Familiar Pieces: A Riveting Kidnapping Mystery (A North and Martin Abduction Mystery Book 6) Read online

  Familiar Pieces

  James Hunt

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  Copyright 2021 All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis.

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  Prologue

  The most valuable currency in the world isn’t cash, gold, or silver; it’s secrets. Secrets so closely guarded by people they would do anything to keep them hidden. And in today’s digital age, it has never been so easy to learn a stranger’s secrets.

  From the comfort of his desk, the blue light glowing from his computer screens brightening the dark basement where he worked, the Broker could learn anything about anyone, and the information he gleaned gave him power.

  In a society that had discarded him, technology opened him to the world. He could talk to anyone, see anything, listen to the most intimate and private conversations, and no one ever knew he was there.

  No one was truly alone anymore, not when everyone carried a phone in their pocket. No one was beyond his reach. And he wanted to understand the world that had cast him aside.

  It was through his voyeurism the Broker discovered how people were only their true selves when they were alone. So many people hid behind masks of pleasantries, lying to their friends and families, and even themselves. It was a coward’s way to live, in his opinion. And he had made the decision to stop hiding years ago.

  The urge to learn people’s truest selves started as a child. He would sneak into his parent’s bedroom and hide in the closet. It was in that darkened corner, tucked away behind his mother’s dresses, that he had learned the truth about his parents, what they really thought of their three children and each other.

  Sometimes the truth was a hard pill to swallow.

  But the revelations of those truths would serve him well in the future. It taught him to be patient and to ask the right questions.

  However, after a while, watching and listening wasn’t enough. He needed to interact with them; he wanted to reach them in a way no one else could. And that was how the Broker came into existence.

  The name wasn’t something he’d chosen for himself. The moniker had been bestowed upon him by the individuals who sought his services.

  The Broker had carved out a niche market for himself, and he was in high demand. He had always been good with computers, ever since he was a child. The machines he worked on had a system of rules, and he could bend and manipulate that system to his will.

  People, on the other hand, were a different story. He had never fit into the real world. He was branded an outcast by his peers at school when he was younger, picked on and bullied for his small stature.

  But now an adult, the roles had been reversed. Computers were the engine of the world, and wealth and power waited for those skilled enough to wield it. And no one was better than the Broker.

  Social media platforms and their endless algorithms designed to like, share, and connect were always the gateway into someone’s life. And all it took was a single word for him to begin his extraction of the truth.

  Hey.

  So innocent, so friendly, so full of possibilities. And children were such curious little monkeys, so eager to have their questions answered by someone who would listen to them. And he did listen, and watch, and wait until he was certain the time was right to strike.

  Over the years, the Broker had mastered the art of luring children closer to him. He had learned how they communicated, and he had discovered how impressionable they were, how easy they were to manipulate. But choosing the right target was important.

  Children who came from broken homes were always his first choice. They were easily swayed to trust an adult who gave them attention. Because as rebellious as children could be, they craved recognition. And when they didn’t receive it at home, they found it in other places.

  Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or whatever new social media craze was burrowing its way into the moldable minds of youth. All it took was one message. One simple, harmless, and irresistible word: Hey.

  Children were curious creatures. They wanted to explore, learn, solve the riddles of the world around them. And nothing was more mysterious than a stranger behind the messages on their screen.

  Who were they? Why were they reaching out? What do they want?

  He understood those children because he had been that very same child. He had been a loner, wishing for someone to speak with, wishing to be accepted.

  It was only natural for children to want someone to emulate, to look up to; after all, it was how they learned. Monkey see, monkey do. And the Broker made these monkeys do anything he wanted.

  He wasn’t a pedophile. At least he didn’t think he was one. But the urge to interact with these children was insatiable. The young and impressionable were blank canvases, eager to prove themselves to their masterful teacher.

  The high the Broker experienced during these cat-and-mouse moments was unlike anything else in the world. He had tried the same techniques with adults, but they wore too many masks.

  Adults only showed the world what they wanted people to see. But children were quick to expose themselves, laying their truths out to him to guard and keep safe. And in return, the Broker filled the void missing in their lives. A void left behind by the very parents meant to protect them.

  And when the game was done, all the Broker asked in return was something so small, a piece of themselves so sacred and innocent that in their naivety, they couldn’t understand what they were giving away until it was too late.

  The first time he had tasted innocence, touched the forbidden fruit, he had been unable to stop himself. And his appetite had only grown. But with his increased appetite came the danger of exposure.

