Designated Target - 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 record 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 canvasing 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 nine-seven?”

“I think so. I’ve had several renters, so they kind of get all jumbled up in my head, butI 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.”

“Do you know where she was calling from?”

“No. I didn’t have caller ID or anything back then, and she never left a number to call her back.”

“How about a picture of her? Do you have anything like that?”

“No. She was really particular about her looks, which was silly, considering that she was a beauty, but she hated having her picture taken. I’d asked a few times, since I like having pictures with the people that stay with me, as memories, you know? She said no, she hated herself in pictures, although I didn’t realize how much until later.”

“How so?”

“One day she was out here in the front room, studying or something, and she looked pretty with the light from the front window spilling across her, so I snapped a picture. She got really upset, which was unusual for her. Bonnie was so even-tempered, I’d never seen her get upset before then, but she was hopping mad. She demanded I expose the entire roll of film. It was a new roll of film and I’d only taken a few pictures of the cat I’d had back then on it, so I hated to waste it, but she was really insistent. She even paid for the roll, and she wanted to expose it herself, ruining the pictures. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it. I understand people not liking their picture, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

The last sentence was mumbled under her breath, almost like she was remembering the event. The woman had an amazing memory for someone half her age, let alone for a centenarian, but her vivid recall of the one event suggested it was more notable than her description let on. It further cemented Taylor’s feeling that this girl, whose name was almost certainly not Bonnie, was the woman he was looking for. She was older than Taylor had first thought when he started looking for her, but it made sense she’d have a lot of experience for the kind of stuff she’d been pulling off.

“Could you describe her for me?”

“I guess. This was twenty years ago, mind you, but she was a real beauty back then, with curly black hair. She was really thin though, which is why I was always trying to get her to eat a little something extra. Her face was angular, you know. Not, pointy and she didn’t have a big nose or anything, but her jawline and cheeks were really noticeable, kind of like Geena Davis.”

“If I brought you a picture of her, do you think you could identify her?”

“Probably, although you know people change a lot in twenty years.”

“Then I might be back, if I find one. In all the time she lived here, did she ever talk about her past? Where she might have grown up? Anything about her family?”

“She never talked about her past and changed the subject the few times I asked. Since she didn’t want to talk about it and I’m not one to pry, I didn’t ask anymore. We all have pasts that we sometimes don’t want to think about, you know.”

“I know,” Taylor said. “So nothing that might help me track her down now? It’s important I find her and ask her some questions.”

“Well, I’m not sure if this is right, but she’d work out most days doing some kind of calisthenics or something. She had this shirt that was really faded, but it said athletics on it, and the top part looked like a school name, but it was mostly worn off. I think it might have started with a P. It had a picture of a pig, or something like that on it. I mention it because it reminded me of the shirts my grand niece has from her school that she wears to her physical education class.”

Once again, Taylor was amazed by how sharp this woman was at her age. He’d be hard-pressed now to describe someone’s outfits from twenty years prior, and he had a long time to go till he was Mrs. Beacham’s age. Even if she wore the shirt often, that was an impressive recollection.

“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Beacham.”

Taylor showed himself out, leaving the old woman looking after him quizzically. He was more convinced than ever that this was the woman he was looking for and was a little annoyed at how poorly the agents who’d questioned Mrs. Beacham in the nineties had missed the fact that a border had just move out, who’d had access to the second phone line. They would have known the connection was dial-up, and should have at least looked into this other person. Of course, even if Mrs. Beacham had mentioned her, it was unlikely they would have put a female tenant together with a suspect wanted for posting murder for hire work. He’d already gotten the side eye several times for suggesting their hit man was actually a hit woman, and the landscape was a lot more progressive now than it had been in the nineties.

It was a reminder to Taylor to not get locked into one way of thinking on an investigation, since it nearly always resulted in throwing out perfectly good leads.

Taylor made his way to the Newark FBI offices, which weren’t that far from Jersey City and the closest place he would have access to the databases he’d need.

He wasn’t surprised when he couldn’t find any listing for a ‘Bonnie’ or any variation of that name, attending St. Peter’s University around the same time, nor any listing of a woman named Bonnie living in Jersey City at all, at least one that matched the age and ethnicity of the woman who lived with Mrs. Beacham.

The old lady had said Bonnie paid her rent in cash every month, and she’d never seen her use a credit card or anything else. The three dial-up accounts linked by Internet Crimes had all been in the name of the homeowner, and Mrs. Beacham hadn’t mentioned Bonnie owning a car or anything like that. She was a ghost living in society but not a part of it. In the early days of his transition from soldier to something like a cop, before he met Whitaker, he’d tracked several fugitives who’d tried to live off the grid. People talked about that all the time, but never really realized how difficult that actually was. The ‘grid’ touched just about every part of a person’s life, and not just the big things. Sure, you could get along without credit cards, without a driver’s license and even without a job that reported earnings to the government, but it was more than that.

