Finding Claire Fletcher (A Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Book 1)

by Lisa Regan

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I hear something under here. I’m getting it out.”

  “It’s a skunk. Leave it alone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen it. It’s not hurting anyone. Just leave it.”

  Her head popped up, eyes narrowed at me. “What if I don’t want a skunk living under the porch? They’re gross.” She resumed poking beneath the floorboards, her stick scraping against them.

  “It’s going to spray you,” I said.

  “No it won’t. Skunks only spray at night.”

  I laughed. “Who told you that?”

  “I just know it. Besides, it’s probably not a skunk at all. You probably just said that to scare me. It’s probably some weird animal you keep under there as a pet, and you just don’t want me to scare it off.”

  I said nothing. The skunk, who apparently found Tiffany no less annoying than I did, promptly sprayed her. The pungent smell wafted up over her shrieks. She ran from the porch, but the skunk did not emerge. She ran in circles, arms waving, face pale and scrunched up. I stood and walked slowly into the house. I went into my room and pushed a box up against the door.

  I went to sleep and woke to the sound of their raised voices. Apparently she had showered and taken up residence on the couch, but the smell lingered and now it was strong and heavy in the house.

  “What were you thinking?” I heard him say.

  “Well, that bitch in there told me there was something under the porch and I should get it out or you would be pissed” came her high-pitched reply. Then there was an audible pout. “I didn’t know it was a skunk.”

  A sigh.

  A moment later, he knocked on my door but did not enter. I heard him through the door, the first words he had spoken to me in three months. “Lynn, I’m getting tired of these little games.” I heard footsteps—Tiffany’s. “I can’t leave the house for even a few hours without you two getting into trouble.” A sound of disgust. “Get into the bathtub and don’t get out until I come back,” he said.

  Whining. “Where are you going?”

  “To get something to rid you of that awful smell. Now go.”

  I heard no more after that, though when I emerged the next day the smell was fainter. The couch had been tossed out into the front yard, and Tiffany was holed up in one of the empty rooms.

  That evening he called us both to the dinner table. Tiffany and I sat on either side of him. She glared at me, eyes narrowed to dark slits. He looked tired. His eyes were rimmed with black circles, his expression weary.

  Finally, he spoke. “This has got to stop,” he said.

  Tiffany immediately piped up. “Well, if she would just leave me alone. I don’t do anything to her. She hates me.”

  He raised a hand to silence her. “Lynn,” he said. “You have to stop fighting with your sister.”

  “She picks on me all the time,” Tiffany blurted.

  “Lynn?” he said, waiting for my response.

  I raised my chin. “Go to hell,” I said.

  Tiffany gasped. He lowered his eyes and shook his head with disappointment. “We’ve talked about this,” he said.

  “About what?” I shot back.

  “About you being a good girl. If you’re not going to be a good girl, I’m afraid—”

  “What? You’ll kill me? You’ve tried enough times, why don’t you just finish the job this time?”

  Tiffany’s eyes widened. He looked up at me sharply.

  I smiled without humor. “What? You think I care what you do to me anymore? Do you honestly think that death could be worse than this?” I waved a hand around the room. “Just do what you have to do,” I added.

  “You said you would be good,” Tiffany said.

  “Oh, shut up,” I told her. I turned back to him. “And stop talking to me like I’m five years old. I’m nearly twenty. I’m not a girl anymore.”

  “You ungrateful bitch,” he said. He threw his fork down, and it clattered on his plate. He stormed off to his bedroom and did not come out the rest of the night.

  Two weeks later, I found a newspaper article taped to the inside of my door. It was a small piece, cut from the metro section of the city paper:

  LOCAL RESIDENT CRASHES INTO STOREFRONT

  Thomas Fletcher, a local businessman, crashed his car into the large storefront window of Starbucks at 4:00 p.m. yesterday. Fletcher was driving down Ninth Street when the brakes on his Chevrolet Lumina failed. Fletcher was taken to Memorial Hospital and released later. Police say Fletcher’s brake lines had been cut, and they are investigating the incident.

  “We fully intend to prosecute,” said DA Pamela Williams. Fletcher, though shaken by the incident, is glad no one was injured. “It was terrifying,” he said yesterday afternoon from his Bell Street home. “I’m just glad no one was killed. I have no idea who would want to do something like this.”

  Police too are baffled by the incident but will continue to investigate. “This was attempted murder,” said Detective Daniel Boggs. “We can’t have citizens afraid to drive their own vehicles. This is very serious, and we’re looking into it with all of our resources.”

  There was no photo. Hands trembling, I pulled the clipping from the door and held it to my chest. Had he really tried to kill my brother? My throat felt thick. I tried not to think of my family often. It was too painful. I liked to imagine them living their lives, happy and fulfilled, doing all the things I could never do. He may have held me captive and ripped me away from them, but in my mind my family was untainted, unspoiled by his evil hands. Now he was a threat to them.

  I slid to the floor, holding the article to me as if it were Tom himself.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Two hours later, Connor emerged from his meeting with the review board, smiling, his body slick with sweat under his suit jacket. Boggs, Stryker, Mitch, and Jen stood in a half circle in the hallway and looked expectantly at him.

