The Couple Next Door (3 page)

The back holds more potential. Most of the houses, including the Contis’, have a single detached garage opening onto the lane – behind the house. The backyards are long and narrow, fenced in between, and most, including the Contis’, have trees and shrubs and gardens. It is relatively dark back there; there are no streetlights as there are in the front. It’s a dark night, with no moon. Whoever has taken the child, if he had come out the Contis’ back door, would only have had to walk across the backyard to the garage, with access from there to
the lane. The chances of being seen carrying an abducted child out the back door to a waiting vehicle are much less than the chances of being seen carrying an abducted child out the front door.

The house, yard, and garage are being thoroughly searched by Rasbach’s team. So far they have found no sign of the missing baby. The Contis’ garage is empty, and the garage door has been left wide open to the lane. It’s possible that even if someone had been sitting out back on the patio next door, he or she might not have noticed anything. But not likely. Which narrows the window of the abduction to between approximately 12:45 and 1:27a.m.

‘Are you aware that your motion detector isn’t working?’ Rasbach asks.

‘What?’ the husband says, startled.

‘You have a motion detector on your back door, a light that should go on when someone approaches it. Are you aware that it isn’t working?’

‘No,’ the wife whispers.

The husband shakes his head vigorously. ‘No, I . . . it was working when I checked on her. What’s wrong with it?’

‘The bulb has been loosened.’ Detective Rasbach watches the parents carefully. He pauses. ‘It leads me to believe that the child was taken out the back, to the garage, and away, probably in a vehicle, via the lane.’ He waits, but neither the husband nor the wife says anything. The wife is shaking, he notices.

‘Where is your car?’ Rasbach asks, leaning forward.

‘Our car?’ Anne echoes.

RASBACH WAITS FOR
their answer.

She answers first. ‘It’s on the street.’

‘You park on the street when you’ve got a garage in back?’ Rasbach asks.

‘Everybody does that,’ Anne answers. ‘It’s easier than going through the lane, especially in the winter. Most people get a parking permit and just park on the street.’

‘I see,’ Rasbach says.

‘Why?’ the wife asks. ‘What does it matter?’

Rasbach explains. ‘It probably made it easier for the kidnapper. If the garage was empty and the garage door was left open, it would be relatively easy for someone to back a car in and put the baby in the car while the car was in the garage, out of sight. It would obviously be more difficult – certainly riskier – if the garage already had a car in it. The kidnapper would run the risk of being seen in the lane with the baby.’

Rasbach notices that the husband has turned another shade paler, if that is even possible. His pallor is quite striking.

‘We’re hoping we will get some shoe prints or tire tracks from the garage,’ Rasbach adds.

‘You make it sound like this was planned,’ the mother says.

‘Do you think it wasn’t?’ Rasbach asks her.

‘I . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought Cora was taken because we left her alone in the house, that it was a crime of opportunity. Like if someone had snatched her from the park when I wasn’t looking.’

Rasbach nods, as if trying to understand it from her point of view. ‘I see what you mean,’ he says. ‘For example, a mother leaves her child playing in the park while she fetches an ice cream from the ice-cream truck. The child is snatched while her back is turned. It happens.’ He pauses. ‘But surely you realize the difference here?’

She looks back at him blankly. He has to remember that she is probably in shock. But he sees this sort of thing all the time; it is his job. He is analytical, not at all sentimental. He must be, if he is to be effective. He will find this child, dead or alive, and he will find whoever took her.

He tells the mother, his voice matter-of-fact, ‘The difference is, whoever took your baby probably knew she was alone in the house.’

The parents look at each other.

‘But nobody knew,’ the mother whispers.

‘Of course,’ Rasbach adds, ‘it is possible that she might have been taken even if you were sound asleep in your own bedroom. We don’t know for sure.’

The parents’ desperate expressions indicate that they would like to believe that it isn’t their fault after all, for leaving their baby alone. That this might have happened anyway.

Rasbach asks, ‘Do you always leave the garage door open like that?’

The husband answers. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Wouldn’t you close the garage door at night? To prevent theft?’

