling screams, intense fear, and flailing limbs only by picking up snippets of conversation from her exhausted parents.

Later, when the episodes finally stopped, her parents were more forthcoming about her sleep disorder. “Remember when . . .” they’d say.

With time, they could even laugh about it.

It wasn’t funny now. Angie couldn’t recall a single image from her dream, but she believed the girl with the deformed ear had been a gloomy presence throughout. Perhaps Nadine had been there, as well. What stuck in Angie’s mind was a feeling of suffocation. A darkness pressing down on her, something pliable and heavy she could claw at but could not clear away. Dirt, perhaps. She felt things creeping over her body, burrowing underneath her skin. It could have been bugs, it could have been fingers, because they were just feelings.

She had screamed, only without a voice. Nothing had come out, not even a hiss of air. The need to scream, to be heard, had felt as imperative as the need to breathe. Her silent yowl was the most helpless feeling she had ever known. She’d awoken with a start in a sterile hotel room and couldn’t stand the thought of falling back asleep.

She’d returned to her stakeout woozy and out of sorts. Her head felt fuzzy, her body ached, and the Advil wasn’t doing nearly enough. She went to the Jamba Juice to suck down an energy boost.

And she saw him. He was in line at the Starbucks, two or three storefronts down from the Jamba Juice. She recognized him by the shape of his head and his build. All of his physical characteristics were etched into her consciousness.

Angie’s malaise fell away with a snap. She was wildly alert, pulse hammering. She placed her order, careful to keep watch on her mark without looking too obvious.

It made sense to her that he’d show up at this hour, when the crowds were thin. It was easier to spot the loners, the vulnerable ones. Maybe he would see a young girl traveling alone, taking an early morning train to some destination, anywhere but where she had been.

Angie’s target ordered a coffee and a bagel. He stood at a counter just inside the Starbucks, leafing through the carcass of a Sunday newspaper someone had left behind. He was there for something other than reading the morning paper.

She found a seat at an Amtrak departure gate with good sight lines and watched him lazily sip from his coffee. Eventually he moved away from the counter, depositing the remains of his breakfast in the trash. Angie let him walk past her before she got up to follow.

He took the escalator up to the main shopping area and ambled along galleries just beginning to bustle with activity. He browsed store windows.

Was he looking for merchandise or searching for something else? Angie made a note of his attire in case she lost him in the growing crowd. He was dressed professionally in a gray suit jacket, white shirt, black pants, and black shoes. It was similar to what he’d worn the day he’d met Nadine.

Angie knew to avoid distractions. A turn of the head at an inopportune moment and he might be gone. Who knew when he’d return? She kept at least thirty feet back at all times, using people as shields whenever possible. Even though she was behind her target, she paced her footsteps to keep from being in sync with his. On the marble floors, the symmetry of the echo might attract his attention.

She did her best to appear like any other shopper—unhurried, browsing merchandise in store windows. She wore a drab green crew neck sweatshirt and gray pants. The clothes she kept in her car were plain, not colorful, never revealing. She never wore popular brands or anything with logos or graphics on them. Those could make people notice her. Dark, muted colors with a timeless look worked best.

She didn’t bother with disguises, though she had several in the trunk of her car. Her target did not know her and wouldn’t recognize her. but he would know if a stranger always seemed to be near. Angie did what others were doing, glancing at her phone as she walked and shopped, not making eye contact.

She flirted with the idea of texting Vincent, but decided not to. Mall security had no training in stealth techniques. Bringing them in risked the operation. She did pretend to call him, though, and even made up a conversation so it would look authentic.

Just be cool and casual like everyone else and this will go fine,
Angie thought. Calm as she appeared, it was hard to contain her excitement. This man could lead her to straight to Nadine, unless of course he drove.

She had her Ford Taurus back, having ferried Mike to Falls Church after he drove her car to Union Station. The garage had space for more than a thousand cars; the chances of Angie being parked anywhere near her target’s car—if that was how he was getting around—were slim to none. He had gone to the garage on the surveillance tape, so she suspected he wasn’t one for traveling by train. If she managed to get a license plate, she would consider it a victory.

Back on the ground level, her target stopped in front of H&M and browsed the window display. Angie walked right by while he went into the store. She crossed toward the main concourse, mindful to keep a thirty-foot safe distance.

Minutes later, the man with the buzzcut hair style in the gray jacket emerged carrying a small bag. Whatever he’d purchased hadn’t taken long to make his selection. He wandered the corridors holding the bag, and Angie remembered the Heydari bag he’d had on the day he’d met Nadine.

The man spent two hours wandering and window-shopping. Angie stayed a good thirty feet away, keeping close to the densest part of the crowd. Nothing about the man’s behavior changed her thinking about his intention. He was prowling for girls, not presents. She watched him watching. His head would turn with every skirt that passed. His ears were attuned to the sounds of girls’ laughter and chatter.

Angie managed to get a few pictures of him with her smart phone. Nothing worthy of a Facebook profile, but she could make out his face a little better than what she’d seen on the surveillance footage. Thus far his fishing expedition—assuming that’s what it was—hadn’t produced even a nibble.

Her target got lunch at Chipotle—a burrito, a bag of chips, and a soda. Angie didn’t want to feel sluggish, so she grabbed a pre-made salad from Chopt, two doors down.

After lunch, the man was on the move again. Same stores, same browsing habits. Angie gave a repeat performance herself.

Forty minutes later, the man approached a girl not more than twenty who was by herself. She was tall and thin, with luxurious long brown hair, dressed in hip-hugging jeans and a form-fitting top. She wore a backpack and wheeled a black suitcase behind her. Maybe the girl had just gotten off the train. She did look a bit frazzled and unsure of herself. In other words, the perfect mark.

The man walked right by the girl, but Angie could tell his gaze never really left her. Angie kept walking too, but she stopped once her target’s back was to her, sidled over to a store, and pretended to look at her phone.