Too Young to Kill (7 page)

“Doesn’t matter,” said another kid, who had walked up and stepped into the conversation. “Ever see that
CSI
show? The cops will find it, even if you get rid of it.”

“What happened?” someone else asked. A little crowd was gathering.

Sarah enjoyed all the attention. It not only fed a low self-esteem problem she contended with, but made her feel as if she was fulfilling that role of leader she saw herself in.

“After beating her ass,” Sarah continued, “I dropped the bitch off at McDonald’s and left.”

A friend of Sarah’s had gone to the movies that night with his brother. They ran into Sarah on the way out. It was near the end of Sarah’s shift.

“Hey,” he said, walking over.

“I told Adrianne not to hang with us anymore,” Sarah said for no apparent reason, after catching up with the kid. He was from that group that Sarah, Cory, Nate, Sean, and the others hung around.

“You did?” he asked. They all knew Sarah and Adrianne hadn’t been getting along for more than a month now, and Sarah was pissed off more recently because she believed Adrianne had made a play for Sarah’s place in the gang. Not to mention several other things Sarah didn’t have time to talk about at the moment.

“Yeah . . . I got into a fight with her today in the car and it went into the McDonald’s parking lot. I just left the bitch there.”

“Later,” the kid said.

Sarah went back to work.

10

Saturday evening turned solemn inside the Reynolds household, now considered to be ground zero, a residence full of people wanting to help any way they could. It was funny how when you needed people most, they came, Tony thought, standing around, looking at everyone, wondering where his Lil’ Bit had run off to. Inside, a fire burned, tearing Tony apart. He was unable to help Adrianne, perhaps when she needed him the most. Here was a big powerful guy like Tony taken down to his knees, wondering what had happened to his only child.

Helpless—the worst feeling in the world for a parent.

There was a negative undertone to all this public attention being focused on Adrianne’s disappearance. But what could he do? As a father, he had to involve the press. The worst part of it stemmed from the same dynamic playing out during any number of high-profile missing person cases that CNN and the other networks jumped on as soon as the first whiff of fresh blood emerged. The problem was that as the community rallied, friends and neighbors got together to help and posters went up, the news coverage picked up pace, and the missing child might decide to go deeper underground, for fear of now being the cause of such a massive manhunt. Publicity could work against a family in a situation like that.

Definitely a God-fearing man, Tony could only hope and pray that this turned out to be the case; that Adrianne, scared and not wanting to cause any more trouble for her family, didn’t want to come out of hiding.

Jo had gone into work on Saturday. She was a basket case, and they sent her home.

“It was beginning to look like Adrianne was gone,” Jo recalled.

Puff!

No one could deny that feeling of absence. Adrianne was all about being the center of attention and making her presence known, wherever she was or whatever room she entered. Part of what she had wanted out of the therapy, Adrianne had told her doctor, was to learn “how to talk less.” Her life revolved around friends. The fact that no one had seen her since school on Friday was beginning to concern Tony and Jo more than an itchy feeling of her being a runaway.

Just a week or so before she went missing, Adrianne had asked her father and Jo if she could spend the night at Sarah Kolb’s house. Adrianne said she wanted to go to a party with Sarah and then crash at Sarah’s after the party. She didn’t want to come home late and wake everyone up. It would be a lot easier to stay at Sarah’s.

Tony said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

Jo wasn’t that naïve. She piped in, “Oh no, she’s not!”

Jo explained: “We didn’t know Sarah’s parents. It wasn’t that we didn’t
trust
Adrianne.” That was something Adrianne never really
got.
“But we never met Sarah’s parents. How would we know if Sarah was in the house at midnight?”

Or at all, in fact.

Tony agreed. He went and told Adrianne that she was to come home after the party, adding, “And make sure you’re home by midnight.”

“Okay,” Adrianne said. Since being back in Illinois this second time, Adrianne knew better than to give Tony any lip. She understood that when Tony spoke, that was the final word. She was on borrowed time here, anyway, so why make matters worse?

On the night of the party, Adrianne went out—and returned home by midnight.

Staring out the window, thinking about that conversation, Tony quivered. That feeling was back, tugging at him. The silence . . . it was so unlike Adrianne.

