The Secret Friend dm-2

by Chris Mooney

  It worked. For the next three months Emma was well behaved. She acted friendly and kind. She seemed interested in what he had to say. She opened up and shared things about her life – personal, intimate things like her mother's death. They had many long, pleasant conversations. They even watched movies together – When Harry Met Sally and Pretty Woman. To show his appreciation, he brought her to the upstairs dining room for a special romantic dinner and served everything on fine china. Emma had repaid his kindness by hitting him over the head with the dinner plate. She almost made it to the front door.

  In the beginning, he had been dazzled by Emma's beauty, had fallen under her spell and was willing to do anything in the world to make her love him – he had gone so far as to sneak back inside Emma's home to retrieve a special necklace. He had given it to Emma as a surprise and she still refused to love him and Mary told him it was time to send Emma away.

  The first week, Judith Chen hadn't screamed or yelled; that came later. When he offered to buy her clothes, any clothes she wanted, she had said yes and thanked him. She had modelled the clothes for him, said how nice they were, and thanked him. He bought her the books she wanted, DVDs and magazines; he cooked her favourite meals and always she thanked him.

  With her soft voice and disarming manner, Judith had seductively manoeuvred him into walks outside to get fresh air. He always took her out late at night, when the rest of the world was asleep. Blindfolded, she sat in the passenger seat and he drove her a mile away, to an isolated section of woods, and walked with her. She never complained about the gag or the handcuffs. When he returned Judith to her room, she thanked him, she always thanked him.

  The night she tried to escape, they were out for one of their lovely walks. This time he hadn't gagged her but her wrists were cuffed. On the way back to the car, she asked if she could kiss him. She leaned forward, smiling, and drove her knee into his crotch.

  The pain was like a white-hot supernova; it exploded across his vision and the next thing he knew he was down on the ground among the dry pine needles gasping for air. She kicked him in the stomach and kicked him in the head once, twice, three times. Then she was sitting on the ground and, like an acrobat, moving her cuffed wrists across the back of her legs and over her feet. She grabbed the car keys from his coat pocket and ran through the woods.

  Bleeding and dizzy, he managed to get to his feet and run after her. Mary told him to relax – everything would be fine, she said, and Mary was right; she was always right.

  Walter caught up to Judith just as she reached the car. He pulled her away from the door and Judith screamed and he shoved her face against the hood and she kept screaming and again he smashed her face against the hood and windshield until Mary told him to stop.

  Judith didn't talk after that. Then she got sick and she… she had to leave.

  Why wouldn't Hannah speak to him?

  This morning, when he delivered breakfast, he had asked her if there was anything she would like: a book, movie, a CD by her favourite band – anything, just name it. Hannah didn't answer.

  Walter came back an hour later and knocked on the door. She didn't answer. He collected the dishes from the sliding tray and carried them upstairs. He worked out extra hard and took a long shower.

  He brought her lunch and knocked. When Hannah didn't answer, he let himself in. She was sitting in the leather chair again.

  Unable to stand the silence any more, Walter decided to tell Hannah about the accident, how he had woken up in bed with his skin and hair on fire and Momma already collapsed on the burning bed. He stressed how he didn't blame Momma for hurting him. Momma was angry because Daddy had left them when Walter was still in her belly and Momma had to work two jobs to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Momma talked about how angry she was at God for having him take away her dreams and sticking her with a bad child – and he had been bad, oh yes, he had done bad things to get Momma's attention. He didn't tell Hannah about the time he was caught choking the little girl. It was an accident. All he wanted was to hug her. She was so pretty and she smelled so good.

  Walter told Hannah how he had learned, through patience and prayer, lots of prayer, to forgive Momma even after all the terrible things she did to him, like the time she dunked his hand in a pot of boiling water. He still loved her now, even though Momma was gone and in heaven.

  And now it was time for Hannah to forgive him. It was time to move forward. It was time for Hannah to be thankful for all the wonderful blessings in her life.

  As a show of good will, Walter gave her a present – a sheet of beautiful Crane stationery and a matching envelope. He handed her a pen and told her to write a letter to her parents. He promised to mail it. Again he said he was sorry for hurting her. It was an accident. Forgive me, Hannah. Please.

