Full Tilt (14 page)

31

Lost River State Forest, Minnesota

“Y
ou come up here for the birding?”

Zurrn didn’t expect the attendant pumping gas into his van to start a conversation. He was in Pine Mills, a village that skirted the state forest near the Canadian border.

The forest was known for bird-watching.

It was dusk. Bishop’s General Store and Gas,
where he’d stopped, was the only sign of life. The attendant, “Ferg,” according to the smudged name patch on his shirt, was chatty.

“That’s right,” Zurrn said to his side-view mirror.

“I figured.” Ferg clamped on his toothpick as the smell of gasoline wafted while the flow hummed. “I see by your plate you’re from Delaware. Folks that come that far, usually—”

A sudden muffled sound from inside the van caught Ferg’s attention. Cupping his free hand to his temple, he drew his face to the tinted window.

“You got a dog in there, or something?”

Zurrn eyed him then caught the flash of a turn signal. A car was approaching the service station from the highway. It bore the emergency light bar of a police unit.

“No.” He kept his voice soft. “My wife’s trying to get some sleep.”

Oh
, Ferg mouthed. “Okay.” After finishing the fill-up, he replaced the nozzle quietly and took care tightening the van’s gas cap.

“That’ll be forty-five,” Ferg whispered. “Want me to check the oil?”

Zurrn held three twenties out the window.

“Nope. Keep the change.” He started the engine.

“Thank you, sir! Want a receipt?”

“Nope.”

As a Klassen County sheriff’s white patrol car wheeled up to the pumps, Zurrn slipped the transmission into Drive and eased away.

That was close.

Watching Bishop’s General Store and Gas shrink in his mirror, Zurrn then glanced over his shoulder, his attention flicking to the enlarged storage area he’d built under the van’s master bed. The sleeping pills were wearing off. Not to worry, it wasn’t much farther.

That little scene back there underscored the need to be vigilant.

Now that he was at war, now that his struggle was national news, mistakes could not be made. He glanced at the newspaper on the passenger seat, folded to the latest article on Rampart. There were photos of the farm with insets of the victims and that reporter, Kate Page, the one who’d begged and pleaded to know more about her sister.

There was a sidebar story about Page and her painful, unrelenting search for her sister. The story praised her as “heroic, brave, courageous and smart.”

Your reverence is misplaced.

Zurrn seized the paper and looked at her face with contempt before tossing it aside. She was a moth, circling mindlessly in his brilliance. He was on the edge of immortality, of achieving something monumental.

You have no understanding of who I am.

Or what I am.

As twilight yielded to the dark he searched the dense woods, unearthing the pieces of his life. His mother had come to America to live with relatives when she was a student from Bulgaria, or Romania, or Serbia. He was never sure. She drank a lot and told him different stories. She may have been a Gypsy. She became an US citizen, working as a nurse until she became a drug addict and lost her job. Her life was far from the American dream. When Frank, the paramedic she’d married, realized that Zurrn was not his son but the bastard of one of her many affairs, he walked out on them.

Zurrn stared into the darkness ahead and admitted what he was.

I am the result of a whore’s barter for drugs.

He had no idea who his father was. Zurrn grew up poor, friendless and with a love-hate relationship with his mother. As a child, he had an ungainly limp, which he’d had surgically corrected as an adult. His mother was protective of him during her periods of lucidity, feeding him the promise of a better life, telling him he was exceptional.

“You’re not like other kids, Sorin. You’re destined for greatness.”

His teachers had found that his IQ was the highest of any student they had taught and that he had an eidetic memory. But Zurrn was ostracized and bullied at school. He would hide away alone after classes in one of the labs, building new computers from discarded ones.

His mother struggled to pay the rent on their cold, ramshackle home but was hostage to her addiction between jobs cleaning hotel rooms or serving fast food, leaving them to rely on charity. One day a boy teased Zurrn because of his shirt.

Hey, why’re you wearing that rag, Hopalong? My mom donated it to a church. How’d you get it? You steal it?

Others soon gathered round and started poking Zurrn.

Know what I heard?
A bigger boy grinned.
I heard your old lady gives blow jobs for dope, anywhere and anytime!

Zurrn burned with shame.

Limping away, he tore off the shirt and threw it in a Dumpster before he got home and sought refuge in his collection. Ever since a class trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden, he’d started collecting butterflies. He began by stealing several exotic ones from the Garden, putting them under his shirt, feeling his prisoners flapping against his chest near his heart. He was enamored with their beauty and, later, the whole process of chasing and capturing specimens in parks.

