Tears welled in my eyes as I kissed Anita and Naomi. Then I went around, picked up Ali, and hugged my boy like he was life itself.
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TO BE HONEST, despite the verdict, I was feeling mixed emotions sitting in a chair outside Chief Michaels’s office the following Monday.
My arrest, the trial, and even the verdict had forced me to do a lot of reevaluating about my priorities and my purpose in life.
I had always seen homicide investigation as a way to represent the slain and help the friends and family of the victims find not only closure, but justice. I think of it as an honorable profession, one that, until I was arrested, gave me a great degree of fulfillment.
But turning back to clinical psychology and counseling, my first loves, had reminded me why I enjoyed that work so much. Ultimately, my job was to help people trying to understand and improve themselves and their lives. Being a psychotherapist was as noble a calling as being a homicide detective, and fulfilling in an entirely different way. And yet here I was, ready to put an end to the counselor part of me again.
“Dr. Cross?” Michaels’s secretary said. “He’ll see you now.”
I went into the chief ’s office. Crossing the room to his desk, I watched Metro’s leader closely, trying to read his body language. The chief had played it political during the months I’d spent on suspension pending trial. In private, he’d expressed support. In public, he’d covered his ass.
So it was a bittersweet experience when Michaels summoned his politician’s smile, reached out his hand, and said, “I knew you’d be back, Alex. What would Metro do without you?”
I swallowed whatever uncomfortable feelings I’d had and thanked him for reinstating me on the Major Case Unit. In the squad room, Bree ended Sampson’s suffering by reassigning Detective Ainsley Fox to another partner and putting the two of us back together. That was good, really good, maybe even better than the verdict. No bittersweet feelings at all.
I spent the rest of that first day filling out forms that sought back pay in light of the verdict and doing a pile of other administrative nonsense. But on Tuesday, Sampson and I were back on the job, with the missing blondes the first order of business. We started early, leaving DC long before dawn and driving north.
Four and a half hours later, we left Interstate 180 for State Route 220 toward Muncy Valley, Sonestown, and Laporte, Pennsylvania. It was timber country. The road was narrow, winding, and flanked on both sides by state game lands and big leafless forest tracts.
We got coffee in Laporte before stopping in at the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office to talk with Detective Everett Morse, who was working with the Pennsylvania State Police on the murder of twelve-year-old Timmy Walker Jr. and the disappearance of Ginny Krauss and Alison Dane.
Morse was collegial enough and showed us the murder book, but it had been months since Ginny and Alison had disappeared and Timmy’s body had been found. The trail had gone cold. Morse told us not to bother trying to talk to the girls’ parents. They’d barely spoken with Morse or the state police.
When we stopped at the Pennsylvania State Police barracks on the north side of Laporte, Investigator Nina Ford largely confirmed Morse’s take on the case. She allowed us to look through her files as well, and, like Morse, discouraged us from trying to talk to the missing girls’ parents.
“What about Timmy’s parents?” Sampson asked.
“Big T’s out of the picture,” Detective Ford said. “Lenore’s at the house. You could stop at Worlds End State Park, where Timmy’s body was found. By the time you have a look around and get to Hillsgrove, Lenore should be up and almost coherent.”
From GPS coordinates Ford gave us, we were able to pinpoint the exact location where Timmy Walker’s corpse had been discovered—roughly a mile east of the parking lot at Worlds End State Park and several miles from where the missing girls’ car was found.
But for an older model white Chevy pickup truck with a toolbox in the back and decals on the window from the National Wild Turkey Federation, the park’s lot was deserted when we pulled in twenty minutes later.
A cold, raw wind blew while we hiked the trail and followed the GPS navigator to the rugged ground where a hiker had come across Timmy’s arm sticking out from under a pile of branches and leaves.
“That’s a workout, getting up here,” Sampson said, chest heaving. “Trail was steep.”
I nodded, my heart still hammering. “Timmy weighed ninety-two pounds, so it was someone very strong.”
“And someone who knew how to get to this particular stretch of nowhere,” Sampson said about two seconds before the shooting started.
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BOOM! CA-CHING. BOOM!
Sampson and I whipped around and dived for cover behind a downed log.
Boom!
“Where the hell is he?” Sampson hissed.
Hearing popping noises, clucking, and branches snapping, I peeked up over the log and saw a flock of wild turkeys racing through the woods. Up the hill, I spotted movement. I grabbed my binoculars, focused them, and saw a teenage girl in camouflage scrambling down the steep hillside, a man carrying two shotguns right behind her.
“I got him, Dad!” I heard her yell and she threw her hands up in the air. “We both did!”
We stood and waved at the hunters as they got busy with the two dead turkeys. It wasn’t until we were close that they noticed us.
The father stood, glanced at the shotguns propped up against a tree. I guess it wasn’t often he saw two men wearing coats and ties in the turkey woods.
We both showed our badges. He got stiffer. “This was a clean hunt.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “We’re here looking into the death of Timmy Walker.”