  Hannah didn't answer.

  Walter gripped the edge of the kitchen counter. He had opened up to Hannah, shared his most painful secrets, and she hadn't said one word, just sat in the damn chair, waiting for him to leave. Her silence mocked him. He felt like slapping her right then but he didn't. Walter was proud of his self-control. He washed the dishes and shut off the lights in the kitchen.

  For the next two hours he worked on a client's website. Then he hit the weights until his muscles were depleted.

  Walter felt lighter, much better. He sat down with the wedding album.

  The first picture was a wonderful black-and-white photograph of Hannah dressed in a stunning Vera Wang wedding gown. Walter wore a classic black tux. They were holding hands. The people sitting in the pews were smiling, admiring them. Everyone was clapping.

  Here was another picture of them on their honeymoon in Aruba. Hannah stood on a beach of white sand, wearing a breathtaking black bikini that barely covered her tanned body. Her hair was wet, smelling of the ocean, and she was smiling and happy as she looked down on him, her husband, lying on a towel under the bright, hot sun, his skin perfectly tanned and sculpted with muscle, not a blemish or scar anywhere.

  Walter was very good with computers. Using Photoshop, he had transferred the digital pictures he had taken of Hannah walking to her job and class and pasted her face on the various photographs he had found on the internet. The results were spectacular.

  His favourite picture was the last one – Hannah holding their newborn son.

  65

  For the next three days, Darby searched through Hannah Givens' cramped bedroom cluttered with notebooks and textbooks piled on a thrift-store desk. She hunted through Hannah's receipts, pictures and scraps of paper jumbled with notes and 'to-do' lists. She examined Hannah's Day Runner and interviewed Hannah's two roommates, friends, classmates and professors, and her parents, who had flown into Boston and were staying in Hannah's apartment.

  Three long days and this was all Darby knew: Hannah Givens was last seen leaving her shift at Downtown Crossing's Kingston Deli on the day of the snowstorm. The bus driver for that route confirmed Hannah Givens never got on the bus. A canvas of local businesses owners, as well as the extensive media coverage, had failed to bring forth any witnesses.

  Given the amount of media attention, the taped pleas from the parents and the toll-free number set up by Commissioner Chadzynski playing in heavy rotation on all the news cycles, some people believed Hannah's abductor might let her go. Boston PD had traps on all the phone lines. As of this morning, they had logged thirty-eight calls, all cranks.

  CNN's Nancy Grace, ringleader for the freak media circus, had stirred up the trash journalists, and they had adopted the college girl's plight with a fevered, Anna Nicole-like intensity. Hannah's high-school graduation picture screamed from the supermarket tabloids, her story the lead item on shows like Inside Edition. Darby wondered if the national exposure would scare Hannah's abductor, prompt him to panic and kill her.

  The twenty-six-year-old mystery of what had happened to Jennifer Sanders was, at the moment, only regulated to the New England news outlets. Tina Sanders refused to speak to the police. H
er lawyer, Marshall Grant, an ambulance-chaser with a bad toupee who ran successful TV commercials during daytime soap operas promoting his firm's extensive legal services, had swooped in and somehow convinced Sanders to allow him to take up her case.

  Grant had no problem speaking to the press. The exposure landed him an interview with Larry King.

  'The police have officially identified a set of remains belonging to Jennifer Sanders but refuse to tell us where she was found for reasons we don't understand,' Grant said. 'We do, however, have reason to believe Jennifer's murder might be connected to a man named Samuel Dingle, who was the prime suspect in the strangulations of two Saugus women in 1982. Unfortunately, Larry, one of the few people who can provide us with clues, Detective Bryson, was murdered by a former FBI profiler named Malcolm Fletcher.'

  Tim Bryson's 'alleged' involvement in disposing of the belt wasn't mentioned or hinted at in any newspaper articles or on TV. Darby wondered if Chadzynski was negotiating with Tina Sanders' lawyer to keep the matter quiet. Chadzynski and her PR machine had, at least for the moment, prevented information about Sinclair from being leaked to the press.