He soon became expert with his killing jar where he imprisoned each catch. He’d watch his beauties flutter themselves to death or die slowly in captivity. Sometimes he’d pinch the thorax to stun them. After death, he took great care spreading their wings, pinning them, mounting them and soaking up their poetry.

My pretty dead things.

They didn’t leave you to buy drugs and get stoned in the bathroom. They didn’t bring home strange men stinking of alcohol.

They didn’t humiliate you.

They were his to own, his to possess, his to control.

He held the power of life and death over them.

He was never alone when he was with his collection. They were individual works of art, so beautiful. Unlike the ugliness he’d endured at every turn. Every day with each indignity he suffered, his anger grew, evolving into a quiet rage.

He remembered walking home one afternoon and seeing his mother searching through the trash cans along their street. At that moment he saw a pack of neighborhood teenage girls swarm her, mock her, slap her and rip apart her plastic bags, scattering her soda and beer cans. Mortified, Zurrn stayed out of sight. Then he ran off, his tears and fury nearly blinding him with shame for not defending his mother.

And shame because of her.

Tonya Plesivsky was the girl who’d led the attack. He knew where she lived and that she had a beloved dog, Pepper. That night, Zurrn lay awake seething. A week later, MISSING flyers went up in the neighborhood for Tonya’s dog. Pet lovers were sympathetic. One day Tonya even stopped Zurrn on the street near Ben Bailey Park.

Have you seen Pepper, Sorin? This is serious. I’m worried.

She had a lot of nerve, after what she’d done to his mother.

No
, he had lied.

Of course, he knew where Pepper was and he considered sending the mutt’s head to her with a note—“I’m missing you in hell”—before dismissing the plan. He was happy knowing that she would never see her precious Pepper again. At the same time, as much as he loathed Tonya, he saw how fear became her, how pretty she was in her anguish. His power over her enthralled him and he fantasized about what he’d do to her, about seeing a MISSING poster with Tonya’s face on it.

The van’s headlights raked the woods and gravel popped under the tires as Zurrn turned onto an abandoned forestry road. He knew this area, he’d been here before. As the van toddled along the old rutted path, soft groaning and cries rose from the back.

“Don’t worry. Not much longer,” he said aloud.

That incident with Tonya was the catalyst that had put him on the path of what was truly his life’s work as a collector. First, he earned scholarships to college and studied computer design. That didn’t last long before he drifted across the country trying this and trying that, before jumping from one computer job to another. During this time, he grappled with his animosity toward his mother, growing distant and out of touch. Only she knew where he was—he’d allow her that much—but he rarely responded to her letters or calls.

Perhaps out of guilt, but more out of curiosity, he monitored the online editions of the Chicago newspapers. He was living in Denver when he saw his mother’s death notice in the
Chicago Tribune
.

His mother’s church had placed the notice.

He contacted the church, then returned to Chicago to quietly arrange for her funeral. But he couldn’t bear to attend. Instead, he’d watched from a distance as they buried her, along with his past.

After her death he returned to Colorado and began severing all ties with his mother and the family name. She had no estate. She had nothing. He ignored or tossed into the trash any records or correspondence linking him to Chicago and the Zurrn name.

At this time he used his expertise to take on a new identity.

He was reborn and started a new life, off the grid.

He was invisible.

Still, he longed for the only joy he’d known through his collection. And he recalled how much he had enjoyed Tonya’s anguish. That’s when his metamorphosis happened. He was traveling when he was seized with a compulsion to start a new collection, a special one that rivaled anything the world had known.

He was nervous and made tiny errors in the early days when he captured his first specimen.

But it was a success.

A work of art.

He cherished it because he owned it.

Over the years he acquired other pretty specimens, enhancing his collection. He became expert at finding them, hunting them and keeping them for as long as he wanted. Each new capture enthralled him, so much so that he would press himself against their cell to feel the panic in their hearts beat against him. Oh, how he loved it.

Flutterings in the kill jar.

Most specimens were cooperative and loyal, but some would fall ill, harm themselves or try to escape.
Escape was treasonous—it meant disloyalty. It was a wish to abandon him, like his father abandoned him; to break a promise and walk away from parental responsibility.

It meant that over the years it was necessary to discard and replace them. It broke his heart, but that’s how it was. The posters of the missing online, with terms such as “last seen,” and “disappeared without a trace” stood as testament to his refined skills as a collector.

My glory.

And no one ever knew.

Yes, other enthusiasts would occasionally surface in the news but only because they’d failed. Some across the country and around the world had kept their work going for years, as well, but they were defeated because of mistakes.

