Hostage Taker (24 page)

F
orty-two minutes ’til deadline.

Eve organized the responses to the four questionnaires they had given the witnesses. Haddox was pursuing the same data quest through the more scientific filter of his computer program. Eve, on the other hand, divided the lives of each witness into four large quadrants on her computer screen. Inside each quadrant was a series of statements, time lines, phone numbers, addresses, and acquaintance lists. She tugged on a curl by her left temple. A bad habit that always helped her to concentrate.

She was staring at the minutiae of four lives, tasked with building a different sort of picture than she usually created. She’d always had a good mind for finding small details, analyzing them, and weaving together certain patterns. When she was done, her creation resembled a spider’s web—with multiple strands coming together to form an intricate whole.

Today, she felt she was staring at four separate webs. And she was searching for the single flyaway strand that would allow her spider to cross from one web to a completely different one. Some shared habit—or perhaps only a single experience—that linked one to another through the most fragile of connections.

They were different ages and from different generations. Cassidy Jones was barely twenty-one years old, and Alina was twenty-nine. Blair Vanderwert was forty-five and Sinya had just turned sixty. Eve tried to imagine their lives, their routines, and the people they would have met.

Cassidy grew up in Atlanta, where she became Miss Georgia Teen USA as a senior in high school. Following graduation, she moved to New York to become an actress, settling into a community of actors in Astoria, Queens. Cassidy was a party girl. Her days might be spent in and around Astoria, where she worked at the Utopia Diner. But she came into Manhattan most days, too—for auditions as needed, and for the bars and dance clubs at night. Her list of friends and recent boyfriends was a daunting one.

Alina could not have been more different. She was quiet and hardworking, devoting hours of practice each day to her piano. She lived uptown in Washington Heights, in a tiny studio apartment overlooking the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades. She had cobbled together a career of playing chamber music and teaching students. But her work took her primarily to areas in and around Lincoln Center and Midtown West, where she was affiliated with one of the local private schools. She had a handful of close friends and no boyfriend.

Blair Vanderwert had lived his entire life on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He’d graduated from the Dalton School and Yale before entering his family’s real estate business. There was no real distinction between his work life and his social life; they fused at the endless society and charity events that he attended. He was always networking—but among a certain social set that didn’t seem to encompass or overlap with the worlds of the other witnesses.

Sinya Willis was a live-in nanny whose main daily contacts were under the age of eight. She resided with the Abrams family. She went to the Baptist Church in her neighborhood every Sunday. She sang in the choir—and those choir practices formed the backbone of her social life. For work, she shuffled the three Abrams kids back and forth to dentist appointments and soccer practice, homework club and playdates.

Haddox had reported that Luis Ramos’s life was lived in the shadows of Harlem. Ramos had come downtown to work as a day laborer whenever a contractor needed extra manpower. All cash, no paper trail. No unnecessary friendships. No excursions.

They lived in different worlds, but they were all typical New Yorkers in one respect: They had provincial routines. Eve had always thought it ironic that the largest city in America cultivated small-town habits better than any small town. But that was what happened when virtually every need anyone had could be satisfied within five blocks of home.

How do you know them?

She started an imaginary conversation with the Hostage Taker, trying to understand how he would have seen them. Why he would have chosen them. How they were bound together.

Then it occurred to her: How was she ever going to do that, when she still didn’t understand the most basic question of all.
Why had he insisted on her?

A sound behind her startled her. She gasped, whirling.

It was Haddox. “Just a quick question for you. I’ve got a list of everybody you’ve worked with at the FBI, including those who were in your training class at Quantico. Were you ever part of an interagency joint task force?”

“You have a list of
what
?” That was the problem with Haddox. Normal boundaries meant nothing to him.

“I live in a world of information, luv.”

“Can you stop calling me
luv
?”

“Maybe not altogether. Maybe just less often. Are you going to answer my question—or don’t you
want
to know why he chose you?”

“I’ve worked closely with the NYPD in past hostage crises—but nothing sustained.”

“That blows that theory, then. Guess he’s just a fan.” He stepped closer and peered at her computer screen. “We can’t figure out why he wants you or what connects them. Seems like he couldn’t have chosen a more random group of people. Makes me wonder: Is that the point?”

“I’ve thought of that. That he’s chosen people at random to be witnesses. That he doesn’t actually have any past connection with any of them.”

“But?”

She shook her head. “This feels too personal to me. Even if he doesn’t know them well, they represent something important to him. I’ve got another idea that might help. You listened to my last conversation with him?”

