Caller unknown, p.4
Caller Unknown, page 4
In response to the media furor Hennessey’s SAC in Boston demanded quick results. The Child Abduction Response Plan was upended. The Bureau’s job was usually to find missing children and return them to their families, but in this case they had found the children but there were no families to return them to. With the agreement of the Houlton sheriff, Hennessey took the decision in the first hour to issue police pictures of the seven children to encourage people to come forward. Five were taken in hospital wards, two in morgues. The pictures went onto the front pages of local and national newspapers. Five of the children stared out of the front pages, glassy-eyed and confused, but two others were shown with eyes closed and with an unmistakable pallor. The images shocked the nation. The signs with their names and the biblical passage were also published, in case they jogged anyone’s memory. A hotline was set up in Houlton.
Neither the mugshots nor the signs elicited any worthwhile leads, though there was a call from someone who had seen a suspicious flying object in the night sky over the dump site and another from a person who claimed to have contacted one of the dead children on the astral plane.
One of the dozen field agents was called Gloria Gonzalez. She was fresh out of Quantico and this was her first major case. She was paired with a veteran of the Bureau, Chris Madden. The two were chalk and cheese. He was thirty-seven, a Korean war veteran with a buzz cut and stern frown but otherwise no visible emotion, and on the older end of the spectrum for a field agent. Despite the regulation gray pantsuit she was wearing, Gloria knew how to have fun and accessorize. She was big in voice, on hair, perfume, and jewelry—the new face of the FBI just emerging in these last days of Hoover.
Hennessey called the first case meeting early the next day. Present were his own agents and assembled police officers from Aroostook and the two neighboring counties of Piscataquis and Penobscot. He said that the medics had forbidden any questioning of the traumatized kids for now, since the doctors reported that each of the five survivors was suffering from acute memory loss, to the degree that they were unaware of the names on their placards. The only clues thus far were the tire tracks on the roadside verge at the dump site and the Pan Am bags. The bags were widely available at every airport gift shop and identifying a point of origin and a purchaser would be near impossible. The Bibles in the bags were the Douay version, used by Catholics, so there was a slight clue. However, these had been printed back in 1941 and so again their origin was difficult to discover. The children’s clothing was so commonplace as to be untraceable. They puzzled over the biblical quotation written in childish hands on the placards.
Molds of the tire tracks had been made by the Evidence Response Team and sent for analysis at Quantico. Yesterday’s canvasing had yielded nothing, but had only taken in the couple of dozen farms, cabins, and trailers in a four-mile radius of the dump site. Apart from the alleged unidentified flying object in the sky, nothing unusual had been noted until McAllister came across the kids at 3 a.m. the day before.
The sheriff ordered the search to be expanded and, short of any other clues, all other officers and agents were sent to man roadblocks and canvas Presque Isle to the east, Ashland to the south and as far north as Fort Kent on the border. A handful of officers were left to man the newly opened public information line.
Madden and Gonzalez were assigned to Ashland and here, at the combined convenience store and gas station, got the first lead.
They showed their badges to the owner, Louis Grandfleur, a garrulous, rotund, thickly bearded French Canadian.
Madden took the lead. “You heard about the abduction case?”
“Who hasn’t?” Grandfleur answered, nodding toward the newsstand, where the pictures of the Seven Apostles, as they were now being called, stared out in life and death.
“We want to question anyone who might have seen the children.”
Grandfleur shook his head. “Believe me, we’d notice seven strange kids around here. This place ain’t exactly teeming.”
Madden tried a long shot. “So, anything else unusual been going on around here?”
Grandfleur shrugged and stroked his beard. “Folk here keep themselves to themselves and that’s fine, but we have some outsiders come through.”
“Such as?” Gloria asked.