  “Well?” Mitch said.

  “Six months on the desk, no active investigating, no time on the street,” Connor said, sighing with relief, as if he’d held his breath the entire time he’d been in there.

  Boggs and Stryker high-fived him and hooted. “See,” Stryker said. “It’s all good, man.”

  Boggs gave Connor a sideways hug over the shoulder, jostling him roughly. “You’ll be back on the street in no time,” he said.

  “Yeah, and in the meantime, you can type up all our reports,” Stryker added.

  Jen rose on the tips of her toes to kiss him on the cheek. “I’m glad,” she said.

  “You wanna get lunch?” Mitch asked. “You can buy since you still have your job.”

  Connor laughed. “Yeah. I’m starving.” He looked at Boggs and Stryker. “You two wanna come?”

  Boggs shook his head. “Nah, some other time.”

  “We got work to do, man,” Stryker added. “Riehl will pop a vein in his forehead if three of us are MIA today.”

  Connor thanked them for coming and watched them walk down the hall toward the exit, already bickering over something.

  At the restaurant, Mitch ordered a round of drinks and three shots. Connor peeled his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves.

  “So what did you tell them?” Mitch asked.

  “The truth,” Connor said. “Just the truth. I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance of keeping my job. And then I thought if I lost it, I could always go into private practice. You’ve got an opening, right?”

  Mitch laughed. “Yeah, for you? Could be. I don’t know, though. You’d have to really bone up on home security.”

  “Cute,” Connor said.

  Jen leaned forward from the other side of the table. “Was there a lot of press over this case?” she asked.

  “Well, there was some, but something else happened the same weekend so I was bumped back to the last page of the metro section,” Connor said. “Which might have just saved my ass.”

  Jen nodded. “Yes. I know a thing
or two about the press. They either make things much better or much worse.”

  “No,” Mitch said. “It’s not so much the press as the unthinking masses who take everything they read to heart.”

  The waiter arrived with everyone’s drinks. Jen held up her shot glass. “A toast,” she said. Connor and Mitch quickly grasped their own shot glasses and waited for her to speak. “To Connor getting to keep his job,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Mitch added. “To a damn fine detective.”

  Connor looked at Jen and held her gaze for a long moment. “To your daughter,” he said. “And bringing her home.”

  Tears filled Jen’s eyes as they clinked glasses and knocked back the shots.

  They chased the shots with long gulps of beer. The waiter returned to take their order, and then Mitch got down to business. He pulled out a file from under his jacket, which he’d brought from the car, and handed it to Connor.

  “I’ve got the composite,” he said.

  Connor flipped open the file and pulled out the sketch of the man who had abused Noel. Connor was immediately struck by how ordinary Page looked. He had thin features and slightly wavy hair, but for the most part, he was unremarkable. He was the guy you bought your morning coffee from every day, whose name you wouldn’t be able to recall even if your life depended on it. He was the neighbor on your street you waved to each morning on your way to work whose physical description you’d never remember in enough detail to recognize him elsewhere. He was a thousand men whose faces were blank spots in your memory.

  “He looks like a regular guy,” Connor commented.

  Jen spun the sketch around so that she could study it. “He looks like my old pharmacist,” she said.

  “He looks like our waiter too,” Mitch pointed out. “That’s the problem with composite sketches. But this is the best we can do in lieu of a photo right now, so what should we do with this?”

  Connor frowned. “I have an idea but it involves some risk.”

  He looked at Jen, who held his gaze without flinching. “Tell me,” she said.

  He held up the composite. “We take this to the press. Tell them there has been a break in the case and that this man is a person of interest.”

  “What about Claire?” Mitch said. “What if he kills her? If he thinks he’s close to getting caught, what’s to stop him from killing her and getting rid of all the evidence, as it were?”

  “If we didn’t know she was alive and we had this lead, what would we do with it?” Connor countered.

  “We’d go directly to the press,” Jen said.

  Connor nodded and looked at Mitch. “He’s not going to kill her. It’s been ten years. She’s still alive.”

  “You don’t know that for sure, though,” Mitch pointed out.

  Connor sighed. “No. I don’t,” he conceded. “But I think this is a risk worth taking. Someone might recognize this guy right away. We don’t know what will happen, but this is a solid lead.”

  They both looked at Jen. Mitch reached across the table and slid a meaty hand over hers. “It’s your call, Jenny. She’s your child.”

  She nodded, her blue eyes steely. “We go to the press,” she said.

  Mitch turned to Connor. “Well, I guess we need to have a conversation with your captain.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  1999

  After finding the clipping about my brother, my sole activity in his house was to avoid Tiffany. Any interaction could lead to me being blamed for something, and I was not so sure I could keep my mouth shut if he chastised me one more time, imploring me to be a “good girl.”

  I was frightened for my family, but I was also angry. He had already killed two people because of me. If he was so displeased with me, why didn’t he just kill me? I knew he had it in him. I had seen it firsthand. It was as if he enjoyed this special sort of torture. Keeping me alive but ignoring me. Keeping me in his house with indirect threats but acting as if I was no longer there. It seemed I served him no purpose, yet he held on to me. If his concern was that setting me free would cause him to go to prison, he could easily have silenced me with death, yet he didn’t.