Never let a specimen escape.

True, Rampart didn’t go according to Zurrn’s plan. He’d intended for the case to be closed with the death of “Carl Nelson.” Sure, he could’ve ended things in the house rather than the barn. But the fire and staging of the specimen were stylistic touches he couldn’t resist. Still, the discovery by police wasn’t a setback.

It was a challenge.

Maybe I’ll go public like the Zodiac and the Ripper.

Zurrn would carry on creating his new garden paradise. But he’d have to make further adjustments along the way. At this moment, he was grappling with keeping the last of his remaining specimens. For years his plan was to start over with all new prospects to capture. But he’d grown partial to some of his specimens and decided to keep them.

And now, with the situation brewing in Rampart and all that business with that reporter, he realized that this was a game changer. This was his chance to showcase his mastery to the world. And the only way to do it was to sacrifice his treasures.

It had to be done. He was at war.

Time to get started.

He brought the van to a stop on a soft, earthen patch alongside a fast-flowing stream. Crickets chirped and starlight glimmered on the water. Isolated. No one around for miles.

No one to hear a thing. Perfect. History will be made, right here.

He stepped from the van wearing high-quality night-vision goggles. They provided him with brilliant, sharp images in the darkness as he worked.

First, he maneuvered the heavy-duty handcart used for moving vending machines and removed the wooden crates, positioning them on the ground.

Then he set out his instruments.

Next, he set up the stands for the studio photography lights, aligning them just so. Then he stood there addressing the questions:

Which one, and how?

A soft cry rose from one of the boxes.

“Please.”

32

New York City

A
fter Kate got Grace to bed she made fresh coffee and called Goodsill back so they could work on the Colorado link to the abduction in Alberta.

Could this lead me to Carl Nelson and information about Vanessa?

Kate needed to follow this through.

“Good news, I found my old files,” Goodsill said over the phone. “Fifteen years is a long time but when I read over my notes, it all came back to me, and I found some interesting stuff. I just sent it to you.”

Kate set her phone to speaker, turned the volume low then started downloading the attachments of scanned documents arriving in her in-box.

“Strange thing is,” Goodsill went on, “that clipping you found is the only story that I wrote on the case, but I put in a lot of time on it.”

“What do you mean?” The documents blossoming on Kate’s screen were crumpled, torn and stained bills, invoices, along with other records. “I don’t understand what I’m looking at here. Walk me through everything”

Goodsill took Kate to the beginning. His cousin was married to a Denver detective, Ned Eckles, and the two men got to talking at a family gathering. Goodsill had learned that Ned was looking into a query from Canadian police to run down a partial plate possibly connected to an abduction.

Ned’s supervisors said that the plate info was so vague it could’ve applied to about twenty-five other states, meaning that without something more specific, they didn’t want him investing much time in the check. Using the vehicle description and the plate’s partial sequence, Ned had the records people do an analysis and they came up with five possibilities for Denver.

“Ned ran them all down, made personal visits and questioned the vehicle owners. Four were easily ruled out. And although he’d ruled out the fifth, Ned told me the vehicle owner gave him a bad vibe.”

“You’re talking about this Jerome Fell.”

Kate looked at her monitor and saw notes for Jerome Fell, aged 30, of 2909 Falstaff Street, Denver. Goodsill had scanned in Fell’s driver’s license with a photo of a clean-shaven man with an expression of indifference staring from it. She touched her fingers to the lower part of his face, covering it and visualizing him with a beard. He could resemble Carl Nelson. She couldn’t be sure. There was a time difference of at least fifteen years.

“Yes. Ned had said that before he visited Fell he already knew from US border people that Fell had been to Canada around the time of the abduction and that he’d returned through Eastport, Idaho. But Fell was never detained at the border and never searched.”

“Why?”

“Border people claimed that they never had any alerts about a van and partial plate, at that time. That’s something the Canadians disputed.”

“But Ned met with Fell?”

“Yes.”

“And had a bad vibe about him, yet he still ruled him out? Why?”

“When Ned questioned Fell cold, about his whereabouts for that time period, Fell acknowledged right off that he’d been to Canada on vacation. He said he’d been in British Columbia but not Alberta and even showed Ned motel receipts to prove it.”

“So then what?”

“Ned cleared him, but something about Fell niggled at him. Ned told me later that Fell seemed unusually well prepared, almost as if he were expecting to account for his travels for that period. Still, Ned’s supervisors, citing the partial-plate business, were satisfied and pulled Ned away to other investigations.”

“Was that the end of it?”

“Not quite. Ned was still bothered by Fell and not long after that suggested I do some quiet digging on him.”

