Finding Claire Fletcher (27 page)

I placed each sheet of paper side by side, lining them up until the surface of the table disappeared. There was a birth certificate, social security card, and a temporary driver’s license all in the name of Lynn Wood. According to the documents, I was twenty-two. My birthday was August twenty-third, and my eyes were brown, not blue.

I was considering whether or not there had been a real Lynn Wood whose life I was taking over, and whether or not he had killed her, when I spied an item he had not specified. My heart jumped as I picked up the neatly clipped newspaper article.

It was not much larger than the one about Tom. This one involved my parents and the house I grew up in. The kitchen, which was at the rear of the house, had caught fire in the middle of the night while my mother and sister slept upstairs. The kitchen was a total loss, but the rest of the house and those in it were saved by a next-door neighbor who was awakened by a noise outside.

He thought he saw a prowler and phoned the police. By the time they arrived, the kitchen was ablaze. Despite police protests, the neighbor had turned his garden hose on the blaze until the fire department arrived.

Investigators could find no evidence of arson, nor could they rule it out, but the neighbor remained firm on the source of the noise that woke him—a prowler.

Here was my warning. Subtle, silent and far more effective than any physical pain he could have inflicted on me.

That night I slept with the clipping beneath my pillow, as if I could protect the members of my family by keeping them tucked safely in my bedding. I dreamt that the girl I used to be was entering her sophomore year of college, studying veterinary medicine. My father helped her move into a dorm room, he and my brother hefting boxes and a few small pieces of furniture up stairs and down hallways rife with young, beautiful people. The girl I used to be hugged and thanked Tom and my father. They made plans to meet at my parents’ house for a Labor Day barbecue the coming weekend. All three of them were happy, their faces intact, unbroken by tragedy, loss, or uncertainty.

Captain Riehl held the composite sketch in one hand and stared at it. He hadn’t spoken for a full minute. Connor knew because he had watched the second hand on the conference room clock above Riehl’s head. The only sound in the room was Stryker cracking his knuckles. Boggs nudged the younger detective and Stryker stopped. They all looked at Riehl, waiting for a response. Twenty minutes earlier, Connor had arrived at the division after his lunch with Farrell and Jenny and gathered the three men in the conference room.

Connor had started at the very beginning and told his colleagues everything. He told them about meeting Claire, spending the night with her and finding only her address the next day. He told them how he’d shown up unsuspecting at the Fletchers’ front door only to be stunned by the revelation that the woman he’d met had disappeared ten years ago. He recapped his meeting with Farrell, calling in a favor with Lena Stark to get fingerprint confirmation and every lead he and Farrell had followed up since.

“Cap?” Boggs prompted.

Riehl sighed and looked at Connor over the top of his reading glasses. “You were supposed to be on the desk.”

“I was! Cap, I met her in a bar—”

Riehl held up a hand, silencing Connor. “Now you want to take this to the press?”

Connor nodded.

Boggs cleared his throat. “Cap, this could actually be a good thing for us.”

Riehl raised a skeptical eyebrow but said, “Enlighten me, detective.”

“If Parks solves a ten-year-old case—a missing persons no less—it makes him and the department look pretty damn good. That rapist he shot? Old news. No one will care about that anymore.”

“Yeah,” Stryker chimed in. “This is Parks’ way of redeeming himself.”

Riehl’s expression did not change, but the fact that he had not immediately dismissed the idea of putting Connor’s name out in the press boded well for Connor.

“The other three guys you mentioned—the ones who saw this woman—they’re all dead?” Riehl asked.

“Speer is dead. The other two are missing.”

“Seems to me someone”—Riehl waved the composite sketch in the air—“is keeping an eye on this woman’s activity and getting rid of anyone she comes into contact with. Either that or he keeps an eye on the Fletcher home and who comes to visit. You think this guy will come after you?”

Connor shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m hoping someone will recognize him. But if he does come after me, I’ll be ready.”

Riehl shook his head. “I’m not sure we have the resources to keep you out of harm’s way. You got someone you can stay with for a few days?”

Connor swiped a hand through his hair. “That would defeat the purpose of flushing this guy out if he
is
spying on the Fletchers or keeping a tight leash on Claire.”

Riehl handed the composite back to Connor and folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t like it.”

“Cap, let’s say we had no idea these other three men either disappeared or got killed—what would we do with a lead like this?” Connor asked, using the same argument he had used earlier with Mitch and Jenny.

Riehl stared at Connor for a very long moment. Connor held Riehl’s gaze, unwavering. Boggs and Stryker watched them, Stryker shifting his weight from foot to foot.

Finally, Riehl gave another heavy sigh. “The best I can do is send patrols past your house a few times a night.”

Connor smiled, resisting the urge to high-five Stryker and Boggs. “All right,” he said.

Boggs looked at his watch. “Well, let’s get some reporters on the line. We should still have time to get on the eleven o’clock news and make tomorrow’s newspaper.”

I heard them arguing. They weren’t even on the porch yet, and Tiffany’s unintelligible squeals were audible across the road. I went to the trailer door this time and flung it open, standing in the open doorway. His voice answered hers loudly, sending a shiver through the center of my body. In ten years, I had only heard him raise his voice a handful of times.

An instant later, he came flying out the front door, stumbling over the decaying floorboards, Tiffany’s hands on the backs of his shoulders. Her face was streaked with tears, nostrils flared angrily. She stood with fists clenched at her sides, chin raised defiantly as she waited for him to turn around.

She didn’t move when he raised his hand and slapped her hard across the face. Without conscious thought, my feet skittered backward, my stomach clenching. I felt the slap all the way from where I stood, as surely as if it had been my face he’d reddened and stung with his palm.

