Winter Black Box Set 3 Read online

  From the short interaction he’d had with the renowned thief the day before, Bobby figured he and O’Connelly would get along fine. With a nod, he took another sip of the black coffee in his hand.

  Max returned the nod before he gestured to the brunette woman seated at the table in front of Sun and Miguel. “Now that we’ve got that settled, I’ll turn this over to Agent Welford from Cyber Crimes.”

  Agent Welford offered a polite smile as she rose to stand. She’d fashioned her dark brown hair into a neat ponytail, and her flats tapped lightly against the tiled floor. Max moved to the side as she took her spot at the front of the room.

  If Bobby met Special Agent Ava Welford on the street, he wouldn’t have guessed she was an agent with the FBI. Her honey-brown eyes were warm and kind, and there were just enough laugh lines on her fair face to make her seem approachable. She looked like someone’s aunt, not a federal agent. Then again, the two things weren’t mutually exclusive.

  Before his mind wandered down the inane path, he took another long pull from the dark coffee. He felt like he’d slept for five hours in the last six days. If it hadn’t been for the trusty combination of energy provided by caffeine and metal music, he’d have curled up in a ball on the floor like a cat.

  “Okay,” Agent Welford’s voice cut through the haze that had threatened to overtake Bobby’s thoughts, “we all know by now that there have been a total of five videos posted to the sub-forum of a website that Mr. O’Connelly found on the dark web. In the first four videos, the camera doesn’t move. All that’s captured in the frames is the women pacing and searching the room. Then, the feed just goes dead.”

  The mention of a serial kidnapper turned murderer was enough to push the cobwebs from Bobby’s head.

  Agent Welford cleared her throat. “Until the fifth video, that was the MO. But at the end of the fifth one, there was a new video after the feed of the captivity ended. In that shot, an unknown masked man produces a butcher knife and slits the young woman’s throat.”

  “We know the videos are real, right?” Sun asked.

  Ava Welford nodded. “Yes. And as best as we can tell, there weren’t any special effects used. To the best of our knowledge, the video of the young woman being killed is authentic.”

  “What are the odds it’s not real?” This time, the query came from Aiden Parrish, the Supervisory Special Agent of the Behavioral Analysis Unit.

  In response, Agent Welford shook her head. “The odds are slim, SSA Parrish. To create something that realistic, the actor and the filmmaker would need access to a state-of-the-art special effects studio and an artist capable of pulling off that type of realism. I’m not sure how many high-budget movies you all have seen recently, but considering half the time Hollywood can’t even get it right, I think it stands to reason that a random person in a basement won’t have what it takes.”

  Bobby half-expected Aiden Parrish to sneer. Instead, his mouth twitched with a slight smile as he nodded. “Thank you, Agent Welford.”

  “What about the IP addresses of the person who posted the videos?” Sun’s tone was as pointed as her expression.

  The attitude change might have been Bobby’s imagination—after all, Sun had been irritable since she walked into the room—but he thought there was a twinge of hostility whenever she spoke after Aiden Parrish. Though Bobby had no idea of the reason for the antagonism, it became clearer and clearer with each of Sun and Aiden’s interactions that there was bad blood.

  Agent Welford spread her hands as she glanced over to Sun. “The IP address was generated by a proxy server to mask the real log-in. We looked through the IP addresses of the commenters on the video, and they all used proxy servers too. It’s not all that uncommon. More often than not, when we’re dealing with people tech-savvy enough to navigate the dark web, they’re using a proxy. With something on this scale, IP addresses are usually a dead end.”

  Though the movement was grudging, Sun nodded.

  “We’re still looking into the posts, and we’ll continue to track down what we can while you work through the investigation on your end,” Agent Welford said.

  Max stepped up to the podium as Agent Welford returned to her seat. “First order of business is to identify the victims. If any of you learn anything new that might relate to this investigation, you’re expected to relay the information to Agent Black and Agent Dalton. Otherwise, you’re all dismissed.”

  When Bobby lifted his coffee for another drink, he was surprised at how light the cup had become. If I have to sift through missing persons reports all night, I’m going to need an entire pot.

  He almost groaned aloud at the thought.

  As Sun strode past without so much as a sideways glance in his direction, he grated his teeth. He wanted to ask her what was on her mind, but right after a briefing wasn’t the time, and the FBI field office wasn’t the place.

  Ryan O’Connelly had better be good company, because this was going to be a long night.

  6

  When Winter stepped into the conference room the next morning to meet with Bobby Weyrick, the weariness on his face was so pronounced that it made her tired. Though Winter had received a message from one of their office’s leading forensics experts to tell her there was an update on the evidence they’d collected from her old family home in Harrisonburg, she was glad she’d decided to meet with Bobby first. If she’d waited, she would have had to wake him up.

  With a light click, she closed the glass and metal door behind herself. “When’s the last time you slept?”

  As he yawned, Bobby shrugged in response. “I’m not sure anymore. Honestly, I think I got more sleep when I was deployed in Afghanistan.”

  Winter sat down at the circular table across from him. “Before you know it, we’ll be back to paperwork and court hearings.”