“Just ran it through the FBI’s biometric database. No hits.”

“Good. Pull it off the database again. Skip to the section where he talks about a religious school teacher and an incident when he was eleven years old.”

“You think his motive is as basic as his history with the Church?”

“I wonder if we can identify the teacher. It sounded like he was a layperson—but that could’ve been a lie. Take what we know—our presumption that the Hostage Taker is local, that he is about thirty-five, and any other data we can glean. Then cross-check it against any child abuse cases that fit the timing. Use a Venn diagram–style approach to establish IDs for those who fit within the overlapping circles—and go from there.”

“Aye, sure,” Haddox agreed. “I’ll need to design a scientific approach to make it work.”

Eve shot him an exasperated look. “Haddox, it’s just data. Sometimes you have to look beyond the bits and bytes. Keep your eye on the human element.”

“Without bits and bytes, we have no data patterns to make sense of.” Haddox started to turn away, then stopped. “By the way, I’ve decided: I won’t call you
luv
anymore.”

“Thank you.”

“Even though it suits you. Loosens you up a bit. So you may as well reconsider.”

“Reconsider what?”

“Having dinner.”

“We still have work to do.”

“But if we didn’t?”

“You mean after the hostages are saved and the Cathedral is secure?”

“Aye. It’s a date.”

“I didn’t agree.” She wasn’t smiling.

“You will when you see the brilliant idea I’ve had. I just need someone to do a little shopping.”

“No cigarettes or Irish whiskey. You’re on Uncle Sam’s dime.”

He ignored her—or seemed to. “This Hostage Taker has more secrets than anyone’s entitled to. Better get back to unraveling his motive.” She heard his steps, returning quickly to his own workstation.

You’re one to complain about hidden motives,
she longed to tell him. She settled for asking herself,
What about your own?

S
ixteen minutes until deadline.

Haddox listened to the recording of Eve’s conversation with the Hostage Taker and decided that she had been played. The Hostage Taker had spun a tug-at-the-heartstrings tale and gained Eve’s sympathy. Completely distracting her from the fact that he’d just that very morning murdered a priest.

No, that wasn’t fair. Maybe Eve was playing the Hostage Taker as well. Acting as though she cared.

Either way, Haddox kept coming back to the witnesses. Given that not one of them even went to a Catholic Church, he simply couldn’t buy Eve’s theory that anger over abuse cases was fueling this Hostage Taker. It felt too pat.

And finding the single common thread linking the witnesses wasn’t working through the usual means. The human brain simply wasn’t capable of connecting the thousands of potential connections among five separate individuals. But his advanced diagnostics program was perfectly designed to uncover the answer.

Sinya Willis was a rabid Mets fan. So was Cassidy’s latest boyfriend. Both regularly attended games. But Blair Vanderwert followed only the Yankees, and neither Alina Matrowski nor Luis Ramos was known to have an interest in baseball.

Alina and Blair were both avid runners, active in New York Road Runners races and events. They had probably run together, time and again, without realizing it. But his practice runs took him down the FDR, while her preferred jogging paths were on the banks of the Hudson River. Cassidy practiced Pilates, Sinya found chasing three boys to be exercise enough, and Luis worked shifts so long he only slept between them.

All but Luis and Sinya had served jury duty downtown. Blair and Alina had even been summoned during the same week two years ago. Blair had been chosen as an alternate in a civil case to determine liability for fire damage to a building. Alina had been dismissed after three days.

They had granted Haddox permission to run a cross-search through their credit card and banking records. Sinya and Alina frequently shopped at the Harlem Fairway. Blair and Cassidy frequented the same indie multiplex on East Houston on the Lower East Side. Everyone but Alina had eaten at least once at the Madison Square Park Shake Shack. Everyone but Blair had visited the TD Bank branch in Times Square. But no one habit, activity, or transaction had yet been found to link all five witnesses.

When something wasn’t working, Haddox’s solution was to try a different strategy. Tackle a different issue. So he turned his attention to the flip side of the problem: the Hostage Taker.

When he ran a skip trace, his starting point was the name—and he used multiple data sources to create a path that inevitably led him to the individual he sought.

Here he had the opposite problem. The living, breathing person he wanted was less than a hundred feet away from him. What he was missing was everything else. A name. An identity.

He clicked away on his keyboard, fingers racing at his usual 120 words per minute. He pulled up the transcripts of Eve’s conversations with the Hostage Taker—which included both text and audio. He cobbled together a kludge, inelegant and clumsy but designed to do what was necessary.

