Find Her

by Lisa Gardner

  “Okay, so where’s the magic?” she prodded as Phil began to climb the stairs wheezily beside her.

  “Kristy had a job to help with her living expenses. Part-time cocktail waitress.”

  D.D. paused midstep. “Someplace near Tonic?” Devon Goulding’s bar.

  “Yes. At Hashtag. Just up the street. How much do you want to bet, after hours, Goulding was known to hang out there as well?”

  “Oh, you’re not getting money out of me that easily. You got detectives visiting the place and flashing photos?”

  “As we speak.”

  “Which would connect Devon Goulding with Kristy Kilker, who hasn’t been seen or heard from in . . .”

  “Mom hasn’t gotten a call since June.”

  D.D. resumed climbing. “That’s like five months ago. She really thought her daughter was still hanging out in Italy?”

  “Kristy had planned to travel around on her own, after the program ended in September. The whole ‘me, my backpack, and various youth hostels’ experience. Which, by definition, would mean she wouldn’t have much money left for international calls and apparently the mom herself doesn’t care for e-mail.”

  “So we have Natalie Draga, who left home a year ago, and Kristy Kilker, who’s been MIA for at least five months. Now, we know Natalie Draga actually worked at Tonic. Carol have any luck talking to the manager?”

  “Yeah.” They’d rounded two flights, kept on trucking. “Manager confirmed that Natalie used to be an employee. Nine months ago, however, she stopped coming in. Never called, never showed up to collect her last paycheck. Manager still has it sitting in her personnel file.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. Was Devon working there nine months ago?”

  “Devon Goulding has been an employee in good standing for the past three years. Excellent bartender. Does have a tendency to flirt with customers, fellow employees, et cetera, but what are you gonna do? His looks helped draw in the crowds while deterring overly aggressive riffraff. That he could be a rapist, no way. Manager doesn’t believe it for a second.”

  D.D. arched a brow.

  Phil nodded. “Exactly, especially once Carol started asking about temper tantrums, rage management. Manager’s story changed. As a matter of fact, in the past year or so, Goulding’s behavior has taken a turn for the worst. In fact, he got in a fistfight with another customer several months ago. Manager had to clean it up, Goulding promised it would never happen again.”

  “So Goulding’s roid rage was making itself known,” D.D. guessed. “And he now has ties with at least two missing women.”

  “Yep.”

  They’d finally arrived on their floor. D.D. felt energized. Phil looked like he was about to keel over.

  “So what happened to them?” she asked out loud. “Kristy Kilker, Natalie Draga? Where are they now?”

  Phil shrugged, his look saying what they both already knew. Most likely, they were searching for bodies, and the number of dumping options in Boston . . . Just ask Whitey Bulger. Boston was a criminal’s playground.

  “Techs have seized his vehicle,” Phil said.

  Which made sense. If Devon had been hauling around bodies, he’d need a private means of transport. “And if it has a navigation system . . . ,” D.D. prodded.

  “We should be able to download frequently driven routes. Whatever he did, wherever he took them, chances are he’d want to visit.”

  “Absolutely,” D.D. agreed. “To relive the glory, revel in his own power, all of the above. Maybe . . .” She thought of the pictures of Natalie Draga, so many photos, clearly from a man either in love or worshipping from afar. “Maybe,” she decided, “even to mourn. If Natalie was his first . . . he might not have intended to kill her. Maybe he really did just want to talk, or win her back, assuming they’d once been together. But when that didn’t work . . .”

  Phil shrugged. The motives for murder were many and varied. At this point, it mattered less to the team why Devon had killed the girls and more what he’d done with them afterward. Sometimes detectives worked to put away the bad guy. And sometimes detectives worked to find closure for the families.

  Speaking of which . . .

  D.D. and Phil walked down the corridor to the homicide unit.

  Where D.D. found Rosa Dane waiting for her, Samuel Keynes by her side.

