The Abducted Super Boxset: A Small Town Kidnapping Mystery

by Roger Hayden

  Two years after Dustin’s death, investigators got an anonymous tip about Ray Gowdy: that he had bragged about killing Dustin so that Phil—Dustin’s younger brother—could take over the family business. Gowdy was brought in for questioning. He lawyered up with enough money to get him out. The investigation went cold. No one knew where he was getting the money from. He traveled frequently. The authorities knew he was bad, but no one could prove anything.

  Enter Rachel, a sixteen-year-old local runaway who Gowdy offered a ride to. She accused him of attempted assault. Gowdy was arrested and his house searched. Investigators found video stakeout footage of schools throughout the area. Gowdy’s lawyers argued that their client is trying to expose would-be predators. As the case went to court, Rachel changed her story and gave a completely different description of the man who assaulted her. The case was dropped.

  Around the same time, Phillip Anderson took over the salvage yard, and another teenage girl was assaulted at a keg party deep in the woods. She was too intoxicated to provide a description of her assailant. Worse yet, she couldn’t remember the incident too well. The kind of “off the grid” parties the Anderson clan was known to partake in.

  The police, however, were certain Gowdy was their man. He was arrested after his DNA was found on the girl’s torn shirt. Open-and-shut case. But when it went to court, Gowdy’s lawyers were able to prove that the DNA evidence had been tampered with. So determined were they to make their case against him that unnamed officers used Gowdy’s DNA from a vial of blood that had been in evidence and planted it.

  This came to light after an anonymous whistleblower contacted Gowdy’s lawyers and revealed the possibility of evidence tampering. The case was dropped, but Gowdy wasn’t done. He sued the county in a civil suit, and a judge soon ruled in his favor, awarding him five hundred thousand dollars. Gowdy had everything. He was vindicated. He was wealthy. To some, Gowdy was a hero. To others he was a criminal. To Miriam, however, he was a mystery.

  After he won his settlement, things were quiet for a while. But in May 2009, Alaina Hutchinson disappeared outside her elementary school in Cape Coral, fifty miles from Palm Dale. Dayana Corbin disappeared one year later, walking home in the Harlem Heights district, close to town. Julie Ross and Taylor Ackerman soon followed. In each case, they vanished. Their bodies were never found.

  Miriam closed Gowdy’s file, feeling overwhelmed but more informed than she had been. “I don’t know, Detective,” she said, pushing the file away. “Like you, all my instincts point to him. Either he’s a serial predator, or he’s the closest thing this town has to one.”

  “In a case this important, the worst thing an investigator can get is tunnel vision on one suspect,” O’Leary said, sipping a cup of coffee he had gotten earlier. “But I find myself being drawn closer to him just as the department is pulling away. Trust me, they don’t want to touch him.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Miriam said. “If he’s the one, he’s the one. I say we go after him.”

  O’Leary raised his hand to caution her. “It’s not that easy. They’re drawing up the warrants right now to search his home and the salvage lot but taking their time. There’s many on the force who think he did it and just as many who think that he didn’t. He’s been nothing but a pain in our ass since day one.”

  Miriam pounded the table and held up a picture of his last mug shot. “Six feet, two hundred thirty pounds. Bring him in, damn it, and put him in a lineup. Have Mrs. Beckett pick him out.”

  “Miriam, it’s not that easy,” he began.

  “Why not?” she asked in a stark, demanding tone.

  O’Leary pushed the many files on the table aside and leaned in closer. “Because he has money. Because he’s connected. Because he could bring down this whole department if he wanted to. Same way it is everywhere.”

  Miriam winced. “Spare me your cynicism. If we do this right, his money and connections won’t matter.”

  “And that’s why I need your help,” O’Leary blurted out impatiently. The room went quiet as she tried to consider what he had just said.

  “To do what, exactly?” she asked, brows raised.

  O’Leary sighed. “To take the fall if this goes south.” He sheepishly looked at the table then back to her. “I figured you did it before, you could do it again.”

