Finding Claire Fletcher (9 page)

As quickly as he entered, he was gone.

It was difficult to catch my breath. I panted, my head still turning wildly from side to side, the muscles in my neck not yet conscious of the fact that the beating had ceased. My skin stung and later, my body ached and swelled. Blood dried at the corners of my mouth and in my teeth. I longed to touch my own face.

It was a long time before he came back. He did not look at me. I felt his hands releasing first my left hand and then my feet. In spite of my pain, I felt wild with anticipation, like a person wandering the desert without drink for days on end, spying an oasis on the horizon. He untied the bindings on my right hand and used handcuffs, which he pulled from his pocket, to secure my right hand to the head of the bed. But still three of my limbs were free.

Curling into myself was not as easy as my body wanted it to be. I was stiff and terribly bruised. He did not release my right hand and take me to the bucket, however. Instead, he set a bucket of soapy water next to the bed. One wash cloth and one towel beside me. A bowl of soup on the table beneath the lamp.

“Clean yourself,” was all he said. Then he was gone.

The pain of my body wilted under the glare of my new freedom. To be able to move three of my limbs, curl up my body, touch my swollen face! To be able to wash myself and feed myself privately! I had to move gingerly, but I reached the washcloth into the bucket and came up with a handful of warmth. I started with my face, then my shoulders, breasts and stomach. I washed and washed, gently rubbing the washcloth over my skin again and again until the water in the bucket cooled.

I stuck my feet in it and let them soak for a while. Then I ate. The soup was bland, but in that moment, it was the best soup I ever had because it did not come directly from his hands. I lay down curled on my side, my right arm stretched awkwardly above my head, still cuffed. I pulled the towel over me and slept.

He did not come back for a very long time. I knew it was several hours because I had to urinate, and the waste bucket was far from my reach. I debated on using the wash bucket since it was already dirty but I didn’t. I held it until it seemed as if the slightest movement would cause my bladder to burst. Finally, I went on the floor. I realized it would likely garner another beating, but I did not care.

Time stretched on. The rosy glow of my newfound freedom fell away with the hours. Hunger pangs came and went, replaced by weakness and what felt very much like delirium. I began to worry that he had abandoned me or that something had happened to him and that no one would ever know where I was. I would die in the barren room.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to live or die. I thought that if he returned, I would wish I had died. But if I wanted to live, I had to do something because I knew it had been days since I’d had anything to eat or drink. I remembered reading about people who drank their own urine to survive while trapped in the wilderness or under collapsed buildings in the rubble left by earthquakes. I wondered if I really wanted to live badly enough to do something that my fifteen-year-old mind could only describe as
so gross
. But my fantasy of SWAT rescuers and being reunited with my family had been my sustenance for so long that I could not let go of that one last, ragged thread on which dangled my will to live.

I drank the wash water.

The water was gone by the time he returned. I was too weak to move or speak. I saw him from beneath heavy eyelids. I wondered if he was really there or if I was hallucinating. He said nothing. He simply went about his business and left.

The next time he came bearing food. He fed me and stroked me as if I were a pet. He talked in that soothing voice, telling me it would be okay. He was here now. He would take care of me.

“There now, love,” he cooed. “My sweet Lynn. From now on we have to be careful. We can’t get you pregnant, you know. You’re much too young for that kind of responsibility. From now on we’ll have to use contraceptives.” He spoke as if I were a co-conspirator, a willing party, a partner.

I wish I could say that those weeks were my lowest point.

Mitch held the fingerprint report in his hands for several moments before he let out a low whistle. “My God,” he said, his voice betraying the amazement and excitement he felt. He continued to stare at it until Connor could no longer tell if his eyes were even in focus.

“Farrell?”

“I don’t believe it.”

Connor grinned. “I know.”

Mitch looked at the younger detective, and Connor thought he saw tears welling in the corners of the older man’s eyes. “This is...I don’t know what to say.”

Connor plopped down in the chair in front of Mitch’s desk and folded his hands across his middle. “Say you’ll help me.”

Slowly, Mitch sank into his own chair. He looked again at the fingerprint match. “I will,” he mumbled. Then he caught Connor’s eyes and his composure began to return. “Are you sure this is right?”

Connor rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s right. I had Lena take three prints and they all match. This is it, Farrell. She’s alive. I wasn’t hallucinating.” Connor leaned forward, unable to contain his eagerness. “I want to find her.”

Farrell placed the report on his desk and leaned back into his chair, swiping his hair back with one hand. “I just never expected this,” he said.

“Something like this is very rare,” Connor concurred. “But we have a chance here. We could find her.”

Farrell frowned. “But maybe she doesn’t want to be found. I mean why, after all this time…” he drifted off.

“She makes contact every two to three years,” Connor said. “She wants to be found.”

“But if she can just walk into a bar and pick up a man and send him to her house, then why doesn’t she just come home?”

Connor had not thought that far ahead. He was silent as he mulled the question over. Claire had made contact two and a half years after she was abducted. She was obviously free to come and go as she pleased, and she had chosen to stay lost. It didn’t make sense. She came back again and again, but she never returned to her family.

“She wants them to know she’s alive,” Connor said suddenly, thinking aloud.

“What?”

“She comes back every two or three years, right?”

Mitch nodded.

“She makes
contact,
but she never comes home. She disappears again. If she didn’t want to be found, why go to all the trouble of picking up a stranger in a bar, sleeping—um, spending the night with him—and sending him to her family’s home? Why not just come home? Reappear on the doorstep and say, ‘Hey, I’m back.’ Yeah, she goes back to wherever it is she’s been, but she wants her family to know she’s alive.”