  The morning after Bryson's death, Chadzynski held a press conference and released Malcolm Fletcher's name to the media. The former profiler, Chadzynski said, was wanted in connection with the murder of Detective Timothy Bryson, who was thrown from the roof of a popular Boston nightclub. Fletcher's picture was printed on the front pages of almost every major newspaper along with the picture from the FBI website. Chadzynski kept stressing the $1 million reward the federal government was offering for information leading to the arrest or capture of the former profiler.

  Chadzynski didn't mention Fletcher's visit to Emma Hale's home, his conversations with Tina Sanders or the DVD he had mailed to Jonathan Hale.

  Darby had processed the mailer. It contained a single fingerprint which matched Malcolm Fletcher's; AFIS identified the print on Wednesday night. The FBI, she was sure, would be arriving in Boston any day now.

  Darby hadn't spoken to Jonathan Hale. According to his lawyer, Hale was out of town on business and unavailable for comment.

  Sam Dingle's whereabouts were still unknown, but this morning's Boston Globe contained a quote from his sister Lorna, who was divorced from her third husband and living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana: 'The last time I saw my brother was when he came home to collect his share of my parents' estate back in 1984. He said he was living somewhere in Texas. That was the last time I spoke to him. I don't know where he is, I have no idea what he's doing. I haven't heard a word from him in decades. For all I know, he's dead.'

  Darby sat on Hannah Givens' sagging mattress. She rubbed the dryness from her eyes and, taking a deep breath, focused her attention on the student's bedroom.

  Hannah had covered up the cracks in the pink wall with framed pictures of her parents, the family Labrador and her friends back in Iowa. Milk crates doubling as shelves held CDs and paperback books with missing covers. An old radio/cassette Walkman sat on a denim beanbag chair. The closet was stuffed with clothes from Old Navy and American Eagle Outfitters.

  Hannah Givens had been missing for a week. Had her abductor panicked and killed her? Was Hannah's body floating somewhere along the bottom of the Charles? The thought left a cold, hollow pocket in the pit of Darby's stomach.

  Three victims. Two were dead and one, Hannah Givens, was possibly still alive. What did all three women have in common? They were young women enrolled in Boston colleges. That was the common trait these three women shared.

  Tim Bryson had investigated the college admissions angle. Darby, along with a team of detectives, had revisited it, checking to see if the three women might have possibly applied to the same school at one point in time. When the search came up empty, she tried to find a common point where all three women might have intersected – a bar, a student group, anything. So far, she had come up empty handed.

  The first victim, Emma Hale, rich and white and extremely attractive, grew up in Weston and went to Harvard. The second victim, Judith Chen, middle-class and Asian, was plain and frumpy, a tiny, almost frail young woman born and raised in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. She came to Boston's Suffolk University to take advantage of their generous financial-aid package.

  Now here was Hannah Givens, another college student, the only child of a lower-middle-class farming family from Iowa, a big-boned girl with plain-Jane looks and a kamikaze attitude toward her studies, her free time, what little of it she had, spent working at either the deli or Northeastern's campus library.

  Why did the killer focus on Boston colleges? Was he a student? Did he pose as a student?

  Darby opened her backpack, grabbed the files and flipped through the pictures of all three college students, trying to see them the way their killer did – possessing something he needed. Why did you keep them for so long only to turn around and kill them?

  Three college women, at least one of whom, Emma Hale, seemed to be tied to Malcolm Fletcher, a former FBI profiler who had been on the run for twenty-five years only to resurface – again in Boston – inside Emma Hale's home. Was Jonathan Hale using Fletcher to hunt down his daughter's killer?

  Like Tim Bryson, Jonathan Hale was a father crippled by grief. Unlike Bryson, Hale was a powerful, wealthy man. If Fletcher had approached Hale with either information about the man who had killed his daughter or a plan to find him, wouldn't Hale jump at the opportunity? And why would Fletcher come out of hiding to help a grieving father find his daughter's killer?