  He dropped his face into one hand. “Yeah, when people stop murdering one another. I’m not holding my breath.”

  At the sarcastic remark, she couldn’t help a quiet chuckle. “Are you and Autumn related? Because you sounded just like her with that comment.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Autumn Trent? The redhead? God, I hope not.”

  Winter froze midway through pushing open the screen of her laptop. As she narrowed her eyes, she closed the computer and laid both hands atop the matte surface. “What does that mean?”

  With a light sigh, he straightened himself. “It means that I need to go to bed because now I’m saying things that don’t make any sense. You don’t really need me to explain that, do you? It just…it came out wrong.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I think you’d better. You’re talking about my friend, you know that, right?”

  As he nodded, he rubbed his eyes with one hand. “I sure do,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it, okay? It’s just, she’s…” Holding out both hands, he gave her a hapless look.

  “She’s what?” Winter’s voice was so flat it bordered on outright irritable.

  “She’s an attractive woman, and if we were related, that’d be…” he made a face like he’d just bitten into a lemon, “that’d make me feel gross.”

  Even as the laughter bubbled up in her throat, Winter couldn’t curb the outburst. As she lapsed into a fit of laughter at Bobby’s awkward explanation, the tension she’d carried since the end of the investigation of Tony Johansson—a corrupt Baltimore City narcotics detective—lifted from her shoulders.

  She held up a hand to stave off any potential remarks, covering her face with the other as yet another wave of laughter threatened to roll over her. She felt punch-drunk, which might mean she could use some extra sleep too.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally managed. As she paused to sniffle, she glanced over to take stock of the mix of confusion and amusement on Bobby’s face. “Sorry. It’s…it’s been a long couple of weeks, and I guess sometimes you need a little fifth grade humor to help cut through the stress.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I understand that. On the plus side, I’m definitely more awake now.” As he flipped open a beige folder, he spun the file around to face Winter.

  Like a switch had been flipped, the good humor in the room evaporated.

  Winter studied the glossy printout of a zoomed-in still frame of one of the five videos. Before she turned over the page, she glanced at Bobby.

  “I found two of them.” He gestured to the folder. “I printed these stills off before I left with O’Connelly last night. Took down the time that each of the videos was posted, and then I went through missing persons reports from around the same time. This young woman here, that’s the girl who was killed.”

  With a grim look and a nod, Winter returned her focus to the printed information behind the blonde’s picture. “Dakota Ronsfeldt. Nineteen, lived in…” Giving her head a little shake, she looked back to Bobby, giving him an is this right stare.

  “Lived in Maine,” he finished for her. “That’s why it took me so long to find her. Her older brother and sister reported her missing, but they just made the report a couple days ago. Dakota was a recovering addict, and when she relapsed, her whole family cut her off. My guess is that’s why she came to Virginia. She got popped here in Richmond for solicitation about a month ago.”

  Winter turned to the next page—the missing person’s report. “How long had she been here?”

  “I got ahold of her brother last night.” Bobby shrugged his shoulders as if trying to work out a knot. “He said she left Maine something like six weeks ago. She’d call them on a regular basis, usually to ask for money. When she didn’t call them for a week straight, they tried to get ahold of her. Then, when they couldn’t, they filed the report.”

  Behind the missing person’s report was a printout of Dakota’s senior picture. Fal
l leaves of gold and red decorated the ground at her back, and her smile was wide and hopeful. What had happened between then and the time she was arrested for prostitution in Richmond, Winter suspected she’d never know.

  Compressed into a few sheets of paper and an eight-by-ten photograph was the entire tragedy of the end of a young woman’s life.

  Any doubts she might have had that the video was a fake could be officially laid to rest.

  Swallowing back the horror that must now be faced, Winter moved the first bundle of papers aside to peer down at the next eight-by-ten. This young woman was also blonde, though she had been only seventeen at the time she was reported missing.

  Bobby cleared his throat. “That’s Anastasia Mitchell. She was reported missing by her mother after she’d been gone from home for more than two weeks. That was a couple months ago, right around the time her video was posted. I got ahold of her mother this morning, and it sounds like they were a really strict household. Jehovah’s Witnesses, I think.”

  Lips pursed, Winter returned Dakota’s file and closed the folder. “It took them two weeks to report their seventeen-year-old daughter missing? Why?”

  Spreading his hands, Bobby leaned back. “I don’t know. From what the mom said, Anastasia ran off to be with a boy. The mother claimed that the boy had turned her daughter into a prostitute, and if it wasn’t for Dakota’s solicitation charge, I’d have thought she was exaggerating.”

  Winter tapped a finger on the closed folder. “During the Augusto Lopez investigation, some of the killers Augusto targeted picked on working girls too.”

  “So did Ted Bundy, The Green River Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, BTK.”

  Winter nodded. “Yeah, it’s a signature move among creeps who like to kill women.”

  Bobby lifted a shoulder. “I hate to say it, but I think we’ve got ourselves another serial killer.”

  Another serial killer.

  Looking at the girl’s picture again, Winter wondered if they’d ever have the manpower to devote to a fresh look at her brother’s case.