He never hit Tiffany.

Never.

In the seven years they’d lived in their own sordid bliss, he had never been violent with her. Slowly, I closed the front door and stepped backward until my body met with the wall. In that moment, none of the beatings or rapes I’d endured flashed in my mind. Only images of Sarah suffocating, her legs kicking uselessly against the couch like a marionette, and Rudy’s bloated, unrecognizable body lying on the living room floor. The news clippings.

Then a new image, more horrible than the others. An image that brought tears instantly to my eyes and caused a snake of fear to coil around my lungs, forcing the breath from my body. Connor, dead and badly beaten, lying on the carpet right in front of me, my captor’s latest insurance policy, assuring my silence and the continued ruse that Claire Fletcher was dead.

Clearly, my captor’s interest in Tiffany had waned or they wouldn’t be arguing every day. She would have no second thoughts about revealing my recent nightly trips away from the trailer, but she had never seen first-hand what he was capable of. She had never seen him kill, never seen the dead body of someone she’d slept with hemorrhage and leak brain tissue onto the carpet. She had no idea.

I stood shivering in the trailer, though it was not cold. My mind raced. I could not get away to call Connor or to spy on him and make sure he was okay—at least until the next day. But I might have to risk it again. The constant arguing between Tiffany and my captor may have been about something unrelated to Connor, to my breaches of
trust
, my secret outings, but I could not quell the creeping, nauseous fear that whatever was happening in that house was wicked enough to warrant my efforts.

The next day I arrived back at the trailer from work smelling heavily of wet dog, which wasn’t wholly unpleasant to me. Every Wednesday, I was responsible for washing and combing whatever animals were in residence at the hospital. Today the hospital was populated almost entirely by dogs, some of whom raucously objected to being bathed.

I glanced across the road to see the rustle of a curtain in the front window. He was not home, but Tiffany was watching. She was the eyes in the back of his head. I would have to wait hours before sneaking out to determine whether or not Connor was safe.

I locked the door behind me, stripped off my clothes in the bedroom and turned the shower on. I waited for the water to turn lukewarm, standing outside the tiny cubicle, marching in place and hugging my nakedness.

Afterward, I threw on a pair of jeans, a tee shirt, and a sweatshirt. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the balmy air in the trailer. I couldn’t get warm. I checked the window from the bedroom. The house stood as always, appearing slightly off kilter and looking as if it might collapse in a heap of particle board at any moment. His car was still not in sight. But Tiffany’s beady eyes remained in place, zeroed in on the trailer. I put on two pairs of socks and went to the kitchen to make tea.

I didn’t hear him come in, but he broke the latch on the door and bent the frame like a partially crushed soda can. He was on me before I could react. I had never seen his face so red with fury. His entire body thrummed with anger, a high-pitched buzz that seemed to make the small room tremble around both of us. He hit me square in the stomach and I doubled, my body falling as if through a hatch in the floor.

He reached down and tangled one hand in my unruly curls. He jerked my head back so that he could look at my face. He punched and I felt the insides of my lips split and crack against my teeth, which felt loosened by the strike.

“How could you do this to me?” he said.

I was trying to breathe long enough for my mind and body to acclimate to the situation. He hit again, and my left eye exploded in a thousand pinpricks of pain and one long, stabbing throb that radiated the length of my jaw.

“You fucking bitch,” he added.

I tried to stand. He let go of my hair, flicking me away as if I were something slimy and germ-ridden that he’d accidentally put his hand in. He kicked and his sneaker-clad foot made contact with my hip bone as I squirmed to protect my center, my kidney. My legs went out from under me like they were made of air. I collapsed onto the tile floor, gasping for breath and clenching my teeth against the assorted pains in my body.

My body did not know which pain to attend to first—the one in my hip, my kidney, or my face. Using my hands, I gathered my stunned legs into me and curled into a ball. He kicked again, this time hitting forearm.

“Stop,” I said, but the word came out raspy and barely audible.

“You will never learn. Will you?” he said.

He paced back and forth in front of me like a cat with its hackles standing on end, waiting for the right moment to spring in for the kill, looking for just the right piece of flesh to sink its teeth into. He kicked thrice more, and my body made a clipped sound like that of an animal caught in a snare. It was involuntary.

“Stop,” I said again.

“How could you do this to me? To us?”

I tried to catch my breath. My eyes watered. I raised my head to look at him, and he took that opportunity to kick once more, again jarring my skull as his foot rocketed into the left side of my face. The skin around my left eye swelled almost instantly, tightening, and burning.

Again he paced. His hands clenched at his sides. His jaw hardened into an angry line. “I don’t understand,” he said. “After all this time. All I’ve given you. I tried to give you freedom, a place of your own, a life. It’s never enough for you, is it?”

“What are you talking about?” I said. I leaned forward and spit blood on the floor. I tried to swallow but it was too thick. Made me cough. The coughing alerted me to the stabbing pain in my rib cage. Neither was pleasant.

He stopped dead center in the room and stared down at me. “You know what I’m talking about, you fucking whore.”

“No,” I said.

“Why would you go to the police after all this time?”

In spite of what might happen to my face, it snapped upward toward him. “What?”

From inside of his jacket, he pulled a folded section of newspaper which he threw at me. It glanced off the side of my head and fell beside me. From my right eye, I struggled to find the item that had sent him into such a rage, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced for years.

Officer Cleared of Wrongdoing in Shooting of Suspected Rapist Opens Cold Case.

“No,” I said. The shock filled the back of my throat, causing me to choke. I coughed violently. The pain of it made my eyes water again and my nose run. I did not need to read the article to know. I need only see the photo of my former face smiling back at me to know that Connor had been found out.