Haddox knew there were many flaws inherent to biometric technology—and especially voice biometric technology. He had already hit a brick wall using the FBI’s database. So he didn’t design his search to generate a specific ID. That would just be a recipe for crashing and burning. The technology wasn’t there yet—and those who pretended it was made embarrassing mistakes. Like when incomplete biometrics led law enforcement to falsely identify Richard Jewell as the Atlanta Olympics Bomber. Or when Brandon Mayfield was falsely accused of orchestrating the Madrid train bombings.

Instead, Haddox’s kludge would search for patterns and produce the most general of biometric profiles. A counterpart to Eve’s working psychological profile, based on the data that could be gleaned from her three brief conversations with the Hostage Taker.

Eve had been convinced the Hostage Taker was a local man, given his comfort level with the Cathedral. So Haddox linked his program to a database run by a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania. That would allow for analysis of consonants and vowels, and generate possible regions where speakers used them in similar ways.

He then connected to a linguist at the University of Virginia who did similar work, but focusing on word choice and phrasing rather than vowels and diphthongs.

Eve believed the Hostage Taker had some background in law enforcement or security. A third linguist—this one at the University of Colorado—specialized in research on military and police slang.

He used an old trick to minimize the static background of the audio.

He let everything run. If he got lucky, these multiple data points—voice details, speech patterns, and key language choices—would work together and yield something they could use.

Eight minutes until deadline. Seven o’clock. At the exact moment the world had expected to celebrate the lighting of the Rockefeller tree, a madman would be demanding his witnesses.

Haddox stole a glance at Saint Patrick’s. Though the rest of Fifth Avenue had gone dark, the Cathedral was bathed in light. Its own floodlights, plus the spotlights brought in by the Feds that fully illuminated its exterior, transformed the Church into a shining beacon of light.

It inspired him to do one more thing. He sent up a prayer to Saint Jude—the patron saint of lost causes and desperate cases.

F
our minutes until deadline.

Mace had followed García into the equipment supply van, set up for the tactical teams readying themselves to breach the Cathedral. An operation certain to occur if Eve was unable to bring the situation to closure. Mace normally hated shopping, but this was different. He scooped up a laser-guided automatic weapon. Checked out its sight line, felt its weight in his hand. Even if he no longer made a living selling this shit, he still got a kick from checking it all out. Special operators always got the cutting-edge technology. Stuff that came straight out of the lab and had never been battle-tested. From there, it would eventually filter down to the regular guys in uniform and then make its way onto the street.

Since Mace never wanted to be surprised when new goods hit the dealers, he told himself this was important learning. He was furthering his education. But who was he kidding? He was bored out of his skull. He needed a diversion to keep from going stir-crazy.

A compact man with round wire glasses, pocket protector, and a name tag that read
BURNS
was showing García a handheld device. “This is a directed-energy weapon with dual capabilities. Use it to inflict pain when you’re dealing with a noncombatant you just need to neutralize. It makes your target feel like his skin is on fire.”

“Is it?” García raised an eyebrow.

“Not literally. Then see this switch?” Burns indicated a device on the underside of the handheld gun. “It lets you change your force level from nonlethal to lethal.”

García scowled. “Still a little bulky. Not exactly handheld.”

“Looks like a lightsaber. Straight out of
Star Wars,
” Mace chimed in.

Burns shrugged. “It’s a lot of technology in a small package. Comes in handy with an operation like this, where you’ve got civilians who could interfere with your ultimate target.” He handed García a pair of sporting sunglasses. “This is another device you might find useful.”

García held the black glasses up to the light. “I’m going to be underground. Probably need a flashlight more than these.”

They had dark lenses, but red plastic ran the length of their top. A designer might have said it looked stylish, but Mace guessed it concealed some functional purpose.

“They look like ordinary sunglasses,” Burns explained. “But they have technology embedded that will let you receive data. Photographs. Video. Location specifics.”

“Kind of like Google Glass?” Mace said with a grin.

“Way cooler than that,” Burns replied seriously as García put them on. “Let me show you what they can do.”

Mace’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered it and said, “This better be important, ’cause otherwise I’ve got a chance to try a real-life lightsaber.”

Vernon Brown’s friend Snoopy said, “Got something to write with?”

“Not handy.”

“Then listen up. You know I’ve been investigatin’ why my man Vern’s sitting in the clink.”

“Yeah.”

