“Was someone there to pick up the call?” Weaver asked.
“Yes, someone picked up the call. They spoke for just under three minutes.”
A few seconds passed with no one saying a word. Everyone seemed to comprehend the gravity of this new bit of evidence. The police finally had a timeline, a starting point. The Carpenters had received a telephone call…and almost forty minutes later, Tuck had failed to show up to work on time.
“Who was the call from?” Weaver demanded as he placed his coffee mug to his lips.
“It was a burner phone,” Adams said. “We don’t know who bought it or from where. It’s completely untraceable.”
Captain Weaver placed his mug back on his desk. His face looked a shade paler, the bags underlining his eyes more pronounced. His voice seemed more forceful as he gave his next instruction. “Whatever this is, whoever is behind it, someone knows something and they’re not speaking up. I’m going to do two things. First, I’m going to issue an APB for this family. If they’re still driving, maybe an officer will spot them on the road. And secondly, I want to get the community involved. Let’s set up a press conference for later this afternoon to officially announce the investigation into the disappearance of the Carpenter family. If no one will raise a stink about these four people, at least we can.”
***
The press conference was held at five o’clock that evening. It was a local affair – covered by a few St. Louis TV stations, and one reporter from a Vetta Park online journal that had a few hundred subscribers.
Captain Weaver chose the time so the event would get mentioned in the local six o’clock news. He knew that no channel would interrupt their regularly scheduled programming, but at least he could offer a clip or a sound bite that would warrant mention in a later broadcast.
The event was held outside. Weaver stood behind a brown podium that was set up in front of the police station. Flanked by trees and concrete benches, he spoke passionately about the missing Carpenter family and urged anyone with any information to call the station. A huge family photograph was perched on a nearby table – same as the one in the family’s bedroom – and Hobbs wasn’t able to look away from the smiles that swayed in the breeze. What was once so innocent now seemed cryptic. The Carpenter family had looked so pure when she held them in her hand…but there was something disturbing about seeing those life-size faces flick back and forth. Hobbs wondered what secrets those smiles were concealing – whether they knew what the future had in store or whether they were taken by surprise.
Weaver stepped away from the podium and then it was Adams’ turn. He described the family members, using all the details and characteristics at his disposal. It didn’t amount to much. Olivia Carpenter liked Minnie Mouse and frequently wore her hair in pigtails. Tuck Carpenter was a St. Louis Cardinals fan who watched almost all the games, according to his colleagues. Greta was a devoted mom. And John Brock was eighteen years old and worked part-time as a mechanic. None of them had been seen since September 7, and the police suspected foul play.
The entire episode lasted less than ten minutes. When he finished describing the family members in the photograph, Weaver rested his hands neatly on the sides of the podium and offered to take any questions. The journalists exchanged glances with each other and looked at their notepads but no one asked a thing.
***
The phone call came in at 5:40pm – just a few minutes after all the journalists packed up their cameras and went back to their trucks.
Lt. Adams was the one to receive it. He put the receiver down and yelled out, “Hobbs, I have Richard Carpenter on line 1 for you!”
Hobbs darted to her desk, inhaled sharply and picked up the line. “Mr. Carpenter?”
“Yeap, that’s me. Is this Officer Hobbs?” The voice on the other end was gruff, a smoker’s rasp.
“Yes, I’m Detective Hobbs. Thanks for returning my call, Mr. Carpenter. I wanted to talk to you about your brother, Tuck. Have you spoken to him in the past week?”
Richard cleared his throat and Hobbs could hear the shouts and shrieks of small children in the background. One voice in particular was shrill and insistent. Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!
“Hush now, I’m on the phone!” Richard barked. Then, more calmly into the receiver: “No, I ain’t spoken to him. Is he alright?”
“Mr. Carpenter, no one has heard from him or his family in eight days. Do you have any idea where they could be or who they could be with?” It was this part of the job that Hobbs detested – giving this type of news to family. She always tried to project her most businesslike demeanor – professional, official, deep, clear voice and unemotional. But these moments made her question why she’d gone into the profession in the first place.
It was quiet on the other end of the line.
“Mr. Carpenter?” Hobbs asked, her voice softening.
“I’m here, I’m here,” Richard said quietly. “I sent the kids…to go and play…in the other room.” He spoke slowly, each word carefully measured.
Hobbs tried again. “Do you know—?”
“Naw – I don’t know where they went, who they’re with. I don’t know who they talk to. We only chat about a few times a year – birthdays and Christmas. I last spoke to Tuck in June and he didn’t say much.”
“Mr. Carpenter, anything that you could tell us about their lives would be a huge help to the case. Can you think about anything that might have been discussed during that conversation?”
“Hmm. We talked mostly about the summer weather, and the bugs they were seeing. He said he was thinking about re-siding part of their house. He’d gone to a Cardinals game that week. That was Greta’s birthday present to him. Is any of this helpful to you?”
“Yes, all of this is helpful to me. Please go on,” Hobbs said. On her notepad, where there should have been names, leads and timeframes, Hobbs had scribbled tiny dots into the margins. She waited for something more useful.
