Finding Claire Fletcher (21 page)

“Man, this is a real shit storm.” Mitch tapped the roof of the car. “We should check out missing persons for girls between twelve and fifteen. You wanna try and find this guy while I do that?”

“Yeah,” Connor said. “I need to get an artist out to Geary’s place too.”

“You know any forensic artists?”

Connor grinned sheepishly. “No. Can’t say I do. There is someone the division uses now and then. I could find out who.”

Mitch waved a hand. “Nah. I know someone. It’s gonna cost close to a grand though. Could be more. I doubt your department is going to pick up the tab on this since you’re not even supposed to be working this case.”

Connor shrugged. “I’ll pay for it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m a divorced workaholic. What do I have to spend my money on? It’ll be a small price to pay if it helps crack the case.”

Mitch stared at him for a long moment, a smile playing at the edges of his mouth. Finally, he said, “We’ll split it then.”

“All right,” Connor said. “You check on missing girls and get me an artist. I’ll see what I can dig up on Rod Page. I’ll drop you off at your car, and I’ll come by your office later when I’ve got something.”

After our first conversation, I tried to pity Tiffany. I tried to imagine her as a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, unspoiled and rife with promise. What had happened to her that sent her down this ugly path to his bed?

As time wore on, I found I could no longer pity her. I hated her. I hated her not for reasons that she surmised, which had mostly to do with jealousy over him, but because she had chosen freely to live the life I had been forced into. I hated her because she had thrown away a girlhood I would have died to recapture.

I became a ghost in the house, only conjured back into form when the two of them needed me to cut a path through the mire of their bizarre liaison. When she felt his attention slipping away for even a moment, she would tune into my presence long enough to blame me for some transgression against her, for which he would punish me. My punishment placated her and jerked him back to her.

After a while, she discovered that refusing to fulfill his sexual fantasies was even more powerful than putting me in the crossfire between them. On those nights, he would suddenly remember me. He came to my room and tried to force himself on me. I had become stronger with growth and months without physical abuse so that finally, I was able to fend him off. I think he came less to fulfill his degenerate needs than to make her jealous.

They professed their love for each other relentlessly, but their connection thrived on the warped, writhing entrails of jealousy more than anything else. It was music they danced to, a theatre in which they acted out a tedious melodrama. I had only cameo roles. Mostly, I did not even speak.

I embraced my life as a sentient ghost. I endured their summons from a place far away, aware of them only as vague annoyances. I kept watch over the two graves outside my window and read what books Tiffany left me again and again until the pages were dog-eared and the bindings loosened.

Still, Tiffany was an irritant. Like getting an eyelash in your eye. She was a paper cut on your index finger that wouldn’t heal. She was the incessant twang of an alarm clock that you could never turn off. Sometimes she was a hot burner you accidentally placed a hand on. No amount of cold water could cool her.

She tested even his patience. I saw in his face sometimes that he questioned the decision he’d made to bring her home with him. In a way, I had been easier for him to deal with. I could be beaten into submission and chained to him. Tiffany, however, had to be placated. If he tried once to hit her, she would leave, and she fulfilled his ultimate fantasy—the child bride wholly in love with him.

Her campaign to exile me from her kingdom began almost the moment she arrived. One evening, the three of us sat at dinner. I ate silently and did not look at either of them.

“What’s the matter with her?” Tiffany asked him, looking pointedly past me as if I were merely air, an unpleasant odor or a stain on her tablecloth.

He set his fork down. “With whom?”

She stabbed her own fork in my direction. “Her. She don’t say nothing.”

He smiled. “Oh, Lynn has always been very quiet.”

He didn’t mention my litany of protests, my howled entreaties to be returned home, or the hours I’d spent screaming so long and loud that I could no longer tell when I had stopped.

“Is she dumb or something?”

“No.”

“Retarded?”

“Tiffany,” he said, gently admonishing.

She did not lower her eyes. “Well, she acts like it.”

She resumed eating, shoveling forkfuls of food into her mouth as if at any second the feast before her might be snatched away.

I pictured her eating from a garbage can. He reached over and touched her forearm. “Slow down,” he said. “From now on you will have all the food you could ever want.”

At this, she was humbled. Her face was like broken glass when she beamed at him. “I want chocolate,” she said.

“Anything you want, my darling.” His words dripped saccharine over her sour demeanor.

He lavished her with anything she asked. He would not allow her to leave the house, though she begged to go everywhere with him.

In the three and a half years he’d held me captive, he had never had a television. Now he installed one nearly the size of Tiffany. When he was gone, she languished in front of it, making lists of things she wanted, which she gleaned mostly from commercials.

One day I spied her latest list.

Sneekers

Wakman

Beretts

Makup

Joolree

She caught me standing with the list in my hand. She snatched it from me.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

I looked at her blankly. She settled onto the couch with her blanket and a box of half-eaten chocolates.

“I could teach you to spell,” I said.

“I don’t need you to teach me anything,” she replied haughtily. “Besides, what do I need to spell good for?”

I shrugged.

“You think you’re smarter than me cause you read all the time?”

Finding no response that might suit her mercurial nature, I shrugged again.

“Only retards stay in their room with their face in a book all day,” she said.

She stretched, catlike, and smiled wickedly. “You can’t even talk,” she said. “How could you teach anyone anything?”

Still, I said nothing.

She picked a small, square chocolate from the box. Holding it between two fingers, she licked the edges of it. Then, eyes narrowed at me, she threw it. It pinged off my chest and fell to the floor. She laughed. Then her face hardened abruptly.

