Every Fear (10 page)

A
fter waking, Jason fired up his laptop, got online, and compared the
Mirror’s
first-day coverage of the Colson story with the competition.

The
Post-Intelligencer
was reporting that investigators had “not ruled out anybody” as a possible suspect. A standard line but it played well.
We have that.
The Associated Press had a retired FBI agent, famous for his expertise in child abductions, armchair quarterbacking the case by doubting that this was a random act. “Somehow, in some way, there’s a link between the Colsons and the suspects.”
So? We’ve got a criminology prof saying the same thing.
And the
Seattle Times,
citing “sources,” led with a report that Maria Colson’s condition had taken a grave turn the previous night.
Got that too.

Tension knotted in Jason’s neck and shoulders as he stepped into the shower. Everybody was pounding hard on the story, he thought, but no one was leading on the story.

Not yet.

It was only a matter of time.

After showering, he reviewed what he knew, searching
for a fresh angle to chase this morning. He was considering looking deeper into the Colsons’ background when his phone rang. Wrapping a towel around his waist and leaving a watery trail on the hardwood floor, he took the call in his living room.

“Hi, Jason, it’s Rosemary,” the news assistant said over other lines ringing on the switchboard. “Sorry to bother you at home so early. Fritz told me to alert you if any readers called with anything worth pursuing.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got this woman on the line. This is the third time in twenty minutes that she’s called. She insists on talking to you this instant. Claims she has something important to tell you on Dylan Colson’s abduction.”

“She give you her name, or her connection to the story?”

“No, she wouldn’t give me anything like that, or leave a message.”

“She sound credible, or certifiable?”

“Hard to tell.”

“All right, put her through.”

“I’ll connect her. Just a second.”

While waiting, he inventoried his apartment, the fireplace and built-in bookcases, the secondhand leather sofas, the coffee table heaped with newspapers. On one wall, Jimi Hendrix, his beloved rock god, gazed from a giant poster above Jason’s thirty-gallon aquarium. The colorful fish gliding among the coral and bubbles kept him company. He was drawn to Detective Grace Garner’s picture in the newspaper when the line clicked.

“Hello? This Jason Wade?”

“Yes.”

“Jason Wade, the reporter who wrote the story about the baby being kidnapped?”

“Yes. Who’s calling?”

Silence.

The caller ID display on his home answering system showed the newsroom switchboard number because the call was bounced to his apartment from the paper. He sifted through his desk for his small tape recorder.

“Who’s calling?” he repeated.

“I don’t want to say. First, I need to know if you protect sources. If you guarantee to keep names out of print?”

He found his recorder, connected the jack; the red recording light blinked. Relief washed over him for remembering to install new batteries.

“Yes, we do that sort of thing. Look, just who are you and what is it you want to talk about?”

“I have information on this case.”

“What kind of information?”

“Critical. It’s about who kidnapped the baby.”

“You know who did it?”

“Yes.”

He tightened his hold on his phone.

“Who did it?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated. I need to give it to you in a public place.”

“Can you give me a hint about who it is?”

“No.”

“Have you given your information to the police?”

“No.”

“No? A baby’s been stolen, his mother’s dying, and you call me up to play guessing games. Come on, if your information has any validity, you would tell them, wouldn’t you?”

“They don’t understand how I obtained this information.”

That stopped Jason cold.

“Have you called any other reporters?”

“Just you.”

“Why me?”

“Your story is closest to the truth.”

What truth?
He didn’t know what the hell this woman was talking about but he decided to go a step further. “All right, we’ll meet at the paper at eleven. Go to security and—”

“No. I have to do this my way.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’ll have my information ready to give to you in one hour.”

“One hour?”

“Yes. Here are details on what to do.”

J
ason lived several blocks south of Woodland Park, on the fringes of Fremont and Wallingford.

After getting dressed, he made a few calls, then pulled his Falcon from his building, deciding Aurora Avenue to 85th Street would be the best way to go for his meeting. Along the way, he listened to “Voodoo Child,” Hendrix’s long blues jam, because it suited his mood, as he thought about the mystery woman he was going to meet.

She’d claimed to know who took Dylan Colson but refused to give him any details over the phone. She wanted to meet within an hour at a northwest park. She sounded halfway credible but it was impossible to gauge people in these situations. Odds were, this tip was pure bull and the woman was a wack job. But it was early and the park wasn’t far, so he figured he’d follow it up. All it would cost him was an hour or so, he reasoned as his cell phone rang.

“Where are you?” Spangler said.

“On the story. Following up some leads.”

“You see today’s coverage in the
Times
and
P-I
?”

“Yes.”

“Our stuff is good but not good enough. We’re not leading.”

“No one is.”

