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

by Lisa Regan

  Connor flipped it open and found himself looking at tax returns and W-2 forms for Rod Page, dated 1993 and 1994. “How did you get these?” he asked.

  Mitch smiled at Jen, who said, “I have a friend, a very good friend, who works for the IRS.”

  Connor looked at both of them. “This is illegal,” he said.

  Jen arched her eyebrows. “It’s been ten years,” she said. “I just want my child back. Now that I know she’s alive—that she really is out there somewhere—that is my only priority. I’m a little past worrying about what’s legal and what’s not.”

  “All right, then,” Connor said. He looked at Mitch. “Just so we understand each other, Mrs. Fletcher, neither I nor Mitch ever saw these documents. We didn’t get them from you. You didn’t get them from your friend. Your friend could lose his job and go to prison over this.”

  “Her job,” Jen corrected. “Yes, we understand each other.”

  “So,” Mitch said. “This guy worked for the National Park Service. Summers only. Basically drove around making sure no one was starting unauthorized campfires, cleaned up trash, kept the roads and walking paths clear. Things like that.”

  “He didn’t make much,” Connor noted.

  “No, he didn’t,” Mitch agreed. “Unless this guy is doing some serious work under the table, he must already have money.”

  “You think?”

  “What else would give him that kind of mobility? If he’s using an assumed name, which we can pretty much guarantee since the social security number on those belongs to a dead man, he would be able to hide a modest savings. He may have had some kind of insurance settlement he’s living from or something like that.”

  “True,” Connor said.

  “It could be anything,” Jen said. “Some civil lawsuit or insurance settlement. It wouldn’t surprise me if this guy took out a policy on his own mother and then killed her for the money.”

  “There was a man who worked with Rod Page,” Mitch said. Before Connor could open his mouth, Mitch went on, “I already talked to him. He didn’t remember much, but he said he remembered Rod Page because Page wasn’t memorable at all. He said Page was quiet, kept to himself. Didn’t talk much. The only thing that might be of use is that Page once told this guy that he was originally from Texas.”

  Connor met Mitch’s eyes across the table.

  “We’ll run a search for arrests and warrants in Texas for peepers and flashers,” Connor said.

  The waiter set their drinks down on the table. Jenny took a sip of water and asked, “Did the composite generate any leads yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, I got a call this morning from a woman who works at a local pharmacy. She said a man matching the composite worked there as a pharmacy tech between 1996 and 1999. But that was all she had. She couldn’t remember the guy’s name. She’s supposed to get a personnel file and get back to me.”

  Jen’s hand flew to her chest. “Oh, my God. Are you telling me this guy worked at my pharmacy after he took Claire?”

  “Didn’t you say yesterday that the composite looked like your old pharmacist?” Mitch pointed out.

  Jen’s face paled. She looked like she was going to be sick. “Yeah. Maybe the woman who called you is thinking about the same guy.”

  “Well,” Connor said, “we don’t know if the pharmacy guy is Rod Page or not, although it is possible. I still have to check it out. And I also want to check out the Texas angle.”

  After lunch, Connor returned to the division. He took six more calls about the composite that afternoon, but none of them seemed promising. Texas yielded nothing. He’d gotten the ViCAP results back, but there were thousands of cases to sift through, leaving him to wonder if three-quarters of the country’s population was sexually deviant. By the end of the day, he was no closer to finding Rod Page.

  He left the division later than usual, but didn’t go home right away. He dreaded going back to his empty house with its concealed weapons tucked about. He drove by the Fletcher home on Archer Street. The living room lights glowed behind gauzy curtains. He sat across the street in his car for several minutes, watching as a light in one of the upstairs rooms came on.

  He felt a twinge of unease, although he couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was his constant undertow of worry for Claire, who was still out there in parts unknown. The last time he’d heard her voice it had been heavy with tears.

  He thought about stopping by Farrell’s office, but instead he went home. As he walked up to the front door, he scanned the perimeter for anything amiss but found nothing out of the ordinary. The flowers along his walk swayed, as if in welcome. He closed and locked the door behind him.

  The last thing he remembered was reaching for the light switch in the dining room.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  When I woke up, pain coursed through my body like the rhythmic booms of a car stereo playing so loudly you could feel its vibration in your teeth as the car passed on the street. I was bound to the thick column beneath the kitchen table in my trailer.

  The chain, a personal favorite of his, was one he had fashioned himself years ago and had used often on me. It looped around the metal column beneath the table, fastened with a padlock, which he had begun employing when he figured out I could easily undo the metal clips he originally used. From the base of the table, the chain extended three or four feet. He had attached handcuffs to the end of it, the tiny chain between them inexplicably threaded through one of the links on the larger chain. He had my wrists cinched so tightly that the metal of the handcuffs bit into my skin and pressed mercilessly into the bones.

  My left eye would not open. I lifted my hands and felt the side of my face, which had swelled disturbingly large in the wake of his beating. My skin was the texture of a grapefruit peel, and I imagined it looked like I had a grapefruit growing out of the side of my face. Dried blood crusted the edges of my mouth.

