Finding Claire Fletcher (26 page)

Connor laughed. “Yeah. I’m starving.” He looked at Boggs and Stryker. “You two wanna come?”

Boggs shook his head. “Nah, some other time.”

“We got work to do, man,” Stryker added. “Riehl will pop a vein in his forehead if three of us are MIA today.”

Connor thanked them for coming and watched them walk down the hall toward the exit, already bickering over something.

At the restaurant, Mitch ordered a round of drinks and three shots. Connor peeled his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves.

“So what did you tell them?” Mitch asked.

“The truth,” Connor said. “Just the truth. I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance of keeping my job. And then I thought if I lost it, I could always go into private practice. You’ve got an opening, right?”

Mitch laughed. “Yeah, for you? Could be. I don’t know though. You’d have to really bone up on home security.”

“Cute,” Connor said.

Jen leaned forward from the other side of the table. “Was there a lot of press over this case?” she asked.

“Well, there was some, but something else happened the same weekend so I was bumped back to the last page of the metro section,” Connor said. “Which might have just saved my ass.”

Jen nodded. “Yes. I know a thing or two about the press. They either make things much better or much worse.”

“No,” Mitch said. “It’s not so much the press as the unthinking masses who take everything they read to heart.”

The waiter arrived with their drinks. Jen held up her shot glass. “A toast,” she said. Connor and Mitch quickly grasped their own shot glasses and waited for her to speak. “To Connor getting to keep his job,” she said.

“Yeah,” Mitch added. “To a damn fine detective.”

Connor looked at Jen and held her gaze for a long moment. “To your daughter,” he said. “And bringing her home.”

Tears filled Jen’s eyes as they clinked glasses and knocked back the shots.

They chased the shots with long gulps of beer. The waiter returned to take their order, and then Mitch got down to business. He pulled out a file from under his jacket, which he’d brought from the car and handed it to Connor.

“I’ve got the composite,” he said.

Connor flipped open the file and pulled out the sketch of the man who had abused Noel. Connor was immediately struck by how ordinary Page looked. He had thin features and slightly wavy hair, but for the most part, he was unremarkable. He was the guy you bought your morning coffee from every day, whose name you wouldn’t be able to recall even if your life depended on it. He was the neighbor on your street you waved to each morning on your way to work whose physical description you’d never remember in enough detail to recognize him elsewhere. He was a thousand men whose faces were blank spots in your memory.

“He looks like a regular guy,” Connor commented.

Jen spun the sketch around so that she could study it. “He looks like my old pharmacist,” she said.

“He looks like our waiter too,” Mitch pointed out. “That’s the problem with composite sketches. But this is the best we can do in lieu of a photo right now so what should we do with this?”

Connor frowned. “I have an idea but it involves some risk.”

He looked at Jen who held his gaze without flinching. “Tell me,” she said.

He held up the composite. “We take this to the press. Tell them there has been a break in the case and that this man is a person of interest.”

“What about Claire?” Mitch said. “What if he kills her? If he thinks he’s close to getting caught, what’s to stop him from killing her and getting rid of all the evidence, as it were?”

“If we didn’t know she was alive and we had this lead, what would we do with it?” Connor countered.

“We’d go directly to the press,” Jen said.

Connor nodded and looked at Mitch. “He’s not going to kill her. It’s been ten years. She’s still alive.”

“You don’t know that for sure though,” Mitch pointed out.

Connor sighed. “No. I don’t,” he conceded. “But I think this is a risk worth taking. Someone might recognize this guy right away. We don’t know what will happen, but this is a solid lead.”

They both looked at Jen. Mitch reached across the table and slid a meaty hand over hers. “It’s your call, Jenny. She’s your child.”

She nodded, her blue eyes steely. “We go to the press,” she said.

Mitch turned to Connor. “Well, I guess we need to have a conversation with your captain.”

After finding the clipping about my brother, my sole activity in his house was to avoid Tiffany. Any interaction could lead to me being blamed for something, and I was not so sure I could keep my mouth shut if he chastised me one more time, imploring me to be a “good girl.”

I was frightened for my family, but I was also angry. He had already killed two people because of me. If he was so displeased with me, why didn’t he just kill me? I knew he had it in him. I had seen it firsthand. It was as if he enjoyed this special sort of torture. Keeping me alive but ignoring me. Keeping me in his house with indirect threats but acting as if I was no longer there. It seemed I served him no purpose yet he held onto me. If his concern was that setting me free would cause him to go to prison, he could easily have silenced me with death yet he didn’t.

I felt on the brink of giving up entirely. Then one day, two weeks after I found the article about my brother taped to my door, he found me in the kitchen. I was standing at the sink, washing dishes and staring idly out the tiny window above the sink. I did not hear him and was only aware of him for a split second before his hand was on the back of my head.

He snapped my head forward, driving my forehead into the window sill. My vision was filled with dark, fuzzy circles. The pain split right down the middle of my skull. He pushed my face toward the sink but I braced myself, hands on the edge of it so that my head did not submerge in the sudsy water.

This was it, I thought. The rest of my body slackened with relief. It would be over. He was going to kill me.

But he didn’t. Instead, he yanked my pants down, fumbling with his fly. He tried to force himself into me, but he was limp. I could feel his hand working furiously between our bodies, his flaccid penis pushing against the back of my thighs. His breath was labored. He pressed harder on the back of my head as I tried to get my bearings.

Abruptly, he stopped. He let go of me with one more push to the back of my skull. Then he said, “Get out.”