Farrell considered this. “Do you think she’s under duress?”

Connor thought of Claire Fletcher’s haunted eyes. In the last 24 hours, he’d been looking at the case from the objective eyes of a detective, trying to fit the pieces together. The word abduction, the reality of it, had not hit him.

Maybe he didn’t want to think about it. This was a woman he’d held in his arms. A woman whose scent lingered on his bedcovers. A woman he wanted desperately to find and not just to return her to her family or to solve a cold case. He just wanted to see her again.

Someone had snatched fifteen-year-old Claire Fletcher right off the sidewalk. God only knew what had been done to her in the intervening years. Maybe she was too ashamed to come home.

“You have thirty years on the force, right?” Connor asked.

Mitch nodded. “Yeah.”

“You worked Special Victims, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What happens when you get an abduction? A teenage girl, abducted from the street or her home or wherever it happens?”

“Parks, you know what happens,” Mitch said.

“Yeah, I do. So where do we find them if we find them at all?”

“Dead,” Mitch replied flatly.

“What else?”

“Sexually assaulted.”

Connor sat back in his chair, pain creeping across his face.

“So what are you saying? Claire was abducted and sexually assaulted, but clearly she wasn’t killed.”

“Maybe she’s too embarrassed to come home,” Connor suggested.

Mitch shook his head. “No. No way. That’s not the Claire I knew.”

Connor stared hard into Mitch’s eyes. “Yeah, but we don’t know what she went through. Things—things like that change a person.”

Connor thought of the rape victims from his last case, the case that might end his career. He remembered their eyes. Sometimes the only thing that made it possible for him to do his job without going crazy was thinking that he might prevent someone else’s eyes from looking like that. Broken, helpless, shamed.

Claire’s had been worse. Beautiful, bottomless pits of despair. What had she seen? What had her abductor done to her?

Mitch changed tacks. “What about the abductor? What happened to him? Ten years. Did he just let her go one day?”

“I don’t know. Look, we have a chance here. Claire Fletcher is alive and I want to bring her in. Are you going to help me?”

Mitch nodded solemnly. “I just hope we can find her,” he said.

They started with Mitch’s files. Connor had Farrell take him through them line by line. It took a whole day. Farrell had been pretty thorough; there wasn’t much he had left out of his files. Connor decided to go through the police files next, and then he would interview both Dinah Strakowski and the other three men that Claire had sent to her family’s house.

He didn’t know why Claire had chosen to stay lost for ten years, reappearing every few years to make contact but never returning home, but he would deal with that when he came face to face with her again.

Connor spent the next two days at his department desk, poring over the police reports from the Fletcher case. His eyes were tired at the end of each day. He went to sleep with visions of suspect and car descriptions dancing in his mind. He didn’t have time to think about the precarious position of his job. He left a message for Strakowski.

The third day, he looked over the vehicle search, which had yielded nothing. Strakowski had said it was a blue station wagon. She couldn’t tell the make or the year. She had looked at hundreds of photos of station wagons and the closest she could come up with was a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon manufactured sometime in the late eighties. They had done a county-wide search of owners registering that make of vehicle but had come up with no suspects. Strakowski had even driven around with the responding officers, looking for the car, but they never found any trace of it.

It didn’t make sense. No one reported seeing any blue Chevrolet Caprices within a ten-block radius in the hours after the abduction. There were reports of station wagons, but they all checked out. If the department had missed something, if they had in fact interviewed the abductor in those first hours and not realized it, it would take Connor months to track down all those witnesses and vehicles again and check them out.

Connor put the report down and rubbed his eyes. Mitch’s words rang in his ears. Before Connor had left Mitch’s office the other day, Farrell said to him, “How do you plan on doing this? Yeah, we know she’s really alive, but we’ve still got the same cold leads we always had.”

Again, Connor had not thought that far ahead. It was true. Connor had nothing more to go on than the investigating team had had ten years prior. He just hoped that he would find some detail that the rest of his colleagues and Farrell had overlooked. It was his only chance.

“Parks! Hey, Parks!”

One of the other detectives in the division interrupted his thoughts.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“There’s a Dinah Strakowski on line four for you. Says she’s returning your call.”

“Thanks,” Connor said, snatching up the phone.

He spoke with Dinah Strakowski for five minutes and arranged to meet her at her home the next morning. As he hung up, he glanced out the window. He watched the last dim shades of daylight sink into the horizon. It was evening. He could go home. He’d been poring over paperwork all day, and his eyes were tired. He lingered at his desk, thinking about home, his bed and a blanket smelling of lavender, and soft skin lying where Claire Fletcher should be.

My captivity didn’t take place entirely in that dark, windowless room. I don’t know how long I was there, but at some point he saw fit to move me.

I was so excited the day he arrived carrying a tee shirt and pair of shorts. I had been naked, uncovered, without so much as a blanket or sheet for so long that the prospect of clothes made me weep. After nearly starving me to death, he had left me handcuffed by only my right wrist. That day he unbound me completely and ordered me to put on the clothes. Before I could think of anything besides the luscious feel of fabric against my skin, he cuffed my right hand again and left, returning moments later with a bowl of soup and a plain piece of white bread.

“Eat,” was all he said before leaving once more.

I ate hungrily, slopping the soup onto the floor and mattress. I subsisted on soup since it was all he ever brought me. The bread was new and tasted like rich chocolate cake to my starved tongue. I curled into a ball when I was finished, my body nearly purring over the treats.