by Kate Gable
This is the thing that I always hate about my job. Though the pursuit of the bad guy and getting justice for the victim and the victim's families always feels good, this part, this wallowing in other people's sorrow, does not.
I wish I could be like some of the other people here who could just turn off their feelings, shut them down, or perhaps just bury them at the bottom of a bottle. I'm not like that. I let their emotions wash over me and I can't help but feel some of it deep in my soul.
I introduce myself and shake their hands.
Mr. Reynard looks like the kind of guy who would give you a strong handshake on any other occasion except for this one. Mrs. Reynard doesn't even try. Her hand is limp and barely there. I hold her hand in my palm for only a few moments before she pulls away.
"How could this happen?" she asks, shaking her head, tears welling up in her eyes.
“That's what we're here to find out,” I assure her, but my words are a lot less than adequate. "I have to go over a few things with you, Mr. and Mrs. Reynard. Would you mind telling me exactly when the last time was that you saw Courtney?"
"She went to bed," Mr. Reynard says, shaking his head. "She went to bed and then she was gone."
"What time was that?"
"I don't know. Nine or so."
“Does she usually go to bed that early?" I ask, knowing full well that that's not a particularly common thing for teenagers to do.
"Well, she said she was going to bed. She said goodnight and kissed everyone on the cheek." When he says that, his wife breaks down in tears.
"I have to tell her everything," Mr. Reynard says.
"Please continue,” I urge him.
He pauses for a moment, not knowing how to continue.
"You said that she kissed everyone. Who is everyone, exactly?"
"We were downstairs, hanging out in the kitchen, having a glass of wine. Maureen had just put down our five-year-old. Well, she was going to, he was not exactly cooperating. So, he was staying up a little late, nine o'clock."
I nod and make a note of that in my notebook.
"Okay, please go on."
"Well, I don't know," Mr. Reynard says, propping his head up with one hand as he crosses his arms.
He has thick, lustrous hair that was once a beautiful color of chestnut. Now there are only a few strands of that color left. The rest has been replaced by a coarse, silver color that makes him a little bit uneasy as he touches it.
"I'm not sure what you want me to say," Mr. Reynard says, exasperated. "I don't know what any of this has to do with what happened. She's not there. I don't know what time she left."
"Okay, please, let's stay calm," I say, being careful to use the words "let's stay calm" rather than "calm down." It puts the job of being calm on all of us in the room, rather than creating an accusation of him being the only one who is getting upset. This seems to work.
I wait for him to collect his thoughts, but then Mrs. Reynard steps up.
"The last time that we saw her was around nine o'clock. She went upstairs to bed. She went around and kissed all of us and said that she was tired. She was going to study a little bit and that's it."
"Okay, good," I say, nodding. "By all of us, you mean you two and your son?"
"Yes, our five-year-old, Dennis. He was still up, unfortunately, or, I don't know. Maybe not."
I nod. I wonder if he knows and, if not, for how long he’ll be able to live in a world in which his sister is still alive.
"That was the last time you heard from her?" I ask.
"No," Mrs. Reynard says, looking down at her pink lacquered nails. The harsh fluorescent light above makes them look a lot less elegant than they are. "I didn't see her again after that. She didn't come down for breakfast, and that's when we knew something was wrong. She's a good girl, she studies hard. I have no idea how she could have left or why or why someone would have taken her."
That's not likely, I want to tell them, but this isn't the right time. The thing is that there is no evidence of...
"What, what is it?" Mrs. Reynard asks. "You don't think anyone took her?" It feels almost like she can read my mind.
"Um," I hesitate.
I know that I shouldn't come right out with this, but I already get the feeling that these people had nothing to do with their daughter's disappearance.
I know that detectives put way too much stress on their feelings and their so-called intuition, but the thing is that most of the time, that's all we have going for us.
Yes, there's DNA, fingerprints, and all of that jazz, but the thing that leads us in one particular direction over another at the very beginning of an investigation is that hunch, the feeling of something being off.
We study people.
We study how they react to things.
We analyze them.
That's why sometimes innocent people get imprisoned.
They don't have the right reactions. They don't say the right things. They don't fit into a nice little box. But in this case, all I see are two parents broken by their daughter’s disappearance.
"We've had officers go through your home and there is no evidence of any sort of breaking and entering," I say.
"What does that mean?" Mr. Reynard barks at me.
"It means that in all likelihood, Courtney took off of her own volition. She left because she wanted to."
They nod just a little bit, trying to process what I'm saying.
"No, no, no. Why would she do that?" Mrs. Reynard says, shaking her head.
Her hair has recently been blown out and I wonder if it has been done by a professional. Her makeup is flawless, even though she has been crying. Just a little bit is smeared around the eyes, but otherwise holding up just perfectly.
"No. She wouldn't have left. She didn't have anywhere to go. Of course, she doesn’t drive yet,” she adds.
"I know. That's what I actually wanted to talk to you about. Is there any chance that she had a friend pick her up, an older friend?"
