Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland by Amanda Berry Read Free Book Online Page B

Louwana, and then called out to the young woman, “Girl, get your ass in the car.”
    But Parker quickly realized it was not Amanda. She had the worn-down look of someone much older.
    “You look so much like Amanda Berry,” Parker told her.
    “Yeah, I know. That’s what people keep saying to me,” the woman said.
    Parker called Louwana back and told her they were still looking.
     • • • 
    When Heffernan heard that the young blond woman in the red-light district they had been tracking for days wasn’t Amanda, he decided to bring in the FBI. It had been ten days since Amanda had disappeared, all leads were exhausted, and the police needed help. Police receive huge numbers of missing-children reports, most of which involve children who intentionally ran away or went somewhere without telling their parents. Police only call in the FBI when they suspect a child has been kidnapped. Heffernan called his friend Tim Kolonick in the FBI’s big Cleveland field office on the shores of Lake Erie.
    Kolonick had wanted to be a federal agent since the day in elementary school that he saw Secret Service agents guarding Rosalynn Carter on a visit to the west side of Cleveland. Tall, trim, and athletic, he rose quickly from Cleveland police officer to U.S. Secret Service agent to the FBI, where he worked on the violent crime task force.
    As they drove up to Amanda’s house, Heffernan and Kolonick saw yellow ribbons tied to the chain-link fence, and they found Louwana waiting for them in a white-hot rage. She demanded to know why they weren’t working harder and why nobody had found her daughter.
    She took them to Amanda’s bedroom, where Kolonick marveled at the twenty-five pairs of jeans Amanda had hung neatly in her closet and the rows of perfectly lined-up shoes. Louwana went through the details yet again—the untouched money, the birthday plans, the strange call from a man who said Amanda was now his wife.
    From everything Kolonick could see, he felt certain Amanda hadn’t run away. He also knew that the longer she was missing, the less likely she would be found alive.
     • • • 
    The FBI hoped the kidnapper’s first mistake would be to turn on Amanda’s phone again. It was 2003 and bureau engineers in Quantico, Virginia, had developed new cell phone–tracking equipment that could pinpoint a particular phone’s location, as long as it was switched on, and so on May 8 an FBI engineer arrived at Cleveland Hopkins Airport with several large suitcases containing a mobile computer lab. Seventeen days had passed since Amanda’s disappearance, and ten days since Louwana had received the call from her daughter’s cell phone.
    Amanda’s phone records showed that her phone had been turned on repeatedly on the night she went missing and during the next day. Someone had been calling her voice mail and listening to the messages.
    FBI agents determined that Amanda’s phone had been somewhere near two cell towers on the west side of Cleveland when the call to Louwana was made. The caller might have been driving, because the signal seemed to bounce from one cell tower to the other. The towers were on either side of I-90, and they covered a radius of about forty square blocks. For all the bureau knew, the caller could have been racing along the highway when he made the call and he—and Amanda—could be in California by now.
    Hoping they were still in the area, Kolonick packed into a grungy gray van with the Quantico engineer and several other FBI agents and looked for a place to park somewhere between the two cell towers. They pulled into the parking lot of the Family Dollar discount store at Clark Avenue and West 30th Street, where their banged-up vehicle was inconspicuous, and turned on their gear: a device consisting of a computer screen, keyboard, and antenna. If Amanda’s phone was turned on for even a minute, they could pounce, along with an FBI SWAT team waiting in two Chevy Suburbans parked nearby.
    Although