“Pick it up, retard,” she commanded.

“What?” I said.

Her face creased. “I said pick it up, retard. I swear you’re totally deaf sometimes.”

“No,” I said.

She plucked another brown square from the box and popped it into her mouth. She worked it around in her mouth, cheeks wiggling furiously. She spit it at me with a swift
tooft
sound. This time it left a dark brown smudge on my shirt. She smiled, satisfied with her ingenuity, as though she had just created a new game. I suppose she had.

I turned silently and went back to my room. Later, she lamented to him that I had called her dumb. She also claimed that I had stolen her chocolates and ground them into the carpet one by one.

Sure enough, after I was chastised for being cruel and hurtful toward my sister, I looked at the carpet and there were big brown flaky splotches ground into its shabby orange fibers.

As he lectured me, I thought only of how Sarah’s legs had dangled uselessly over the carpet, kicking the side of the couch with muted thuds as she fought desperately for air, eyes locked on mine in our mutual death.

Prior to the chocolate incident, I had thought only of her eyes, death opening her face into a wide yawn. Then the dirt filling her putty-thick mouth and clinging in tacky misshapen globules to her pupils.

That day I began to think of her feet. They were much smaller than mine. Dainty in perfectly white, virginal sneakers and white anklet socks circled by a black stripe. He had killed someone in this spot, and now he was worried about chocolate.

At Tiffany’s insistence, he ordered me to clean the carpet, but I refused, even after he slapped and punched me and pressed my nose into one chocolate lump. I was confined to my room for several days, and when I was finally allowed back into the rest of the house, the stains were gone.

Connor went directly to the division after dropping Mitch off. He held the piece of paper Mitch had given him with the name and descriptors of Rod Page. Not that Connor needed it. He wasn’t likely to forget anything about the case.

Boggs and Stryker sat at their desks facing each other, both their heads bent over reports.

“Boy, you girls work a lot,” Connor said as he approached.

They looked up at him in unison. “The same could be said for you,” Stryker said. “For a desk jockey you sure are out a lot.”

“You worried about the review board?” Boggs asked.

Connor had almost forgotten about it. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

“Fuck ‘em,” Stryker said. “Let those suits go storming a house one time looking for some asshole who’d shoot his own mother. They have no idea.”

Boggs looked pointedly at Stryker, who was at least fifteen years Boggs’ junior. “Checks and balances, Stryke. Checks and balances. Someone’s gotta make sure we’re not out there shooting off our guns like vigilantes.”

Stryker looked appropriately admonished. Boggs turned to Connor. “What time does that start?”

Connor shrugged. “Nine, but I don’t have to be there till noon. They’re debriefing the other guys first.”

Boggs looked serious. “We’ll be there, man.”

“Yeah, we’ll be there,” Stryker chimed in.

“Thanks,” Connor said, encouraged by their support.

Connor sat at his desk, booted up his computer and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. He and Mitch were both working on the assumption that Rod Page was still living in the state. If he wasn’t, it would be far more difficult for Claire to come to the city in search of unwitting men and disappear before the night was through, particularly if Page was still monitoring her.

In addition, Mitch had pointed out that if Page had been kidnapping other girls since he’d snatched Claire, he might not want to risk taking them over state lines because then he’d be looking at Federal charges.

Not that Page seemed particularly concerned about getting caught, Connor thought. He’d already molested Noel, abducted Claire and in all likelihood murdered at least two of the men Claire had been with in the last ten years. Connor had an ugly, creeping suspicion that the fire that had killed Speer was not an accident either, which would make three murders. Besides that, if Noel had not been his first victim, who knew how many girls Page had victimized before he moved into the Geary household.

Connor worked for three hours before driving over to Mitch’s office. They locked the front door and went to Mitch’s back room, settling on the leather couch and spreading their respective printouts on the table.

“I have good news,” Mitch said, bobbing up and down with excitement, like a large dog. “My artist friend is between jobs. She’s over at Geary’s place now working on a composite.”

Connor smiled and patted Mitch’s shoulder. “That’s great. As soon as you have it let me know. We can talk about how best to use it once we’ve got a composite.”

“Sure thing,” Mitch said. “What about you? What have you got?”

Connor frowned. “You’re not gonna like it,” he said.

Mitch’s upper body sagged. “It’s an alias, isn’t it?”

Connor shrugged. “Hard to say but I’m thinking yeah.” He handed Mitch a sheet of paper. “There are two Rod Pages in the state. One is black so that rules him out. The other is only twenty-one. I pulled up both their driver’s license photos and neither one fits the description.”

He handed Mitch another sheet of paper. “There’s one Roderick Page and one Rodney Page. Roderick is eighty-six years old, and he lives right here in the city. No good. Rodney Page is fifty years old, which is probably within the age range—Noel said her Rod Page was in his mid-thirties at the time she knew him, but she couldn’t be entirely sure.”

“So what’s the catch?” Mitch asked. He was looking at the sheet Connor had just handed him with Rodney Page’s driver’s license photo on it. “He’s a little gray but he fits.”

Connor handed him another sheet. “No, he doesn’t fit. The guy is a big research doctor for a pharmaceutical company on the south side. He’s highly visible. He has a wife and two kids, and he’s lived in the same house for more than twenty years. I checked back in the company’s press release archives, and he was receiving some award in New York the week Claire was abducted. He’s too stable.”