Runaway Girls

by Skylar Finn

  Unlike many misconceptions introduced by the media, the child did not have to be taken across state lines, nor did there need to be a ransom demand for the FBI to get involved. The Lindbergh Law in 1932 had given us the jurisdiction to investigate any and all disappearances and kidnappings of children under mysterious circumstances immediately. I was brought in to assist CARD based on my knowledge of the area. I assumed Harper had worked a similar case during his time in BAU-2.

  Harper parked along the curb in front of the First United Methodist Church. I could see the river at the end of the block, just past the fire station. It was easy to orient oneself here because of it.

  The back room of the church was bustling. Agents crossed paths in a highly synchronized ballet of motion and energy. There was a large board set up at the back of the room with a map of the town, surrounded by several smaller maps of the places Brittany had frequented—Magnolia High School, the Dairy Bar, her house.

  A perimeter of the area she was likely in had been highlighted, assuming she had run away on foot. If she’d been taken in a car, there were any number of possibilities as to how far she might have gone—or she might be held locally. The possibilities were still numerous at this point, and we had our work cut out for us in narrowing them down.

  Harper got a stale doughnut and some questionable-looking coffee from a folding table along the wall. I eyed it warily. It didn’t look enough like coffee to indulge, even by my desperate standards. I didn’t have long to consider the question when we were approached by a statuesque woman who reminded me of an Egyptian hieroglyph—austere, dignified, with jet black hair, hazel eyes, and a purposeful stride.

  “Agents Harper and St. Clair? I’m Agent Brown,” she said, crossing the room in a few steps. She was extraordinarily tall. Her legs were half the size of my entire body. She towered over Harper, who was not a short man. “Have you been briefed?”

  “Not since St. Clair arrived,” said Harper. “We just got back from talking to Cynthia Hayes.”

  Agent Brown grimaced. “My condolences,” she said. “At any rate, we’ve looked into all area registered sex offenders. All of them are presently accounted for. None of them had any connection or contact with the girl, at least none that we’ve been able to determine. Right now, we’re zeroing in on recent online contact of Brittany’s: a Pete Moss, so-called. Friends and classmates haven’t been able to provide an identity, so we’re considering the possibility that it might be a catfish—in this case, an online predator specifically targeting a young girl like Brittany. Her parents were unable to locate her phone, and the GPS is off. We found a record of their conversations on her computer.”

  “Do you have a transcription?” asked Harper.

  “We’ll provide you with full transcriptions of their conversations,” Brown said. “Agent Manning will assist you with that. In the meantime, I’d like you to pay a visit to the stepfather, Daniel Hayes. I’d like a profile on him by the end of today. He’s been elusive so far, in terms of talking with authorities—he’s spoken to local police once since Brittany’s disappearance, and that’s it.”

  “Once?” I asked, startled. “Where is he?”

  “He co-owns a construction company across the river. He claims to have been working on-site in a place with poor reception. He’s frequently unavailable and often someplace inaccessible in the hills. Forget getting ahold of him by phone. He should be in the office now, according to the information provided to us by Mrs. Hayes. If you get there quickly, you should be able to ambush him.”

  “Address?”

  Agent Brown took Harper’s phone and quickly typed it in. “His inaccessibility could be his way of dealing with the situation—by not dealing with it—or it could be a sign of something more sinister. Report back here as soon as you get done with him.”

  Within minutes, we were back in the car, tootling down the narrow streets towards the bridge. I had relented and gotten not only several stale doughnuts but a cup of the questionable-looking coffee, which tasted just as bad as it looked.

  “Think he’s just avoiding the situation?” asked Harper.

  “I doubt that very much,” I said. “But I’m told that I’m a cynic.”

  The wind whipped over the river, and water churned at the dam. I looked at the address in Harper’s phone, mounted to the dash. “Katy Lipman?” I said with surprise. “I know that name.”

  Harper pulled off the ramp after we crossed the bridge and into the gas station directly across the exit ramp. “Who’s Katy Lipman?” he asked. “Tell me now before we go in there. The address is about five seconds away, like everything else around here.”

  “Katy Lipman tried to convince my mother to sell my grandparents’ house and land to her a few years back,” I said. “It’s right up the road from here, on the opposite end of the lane from this address. The whole lane belonged to our family when my mom was a kid. My grandparents built their house first—my grandfather was a carpenter. My Uncle Pig—my grandfather’s brother—lived in the house next door, and my Great-grandma Corey owned the house next door. Uncle Pig and my grandpa sold Corey’s house to another WWII vet they knew from town, and he ended up selling that land to Katy Lipman, who started the construction company. Our entire family was furious. It was a quiet place, and now trucks rumble down the lane from dawn to dusk. It’s a huge eyesore.”

  “This is the company that Daniel Hayes co-owns?”

  “Presumably,” I said. “I’ve never heard of him. Katy Lipman’s been trying to get her hands on the rest of the land ever since. The other two houses have renters in them now, but my mom and her cousins refuse to sell. They own the land behind both properties, and Katy Lipman wants to get her mitts on them so she can lease them to the oil companies for fracking. Not to mention probably bulldozing everything and expanding her construction business. Their construction business.”

