by Lisa Regan
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mitch held the fingerprint report in his hands for several moments before he let out a low whistle. “My God,” he said, his voice betraying the amazement and excitement he felt. He continued to stare at it until Connor could no longer tell if his eyes were even in focus.
“Farrell?”
“I don’t believe it.”
Connor grinned. “I know.”
Mitch looked at the younger detective, and Connor thought he saw tears welling in the corners of the older man’s eyes. “This is … I don’t know what to say.”
Connor plopped down in the chair in front of Mitch’s desk and folded his hands across his middle. “Say you’ll help me.”
Slowly, Mitch sank into his own chair. He looked again at the fingerprint match. “I will,” he mumbled. Then he caught Connor’s eyes, and his composure began to return. “Are you sure this is right?”
Connor rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s right. I had Lena take three prints and they all match. This is it, Farrell. She’s alive. I wasn’t hallucinating.” Connor leaned forward, unable to contain his eagerness. “I want to find her.”
Farrell placed the report on his desk and leaned back into his chair, swiping his hair back with one hand. “I just never expected this,” he said.
“Something like this is very rare,” Connor concurred. “But we have a chance here. We could find her.”
Farrell frowned. “But maybe she doesn’t want to be found. I mean, why, after all this time … ?”
“She makes contact every two to three years,” Connor said. “She wants to be found.”
“But if she can just walk into a bar and pick up a man and send him to her house, then why doesn’t she just come home?”
Connor had not thought that far ahead. He was silent as he mulled over the question. Claire had made contact two and a half years after she was abducted. She was obviously free to come and go as she pleased, and she had chosen to stay lost. It didn’t make sense. She came back again and again, but she never returned to her family.
“She wants them to know she’s alive,” Connor said suddenly, thinking aloud.
“What?”
“She comes back every two or three years, right?”
Mitch nodded.
“She makes contact, but she never comes home. She disappears again. If she didn’t want to be found, why go to all the trouble of picking up a stranger in a bar, sleeping—um, spending the night with him—and sending him to her family’s home? Why not just come home? Reappear on the doorstep and say, ‘Hey, I’m back.’ Yeah, she goes back to wherever it is she’s been, but she wants her family to know she’s alive.”
Farrell considered this. “Do you think she’s under duress?”
Connor thought of Claire Fletcher’s haunted eyes. In the last twenty-four hours, he’d been looking at the case from the objective eyes of a detective, trying to fit the pieces together. The word abduction, the reality of it, had not hit him.
Maybe he didn’t want to think about it. This was a woman he’d held in his arms. A woman whose scent lingered on his bedcovers. A woman he wanted desperately to find and not just to return her to her family or to solve a cold case. He just wanted to see her again.
Someone had snatched fifteen-year-old Claire Fletcher right off the sidewalk. God only knew what had been done to her in the intervening years. Maybe she was too ashamed to come home.
“You have thirty years on the force, right?” Connor asked.
Mitch nodded. “Yeah.”
“You worked Special Victims, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What happens when you get an abduction? A teenage girl, abducted from the street or her home or wherever it happens?”
“Parks, you know what happens,” Mitch said.
“Yeah, I do. So where do we find them if we find them at all?”
“Dead,” Mitch replied flatly.
“What else?”
“Sexually assaulted.”
Connor sat back in his chair, pain creeping across his face.
“So what are you saying? Claire was abducted and sexually assaulted, but clearly she wasn’t killed.”
“Maybe she’s too embarrassed to come home,” Connor suggested.
Mitch shook his head. “No. No way. That’s not the Claire I knew.”
Connor stared hard into Mitch’s eyes. “Yeah, but we don’t know what she went through. Things—things like that change a person.”
Connor thought of the rape victims from his last case, the case that might end his career. He remembered their eyes. Sometimes the only thing that made it possible for him to do his job without going crazy was thinking that he might prevent someone else’s eyes from looking like that. Broken, helpless, shamed.
Claire’s had been worse. Beautiful, bottomless pits of despair. What had she seen? What had her abductor done to her?
Mitch changed tacks. “What about the abductor? What happened to him? Ten years. Did he just let her go one day?”
“I don’t know. Look, we have a chance here. Claire Fletcher is alive, and I want to bring her in. Are you going to help me?”
Mitch nodded solemnly. “I just hope we can find her,” he said.
They started with Mitch’s files. Connor had Farrell take him through them line by line. It took a whole day. Farrell had been pretty thorough; there wasn’t much he had left out of his files. Connor decided to go through the police files next, and then he would interview both Dinah Strakowski and the other three men that Claire had sent to her family’s house.
He didn’t know why Claire had chosen to stay lost for ten years, reappearing every few years to make contact but never returning home, but he would deal with that when he came face-to-face with her again.
Connor spent the next two days at his department desk, poring over the police reports from the Fletcher case. His eyes were tired at the end of each day. He went to sleep with visions of suspects and car descriptions dancing in his mind. He didn’t have time to think about the precarious position of his job. He left a message for Strakowski.