He left. I stayed there, bent over the sink. Blood dripped into the dishwater from the gash in the middle of my forehead. I watched the drops fall and diffuse into the water. I listened to my breathing, tried to squeeze out the throbbing, echoing pain in my head. My arms ached from holding my upper body over the sink. After a few moments, I stood upright and straightened my clothes. Blood dripped warm and slow down my nose. I used a towel to stop it.

He had told me to get out. Just two weeks ago, he had tried to kill my brother. Now he was telling me to get out. Could I just walk through the front door and leave? Flag down the nearest car and tell them I was Claire Fletcher, the fifteen-year-old girl who’d been abducted four years ago? Or would that cost me a family member? Would he wait for me to leave and then sneak up on me, drag me back to this shack and torture me into compliance?

Anger swelled inside me enough to match the throbbing in the center of my head. I was weary of his games. I strode into the hallway and burst through his bedroom door without knocking. He was not standing by the window, watching for my escape. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed, pants undone, Tiffany’s head working furiously in his lap. His head snapped in my direction, but Tiffany did not even pause.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What did you just say to me?” I responded, holding the towel to my forehead.

“Get out,” he said, his tone low and menacing.

“Right now?”

“Yes.” He glanced down at the top of Tiffany’s head. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“You want me to leave? Just walk right out of here? Go home?”

He sighed and pushed Tiffany away with a single thrust. She fell on her back with a small cry.

He stood and zipped his pants. “You can’t stay here anymore,” he said, facing me. His face was red.

“What?”

“I said—”

“I heard what you said. What does that mean? I can just go home?”

“Home?” he said.

“Yes. To my family. You know goddamn well what I mean.”

He took a step toward me. His fingers played nervously with the buttons on his shirt. “Your home is with me. You know that.”

“You just told me to get out.”

“You can’t live here anymore. I’ve arranged for you to live in the trailer across the road. You’re free.”

I threw one hand up in the air, resisting the strong urge to slap him once more. “I’m not free, you shithead. What if I don’t want to live in your stupid trailer? What if I walk out of here right now and never come back? Then what?”

He donned his most serious look. “Then you know what happens to the Fletchers.”

Tiffany, still lying on the floor like a wounded doe, said, “Who’s the Fletchers?”

We ignored her. “Just what the fuck am I supposed to do over there?” I said.

“Lynn,” he said. “Sooner or later, you have to grow up. I’ve arranged it all. You’ll have papers, and I will supply you with a modest income for your needs.”

“Papers?”

“Yes. A driver’s license in your name, social security card, that sort of thing.”

“My name is Claire Fletcher.”

“Your name is Lynn,” he replied, as if talking to a recalcitrant child.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked. It was a question I had asked in the first days of my captivity, through tears and pleas which he had never answered. Now, as the question issued forth from me once more, I realized I wasn’t asking why he did the things he did. I was asking the impossible question. Why had this happened to me?

His motives were simple. I had fulfilled a need, a desire for him. His reasons for keeping me long after I’d ceased to satisfy his sick urges were practical—if he did not either keep me or kill me, he would surely go to prison.

The question of why my life had taken the bizarre twist it had that day on the sidewalk was the one that truly plagued me. It was as useless as asking what was the meaning of life. There was no answer that would satisfy me, that would make the years of torture, abuse, isolation, and separation from my loved ones justified.

He chose not to hear me. Instead he walked to his dresser, opened the top drawer and dangled a set of keys before me. “Here are the keys to the trailer,” he said. “Why don’t you go have a look?”

The moment he told me to get out, I should have taken those words for what they were. I should have just walked down the road until I could flag down a car and asked the driver to take me to the nearest police station. But part of me feared that he would harm my family, even if I did not return to them. What he really offered me was pseudo-freedom. A place of my own where my comings and goings would be carefully monitored. I was still a prisoner with an invisible tracking device strapped to my ankle.

I went to live in the trailer, which was small and not well suited for bad weather. But for the first time in my life, I was alone. There was a lock on my door. The silence into which I slipped so easily went uninterrupted. For a time, he delivered food and toiletries, carrying a brown bag across the road every few days.

When I had not attempted any escape, he decided to test my newfound independence. He arrived with a thick manila envelope, which he handed to me as we stood in the trailer’s small kitchen.

“You need to start doing things for yourself,” he said, as if he were a father figure instructing a child.

“What’s this?” I said, fingering the envelope but not opening it.

“In there you will find identification items. You will also find directions to the nearest town. Since you made it clear you are able to drive, I’ve included the keys to the truck, which you may use only to go to town and purchase necessities.” His eyes bore into me, adding emphasis to the word only. “I’ve also included some money to get you started. This is a big step for you, Lynn.”

“Don’t call me Lynn,” I said.

He ignored me. He moved closer. I felt his breath on my face, hot and rapid. He fingered the buttons on his shirt. “Don’t disappoint me,” he said.

I held the envelope in front of me like a shield. I held a breath, waiting for his hands to slip around my throat or grab my hair and jerk me across the room, or his fists to fly at my face. Some kind of warning. A beating for good measure. Something to assure me that if I breached his protocol, I would pay.

But he stepped away without touching me. Before he stepped outside, he turned to me. “I will be watching you,” he said. “If you betray my trust, there will be consequences. Do not forget that.”

When he was gone, I opened the envelope and spread the contents over the kitchen table, which extended from the wall, sandwiched between two vinyl-cushioned benches like a restaurant booth.