The 1964 link was undeniable, but Ella still didn’t know what it symbolized. These men were all different ages, so it wasn’t their birth years. It couldn’t be the unsub’s year of birth either, since that would make him almost 60 years old. A 60-year-old, no matter how healthy or athletic, couldn’t pull off the necessary guile to carry out these attacks. It was rare, almost unheard of, for a serial killer to begin their killing career so late in life.
She thought of the first two victims, a former bank manager and antiques dealer. How could she dig into their lives? If they had a link to the world of coin collecting, she needed to find it. The first victim, Alan Yates, began as a bank manager and then retired in his fifties to focus on charity work. She sifted through her papers looking for everything she had on Alan Yates, scanned it, and found no link to the coin world. Opposite her, Byford buried his head in the new reports.
Ella sat down and pulled her laptop closer. She had to go virtual to find something on him. She searched online for ALAN YATES NEWARK DELAWARE and came up with over 3 million results, way too many to sift through. She added the word philanthropy and narrowed it down significantly. She began scrolling through the results.
“Wow, looks like Alan Yates was quite the donor.” She found mentions of schools, hospitals, and charities on the first page of results alone. LOCAL BENEFACTOR GIFTS PPE TO HOSPITAL was the result she first dug into. The article had a picture of Alan Yates, shaking the hand of a woman in nurse scrubs. She scanned for anything useful in the article but found nothing.
She continued on down the page. The next result detailed Alan’s donation to a local charity for underprivileged children. Books, toys, games, clothes, electronics. The guy was a real hero, Ella thought. The fact such a generous man could be taken so cruelly filled her with a dreadful awareness of her own mortality.
“Found anything?” Byford asked.
“Alan Yates gave away a small fortune but I’m not finding a link to the coin collecting world.”
“Maybe try collector pages or see if there are communities in the area.”
Ella didn’t think it would be much use. “If Alan was a collector, we’d have found coins in his house. The sheriff said he searched that place high and low and found nothing. Same with Jimmy Loveridge.”
“I guess,” Byford shrugged, offering nothing more. Ella wished he’d be a little more enthusiastic at times.
She scoured five more articles, finding more of the same. Alan seemed to make notable donations on a regular basis, like he was eager to give away his entire fortune. As a last resort, she flipped to the images section and mostly found the pictures she’d already seen in the articles. She scrolled through. Alan smiling in a group of children, Alan shaking hands with the mayor, Alan at an awards ceremony.
The images decreased in quality as she reached the bottom of the page. By now, she was finding things completely unrelated to the task at hand. She fell back in the chair and let the white glow of the screen engulf her vision, then she fell into a daydream as thoughts of the strange note back in her motel room returned. The recent discovery of Barry Windham’s collecting habit had made her all but forget about the note, but when the chaos died down, Tobias Campbell was still there haunting her reflections. He was two thousand miles away, but right next to her at the same time.
For a fleeting moment, she wondered if the best possible solution to all this was to visit Maine Correctional one last time, sneak in a Glock .22 and put a bullet in his Campbell’s heart. The fantasy quickly became all-consuming, and it wasn’t until a minute later that she realized she was staring at a very familiar image on her computer screen.
Ella gripped the table edge and shook away any thoughts of Tobias. When she was back in the present, she became aware of the fact that the last image on her search results featured that of a small child, glowing blonde hair, beaming smile like he’d just drank an ocean of chocolate milk. The image quality was low, like it had been pulled from a decades-old news piece, and the child in question bore no resemblance to any child she’d seen in her lifetime.
But what caught her attention was the object in his hand.
“Nigel,” she said. “Here.”
Byford rushed up from his chair and joined her on the other side of the table. Ella enlarged the image, finding it was barely three-hundred by three-hundred pixels.
“Oh, lord. That’s…,” he squinted his eyes. “The Japanese yen coin. The one they found at the Yates scene.”
Ella’s first thought that this was some massive accident on her part and that she’d altered her search results during her mind-drift. She checked everything again. No, she hadn’t. The results still said ALAN YATES NEWARK PHILANTHROPY. She clicked into the corresponding article and the page loaded a completely white slate.
“It’s a dead link,” Byford said.
Ella slammed her palm against the table. “Shit. There’s gotta be a way in.”
She copied the link location, pasted it in the URL bar and got the same blank page. She tried a different browser with the same result.
“Give it up, it’s not going to work.”
Ella remembered Mia saying something about technology the last time the Internet let them down. She couldn’t remember the exact line, but it was something like stop demanding so much from technology and start demanding it from yourself. Ella interpreted it to mean that if you wanted results, technological or not, you had to apply yourself.
“The page must be cached somewhere,” she said. On the blank white page, she dug into the HTML code through the browser’s command console. Her heart began to pound when she saw five text files, two image files and a bunch of extensions she didn’t recognize. There was something here.
She extracted the first text file to a Notepad document and found it was the first paragraph of the dead article. “Yes!” she called. “We got it.”
19th March, 2002. A local investment banker and benefactor put smiles on a lot of faces this week after showing up unannounced to a local school armed with sacks full of goodies for the children to enjoy. Alan Yates surprised the schoolchildren at Wood Green’s School For Disadvantaged Children with cases of toys, board games, creative tools, and Nintendo devices.
“I’m not seeing anything about coins,” Byford said. Ella wished he’d be a little more patient. Ella extracted the next paragraph.
But one particular stack of items from Mr. Yates’s stash was the biggest hit among the children: his bags of old coins. “Sometimes we get the odd foreign coin in the stashes at the bank.” Mr. Yates went on to say. “We don’t have much use for them, so I take them out and save them. I know Pogs are all the rage these days, so I thought the kids would have more use for them than me!”
“Got you!” Ella said. She clenched her fists and hammered them on the table in exhilaration. “I knew it! Alan used to gift coins to kids. That’s gotta be part of this whole thing.”
Byford took a step back, rubbed his chin forcefully. “It’s interesting to say the least, but how?”
Ella realized now that Byford was one of those people who was quick to offer problems but rarely solutions. “I don’t know, but it’s a starting point. Now, if we can establish that Jimmy Loveridge had some link to this world, we’ve got a solid connection we can explore.”