Page 50 of Psycho
“So, you believe him?” August asked.
“He just said he thinks he’s truly crazy, not undercover. Not a glowing endorsement,” Atticus said.
Thomas flicked a gaze to his oldest son. “Atticus, quiet.”
The large man began to sulk. The Mulvaney boys didn’t like being questioned and they certainly didn’t like not getting their way. They were like murderous toddlers, willing to defend their toys and their status as Daddy’s favorite with violence. The criminologist in Lucas wanted to sit with each of them and see how they ticked. But that wasn’t why they were there.
Thomas looked at Lucas. “I believe you can do what you say you can, and I believe you’ve been set up. I’ll reserve my judgement on anything else until we hear what Calliope has found.”
Thomas hit a button on the conference room speaker. “Calliope, we’re all here.”
The screen directly in front of them lit up, but there was no information presented. “Sorry, August,” she said sheepishly. “Okay, here’s what I know. Laurence Kohn transferred here permanently about two weeks after Lucas took the job at the university. He actually settled in before Lucas officially moved here. He lives alone as far as I can tell, is working a desk job as a supervisory special agent, and pays his bills on time. His computer is pristine, his bank records boring. On paper, he’s clean enough to squeak.”
“Did you find anybody who might be his partner?” August asked.
“Yeah, that’s the thing, his phone records are the only thing that stand out as strange. He receives an obscene number of calls from burner phones. At first, I thought maybe this partner was just overly cautious, tossing burner phones after limited use, but then I realized the numbers overlap. He’s getting repeat calls from burner phones, but they’re all coming from different people.”
“Human traffickers?” Archer enquired.
Lucas shook his head. “Kohn was torturing these women. Traffickers don’t damage their merchandise. Traffickers use drugs and debt to control their victims. They don’t mutilate them unless keeping them becomes a liability. These women were taken solely for his perverse pleasure. There’s too short a window between when they’re taken and when the bodies are discovered.”
August turned to Lucas. “But you said only three bodies were recovered, despite several young women going missing. Could there have been a reason he didn’t keep them? Maybe they’d caused too much trouble? Maybe the others were trafficked, but these women were…a warning? Or, like you said, a way to taunt you?”
“Maybe. But it just feels…off. Wrong somehow. I can’t explain it. If he was trafficking them, he’d have to be hiding his money somewhere, no?”
Archer shifted in his seat. “If the transactions are taking place on the darknet, he could be using cryptocurrency. It’s the preferred currency of the underworld.”
“So, we have nothing? For all intents and purposes, he’s just another upstanding citizen,” Lucas said, disgust leaking into his tone.
“Except, we know he’s not. He’s fucking with you. That Post-it note wasn’t just a warning, it was a clue,” August said. “He wants to play with you, drag you into his twisted fucking game. Whatever is in that box, I guarantee it will be something that forces you to experience something terrible for another piece of the puzzle. We know he’s guilty. Just let me fucking kill this guy. Nobody is going to miss him.”
Lucas shook his head, his gaze locked on the shoebox. August was right about the box. Kohn was fucking with him. “What if he’s taken more girls? We don’t know there aren’t other women out there being tortured.”
“Lucas is right. Girls are going missing here,” Calliope said, drawing everybody’s attention back to the speaker in the center of the room.
“Who?” Thomas asked sharply.
A cursor appeared on the screen as Calliope said, “I can’t tell you who, but I can tell you where.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas asked.
A map appeared on the screen. “Do you see this six block radius?”
“Yes,” Thomas confirmed, looking at the blocks she’d highlighted in pink.
Calliope was rapidly typing even as she spoke, like she was somehow multitasking. “It’s our version of skid row. This place houses the greatest number of our homeless population, addicts, and sex workers. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of overlap.”
“Okay?” August prompted.
“There’s a certain number of indigent people who regularly go missing. Strangely, the statistic remains fairly static. Two weeks after Laurence Kohn moved into the city, that number began to spike...steeply. People are disappearing from this part of town at an alarming rate.” Missing person posters began to fill the screen, overlapping each other until no one person stood out. “If I get rid of the men and those found dead, all of these women and young girls are left.”
Lucas could feel his breakfast creeping back up his esophagus. “Calliope, is there any overlap in profiles? Can you cross-reference details of their lives? Their features, characteristics? Anything that denotes a pattern?”
“I can try. It’s going to take time. This population tends to live off-grid, whether they mean to or not.”
“In the meantime, maybe we should just do it the old fashioned way,” August suggested.
Lucas frowned. “Meaning what?”