‘We don’t keep anything valuable in the garage,’ the husband says. ‘If the car’s in there, we generally lock the door, but we don’t keep much in there otherwise. All my tools are in the basement. This is a nice neighborhood, but people break into garages here all the time, so what’s the point of locking it?’

Rasbach nods. Then he asks, ‘What kind of car do you have?’

‘It’s an Audi,’ Marco says. ‘Why?’

‘I’d like to have a look. May I have the keys?’ Rasbach asks.

Marco and Anne regard each other in confusion. Then Marco gets up and goes to a side table near the front door and grabs a set of keys from a bowl. He hands them over to the detective silently and sits back down.

‘Thank you,’ Rasbach says. Then he leans forward and says deliberately, ‘We will find out who did this.’

They stare back at him, meeting his eyes, the mother’s entire face swollen from crying, the father’s eyes puffy and bloodshot with distress and drink, his face pasty.

Rasbach nods to Jennings, and together they leave the house to check the car. The couple sit on the sofa silently and watch them go.

Anne doesn’t know what to make of the detective. All this about their car – he seems to be insinuating something. She knows that when a wife goes missing, the husband is usually the prime suspect, and probably vice versa. But when a child goes missing, are the parents usually the prime suspects? Surely not. Who could harm their own child? Besides, they both have solid alibis. They can be accounted for, by Cynthia
and Graham. There is obviously no way they could have taken and hidden their own daughter. And why would they?

She is aware that the neighborhood is being searched, that there are police officers going up and down the streets knocking on doors, interviewing people roused from their beds. Marco has provided the police with a recent photo of Cora, taken just a few days ago. The photo shows a happy blond baby girl with big blue eyes smiling up at the camera.

Anne is angry at Marco – she wants to scream at him, pummel him with her fists – but their house is full of police officers, so she doesn’t dare. And when she looks at his pale, bleak face, she sees that he is already blaming himself. She knows she can’t survive this on her own. She turns to him and collapses into his chest, sobbing. His arms come up around her, and he hugs her tightly. She can feel him shaking, can feel the painful thumping of his heart. She tells herself that together they will get through this. The police will find Cora. They will get their daughter back.

And if they don’t, she will never forgive him.

Detective Rasbach, in his lightweight summer suit, steps out the front door of the Contis’ house and down the steps into the hot summer night, closely followed by Detective Jennings. They have worked together before. They have each seen some things that they would like to be able to forget.

Together they walk toward the opposite side of the street, lined with cars parked bumper-to-bumper. Rasbach presses a button, and the headlights of the Audi flash briefly. Already the neighbors are out on their front steps, in their pajamas and summer bathrobes. Now they watch as Rasbach and Jennings walk toward the Contis’ car.

Rasbach hopes that someone on this street might know something, might have seen something, and will come forward.

Jennings says, his voice low, ‘What’s your take?’

Rasbach answers quietly, ‘I’m not optimistic.’

Rasbach pulls on a pair of latex gloves that Jennings hands him and opens the door on the driver’s side. He looks briefly inside and then silently walks to the back of the car. Jennings follows.

Rasbach pops open the trunk. The two detectives look inside. It’s empty. And very clean. The car is just over a year old. It still looks new.

‘Love that new-car smell,’ Jennings says.

Clearly the child isn’t there. That doesn’t mean she hadn’t been there, however briefly. Perhaps forensic investigation will reveal fibers from a pink onesie, DNA from the baby – a hair, a trace of drool, or maybe blood. Without a body they will have a tough case to make. But no parents ever put their baby in the trunk with good intentions. If they find any trace of the missing child in the trunk, he would see that the parents rotted in hell. Because if there’s anything Rasbach has learned in his years on the job, it is that people are capable of almost anything.