  “Wow, I had no idea there was so much drama here,” said Harper. “Does she know who you are?”

  “I’ve never met her,” I said. “I highly doubt she knows what I look like. She might recognize my last name; she might not.”

  He put the car into drive. “I’ll take care of it.”

  We went up the road and turned right onto the lane. It was surreal, seeing the place I had spent so many summers in my childhood. It was stranger to see it without my grandparents there to make it home.

  The two black metal Ts that formed the clothesline in the side yard were empty, and there was no seasonal flag on the front porch. The current renters had taken down the swing in the tree in the front yard and the porch swing in the carport. I hated the idea of strangers in my family’s house, even though I had not even personally been there for years. I knew my mother felt the same way.

  If we disliked the oddity of knowing strangers were tramping around in my grandparents’ and uncle’s houses, it was nothing compared to the eyesore at the end of the lane. Katy Lipman had built a grotesque modern log cabin to house her construction company, and it couldn’t have been more out of place. I wanted to steal one of her bulldozers and mow it down.

  Harper parked out front. There was a brand-new Jeep Wrangler parked next to an older Jeep Sahara. I wondered if one of them belonged to the elusive Daniel Hayes.

  We got out of the car. “Let me handle the introductions,” he addressed me out of the side of his mouth as the front door opened.

  A woman in her forties in a down vest and hiking boots watched us curiously as we approached. Katy Lipman, I was sure. My mother had described her with contempt often enough that I had a pretty solid visual of her in my mind’s eye.

  “Katy Lipman? I’m Agent Harper, and this is Agent Sinclair.” It sounded almost like he’d said St. Clair, but not quite. He had definitely said, Sinclair. It was an easily explained misunderstanding if it came up later on. “Do you have a minute to speak with us?” It was more of a formality, the question. No one said no to the FBI.

  “Is this about the missing girl?” she asked. Her eyes mov
ed over me curiously but gave no sign of recognition. I felt relieved. “Brittany?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is,” said Harper as I wondered what other reason Katy Lipman thought the FBI might visit her. “Is Daniel Hayes here as well, by any chance?”

  “Daniel?” Her eyes drifted back to the cabin. “He was just here. I’ll have to check. I think so. He dips in and out so quickly it’s hard to say at any given moment whether he’s here or not.” She laughed awkwardly. Nervously, I thought.

  “Is one of those his?” I asked, raising an eyebrow and nodding at the Jeeps out front.

  She flushed. “Well, I mean, yes. But sometimes he takes one of the trucks. There’s one gone now. But sometimes, so does Caesar. He’s one of our foremen. Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee while I check?”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Harper nodded as she ushered us into a small waiting area with chairs against the wall and a few automotive and hunting magazines strewn across the end tables. I was relieved to see a Keurig on the desk across the room.

  Katy Lipman disappeared through the open doorway behind the desk, and I availed myself of the Keurig. “Green Mountain or Doughnut Shop?” I asked Harper.

  “I just had coffee,” he reminded me.

  “I don’t know what the CARD team is drinking, but it’s definitely not coffee,” I said. “Doughnut Shop it is.”

  When someone crossed the threshold of the open doorway again, it wasn’t Katy Lipman. Instead, it was a tall, disheveled-looking man whose pale-blond hair stuck up, askew, around the edges of his John Deere cap. He, too, wore a navy down vest over a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt and duck boots covered in mud.

  “Daniel Hayes,” he said, striding across the room and shaking first Harper’s hand, then my own. “Katy tells me you wanted to speak with me?”

  “We would,” said Harper. “And with her, if she has the time.” Again, it was more of a formality. Even if she didn’t, she would make the time—whether she liked it or not.

  “She just ran out with Caesar to a site,” he said regretfully. “Just right quick, they’ll be back in a few—it was a bit of an emergency, to be honest with you. Plumbing thing.”

  “Of course,” said Harper politely. “I hear you’re a hard guy to get ahold of.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” Hayes lifted his hat and scratched his head absently, revealing a bald pink patch in the middle of his scalp. “Maybe a bit. I’m just on site quite a lot here. I’ve been working with the police as much as I can to try and get Katy back home safely.”

  “Katy?” I stared at him.

  “What?” He looked at me, confused.

  “You said you were trying to get Katy home safely,” I said.

  He blushed. “Brittany. I meant Brittany, obviously. We were just talking about Katy, so I was thinking about her, and I got confused. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” said Harper. “We understand.”

  It actually wasn’t that odd; a lot of people got nervous and went to pieces as soon as they started talking to law enforcement, let alone the FBI—perfectly innocent people started acting guilty, second-guessing everything they said, imagining how it looked and sounded to us. I’d be more suspicious if he were perfectly composed, the way his wife had been. Of course, there was a second group of people who also acted incredibly guilty under questioning: the guilty ones.

  “Do you remember the night Brittany went missing?” I asked.

  “Well, it was two nights ago, so on Tuesday—I was in bed with my wife, sound asleep. I remember seeing Brittany when I got home from work and at dinner. Then she went upstairs to do homework.”