“We have to lead. We need an exclusive today, do you hear me? Turn your radio down, do you hear me, Jason?”

He didn’t touch the volume.

“I hear you.”

“So what’ve you got going today?”

He hesitated telling him about the tipster just yet. In his short time at the
Mirror,
he had learned a few cold, hard facts about editors and how dangerous ones, like Spangler, reacted to wild tips. They jumped on them as if they were confirmed, then listed them on news skeds. And all day long other editors would talk about the tip as if it
were
a fact or an actual story being written, rather than a lead being checked out. And when the tip fell through, there would often be pressure to somehow resurrect or salvage the engrossing aspects of it, to shape it into a news story, to try to find other facts, which didn’t exist, to support the notion of a story that originated as a false lead. Revealing long-shot tips in their embryonic stage was a dangerous thing to do.

“Well, Wade, what’ve you got?”

“There’s a case status meeting of the FBI and Seattle Homicide squad this morning. I want to follow that.”

“That’s obvious. If they have a major break they’ll tell everyone. What else you got?”

“I was going to door-knock in the neighborhood.”

“Do that. Because for now, the Colson family is the story. I want you to keep pushing. Find out more about them. I get a sense from your stuff that there’s a lot more going on with Lee and Maria.”

“I’ll keep digging.”

“And while you’re at it, keep this in mind. Everybody has a dark side. Everybody has secrets.”

Jason agreed. Whatever it was, nobody had the full story on the Colsons, and on this beat he’d learned that there are always more than two sides to a story, that nobody is ever as bad as people think, and nobody is ever as good as people think.

“I want you to keep digging on the Colsons until we know absolutely everything there is to know about them,” Spangler said. “I also want you to stay on top of Maria’s condition. The instant she dies, I want to know, because then we’ll have a murder, likely a double murder when they find her kid, and then this story will explode.”

Sounded like Spangler was hoping for that outcome, which disgusted Jason, but he said nothing.

“Did you hear me, Jason? What’s that crap you’re listening to?”

“I heard you, loud and clear. That it?”

“Check in with me every two hours.”

Sunset Hills Park, in northwest Seattle, offers a sweeping view of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound. Alders, Douglas firs, and big-leaf maple trees cover its steep slopes rising above Elliott Bay.

Jason parked, then walked to the designated meeting place and stood along the chain-link fence overlooking the hundreds of sailboats docked at the Shilshole Bay Marina. He inhaled the salt air and watched the gulls gliding in the clear blue sky.

He turned to inventory his immediate area of the park and neighborhood. Empty. Except for an old man
on a distant bench who was reading a large print edition of
Ulysses
by James Joyce.

The park was beautiful, but Jason felt the clock ticking, felt seconds slipping away as he began to doubt himself for agreeing to come and stand here when he was under pressure to break news.

Then his cell phone rang.

“This Jason Wade?”

He studied the number ID display for incoming calls. It came up blocked but he recognized the voice of his female tipster.

“This is Jason.”

“Did you come alone?”

“Yes.” He scanned the park and vehicles parked nearby. “Where are you?”

“Out of sight. This is how I have to do this.”

“Look, frankly, this is silly, and I don’t have any more time to waste. Come to the point now, or else—”

“See the trash can to your right?” His hesitation agitated her. “You’re not looking. Look.”

Christ. She’s near. Watching me.

“Do you see the trash can?”

He glanced at it. It was clean, practically empty.

“Yes, what about it?”

“There’s an orange plastic bag in it. Do you see it?”

He stepped to the bin and saw the bag.

“I see it.”

“The bag and its contents are for you. Good luck.”

The call ended.

“Wait!” He swirled around, pricking up his ears for
anything, sharpening his focus for something to help him understand. With the exception of the old man reading, and the distant sounds of the marina, the gulls, and the bay, he saw and heard nothing to point him to the woman.

He used his pen to hook the handle of the bag. It was very light. He sat on an empty bench and looked inside. It contained a large, plain, sealed white envelope bearing the words “For Jason Wade,
Seattle Mirror”
in neat block letters.

He opened it and slid out the documents inside, which were on very small sheets of yellow paper. The first was text of a computer printout. Looked like some kind of summary or note:

Information Pertaining to:

The Abduction of Dylan Colson and Injury of Maria Colson:

The following was developed through methods other than known senses, or traditional channels of investigation. Those behind the crime departed the scene with the child immediately in a vehicle in an easterly direction through the community. Their vehicle was seen by hundreds of people. But as nothing untoward was known to have occurred at this time in the community, the vehicle did not stand out, or register with nearly all of the witnesses. In fact, they do not recall seeing the vehicle. However, at several junctures of the vehicle’s departure, there were individuals
who encountered it. The vehicle is a van. While it is difficult to ascertain witness recollection, one strong impression has emerged. A woman was seen sitting in the passenger seat of this van.