"Three years older?" Mr. Reynard pipes in. "Is that the kind of girl that you think that she is?"
This takes me by surprise. Now it's my turn to shake my head and furrow my brow.
"I'm not sure what you mean by that."
"Well, what are you saying exactly? Are you saying that our daughter was hanging out with sixteen year olds and just decided to sneak out and go where exactly? Why would she be found in Runyon Canyon Park? She has never been in that part of town."
"I don't have any answers to any of these questions, Mr. Reynard," I say. "That's actually what I want to ask you about.”
This turnaround in the conversation catches me off guard. I don't know why this triggered him so much, why he got so angry at my suggesting that his daughter would hang out with someone with a license. It’s not completely unheard of.
I excuse myself for a moment.
Out in the hallway, I go around the corner and into another room. This is the place where all of my colleagues are gathered watching the interview. Captain Medvil gives me an approving look.
"What do you think?" I ask, walking up to him.
They've all been gathered around two monitors, which are sending out the feed from the interview room. There are closeups on both of their faces along with mine.
"I don't know. I thought that they were just a normal couple, but he did get a little bit upset about you suggesting that she snuck out," Captain Medvil says.
"I know. I don't know what to make of that. I mean, is he just your average controlling father or is there more to it?"
"Why don't you go and press him a little bit more?" he suggests, leaning back against the wall and thinking. No one else has any other suggestions. Forensic evidence is still being processed, but so far no fingerprints have been found.
I come back into the room with a renewed sense of purpose. I bring in two coffees, one for each of them, along with a few packs of M&M's and some candy. Mrs. Reynard says no a little bit too quickly, but keeps eyeing the candy
like it's something that she wants but can't have.
"Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves?" I ask, popping a yellow peanut M&M in my mouth and biting through the thin candy shell to the delicious chocolate inside.
"Like what? What do you want to know?"
"Just what it is you do for a living, sir?”
"I'm an oral surgeon."
I nod, having only a general idea of what that is.
"I do teeth when there are emergencies. Like when there's an accident, somebody gets hit by a car, their mouth gets injured, they need a whole bunch of reconstruction done. That's the kind of thing I do."
"You work where?"
"Cedars-Sinai. Everywhere, actually. Sometimes I fly out to San Francisco, depending on where they need me."
"Okay. And you, Mrs. Reynard?"
"Well, I used to be a dental hygienist, but not anymore. I haven't worked since Courtney was little. I do a lot of volunteering and fundraising.”
"And what were you doing during the day, up until that point?"
"I don't know." She shakes her head. "I went shopping for a bit, had lunch with a few girlfriends, came back, started dinner, your usual things."
"What about your son, Dennis?" I look at my notes to remember his name.
“Did you pick him up from school?”
"No, I have a nanny to do that."
“Okay.” I nod.
"Of course," I want to say quietly to myself, but I'm not here to judge or to make those kind of assumptions.
I ask Mr. Reynard for the same information and he also says that he got back just in time for dinner. The four of them had dinner together around six, hung out in the living room, watched some television, and then Courtney decided to go upstairs to finish her homework and then go to bed.
"So, let me tell you what we know," I say, looking through the notes in my notebook. "The officers who analyzed the scene found that her window to her room on the second floor was closed and locked from the inside."
"Okay.” Mr. Reynard nods.
"What does that mean?" Mrs. Reynard asks.
"Well, it means that if she snuck out on her own, then she did not do it through the window. She just came right downstairs and walked out. It also means that no one took her from her room directly."
"They couldn't have come in through the front door.” Ms. Reynard looks at her husband. "We have the alarm set up."
"So that's what I was going to ask you. Did you have the alarm set up that night?"
"Yes, we do. Every night. My husband is paranoid about that kind of thing."
"What about cameras? Do you have some sort of doorbell camera or anything like that?"
"Yes, we do.” Mr. Reynard nods. "I have it on my phone."
He pulls out his phone and checks the date. He goes back to the night of the incident and clicks through the images.
"How long do these stay here?"
"For a week and then they get saved onto iCloud where I can then delete manually."
"Okay, well, we're going to have to have our team look at them."
"Yes, of course," Mr. Reynard says, but he shows me briefly what happened that night.
Nothing of consequence.
The camera comes on when it detects motion on the front porch and there was none of that after six o'clock in the evening.
"What does this mean?" Mrs. Reynard says when I sit back in the chair and process everything that has happened, or rather not happened.
"Well, it means that we know that she left the house, correct?"
"Of course.” Mrs. Reynard nods.
"Well, she didn't go out the front door and she didn't climb out of her window, because it was locked from the inside."
"Okay."
"Is there any other way that she could have left the house?"
"Maybe the garage."
"Okay, the garage."
"Or the back door or the sliding door through the kitchen," Mrs. Reynard suggests.
"You don't have any cameras pointed there?"
"No. No, we don't."