  I was on the brink of giving up entirely. Then one day, two weeks after I found the article about my brother taped to my door, he found me in the kitchen. I was standing at the sink, washing dishes and staring idly out the tiny window above the sink. I did not hear him and was only aware of him for a split second before his hand was on the back of my head.

  He snapped my head forward, driving my forehead into the windowsill. My vision was filled with fuzzy dark circles. The pain split right down the middle of my skull. He pushed my face toward the sink but I braced myself, hands on the edge of it, so that my head did not submerge in the sudsy water.

  This was it, I thought. The rest of my body slackened with relief. It would be over. He was going to kill me.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he yanked my pants down, fumbling with his fly. He tried to force himself into me, but he was limp. I could feel his hand working furiously between our bodies, his flaccid penis pushing against the back of my thighs. His breath was labored. He pressed harder on the back of my head as I tried to get my bearings.

  Abruptly, he stopped. He let go of me with one more push to the back of my skull. Then he said, “Get out.”

  He left. I stayed there, bent over the sink. Blood dripped into the dishwater from the gash in the middle of my forehead. I watched the drops fall and diffuse into the water. I listened to my breathing, tried to squeeze out the throbbing, echoing pain in my head. My arms ached from holding my upper body over the sink. After a few moments, I stood upright and straightened my clothes. Blood dripped warm and slow down my nose. I used a towel to stop it.

  He had told me to get out. Just two weeks ago, he had tried to kill my brother. Now he was telling me to get out. Could I just walk through the front door and leave? Flag down the nearest car and tell them I was Claire Fletcher, the fifteen-year-old girl who’d been abducted four years ago? Or would that cost me a family member? Would he wait for me to leave and then sneak up on me, drag me back to this shack, and torture me into compliance?

  Anger swelled inside me enough to match the throbbing in the center of my head. I was weary of his games. I strode into the hallway and burst through his bedroom door without knocking. He was not standing by the window, watching for my escape. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed, pants undone, Tiffany’s head working furiously in his lap. His head snapped in my direction, but Tiffany did not even pause.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “What did you just say to me?” I responded, holding the towel to my forehead.

  “Get out,” he said, his tone low and menacing.

  “Right now?”

  “Yes.” He glanced down at the top of Tiffany’s head. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “You want me to leave? Just walk right out of here? Go home?”

  He sighed and pushed Tiffany away with a single thrust. She fell on her back with a small cry.

  He stood and zipped his pants. “You can’t stay here anymore,” he said, facing me. His face was red.

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  “I heard what you said. What does that mean? I can just go home?”

  “Home?” he said.

  “Yes. To my family. You know goddamn well what I mean.”

  He took a step toward me. His fingers played nervously with the buttons on his shirt. “Your home is with me. You know that.”

  “You just told me to get out.”

  “You can’t live here anymore. I’ve arranged for you to live in the trailer across the road. You’re free.”

  I threw one hand up in the air, resisting the strong urge to slap him once more. “I’m not free, you shithead. What if I don’t want to live in your stupid trailer? What if I walk out of here right now and never come back? Then what?”

  He donned his most serious look. “Then you know what happens to t
he Fletchers.”

  Tiffany, still lying on the floor like a wounded doe, said, “Who’s the Fletchers?”

  We ignored her. “Just what the fuck am I supposed to do over there?” I said.

  “Lynn,” he said. “Sooner or later, you have to grow up. I’ve arranged it all. You’ll have papers, and I will supply you with a modest income for your needs.”

  “Papers?”

  “Yes. A driver’s license in your name, social security card, that sort of thing.”

  “My name is Claire Fletcher.”

  “Your name is Lynn,” he replied, as if talking to a recalcitrant child.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I asked. It was a question I had asked in the first days of my captivity, through tears and pleas, that he had never answered. Now, as the question issued forth from me once more, I realized I wasn’t asking why he did the things he did. I was asking the impossible question: Why had this happened to me?

  His motives were simple. I had fulfilled a need, a desire for him. His reasons for keeping me long after I’d ceased to satisfy his sick urges were practical—if he did not either keep me or kill me, he would surely go to prison.

  The question of why my life had taken the bizarre twist it had that day on the sidewalk was the one that truly plagued me. It was as useless as asking: What is the meaning of life? There was no answer that would satisfy me, that would make the years of torture, abuse, isolation, and separation from my loved ones justified.

  He chose not to hear me. Instead he walked to his dresser, opened the top drawer, and dangled a set of keys before me. “Here are the keys to the trailer,” he said. “Why don’t you go have a look?”

  The moment he told me to get out, I should have taken those words for what they were. I should have just walked down the road until I could flag down a car and ask the driver to take me to the nearest police station. But part of me feared that he would harm my family, even if I did not return to them. What he really offered me was pseudo-freedom. A place of my own where my comings and goings would be carefully monitored. I was still a prisoner with an invisible tracking device strapped to my ankle.