“What? What the hell is this cryptic bull?” Jason said after reading it. “Everything in here is known to the public. It was in the alert. What a stupid waste of time.” He flipped to the second page. As he continued reading, he stopped breathing.

The woman’s true name is Diane M. Fielderson, born in the very early 1980s in a jurisdiction at the U.S. Canada border, possibly Michigan, New York, or Ontario. Caution:
Death stands over this case.

Death stands over this case.

Man, what the hell is this cryptic crap? Strange, weird bull,
he thought, biting his bottom lip and turning to the final page.

It was a sketch, done in pencil, that depicted a woman’s profile, in shadow, in the passenger seat of a van. Underneath the sketch was the line:

This woman abducted Dylan Colson.

“T
his is the shoe of Dylan Colson’s abductor.”

FBI Special Agent Kirk Dupree’s attention was on the big screen overlooking the polished table in the conference room of the FBI’s Seattle field office.

Grim-faced detectives from the FBI, Seattle PD, King County Sheriff’s Office, Washington Highway Patrol, and other departments studied the image, as did off-site investigators who hooked up via a secure audiovideo link, in Quantico, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Denver. They were joined on the link by Vancouver and Calgary city police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and border agencies in the U.S. and Canada. It was now twenty-four hours since Dylan was stolen and the multiagency task force had kicked off its first case status meeting.

All on the same page, thought Detective Grace Garner.

Most of the Seattle people at the meeting had had less than two hours of sleep. They reached for coffee cups and doughnuts, taking notes as they examined the huge, blurred, blow-up frame of a white sneaker emerging from the van used to abduct Dylan Colson.

The image had been recorded on the security camera at Arnie Rockwell’s hardware store. FBI and Seattle technical wizards had worked nonstop enhancing it and the quality they had produced was remarkable.

“The shoe we’re looking at is solid evidence on the suspect,” Dupree said. “The image lasted exactly zero point eighteen seconds in real time on the tape. By comparison, it takes an average zero point thirty seconds for a human to blink their eyes. So this work is outstanding. Paul, from ERT, will take it up here.”

“Paul Cray, FBI Evidence Response Team,” he said, raising his voice for the speaker phone. “As you can see”—Cray worked the slide so the shoe’s image jumped back and forth repeatedly showing it touching the sidewalk—“where the shoe makes contact, there is a patch of dew-moistened street dirt. A thin layer, but enough to capture a partial foot impression. Everything but the heel, which creates a challenge.”

Through their work with casts and photos at the scene, investigators narrowed the identity of the shoe. It was either a Suntour Glider or a near-twin knockoff, a Sunchaser Slipstream, Cray said.

“It is imperative that we confirm the precise model. In both cases the shoe is an Oxford-style women’s casual sneaker, a canvas lace-up with a rubber outsole and traction pattern.

“The Glider retails for about forty-five dollars, is manufactured in Brazil, and is widely available in department stores largely in South America, Europe, and parts of the southern U.S.,” Cray said. “The Sunchaser is made in Nigeria. It sells for about twenty-one dollars
and is widely available in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Canada, and the Midwestern United States.”

“All that from one footprint?” a young King County detective said.

“We got a bit more,” Cray said as the screen displayed a magnified image of the impression made by the shoe. “The outsole is rubber with a traction pattern. But see here, as we consider the circles, waves, and diamond design of the sole, you’ve got very distinctive characteristics. Unique.”

Cray started clockwise, pointing to a slight gouge in the tip, some wear bars in the center, two nicks and cuts in the inside midstep.

“So what we have is like a fingerprint?” Grace asked.

“Exactly,” Cray said.

“The problem is the Nigerian manufacturer’s offices recently burned down. An FBI agent with the U.S. Embassy in Abuja is working on obtaining a crisp color image of the shoe from a distributor in Senegal.”

“What’s the ETA on that picture?” asked McCusker, a white-haired man who oversaw Seattle’s FBI operations.

“The FBI agent in Nigeria e-mailed me this morning advising that we could have our image by tonight,” Cray said.

“Good.”

“At that point,” Cray said, “we advise that we publicize the security tape image and the shoe’s image in an appeal to the public to report anyone with shoes like this who may have come in contact with a baby, or a van like the suspect vehicle.”

“It’s a double-edged sword,” said an FBI agent in Chicago. “As soon as you do that, your suspect ditches the shoes.”

“But you stand a chance of getting closer to the suspect and the child,” a King County detective said.

“You’re also tipping your hand to your suspect and risk losing them,” the Chicago agent said.