“Well, we get our share of out-of-state hunters, folk on a back-to-nature Thoreau trip, a few anti-draft kids heading north to Quebec, but they’re all here today, gone tomorrow. Strangest permanent folk around here would be that couple living out in the woods. Name of Frome, place called Eriksson’s Lot. About the only piece of the North Woods not owned by the big logging companies. He’s some kind of survivalist I guess, but she don’t look like that at all. She’s more housewifely, you know? They drive through in a beat-up Chevy pickup every now and again. But never together. Just one or the other. Never stopped here neither, which is weird, given there ain’t another gas station within ten miles of this place. Only reason I know their name is one of the guys at the forestry checkpoint told me it.”
“So, you never saw them with kids?” Gloria asked.
Grandfleur quirked an eyebrow. “Like I said, in this town you’d have noticed something like that. But if you want to know more, go out to the forestry checkpoint. It’s on the abandoned highway west of here. There’s a story there—shoulda gone all the way to Canada but construction got pulled in the Fifties. Land slips and environmentalists, you know? Checkpoint’s manned eight to four this time of year. Those guys are meant to log everything. Must have processed that Chevy a bunch of times. And they may be able to tell you where this Eriksson’s Lot is. Me? I ain’t got a clue. Back of beyond is all I know. Watch you don’t get a flat—no tows out there.”
Madden and Gonzalez exchanged glances. They had been assigned to assist in canvasing the town. But, as it was, the place was already crawling with police teams. There was something in Grandfleur’s story. Loners were behind most non-family child abductions and these Fromes fit that bill exactly. They thanked him, called Special Agent Hennessey and told him they were investigating a lead and set off down the highway. A sign gave it a name, Realty Road, but after a few potato farms and a sawmill on the edge of the forest there was no other property.
The officer at the checkpoint was new to the job but showed the agents the logbook. Sure enough there was a record of the Chevy’s journeys back and forth, its registration and two barely legible signatures, always on different dates. He, too, had heard that the Fromes were some kind of survivalist couple, maybe even cultists of some nature. The one time he’d seen the Chevy, its bed had been piled with dry goods, good enough for a month-long siege, but, hell, survivalists were hoarders, weren’t they? With the Missile Crisis not that long ago he guessed these folk were just stockpiling against a nuclear winter. He gave the two agents directions to the turnoff to the Lot.
Madden aimed the sedan down Realty Road. It was strange to be following a blacktop into the middle of an uninhabited wilderness. They drove down this dull, undulating arboreal tunnel, the monotony broken only by glimpses of distant blue-gray mountains, streams rushing under the road in culverts, and the hint of blue lakes glimpsed through the lattice of trees.
Then an aberration appeared. They came around a wide bend and saw that the firs and spruce had been cleared back some twenty yards from the road and there sat a ruined Texaco station. The place had apparently been dropped from the heavens to serve the abandoned highway, then forgotten. The Texaco sign with its red star and green T on its post was rusty and pitted with buckshot. Rusted pumps stood under a sagging canopy on the overgrown asphalt. Beyond, the office front was boarded with rotten panels. At some time the entrance had been broken into and the hole looked like a dark, sinister mouth. A few yards further on, the blacktop abruptly ended and the road became shale and gravel.
They didn’t stop. The agents’ attention had already been drawn to a plume of smoke rising from a mountain ridge some twenty miles to the northwest, roughly where the forestry officer had told them the Lot was. Madden pressed down on the gas, heedless of Grandfleur’s warning about flats.
They could hardly miss the turning when it came. There had been no other side road, just firebreaks, in the last hour. A chain-link fence appeared by the side of the road and ran alongside it for a half-mile to a padlocked swing gate. There was a metal sign with “Eriksson’s Lot: Private Property. Trespassers will be Prosecuted,” stenciled in faded red paint on the fence next to it. Rusted buckshot holes decorated the sign in several places. A passing wit had scored through “Prosecuted” and scratched the word “Shot” above it. The unpaved track behind rose steeply into the forest.
Seeing the locked gates, Madden went to the sedan’s trunk and took out a pair of bolt cutters.