  * * *

  ROSA WAS DEFINITELY DRESSED for comfort—yoga pants, an interesting assortment of tops that seemed to end in an oversize blue flannel shirt. Her son’s shirt? Maybe even her late husband’s, given the frayed cuffs and hem. It definitely contrasted with Keynes’s classically tailored suit.

  Rosa’s face, however, was pure Flora. Or vice versa. The grim set of her lips, the hard line of her jaw. Clear gray eyes that peered straight at D.D. and didn’t flinch. Rosa’s hair was lighter, blond streaked with gray. But otherwise, she could be her daughter’s older sister.

  D.D. thought of what the victim advocate Pam Mason had said about how close Stacey Summers was with her mom. She wondered if Rosa saw the parallels with the relationship she used to have with her own daughter, and whether that helped her or hurt her when it came to mentoring the Summerses.

  “She’s missing.” The woman stated the phrase. Again, eyes clear, jaw set. “When Samuel called”—she nodded her head in his direction—“he didn’t say as much, but the questions he asked. I’ve been asked those questions before.”

  “I suggested she meet with you directly,” Keynes spoke up. “And I assured her you were doing everything in your power to help locate Flora.”

  D.D. resisted the urge for sarcasm. Now was not the time. With one last parting glance at Phil, whose expression was completely sympathetic, she motioned for Rosa and Keynes to follow her to her office.

  “After talking to Samuel,” Rosa continued, falling in step behind D.D., “I tried calling Flora again. Four, five times. She never called back. It’s not like her to go so long without making contact; she knows better.”

  “Would you like some coffee?” D.D. asked.

  “So I drove down. Hoping for the best, because that’s what mothers do. But I knew. The entire way. Driving, driving, driving. I knew she was gone. Then, arriving at her apartment, seeing the police cars . . . I spoke to the Reichters. They told me what happened.”

  D.D. had finally reached her office. Not the largest or grandest in the unit, but perfect for private conversations. She ushered Rosa and Keynes inside, once again offered coffee, water, any kind of refreshment. Keynes shook his head. Rosa simply stared at her. D.D. took the hint.

  “We are actively searching for your daughter,” D.D. stated, making herself at home behind her desk. “We have concerns for her safety.”

  Rosa smiled. It was not a happy expression, and immediately, D.D. recalled Flora sitting in the back of the patrol car just yesterday morning. Survivors, D.D. realized. She was dealing with not one survivor of a traumatic kidnapping seven years ago but two of them. Mother and daughter. And the scars the ordeal had left on both of them.

  And Keynes, standing patiently beside the door as Rosa took a seat. What was his role in all this? Just what kind of victim specialist remained on such familiar terms with a mother and her daughter five years later?

  “I’m here to file a missing persons report. That will help, yes?” Rosa’s tone was even.

  D.D. nodded. She kept her gaze on Samuel, who hadn’t spoken since entering the office and yet he seemed to assume he was part of this meeting. Why?

  “I last saw her around one fifteen yesterday, Saturday,” Rosa said. “You need to know that too.”

  D.D. picked up a pad of paper, made a note. The woman was clearly a pro.

  “She was dressed in her pajamas: blue plaid cotton boxers and a white T-shirt. Last I knew, she was planning on taking a nap, after being . . . out all night. I can go through her clothes and tell you if any
thing else is missing.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “You think she was taken from her bed, then. Kidnapped straight from her apartment.”

  “There were no signs of a struggle,” D.D. said.

  “He ambushed her. Drugged her?”

  “We’re still looking into that.”

  Rosa nodded. Her face remained set. Not calm, nor simmering with the barely suppressed rage that animated Colin Summers’s entire body. Instead, she was preternaturally composed. Like a fellow cop, D.D. thought. A woman who’d been there and done that before.

  The woman gazed up at Keynes. He gave a faint nod, and she reached down for her oversize cloth shoulder bag, digging around until she produced a manila folder. “Recent photo,” she said, placing it on D.D.’s desk. “Written description. Her fingerprints are already on file.”

  D.D. took the file.

