Find Her (Detective D.D. Warren #8)(71)

“At this stage, Flora had been missing approximately four months. With evidence that she’s still alive and has crossed state lines, now it’s full-on federal mobilization. Except . . . we couldn’t gain any traction. There was no video, no witnesses to her abduction. Did she walk out with a guy? Was she ambushed? We couldn’t find anyone who saw anything.”

“I have video of an abduction,” D.D. offered, “and we still can’t find anyone who knows anything. What about the postcards?”

“We traced the second note to the originating post office, but again, no video, no witnesses. All we got was that both post offices were near major interstates. Easy on and off for someone who’s traveling.”

“Does the second postcard include anything personal?”

“Please feed the foxes. Apparently, when Flora was growing up, she liked to tame the wild foxes on her mother’s farm.”

“Rosa’s necklace,” D.D. said. “It has a fox charm.”

“Exactly. Handwriting on the second postcard shows further deterioration. It’s spidery, shaky, lacks strength. If you’re into graphology—predicting personality based on, say, the slant of your handwriting—Flora’s breaking down.”

“I’m familiar with graphology,” D.D. supplied. “Not sure what I think, but in a case where you don’t have much else to go on . . .”

“You take whatever you can get,” Kimberly agreed. “Given our lack of leads, and the UNSUB’s clear interest in Flora’s mom, the profiler advised a press conference with Rosa front and center. The UNSUB was communicating with her. Now it would be her turn to communicate directly with him. And, frankly, see if we could elicit some kind of response.”

“Did it work?”

“Not that we could figure out at the time. The profiler drafted a media message designed to humanize Flora, focus on her loving family, unique upbringing in the wilds of Maine, her kindness to others, et cetera. Rosa was dressed up to appear as all-American mom as possible. Basically, the kidnapper was crafting one storyline—an overly sexualized college girl obsessed with guys. We went to the other extreme, a nature-loving good girl adored by everyone who knew her.”

D.D. couldn’t help but arch a brow. That didn’t quite jibe with the dark, edgy Flora she knew. Which made her wonder: Maybe Flora’s mom had been right after all. D.D. had never met and would never know the real Flora Dane. She had only encountered Jacob Ness’s twisted creation, four hundred and seventy-two days in the making.

“Rosa did her part,” Kimberly was saying now. “She stood up there, looked right in the cameras, and delivered a message that was empathetic, genuine, and moving. The news teams ate her up. We got full national coverage for a solid week, boosted by her appearances on several major morning shows. Which is not something easy or automatic for a woman who up until then had been happiest driving a tractor.”

D.D. understood. What the media expected of victims in this day and age wasn’t for the faint at heart. Let alone when the lead investigator was standing at a grieving parent’s shoulder saying this must be done—you want your kid back, then this is what it takes, exposing your heart and soul on the national stage.

“What happened next?” D.D. asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Week after week. Month after month. Trail went cold. Rosa talked and talked and talked. Received no postcards or messages in reply. We blasted Flora’s picture all across the world. We got no credible leads. Which, at a certain point, starts to tell you something. Such as Flora’s either locked away so tightly there are no witnesses, or he’s done a bang-up job altering her appearance. And he either doesn’t care about the press conferences—or he didn’t see them.”

“Didn’t see them?”

“Our profiler, Ken McCarthy, didn’t believe it would be possible for the UNSUB, who’d started the conversation, to simply walk away. So if our attempts at communication weren’t eliciting a response, maybe he wasn’t getting the messages. Which brought us to the next phase of our investigation, where we chased down every southern recluse and off-the-grid survivalist with a history of sexual assaults. Now that was a list.”

“Not a bad strategy,” D.D. granted. “Certainly someone like that would fit your profile. Taunting the mother as a proxy for an authority figure, right?”

“Hey, we’re the FBI. We can make anything look good on paper. Unfortunately, we were wrong.”

“So what happened?”

“Jacob. Eventually, he reached out again. Except this time, it wasn’t a postcard. It was an e-mail sent from a dummy account to Rosa’s personal e-mail. It contained an audio of Flora talking.”

D.D. winced. She couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for Rosa. To, after all this time, hear her daughter’s voice and yet the things, the terrible, twisted words that must’ve come from her daughter’s mouth . . .

“Escalation of communication is not atypical,” Kimberly said quietly. “We assured Rosa this was a good thing. It meant Flora was still alive. It meant, as strange as it sounded, that he still cared. Now, him moving to e-mail helped us. We could trace the IP address back to an Internet café, this time in Alabama. And, like the post offices, located near a major interstate. This led us to our next investigative leap, from looking at survivalists hunkered down in backwoods to looking at someone who was mobile. Say, salespeople, truck drivers. Given the long hours on the road, these people might not catch the morning news shows or the five o’clock wrap-up, hence the UNSUB’s lack of reaction to our TV blitz. We adjusted our communication strategy accordingly, targeting mediums that would be more accessible to someone with a transient lifestyle. We emphasized social media, such as daily Facebook posts that the UNSUB might access during his downtime on a laptop or mobile device. We also targeted local radio stations and independent newspapers, the kind of daily pubs that are easily accessible at diners, gas stations, motels.