Where in the heck is she?

During that Saturday afternoon, the EMPD had made contact with Sarah Kolb for what was the second time since Adrianne had gone missing, this after hearing from several people they had interviewed that Sarah was bragging about a fight she’d had with Adrianne earlier in the day on Friday. None of this information, however, was ever relayed to Jo and Tony. It wasn’t the right time. Cops don’t fill the family in on every single detail of an ongoing investigation. They like to keep their cards close. Just in case, of course, someone in the family is involved.

“I’m calling because of Adrianne Reynolds,” the cop explained to Sarah. “She’s been missing and could be a runaway. Do you know where she is, Miss Kolb?”

The EMPD was looking to resolve this case. It was dragging on. Was Adrianne a runway or not? The best place to uncover that fact was with her friends. Her closest allies. If no one else, Adrianne’s friends would know where she had run off to.

“I dropped her off at McDonald’s on the Avenue of the Cities,” Sarah offered. “I wish I knew more because now
I’m
concerned.”

“Contact us if you find anything out,” the cop told Sarah.

“I will. You do the same.”

Sarah was inside a friend’s van outside Showcase Cinemas after her shift ended, when she once again brought up that fight she said she’d had with Adrianne on Friday. Sarah said that a guy Adrianne knew was supposed to drive Adrianne home from school, but that he never showed up for class. So the chore fell on Sarah.

She laughed. “Fucking Jiffy!”

“Jiffy” was one of those terms Sarah used for a girl who, she later said, “spreads her legs easy, like peanut butter.” Sarah hated the idea that Adrianne slept around. Sarah despised easy girls, who she believed disrespected the female culture in general.

“What happened?” the girl in the van asked.

“Ah, she said something that upset me and it started a fight in my car. . . . She punched me. I punched her. Broke four of her teeth. I was choking her and then she started choking on her own teeth!” Sarah stopped then, she explained. “She spit her damn teeth out at Cory. He was in the car, too. There was blood all over my car, on my clothes. On Cory, too.”

“Did she go inside [the restaurant] for help?”

“We made up. I dropped her off at McDonald’s.”

At some point on Saturday night, after Sarah got home from work, the EMPD made contact with her again. They had spoken to Cory Gregory earlier in the day, the cop said, and there were some differences—slight as they were—in the stories Sarah and Cory had told police. The EMPD needed to clear things up.

Were Sarah and Cory covering for Adrianne? Making up a story so Adrianne could run off without being chased?

It was after 10:00
P.M.
when Officer Kevin N. Johnson called Sarah on her cell phone. Johnson wanted a complete description of the events that Friday—exactly what happened, when, where. He needed to fill out a report, get Sarah Kolb on record with her version of the story from the time they left school until she dropped Adrianne off at McDonald’s.

“Okay,” Sarah explained without hesitating, taking a breath, as if to say,
Here we go again.
“I was driving to the Taco Bell in Moline. Sean [McKittrick], Cory, and Adrianne were in the car. I wanted one of those half-pound things at the Taco Bell . . . you know. I started arguing with Adrianne. She had told me that she was falling for Cory and that she had never met anyone like him.”

“Okay. Continue.”

“I mean, she barely even
knew
him. Cory wasn’t interested in her.”

“What was
he
saying?”

“He wasn’t saying anything. I made a reference that she was sleeping around with a lot of guys.... She called
me
a whore! I punched her. She punched me back.”

“What about Sean?”

“Sean got out of the car and started walking back toward Black Hawk Outreach in East Moline. Adrianne and I continued arguing. At some point, I told her I was taking her home.”

Sarah went on to explain how she and Adrianne “made up on the way” to McDonald’s, a location where Adrianne had insisted she be dropped off. “She said something about her dad seeing Cory in the car and being upset that she was with a boy.”

“So what did you do?”

“I dropped her off in the front parking lot of McDonald’s and drove around to the drive-through. When we left the drive-through, we did not see Adrianne again.”

“We spoke to Cory,” Officer Johnson explained. “Why wouldn’t he tell us why you two were arguing? Or say anything about you two punching each other?”

