by Blake Pierce
For a moment, Riley felt too staggered to contemplate the awful thing that might have happened here. It was only during their walk back toward the main building that the ugly possibility began to sink in again.
She looked all around, hoping to glimpse some trace of where an abduction might have taken place. She saw nothing suspicious anywhere. But then, she didn’t really know what she ought to be looking for.
She thought back to the crime scene that she and Crivaro had visited when they first arrived in Tennessee—the spot where Kimberly Dent’s body had been found. She remembered getting just a fleeting sense of the killer’s mind there.
She hadn’t sensed any anger or hostility or even shame about him. The crime scene had been much too orderly to suggest such turbulent emotions. Instead, she’d sensed that he’d taken a sort of satisfaction in his deed, almost as if he’d done his duty in taking an innocent girl’s life.
Then something dawned on Riley about the killer.
He’d feel comfortable here.
This tranquil, lovely place would probably be just to his liking.
And abducting a young woman on one of these walking paths would suit him perfectly.
I’ve got to talk to Crivaro about this, she thought.
She needed to persuade him that they should spend more time here.
But as they arrived back at the main building, Crivaro obviously had different ideas.
He said to the principal, “We appreciate your time, Sister Agnes. Once again, you were right to get in touch with us about this. We’ll let you know immediately if we have any news.”
Sister Agnes thanked him, but there was a note of anxiety still in her voice. Riley could imagine what the principal must be thinking. She was wishing that Riley and Crivaro could offer her some assurance that her novitiate was safe and sound somewhere, and she had nothing to worry about.
Of course, they could assure her of no such thing.
Meanwhile, Riley felt a bit dazed at the rush Crivaro seemed to be in to get away from here. She had to quicken her pace to keep up with him as they headed back toward the parked car.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“We’re going where we’ve got some real business,” Crivaro said brusquely. “We’re driving to Brattledale to see what we can find out about the first victim.”
“But what about Sister Sandra?” Riley said.
Crivaro scoffed, “She’ll turn up on her own, I’m sure.”
“You mean you don’t think—?”
“That she was abducted? No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would be inconsistent with the killer’s behavior. The minute I heard she wasn’t a student, and certainly not a teenager, I knew this was a blind alley. Our killer’s got a taste for young girls. We can’t be sure of much, but we can be pretty sure of that.”
“But what about Sister Sandra’s behavior?” Riley said. “Sister Agnes doesn’t believe she’d run away like that. In fact, she said that she thought Sister Sandra’s devotion was growing with time.”
Crivaro grunted and said, “If you ask me, Sister Agnes isn’t much of a psychologist. She wants to believe what she wants to believe about her protégé. But she said it herself—the girl was ‘restless.’ That’s the key word as far as I’m concerned. It means she wanted out of the cloistered life, but didn’t want to tell her mentor about it. So she just took off last night. Sister Agnes probably knows that deep down, but just won’t admit it.”
Riley stammered, “But—but her disappearance—wouldn’t it be a real coincidence if—?”
Crivaro interrupted again, “If what? She happened to disappear around the time the other girls were murdered? Riley we’ve talked about this before, and you’ve really got to get it through your head. Coincidences are a fact of life in our business. They’re even inevitable from time to time. You take them for what they are, and then you move on. Otherwise you get tripped up by confirmation bias. If you’re not careful, everything you see looks like evidence for what you want to believe.”
“But I don’t want to believe anything,” Riley said.
“That’s good,” Crivaro said. “Try to keep on that way. Believing screws up your judgment.”
Then under his breath, he said, “Me—I stopped believing a long time ago.”
Riley was startled to realize he wasn’t talking about the case when he said that. He was talking about his own upbringing, which had soured him on religion. He just couldn’t put himself in the shoes of someone who might joyfully pursue the kind of life Sister Sandra wanted for herself—the kind of life that Sister Agnes had embraced for many years.
So which one of us has a real problem with confirmation bias? she wondered.
Riley tried to talk herself out of pursuing the subject. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was right that Sister Sandra had been abducted and was surely in great danger right now—if she wasn’t dead already. Riley just couldn’t ignore her own instincts. She had to come right out and speak her mind.
She looked long and hard at Crivaro, then said, “That place really pushed your buttons, didn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Crivaro said.
“I mean Magdalene High School,” Riley said. “You went there expecting some kind of emotional hellhole, like the school you went to as a kid. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was really lovely, and everyone there was happy. And that really bugged you, didn’t it?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Crivaro said.
“Yeah, I think I do,” Riley said. “You could have coped with it if it was as bad as you’d expected. If it had been, we might even still be there right now trying to find out what happened to Sister Sandra. But what you saw there really messed with your head. You found yourself wondering what your whole life would have been like if—”
“If what?” Crivaro snapped. “If I’d gone to a school like Magdalene instead of where I did go to school? Okay, then, I can admit that. The thought did cross my mind. And that place did push my buttons. It bothered the hell out of me. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Because I don’t let my emotions interfere with my judgment.”