  Maybe Fletcher hadn't approached Hale. Maybe Fletcher's agenda was simply to expose Tim Bryson's sins. Fletcher had made a public spectacle of Bryson's death, throwing him off the roof of a crowded nightclub with a plastic bag holding Jennifer Sanders' licence and credit cards. Fletcher had also contacted Tina Sanders. He put Tim Bryson on the phone and Bryson confessed to throwing out evidence that would have implicated Samuel Dingle in the rape and murder of two women from Saugus.

  And where was Sam Dingle? Had he moved back east? Was he responsible for the deaths of Emma Hale and Judith Chen? Did he now have Hannah? His name was all over the news. Had he killed Givens, dumped her body in the river and disappeared?

  Everything pointed back to Sam Dingle. It seemed too neat, too easy.

  Bryson had mentioned that Fletcher was trying to throw them off the scent. Maybe Bryson said it to try to protect his ass. Maybe Bryson was telling the truth.

  What if Fletcher's real agenda was to shift the focus of the police away from the real killer so he could find him first? According to Chadzynski's FBI contact, Malcolm Fletcher was a one-man judge, jury and executioner. If Sam Dingle was, in fact, the man who had killed Hale and Chen, Darby doubted Fletcher would leave town without finding him.

  Darby's cell vibrated. The caller was Christina Chadzynski.

  66

  'It seems Malcolm Fletcher mailed CDs containing a recording of Tim Bryson's conversation with Tina Sanders to every reporter in the city,' Chadzynski said. 'I'm sure they'll be playing it over the news tonight.'

  'Have you heard a copy?' Darby asked.

  'Not yet. I'm afraid I have more bad news. A reporter for the Herald knows Sanders' remains were found inside Sinclair. The reporter is amenable to stalling the story in exchange for an exclusive interview with you after you've solved the case.'

  Darby leaned back against the wall. Stuffed animals from Hannah's childhood were arranged around the pillows and cheap comforter.

  'I'm not suggesting you do it,' Chadzynski said. 'It's only a matter of time before other reporters find out. I'll try and stall him as long as I can.'

  'I spoke with Bill Jordan. He's brought in some men with SWAT experience. When our man shows up at the chapel, Jordan and his men will take him down.'

  'Do you really think this person is going to show up?'

  'I do. At some point, he will return. The statue of the Virgin Mary I found was clean – remember the bucket of water and towels I found? That statue and the chape
l hold a special connection for this person. He could go to any church but he specifically goes to this chapel that's buried under the ground. It's not easy to find. He must have found a special route.'

  'Darby, I've been on the phone with the federal task force assigned to track down Malcolm Fletcher. The task force coordinator is a man named Mike Abrams. He met Fletcher while he was working the Sandman case. Abrams was a site profiler for the Boston office. He suspects Fletcher is long gone, but Abrams still wants to speak to us. They're scheduled to arrive at Boston sometime tomorrow afternoon. His people want to look at the DVD Fletcher sent to Hale as well as the audio tape you found.'

  'Maybe you should have him talk to Jonathan Hale while he's here.'

  'I'm sure they'll want to talk to him. Have you read Bryson's toxicology report?'

  'I didn't know it was available.'

  'I received a copy this morning. Tim was injected with GHB and Ketamine. If he was alive, his drug-induced confession would be thrown out. It wouldn't have a leg to stand on during trial.'

  Maybe that's why Fletcher threw him off the roof, Darby thought.

  'Have you made any progress with Sam Dingle?' Chadzynski asked.

  'The address Fletcher left on the sign-in sheet at the club and the registration for his Jaguar, which still hasn't been found – all of it points back to the house where Sam Dingle grew up. It's like Fletcher's shoving it in our faces.'

  'I agree. Where do you think he is?'

  'Who knows? If you're serious about finding him, you need to put people on Hale.'

  'Malcolm Fletcher is a loner. He doesn't work for anyone.'

  'The locks for Emma Hale's doors weren't picked. He didn't force his way in there.'

  'Darby -'

  'At least put Hale under surveillance.'

  'I'm not going to do that.'

  'Why? Because he's rich?'

  'Because there is no evidence to suggest that Fletcher is working for or is in collusion with Jonathan Hale,' Chadzynski said. 'For God's sake, we have a security tape showing the man sneaking inside the parking garage.'