  The Broker had gotten very good at hiding. He hid behind his monitors, and his keyboard, and his code, ruining lives from the comfort of his ergonomically correct chair. He had become a new kind of threat in a hunting ground that was ever-changing, evolving, and constantly updated with new terms and conditions.

  But there was a place in the digital world that was hidden, a scaly underbelly of the internet known as the dark web. It was here the Broker covered his tracks, masking his identity.

  The authorities were growing restless to catch him. But for all their efforts, he was still free, still uncaged, still wreaking havoc.

  The papers had called him a monster because of his association with the pedophiles he helped. But who was he to judge someone else’s perversions?

  After twelve abductions, the call for the Broker’s capture was growing more frantic. Every new interaction he made was dangerous. His legend had grown, and if he weren’t careful, it would all come to a crashing end.

  But he believ
ed himself uncatchable. He left no footprint behind, no DNA, nothing the police could use to identify him.

  However, one detective refused to give up. He hunted the Broker relentlessly, but so far, the detective remained one step behind, and the Broker intended to keep it that way.

  Deep down, if the Broker were honest with himself, he enjoyed being chased. It raised the stakes. He had even started to text the detective, goading the officer to try harder.

  The Broker considered texting the detective tonight, just to remind him he was still causing trouble. But he was rather busy. So many children, so little time.

  Right now, one particular case interested the Broker above all else, a child whose abduction would draw quite a lot of attention. But the Broker had never shied away from a challenge before.

  It was wrong, it was vile, it was sinful, but he couldn’t help himself. He had a disease—incurable, insufferable, and unstoppable.

  But who was he to deny the delicious taste of flesh? And if he were honest with himself, revealing his own little secret: he liked it.

  The itch to hunt down a child, to manipulate them, to earn their trust, only to betray them was intoxicating.

  And it was such a fun game to play.

  1

  The light shined down in a perfect cone of yellow that engulfed the kitchen table, a single light fighting against the early morning darkness while the rest of the house slept blissfully and peacefully upstairs.

  Detective Jim North sat hunched forward in his chair, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, or it could have been two days ago that he had changed? He wasn’t sure. His face was covered in scruff, his chocolate-brown eyes bloodshot and tired, his hair disheveled as he fixated on the twelve different files spread before him on the table, rehashing each of the cases in hopes of finding anything he had missed. But no matter how many times he stared at the documents under the incandescent glow, he found nothing new.

  And that frightened him.

  Each of the twelve abductions had been performed by different individuals. But there was one commonality between them: a man.

  The “Broker.”

  All of the suspects Jim had apprehended had given him this same name when they were interviewed after the arrest. But the moniker was all the pedophiles could provide.

  The Broker never gave his real name and never showed his face. All communication was done electronically, and their cyber team found no traces of any digital communication. Like a ghost, the Broker came and went as he pleased, only revealing himself to those he deemed worthy.

  Each of the cases was unique, but there was one common piece of evidence that tied all twelve cases together. The children who were abducted were each given a phone. It was a smartphone, silver case, with a screen protector. It was always the same model, same brand, same sleep design.

  The Broker had developed unbreakable encryption, and any attempt to open the phone resulted in its destruction, frustrating their cyber division every time they tried to extract evidence from the device.

  Jim had stared at the black screens of those phones for just as long as he had the case files. He knew it was how the Broker communicated with his victims. And the fact that the Broker used the same phone each time revealed an arrogance that drove Jim mad.

  Jim rubbed his eyes, the exhaustion of the past three months having caught up with him three weeks ago. Sleep eluded him, and these cases were the source of his insomnia.

  Three months ago, a little girl was abducted from a local park in southeast Seattle. The suspect, Gary Kavas, had lured nine-year-old, Amy Fuller, into his van by means of a mutual friend: The Broker.

  Between eye-witnesses at the park and traffic footage of the van the witnesses had described, it didn’t take long for the authorities to track Gary Kavas down. But as quickly as they had worked, they were still three minutes too slow.

  Three minutes.

  One hundred and eighty seconds.

  That was the amount of time that separated finding Amy Fuller alive and reuniting with her parents and her suffocating to death after her abductor, Gary Kavas, tied a plastic bag over her head.

  The autopsy had confirmed how close they had come to saving Amy’s life, and those three minutes had haunted Jim for three months. Ever since then, time had taken on a new appreciation for him. He counted every second that had passed, but time slipped through his fingers like granules of sand in an hourglass. No matter how hard he held that sand in his hand, it always found a way to sift through the cracks.

