Gone (33 page)

Jake’s eyes went so dark that Clare saw herself reflected in them. “There was a better way to flush him out.”

“How? When?” Clare leaned forward in the chair. “Just when were we going to enact this ‘better’ way? We have nothing to identify the unsub. In the meantime the clock is ticking. I don’t have to tell you that each day that passes and Beth is not found reduces her chances of being found alive. How long could we afford to go through proper channels and sit and wait?” Her voice throbbed with emotion.

Jake set his teeth. “We haven’t been sitting or waiting. Aside from the reactions of the McCowan family, and the Bureau, I hope your maverick action doesn’t backfire and if someone does have Beth, he doesn’t decide to go underground, cut his losses, and anything that links him to Beth’s disappearance.”

Get rid of Beth.
Clare knew that’s what Jake meant. She didn’t know how to respond to that. It was possible that she may end up being responsible for costing her sister her life.

Jake shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Clare didn’t comment. Goosebumps sprang on her arms and she crossed them against the sudden chill. She gazed through the glass door to the files and notes spread across the dining room table. Most were from Sara McCowan’s disappearance. What they had on Beth was painfully small. Nothing had come through from other law enforcement agencies. Beth got into her car the afternoon at Connie’s and not been seen or heard from again. Beth was simply . . . gone.

Clare fell silent with that thought and stared into the night. She drew out a silence, then said, “There’s no MO for NCIC to pick up.”

“What?” Jake asked.

“NCIC. There’s no MO to match between Sara’s disappearance and Beth’s.”

One of the functions of the National Crime Investigation Center was to cross-reference crimes with the
modus operandi
of criminals, searching for commonality. What did they have that was common to both Beth and Sara? Nothing.

Or at least on the surface there was nothing in common.

Assuming both women were abducted, a certain methodology was common to the crime of abduction. But what, other than the crime itself, was similar in these two cases? What about the abductions was alike?

“If Beth was taken from her car,” Clare said, “and Sara from the cabin, what about the execution of the crimes makes them unique to one person? What makes them personal to the guy we’re after?”

“Maybe nothing.” Jake rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s the coincidence of Farley that has us considering that there’s a link between both disappearances. Again, we could be all wrong here, Clare. Yes, they’ve both been in Farley. Remember, though, Sara’s cell phone was found in Columbia. The investigators weren’t able to find anyone to place her in Columbia after her visit to Farley, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t there. Your theory that the cell phone was a plant, is just a theory. You also need to remember that solving Sara’s disappearance may not solve Beth’s.”

Clare glared at Jake. “Don’t you think that I’m praying Beth is on a beach somewhere and whatever happened to Sara has not also happened to Beth? I don’t
believe
Beth is on a beach and I will do anything I have to, to find my sister.”

Jake regarded her again, his eyes burning like hot coals. “You can’t find her if something happens to you.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“What you’re doing is thinking like Beth’s sister, and not like a cop. Beth doesn’t need her sister Clare right now. She needs Clare the cop.” He rubbed his brow where deep lines were now etched in the skin. “I’m going to bed,” he said, the words bitten off in his anger.

Clare watched him stalk into the house, fuming herself.

She made her way slowly inside. She locked the kitchen door behind herself. She stopped at the fridge, and poured a glass of lemonade. The air conditioning was welcome, both the cold air it provided and the hum, which for some reason Clare found soothing. A perfect background noise for working.

At the dining room table, she fanned out the few pages of notes she’d written on Beth’s disappearance. Pitifully few.

She drew a family tree–type diagram with Beth’s name in the center and all of the people that could be linked to her in some way, either as family or friend or neighbor. Names included Dean Ryder, Patty Burby, Parker Burby, Connie Dannon, Rich Dannon, Gladys Linney, Lil Fisher, Gil Hoag, Cal Dawson. She added her own name to the list.

She went a step further and placed a star beside the names of those known to have seen or interacted with Beth in some way on the day she went missing.

As she looked it over, she considered the relationships good and bad. First and foremost was Dean Ryder. Clare tapped the pen she held against the diagram. Again she wondered why he’d agreed to allow a search of the sedan. And again she considered if the reason was that he’d already removed anything that would incriminate or implicate him in his wife’s disappearance.

Clare wondered if she’d tipped him off when she’d told him she wanted a look inside the vehicle. She didn’t think so. He already knew that the car was the last place Beth had been seen. If he’d had a hand in her disappearance, he would have taken steps to rid the sedan of anything that could tie him to Beth’s last time in it.

Connie Dannon had seen Beth on her last day. Lil Fisher had seen Beth drive away in her vehicle.