Then in a near-whisper, he added, “Unlike someone else I know.”
Riley’s mouth dropped open.
“What do you mean by that?” she said.
“Nothing,” Crivaro said with a wave of his hand. “Nothing at all.”
“No, I want to know what you meant.”
“And I don’t want to talk about it,” Crivaro said. “Suffice it to say you’re way out of line. I just want you to respect my years of professional experience. And right now, everything I’ve learned over the years tells me that whoever killed those two girls wouldn’t have been the least bit interested in Sister Sandra. And if we get hung up looking for a woman who might not even want to be found right now, we’ll be wasting precious time. Somebody else could die.”
Riley said nothing. She was still stinging from his suggestion that she was somehow failing to be objective. But she sure didn’t want to pursue the subject.
Meanwhile, Crivaro had been following highway signs to Brattledale.
Crivaro said, “Since we’ve got that settled, I need for you to do two things for me. I need for you to get on your cellphone and call the county sheriff over in Brattledale and tell him we’re on our way, and that we want to talk to Natalie Booker’s parents. Then I need for you to get out that map and make sure we don’t get lost on the way there.”
Still seething inside, Riley took out her cellphone and started to do exactly as she was told. But as she punched in the number for the Brattledale police department, she couldn’t help but glance back toward the school they were leaving behind.
Something bad happened there, she thought.
I can feel it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Riley was worried about the bottled-up anger in the car. She and Crivaro managed to drive the rest of the way
to Brattledale without getting into another fight. But Riley didn’t like how things felt between them, and she was sure Crivaro felt the same way. Sooner or later they were going to have to get their feelings out. She didn’t look forward to whatever it was going to take to resolve things between them.
It’s not going to be pretty, she thought.
As they pulled into Brattledale, it almost eerily reminded Riley of Slippery Rock, the little town where she had spent part of her childhood. Unlike that Virginia town, Brattledale wasn’t nestled in a mountainous valley. But as they drove down the main street, Riley could almost believe that downtown Slippery Rock had been transplanted into this flatter countryside.
There were all the same businesses and buildings—a drugstore, a movie theater, a church, a diner, a bank, a volunteer fire department—many of them with the same architectural false fronts she remembered from Slippery Rock. Like Dalhart, Brattledale was a county seat with its own courthouse, but it was a much smaller courthouse and a much smaller town.
They parked in front of the county police station. As Riley and Crivaro got out of the car, a pudgy man in a sheriff’s uniform came walking out of the station toward them, smiling widely and shaking hands with them.
“You must be our fed friends,” he said. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it’s about time you showed up. I’m Jim Cole, the county sheriff, and I’ve got to admit that me and my boys are way out of our league dealing with this murder business. I sure hope you can give us a hand.”
Riley was startled by how different this greeting was from when Sheriff Quayle had met them at the airport yesterday.
I guess some locals don’t hate the FBI after all, she thought.
Sheriff Cole said, “I understand you want to talk to poor Natalie’s mother. Let’s drive over and see if we can catch her at home. I’ll tell you how to get there.”
As the three of them got into the car, Riley asked Cole, “Shouldn’t we call ahead and see if she’s available?”
“Hannah Booker doesn’t have a phone,” Sheriff Cole. “She doesn’t have much of anything electrical—no computer, not even a TV, I don’t believe. But there’s a good chance we’ll find her this time of day.”
Cole rattled off some directions, and as Crivaro started to drive, he filled the sheriff in on what he and Riley had been doing since they’d started working on the case yesterday.
“Doesn’t sound like you’re making much progress,” Cole said. “And I’m afraid talking to Hannah won’t do you much good. I spent a good long time talking to her, and I don’t think she knows anything. She’s kind of a basket case, if you want to know the truth.”
Riley said, “I can’t imagine how hard this must be for her.”
“Oh, it’s hard, all right,” Cole said. “But she’s been pretty much a basket case for years, ever since she and I were in high school together. She got pregnant with Natalie when she was sixteen, poor kid. Everybody knew who the father was—an older boy named Elmer Clay.”
Cole shook his head and continued, “Hannah never said so, though. And Elmer never admitted the kid was his. A real jerk, that guy. Everybody in town always knew he wouldn’t amount to anything, and we were more right than we knew. He got drunk and killed himself by driving into a tree a couple of years after Natalie was born.”
Riley’s curiosity was piqued.
“So what happened to Hannah?” she asked.
“Well, she managed to raise Natalie on her own,” Cole said. “She’s been working at whatever kinds of jobs she can get all these years—cleaning houses, dishwashing at the local diner, doing laundry, menial stuff like that. She was never especially bright or capable, so she depends a lot on people’s kindness and charity. Fortunately, there’s still some of that kindness and charity in these parts.”
Cole sighed and added, “The truth is, Hannah has regressed emotionally. During the last three or four years, Natalie got to be more of a mother to her than Hannah ever was to Natalie.”
Crivaro asked, “What about Natalie? Did you know anyone who might have meant her any harm?”
