The One That Got Away (8 page)

Marshall Beck sat in his SUV waiting for Number IV. He had parked between a couple of bail-bond outfits and had a clear view of the Hall of Justice, which was home to the superior court, the DA’s office, and the SFPD, to name just three. He had no idea if she was inside there, but there was a good chance she was, since the Hall of Justice was home to the SFPD’s major-crimes division. She was no longer at the crime scene. He’d checked. The cops were there, doing their cop thing, but Number IV wasn’t. The police might have sent her on her way, but he didn’t think so. They would want to question her, even if it was to dismiss her as a nut.

Since seeing Number IV on the news broadcast, he’d been scouring his brain to remember her name. Snatching her and Number III had been a spontaneous thing, so he hadn’t done his usual due diligence. He hadn’t thought it was necessary at the time. The two of them were just passing through town. They were strangers with no ties. That had been his foolproof thinking, until Number IV escaped. He’d gotten a look at their IDs only once before he’d disposed of them. He remembered Number III. Her name was Holli Buckner, but Number IV was just out of his memory’s reach. He closed his eyes and pictured himself reading her ID. A name came into focus.

“Zoë Sutton,” he said. “How nice to renew our acquaintance.”

He wasn’t concerned that Zoë would be spilling her guts to the cops. She didn’t know anything that would send them to his door. If she did, she would have told them after her escape. The only damage she could do to him was to provide the police with a second data point. Then they’d realize they weren’t dealing with a single case, but two and possibly more. Even that second data point didn’t help the investigators much. You needed three or four to yield direction, and that wasn’t anything Zoë could provide.

No, his interest in Zoë was one of personal pride. She was unfinished business. He’d been lax, and she’d gotten away because of it. She hadn’t paid her dues. She’d gotten only a taste of what was coming to her. It was high time he made her endure her full comeuppance.

But he couldn’t rush things and let his emotions rule over good judgment. He’d taken all precautions with Laurie Hernandez, and something had still gone wrong. He needed to use stealth and cunning if he was to close his account with Zoë. He had to track her and observe her. But for that, he needed his own data points, and at the moment, he had none. He knew only her name and that she lived in this area. A quick Internet and phone-book search had failed to reveal a home address or any active social-media links. If she’d gotten married, she might be going under a new last name, but he didn’t think that was the case here. That dress wasn’t the dress of a married woman. No, Zoë Sutton was single. And that told him something. She was living as far off the grid as someone could these days. Who avoided Facebook and Twitter and didn’t have a listed phone number? Unabomber-style technophobes? Yes, for sure. People hiding from the world? Most definitely. Zoë was hiding, and hiding from him. He could have tracked her down right after she had busted out, but he’d had other things on his mind. He’d accepted her escape and moved on. It looked as if Zoë hadn’t. He had to give her props for that. She’d learned from their previous encounter.

He eyed the dashboard clock. He’d been here two hours already. Had he missed her? He hoped not. He pieced together a timeline. Working from the time of the news report, he estimated Zoë had engaged the cops approximately three-and-a-half hours ago. To hustle her from Pier 25 to this office wouldn’t have taken long, but they would have most likely put her on ice for a while so they could run a background check. Maybe he was being optimistic, but he could see them grilling her for a couple of hours if she’d told them something worthwhile. It was still in the realm of possibility that she was in there. The thought buoyed him. He decided he’d give it another two hours before he called it quits for the night.

But he didn’t have to wait that long. Forty minutes later, Zoë emerged from the slab-sided building. A man in his thirties, wearing a suit, escorted her down the steps to the sidewalk. Beck guessed he was either a plainclothes cop or a district attorney. Zoë and the man were talking, but he was too far away to catch any of the conversation.

A car that appeared to be an unmarked police vehicle drew to a stop in front of them. The man held the door open for Zoë, and she climbed into the back of the car.