  My right eye searched the kitchen and locked on to the object I was looking for. He had left it on the floor where he’d thrown it at me. Using my legs and squirming erratically, I used my feet to pull the newspaper to me. On my knees, I bent my body toward the floor, my face inches from the page, and read the article with my good eye.

  I was shocked to see the composite and wondered where in the world Connor had gotten it. It was a good likeness of my abductor, although in it he looked much younger than he was now. The article named Connor directly but even if it hadn’t, I believed my abductor would have found him. My captor was all-knowing, all-seeing, or so it had seemed these many years.

  The night I left the trailer and found Martin in an upscale city bar, bedding him at a nearby hotel several steps up from the motel in which I’d first given my body up to another man, I’d thought for sure that my captor would have no way of finding out whom I’d been with.

  I had known that Tiffany watched from one of the windows as I left in the truck. When I returned, he was still not there. I knew she would tell him I had been gone for almost an entire night, but I figured he would only beat me, maybe revoke my newfound privileges, or maybe kill me.

  But I thought for certain he’d have no way of really knowing where I’d gone or whom I’d been with. Martin was dead two months later, and like the newspaper clippings in which my brother and mother and sister were almost killed, a new one had been taped to the inside of my trailer door. One in which Martin had no nosy neighbors to call the police before the fire blazed out of control, burning him alive.

  With Jim, I’d been far more careful. I’d studied my captor’s schedule. When the time came for me to sneak away, I’d put the truck in neutral and let it roll down the road as far as I could get it before starting it. I was gone only six hours, and the house was dark when I returned. Again, I turned off the truck and let it roll to its place behind the trailer. Neither he nor Tiffany alluded to the fact that they knew I had even left. It was months later—when something I said or did displeased him—that he stopped by and dropped Jim’s wallet on my kitchen
table.

  I didn’t know how long he’d had it. Whether he had actually done anything to the man or if he’d just pilfered the wallet to use later as a way to intimidate me. All the same, it had worked. It worked because no matter what I did, he found out. I had no idea how. It had been almost three weeks since I’d met and slept beside Connor Parks, nestled in the warmth of his arms, against the lovely smooth skin of his chest.

  I realized my captor had not known about Connor. Otherwise he would not have flown off the handle when he discovered the newspaper article. Seeing the composite, it was no wonder he believed I had gone to the police. Tears blurred the vision in my right eye. I tugged uselessly against the chain. Connor was a police officer. A detective. He’d shot and killed someone the day I met him. Surely he could defend himself against this man.

  I sat upright, flexing my body, testing this way and that for pain that might hinder any escape I made. I had no idea how much time had passed, but outside, the world was dark. The small lamp I kept on the table was lit. I’d turned it on before he entered, anticipating a cup of tea while I sat there and read a book, waiting until I could sneak out to check on Connor.

  I took several deep breaths and shifted so that I could brace my feet against the base of the table. Pulling with my hands and pushing with my feet, I tried to break the chain from its vise around the column. I was not thinking clearly. Pain in my ribs screamed and my body went limp, gasping for air.

  I shifted again, this time bracing my feet awkwardly against each of the benches on either side of the table. I pushed against them and pulled with the chain, trying instead to dislodge the column from the table so that I could slip the chain over it. It did not give.

  A sob rumbled up from the back of my throat. Tears leaked slowly out of the slit that was my left eye and burned my face as they slid down to my chin. They flowed more freely from my good eye.

  I stood up, though the length of the chain did not allow me to straighten my body completely. I used both hands to pull at one corner of the table, but the effort caused too much pain. I found myself back on the floor.

  I looked at my hands and the flesh of my wrists blooming on either side of the metal rims of the handcuffs. I pulled at my right hand. I could easily dislocate my thumb again. At least I could easily deal with the pain of it. I had done it twice before in desperation. But now the cuffs were flush against my bone, and my hands seemed much larger than they had before. There was not even room for the cuffs to scrape the skin away.

  My mind raced. There had to be some way. There had to be something I could do to free myself. I looked around the kitchen for anything I might use, and my eyes fell on Tiffany, standing just inside the trailer door, silent and staring at me.

  She looked sad. I had no idea how long she’d been standing there. When she spoke, her voice held none of its usual malevolence. It was hollow and flat.

  “Now you’ve really done it,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Tiffany walked into the kitchen and gasped when the circle of light illuminated the full injury of my face.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Get me out of here,” I said.

  She put her hands on her hips and stared at me. Her face was slack and all the more disturbing because it was not twisted in the sneer that she usually directed toward me.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling at the chains and offering my hands up to her as if in prayer.

  She ignored me, sitting on the floor in front of me and folding her legs into a triangle, bony knees jutting out from her shorts. As if we were two teenage girls at a slumber party, sharing secrets atop a sleeping bag in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t understand it,” she said. “I don’t understand you. You always want to get away, but you never leave. He’s obsessed with you. No matter what I do, it’s not good enough. It’s never good enough. You treat him like shit, and he still has to know everything you do, every place you go.”

