1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,37

in a van with Keats and the rest of our six-person team, heading to the helipad at Boston Harbor. One of the Bureau’s black Bell helicopters was waiting when we got there, and by eleven, we were lifting off for the forty-five-minute flight to Portland.

It was a surreal feeling, watching the city fall away beneath that chopper—my biggest reminder yet that I was running with the big guns now. Which also meant no wiggle room. If the FBI couldn’t get this done, who could?

Tiny mistakes were the difference between life and death here. I was going to need to do everything I could to hold up my little corner of this investigation. And no matter what else happened now, I just hoped we were moving on this fast enough to make sure that Reese Anne Sapporo made it back home alive.

That is, assuming we weren’t already too late.

CHAPTER 40

WHEN WE LANDED in Portland, two reps from the Cumber-land County Sheriff’s Office met us with cars at the airport. The reps were fairly cool and neutral about the whole thing. It was hard to gauge if we were a welcome resource or some kind of law enforcement interlopers to these people. That seemed to be the norm in the cop shows and movies I’d seen, but then again, I was on a pretty steep learning curve these days. It was all about where those stories left off and reality picked up.

From the airfield, we drove to the Deering neighborhood, where the Sapporos lived. I rode with Keats, Adam Obaje, and a Detective Friebold, who briefed us on what they had so far.

There were no indications of a forced entry, or a struggle of any kind, at the Sapporos’ house, Friebold said. Other than a single window left unlatched in the girl’s room, the whole place had been left undisturbed.

“We’re guessing Reese let this creep in but didn’t leave willingly. Might have been drugged,” Friebold told us. “If only because her phone was left behind. You don’t see a lot of fifteen-year-olds doing that, you know?”

I’d been thinking the same thing. Especially not when it came to fifteen-year-olds who were phone-oriented enough to fall into an app like this one.

Friebold went on. “As soon as that photo came in this morning, we reclassified the case from missing persons to an abduction,” he said. “But there’s been no word since. No demands. Nothing. Her poor folks are out of their minds.”

An Amber Alert had gone out, and police were already speaking with Reese’s friends, teachers, and neighbors. They were also covering all major transportation hubs, but it was impossible to know how many hours’ head start the kidnapper might have had. I tried not to imagine it too much from Reese’s perspective, how freaked out and terrified she would have been. But at the same time, I tried not to push it away, either. I could feel myself sharpening my analytic skills, even if that lingering dread in my gut was the same as ever.

“What are the chances she’s still alive?” I asked Keats. “Statistically speaking.”

“Statistically? Ten percent, maybe,” he said. “But there’s nothing typical about this.”

I wasn’t completely sure what Keats meant by that, but something told me to cut off the rookie questions at that point and just focus on the briefing we’d had.

When we reached the house, Keats met with Mr. and Mrs. Sapporo while Candace put in a call to the family’s ISP to start tracking down whatever we could get on every device in that house. I shut myself up in Reese’s bedroom and got busy with her Samsung Galaxy phone. It had already been fingerprinted and left as it had been found, on the unmade bed.

Knowing what we did about the app, my instructions were to work silently, avoiding any possible eavesdropping through the phone. I sequestered it in a Faraday bag, cabled it to my laptop, and started running a copy right away.

Once that was going, I turned my attention to Reese Sapporo herself.

Besides the bed, everything about her room was crazy tidy. The only things on the white painted desk were a gooseneck lamp and a rose gold MacBook Air laptop. Her books were organized by color, and the clothes in her closet looked like they’d never been worn.

A quick check on her social media showed me a heavyset, plain girl. She didn’t seem to have a ton of friends, and her postings tended to be on the geeky side. I saw several Game of