  Miriam felt confused. Angry. Violated in a way. Her hands dropped as she stared at him with blank, exhausted eyes. “You’re setting me up, just in case.”

  He looked down at the floor then lifted his head and stared right at her. “Yeah.”

  “What an S.O.B. you are.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then she laughed. “Okay,” she said, shaking her head at him. “Whatever your screwed-up motivations are, I don’t care. I’m in. I just want to find this girl.”

  Her response surprised O’Leary. He was expecting her to leap across the floor and attack him. “That’s all I want too. That’s why we’re going to have a little fun with Gowdy. I want him to meet you.”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

  O’Leary started to spin out his plan, something he’d been thinking about for a while, it seemed, but also something he seemed to be conjuring on the spot. “If this man did shoot Deputy Lang in cold blood, if he took all those girls, one look at you and his eyes will tell me everything we need to know. He knows you from the news. He remembers you. That I’m sure of.”

  Miriam flashed a look of skepticism. She wasn’t buying it.

  “The truth is in the eyes, Miriam. Not even the most hardened psychopath can get around that. That’s what I’m waiting for. Then I’ll know.”

  Miriam waited for more details, but O’Leary said nothing else. She held her arms out. “That’s your master plan? Look into his eyes?”

  “It’s a start.”

  Miriam dropped her head, burnt out beyond words. Her hair hung down in her face. O’Leary waited patiently with his hands interlaced, hoping she would see it his way.

  She looked up and shrugged. “Okay. You’re the boss. We do it your way.”

  O’Leary leaned back, satisfied, as his chair creaked. “Thank you. If I know this man, it’s that he feels invincible.”

  “Which is why we need to either take him down or move on to someone else,” Miriam added.

  She looked down and thumbed through some more photos of Gowdy with the Andersons, laughing it up like one of the family. Her attention focused on Phil, in the middle of one particular group photo—tall with a beard, wide smile, and dirty-blond hair. He seemed to tower over the entire family. He was also a very large man. Gowdy looked smaller in comparison. Who was really in charge of that family? She couldn’t tell.

  “You wanna grab a bite to eat to clear your head a little?” O’Leary asked. “My treat.”

  It was the best idea she had heard all day. She pulled her phone out and saw that it was five after eleven. O’Leary packed the files back up in the box, and they left the room, only to find the precinct still noisy and chaotic.

  They carried the heavy boxes to the far corner of the parking lot where his car was parked.

  “Feels good to get some air,” Miriam said.

  “You said it.”

  They loaded up and drove off to a diner around the block where most of the officers went after a long day. The Snatcher had his next victim, but if they played their cards right, they might be able to save Emily before she turned into a cold case like the others.

  Day Two

  O’Leary picked her up the next morning at her hotel, which was a few blocks from the police station. The plan was simple enough: revisit the crime scene where Deputy Lang had been shot and then swing by the salvage yard for a friendly chat. Nothing serious. The last thing O’Leary wanted to do was give Gowdy the impression that they were closing in on him. They wanted him calm, careless even. Then they’d drop the hammer.

  Miriam, however, had another theory, developed overnight.

  “W
hat if it was one of the other brothers? Heck, what if the whole family is in on it?”

  “Careful now,” he said. “We don’t want to go chasing unicorns. I admit, the entire family is suspect, but I wouldn’t put any involvement on anyone except maybe Phillip and Gowdy himself. Not yet, anyway.”

  Miriam tapped the side of the passenger door with her cell phone, thinking. It was early, and the sun was just rising beyond a pine forest on her side. She had already sent a text back home, checking in, though she figured it was still too early for Freddy to respond.

  “What about the DNA and fingerprints?” she asked. An obvious question, but one she hadn’t asked before. “That should seal the deal right there.”

  O’Leary shook his head. “I checked earlier. No DNA recovered on Mrs. Beckett. The fingerprints taken from the carts don’t match Gowdy, or any of the Anderson boys for that matter.”