  “What about Flora’s cell phone password?” D.D. asked. “Because we’re subpoenaing records of her texts and messages now, but that will take a few days, versus if we could access the phone directly.”

  Rosa rattled off four digits. D.D. wrote them down, then glanced up. “That’s not a birthdate,” she said.

  “No. It’s a random code. More secure. Flora was big on security.” A slight fissure in the woman’s composure. Rosa squared her shoulders, soldiered on. “She shared the code with me, however. More security . . . in case something happened to her.”

  “Were you worried about Flora, Mrs. Dane?”

  “Yes.” No hesitation. No shirking.

  “Do you know what she’d been doing? Even before Devon Goulding?”

  “Yes.”

  D.D. leaned forward, resting her elbows on her desk. “Mrs. Dane, do you think Flora was truly trying to save the world, or do you think it’s possible that Flora has a death wish? That she wasn’t looking to continue her good work, she was looking to end things?”

  Rosa Dane’s facade cracked. A wide, gaping schism that revealed a world of pain and sorrow and resignation. A mother’s aching, powerful, powerless love for her daughter.

  Keynes reached out and gently squeezed her shoulder.

  “She was my happy child,” the woman whispered. “Darwin . . . he was old enough to feel the loss of his father. To know, at an early age, that a phone can ring and nothing will ever be right again. But Flora was just a baby. She didn’t bear those kinds of scars. She loved the farm. Chasing the hens, planting spring seeds, running through the woods, sneaking food to the foxes. She loved everything, everyone. All I ever had to do was open the front door, and she was happy.

  “He put her in a box, you know. He shut her away in a pine coffin, day after day after day. And when he finally let her out, it was under the condition that she call him by her late father’s name.”

  D.D. got up. She had a box of tissues on the filing cabinet behind her. Now, she placed it on her desk in front of Rosa Dane. But the woman remained dry-eyed, stoic. The kind of grief too deep for tears. Keynes’s hand was still on her shoulder. He seemed in no rush to pull it away.

  “Do you have a child?” Rosa asked.

  “A son, Jack. He’s four, currently obsessed with Candy Land.”

  “And if something happened to him?”

  “I’d do whatever it took to get him back,” D.D. agreed.

  “I did. I completed paperwork and designed fliers and personally worked the phones. Then, after that first postcard . . . I wore what the victim advocates told me to wear. I said what the FBI experts told me to say. I went on national television and begged for my daughter’s life.

  “Then I waited, and waited, and waited. Morning shows, nightly cable news. Watched my son return from college and lose himself to Facebook drives, Twitter appeals. Neither one of us had any idea. We’d been a family, just a family of farmers from Maine. Except then my daughter disappeared and for four hundred and seventy-two days . . .”

  “I’m sure the police appreciated your cooperation.”

  “They didn’t.” Her voice was blunt. “The investigators were hopeless. No leads, no clues. First it was all don’t call us, we’ll call you. Then, later, why hadn’t I done this, why didn’t I do that, as if suddenly it was my fault they couldn’t find her. You know who helped us find Flora?”

  D.D. shook her head.

  “Jacob Ness. Him and his damn messages. At a certain point, postcards weren’t enough. He started sending e-mails, even posting on her Facebook page. Escalation, they called it. But he e-mailed one too many times and an FBI agent in Georgia was able to trace the IP address to some Internet café that was part of a truck stop. But if not for that message, Flora would still be lost. We found her not because the police were that smart but because Jacob was that stupid.”

  “Is that what you told Mr. and Mrs. Summers?” D.D. asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know that Colin met with Flora? Did you know that she had agreed to help find Stacey?”

  For the first time, Rosa fell silent. She sat back. Not saying yes, not saying no, but processing.

  “Do you think the same person who took Stacey has now kidnapped Flora?” she asked at last.

  “We don’t know what to think. But it’s certainly a possibility.”

  “I love Flora,” Rosa whispered.

  D.D. didn’t say anything.

  “I will always love her. That’s what mothers do. But I . . . I miss her.”

