The Stranger You Know (Forensic Instincts 3)

Immediately, the keypad tone began beeping, indicating the start of the alarm system countdown. Ryan calmly entered 4-7-3-9 and silenced the tone.

Quickly, the two men made their way down into the basement. Ryan would have preferred placing Gecko behind an air vent in the owner’s office, but that wasn’t about to happen. A steel-clad door and Medeco cylinder lock required them to shift to plan B. Fortunately, the utility room was unlocked, so in they went, straight to the air vent. Just to be on the safe side, Ryan cut a square access hole on top of the supply duct, so no one would notice that the duct had been compromised and repaired.

Then he turned Gecko on.

He watched as the little fellow whirred to life, and then set him inside the duct. Slowly and methodically, Gecko executed the 3-D navigation plan that Ryan had generated. Both Ryan and Marc listened as the “tink, tink” sound of Gecko moving from duct to duct echoed in the basement.

Ryan pulled out his iPhone and started the monitoring app he’d created. Marc, always impressed by Ryan’s abilities, peered over his shoulder as Gecko turned on his camera and LED light, illuminating the air vent in the market’s locked office. Ryan could see the desk. On top were a telephone, fax machine and a large black ledger. On the walls were maps of the world with time zones clearly delineated. It looked more like a bookie’s office than a butcher’s.

With Gecko in place, Ryan turned off the little critter’s LED light, and put him in “vigilant” mode, where Gecko would conserve power waiting for noise, light or motion to trigger a status change to “active.” When that happened, all sensors would go on and data streamed in real time to FI’s offices.

Ryan sealed up the duct, closed the utility room door and he and Marc headed upstairs. Marc stood outside while Ryan pressed 4-7-3-9 to reactivate the alarm and then exited. Marc expertly relocked the door and the two men walked toward their truck.

* * *

The whole FI team knew that Ryan treasured his sleep, and how miserable he was when he didn’t get his eight hours. But tonight, he had no thought of hitting the sack—not until he’d done some heavy-duty digging into Jack Fisher.

He pulled up the information Yoda had compiled. Jack’s parents’ death certificates. Trust fund documents. Glen Fisher being appointed Jack’s guardian after his parents were killed in a car accident. Jack disappearing when he was sixteen.

He’d been a minor back then. Therefore, Ryan’s normal background search procedures wouldn’t work. Usually he would access credit reporting, criminal and other databases. But a disappearing teenager presented a unique challenge.

Ryan started by using school districting maps to determine what elementary school Jack had attended. He then followed the boy’s progress from elementary school P.S. 59, to Simon Baruch Middle School and finally the Honors Academy at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn.

Assembling the assorted pieces, Ryan determined that Jack had disappeared sometime between his sophomore and junior years in high school. That was consistent with his death certificate, which listed him as seventeen when he died.

“Bullshit,” Ryan cursed at the monitor. “The fucker’s still alive.”

Time for some real investigative work. Using the dates he now had, Ryan dug up yearbook and other intermittent pictures. He fed the time-sequenced images into the system, and used photo-aging algorithms to project a current picture of Jack at age twenty-four.

He printed copies of Jack’s photo on FI’s high-resolution color laser printer, and then continued his research.

A decade ago, blogs and social media were in their infancy. Ryan searched the local newspapers around the time of Jack’s disappearance for any clues.

One story popped up and Ryan’s antennae rose.

It was an article about a sixteen-year-old girl being molested outside a nightclub on 88th Street in Bay Ridge—The Suite, which was today known as the Capri. The girl, Angela Minutti, was the daughter of local mobster Paul Minutti. Two male teenagers were found the next day, beaten to death and dumped in front of the nightclub. Another boy was missing and presumed dead.

Angela Minutti was in shock and uncertain who’d attacked her and who’d rescued her. There were ski masks, brutality and finally the police. One thing she did recall—and that was that Jack Fisher was on the scene. But she couldn’t remember if he’d helped her or hurt her.

Ryan found an interesting video taken the day after the attack. Angela had just been helped into an ambulance, where she was huddled, wrapped in a blanket and shaking. There were visible bruises around her neck.

Ryan paused the video, extracting and enhancing the frame he was interested in. Then he made a snap decision. He needed Hutch to weigh in on this.

Quickly, he composed an email to Hutch detailing the key points of his research, including a link to the video. He attached the still video frame he’d extracted and enhanced. Then he pressed Send.

It didn’t take three minutes

before his cell phone rang.

“I got the email,” Hutch said. “I’m reading your points right now.” A pause. “Looking at both the video and the picture.”

“And?”

“And those are definitely choke marks on her neck.”

Ryan cleared his throat. He was getting into dicey territory. He couldn’t reveal the fact that Jack Fisher was alive—not without telling Hutch how he’d found out. Illegally.

“Hutch, let’s say this incident happened before Jack Fisher died. Let’s say he was responsible. What can you read between the lines here?”