  She picked at the hem of her shorts, face bent downward, and her thin brown hair fell across her cheek. “I thought it would be so great after you left, and it was for a while. Then he started going out more and staying out overnight. He told me he didn’t mess around with other girls, but still it seemed like he never wanted to be with me. We still had sex all the time, well, at least till last year. Now he hardly touches me. It’s like I’m ugly or something.”

  “Tiffany,” I said. “Listen to me. You have to get me out of these chains.”

  She looked at me, and her eyes were sorrowful. “Why should I? You ruin everything. You’ve totally ruined everything after tonight.”

  “Oh come on,” I said. “He’s angry. He’ll get over it like he always does, and the two of you can go back to doing, oh I don’t know, whatever sick, bizarre things you do over there. But you have to get me out of here right now. He’s going to do something bad. He’s going to hurt someone I care about if I don’t stop him.”

  Her face pinched. “See? You don’t care about me. All you can think of is yourself. You’re not even listening to me. No one listens to me. You don’t care how I feel.” She said the word feel as if it were the first time she’d uttered it. It peeled off her tongue like a foreign word.

  “I do listen to you,” I said. “You think he cares about you but he doesn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t have made you his sex toy when you were only thirteen. Someone somewhere cares about you, about how you feel, but it’s not him.”

  Her eyes flashed: a familiar emotion in the flatland of her face. “You’re wrong,” she snapped. “He’s the only one who ever cared about me. You think my mom cared about me? You think those stupid social workers cared about me? You think my grandparents or those snotty people at that dumb old church cared about me? No one did. No one gave a shit about me until he came along. Now everything is ruined.”

  I moaned. “Fine. Fine. Whatever. But it’s not ruined. Look, he’s held on to me this long, do you really think he’s going to send you packing now? Just get me out of these chains. I have to stop him.”

  Again, the flat quiet settled over her. She resumed picking the thread from the hem of her shorts. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what I do. He’ll keep you or he wouldn’t have chained you up. So what if you go after him. That’s probably what he wants. But he doesn’t care about me anymore.”

  I struggled with the words, not wanting to say them but seeing no other way to coax her to help me get free. “Yes, he does. Of course, he does. Don’t say that. Just help me out of here.”

  Again, I offered my hands in supplication. “No, he doesn’t,” she said, more sharply. “He’s already got someone else.”

  All the throbbing, stabbing pain in my body was sucked into a single point in my stomach, like a whirlpool pulling it down to some dark place I never wanted to see again. “What?” I croaked.

  “He brought her home a few weeks ago. I didn’t know she was in there right away until I realized he’d started locking the door. I only saw her once. I don’t know why he likes her. She’s small, and she doesn’t even talk. All she does is cry all the time. She’s a big, stupid baby.”

  On my hands and knees, I crawled as close to her as the chain would allow. My voice held a new intensity, desperation. “Tiffany,” I said. “You have to help me get out of here. Now.”

  She shook her head.

  “Please,” I said. “This is very, very important.”

  Again, she shook her head.

  Then, an idea. “I’ll take her away,” I said. “Help me get out of here, and I’ll take her away and she’ll never come back.”

  “Yeah right,” she mumbled. “Then he’ll just be mad at me even more ’cause I let you go. Forget it. I wish you would go away.”

  “I will. Let me go and I will. I’ll go away, so far away you won’t be able to find me, and you’ll never see me again.”

  “No way,” she said. “Like I would believe anything you said. You’re a big, fat liar.”

 
She sat, staring at the floor, slowly unthreading her shorts. I resumed my struggle with the chains, gasping, squirming, pushing, pulling, and nearly screaming with frustration. When I was spent once more and the pain in my ribs had become too much, I stopped and faced her again.

  I watched her for a long time, my mind working through countless words I could use to convince her to help me. I shifted so that I could rest my back against the side of one of the benches. I tried to even out my breathing.

  “Could you at least get me some ice?” I said. “For my face.”

  She looked at me and then rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said.

  She went to the freezer and took out a tray of ice cubes, which she dumped into a kitchen towel. She gathered the ends of the towel up in one hand and brought it to me. She held it out. I took it with both hands and pressed it to the side of my face. She took up her position across from me once more.

  After several minutes, I held the makeshift ice pack out to her. “Could you hold it on my face for a while? It hurts when I keep my arms up like that. I think he broke some of my ribs.”

  She rolled her eyes again but shimmied over and took the ice pack from me. As she reached up to press it to my face, I swung my arms over her head and looped the chain around her throat. I pulled her into me with both hands and the chain tightened, its length fully expended. She choked and spluttered. Her hands flew to her neck and dug into the skin above and below the heavy links of metal. Her legs shot straight out.

  I steeled myself against the awesome pain in my ribs, pulling and pulling until she slackened a little. I loosened the chain slightly, and her breath emerged in small bursts of air.

  Into her ear, I hissed. “Now you listen to me. You’re going to get me out of these chains or I am going to kill you. I’m going across the street, I’m taking that girl, leaving with her, and you aren’t going to say a fucking word. Do you understand?”

  She gave no indication so I jerked furiously on the chain. This time, her back arched, and her body danced helplessly, like a branch caught in a storm. After several seconds I released my hold again, allowing her to breathe. Still, she clutched at her neck.