  D.D. remained silent. Rosa looked up, eyes so much like her daughter’s, searching D.D.’s own.

  “My daughter disappeared March eighteenth. My beautiful, happy child. The girl who loved to climb trees and eat blueberries straight from the bush. I can remember how she looked, the full brilliance of her smile. I can remember how she felt, hugging me as if her whole body depended upon it. The lilt of her voice—’bye, Mom—as she was halfway out the door, always cheerful, never worrying because of course we’d see each other again. My daughter disappeared March eighteenth. Seven years ago. Jacob Ness destroyed her, as surely as if he’d fired a bullet into her brain. And now . . . I love her. I will always love her. But this new Flora, she scares me. And she knows it.”

  “Did Flora ever talk to you about the Stacey Summers case?”

  “Never.”

  “But you can believe she’d take an interest, go looking for Stacey herself.”

  “I’ve seen her bedroom wall, Detective.”

  “Was she getting counseling, therapeutic support?”

  Rosa glanced up at Keynes. He’d finally taken his hand off her shoulder. Now, his arm hung by his side. Was it just D.D., or did he seem smaller somehow? Lonelier?

  “Samuel designed a plan for her reentry,” Rosa said, gaze on the victim specialist. “In the beginning, it included sessions with an expert in trauma. But Flora didn’t care for those meetings. She claimed they didn’t help. Ironically enough, it was her first self-defense class that made the most difference. After having spent so long feeling powerless, she delighted in discovering her own strength. Samuel approved. The best antidote for anxiety is confidence.”

  “But she didn’t stop with a few self-defense classes,” D.D. filled in.

  “She became . . . obsessed. With both safety and security and then other missing persons cases. All the other children out there who still haven’t made it home again.”

  “Do you think she could find Stacey Summers?” D.D. asked.

  “I’m afraid that she could.”

  “Afraid . . .” D.D. didn’t have to consider it too long. “You think there’s more to it than saving others. You think it’s also about punishing the perpetrator.”

  Rosa didn’t look at Keynes this time when she spoke. She stared straight at D.D.

  “After everything Jacob Ness did to her, he died too quick.”

  “What happened when they rescued Flora?
”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to contact FBI agent Kimberly Quincy out of Atlanta. She’s the one who located Jacob and led the raid to rescue my daughter.”

  D.D. glanced at Samuel, who nodded.

  “Were you there?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  “But you know what happened.”

  “Only from hearsay. And as for anything Flora might have told me . . . We struck a deal that first day. She told me her story once. I repeated it for the official record. And now, we both keep her focused on the future.”

  She turned her attention to Rosa. “You’ve mentioned a brother—”

  “Darwin.”

  “Are he and Flora close? Would she have spoken to him about what she was up to?”

  “Darwin is in London,” Rosa said.

  D.D. shrugged. “Which is why there’s texting, e-mail, Skype?”

  She kept her gaze on Rosa, who was clearly hesitating.

  Interestingly enough, it was Keynes who spoke next, except not to D.D., but to Rosa. “Have you told him?”

  “No.”

  “Wait,” D.D. spoke up. “You mean you haven’t told Darwin his sister is missing?”

  Keynes continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Are you going to tell him?”

  Again, that hesitation. “He’s just getting his life back. If you could’ve seen him, what this did to him the first time she disappeared. The helplessness, the hopelessness. He gave up college, halted his entire life. And then she came back. Our own happily-ever-after. Except . . . she wasn’t happy. The mood swings, the night terrors. The feeling that some imposter had taken her body. This wasn’t my daughter, his sister. This couldn’t be our Flora.”

  Rosa looked up. “He’s just now getting himself together. How do I call and spring this on him? Again. So, what, he can drop everything? Again. Feel helpless and hopeless. Again. Even if he did come back, to do what? No postcards this time. At least not yet. In fact, best I can tell, you have no leads at all.”

  “So are you going to tell him?” D.D. repeated Keynes’s question, because she thought it was a good one.