Finding Claire Fletcher (A Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Book 1)

by Lisa Regan

  “He can probably see her coming for a block or so. He doesn’t know if she’s going to keep coming this way or cross the street, turn the corner or what, but he’s betting she’ll come his way, so he gets out, comes around the side of the car, and sets the trap.”

  “Man having trouble with car,” Mitch added.

  “Right. A lot of these guys use the same type of lure to get the vic close enough to grab them. So what does he say?”

  Mitch rubbed his fingers over the gray stubble that covered his chin. “Well, the puppy or kitten is a popular one. Strakowski said he was down there looking under the car, right? So he sees Claire, when she gets close enough, he says, ‘Hey, I got this cute kitty under the car and she won’t come out, will you help me?’”

  “Yeah,” Connor agreed. “She gets down there next to him, right by the open door, which he’s laid out for his own convenience. He knocks her out, tosses her in, and drives off.”

  “Okay. We’ve got that. So what else?”

  “Well,” Connor mused, surveying the street in both directions. “He drives off in that direction, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Police units are here in what? Five minutes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They set a perimeter, canvass the area, stop all the blue station wagons, and drive Dinah Strakowski around the neighborhood looking for this guy, right?”

  “Yeah,” Mitch repeated.

  “This is a residential area. No highways. School zone, eight o’clock in the morning. The average speed limit within the surrounding eight to ten blocks is gonna be twenty-five to thirty-five miles per hour. There’s gonna be a fair amount of traffic this time of day with kids going to school and people going to work.”

  Mitch stood up, fully erect, and looked Connor in the eye. “This guy is not going to want to draw attention to himself with an unconscious minor in the back seat. If we say ten minutes to start the canvassing, how far is he really going to get? He can’t break the speed limit, can’t drive erratically. Far enough to elude the police?”

  “Exactly,” Connor said. “This fucker disappears. Totally. Him, the car, Claire. Vanish into thin air. But how? Everything in this case was done according to best-case-scenario conditions and damn-near-perfect police response. So how did he do it?”

  “Holy shit,” Mitch said, the realization nearly exploding between them like a ball of flames. “He lives in the fucking area.”

  “Yeah. He has to, probably within a ten-block radius. He won’t want to be too close because he’ll be easily recognized but close enough to pull into a garage, close the door, and act like nothing happened,” Connor said.

  “Holy shit,” Mitch said again. “But wait, they went door-to-door and didn’t even come up with anything suspicious.”

  Connor waved a hand dismissively. “That won’t turn up anything unless he’s got her tied up in the foyer.”

  “What about the station wagon? Sure, they didn’t know the make or model, but they did a search of all blue station wagons registered to people inside the perimeter. Why didn’t this guy show up? Did he take off by then?” Mitch said.

  At that moment, the gods of investigative insight smiled on Connor. The dim shapes in his mind revealed themselves. “No,” Connor said. “The station wagon wasn’t registered to him. It was registered to a woman. They probably went to the house. She’s probably right there on the goddamn list. He’s a son or a brother or something, maybe even a boyfriend. That’s why he’s not easily recognized in the neighborhood, but he still has access. He’s transient. She was probably at work. He had the whole day to stash Claire while he figured out what to do next.”

  “You think he kept her in the house with this other woman?” Mitch asked.

  Connor shook his head. “I don’t know. At this point, I don’t think it really matters. If we can find her, we can get an ID on him.”

  “She may have moved by now,” Mitch said, but he emanated the same excited energy that presently made Connor unable to stand still.

  Connor met the older man’s eyes once again and could not suppress a smile. “You work the car. Narrow the make and model. I’ll check the list again and go from there. It might take a while to get addresses from information that’s ten years old, but I still want to track down the other guys Claire saw after she disappeared.”

  Mitch beamed at him from beneath bushy eyebrows. “Fine work, Detective,” he said. “Damn fine work.”