He softened. “That’s a tragedy. My Ellie here went to school with him. I’m Howard Young, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Young,” I said. I shook his hand and then looked at his daughter. “Tell us about Timmy.”
Ellie played with a camouflage scarf around her neck and her expression soured. “TW-Two was nice growing up, but then he kind of became a creep.”
“More like a little pervert,” her father said.
“How’s that?” Sampson said.
Ellie looked around and then said, “I don’t know if it’s true, but he supposedly put a hole in the wall at school so he could look into the girls’ locker room. The rumor was he took pictures and showed them to his friends.”
Sampson grimaced.
I said, “Was that investigated?”
“The principal said so,” Ellie said. “The school even had police look at Timmy’s phone, but there was nothing on it.”
Her father said, “Doesn’t mean there wasn’t another phone or a camera. I wanted that boy thrown out of school, but they didn’t do a thing. And then he died, so we’ll never know, will we?”
“We’re hoping to help figure out why he died,” Sampson said.
Young nodded uncertainly. “Well, we’ve got birds to clean, and Ellie’s got classes this afternoon.”
We thanked them for their time and hiked back down the steep hillside to the parking lot. Had Timmy been killed for taking pictures he shouldn’t have? Had the killer brought Timmy up that trail in the dark? His mother had reported him missing well after sunset, so there was a good chance. That meant the killer had a headlamp or a helper. Did that matter?
I set that thinking aside and went back to the iPad, looking at an aerial view of the area with pins that marked the locations of the girls’ abandoned car, Timmy’s botched burial site, and his home. The car and the house looked about a mile apart, but the killer had dumped his body miles away.
Why? To try to separate the two cases in the minds of police?
I supposed that was likely, though any detective worth his or her salt would have known the two cases were related. Same day. Same general time frame. The proximity of Timmy’s home to where the girls
’ car was found.
So what happened? Did Timmy see the kidnapping, blunder into it somehow, and get killed for it?
That was our working theory when we pulled into the driveway of Timmy Walker’s house, a restored Colonial with fresh paint and a new, seamless metal roof. It was by far the nicest home in this small mountain hamlet where most of the structures looked like hunting camps. Brown leaves covered the modest front yard. A tricycle lay tipped over by the birdbath.
Sampson knocked on the door. No answer.
He knocked harder, and the door opened. A young girl, six or maybe seven, stood there in food-stained pajamas. She had a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket around her shoulders and studied us with red eyes.
“Hi there, young lady,” I said. “We’re police officers. We’d like to talk to your mom.”
“She’s sleeping,” the girl said.
“Can you wake—”
“I’m up!” a woman said, pounding down the stairs.
Mom was in a blue terry-cloth robe and barefoot. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were puffy, rheumy, and wild when she said, “You get him? Timmy’s killer?”
“Mrs. Walker?” I said.
She came up behind the girl, hugged her. “I’m his mom, Lenore. This is his sister, Kate.”
We identified ourselves, said we’d like to talk to her.
“So you didn’t get him?” she asked, bewildered.
“Not yet, ma’am.”
The dead boy’s mom swallowed thickly and looked off in despair. “No one tells me what’s going on. Months Deuce has been gone and no word from anyone in weeks, not the sheriff, not the state police, not the FBI … not even my coward of an ex-husband.” She broke down weeping.
Her daughter scowled at us and then turned around to hug her mother.
“It’s okay, Mommy,” the little girl said. “It’s going to be okay.”
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WHEN WE GOT Lenore Walker calmed down enough to talk, she invited us in, and we learned that she had, by her own description, led a fairly charmed life until the night Timmy disappeared. She’d grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and met Tim Walker her junior year at Pennsylvania State.
Walker got a good job working as an oil engineer right out of school and made enough in the fracking industry that they bought the house, restored it, and had kids. Timmy—Deuce—was his father’s favorite, and they spent many hours together early in the boy’s life.
Then Walker started moving up the corporate ladder and was gone a lot. And then he discovered “playthings,” as Lenore put it, and he was gone a lot more. After Deuce died, her husband, heartbroken and in love with a twenty-four-year-old, had left for good.
We asked her about the rumors, about the hole in the wall at the school. “Never happened,” Lenore said.
“Your son have a computer?” Sampson asked.
“Two, or one and a half, I guess, at the end. He was always buying and selling them on eBay.”
“Really?” I said. “At twelve?”
“Oh, sure. Computers, phones, iPods, anything electronic, long as it was used and cheap. It was kind of his hobby. He made pretty good money doing it.”
“Police look at his computers?”
“They took them,” she said. “I assume they looked at them.”
“And his phone?”
“They found one.”
“He had more than one?” Sampson asked.
“Sometimes three, but I only knew of two at that time. A Samsung, which they found, and a used iPhone, which they didn’t.”
“Anything else?”
“No. There’s not much left other than pictures, videos, and my memories.”
She started to cry again. Her daughter came over and hugged her until she was composed enough to tell us about the day her son disappeared.