“Oh, no, everybody loved her,” Cole said. “She was a good kid, a bright kid, kind and super responsible and mature. You’d never have believed she’d grown up in those kinds of circumstances.”
“Did she have a boyfriend?” Crivaro asked.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” Cole said. “She’d been dating Dick Haley, another older kid, but a really good guy, a star athlete and a great student and an Eagle Scout. He joined the army a year ago, and he’s stationed at Fort Hood in Texas. He stopped in town on leave about a week and half ago, shortly before Natalie was killed, and they spent some time together.”
“Do you think … ?” Riley began.
“Not a chance,” Cole said. “Not that I’d ever suspect Dick of anything like that, I still went to the trouble of eliminating him. I confirmed with the staff down at Fort Hood that he was back there at the time of the murder. I interviewed him over the phone, and he couldn’t imagine who would have done such a thing. Poor guy was awfully shook up about it. He couldn’t get another leave to come back for Natalie’s funeral.”
Riley got the feeling that Cole was one small-town sheriff who was really good at his job. She doubted that he’d left a single stone unturned. And if Hannah Booker knew anything at all about her daughter’s death, Cole would have already found out about it.
This is probably going to be a wasted visit, she thought.
She wished more than ever that Crivaro hadn’t dragged them away from Magdalene High School. She couldn’t help thinking they still had some unfinished business there.
Cole directed Crivaro to stop in front of a shabby, one-story wood-frame house in an otherwise pleasant neighborhood. The three of them got out of the car and walked up to the door and knocked.
The woman who answered the door looked tired and worn and extremely thin.
Cole took off his hat respectfully and said, “Hannah, I hate to trouble you any more, but these two are from the FBI’s BAU—Agents Crivaro and Sweeney.”
There was just a flicker of life in the woman’s dull eyes.
“Oh—have you found anything about what happened to Natalie?” she said.
“I’m afraid not,” Cole said. “But they’d like to talk to you.”
That flicker vanished, and her eyes went dead again.
“I can’t imagine why,” she said. “And I’m awfully tired of talking about it.”
Hannah Booker was standing square inside the front door, not offering any invitation for her three visitors to come inside. Crivaro didn’t seem to want to press the issue. As they stood on the porch in the cold air, Riley listened as Crivaro asked Hannah a few questions and she answered as well as she could.
She’s said all this before, Riley guessed.
As the questions and answers continued, Riley noticed something odd about Hannah’s voice and manner of speaking. She spoke very quietly, but in a high-pitched, babyish voice, and an almost eerily singsong manner.
Like a child, Riley thought, remembering Cole’s remark that Hannah had regressed emotionally over the years.
Riley wondered—had this woman ever really grown up? Living life as a single mother in a small town like this must have taken a terrible toll on her. Her youth had been taken from her at the age of sixteen. Perhaps her ability to grow up emotionally had been taken from her as well.
Riley remembered something that Cole had said.
“Natalie got to be more of a mother to her than Hannah ever was to Natalie.”
Everybody in town seemed to think very highly of Natalie, especially her mature and responsible nature. Had Natalie been forced to grow up fast because her mother had never grown up at all? All Riley knew for sure was that this woman was going to have a very hard time in life without her daughter’s steadying hand.
It’s so sad, Riley thought.
Hannah finally interrupted Crivaro’s questions.
“It’s ki
nd of you to try to find whoever did this. But you can’t. You’ll never succeed.”
“Why not?” Crivaro asked with surprise.
Hannah heaved a long sigh and said, “Because it’s not God’s will. If God had wanted her killer to be found, he’d have let it happen by now. But he didn’t.”
With a determined expression, Hannah nodded and said, “And that’s all right. I understand everything now. God took Natalie away while she was still good, and she’s in heaven now. He wasn’t punishing her. He was punishing me. And I deserve it because of how I sinned all those years ago.”
Sheriff Cole looked distressed by what he was hearing.
He said, “Now Hannah, don’t talk that way.”
Hannah smiled strangely and said, “Thanks so much for dropping by. I hope you’ll stop troubling yourselves about all this. Things are as they should be, and there’s nothing more to be done about it.”
Without another word, she stepped back and shut the door, leaving Riley and her two colleagues standing on the porch.
Sheriff Cole raised his hand to knock the door, but Crivaro stopped him.
“Don’t bother, Sheriff. She’s got nothing more to tell us.”
The sheriff just glanced at Crivaro and nodded, and they returned to the car.
As they drove to the police station, Riley remembered Hannah’s words.
“God took Natalie away while she was still good …”
An idea was taking shape in Riley’s mind about these sad young victims. But she couldn’t yet put her finger on exactly what it was or what it could mean.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
All during the drive back to Dalhart, Riley couldn’t get Hannah Booker’s words out of her mind. The woman considered herself a sinner, but was sure that her daughter Natalie had been utterly good.
“She’s in heaven now,” the woman had said with absolute conviction.
Of course that belief was to be expected in a woman of such faith, but Riley could feel something about those words nudging her toward a broader idea. She couldn’t quite get hold of it.