  Miriam sighed. “How could that be? How could someone be so careful as to not make a single mistake? There has to be something we’re not seeing. Something that will tie all of this together.”

  O’Leary laughed ironically. “I’ve been saying that to myself for the entire year.”

  The outskirts of Palm Dale brought them to a narrow two-lane road, cracked, with tall weeds on both sides. They had the windows down, but even with the sun not fully risen, the wind felt hot. There were no discernible signs or marks in the road, but Miriam knew they were close. She could feel it. They were almost to the place where her partner had been killed. A few miles beyond was a long dirt road that led to Anderson’s Auto Salvage. O’Leary was paying close attention to the GPS screen attached to his dashboard.

  “We’re about half a mile away.”

  Miriam stared ahead, saying nothing.

  “What exactly do we expect to find out here?” she asked as though the question had just entered her mind.

  “Simple,” O’Leary answered with his eyes on his dashboard GPS screen. “We’re starting at the beginning.”

  He slowed the car as they approached the spot—the very same barren shoulder where Miriam and her partner had stopped the infamous blue station wagon. The vehicle was later impounded for weeks, and an exhaustive search was conducted for fingerprints, hair samples, and other evidence.

  The only fingerprints they found belonged to Betsy Cole and her husband. Two hairs had been recovered. One of them belonged to Jennifer Dawson—definitively proving that she had been abducted by the same individual who shot Deputy Lang. Another hair had been found. But it wasn’t real hair at all. It was synthetic fiber, probably from a wig.

  O’Leary went over these details as he pulled the car to the side and parked.

  “So we have reason to believe that our suspect was in fact wearing a wig. Obviously to conceal his identity.”

  His door squeaked as he swung it open. It was eerily quiet outside, aside from the crickets, and there wasn’t a single car on the road. Miriam followed and stepped outside, onto the patchy grass of a small hill that traveled downward into a long, shallow trench that ran far into the distance along the road. A chain-link fence separated the roadside from the area beyond it. It never surprised Miriam how much of the seemingly vacant land surrounding them was actually private property.

  “So, according to your report, you and Deputy Lang were headed toward Anderson’s Auto to respond to a call about stolen copper?” O’Leary asked as he walked ahead.

  “That’s right,” Miriam said, following him.

  He stopped at a distinctly recognizable part of the road, pictured in so many police photos, and stood on a faded white line. Chunks of asphalt were missing on both sides of the pavement. Grass, weeds, and sand-spur patches hung over the surface. “You stopped the blue station wagon here, noting a broken taillight. Ran the plates, everything checked out, and Deputy Lang went to talk to the driver. Sound about right?”

  Miriam felt a sickness that she hadn’t encountered in some time. She nodded, looking away. O’Leary seemed to get more into the moment, now observing the ground with great intensity. He took a couple of hurried steps forward then stopped and spun around.

  “About here, Deputy Lang was shot. One .44 magnum casing was recovered in the middle of the road. Records did not yield any potential suspects for that particular weapon.” O’Leary stopped and looked up to find Mariam staring into the forest alongside them.

  “Miriam, are you okay?”

  She looked over to him, snapping out of her daze. The wind blew a long strand of hair from her ponytail, sending it falling across her tan forehead. “Yes, I can remember clearly,” she said, walking over to him. “I heard the gunshot and jumped out of the car to engage the suspect. I fired three shots, shattered the back window. Tailed him in the patrol car at about a hundred and twenty. Found the Buick abandoned. No kid, no suspect.”

  “No one vanishes,” O’Leary said. “There has to be an explanation. For two weeks straight, search teams patrolled the area in a ten-mile radius and came up short. The question is, where did he go?”

  O’Leary signaled ahead and pointed to a sign far up the road. Miriam squinted to read it, its words clear as the morning: Anderson’s Auto Salvage and Recycling.

  A large semi-truck then came into view with smoke billowing from its exhaust pipes. They stood there on the side of the road watching as it roared past them, leaving a strong gust of wind in its wake and blowing their jackets open.