Rasbach is aware that the baby could have gone missing at any time before the dinner party. He has yet to question the parents in detail about the previous day, has yet to determine who, other than the parents, last saw the child alive. But he will find out. Perhaps there is a mother’s helper who comes in, or a cleaning lady, or a neighbor – someone who saw the baby, alive and well, earlier that day. He will establish when the baby was last known to be alive and work forward from there. This leaving the monitor on, checking every half hour while they dined next door, the disabled motion detector, the
open front door, it could all simply be an elaborate fiction, a carefully constructed fabrication of the parents, to provide them with an alibi, to throw the authorities off the scent. They might have killed the baby at any time earlier that day – either deliberately or by accident – and put her in the trunk and disposed of the body before going to the party next door. Or, if they were still thinking clearly, they might not have put her in the trunk at all but in the car seat. A dead baby might not look that different from a sleeping baby. Depending on how they killed her.

Rasbach knows that he’s a cynic. He hadn’t started out that way.

He says to Jennings, ‘Bring in the cadaver dogs.’

RASBACH RETURNS TO
the house, while Jennings checks in with the officers on the street. Rasbach sees Anne sobbing on the end of the sofa, a woman police officer sitting beside her with her arm across Anne’s shoulders. Marco is not with her.

Drawn by the smell of fresh coffee, Rasbach makes his way to the kitchen at the back of the long, narrow house. The kitchen has obviously been remodeled, and fairly recently; it is all very high-end, from the white cabinetry to the expensive appliances and granite counters. Marco is in the kitchen, standing by the coffeemaker with his head down, waiting for it to finish brewing. He looks up when Rasbach comes in, then turns away, perhaps embarrassed by such an obvious attempt to sober up.

There is an awkward silence. Then Marco asks quietly, without taking his eyes off the coffeemaker, ‘What do you think has happened to her?’

Rasbach says, ‘I don’t know yet. But I’ll find out.’

Marco lifts the coffeepot and pours coffee into three china mugs on the spotless stone counter. Rasbach notices that
Marco’s hand trembles as he pours. Marco offers the detective one of the mugs, which Rasbach accepts gratefully.

Marco leaves the kitchen and returns to the living room with the other two mugs.

Rasbach watches him go, steeling himself for what is ahead. Child-abduction cases are always difficult. They create a media circus, for one thing. And they almost never end well.

He knows he will have to apply pressure to this couple. It’s part of the job.

Each time Rasbach is called out on a case, he never knows what to expect. Nonetheless, each time he unravels the puzzle, he is never surprised. His capacity for surprise seems to have evaporated. But he is always curious. He always wants to
know.

Rasbach helps himself to the milk and sugar that Marco has left out for him and then pauses in the doorway of the kitchen with his coffee mug in his hand. From where he stands, he can see the dining table and the sideboard near the kitchen, both obviously antiques. Beyond that he can see the sofa, upholstered in dark-green velvet, and the backs of Anne and Marco Contis’ heads. To the right of them is a marble fireplace, and above the mantelpiece hangs a large oil painting. Rasbach doesn’t know what it is a painting of, exactly. The sofa faces the front window, but more immediately in front of the sofa there is a coffee table and, across from that, two deep, comfortable armchairs.

Rasbach makes his way into the living room and resumes his previous seat across from the couple, in the armchair nearest the fireplace. He notes how Marco’s hands still shake as he brings the mug to his mouth. Anne simply holds the cup in her hands on her lap, as if she doesn’t realize it’s there. She has stopped crying, for the moment.

The lurid lights of the police cars parked outside still play across the walls. The forensic team goes about its tasks in the house quietly, efficiently. The atmosphere inside the house is busy but subdued, grim.

Rasbach has a delicate task before him. He must convey to this couple that he is working for them, doing everything possible to find their missing baby – which he is, along with the rest of the police force – even while he knows that in most cases when a child goes missing like this, it is the parents who are responsible. And there are factors here that certainly make him suspicious. But he will keep an open mind.

‘I’m very sorry,’ Rasbach begins. ‘I can’t even imagine how hard this is for you.’

Anne looks up at him. The sympathy makes her eyes instantly well up with more tears. ‘Who would take our baby?’ she asks plaintively.

‘That’s what we have to find out,’ Rasbach says, setting his mug on the coffee table and taking out his notebook. ‘This may seem too obvious a question to ask, but do you have any idea who might have taken her?’