Chapter 9

Jersey City, New Jersey

Like the guy in Internet Crimes had said, the leads were thin. The agents back in the day had checked the name on the Vegas lease and determined it to be a fake, but Taylor called up the original landlord, just to be sure. Or at least, he tried. The property had been owned by an old couple who’d passed away in the meantime. They’d left no children and nothing Taylor could find pointed to anyone who might have known or seen the person renting the apartment back then. They’d been in their mid-seventies when the apartment had been rented and they’d both died more than several years ago, so Taylor doubted their deaths were from anything other than natural causes.

That only left the locations in New Jersey. After checking on Robles and letting him know what he was up to, Taylor caught a flight back across the country. Robles knew the way home, although he still had another surgery to fix his shoulder, and the doctors wanted that done before he got on a plane, so it would probably be a week or so before Robles made it back to DC. While that meant Taylor was once again working alone, he didn’t mind. He’d liked having Robles along, but it hadn’t been the same as working with Whitaker.

It was late when Taylor got into New Jersey, so after a brief call with Whitaker to make sure she and the baby were still doing okay, Taylor found a hotel and got some much-needed rest. The next morning he was up and checking the leads, all of which were in Jersey City, which seemed like too much of a coincidence. The Internet Crimes guy had said people back then weren’t doing much to hide their locations, so Taylor thought it was a good sign that she had been living out here early in her career, since criminals tended to stay where they felt comfortable, unless they had a financial incentive to travel.

Two of the leads were complete busts, just like the one in Vegas. The first address Taylor checked had been a small house, which had been torn down. Taylor made a note to look up the original owners and see if they had rented it to a woman back in the late nineties, and continued on to the next address which, thankfully, was still standing.

Unfortunately for Taylor, the people that lived there had bought the house three years ago. They’d bought the house from an older lady who’d lived there for just under ten years, having inherited the house from her mother. Both ladies were now dead, which meant that if his shooter had lived there twenty years previous, the people who would have rented the house, or a room in the house, weren’t around to tell him about her.

While there were a lot of bodies racking up, Taylor thought it was likely a coincidence and not the shooter getting rid of witnesses. It was more likely that she had purposefully picked homes to rent from older people. Besides the fact that they had a good chance of dying before anyone might come looking for her, older witnesses tended to be more than useless on the stand.

If the last lead didn’t pan out, Taylor was going to be stuck in a records room again, looking up who owned the neighboring houses to see if any of them remembered a younger woman renting at any of those houses twenty years ago.

The last house was on the outskirts of town in one of the built-up areas that was probably nice fifty years before but had fallen into disrepair. Most of the houses were in desperate need of fresh paint and the yards had mostly died, with random trash and parts of finished projects stacked here or there in them.

There wasn’t a driveway to speak of, since the houses on either side were right up against it, and there wasn’t a car out front, but that didn’t mean anything. This wasn’t Florida or Texas, where cars were completely necessary for everyone to get around. After knocking and waiting several minutes without an answer, Taylor started to think he’d struck out again when the door finally opened revealing a diminutive and ancient woman. She had to be in her nineties, and Taylor was amazed she was walking under her own steam. She had that look some very old people get where it seems gravity has pulled them towards the earth, squishing them into themselves.

“Are you Mrs. Beacham?” Taylor asked, using the name that had been on Internet Crimes list when they’d first investigated.

“Yes,” she said, looking up at him.

“You lived here in September of nineteen-ninety-seven?”

“Yes,” she said again.

Normally by this point the person he was questioning would start asking who he was and why he was asking questions. Her age and single-word answers devoid of any curiosity made Taylor start to worry she might suffer from dementia like Randazzo Sr. What he was certain of was that she wasn’t his shooter. If she did live here back then and wasn’t just answering yes to all of his questions, a child, boarder, or someone else could have used her IP address to post the messages, because she would have been in her sixties or seventies, and was probably not sniping gangsters through a moving car from an apartment on Vegas Boulevard.

“I’m Agent Taylor with the FBI,” he said, flashing his badge. “Could I come in and ask you some questions?”

If she was the right person, she would hopefully have pictures or something else of the person who lived here, and in Taylor’s experience so far, people were more likely to cooperate in handing that stuff over if he was inside. People had experience putting distance between themselves and solicitors at the front door, and almost universally put up barriers between themselves and their callers. Once you got inside, it was harder to tell the person to get lost. It’s why door-to-door salesmen would push to come in and give a demonstration or show brochures, since being inside the house removed some of those defenses and put the homeowner off balance.

“Okay,” the old woman said, turning and shuffling back into the house, leaving the door open.

Taylor assumed it was an invitation and followed her in. Instinct had him scanning the room as he entered, trying to look through doorways and listen to the sounds of the house. He didn’t expect to find anything, especially not the shooter who wouldn’t still be in the same place twenty years later, but it had become an unconscious habit every time he was invited inside during an investigation.