“Let’s call it probable cause,” he said. He swiftly dispatched the padlock. They cleared the scattered deadfall on the track beyond. There were two vehicle tracks in the mud underneath: one heavy, possibly correlating to the heavy tracks found on 11, the other lighter and perhaps those of the pickup.
Madden looked at Gloria. “Looks like a match, but we need a warrant and the ERT before we go further and we’re out of radio range. I’m going to have to go back while you hold the fort. No one in, no one out.”
“No one’s coming, Chris,” Gloria said.
“I won’t be long,” Madden said. But, of course, he was. It took four hours before he was back with the warrant and the ERT. The four hours were the loneliest Gloria had ever spent. She sat on a tree stump, fished out a packet of Salems and lit up. There was utter, total silence. You would have to believe in some crazy stuff to live out here in this nowhere. A millennial cult who drank the blood of living children perhaps. She shivered. There was a sudden rustling in the trees across the way. She dropped her cigarette and pulled her service .38, thinking it was a bear. She was ready to fire a warning shot but the rustling moved off. Her heartbeat stilled. She sat back on the stump, let the sun beat down on her, hoping it would drive the unease from her. But she couldn’t rid herself of it, or the sense of being watched. She looked around but there was only the rusted gate and the track leading up to God knows what on the top of the mountain. Not a single vehicle passed.
By the time Madden was back with the ERT in the midafternoon, there were a half-dozen lipstick-ringed Salem butts around the tree stump.
The ERT confirmed the heavy tracks looked a match with the ones on the 11. They took molds and photos for analysis. Then Madden, Gonzalez, and two others drove up the track. Gonzalez clutched the gold crucifix around her neck. She decided she hated these woods.
The second gate lay open at the top. A little beyond, smoke rose from a blackened crater some forty feet across and twenty feet deep. No trace of a dwelling remained, just charred wood scattered for 100 yards around. The surrounding trees were scorched but had not caught aflame. Even in June the Maine woods had a pervading dampness about them.
The neighboring lean-to had partially collapsed but otherwise survived the explosion. The ERT went into it first. They found tools and empty fuel containers, which they dusted, but these had been wiped of fingerprints.
More agents arrived and an incident site was established. A mechanical digger was brought in from a logging camp and a six-foot radio mast was erected with the range to reach Ashland. Tents were set up and a latrine dug. The summer bugs descended on the sweating agents. Gloria spent three nights in that godforsaken place without a change of clothes or anywhere to wash. The ERT sifted the pulverized concrete, melted metal, and charcoal at the bottom of the explosion crater. On the third day they found fragments of carbonized bone, possibly lumbar vertebrae. There was not much left for the pathologist. All he could determine was that they didn’t belong to a child; the fragments seemed to belong to a mature adult, or adults.
It could be the Fromes, but two vehicles had been driven away from the Lot. Did the Fromes have accomplices? Other members of the same cult who had disposed of the kids while the Fromes killed themselves?
On July 1, the abandoned school bus was discovered in some woods near Fort Kent. The tire treads of the bus were an exact match with those gathered at the Lot and on Highway 11. The bus had been purchased for cash in a sale of state assets ten years previously. The purchaser’s ID was discovered to be fake. The bus contained the fingerprints of the seven children, but not its driver. A J.C. Penney bag with a jug of OJ and barbiturate mix, a Penthouse magazine, and some used Kleenex were found under the bus driver’s seat. The driver had presumably skipped across the border into Canada from Fort Kent.
Identikit pictures of the Fromes were produced and warrants for their arrest issued, just in case they were still alive.
CHAPTER NINE
The children were transferred to hospitals in Massachusetts. Who were they? All the authorities had were the names on the placards. The Missing? The Trafficked? The Abducted? Survivors of Homicide? The doctors determined that their ages were probably within six months of one another, from nine to nine and a half years old. Young for runaways, but still possible. In that year there were over a half-million missing person cases in the US. But after a solid month of exhaustive cross-checking it was established that the kids could not be linked to a single one of them.
