The Abducted Book 0 (11 page)

From the beginning, Gowdy showed early
warning signs: fights, suspensions, and eventual expulsion for
bringing a knife to school. The years after high school weren’t
much better. He and Phillip looted homes and businesses. They sold
weed. They got into bar fights. Miriam didn’t want to believe that
some people were just “bad,” as she had encountered all kinds
during her time on the force. Gowdy, however, fit the description
of a bad seed. The question was, what was he still doing on the
street?

A year after his latest stint in
prison following grand theft conviction, Ray seemed to be getting
his life together. He worked at the Anderson yard and had stayed
out of trouble for years. He even bought a house, got married, and
had two children. While the report stated the bafflement of
authorities, Miriam got chills down her spine.
A family man.
He fit the bill
perfectly.

The Andersons, it appeared, had welcomed Ray
into their family after his own mother had passed away from a brain
tumor, and they’d been close ever since. All seemed at peace. Then,
however, suspicious things began happening around Palm Dale. People
went missing—drug dealers and prostitutes mainly.

The Anderson
s consisted
of Boone and Judith Anderson—a couple in their sixties—and their
five adult sons. The entire family was suspected of criminal
activities that stretched from drugs to gambling to
racketeering—but the investigation had dragged on for years, and no
evidence came to light.

Their eldest son, Dustin, was killed in a
head-on collision under mysterious circumstances. The 1964 Dodge
Charger that had T-boned him and sent him flying through the
windshield of his Cavalier had been abandoned in the middle of the
road. No sign of any driver. No blood. Nothing.

Two years after Dustin’s death,
investigators got an anonymous tip about Ray Gowdy: that he had
bragged about killing Dustin so that Phil—Dustin’s younger
brother—could take over the family business. Gowdy was brought in
for questioning. He lawyered up with enough money to get him out.
The investigation went cold. No one knew where he was getting the
money from. He traveled frequently. The authorities knew he was
bad, but no one could prove anything.

Enter Rachel, a sixteen-year-old local
runaway who Gowdy offered a ride to. She accused him of attempted
assault. Gowdy was arrested and his house searched. Investigators
found video stakeout footage of schools throughout the area.
Gowdy’s lawyers argued that their client is trying to expose
would-be predators. As the case went to court, Rachel changed her
story and gave a completely different description of the man who
assaulted her. The case was dropped.

Around the same time, Phillip Anderson took
over the salvage yard, and another teenage girl was assaulted at a
keg party deep in the woods. She was too intoxicated to provide a
description of her assailant. Worse yet, she couldn’t remember the
incident too well. The kind of “off the grid” parties the Anderson
clan was known to partake in.

The police, however, were certain
Gowdy was their man. He was arrested after his DNA was found on the
girl’s torn shirt. Open-and-shut case. But when it went to court,
Gowdy’s lawyers were able to prove that the
DNA
evidence had been tampered with. So determined were they to make
their case against him that unnamed officers used Gowdy’s DNA from
a vial of blood that had been in evidence and planted
it.

This came to light after an anonymous
whistleblower contacted Gowdy’s lawyers and revealed the
possibility of evidence tampering. The case was dropped, but Gowdy
wasn’t done. He sued the county in a civil suit, and a judge soon
ruled in his favor, awarding him five hundred thousand dollars.
Gowdy had everything. He was vindicated. He was wealthy. To some,
Gowdy was a hero. To others he was a criminal. To Miriam, however,
he was a mystery.

After he won his settlement, things were
quiet for a while. But in May 2009, Alaina Hutchinson disappeared
outside her elementary school in Cape Coral, fifty miles from Palm
Dale. Dayana Corbin disappeared one year later, walking home in the
Harlem Heights district, close to town. Julie Ross and Taylor
Ackerman soon followed. In each case, they vanished. Their bodies
were never found.

Miriam closed Gowdy
’s
file, feeling overwhelmed but more informed than she had been. “I
don’t know, Detective,” she said, pushing the file away. “Like you,
all my instincts point to him. Either he’s a serial predator, or
he’s the closest thing this town has to one.”