The house was much tidier than Taylor would have thought. He and Whitaker had interviewed a fair number of elderly witnesses over the years working cases, mostly because these were the people who were home all the time and tended to be paying attention to what was going on in their neighborhoods. Taylor assumed it had to do with just needing something to do, but for whatever reason, senior citizens tended to be common on both neighborhood watches and canvassing reports.

He’d found that many of these houses ended up cluttered as the homeowner’s ability to keep stuff from piling up decreased. If the house remained neat and well-cleaned it could mean another person lived there.

The old woman made her way into a dining nook next to the kitchen and eased herself into one of the vinyl-backed chairs around a small round table.

“Mrs. Beacham, did you have someone living with you in ninety-seven? A friend or child; perhaps a young woman?”

“I don’t have any children,” she said, uttering a full sentence for the first time since answering the door. “I did rent out my spare room back then to college students. Don’t have the energy to rent it out now, but it was nice having the company and it helped pay some bills.”

“And you had someone renting in ninety-seven?”

“I think so. I’ve had several renters, so they kind of get all jumbled up in my head, but I think that was the year Bonnie stayed with me while she finished up her degree at St. Peter’s. I think it might have been for journalism or writing. Something like that.”

Taylor had to readjust the assumptions he’d made when he’d first walked into her home. She might have been old, but besides still being surprisingly mobile, she also wasn’t as senile as he’d feared.

“How did Bonnie end up living here? You said you rented the room out for college students. Did you advertise it somewhere? Maybe college newspapers?”

“No, not in newspapers. That was too expensive. When my previous border was leaving, I’d ask them to put a note about the room up in the student center where they went to school. If I felt up to it, I’d go to some of the other nearby colleges and put up notices myself.”

“And that’s how Bonnie found you?”

“No. Actually, my previous boarder had to move out suddenly, something about a sick parent, and wasn’t able to put up the notice for me. I hadn’t gotten around to going there myself to put it up, and they’d been going to Jersey City College. Bonnie was the first student I’d ever had from St. Peter’s, and I never went there to put up notices myself. It’s a small school, so I didn’t think there was much chance of getting any renters from there.”

“Then how did Bonnie find you?”

“I don’t really know. I guess she heard it from someone, because she just turned up one day and said she’d heard I had a room for rent. I’d just been thinking about putting the add back up at the college anyway, so it worked out great for me.”

“And you let her use the Internet here?”

“Ohh, I didn’t have Internet back then. Too expensive.”

“Could she have gotten Internet installed without you noticing?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t think so. I don’t go out much and didn’t back then either, except to church on Sunday, so I was around all the time. I think I would have noticed workmen showing up.”

Taylor frowned, looking down at his notes. The Internet guys had given him the list of addresses, and he’d just gone with it. He’d have to call them back and find out providers, and backtrack it that way, because this girl sounded promising, especially compared to the other two leads.

“I did have a separate phone line installed in that room. Sometimes the girls who rented from me would get calls late at night, and it’d wake me up, so I got it so they could talk to their friends without disturbing my sleep.”

She could have gotten dial-up pretty easily, Taylor thought. The nineties were a long time ago, but he could still remember being a teenager in his parents’ house, using the phone for dial-up Internet, getting in fights with them about tying up the phone line for hours on end. He hadn’t set it up and he’d gone into the military right out of high school, where there wasn’t much need to set up Internet service, but his first thought was that kind of thing could be done over the phone. Since she was dialing out, and the phone line was already set up, there wasn’t a need for a technician to come out for anything.

“Do you remember the police coming out back then, asking you some questions about the Internet?”

“I do. It’s not like I get visited by officers in suits very often, after all. They asked about my Internet usage, and I told them I didn’t have Internet. They said they tracked it back to my phone number, but I don’t know how any of that works. I let them look around the house, and they asked if anyone else lived there. Bonnie had moved out a few weeks before, since the semester was just ending, so it was just me. They thanked me and left. I didn’t hear anything else about it until just now. Is this about the same thing?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor lied. “I’m just following up on some old reports, trying to close out some old files. Do you have any contact information for Bonnie or are you in contact with her now?”

“Is this about Bonnie? Did she do something back then?”

“No. She’s not in any trouble. Like I said, I’m following up on some old reports and a woman living here was a witness to a crime. It was around the time Bonnie was living here, so my best guess is she was the witness in question.”

“Ohh. No, I don’t have any recent messages from her. I got a few calls over the next year from Bonnie, checking up on me and making sure I was doing okay. She was a real sweet girl, but then the calls stopped. Young people have so much going on and she was just starting out in life, so I thought maybe she just got too busy or maybe she got married, or something.”