  Not if these psychopaths keep popping up, she thought bitterly.

  The sooner they took this bastard off the streets, the sooner she could focus her efforts on finding Justin.

  Ryan was glad the bureau had sprung for a hotel suite with a separate bedroom. He’d been advised against closing its door completely, but he was satisfied with the thin slat of light when he left it ajar. As long as Agent Sun Ming wasn’t staring at him while he shoved his face under a pillow and squeezed his eyes shut, he didn’t care.

  He couldn’t blame the agents for their wariness. He’d earned the suspicion and mistrust of the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  At least they won’t drug me and strap a bomb around my head.

  Though he still felt like a captive, the accommodations on the fifteenth story of the mid-grade hotel was much better than his time under Heidi’s thumb.

  He assumed the FBI had chosen the fifteenth floor in order to make an escape more difficult for Ryan, but between the eagle-eyed agent in the next room and the sci-fi ankle monitor he’d been fitted with the day before, he doubted he could have broken free from their oversight even if he tried.

  As he’d been pointedly told by the Richmond SAC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was far more acquainted with flight risks than the Erie police had been.

  Even if he made it past his vigilant babysitter and managed to ditch the high-tech ankle monitor, what then?

  He didn’t doubt Max Osbourne’s conviction when he’d assured Ryan he would find him if he ran, nor did he doubt the man’s capabilities.

  If Ryan made it out of the hotel, even out of the city, what did he do then? How did he keep his sister safe from her abusive ex-husband if he was constantly forced to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life?

  Before he’d left the field office the day before, Agents Black and Dalton had thanked him for his help and vowed they would find the person responsible for the macabre videos.

  If Ryan’s fate was in the hands of the two agents and their SAC, he would feel a bit better. But his future was in the hands of a lawyer.

  Ryan had always hated lawyers.

  With a muffled groan, he tightened his grip on the pillow that covered his head. He’d been so tired when he met with Agent Black and Agent Dalton, but even though he’d barely managed a couple hours of sleep since then, he couldn’t will his eyes to stay closed. No matter how hard he tried to blank his thoughts, they kept spiraling.

  He’d feel better if he could at least talk to Lillian, if he could at least confirm that she was okay, but he wouldn’t risk an outreach to the person he’d tried so hard to protect. Even if the FBI had Ryan dead to rights, they didn’t have Lil.

  The bureau wanted him around for the course of the investigation, but after an entire night in the company of an agent, Ryan still didn’t understand what they expected from him. He’d given them all the information he found—wasn’t that enough?

  Sure, he had gained access to the portions of the dark web where the videos had been found in the first place, but he had given the bureau’s tech department the information to do the same.

  Clenching and unclenching both hands, he finally lifted the pillow, rolled to his back, and took in a deep breath.

  You made your choice before you even came here, he told himself.

  Coming clean to the FBI was the only way to restore some semblance of normalcy to Lil, Evan, and Erin’s lives. It was the only way he could be sure the Feds wouldn’t paint a target on his sister’s back.

  If he ran, Lillian would be their first stop.

  Ryan flung an arm over his eyes to block out the sight of the room.

  If he had a choice before, he didn’t now.

  7

  After Winter made copies of all Bobby Weyrick’s notes and files he’d gathered the night before, she dropped the folder off at Noah’s desk. She’d hoped he would be there, but he must have been tasked with a meeting or an errand.

  As she made her way to the elevator that would take her to the cluster of offices that belonged to the forensic lab’s senior members, she felt like she was on her way to her first day of school. Though Stella Norcott had told her she’d finished her evaluation of some of the items from the house, she hadn’t elaborated. If any pertinent information had been found, Winter was sure she would have called or written a more detailed note.

  A little over a week ago, Autumn had accompanied Winter to her childhood home in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

  Visiting the house was a follow-up to the cryptic email Winter had received from Justin: Hey, sis. Heard you’ve been looking for me.

  The FBI Cyber Crimes Division had determined that the email originated from Harrisonburg. Right away, Winter had been certain not just that the sender was her little brother, but that he’d set foot in the house that had been abandoned since their parents were killed.

  Her hunch had been right.

  On the drywall of the area that had once been their family’s living room, he had written: Hey, sis, you just missed me.

  When Winter and Autumn had followed a foul stench upstairs, it led them to the same bedroom where Winter had found her parents’ bodies all those years ago. Written in the same substance as the message downstairs was another cryptic message: See you soon.

  What that meant, Winter was still no closer to knowing. The short message had been rendered even more ominous by the pile of desecrated rat corpses in the corner of the room.

  With a long exhale of breath, she shook herself from the recollection and jabbed the button for the third floor.

  To hope that a few dead rats and the dust in an abandoned house would unequivocally point them in Justin’s direction was naïve, to say the least. Any time her thoughts drifted toward the realm of wishful thinking, she abruptly reigned them back into reality.

  Over the past few days, she’d started to wonder if her brother even wanted to be found. Did he think he was in danger? Did he think that because Douglas Kilroy had stolen him away from his family, he was somehow responsible for the man’s crimes?