“Why him?”
“His mom dated Rex Whitehurst,” Pete began. “The killer from way back. Turns out her son and Rex were tight. When I was visiting Emily, she freaked out when Aguilera showed up and started talking, as if she recognized his voice.”
“So what do we do?” Dave said as he scratched his chin absentmindedly. “Go to the cops and explain everything? I mean, they’re on your ass.”
“First, we need to get rid of Kathy’s car,” Pete said.
“Gomez is already driving it to Coral Gables,” Dave said. “It’ll be outside her apartment in no time.”
“Can you get someone to keep an eye on Emily’s room in Baptist?” Pete said.
Dave nodded.
“I’ll call some people, see what we can do,” Dave said. “It’s going to be tough, especially if there are cops around her all day. But we’ll try.”
“If it is Aguilera, then he thought Emily was dead when he dumped her on the side of the road,” Pete said. “Now he knows she’s alive—and he knows she’ll pin this on him. He’ll try to kill her first chance he gets.”
Dave pulled out his cell and walked away from Kathy and Pete. He could only make out a few words of what Dave was saying in Spanish.
“What’s going on?” Kathy asked. She was nervous.
“If we don’t hear what he’s asking them to do, we can’t be implicated,” Pete said.
“That is some loose-ass logic there, Petey,” Kathy said.
Dave flipped his phone shut and walked back to them.
“What else?”
“I dunno,” Pete said. “That’s all I worked out on the way here. We need to think. I need to figure out how we can put the spotlight on Aguilera before we get arrested, because if we’re locked up, that gives him time to bail.”
“Follow me,” Dave said, motioning them toward a gravel walkway near the back of the patio.
They walked along the narrow path for a few feet until they arrived at a shack about the size of a college dorm room.
“The fuck is this?” Kathy said.
Dave opened the door. Inside was a small, well-lit room, with a few chairs and a table that served as a dining area. There were no windows. On the table was a Mac laptop. It was cold in the tiny space.
“I come here when I need a break,” Dave said. “Computer’s all yours, just don’t judge me if you stumble across anything dicey in my Internet history. I got my car back, by the way. No thanks to you.”
“How long do you think we have before they find us?” Pete asked, ignoring the jab.
“Couple hours at least,” Dave said. “Probably a few days if you stick it out here. But knowing you, that’s probably not going to happen.”
“No,” Pete said. “But this’ll do for now. Thanks, man.”
***
“What do we know?”
Pete’s words echoed around the tiny room. It was close to three in the morning. He and Kathy had spent the last few hours doing as much research on Raul Aguilera as one could with just a laptop and an Internet connection. Luckily, the usually sloth-like
Miami Times
had yet to revoke Kathy’s database access, giving them a bit more maneuverability than they’d expected. It probably had to do with the please-don’t-sue-us “exit package” they’d given her, which meant she got part of her salary for a few weeks but didn’t have to report to work—something to tide her over until she found a new gig. Still, the search results were nil.
“We know that Raul Aguilera was a model student,” Kathy said. “And he went on to be a well-regarded and respected FBI agent. No criminal record, no professional missteps and, aside from what we learned today, no links to Rex Whitehurst or any other serial murderers, aside from the ones he tried to put away. We have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s focus. We don’t exactly have the option of going home and sleeping on this.”
“No, we don’t,” Pete said. In the last few hours, they’d seen numerous news reports—on the Internet and television—with their photos featured. The cops were doing the full court press to find them, and if they were caught with nothing to back up their claims, whatever hopes they had of stopping Aguilera would be under the bus with them.
“Any chance we could find some of those ads?” Pete said.
“The ones the killer posted?”
“Yeah,” Pete said.
Kathy didn’t respond right away, but began typing.
“Let’s see how far back we can go,” she said. Pete leaned over her, his eyes scanning the screen as she flipped through pages and pages of the Craigslist’s site history.
“I wish we had the stuff we got from visiting Alice’s roommate,” Pete said. “It’s going to be impossible to figure out which ad one of these girls responded to.”
“Wait,” Kathy said. She lifted her hands from the keyboard for a second. “Didn’t one of the posts come from a weird e-mail address?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Pete said. “A Hotmail account. Alice’s roommate got defensive when you made fun of the poster for using one.”
“It was something cheesy but sort of official-sounding,” Kathy said. “Like, MiamiApartments@hotmail or something?”
“MIAapartments4rentSOON@hotmail. Try that,” Pete said.
She typed in the address and waited for the slowish Internet connection to kick in. After a few seconds, a single listing appeared—from a few months before.
“Bingo,” Kathy said.
She clicked on the listing. They both scanned the text quickly.
“This is it,” Pete said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yup. This is the ad Alice Cline read and responded to,” Pete said. “This is the ad that killed her.”
$800 / 1br—430ft²—APARTMENT IN KENDALL (7320 SW 80TH ST APT J402)
Nice clean apartment, for rent starting June 1st. By appointment only. Ideal for first-time tenant or college student. Located near restaurants and laundry. No broker fee, great deal. Contact Steve via email.
“OK, but there’s no number with it,” Kathy said. “We know it’s him, but that doesn’t help. We’re grasping at straws here.”
Pete motioned for Kathy to step away from the laptop. They were both tired and cranky, but he had an idea.
“Let me get in there for a second,” he said.
He went back to the main search option and typed “miaapartments4rentSOON”—minus the Hotmail domain. He got a handful of search results.
“They’re all from the same time period,” Pete said.
“So?”
“So, our guy was creating e-mail addresses with different service providers,” Pete said. “But he couldn’t be bothered to change up the login names.”
“Again, so what? How does that get us any closer to anything?”