“
In a case this important, the worst
thing an investigator can get is tunnel vision on one suspect,”
O’Leary said, sipping a cup of coffee he had gotten earlier. “But I
find myself being drawn closer to him just as the department is
pulling away. Trust me, they don’t want to touch him.”

“
That’s nonsense,” Miriam said. “If
he’s the one, he’s the one. I say we go after him.”

O’Leary raised his hand to caution her.
“It’s not that easy. They’re drawing up the warrants right now to
search his home and the salvage lot but taking their time. There’s
many on the force who think he did it and just as many who think
that he didn’t. He’s been nothing but a pain in our ass since day
one.”

Miriam pounded the table and held up a
picture of his last mug shot. “Six feet, two hundred thirty pounds.
Bring him in, damn it, and put him in a lineup. Have Mrs. Beckett
pick him out.”

“
Miriam, it’s not that easy,” he
began.

“
Why not?” she asked in a stark,
demanding tone.

O’Leary pushed the many files on the table
aside and leaned in closer. “Because he has money. Because he’s
connected. Because he could bring down this whole department if he
wanted to. Same way it is everywhere.”

Miriam winced. “Spare me your cynicism. If
we do this right, his money and connections won’t matter.”

“
And that’s why I need your help,”
O’Leary blurted out impatiently. The room went quiet as she tried
to consider what he had just said.

“
To do what, exactly?” she asked,
brows raised.

O’Leary sighed. “To take the fall if this
goes south.” He sheepishly looked at the table then back to her. “I
figured you did it before, you could do it again.”

Miriam felt confused. Angry. Violated in a
way. Her hands dropped as she stared at him with blank, exhausted
eyes. “You’re setting me up, just in case.”

He looked down at the floor then lifted his
head and stared right at her. “Yeah.”

“
What an S.O.B. you are.”

“
Yeah.”

And then she laughed. “Okay,” she said,
shaking her head at him. “Whatever your screwed-up motivations are,
I don’t care. I’m in. I just want to find this girl.”

Her response surprised O’Leary. He was
expecting her to leap across the floor and attack him. “That’s all
I want too. That’s why we’re going to have a little fun with Gowdy.
I want him to meet you.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “What are
you talking about?”

O’Leary started to spin out his plan,
something he’d been thinking about for a while, it seemed, but also
something he seemed to be conjuring on the spot. “If this man did
shoot Deputy Lang in cold blood, if he took all those girls, one
look at you and his eyes will tell me everything we need to know.
He knows you from the news. He remembers you. That I’m sure
of.”

Miriam flashed a look of skepticism. She
wasn’t buying it.

“
The truth is in the eyes, Miriam. Not
even the most hardened psychopath can get around that. That’s what
I’m waiting for. Then I’ll know.”

Miriam waited for more details, but
O
’Leary said nothing else. She held her arms out.
“That’s your master plan? Look into his eyes?”

“
It’s a start.”

Miriam dropped her head, burnt out beyond
words. Her hair hung down in her face. O’Leary waited patiently
with his hands interlaced, hoping she would see it his way.

She looked up and shrugged. “Okay. You’re
the boss. We do it your way.”

O
’Leary leaned back,
satisfied, as his chair creaked. “Thank you. If I know this man,
it’s that he feels invincible.”

“
Which is why we need to either take
him down or move on to someone else,” Miriam added.

She looked down and thumbed through
some more photos of Gowdy with the Andersons, laughing it up like
one of the family. Her attention focused on Phil, in the middle of
one particular group photo—tall with a beard, wide smile, and
dirty-blond hair. He seemed to tower over the entire family. He was
also a very large man.
Gowdy looked smaller in
comparison. Who was really in charge of that family? She couldn’t
tell.

“
You wanna grab a bite to eat to clear
your head a little?” O’Leary asked. “My treat.”