  Miriam suddenly walked off, as though she were under some kind of external control. O’Leary followed, trying to keep up with her fast pace.

  “What is it? What do you see?” he asked.

  Miriam stopped and turned to him. “Here’s what I’ve been thinking, and it’s something I’ve been thinking for a long time: He was taking the girl somewhere out here, not expecting to encounter any police.” She raised her arms. “And what is out here?” She bit her lip and looked into the distance.

  “Swamps. Cow pastures. Acres of land,” O’Leary said.

  “Everything and more,” she answered. “The perfect hideout.”

  “Yeah, but they’ve searched this area far and wide,” O’Leary said. “There’s no trace of him.”

  “Because he’s smart,” Miriam said. “Let’s go to the place where I found the Buick.”

  They had begun walking back to the Crown Victoria when Miriam held her hand out. “Mind if I drive?”

  “Not at all,” O’Leary said, digging into his pocket. He handed her the keys and walked to the passenger side. Miriam got in and fired up the car, peeling out. Taken by surprise, O’Leary flew back against his seat, struggling to put on his seat belt.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  Without answering, she pressed on the gas. Inside, she felt as if she were getting into the right state of mind. Images of the Buick flashed in her mind. She searched her memory for clues—anything from the time just before she found the car. Her hands clutched the wheel as she pushed the car past one hundred miles per hour.

  “Miriam, can you slow down please?” O’Leary asked, gripping the passenger-side handle.

  “We’re almost there,” she said, staring ahead. The car vibrated and motored loudly as exhaust surged out the back, leaving a thick black trail. She inched past the one hundred fifteen mark, feeling as though she were getting a second chance to do things differently.

  Suddenly she let up on the gas. The speedometer dropped as the car slowed, much to O’Leary’s relief. She then jerked to the side of the road and slammed on the brakes. O’Leary flew forward but caught himself against the dashboard. Smoke from the tires drifted inside the car along with the smell of burnt oil.

  O’Leary coughed. “I hope you enjoyed that little joyride.”

  “Calm down, Grandpa,” she said, shutting off the engine and handing him the keys.

  She got out of the car and walked along the side of the road and down the grassy slope that led into the woods. O’Leary, looking disheveled and upset, followed a few steps behind her. She stopped whe
re the forest was separated from the slope by the six-foot fence. No Trespassing signs hung from the fence at intervals for miles. None of that had been there before.

  “This is new,” she said, pushing against the fence.

  “They recently put it up,” O’Leary said, trudging down the slope from behind.

  She gripped the fence with both hands, peeking through, but it was hard to see anything beyond the thick brush. She then let go, turned around, and went back to the road.

  “What is it?” O’Leary asked, following her. “Do you have something?”

  She was looking at the other side of the road, where yet another fence separated it from the vast wilderness beyond. “Not yet,” she said. She stepped forward and stopped directly in the middle of the road, unconcerned about traffic. But there wasn’t any; this was a remote, desolate place. O’Leary seemed to follow her every move, observing the surroundings, just as she was doing.

  “So many private property signs. Who owns this area?” she asked him.

  “I want to say a land developing company. Their name escapes me.”

  “And when did they purchase all this land? And for what reason?” she continued.

  O’Leary stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around. “I’m not sure. Why?”

  “I just think it’s interesting that this is the very area our suspect fled into. I thought about it after you told me that Gowdy had invested in land development.”

  She went to the other side of the road and looked beyond the fence there, beyond the woods. “With the money Gowdy has, we’re looking at some kind of underground lair. I guarantee it.”

  “Yeah. But this area’s been searched within a ten-mile radius, I told you that. They looked for weeks.”

  “I believe you,” Miriam responded. She looked down at a glimmering soda can, flattened against the road. Within the grass ahead, there were cigarette butts, beer bottles, and plastic bags, barely visible—the same litter seen on any open road, and trapped by the fencing. Several thoughts came to Miriam all at once. She felt as though their suspect was very near. Maybe that was the genius of his escape.