Beck started his Honda Pilot and pulled onto Bryant Street behind them. Tailing the unmarked was a trickier proposition than normal. Now that they were into the small hours of the morning, traffic was scarce, giving him little in the way of vehicles to hide behind. All he could do was hang back and hope for the best. He liked to think his cause was helped by driving the ultraordinary Honda. It was practically urban camouflage. He wondered if cops looked for a tail as a matter of course. He imagined they scanned for illegal activities, but he doubted they figured they were being surveilled. He put that down to the arrogance of their position. Police saw themselves as untouchable, even bulletproof. He guessed he’d soon know if his tail had been spotted or not. The cop driving Zoë wouldn’t do the dirty work himself, not with a person of interest in the car. No, it would be called in, and a separate unit would try to pull him over.

The unmarked cut across the city. He mentally crossed off neighborhoods as they passed through them. He was starting to wonder if this was a wild-goose chase when the unmarked slowed and turned into an apartment complex. The security gate eased back as the cop car approached. It was a small complex, maybe less than thirty units, and Beck chose not to follow them inside. Instead, he pulled over, jogged across the street, and stopped in front of the gate just as it closed. He watched the uniformed cop walk Zoë to her door on the second floor of the unit. It was too dark to make out the number, but he memorized the location. He’d come back during the day to establish her full address. As Zoë let herself in, he turned around, smiling. He knew where Zoë Sutton lived. He had his first data point. Now he could begin planning her recapture.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The following morning, Greening was deskbound while Ogawa attended the Jane Doe autopsy. He developed his background check on Zoë Sutton. The databases told an interesting story about her, throwing up a number of red flags he wasn’t expecting to find, namely a number of misdemeanor charges. In the past fifteen months, she’d picked up two disturbing-the-peace charges in San Francisco and a misdemeanor battery charge in Oakland. Reading the police reports, the incidents shared a common thread—Zoë’s temper. She’d gotten into an altercation with someone at a bar or club, which had led to words before turning physical. She pled guilty in all three cases and served her sentence with community service.

The convictions had all happened in a seven-month period. Seemingly, she’d kept her nose clean for the last six months, at least as far as the courts were concerned. However, her name appeared on a number of field interview cards, which had resulted in warnings instead of arrests. There were four during those months, and judging by the addresses, they’d all occurred in and around her neighborhood. The interesting feature to these call outs was the responding officer. Officer Javier Martinez had answered three of the four calls, and he was the arresting officer in one of the disturbing-the-peace cases. He’d also tagged Zoë’s name, asking to be contacted if she was picked up on a charge. It looked as if Zoë had a guardian angel. Greening picked up the phone and left a message for Martinez to contact him.

Greening ran Zoë’s name through the national crime databases, and her name came back clean, other than her and Holli’s abduction. Databases were limited in their reach. They gave him the official account of a person—what they’d done, how much they were worth—but they didn’t tell him about a person. Social media was the place to get a window into someone’s personality. While some saw social media as a twenty-first-century scourge, it was a godsend to law enforcement. People forgot how public they made their lives—even criminals. You were what you retweeted, for better or worse.

He plugged Zoë’s name into Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, Twitter, and all the other usual social media suspects. Zoë had Facebook and Twitter accounts, but both were dormant. The two had been pretty lively until fifteen months ago. Zoë’s last post on Facebook simply said:
Vegas, baby!
In the string of replies was a comment from Holli that said:
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

And it had
, he thought sadly.

Zoë hadn’t posted since. Others had. There were comments from friends, asking where she was and what had happened, but no responses from Zoë. Michaela Shannon looked to be a persistent friend. Every few weeks for the past year, up until three months ago, she’d dropped a note on Zoë’s status page. Messages included: “How are you doing?” “Hope you’re OK.” “Call me.” “Where are you?” Her last message had been: “I’m worried about you. Please call.” All her pleas had gone unanswered.

Greening shot Michaela Shannon a private message from his account, introducing himself and asking her to get in contact with him about Zoë.

Greening saw a shadow descend over him. He turned to find a uniform containing a barrel-chested man in his fifties with thick salt-and-pepper hair.

He smiled. “You know, I can cite you for social networking on police time.”