“Uhhh … I guess…the only other thing I can think of is that Tuck said Greta was taking time to teach the kid to read. Or that she had finished doing that. That’s all I can think of.”
Hobbs continued drawing dots on the faint blue lines of the page. “They were teaching Olivia to read themselves or they were sending her to a preschool program?”
“Not Olivia. John.”
Hobbs stopped scribbling and took a beat before asking, “Greta had just finished teaching John to read?”
“Yeah. That’s what he said.”
“The eighteen-year old?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Mr. Carpenter—” Hobbs was about to plow forward with her next question but she caught the edge in her voice and took a pause. This wasn’t a suspect. This was a missing family member’s relative.
“Mr. Carpenter, did you know that your nephew was learning to read at age eighteen?”
“He wasn’t my nephew, Officer. He was Greta’s boy. And yes, Tuck had mentioned that John had a lot of difficulties in school but I didn’t ask too many questions. It’s not my place.”
“I see,” Hobbs said, her pen frozen in her hand.
“Do you need me to come up there, maybe help out for a day? See what I can do?” Richard asked.
Hobbs’ head snapped up. “Are you close with anyone here who knew the family?” she asked.
“Naw. And I don’t know what help I’d be anyway. Besides, I’ve got my kids down here and my wife works, and we can’t really pull them out of school…you know?”
So the question had been an empty gesture. Hobbs was quiet for a moment and Richard broke the silence by saying, “Officer? I need to get back to my family. Can you keep me posted on what y’all discover?”
“We will, Mr. Carpenter. Take care.”
Hobbs hung up the phone and looked down at her notes. Along with the dots, and shapes and random scribbles spread across the page, she had written: John???
Chapter Seven
February 4, 2005
John wasn
’t breathing right. His breaths were quick and staccato – short up-and-down gasps that pulled on his belly. Greta first noticed it when she was giving him a bath but she thought she might be imagining it.
Later that night, when it was time to tuck John into bed, Greta pulled Griffin aside. “Does Johnny seem alright to you?” she asked her husband. “His breathing is strange.”
Griffin had been sitting at the dining room table, working on a project. Greta knew he worked in real estate but never mired herself in his details. He was gone a lot – scoping out land, talking to developers, selling to investors. She didn’t know exactly what he did during his trips but she knew they made him anxious. The days before a trip meant late nights at the office and long conference calls from their tiny study even when he was home.
Sometimes she thought Griffin was gone even when he was still in Vetta Park. She would tuck Johnny into bed, and tell him stories of his father’s fanciful adventures in other cities, then tuck herself into bed alone a few hours later. In the middle of the night, he’d come home – keys dropped loudly onto the kitchen counter, shoes stomped against their wooden floors…and then he’d make his way into their bedroom. Awake and frustrated, Greta would pretend to be asleep until he changed his clothes, stretched out next to her and turned out the lights.
She had so much to ask him, so much she wanted to know. The gaps in their marriage seemed to widen each year until they were no longer gaps but canyons – deep gorges of silence with a riverbed of anger flowing through them.
By 2005, she had been in the marriage seven years and felt she knew Griffin no better than when they’d first met. When he’d first walked into her diner years before, at least there was the hope of getting to know him better, of opening up to him. But now he seemed primarily motivated to get out of their conversations as quickly as possible. He seemed always searching for the nearest exit.
So when she saw him at the dining room table that evening in February, pounding at his keyboard and staring at the monitor with deep concentration, she knew that broaching the topic of John’s health would be as futile as discussing the state of their marriage – the state of anything for that matter. But she asked him anyway.
“He’s been making a strange noise when he breathes,” she continued. “Do you think I should take him in?”
“You’re always hovering over him, Greta,” Griffin said. “I’m sure the kid’s fine.”
She let the matter drop, but later that night they could hear a seal’s bark emanating from John’s room. Greta sprinted into his bedroom and found him feverish and shaky, with inhalations that seemed forced.
“I’m taking John to the hospital!” Greta yelled. She wasn’t sure if Griffin heard but she pulled John out of bed anyway, rushed him into his car seat and sped to Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. It was a thirty-minute drive but the cold air helped soothe his respiration. By the time they arrived in the reception area of the Emergency Room, John sounded better. His breaths were less forced and more even, although still barky.
The hospital took him back right away and it didn’t take long for a young resident to diagnose him with croup. While they waited for two breathing treatments and a dose of steroids to calm his breathing, Greta sat with him in his hospital bed and told him stories.
“One day you’ll meet your grandmother,” she murmured to him. “Her name is Johanna, which means God is gracious. You were named after her, and you kind of look like her too. Did you know that?”
John smiled and closed his eyes, but didn’t say anything. He was long asleep by the time the ER nurse came back into the room and told them they could go.
“Watch his breathing and bring him back if he has any difficulty,” the nurse advised. She then gave Greta the discharge papers and waved them out of the room.
Greta carried John back into the car and buckled him into his booster seat. It was nearly 2 a.m. when she got back on the road.