I nod and admit, "Yeah. Those are all options. So, do you have some sort of sound that comes on inside the house when a door opens?"
Mrs.. Reynard looks from side to side, trying to remember.
"Yes, we do," she says, pointing her finger in my face. "When you open the laundry room going to the garage, it makes a sound like a little ding. The same thing happens when you open the door that goes out of the garage, out to where the cans are."
"What about the sliding door and the kitchen?"
"No.” She shakes her head categorically. "No, that one doesn't make a sound."
"Okay. So, no sound there and no camera there. Courtney would know this as well, right?"
"Yes, but I don't know how this makes any sense," Mr. Reynard says, his words tumbling over one another.
"What do you mean, sir?" I ask.
"Well, why does it even matter which door she went through or what happened? I don't understand the whole point of this conversation. What was she even doing in Runyon Canyon? How did she get there?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out, sir. That's why I need all of these answers. Now we know that she left using that sliding door and she would be the one that knew... So, unless someone took her who knew exactly which door wouldn't have the camera on it and wouldn't make a sound, she's the one who left voluntarily through it."
He nods, but still looks a little bit upset and lost. Suddenly my opinion of him shifts a little.
Of course, he still appears to be the concerned father that he was initially, but all of this drama that he created as a result of the door and recording conversation gives me a funny feeling that's difficult to describe.
"What about her phone? Did she ever leave her phone to go anywhere or was she just like the rest of us, keeping it attached to the hip?"
"What do you mean?" Mrs. Reynard asks.
"You know, how we're all addicted to phones. I know I never go anywhere without mine. What about Courtney?"
"No, she was the same way," she says, hanging her head. "She even took it to the bathroom.”
"That's what I thought." I nod my head. "Well, we're going to have our forensics people go through her phone and her laptop and all of her social media stuff to see if they find anything of use."
"I just don't understand.” Mrs. Reynard shakes her head. "Why would she not have her phone? Why would she leave voluntarily, if what you're saying is right, and leave her phone? I mean, wouldn't she need it? She took it absolutely everywhere."
"I don't have the answer to that question either, but I hope that someday we will."
10
After the preliminary interview is over, I walk back to the room with the screens.
"What do we think?" I ask Captain Medvil and the others.
They look at me and give me a blank stare, a couple of shrugs here and there.
I go through the crime scene in my mind. She was found at one a.m. The medical examiner in the preliminary report, which I had received earlier suggests a time of death all around eleven p.m.
She was found in the middle of the night and it's unclear as to why she left, or with whom, or for what reason. The last time her parents saw her was at nine p.m. She might've left immediately, or she could have waited and someone might have picked her up.
I have one more question. I walk out the door and head toward the interview room. The Reynards are just leaving.
"One more thing,” I say and they both lower their heads cowering a little bit. I guess they thought this part was over. “If Courtney did leave through the sliding glass door in your kitchen, would you be able to know that if you were still downstairs?"
They shrug and look at each other. I realize that I’m not getting through.
"What time did you leave the kitchen or go upstairs or do whatever it is that you were going to do?"
Mrs. Reynard looks at her phone and her watch for some reason as if it would provide her with th
e answer.
"I think we stayed in the kitchen until, what, nine thirty, ten or so, and then we went to the living room to watch some Netflix."
"Okay," I say, shaking my head and tapping my foot on the floor. "From the living room, would you be able to see the sliding door in the kitchen?"
"I don't know. No, I don't think so," Mrs. Reynard says.
I narrow my eyes and I want her to really think about it. She looks at her husband.
He looks perplexed, but not confused.
"No, we wouldn't be able to see her. We were in the living room and that is clear across the dining room on the other side of the house," Mr. Reynard says decisively. "My wife is right. We stayed in the kitchen for a while and so she must not have left then and then we went to the living room around nine forty-five. I'm not sure."
"Okay. Thank you for your time. I'll be in touch."
I walk back down the empty, brightly lit hallway with my hands folded across my chest.
I need a few moments before going inside, a few moments of peace and quiet. I walk past the room with the captain and everyone else on the case and just keep going.
“So, she must have snuck out right around ten at the earliest, but why wouldn't she take her phone? I mean, it's clear why she wouldn't take her laptop, but why not her phone? If someone took her, I don't know. That seems like a far stretch," I mumble to myself, practically speaking out loud just to make sure the thoughts become more concrete in my mind.
No, the most reasonable thing that could have happened is she snuck out, maybe to meet someone or go somewhere and then something happened.
Someone took her.
Unwittingly, my thoughts drift back to Violet.
Why does this girl have to be the same age as her?
Why do these two cases have to be so similar?
No, Violet is not a case, I say to myself, stopping midstep and forcing one foot right next to the other.
I hate wearing heels. They dig into my feet and bind them in the most unnatural way.
I'm not sure what to do. This whole time I've been doing my best not to think about Violet, but it's hard to put her out of my mind completely.
The more time that passes, the more I know that she's probably not gone of her own volition.