“I spoke with a couple guys outta Midtown West. Jeff Simmons and T. J. Pierce. They’re assigned to tracking sensitive items as they move into and out of the evidence locker. A big haul a few weeks ago has been keeping them real busy. First they had to secure it, meaning load it up and safely transfer it from some ratty crime scene to the evidence locker. Then they spent a solid month shuttling pieces of it back and forth to the forensics lab so everybody could learn about it. They weren’t happy when it all disappeared. Reflected badly on them, you know? Now they’re the subject of an investigation and stuck on desk duty. Bored out of their skulls.”

“So did they steal it?”

“Don’t think so,” Snoopy said. “Word on the street is that nothing like the stash that’s missing came up for sale. And neither Simmons or Pierce have anything to show for it. There’s no extra zeros in their bank account or new cars in their driveway.”

“What’s your point, then?”

“They can’t prove it. But they’ve got a theory.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Here’s the deal. I’m gonna give you the info—and if it works out, you’re gonna pay me back by makin’ sure Vern gets sprung. That he knows old Snoopy’s the one responsible for his freedom. And the high-ups need to give him a big, fat apology.”

“Sounds like a tall order.”

“Not for you,” Snoopy said as he gave Mace the names.

Haddox’s down-and-dirty algorithm
turned up one result almost immediately. It identified the Hostage Taker as a Brooklyn native. When he was calm and in control, his articulation was careful. When his temper rose, he reverted to a communication style found primarily in Brooklyn. In other words, he punched his initial consonants. Jumbled his words together. And left off his
r
’s and
g
’s. There was also a slight—so slight as to be almost imperceptible—substitution of
d
for 
th
.

Brooklyn,
Haddox thought.
A borough of only 2.6 million people. And that’s assuming he was Brooklyn born and bred and never moved away.

Brooklyn contained microcosms of different communities—Italians, Greeks, Jews, Irish, African Americans, Germans, and Russians. Now Haddox’s kludge would search for slight variations that might indicate one of those particular groups.

The final linguistic analysis centered on one phrase. The term
house mouse.
It was what the Hostage Taker had called Annie Martinez, the NYPD negotiator he had killed. It wasn’t part of the recording—but Eve had remembered.

As Haddox discovered, it was a common term in three different communities. Haddox put the first—the S&M practitioners—aside for now. Not that the Hostage Taker hadn’t inflicted plenty of pain, but it didn’t feel like his primary motive. Next was the Marines.
House mouse
was their term for the drill instructor’s gofer. That felt better to Haddox. Annie Martinez had been killed because she wasn’t important enough. Because she wasn’t
Eve—
the negotiator the Hostage Taker had demanded.

The third community where the phrase was commonly used was the police. Cops used it to describe a homebody. Someone who did more filing than fieldwork. Haddox liked this scenario because they knew the Hostage Taker understood police protocol and procedures so well.
He knows the playbook,
Eve had said.

So which is it?
Haddox wondered.

The more he could triangulate the data, the better his odds of success. So he added a search function that would pick up sex-abuse cases. Anything in the local area, happening in the right years. Then he waited.

García was having
bad dreams already, and it wasn’t even close to bedtime. Haddox had downloaded a few files to the special optics glasses. Just to be sure things were working. Now García had access to the partial schematics of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, marked with the possible location of hostages. He also had photos and plenty of data about the explosives that were rigged throughout the Church.

García didn’t like these high-tech glasses. He wanted to stay focused on what was real and immediate. He didn’t need extra images filling his head. Wasn’t that the problem in the first place?

He took the glasses off. Stuck them on his belt. Maybe he’d try again later, if he ran into an issue.

He’d gone into plenty of houses like this before. His mission had been pretty much the same: Take out the insurgents. Rescue the civilians. Then get the hell out.

The only difference—and it was a big one: When he’d been on overseas duty, no one cared if the house blew. Not once all innocent civilians were safe.

He didn’t have a good feeling about this. It had the potential to be a major bloodbath. And there might not be a damn thing he could do to stop it.

Eli was waiting.
He’d commandeered two machines, and had his favorite databases open and running. Mace strolled right up to him and handed him the names.

“Check these guys out for me, will ya?” He turned, thought of something, turned back. “Want some more coffee?”

“Do bees sting? Do bears shit in the woods?” Eli grinned. “Except I can’t believe Julius Mason is offering to fetch me a cup of coffee.”

“Don’t get used to it. I only do favors when I need something bad.” He noticed that Eli had changed shirts. The new one was a bright green New York Jets jersey. He must’ve had someone grab it for him from one of the tourist traps on Broadway.

“What am I looking for, exactly?” Eli typed the first name into the database.

