Chapter 06
First contact
By the next morning another team had arrived from the FBI, had been briefed, and the team was heading back to the BAU to resume the case. As soon as they landed they headed for the conference room. "You said you weren't able to trace the call?" Hotch asked that right off.
"No, unfortunately," Garcia told them. "Lizzy was calling me on a Voice-over-IP line, basically a phone that uses the internet instead of the phone company. Uncle John has this thing set up with what's called an Onion Router. Onion Routing is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Onion Router client software directs internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. It was originally designed to protect whistle blowers and human rights workers but of course it's now used to anything anyone doesn't want traced, very popular with all kinds of illegal types including child porn types."
"And it can't be broken?" Hotch asked.
"The best you can do in theory is capture one-third of the nodes using Onion Routing at any given time and acquire their encryption keys and algorithm seeds. You can then use those keys and seeds to decrypt the first two layers of protection, mount a DOS attack for force all the Onion traffic over those nodes and then use statistical analysis to break the third key, but that will only get you to the entry node. It would be like getting you to a cell phone tower, you still wouldn't know which phone you were looking at and even if you could find the specific phone you would still have to decrypt it to get in and try to find the location of the person with the phone. And of course all of the seeds change every time you log on."
"So you'd have to do all that in the space of one phone call." Blake said.
"Yeah, and only one person has ever even tried that." Garcia shrugged. "Reid has some very strange ideas of what constitutes 'fun'."
"So the answer is no, we're not going to be able to trace the call if she calls again." Rossi nodded, "Slick. What about our other victims?"
"Okay, here is what I have so far." Garcia put a picture of a woman up on the board. She had sharp, almost elf-like features, white, red hair chopped just above her shoulders. Her best feature was her amber eyes that seemed to be laughing even though she was wearing a professional smile. "Meet Laura Patterson. She's 28, from Palo Alto, California, currently a grad student at Cornell University going for her PhD in Human Ecology, and she went missing a month before Reid. Same MO, her housemates noticed she wasn't at breakfast, they found her car in a lot behind the Human Ecology building, the cameras were disabled by two guys in the Johnson Electric van, different plates, still stolen."
"Any connection between her and Reid?" Hotch asked.
"Not that I have found so far but I am going to dig as deep down the rabbit hole as I can." Garcia replied. "Now as for Lizzy the girl that best fits the bill is an Elizabeth Martin from Austen, TX." She put a picture of a little girl with blue eyes and blond pigtails on the screen. "She disappeared four years ago when she was four when her mother sold her, grrr, to pay a drug debt. Her grandparents Sam and Edith Martin reported her missing. They have since gotten sole custody, thank god."
"I wonder if there's any connection there." JJ mused.
"Don't know, I am still digging."
"Is it me or is this guy trying really hard to stay off the grid." Morgan said. "He's getting the mail through his friend Kipling, rarely leaves the place, and is using all this encryption on his computer…"
"Glass on the roof, I bet that's solar." JJ added. "And a windmill could mean a well which means he's off the utility grid. It sounds like he's relying on Kipling for everything."
"Yeah, I checked into those magazines she was talking about." Garcia replied. "I didn't know what Backwoods Home was; they're a small magazine for hard-core Libertarian survivalists. All about living off the grid and fighting the government. I tried to do a thing and get their subscriber lists but they didn't have them on their computers."
"Good luck there." Rossi scoffed. "Guys like that keep them hard copy just so you can't do a 'thing'. They would rather destroy their files and take a contempt charge than give up that data."
Blake had been considering the file while they talked. "Guys, look at these dates. Reid went missing on March 22, the fourth Friday of the month. Laura Patterson went missing on February 22, the fourth Friday of the month. Lizzy called us on April 26, the fourth Friday of the month. I wonder if Kipling is only available on that week-end. That might explain the quid pro quo here."
"The quid pro quo?" Garcia asked. "Once more for the non-profilers?"
"Kipling is helping Uncle John stay off the grid so he can do…whatever he's doing to Reid and Laura." Morgan told her. "He's providing another level of insulation. In exchange we're guessing that John is looking after Lizzy, Kipling's victim, because Kipling is living a life that makes him want to keep being a pedophile even more of a secret than usual. That probably means that he's married and holds down a job. He looks like the perfect husband but once a month he takes a week-end off with the guys to go hunting, or some excuse like that."
"Even if John isn't a pedophile they're both committing criminal acts." Hotch pointed out. "If one goes down he'll take the other, which locks them into the relationship. I'll contact Katherine Cole and Andi Swan, see if they can help us from that angle."
"Does anything we have so far help us find them?" JJ asked. "Or tell us what's happening to them?"
Blake pulled the transcript of the call over. "Well, five hours outside the city with snow on the ground this time of year means north, probably north-west, toward the great lakes. Garcia, can you pull that up?"
Garcia obligingly put it up on the board. "I wonder how he knew."
"He might have been unconscious that long." Hotch said. "If we assume the same kind of sedative…can you also give us a five hour ring outside Cornell?"
Garcia did, taking in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, New York City and Baltimore. "He would have to be in a deeply rural area to pull this off." Blake said. "The Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York corridor is less likely, but there is a lot of Pennsylvania that fits the bill."
"At least we're not looking all over the country anymore." Morgan replied. "What do you think he's doing to them?"
"Well, we know he has them locked in the cellar." Rossi said. "They're uninjured, healthy enough to play cards, and able to communicate to Lizzy if no one else. But it's been a month, why hasn't the Unsub talked to them yet? And while we're at it, why these two? These guys went through a lot of trouble to target these two personally."
"I don't know." Hotch said, in the voice that said that he did not like not knowing. "Who do we have that we can talk to about Laura Patterson?"
"Well her father, Andrew Patterson is on his way here to talk to…uh oh." Garcia's eyes went wide.
"Uh oh what uh oh?" Morgan asked.
"Her father is a venture capitalist. He runs the Palo Alto office of In-Q-Tel."
"In-Q-Tel?" Hotch asked.
"It's a venture capital firm that invests in high tech companies. Its parent company is the CIA."
"This is not good." Rossi said.
"Has Patterson received a ransom demand?" Hotch asked.
"No Sir." Garcia replied, "At least not one that we know about."
"And you said he's on his way here? What about the mother?"
"He should be landing within the hour. Laura's mother died when she was eight, he father remarried when she was ten, her step-mother is a patent lawyer, and she is not on her way."
"You can't get much further from the Bay Area than Cornell." Blake said. "Most students don't go all the way across country for school without a good reason. A contentious family relationship is a big one."
"All right," Hotch said. "I'll remain here and interview the father. The rest of you take the plane and head up to Ithaca, see what you can find."
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