Page 14 of Billion-Dollar Ransom
WELL, THAT MADE everyone in the Sandbox sit up and pay attention. Even the mayor blinked in surprise.
“Do you have the name of this suspect?” the mayor asked, suddenly excited.
“No,” Nicky admitted. “What I have is a pattern . I’ve been tracking a team of kidnappers here in Southern California. They’ve pulled off a series of small but successful abductions in Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Big Sur. The hallmarks are all the same: precision timing, no loose ends.”
“So the kidnappers got a little taste of success,” Mike Hardy said, “and they decided to try for a bigger fish.”
“Not exactly,” Nicky replied. “It’s my belief that these earlier three kidnappings were simply practice .”
Nicky tapped her cell phone repeatedly and brought up an almost dizzying array of crime scene photos.
“The first abduction was outside a salon on Figueroa Street in Santa Barbara. The vic was a model, the trophy wife of one of the city’s richest men, and it happened so smoothly that nobody knew she was gone until the ransom demand was hand-delivered to the husband’s office.”
On the screen, a headshot of the victim that included the name of her modeling agency stamped in the lower right corner appeared.
“What happened to her?” the mayor asked.
“Quarter of a million dollars later,” Nicky said, “she was safely returned to her home in Hope Ranch. She was unable to identify her abductor, who I’ve come to believe was a male working with a partner who was not present at the scene.”
Another tap, and another photo appeared: a school bus in downtown San Diego surrounded by uniformed police, FBI, and dozens of terrified parents hugging their elementary-school-age children.
“Three months later, the twin daughters of a very successful comic-book artist were taken from their school bus. The children were returned safely, but not until the artist had been forced to essentially liquidate his own art collection to come up with the half-million ransom demand.”
Jeff Penney asked, “Same male abductor?”
“No,” Nicky replied. “The twins said they were taken by a man and a woman, possibly a couple, the twins said, based on how they spoke to each other.”
“Then why do you think it’s the same team of kidnappers?”
“I’ll get to that,” Before Jeff could interrupt again, Nicky tapped her cell phone.
A screen grab from a comedy show with a middle-aged comic twisting his face into a display of faux agony appeared on a monitor.
“Six months ago, this comedian and his new bride, who is twenty-six years his junior, were taken from their remote cabin in Big Sur. Their families struggled to put together a million bucks to secure their release.”
“I caught that guy’s act once,” Mike Hardy said. “He’s famous for being a total dick to pretty much everybody.”
The mayor shook her head in annoyance. If Mike Hardy weren’t so incredibly good at his job, Nicky thought, he would have been fired a long time ago. He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
“Were they released unharmed?” the mayor asked.
“Not this time. The comedian was severely beaten. He claimed that he’d been assaulted by a couple of gangbangers who were clearly working for someone else. He assumed they were hired by his former management, but that turned out to be a dead end.”
The mayor didn’t seem all that impressed with Nicky’s theory. “Different people, different perps… I agree with Captain Penney. Why do you think these three cases are related?”
“For many reasons, Madam Mayor,” Nicky said.
“The smooth, well-practiced abductions. The escalation in ransom money as well as increasingly ambitious targets. And the ease with which they were able to secure the ransom money in all three cases suggests a group of individuals extremely familiar with our protocols.”
Mike Hardy smirked. “You think they have a cop on their team.”
“Or a former cop,” Nicky said. “But the most important reason is that the three cases I’ve just presented seem to be dry runs for exactly what happened to the Schraeders this afternoon.”