“Not sure yet,” he said. He cursed under his breath. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner?
Pete clicked on each ad from the list, opening each one in its own browser tab. He scanned them, one by one. They were identical, except for the second-to-last one.
“We’ve got a number,” Pete said.
“What?”
“There’s a phone number with this ad,” Pete said. “None of the others have one, but the text is identical otherwise.”
“Why have a number on this one?”
“Not sure,” Pete said. “This is one of the later ones. Maybe he was hoping to expand his client base?”
“Victim base, you mean,” Kathy said. He could see the weariness in her eyes. She wanted no part of this anymore. Pete couldn’t blame her.
Pete grabbed Kathy’s phone from the table and began dialing. She didn’t protest. After a quick exchange with someone on the other end, Pete hung up with a long, frustrated sigh.
“What happened?”
“False alarm,” Pete said.
“How so?”
“The number’s for a disposable phone,” Pete said. “Whoever had it before knew that. The number itself is worthless.”
“True, but the clue is valuable,” Kathy said. “It means he didn’t want to be traced, which implies he was doing something wrong. Not a smoking gun, by any means, but still. Something.”
Pete pushed himself away from the table in frustration and stood up. He was tired. His head hurt. They’d been holed up in this tiny, sketchy room for hours and all they had was a temporary cell phone number and a few Internet postings. He felt helpless.
“Something isn’t going to help us here,” Pete said. “We need more. This guy was going after girls. He had a fixation with his mentor, Rex Whitehurst. What else? What else can we pin on him?”
“How do killers pay homage to other killers?” Kathy said. “What methods did Rex Whitehurst have that Raul Aguilera could mimic?”
Pete nodded, starting to pace again.
“What did this killer do?” Pete said. “What did Rex do differently?”
“Rex’s kills were similar, but not the same,” she said. “He didn’t use ads, he’d troll neighborhoods and entice kids to come into his car…”
“Wait,” Pete said. “That’s it.”
“What is?”
“His car,” Pete said. “Rex drove a white van. That was his signature move. Erica Morales’s friend Silvia said she saw Erica get into a white van. But saying someone owns a white van in Miami is like saying you have sunglasses in LA. Still, what if Aguilera adopted that part of his stepdad’s MO?”
“That would make sense,” Kathy said.
“Can you find out what kind of van Rex Whitehurst used for his crimes?” Pete asked.
“Sure,” Kathy responded, already back at the laptop and typing. “Shouldn’t be too hard. Let’s see. Okay, here we go. A Ford Aerostar, 1983, white.”
“Ford stopped making the Aerostar a few years back, no?”
“How should I know?” Kathy said.
“It’s true,” Pete said. “They changed the name—to the Windstar. So someone still driving a Ford Aerostar, especially one from 1983 that’s white, has got to be rare.”
“Thank you so fucking much for being incompetent,
Miami Times
,” Kathy muttered as she continued to type. “Let’s see how far into the DMV records
The Times
system will take me before it raises a red flag and they realize I’m not exactly an employee anymore.”
Pete nodded. He’d done something similar the year previous during the Silent Death case, also with Kathy’s account, no less.
The Miami Times
, as the city’s paper of record, had unprecedented access to public networks, databases, and information, the Department of Motor Vehicles being one of them. But even that had its limits. If a user account was flagged for browsing sensitive sections of personal records, it could be shut down.
“Bingo,” Kathy said. Pete felt his stomach tie into a knot. “There’s a handful of 1983 white Ford Aerostars still registered and active in Miami. Most seem to be in the hands of older folk, or in junkyards—which means they won’t get their registration renewed or they’ve been on the garbage pile for years.”
“Anyone actively using one, though? Any person seem out of the ordinary?” Pete asked.
Kathy took a sharp breath.
“What is it?”
“Fuck,” Kathy said.
Pete moved in closer to the laptop and looked over her shoulder.
There was one person who owned a white Ford Aerostar from 1983 that wasn’t pushing it in age. His name was Julian Finch. He was thirty-five, white, male, and worked as a Realtor for Penagos Realtors in West Kendall.
Penagos Realtors.
Pete could see the shop’s neon sign as if he were standing in front of it. His mind jumped back to seeing Emily waiting inside. It jumped ahead a few days—to the body of Melissa Saiz being pulled out of a garbage dump behind the building. The fruitless search. They had been so close.
“Who the fuck is Julian Finch?” Kathy said.
But Pete wasn’t around to answer.
She wanted to die.
Nina Henriquez could hear her heart beating. Slower now, it seemed. She’d lost track of time. All she knew was that she was running out of water and had finished the last few crumbs of cereal yesterday.
The whirring sound—the camera, she figured—hadn’t come to life in a while. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. The man that brought her here—Steve, the real estate guy—was gone. Was he real? Her head was still foggy. But she had pieced together enough.
How could she have been so stupid? The thought crossed her mind throughout the days—weeks—she’d been here, in the small, musty-smelling room.
He’d planned her capture well, Nina mused. Tying her hands just so. She was able to stretch her fingers and reach the food—sometimes even the water—but it was almost impossible to yank the cloth wrapped around her face. Almost.
Her legs felt dead under her. She rocked back and forth, trying to get the blood circulating again. She knew it was only a brief respite. Her wrists—tied to her ankles—were rubbed raw. Her fingers massaged her toes.
She’d stopped crying a while ago. Not because she didn’t think anyone could hear her. She’d figured that out soon enough. She didn’t want to give him the pleasure. This asshole had manipulated her. Taken advantage of her. For what? She wasn’t sure. She may never know. But she wasn’t going to feed his sick fantasy. She wasn’t going to just be a notch on his wall.