It was the best idea she had heard all
day. She pulled her phone out and saw that it was five after
eleven.
O’Leary packed the files back up in the box,
and they left the room, only to find the precinct still noisy and
chaotic.

They carried the heavy boxes to the far
corner of the parking lot where his car was parked.

“
Feels good to get some air,” Miriam
said.

“
You said it.”

They loaded up and drove off to a diner
around the block where most of the officers went after a long day.
The Snatcher had his next victim, but if they played their cards
right, they might be able to save Emily before she turned into a
cold case like the others.

Day Two

O
’Leary picked her up the
next morning at her hotel, which was a few blocks from the police
station. The plan was simple enough: revisit the crime scene where
Deputy Lang had been shot and then swing by the salvage yard for a
friendly chat. Nothing serious. The last thing O’Leary wanted to do
was give Gowdy the impression that they were closing in on him.
They wanted him calm, careless even. Then they’d drop the
hammer.

Miriam, however, had another theory,
developed overnight.

“
What if it was one of the other
brothers? Heck, what if the whole family is in on it?”

“Careful now,” he said. “We don’t want to go
chasing unicorns. I admit, the entire family is suspect, but I
wouldn’t put any involvement on anyone except maybe Phillip and
Gowdy himself. Not yet, anyway.”

Miriam tapped the side of the passenger door
with her cell phone, thinking. It was early, and the sun was just
rising beyond a pine forest on her side. She had already sent a
text back home, checking in, though she figured it was still too
early for Freddy to respond.

“What about the DNA and fingerprints?” she
asked. An obvious question, but one she hadn’t asked before. “That
should seal the deal right there.”

O’Leary shook his head. “I checked earlier.
No DNA recovered on Mrs. Beckett. The fingerprints taken from the
carts don’t match Gowdy, or any of the Anderson boys for that
matter.”

Miriam sighed. “How could that be? How could
someone be so careful as to not make a single mistake? There has to
be something we’re not seeing. Something that will tie all of this
together.”

O’Leary laughed ironically. “I’ve been
saying that to myself for the entire year.”

The outskirts of Palm Dale brought them to a
narrow two-lane road, cracked, with tall weeds on both sides. They
had the windows down, but even with the sun not fully risen, the
wind felt hot. There were no discernible signs or marks in the
road, but Miriam knew they were close. She could feel it. They were
almost to the place where her partner had been killed. A few miles
beyond was a long dirt road that led to Anderson’s Auto Salvage.
O’Leary was paying close attention to the GPS screen attached to
his dashboard.

“
We’re about half a mile
away.”

Miriam stared ahead, saying nothing.

“
What exactly do we expect to find out
here?” she asked as though the question had just entered her
mind.

“
Simple,” O’Leary answered with his
eyes on his dashboard GPS screen. “We’re starting at the
beginning.”

He slowed the car as they approached the
spot—the very same barren shoulder where Miriam and her partner had
stopped the infamous blue station wagon. The vehicle was later
impounded for weeks, and an exhaustive search was conducted for
fingerprints, hair samples, and other evidence.

The only fingerprints they found
belonged to Betsy Cole and her husband. Two hairs had been
recovered. One of them belonged to Jennifer Dawson—definitively
proving that she had been abducted by the same individual who shot
Deputy Lang. Another hair had been found. But it
wasn
’t real hair at all. It was synthetic fiber,
probably from a wig.

O
’Leary went over these
details as he pulled the car to the side and parked.

“
So we have reason to believe that our
suspect was in fact wearing a wig. Obviously to conceal his
identity.”

His door squeaked as he swung it open.
It was eerily quiet outside, aside from the crickets, and there
wasn
’t a single car on the road. Miriam followed and
stepped outside, onto the patchy grass of a small hill that
traveled downward into a long, shallow trench that ran far into the
distance along the road. A chain-link fence separated the roadside
from the area beyond it. It never surprised Miriam how much of the
seemingly vacant land surrounding them was actually private
property.