“I wanted him to go to the store for me.” She sniffed. “He’d been in for a snack and then said he was going out to play. But when I called after him, he never answered.”
We asked her to point out the trail she believed Timmy had used to reach the forest clearing where the missing girls’ Toyota was found. As she went to the window to show us where to find the path, Lenore expressed bitterness about the investigation, saying that state and local detectives had been more interested in the lesbians than her son.
“Then again, they’re probably still alive, and my son’s dead, buried, and forgotten,” she said morosely as she led us to the door. “So thank you for thinking about him.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “We’ll let you know if we make any progress.”
“I believe you,” she said. “Even if no one else seems willing to help.”
Walking down the driveway, feeling Lenore Walker’s tortured gaze on my back, I was once again grateful for my many blessings and hyperaware of how the gifts of life can disappear in the blink of an eye.
“There but for the grace of God go I,” Sampson said in a soft voice.
“I hear you, brother,” I said. “Loud and clear.”
We found the path and went into the woods. The trail ran out across a shelf and then dropped steeply downhill to a logging road. When we came over the edge of the shelf, a black, whirling explosion went off down in the bottom.
I lurched back, ducked, and threw up my arms to protect my head.
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A BIG FLOCK of wild turkeys had been feeding in the logging road when we appeared above them. They erupted off the forest floor and roared right over our heads, causing us to duck and take cover until they were gone.
“You should have seen the look on your face when they came blowing out of there,” I said, grinning.
“I almost had a heart attack.” Sampson laughed. “You did too.”
“I’m a city boy, not used to getting attacked by wild critters.”
“Critters?”
“I’m trying to channel my inner country.”
“Yee-haw,” Sampson said and dropped down the bank onto the logging road. “Boy, those damn birds really tear up the place, don’t they?”
I saw what he meant. For a good fifty yards in every direction, the leaves were all fluffed and piled up where the turkeys had scratched and overturned them looking for food.
“There had to have been forty of them,” I said.
“At least,” Sampson said, heading down the trail to where it met a creek.
We paralleled the creek for almost a mile to a fork in the two-track road. We went left and found the creek crossing Lenore Walker had described and continued on up a short hill.
At the top of the rise, we could see through the bare trees some ninety yards across a wide flat to the clearing where Alison Dane’s Toyota Camry had been found, abandoned. The flock of turkeys had been there before us, tearing up the forest floor on both sides of the trail all the way to the clearing.
I had a picture on my phone of the Toyota Camry as it was found, and we were able to use it to figure out roughly where the car must have been. We crossed the clearing to the spot.
Looking back to where the logging road met the opening, I said, “So Timmy comes to the edge of the woods over there, and sees what?”
“The car, the girls,” Sampson said. “And maybe whoever grabbed them.”
“Sure, it’s not far. Sixty yards? Seventy?”
“Sounds right, but then what? Someone sees Timmy?”
I nodded. “Chases him down, crushes his throat.”
Sampson took a big breath and let it go. “Poor kid.”
“Right?” I said, looking around and feeling upset.
I guess I’d hoped driving to this place four and a half hours away would help, and while seeing the crime scene gave us a clearer sense of where the girls and Timmy had been on the day in question, I didn’t see any new light indicating the end of the tunnel.
Sampson said, “It’s pushing noon. We should go back, get the car, and find somewhere to eat before we head home.”
“So
unds like a plan,” I said.
We crossed the clearing, bowing our heads and pulling up our coat collars against the raw wind blowing. It was calmer in the woods, but I still hustled to get back to the car and the heater.
So did Sampson, until something caught his eye. He pulled up, said, “Hold on a second. I saw something back there.”
He walked back down the trail a few steps and then went right six or seven more through the leaves and loose forest duff the turkeys had scratched and turned over.
John stopped and glanced around. He took one step and then another before halting, digging a handkerchief from his pocket, and crouching in the leaves.
When he stood up, Sampson held out a dirty white iPhone.
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THE FOLLOWING EVENING around seven, Ali dashed into the kitchen where the rest of us were cleaning up after dinner.
“Jannie!” he cried. “A cab pulled up! He’s here!”
“Oh God,” Jannie said, holding her stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten so much. I think I’m going to be sick.”
Nana Mama squeezed her arm gently. “You’re going to do just fine. If he wasn’t already impressed, he wouldn’t be here, so just be yourself.”
“Great advice,” I said just before the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it!” Ali cried.
“No,” I said. “Jannie and I will get it.”
“C’mon, Ali,” my dad said. “Sit down, have a piece of Nana’s shoofly pie.”
“With ice cream?” Ali said.
“He deserves ice cream,” I said as I followed Jannie.
“You’ve been saying that every night since the trial ended,” Nana Mama complained.
“And I’ll be saying that every night for a little while longer.”
Before I left the kitchen, I blew a kiss at Bree, who caught it and smiled. We’d both carved out time for each other the past few days despite our busy schedules, and all in all my personal life was starting to feel much more balanced than it had for well over a year.
The People vs. Alex Cross Page 21