Sarah went quiet for a beat. Then: “I asked him to lie about it, since Adrianne is missing.” Sarah said she didn’t want any trouble. She and Adrianne fighting; Adrianne turning up missing; she and Cory dropping her off; the last two people to see her. . . . Two and two made four. Sarah didn’t want to be blamed for something she didn’t do. “I didn’t want anybody to know I was fighting with her just before she came up missing, you know.”

“Tell me about Adrianne—what she was like?”

Sarah had no trouble answering this question. “I’d estimate that she has slept with, oh, maybe about fifty guys in the time she moved back up here to East Moline. She constantly writes me notes about how bad her life is and everything she does. I was there one night when she took off and had sex with a guy.”

“You remember his name?”

“No.
Adrianne
didn’t even know his name. She’s disturbed and unstable. I know she went over to [a friend’s house] with Cory one day and she asked them about a threesome, but Cory wasn’t interested.”

Johnson said the EMPD would be back in touch.

11

On Sunday morning, Jo got up and went to work. What good was she at home, wandering around, numb as an infected wound, wondering what was going to happen next? Work would keep her mind off what was looking to be the inevitable: Wherever Adrianne had run off to, or whatever had happened, she wasn’t coming back. There had not been one word from Adrianne or the police throughout the night.

Early morning, Tony pulled into the parking lot of the Hy-Vee where Jo worked and ran inside. He seemed desperate to find his wife. Frazzled. In a hurry.

Watching him walk toward her, Jo considered Tony had some news.

“What is it?” Jo asked when Tony came up on her.

“I’m worried,” Tony said. Jo could see it written all over his face. Tony had a melancholic twist about him she had not seen before. He looked beaten, as if tossing in the towel. “I don’t know what to do, Jo.”

Tears.

The guy was lost.

Jo started crying. “Tony . . .”

Adrianne didn’t have a cell phone; she talked too much, Tony said, and “she knew that she could never afford the bill.” Now Tony was wishing he’d paid for the damn thing himself. It seemed so long ago, the last time he saw Adrianne. It was Thursday night, January 20, near bedtime. Adrianne was in her room. Tony opened the door like a proud father checking on his child. Peeked his head in. “Just wanted to say g’night, Lil’ Bit. I love you.” He walked over, gave his daughter a peck on the cheek.

“I love you, too, Dad,” Adrianne said.

Adrianne never got her driver’s license. She hardly knew her way around town, better yet the area.

Tony had never caught Adrianne drinking or using drugs. “Look,” he said, “she was no saint. But then again, she was different than any other sixteen-year-old.”

All of these feelings and thoughts, as they began to flood Tony, were both cumbersome and comforting, an off mixture of emotion. Anxiety pumped through Tony like a drug, leading him to believe that if Adrianne was out there, in trouble, she would have found a way to reach out to someone.

She would have called by now.

Jo decided to stay at work. Tony said he was going to drive around and see what he could find. There was no way he could sit home. It was close to two full days that Adrianne had been gone. Any anger Tony had when he first learned Adrianne had failed to come home, figuring she was out running around, had been replaced by fear, dread, worry. The quote Tony gave the newspapers that Sunday put it all into context: “I was mad, but now I’m scared.”

Every car he passed, Tony looked inside.

Adrianne?

He was desperate. He hung more flyers. He called family, friends, numbers he pulled from Adrianne’s address book.

Again and again, no one had seen or heard from Adrianne Reynolds.

12

Nate Gaudet slept late on Sunday, emerging from his room inside his grandmother’s house between 10:30 and 10:45
A.M.
Nate was a handful. Drugs. Drinking. Loud music. Strange friends coming and going. He sometimes wore a weird set of contact lenses that made his eyes look like that of a reptilian monster in a sci-fi film. Unbeknownst to his grandparents, Nate Gaudet was out of control.

To his grandmother’s surprise, Nate opened the door of his room and walked out wearing a black trench coat, same as one of those boys from Columbine. The old woman did not like the way Nate was dressed.

It scared her.

At almost the same time that Nate came out of his room, a “red car,” his grandmother later reported, pulled into the driveway.