The third day, he looked over the vehicle search, which had yielded nothing. Strakowski had said it was a blue station wagon. She couldn’t tell the make or the year. She had looked at hundreds of photos of station wagons, and the closest she could come up with was a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon manufactured sometime in the late eighties. They had done a county-wide search of owners registering that make of vehicle but had come up with no suspects. Strakowski had even driven around with the responding officers, looking for the car, but they never found any trace of it.
It didn’t make sense. No one reported seeing any blue Chevrolet Caprices within a ten-block radius in the hours after the abduction. There were reports of station wagons, but they all checked out. If the department had missed something, if they had in fact interviewed the abductor in those first hours and not realized it, it would take Connor months to track down all those witnesses and vehicles again and check them out.
Connor put the report down and rubbed his eyes. Mitch’s words rang in his ears. Before Connor had left Mitch’s office the other day, Farrell said to him, “How do you plan on doing this? Yeah, we know she’s really alive, but we’ve still got the same cold leads we always had.”
Again, Connor had not thought that far ahead. It was true. Connor had nothing more to go on than the investigating team had had ten years prior. He just hoped that he would find some detail that the rest of his colleagues and Farrell had overlooked. It was his only chance.
“Parks! Hey, Parks!”
One of the other detectives in the division interrupted his thoughts.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“There’s a Dinah Strakowski on line four for you. Says she’s returning your call.”
“Thanks,” Connor said, snatching up the phone.
He spoke with Strakowski for five minutes and arranged to meet her at her home the next morning. As he hung up, he glanced ou
t the window. He watched the last dim shades of daylight sink into the horizon. It was evening. He could go home. He’d been laboring over paperwork all day, and his eyes were weary. He lingered at his desk, dreaming about home, his bed, and a blanket smelling of lavender from the soft skin of Claire Fletcher.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1995
My captivity didn’t take place entirely in that dark, windowless room. I don’t know how long I was there, but at some point he saw fit to move me.
I was so excited the day he arrived carrying a T-shirt and pair of shorts. I had been naked, uncovered, without so much as a blanket or sheet for so long that the prospect of clothes made me weep. After nearly starving me to death, he had left me handcuffed by only my right wrist. That day he unbound me completely and ordered me to put on the clothes. Before I could think of anything besides the luscious feel of fabric against my skin, he cuffed my right hand again and left, returning moments later with a bowl of soup and a plain piece of white bread.
“Eat” was all he said before leaving once more.
I ate hungrily, slopping the soup onto the floor and mattress. I subsisted on soup since it was all he ever brought me. The bread was new and tasted like rich chocolate cake to my starved tongue. I curled into a ball when I was finished, my body nearly purring over the treats.
Minutes later, drowsiness—heavy like a winter coat—seeped into every limb and finally into my center. My heartbeat slowed. I tried to keep my eyes open, but my eyelids felt too weighted. Sleep came. I dreamed of my mother.
What seemed like days later—and for all I know it could have been—I woke disoriented to find that I was no longer in that room. The weight of sleep hung on me. I had to think about my arms and legs to get them to move. My eyelids were pasted together, my mouth parched.
When I opened my eyes, I was temporarily blinded by the daylight streaming through a single window in the room. It had been so long since I’d seen natural light that I wanted to open my mouth and drink it in.
The room was barren except for an empty closet, which stood open. I was lying on the hardwood floor, both hands bound together above my head. I was still wearing the clothes he had given me, and now I had a blanket, although it lay beneath my body.
I looked up over my head to see what I was tied to. It was an old cast-iron radiator, and my hands were bound to one of its claw feet with heavy rope. I squirmed and rolled side to side, using my feet to pull the blanket from beneath me and cover myself up as best I could. I watched the daylight filter through the curtained window.
He came later, closing the wooden door behind him. He smiled at me benevolently.
“You’re up,” he said softly. “Well, I hope you’ll like it here. I haven’t got all the furniture yet, but don’t worry, Lynn. I’ll have your room fixed up in no time at all.”
“My name is not Lynn,” I said. “Where am I?”
“You’re home, darling.”
“This is not my home.”
“Oh, Lynn,” he scoffed, the painted smile never leaving his face. “Your home is with me now.”
“Let me go,” I tried, although I knew he would not.
He made a tsk-tsk noise and shook his head. “Now I can’t untie you until I know you’re going to be a good girl.”
“That’s not what I meant. I want to go home.”
“Oh, I know it doesn’t look like a home now, but once I get some furniture—”
I cut him off, shouting, “I don’t care about furniture! This is not my home. My name is not Lynn, and I want out of here.”
He looked at me for several minutes, silent. Then he arched his eyebrows and his smile grew. “I know what you need,” he said.
“I need you to let me go.”
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “You just need some attention.”
I began to squirm, and my shouts were so loud they bounced off the walls and ceiling, echoing back to me. When he knelt beside me, I began kicking at him.
My legs worked furiously, hitting his chest like a drumroll and knocking him back onto his behind. I kept kicking. He got up on his knees and grabbed for my legs, catching my feet after several tries.