  In Jim’s first six years with the police department—three as a detective—he had developed a reputation as a lone wolf. Nothing mattered to him except for closing the case. It didn’t matter what his partner or superior had to say on the subject, Jim was always convinced he was right, and he had the record to back it up—more closed cases, more convictions, and more recovered children than any active detective in the country.

  Amy Fuller’s death was the first time Jim had ever failed. It was the first time he didn’t know how to find his way out and the first time a criminal had managed to one-up him.

  It had been a tough pill to swallow, and if he were honest with himself, it had eaten away at his confidence. The unshakable ground he had walked for so long had suddenly fractured, and there was no telling how wide the chasm would grow.

  Unable to leave the fate of the children he was tasked to recover to chance again, Jim had buried himself in work. And because of that, he had slipped back into old habits.

  But those early days in his career were lonesome. He was hated by his peers and merely tolerated by his superiors. It wasn’t until he was transferred to Seattle’s fifth precinct that he had found a place where he belonged. He found a family at the Five, and through the help of his new partner and his lieutenant, Jim’s past began to fade into memory. But failure had returned Jim to his troubled past.

  The relationships he had built, the comradery he had enjoyed had been set aside for the sake of the job. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered was finding these children and bringing them home. But the endless hours, the constant grind, had slowly chipped away at the life he had worked so hard to build.

  Since Amy Fuller’s death, eleven more children had been abducted. Thankfully, Jim and his partner had managed to recover them. But their lives had been forever changed.

  Jim picked up one of the files he had closed out just the day before. An eight-year-old boy had been taken by his step-uncle, a registered sex offender. Three hours after the AMBER Alert had gone out, Jim had the uncle in handcuffs and the little boy back in his mother’s arms.

  Another case from six weeks ago had involved a five-year-old girl and the friend of a family member. A tip had come in from a neighbor after spotting the man—aged forty-seven—sneaking around to the backdoor and snatching the girl from her bed while she slept. Jim had found the man and the girl before the sun came up the next morning.

  Each of the cases since Amy Fuller’s had had happy endings. But Jim knew that once innocence was lost, it was gone forever. No amount of therapy or healing could reclaim it because the memories of what had taken it away never faded. Jim knew exactly how devastating abusive trauma could be for a young child.

  Jim stared at the scars on his palms, remnants of his own stolen innocence when he had been abducted as a child. He remembered the fear, the shame, the anger. He had grown up in the foster system, which had failed him more often than not, betrayed by the adults who were charged to protect him.

  Jim’s childhood was the reason he had become a cop. His trauma was the root of his passion in the pursuit of these children who were victims of the very people who were supposed to care for them. In Jim’s humble opinion, it was the most despicable crime anyone could commit.

  Having grown up in foster care for most of his life, Jim had been passed around to broken homes, most of them horrible, some downright evil.

  Jim was cast into the fire before he was old enough to defend himself, and throug
h the wickedness of others, Jim was forced to harden, forced to forsake his childhood to survive.

  Anger had built up inside of him for years and festered like a callous over his emotions. But when he was sixteen, Jim received the biggest blessing he didn’t know he needed.

  Foster parents who cared.

  After being chewed up and spit out by the system, he stumbled upon a couple who provided the love and understanding he had needed to pull himself out of the hole he was digging for himself during his teen years.

  Jim credited Ray and Mary Swisher for changing his life. Without them, Jim was certain he would be dead or in jail.

  Ray and Mary Swisher had adopted a sixteen-year-old who had developed a bad reputation. There weren’t too many families willing to take a risk on a sixteen-year-old kid who’d already been arrested half a dozen times and was flunking out of school. But they had, and it had made all the difference in his life. He owed everything he was today to their love and their relentless capacity to forgive.

  Without them, Jim never would have become a cop, he never would have been promoted to detective, and none of the hundreds of children he had helped recover would have been found.

  But he couldn’t help but wonder if Amy Fuller would have lived if it had been another detective assigned to her case. It was the thought that kept him up late at night, pouring over these cases, wandering aimlessly through the house during his sleepless nights as he tried to uncover the identity of this mysterious Broker.

  Jim leaned back into his chair and rubbed face. The dark crescents imprinted beneath his eyes another physical sign of his deteriorating state. His mind was foggy, sluggish, fueled by caffeine, adrenaline, and the obsession of bringing the Broker to justice.