Clare felt like throwing her notes against the nearest wall in frustration. There was something here that she was missing. If Beth really had gone missing from Farley, and that was what Clare believed, then someone in town was responsible for her disappearance. Someone wanted her gone. Someone on Clare’s list?

She shook her head then selected one of the interview statements at random. She’d been over them all, and more than once. She’d been over every piece of paper associated with Sara’s disappearance that they had, and had come up empty. She and Jake and the two Columbia detectives and every other law enforcement officer who’d looked into Sara’s disappearance. But crimes didn’t happen in a vacuum. This criminal wasn’t invisible or omnipotent or infallible. Someone had to have seen something. Somewhere among all the paper this case had generated was a clue to finding who abducted Sara.

She opened the file on the McCowan disappearance. She reviewed the interviews conducted by the Columbia PD detectives of the three girlfriends who’d traveled with Sara on her last fateful trip. Brownley and Stokes had been thorough, conducting interviews more than once. Clare selected one Brownley had conducted with Sara’s friend Kelly Price and began to read:

BROWNLEY: Did Sara ever mention to you anyone following her, sending her presents, any obscene calls or hang-ups? Some guy who wanted to take her out that she didn’t want and wouldn’t take no for an answer?

KELLY PRICE: No. Sara loved dating. She didn’t turn down many offers. I never heard her say that anyone was hassling her.

BROWNLEY: No one back home?

KELLY PRICE: No.

BROWNLEY: Did you notice anyone hanging around her? Maybe someone she was unaware of? Someone who’d tried to get her attention and she’d blown him off?

KELLY PRICE: No. There wasn’t anyone like that.

BROWNLEY: Any of the other girls complain about someone giving them unwanted attention?

Clare glanced up from the statement. She knew where Brownley was going with that. It was possible that one of the other girls had been targeted, but the abductor hadn’t been able to get to her, so took Sara instead. She read Kelly’s response.

KELLY PRICE: No. Nothing like that was going on. If there was, we would have told each other. Not only for safety, but also ’cause, you know, we’d talk it out. We’re each other’s best friends. We talk stuff out. If we’d known someone was out there watching us or wanting to hurt one of us, do you think we would have let Sara meet up with that guy alone?

BROWNLEY: Which clubs did you girls go to?

KELLY PRICE: Aces. The Starlight. Flicker. Moutons. The Red Door. I can’t think of any others right now.

BROWNLEY: I need you to remember those names, Kelly. Think about it. We’ll go back to it.

KELLY PRICE: Sure. I’ll think on it.

Clare frowned. Something about those places seemed familiar to her. Though why that was, she couldn’t say. She’d only been to Columbia since her arrival in Farley and those visits hadn’t included the bar or club scene. Clare put it out of her mind and returned her attention to the interview.

BROWNLEY: Where did Sara say she met this guy?

KELLY PRICE: You asked me that before. I don’t know. Like I already told you, we hit a lot of clubs and bars in the three nights before Sara disappeared. We were all having a good time. Got pretty wasted. Sara wasn’t the only one who went home with a date on those nights.

The interview ended there. Brownley noted that the witness had broken down and was unable to continue.

Brownley had followed up with the men Kelly named that she and the other girls had gone home with. At least the ones the girls had gotten names from. They had all been cleared. Michelle Stephens, another girl in their group of four, had met someone and arranged a date for Sara with that man’s friend. There were multiple interviews with him, a twenty-three-year-old college student from NYU named Adam Marsh. Sara had spent one night with him then abruptly dropped him, saying she’d met someone else.

Brownley had gone over it many times with Marsh, asking how Marsh felt about being jilted. Did that make him angry?

Marsh had said pretty much the same thing each time Brownley raised the subject:

Hey, I wasn’t looking for forever. I only wanted to fuck her.

Marsh had gone on to say that Sara moving on had saved him the hassle of ending it. By the time she’d told him she wanted to call it quits, he’d already set his sights on another girl he’d met.

Marsh had no idea who the new guy in Sara’s life was, he’d said. She didn’t say; he didn’t ask. He was just glad that he was out.

Marsh’s story about the new girl had also checked out. That went with the rest of Brownley’s investigation of him. Marsh had been cleared.

Clare rubbed her eyes. She took a swallow of the lemonade and picked up the transcripts of Brownley’s interviews with Marsh. She read through each one. Marsh had no prior arrests. Nothing more significant than a few speeding tickets. She scanned the background information that had been assembled on him. In the end, she concluded as Brownley had. Marsh wasn’t the guy they were looking for.