It meant no flights. No long-distance bus travel. No medical care. No cashing of checks of any kind, so everything was cash. For someone in her trade, no going into a gun store. Weapons would have to be bought person to person or at some gun shows, and that was even a problem. If a weapon was dropped or lost, it could be traced back to the previous owner, who might remember details of her, so she might have to use intermediaries and cutouts.

It was easier in the nineties, to be sure, but this woman was still a ghost, so she had to be operating off the grid at least part of the time. Back in the nineties it was possible to get fake documents, but that had gotten harder since everything was connected to databases and checked in real-time.

Human behavior, though, was a lot more difficult to fake. Beyond the financial burden, it was hard to just pick up and move somewhere brand new without a specific reason, because people wanted to stay in the area they thought of as home. Somewhere familiar.

Everything pointed to her living in New Jersey before her break, and she only went out to Vegas and then Los Angeles when she had specific work. As soon as that dried up and nothing new came along, she’d come back to New Jersey. That wasn’t just a coincidence, she’d come back here because this was home.

Taylor would bet she was from New Jersey.

More than that, all three of the addresses that connected back to her early days, when it was clear she was just starting out, were all in Jersey City. She’d also found out about Mrs. Beacham somewhere. Sure, the old lady had advertised on some campuses, but that was basically just putting a notice up in the student center. She wasn’t putting an ad in the classifieds or up on the internet. ‘Bonnie’ would have had to have seen those messages, or more likely heard about it through word of mouth.

All three addresses he’d checked were older women or couples, like Mrs. Beacham, which was also not a coincidence. She would have picked them because they’d be less likely to notice what she was up to and more likely to write off a “college student” as harmless. Also, like Mrs. Beacham, the selection of those particular people wouldn’t have been random. She couldn’t have afforded to check in with this or that renter until she found the right one, because the whole point was to go unrecognized.

That meant watching, research and surveillance. It also meant a way to know about them that didn’t involve random calling of classified ads. If she’d found just one renter who fit the pattern, Taylor might be willing to write it off as luck, with ‘Bonnie’ just happening to hear about the room. Three times made it something else.

If Taylor had to guess, she was from Jersey City. She probably grew up here. It was big enough for her to disappear in, but still feel comfortable going out on her own. She’d know enough people to hear about these kinds of rental opportunities second or third hand with people who had no idea who she was. A smaller town wouldn’t let her remain invisible as well as she had and driving out here from Manhattan didn’t make much sense.

Of course, even assuming he was right, he’d still had quite the haystack to search through. Jersey City had a population of two-hundred and fifty thousand, which was a lot when he didn’t even know this girl’s real name.

The only lead he did have was the athletics shirt the old lady mentioned. As leads go, it was thin, because people buy similar shirts for all kinds of reasons. It could have come from a college, a thrift store, or just a random purchase. The only thing that made it stand out for him, and probably why it stuck in Mrs. Beacham’s memory, was the fact that it was well-worn.

People are creatures of habit. They like the familiar. It’s why he was going on the assumption that she was from Jersey City, and it was also why he was thinking the shirt wasn’t just a random purchase. She was wearing a shirt originally made for someone to wear to a PE class to do exercise. Subconsciously, that could have been because she associated it with exercise. Even if she didn’t, the fact that she was maybe twenty at the time and it was well worn meant she’d had it for several years, which meant high school age. It was unlikely it was from before that, because not many people could fit into their middle school clothes as an adult, and even if she could, that would have been enough time for it to become tattered instead of worn.

Taylor was working with a lot of assumptions, but it was what he had, so he ran with it. Looking up high schools in Jersey City, he started searching for one with a name that started with a P and had a pig for a mascot. There were nine high schools in Jersey City, and none of them started with a P. There was, however, one that started with an R and its mascot was a wild pig. On a very faded shirt, it was entirely possible to mistake a R for a P if the font was right, and it was the only one close to Mrs. Beacham’s description.

The Reagan Razorback was the mascot of Ronald Reagan High School, a low-income school in downtown Jersey City. It was a long shot, but it fit what he was looking for. The school itself had no real website and nothing on it going back to the nineties, which meant Taylor’s next stop was visiting the school, although he still only had an incredibly vague description.

He was just shutting down the computer he’d borrowed when his phone rang.

“I think we need to talk, John,” an icy voice said when he answered.