Greening smiled back. “It’s work stuff. Honest.”

“Javier Martinez. You called?”

Greening stood and shook Martinez’s hand. He gestured to his one and only visitor’s chair, and Martinez sat.

Greening didn’t know Martinez but instantly liked him. His friendly manner put Greening immediately at ease. It was such a great asset for a beat cop. Invariably, people encountered the police at the worst moments in their life. It made all the difference if the officer was viewed as someone who was there to help.

“What can I do for you, Inspector?”

“Zoë Sutton.”

Martinez’s smile disappeared. “She in trouble again?”

“Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking,” he said and explained the events from the previous night.

“Poor kid. Is there a connection?”

“Possibly. I’m checking into her, and I see you’ve been asked to be contacted in case of trouble—may I ask why?”

“I picked her up on a disturbing-the-peace thing a year ago. It should have been for assault. She’d gotten into it with some guy who was hitting on her in a bar, and she hit him when he wouldn’t back off.”

“Why didn’t you push for the assault?”

“I felt sorry for her. I could tell there was something more to the situation than a girl who wasn’t slow when it came to throwing a punch. I got her to open up, and she told me what’d happened to her friend. It was still raw for her back then and continues to be so. The girl needed help, not prison time, so I changed the dynamic of the situation. I asked the guy—a real asshole—if he really wanted to go to court and testify that a chick half his size put him on his butt. That cooled his jets and I took her in on disturbing the peace.”

“I see there’ve been a few field incident cards with no charges.”

Martinez shifted in his seat. “Yeah, I’ve been trying to keep the girl out of trouble. She got put through the wringer and survived, but no one was there to help her handle what came next. She’s got a hair trigger. I just try to talk her down from the ledge when she hits a red zone and assist her with assholes that aren’t worth going to jail for.”

“Where’s her family in all this?”

“I reached out to her parents. They’re good people, and they did their best to be supportive. They even got her younger brother to act as emissary, but she cut herself off from them. Embarrassment and the shame factor are at play there. That’s when I got her some outside help. There’s a women’s victims-of-violence charity that funds therapy. I hooked her up with them, and they got her a shrink.”

Greening picked up his notebook and flipped it to a fresh page. “Got a name?”

“Yeah, Dr. David Jarocki.” Martinez brought out his cell phone and thumbed through it. “He’s got an office on Spear, but this is his number.”

Greening took the phone, jotted the details down, and handed it back.

“Therapy working?”

“I don’t know, but she’s certainly more stable than when I first met her. She went through something horrific. That shit don’t fade overnight.”

Greening smiled. “Are you a knight in shining armor for lots of damsels in distress?”

Martinez colored. “I do my best for everyone I encounter, but Zoë’s different. With a little help, she can get her life back on the right track. Did you know she was halfway through her PhD when this happened? She wanted to work for the EPA and clean up the planet.”

“She’s a mall cop right now.”

“Yeah, I know. She’s turned her back on life, love, friends, career, dreams—everything. It’s a real shame.”

Martinez had confirmed what Greening had established for himself. All signs pointed to Zoë’s life taking a complete left turn after the abduction. But that was underplaying the situation. Zoë’s life hadn’t changed—she’d changed. Effectively, she had died when Holli Buckner had, and someone else had been resurrected.

“What do you think happened to her in the desert?” Greening asked.

“She and Holli ran into one of life’s brick walls.”

“So you think they ran into a tall, dark stranger?”

Martinez’s expression tensed, and he sat a little stiffer in his seat. Greening had touched a nerve and Martinez was tightening up on him. He was used to seeing that with suspects and witnesses, but it was strange to see it from a cop. “What are you getting at?”

Martinez might be a brother officer, but in these situations you had to push to get the truth, even if that meant hurting a few feelings. Playing to his own healthy sense of cop skepticism, Greening picked up all the FI cards on Zoë. “Zoë Sutton has a history of violence. Could she have harmed Holli Buckner and invented this abduction?”

Martinez was already on his feet. “Like I said before, Zoë Sutton needs our help. She’s the victim here.”