***
Greta drove quickly through the main highway that connected St. Louis to Vetta Park, and then onto more familiar streets. The nocturnal silence was sporadically broken by a distant siren – and Greta took note of how eerie it was to be the one of the only cars on the road. The night itself was damp, with a light mist settling over the streetlamps.
When she was closer to her house, Greta noticed a pickup truck behind her, its headlights blindingly bright as it trailed a few hundred yards back. She got to a stoplight and continued through the intersection. The green shined down on her car for an instant as she made her way through. A few seconds later, Greta peered through her rear view mirror at John. He was peacefully sleeping in the back seat, his chest rising and falling with even breaths.
In an instant, a yellow sports car gunned through the same intersection from the cross-street and slammed into the pickup truck that had been trailing her. Greta saw it all in her rear-view mirror. First the accident itself – that happened so quickly it was over in a second – then the shrieking sound of iron, aluminum and steel crushed together at a voracious speed.
Greta hollered and pulled a U-turn in the middle of the road. The traffic light was still green as she headed back to the blazing collision.
John woke up in a panic from his backseat slumber. “What is it, Mommy? What happened?” he yelled.
“It’s okay, Johnny,” Greta said in a trembling voice. “Some people are in trouble and we’ll see if we can help.”
She drove closer to the mangled cars in the middle of the intersection and parked on the road’s shoulder. The yellow sports car was pinned beneath the pick-up – its front barely visible – although from closer inspection, Greta could see that it was a Ferrari. She stepped out of her car onto the street and started dialing on her phone.
“911,” a voice said.
Greta tried to steady her voice, to calm her rising panic. The pickup driver emerged from the wreckage of his truck and surveyed the remains of the sports car beneath. He was an older man, with a blood-spotted St. Louis Cardinals cap pulled down over his head.
“911,” the dispatcher repeated.
Greta cleared her throat and found her voice. “Yes, hi. I’m at the intersection of Memorial and Olympic Boulevards, in Vetta Park. There’s been a terrible car accident. Can you please send someone right away?”
“Memorial and Olympic? Is anyone injured?”
“Yes, yes I think so. There was a yellow Ferrari that ran a red light. I haven’t seen anyone come out of it. And there’s a pickup truck driver. He’s walking, but there’s blood on his baseball cap.” Greta pulled the phone away from her ear and yelled, “Sir? Sir? Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance?”
The man frowned at Greta and put his hand to his forehead. Just beneath the bill of the cap, Greta could see a bloody tear of skin that she hadn’t noticed before. She brought her phone back to her ear. “Yes, one maybe two injuries. Maybe more. I’m not sure.” Her voice was shaking, her body trembling in concert. The night air suddenly seemed extremely cold.
“What’s your name?” the dispatcher asked.
“My name is Greta Brock. Can you please send some help?” she asked urgently.
“Yes, there is help coming that way. Can you tell me what happened? You said a Ferrari ran a red light at an intersection?”
Greta started to answer but then she saw some signs of life from inside the Ferrari and she all but forgot she was having a conversation. The passenger side door slowly opened and a man emerged. He was African-American, lanky, well dressed but disheveled. His shirt had blood spots and was torn in a few places and his nose was bleeding. He looked to be in his mid or late twenties.
“Are you okay?” Greta called out to him. “Do you need help?”
The man held up his left hand but didn’t say anything and stumbled backward into the passenger seat. Greta wasn’t sure what the gesture meant.
The police arrived a minute or two later. First Greta heard the sirens, then two Vetta Park police cruisers, a fire truck and two ambulance
s arrived.
It took about twenty minutes to remove the Ferrari’s driver from his car, but the emergency responders were able to place him on a stretcher and get him into an ambulance. From what Greta could see, he was also in a suit, and also looked to be in his late twenties or mid-thirties. The Ferrari’s passenger went in the other ambulance and the pickup truck driver declined medical attention.
With both doors of the sports car wide open, Greta was close enough to smell the stench of rum or maybe whiskey.
“Excuse me!” A deep voice barked. “Miss, can I ask you to take a few steps back while we clear the scene?”
Greta pivoted and saw a tall, muscular, non-smiling man in a police uniform standing behind her. His badge read Hardy.
“Is that your car over there?” Hardy asked.
Greta nodded. “My son is asleep in the back seat.”
They walked over to Greta’s car and verified that John was indeed, still in the back seat. Instead of sleeping, he was awake – staring at the scene of the accident with an expression of terror.
Hardy peered into the backseat and smiled at John. “How you doin’ there, little guy?”
John just swallowed and blinked in response.
“He’s a little overwhelmed by everything.” Greta said.
“I can imagine. It’s also three in the morning. What are you two doing out so late?”
“I took him to Children’s Hospital – in St. Louis. He had croup.”
“I see,” Hardy said with a nod. “Did you witness the accident?”
“From my rear view mirror, yes. The Ferrari ran a red light and slammed right into the pick-up truck.”
Hardy pulled out a pad of paper and jotted a few things down. “You sure about that?” he asked.
“Yes,” Greta said. “The pickup truck was right behind me. The traffic light was green when I went through…and hadn’t changed by the time he went through. I’m positive.”
All The Hidden Pieces Page 4