“What’d you do?”

“I never talked to Fell. I didn’t want him to get suspicious. I talked to his neighbors, kept an eye on his place. I learned that he was a computer expert, a contractor, that he lived alone, kept to himself and kept up his property. See the pictures. He had a tidy little bungalow with a garage.”

“What did you find out?”

“Not much, but I figured that if this guy had kidnapped a Canadian girl and was living in Denver, this would be a huge story, so before letting it go, I decided to do a trash hit.”

“You stole his garbage from the curb?”

“Yup, I think I did it about six times under cover of night. You ever do that, Kate?”

“A few times.”

“Dirty, messy work, but the Supreme Court says it’s not an invasion of privacy once it’s on the street,” Goodsill said. “You can find out a lot by going through people’s garbage. At first, there was nothing that stood out in Fell’s trash.”

“Did you find anything suggesting that Jerome Fell was an alias?”

“No.”

“You’ve seen the pictures of Carl Nelson. Do you think Nelson and Fell are the same person?”

“Well, fifteen years is a long time, but I thought about that when I saw the stories out of New York and I got to thinking that it sure is possible.”

“Did you find anything with the name Carl Nelson, or anything linking him to Rampart? I don’t see it in the samples you sent me, in the ones I’ve opened so far.”

“I’m afraid not. A lot of junk food wrappers, empty take-out containers, pizza boxes, some bills for cable, for utilities, all to Jerome Fell, or J. Fell. A few items of mail for neighbors sent to his address. I saw that he was not kind. Instead of giving them to his neighbors he opened them and tossed them. It’s all there. I’ve got more coming your way, maybe forty in all.”

“I’m not surprised you didn’t find anything. I know it’s possible he could’ve missed something. But I think he would’ve been careful not to miss anything. You think he would’ve used a shredder.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Maybe he shredded stuff, maybe he burned stuff, but all in all, I found nothing unusual and dropped it. Then my wife noticed something, I’d missed—a couple things actually.”

“What?”

“See attachment number sixteen, the stained receipt for a bracelet kit, a Spirograph set, a bead art kit and a colored pencil set?”

“My wife thought those are items or toys you’d buy for a young girl, especially one who might be bored.”

Kate’s concentration sharpened on that point and she agreed.

“Then my wife noticed another one. That’s number twenty-two, a small ripped receipt from a drugstore for sanitary napkins and whatnot, excuse me, but see?”

Kate moved her mouse to number twenty-two and opened it.

“Yes.”

“Now, I looked into this and most American girls get their period when they turn twelve or so, and this Canadian girl, who could’ve been your sister, was about ten when she was abducted, right?”

“Actually, my sister would’ve been closer to eleven and a half.”

“Those two factors were kind of disturbing, but I said to my wife, Fell could’ve had a girlfriend, who had a daughter, you know? There could be explanations. Besides there are privacy issues and I was thinking, how do I challenge him? So I gave it some thought over the next few weeks, thinking the best thing to do was talk to Ned.”

“What happened?”

“Ned suffered a heart attack and stroke. That was a big scare for my family and it took me away from things for a while. By the time I went back to check on Fell a month or so later, he’d moved away. I couldn’t get a new address for him.”

“What about the Realtors, neighbors, his employer, the post office?”

“I tried them all, Kate, and got nothing. It was like he’d vanished.”

Kate sat there staring at the items on her monitor. Several moments of silence passed before she thanked Goodsill and hung up.

For the next hour or so, Kate clicked on every attachment, examining each one for clues, anything Goodsill missed. But he’d been thorough. He’d done everything that she would’ve done and as she clicked from item to item, she considered herself lucky he’d helped her.

When Kate came to pictures of Jerome Fell’s house, her thoughts darkened.

Was Vanessa held captive here? Was Fell actually Carl Nelson? Or was she chasing another mirage?

Kate pulled up the FBI photo of a Nelson Wanted poster and positioned it next to the Jerome Fell’s Colorado driver’s license. There was about fifteen years of time between the two images. Kate placed her notebook against her monitor so that only the eyes and top of the head of each photo were visible.

Are his eyes the same?

In both cases they had the icy veneer of a deep-seated resentment. Definitely a guy who wouldn’t return your misdirected mail, Kate thought before looking at the miscellaneous attachments again, the invoices, the bills and what appeared to be a misdirected invoice or note.

What’s this?

Something from Chicago about a burial site of Krasimira Zurrn.

What could that be? Who is Krasimira Zurrn?

She’d check that out later. It was 3:45 a.m. She had to get to bed.