“Yeah,” Sampson said. “Run that one by me again.”
I held both palms out toward my wife, who said, “I went on the Internet last night, searching for news stories about baby kidnappings in other cities. It’s horrible to say this, but it’s more common than you think.”
Quintus nodded. “Every couple of years, some wacko tries to steal a kid.”
“Some succeed,” Bree said. “And if the parents are from a lower socioeconomic class, the stories don’t get big play.”
Sampson said, “But how are the killings and the kidnappings connected?”
“The cities,” Bree replied. “And the dates.”
During her research, Bree had found references to the kidnapping of five-month-old Juanita Vicente and seven-month-old Albert Tinkler in Albuquerque, in April four years before. The connection didn’t dawn on her until she discovered two separate abductions in Tampa, in April two years later, a boy and a girl, four months and eight months old.
“It’s virtually the same time frame as the massage parlor shootings in those cities,” I said.
We showed them stories from April four years prior in the Albuquerque Journal and others published April two years ago in the Tampa Tribune, which referenced the massage parlor killings, the missing prostitutes, and the baby kidnappings on the same day but not in the same articles.
“They were thought of and treated as separate crimes,” Bree said. “We believe they’re all part of the same series of crimes perpetrated by the same two people, a man and a woman working together.”
Studying the reports intently, Quintus mumbled, “Jesus H. Christ.”
“It gets worse,” I said, putting the last of the stories from both papers on the captain’s desk. “In Albuquerque and in Tampa, the babies were found several days after the dead prostitutes. Drowned. But here’s the thing. When we compared the autopsy reports, we saw that the babies and the hookers died at roughly the same time.”
“So let me get this straight,” Captain Quintus said. “Every two years this couple hits a massage parlor, kills everyone except for one prostitute, whom they take hostage, and then they kidnap two babies, girl and boy.”
“Correct,” Bree said. “And then the prostitutes are strangled and the babies are drowned. And then they’re dumped apart.”
“They died at roughly the same time, right?” Sampson asked.
I nodded. “Give or take an hour.”
“Any other timetable to this?” Captain Quintus said.
“I don’t follow,” Bree said.
“Parallels as far as time sequences,” he replied a little testily. “I haven’t had as much experience with ritualistic killings as Alex has, but here you have two years between each of the events, which always occur in April. There have to be other consistencies like that.”
I agreed and started going through the files, looking at dates and times, while Bree, Sampson, and Quintus continued to analyze what we already knew, looking for more connections we might have missed. Ten minutes later, they were speculating on what could possibly have driven a man and a woman to mass murder, kidnapping, and infanticide, when I saw another parallel.
“Thirteen days and seventeen or eighteen hours,” I said, interrupting them. “In both Albuquerque and Tampa, the babies and the prostitutes were murdered in the early evening thirteen days after the massage parlor was attacked.”
“You’re sure?” Quintus said.
“Positive,” I replied. “Which means—”
“Cam Nguyen, Joss Branson, and Evan Lancaster are all dying this coming Wednesday night,” Sampson said.
Chapter
53
Almost forty excruciating hours passed with no significant gain in any of the investigations we were running. The entire time, I was aware of the clock ticking on the lives of the coed and the two babies. I kept thinking about my own kids, how gut-wrenching this all had to be for the Branson and Lancaster families. More than once, I bowed my head and prayed that we’d get some kind of break.
Around four thirty on Palm Sunday, we did.
I was at home, upstairs in my office after attending Mass with Nana Mama, when I got a text from Detective Brefka. It had taken almost ten days for a tech at the FBI computer lab at Quantico to debug the files from the city’s closed-circuit television cameras in the blocks around the Superior Spa the night of the mass killings. Brefka had spent the weekend going through them all and sent a report on what he’d found to my departmental e-mail.
I forwarded the file to Sampson and called him at home. I got Billie, who turned testy when I said John needed to download the file and then call me back. Billie reminded me curtly that he had not had a day off in three weeks. I replied that I hadn’t had a full day off in four weeks, and that it shouldn’t take long.