The FBI’s Kidnapping and Missing Persons department had a list of the rare cases of babies being snatched from childcare situations, but nearly every one had been solved and the child returned to its parents. There were only unsolved cases every five years or so. Seven concurrent cases had never happened.
Homicide: what if both parents had been murdered and the child taken by the perpetrators? Despite some 16,000 homicides in the US in 1970, there were no reported cases of double homicides and child abduction that year, or, for that matter, in the preceding decade.
The only remaining theory, bar the alien abduction one, was one that actually approached the truth. The children had been born off the grid and their parents had simply vanished.
Gonzalez was given the task of examining the land registry for the Lot. The public record office in Houlton had all she needed. The place got its name from a Swede, Matthias Lars Eriksson, who bought it shortly after the creation of Aroostook County in 1839. Eriksson logged the valuable white pine out of it, then departed the woods leaving only his name behind.
Afterwards the Lot changed hands twice and was then sold just after the Second World War to what her investigations would eventually reveal was a shell company registered in the Caymans. As the islands were a British Overseas Territory, further information about the directors of the company would have to be sought from the UK. Companies House in London did eventually supply some names, but these, unsurprisingly, also turned out to be entirely fictitious.
It was time to begin questioning the children. The Massachusetts psychiatrists and the FBI established a protocol: the five survivors were to be kept under observation in separate institutions. The separation was intentional: if their memories did return, and the case ever came to trial, the Feds didn’t want any cross-contaminating false memories. Child witnesses were tricky enough at the best of times.
An agent was designated to each child. On his return to the Boston Field Office, Hennessey, who was pleased with his new agent’s performance in the backwoods, got Gloria assigned to one of the boys, Edward. Gloria was to feed information back to the investigative coordinator. How much could be obtained from the kid was doubtful. The psychologists were certain that the children had been subjected to some kind of deep brainwashing regime. They used the word “zombie” in private to describe them, but never in public.
CHAPTER TEN
Dr. Roger Gant, the child psychologist at the Boston Children’s Hospital in Brookline, looked like an eccentric scientist in a TV show: he was bearded and wore a stained lab coat and half-moon glasses. He liked to keep things informal and decided he’d address the kid as Ed. He wasn’t happy to learn that an agent had been assigned to shadow Ed’s treatment.
He met Gloria in the corridor outside his office before the first session.
Gloria had ditched the serious pantsuit. She wore coral lipstick and a sangria-colored blazer and skirt combo. The skirt had quite a high hemline. She smiled warmly, and Gant couldn’t help but smile back. Whoever had chosen her for this assignment had chosen well: this could work.
“Good to meet you, Agent Gonzalez—”
She held up a hand. Her rings flashed in the corridor light. “Please, call me Gloria.”
“OK, Gloria. Before we go in, I just wanted to review the case.” He gestured to a bench in the corridor.
“Fine by me.” She sat, pulling down her skirt, but not before Gant had admired her knees.
He cleared his throat and sat too. “The kid’s suffering amnesia brought on, we think, by some sort of traumatic mind control. Are you familiar with the topic?”
“You mean, have I seen The Manchurian Candidate? Yes, as a matter of fact.”
Her smile was really quite infectious. He smiled back. “Well, I guess the movies and books have a lot to answer for. Fact and fiction kind of blur. I hear that some of the defendants in the Tate–LaBianca trial are pleading coercive persuasion.”
The trial of Charles Manson had just begun and had quickly replaced the Apostles’ story in the national headlines.
“Do you believe they were forced to commit those murders?” Gloria asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do. I think given the right circumstances—drugs, sleep deprivation, torture—quite normal people could be driven to murder on command. They’re called robot agents. I’m sure you’ve heard the term.”
Gloria’s smile faded a little. She wasn’t going to admit it to Gant, but at Quantico the trainees had heard all about MKUltra, the CIA’s program of research into behavioral modification. Prisoners, psychiatric patients, and women suffering postpartum depression had been subjected to electroshock and LSD treatments by their secret service colleagues disguised as innocent medical research students, all with the intention of wiping their subjects’ memories.