We struggled wordlessly until he straddled me. His hands closed around my throat. I tried to stave off the pain, cling to consciousness, but blackness descended on me and I slid gratefully into the dark oblivion.
When I woke, my feet were bound. When he came in again, I heard only his voice.
“I know what’s best for you, Lynn. I’m sorry you can’t understand that right now. I don’t like being hard on you. I wish you wouldn’t make me do such things. I want us to make a home here.”
He untied my legs and left my hands bound together but untied me from the radiator. He pulled me up, but my legs still didn’t work properly. Just like a baby deer trying to walk for the first time, my legs folded beneath me. I stumbled along as he half carried me out of the room. Everything was dark and fuzzy.
When I felt the cold hardness of porcelain on the backs of my legs, I realized we were in a bathroom. After I relieved myself, he took off the ropes and my clothes, and showered me. The water scalded my face. I did not fight him.
He dressed me again and returned me to my new room, tying me to the same place and securing my legs together tightly. That is where I remained. I began to count the days by the waning and waxing of the delicious daylight. When the count reached 102, I began weeping each day in time with the sunrise.
Surely, I could not have been his captive for so long. I was disoriented. My defiance of him and entreaties for freedom earned me beatings, but I could not stop. I no longer cared about the fists flying at me or the heavy feet impacting my sides. I just did not want to go willingly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dinah Strakowski had lived in the same house since 1995. In ten years, she had had no desire to move. In fact, she had had a new roof installed and cut back the foliage around her home. She had also replaced one water heater and all of the tiles on her kitchen floor. So she told Connor when he visited her.
She was forty-six now. Her two children had recently left for college and she lived alone, which she liked because it was quieter and there was less laundry to do, but still she missed the sounds of her children moving around the house at all hours.
Her hair was badly dyed a coppery red. She was round and pudgy, which she attributed to the effects of aging. She was so pleased to have a guest—even if he was there to talk about the awful thing that happened to that poor little girl so long ago—that she made cookies and lemonade just for Connor’s arrival.
Dinah chattered while Connor sat on her couch and fished a notepad and pen from his pocket. He tasted the cookies and lemonade to be polite, and despite the fact that he had already been there ten minutes and found out nothing useful, he discovered that he liked Dinah. She had a lovely, off-center charm about her that had mostly to do with her open, gracious manner and her effusive offerings.
“Mrs. Strakowski,” Connor said when he could finally snatch a moment of silence. “As I said on the phone, I’m investigating the abduction of Claire Fletcher as a cold case. What I’d like to do is take you through that morning again, and I’d like you to tell me everything you remember. I know it’s been ten years, but I’d like you to try to recall every detail, no matter how insignificant it may seem.”
Mrs. Strakowski nodded solemnly. “Oh, Detective, I haven’t forgotten that day at all. Something like that is hard to put out of your mind. Why, I’ve thought about that poor girl and her family quite a bit. I even kept one of those missing flyers on my fridge for a couple of years because I felt so bad about it. I still second-guess myself today. Maybe if I had run out there with my broom or my son’s baseball bat instead of calling 911, I could have saved her.”
“You did the right thing, Mrs. Strakowski,” Connor assured her. “You can’t blame yourself. You did exactly what anyone would have done. You called the police and reported it immediately.”
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She twisted her hands in her lap. “I felt so bad,” she repeated.
“Now, could you just take me through what happened? What you saw?”
Strakowski looked upward, as if the contents of her memory were visible on the ceiling. “Well, I had just got the kids off to school maybe twenty minutes before. I was in here in my bathrobe just straightening up. The phone rang so I went into the kitchen to get it. It was a cordless, so I came back in here and was talking to my sister—she had one bastard of a husband back then. She was always crying to me over that one. Almost every morning she called like clockwork. ‘What’d he do now?’ I’d say as soon as I picked up.”
Connor caught her eye, and she smiled sheepishly. “Well, anyway, I was on the phone, just puttering around in here. It was a real nice day so I went to the window and pulled the curtains. I was listening to my sister go on and on and standing at the window, just looking out at the day. There was a man parked in his car right out front. Just sitting there in the driver’s seat. Looked like he was reading something. He had brown hair, but I couldn’t see him too good from here. I didn’t pay him no mind ’cause this is a busy street. Lots of people park out front. Sometimes they block the driveway, though.”
“Did you leave the window?” Connor prompted, so he didn’t lose her again.
“Well, yes, I went back into the kitchen for something, my coffee cup I think. I wasn’t in there for more than a minute or two. My sister was just jabbering away, and I went back to the window because I was thinking I’d like to get out there and work on my garden, seeing as it was so sunny.
“By that time, the man had got out of the car, but his back was to me. He was kind of squatting down next to the car, and the back door was hanging open. I still didn’t pay him any mind. I thought maybe he was just fixing something. Maybe he had been sitting in there reading a repair manual or something and had just got out to fix something, even though it was a strange place to be working on your car in front of someone else’s house.”
“Did he turn around at all? Did you ever see his face?” Connor asked.