  “What time was that?”

  “That would have been around seven. She typically stays in her room, doing homework and talking to her friends online, then goes to bed. She has a strict lights-out at eleven.” It was one I highly doubted Brittany abided by. “So dinner would have been the last time I saw her.”

  “Do you and your wife typically stop by Brittany’s room to say goodnight?”

  “Not typically. I respect her privacy. Teenage girls, you know? Her mom sometimes goes in to say goodnight—and check to make sure she’s sleeping—and she gets annoyed, but she’s annoyed by most of what Cynthia does lately. It doesn’t stop her from doing it. They’re always sniping at each other these days.”

  “What do they fight about?” Harper asked.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call them fights. Nothing like that. Just typical stuff: Brittany wanting to wear more makeup and go out every weekend, and Cynthia putting her foot down.”

  “You don’t feel the need to put your foot down?” I asked.

  He flushed, nervous again. “I mean, I intervene when need be. I think kids deserve a little bit of freedom. And a little bit more credit than we normally give ’em, especially girls. Plus, I’m usually working. But Cynthia is very strict. Brittany never minded it when she was little, but now that she’s getting just a little bit older, they’ve really started butting heads.”

  “How old was Brittany when you and Cynthia got married?” Harper asked.

  “She was seven. We’ve always got along well, but she was old enough that she knew her dad and remembered him, so I was never Dad. Always Daniel.” He smiled ruefully. “Cynthia tried to get her to call me Dad at first, but Brittany threw a fit, and she finally gave up.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No, not really. I know some kids that will sooner light their step folks on fire, but Brittany’s never been like that. Always polite, real sweet kid. Almost too polite: like I’m more the butler than a dad, but nothing wrong with that.” He laughed. “I’d rather she was respectful toward me than acting out.”

  “Did you know of any friends Brittany had? New ones? Maybe someone older, or male? Or both?”

  He frowned. “Brittany didn’t have any boyfriends. Cynthia would have sooner painted all the windows shut and locked her in her bedroom before that happened. She wasn’t allowed to date. She just has that one friend, the one with the brown hair. And that new one, the blonde girl.”

  Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. Her friends, and therefore her inner life—the only one that mattered to her—were so inconsequential to him that he couldn’t even be bothered to remember her friends’ names. It was a typical dad move (my own father had referred to my best friend throughout four years of high school as “the girl with the blue car”), and it often made them virtually useless in an investigation. Vague, nonspecific. Confused.

  Assuming, that was, that his confusion wasn’t merely an act. I thought of his odd Freudian slip earlier, identifying his business partner rather than his daughter. His business partner, whom, for all intents and purposes, had essentially given us the slip when she found out we wanted to speak with her.

  “Were you aware that Brittany was talking to someone online? A Pete Moss?” I said.

  “We monitor that stuff pretty well,” he said. “I just don’t know about that.”

  I thought of the sheaf of transcriptions in the car that stated otherwise. He was like a politician who believed his own lies.

  “Is there anything else you remember that you could tell us? Anything that might indicate a change in Brittany’s behavior before she disappeared?” Harper asked.

  “No, everything seemed perfectly normal to me.” He looked baffled. “She went to her dance team practice, did a car wash fundraiser for it with her teammates and her mom, went to school. This has all just happened out of the blue.”

  “Well, we’re doing everything in our power to locate her as quickly as possible,” said Harper. He reached into his wallet and handed Daniel Hayes his card.

  I didn’t offer my own. I didn’t want my real last name hanging out on Katy Lipman’s desk.

  “If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  “Katy should just about be back here soon, from checking on the wiring and all,” Hayes said. “If you guys had any questions for her.”

>   “I thought you said it was the plumbing?” I inquired.

  “What?” He looked startled.

  “The emergency at the site,” I said. “You said it was the plumbing.”

  “Plumbing and wiring,” he clarified. “You know how it is. When it rains, it pours.”

  I smiled thinly. “Indeed, it does, Mr. Hayes. Indeed it does.”

  “Anyone that given to spouting clichés is clearly hiding something,” I said when we got back into the car. Unsurprisingly, Katy Lipman had failed to materialize by the conclusion of our interview.

  “They’re definitely up to something, all right,” said Harper. “If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that.”

  6

  To Catch a Predator

  After we gave our briefing to Agent Brown, we looked for a quiet place to read over the Pete Moss transcriptions given to us by Agent Manning. There was a Mexican restaurant on the river next door to the church, which seemed like as good a place as any. Real estate was at something of a premium in the back room of the church amidst the flurry of CARD team members, and I was the type of person who needed absolute peace and quiet to concentrate.

  We asked for a table outside on the deck at Dos Hermanos, all but ensuring we would be alone with no one to overhear or interrupt. It was still cold enough that no one would be joining us outside. Harper ordered two Coronas and a basket of chips while we looked over the menu.

  “What do you think Lipman and Hayes are up to?” Harper asked as I pulled out the ominous manila folder that held Brittany’s interactions with the mysterious Pete Moss.