“The usual. Any big purchases. Any sudden infusions into their bank account. Basically anything to indicate they might have stolen a whole lotta explosives and sold ’em for a tidy profit.”

“What if they didn’t sell it—but used it themselves?”

“Then we’d have a pretty good line on the man inside. Say, you feelin’ okay?”

Eli suddenly looked as green as his new jersey. Eli shook his head. “Think I ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

“You didn’t have a hot dog from the vendor on Sixth, did you? They get me every time.”

Despite Haddox’s misgivings,
it turned out that his bad apple search—combined with his other parameters—provided the necessary magic to narrow the field. At first, he thought his data points were too obscure. But once he combined the right age with the right time period with the right borough, only four sex abuse cases fit his parameters. It would have been impossible to miss one case in particular. That of John Timothy Nielsen.

The list of those who claimed to have been victimized by Nielsen was not small. Once the first victim was brave enough to come forward, more than fifteen boys—many of them grown men by the time of Nielsen’s arrest and subsequent trial—came forward with additional accusations. Haddox’s search cross-referenced their names against the results of his broader search.

Within moments he had generated a couple of names.

Paulie Corsillo, son of a Marine, had joined up at age eighteen. Paulie barely waited forty-eight hours after graduating from Saint Xavier’s, the local Catholic boys school. His parents had been proud. Following the family tradition, they bragged. A jarhead, just like his old man. A captain who’d served in the Far East and the Middle East before coming home to Brooklyn.

Paulie had done three tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. He was decorated, having received two special commendations and one Purple Heart. He had trained as a sniper, but had just barely missed making the cut. So he worked as a sapper, defusing hundreds of bombs. Roadside IEDs. House Borne IEDs. It was painstaking work. Requiring a certain kind of temperament. A temperament Paulie had—right up until the day he didn’t.

He wasn’t held captive by the Taliban for long. It was only nine days—after which a prisoner exchange was brokered. The Americans didn’t participate, naturally. Americans always balked at negotiating with terrorists. But a third party brokered the deal, and Paulie was sent home permanently. Nine days with the Taliban had apparently triggered serious anger issues on his part, and the Marines didn’t need that kind of liability. Between the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the Mahmudiyah killings, things were bad enough for the American military.

When he returned home, Paulie refused any kind of therapy. He insisted his only issue was that he hated the Talibs for what they had done to him. In his mind, they deserved every ounce of loathing he could muster. Soon he figured out he hated someone else, too. Someone much closer to home. Someone who’d done things to him that were equally terrible and just as perverted.

When the original complaint was filed against John Timothy Nielsen, it was Paulie Corsillo who spearheaded the action. He wanted to make Nielsen suffer and pay. To make sure no other boy was abused the way he had been. It was only right.

Haddox liked Paulie as a candidate for being the Hostage Taker. The military background and deep knowledge of explosives made perfect sense. His anger issues were well documented. No doubt his captivity with the Taliban had left a less visible, but no less permanent, scar than the shrapnel damage that led to his Purple Heart. And his motive was perfect: a vendetta against the Church, which he believed had failed him.

Sean Sullivan was also in his early forties, just like Paulie. They’d been born at the same Brooklyn hospital: Kings County between Clarkson and Winthrop. Been baptized in the same parish in Bensonhurst. Even served as altar boys at the same time. Their paths differed in three important respects.

First, Sean’s family was Irish—and thus a world away, culturally, from Paulie’s Italian clan.

Second, Sean’s family was a family of cops and firemen. When a Sullivan boy turned eighteen, he chose the NYPD or the FDNY. He’d have no more have enlisted with the Army, Navy, or Marines than he’d have drilled a hole in his head. Even after 9/11 happened—and Sean did like a lot of young men and enlisted in the Marine Reserves—he saw himself as a cop through and through. When the time came to serve his tour of duty overseas, he didn’t do it for honor or country or apple pie. He did it for the boys in blue.

Third, Sean and Paulie’s paths diverged significantly when Sean’s parents separated—and his mother decided to leave the neighborhood for suburban Long Island. Sean moved when he was twelve; his return visits to the old Brooklyn neighborhood became sporadic.

It’s likely his family never knew what he claimed to have suffered at the hands of Mr. Nielsen. From the sealed complaint in the DA’s files, Sean was one of the luckier ones: His forced relations with the teacher lasted only three months. He had testified on the QT, using an assumed name. He wanted only to corroborate what others said. To make sure justice was meted out to this priest. But no more. No headlines, no public vendetta. All Sean wanted was to return to his own life on the Island.