“All views hold merit. The shoe is strong key fact evidence that will ultimately have to withstand a court challenge. Paul, have you run it through ViCAP?”

“Yes. No footwear matches from other crimes in the country.”

“In abduction cases like this, leads to an arrest typically come from the suspect’s social circles. We’ll launch a public appeal once Paul’s team has confirmed the shoe and has obtained the image for circulation. Until then, and let me be clear on this, this is holdback. We must ensure there is absolutely no confusion on the shoe evidence, since we have two possible models.” McCusker checked the time.

“Let’s move along quickly, please. On the vehicle,” McCusker continued. “We have a red 2002 Chrysler Town and Country minivan. We have nothing on the plate but a witness noted the rear door had a small mural showing the sun and trees. We’re checking with airbrush artists, people who do custom paintwork with cars and vans.”

They moved through the status. No ransom call so far. Nothing through the Colsons’ Internet use or phone records that pointed to a lead. A run of all registered sex offenders in the region was ongoing. Criminal checks
of neighbors and all of the contractors linked to the construction project at the Lincoln estate down the street were ongoing. The community was being canvassed again and again under the belief that someone had to have seen something.

Time lines for Lee Colson had been checked; as were his financial situation, his insurance policies, and business matters. At this point he was not a suspect and investigators had no reason to believe that he, or anyone known to him directly, had abducted his son. That did not rule out people in Colson’s circles and social networks.

Investigations so far showed nothing criminal in Lee or Maria Colson’s past. No drug debts, extramarital affairs, or run-ins with people who might have harbored a grudge against the family.

Shannon Tabor, the teenager who had been distracted from watching Dylan, was checked, as was her caller. No concerns there.

“Look, I think there may be something to the fact that Maria Colson had trouble conceiving,” Grace told the task force before reading excerpts from what Maria had written in Dylan’s baby book. “I’ve got nothing more than her journal here, but I just get a feeling.”

“But she is Dylan’s biological mother,” Dupree said. “And Lee is the biological father. Hospital records confirmed it and we interviewed the doctor who delivered.”

“I know, it’s an intangible. They went through a rough period. According to Lee they’d considered adopting, or using a surrogate.”

“But never acted on it,” Dupree said.

“We need to investigate beyond their social circles,” McCusker said, “to people they may have had contact with while looking into adoption or surrogates. Charlie”—McCusker checked his watch—“give us your take.”

Charlie Paine, the FBI’s profiling coordinator, cleared his throat before outlining a psychological portrait of people who abduct babies.

“The offenders are almost always women with a pathological need to have a child at any cost. They’re mentally unstable individuals whose acts are fueled by fantasy, delusion, drugs, alcohol, trauma, or a combination of any of these things. They have usually lost a child by stillbirth, miscarriage, or accident, or simply cannot bear children. A child is paramount to their existence. They may see the replacement, or the filling of the void, as the cure-all to their psychological distress.”

McCusker and the others took careful notes as Paine continued.

“Their desire to have a child evolves into a plan with months of detailed and careful preparation. A family or mother can be selected or targeted for any number of reasons, none of which could be logical. They can be surveilled and stalked, and the operation may be practiced over and over as part of the offender’s obsession. The event can also involve a blitz attack, whereby the desperate offender simply acts when an opportunity arises.”

“Sounds like our situation,” someone around the table said.

“The fact violence was used makes it clear the offender in this case will not allow anything to prevent them from fulfilling whatever fantasy is driving them.”

“Do you believe Dylan Colson is still alive?” Dupree asked.

“It’s a possibility, depending on who else is involved. If one of the individuals is a violent sex offender, then that injects an entirely different dynamic into the scenario.”

“Meaning?”

“The child would likely be killed and discarded within hours of the abduction. In such cases, you’re seeing the work of a serial sexual predator who’s likely offended before and travels extensively.”

“All right, thanks, Charlie,” McCusker said. “So, we go back to every woman who was in Maria Colson’s birthing classes, or was in the same hospital around the time she had Dylan. We comb all hospital records, and go to hospital staff in Seattle and King County, and fan out from there, for women who’ve suffered stillbirths, miscarriages, or deaths of children under the age of two, over the last two years. We ask psychiatric services for help on serious cases of postpartum women. We check with clinics and welfare agencies about women who suddenly have a baby. Detective Garner will continue to keep a vigil for a dying declaration from Maria Colson, who remains our best hope on identifying the suspects, while we roll. Thank you, everyone.”

“Remember,” Dupree called out as the meeting closed. “As you knock on doors, keep your eyes open for Oxford-style sneakers.”

“Kinda like Cinderella, only this time if the shoe fits, Cinderella is read her rights,” Perelli said to Grace.

She didn’t hear him.

She’d stepped away to take a phone call, her face creased with concern.