  Connor drove back to the division, feeling heady and buzzed, the same high he felt whenever the job was going well, when an investigation hit a turning point. It was one of the things he loved about his job. It wasn’t an easy thing to deal with the bad guys day in and day out and face the things they had done, shouldering the responsibility of bringing them to justice. He had to fit all the pieces together, make sure the evidence was viable, and that all the procedures were followed meticulously so that when he handed a case over to the district attorney, they could look forward to a conviction. But when things came together, he felt exhilarated in a way nothing else in his life provided. His wife used to say he was “in the zone.”

  Connor parked and walked toward the door where two of the detectives from his division were standing, smoking cigarettes, and talking shop. Boggs and Stryker. He’d worked with both of them on different cases, although they usually worked together. Where you found one, you’d find the other. The rest of the division liked to joke that they were together so much, they were practically married.

  Connor smiled at them when he approached. “Hey, if it isn’t my favorite couple,” he said.

  Stryker said, “Fuck you, Parks,” but smiled back.

  “Hey,” Boggs said. “Good luck next week with the review board.”

  Connor jammed his hands into his pockets. “Thanks,” he said.

  “That’s a bum rap,” Stryker said. “That fucker got what was coming to him.”

  “That’s a popular sentiment around here,” Connor replied. “But I’d hate to lose my badge over him.”

  Boggs took a long drag on his cigarette. “It’ll work out,” he said. “Worst case, they’ll put you on the desk for six months.”

  “Nah,” Stryker said. “Unpaid suspension.”

  Connor rocked back and forth on his heels. “Either way it sucks,” he said.

  Boggs grinned at him. “You’re a good egg, Parks. Riehl will go through the roof if he loses you. You had that piece of shit on five counts. The convictions would have gone through. You’ll never get out of here.”

  “Don’t go all sappy on me, Mrs. Stryker,” Connor said.

  “Hey, fuck you, Parks,” Stryker said again in Boggs’s defense.

  Connor laughed.

  “What are you working?” Boggs asked.

  “Cold case,” Connor said with a shrug. “Something to do besides typing reports for your pansy ass.”

  “Well,” Stryker said. “Let us know if we can help you. We got our last one in the bag. We’re about to go get the fucker now.”

  Boggs looked at his partner with disdain. “Good God, Stryke. You kiss your mamma with that mouth?”

  Stryker narrowed his eyes. “No, but I do kiss your wife with it.”

  The two detectives flicked their butts to the ground in unison and started a pushing match as they sauntered off to their car.

  “Fucking jerk,” Boggs muttered.

  Connor waved and made his way up to his desk. He pulled the vehicle registration list from the Fletcher file and got to work. Two hours later, he had narrowed the list of female owners of any blue station wagon within the four-mile radius of where Claire had been abducted down to twelve women. He’d have to get the last known addresses on all of them, but the list could be narrowed further if Farrell positively identified the make and model of the station wagon from the picture Strakowski had provided. Next, he would look for addresses on Teplitz, Speer, and Randall in his files at his house.

  Connor ordered a pizza and picked it up on his
way home. He changed into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and worked over the file Mitch had given him in Denise’s old formal dining room. He still hadn’t gotten rid of the large furniture, but he’d taped a map on the wall as well as several items from the file. With the space effectively turned into what would pass for a task-force room in law enforcement, a half-eaten pizza box, and beer bottles on the table, the space was beginning to feel like his own.

  He thought about Boggs and Stryker, the odd couple, and decided he could invite them over to help him get rid of the rest of the furniture. He was thinking about how well a pool table would fit after he tore down the mauve drapes when his doorbell rang.

  Expecting Farrell to be taking up the greater part of his front stoop, Connor was surprised to find a petite woman smiling up at him, bearing a Tupperware container filled with something that smelled delicious.

  “Detective Parks?” the woman said.

  Connor raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  “Hi.” She extended a hand. “I’m Jenny Fletcher. I’m, uh, Claire’s mother.”

  Connor grasped her hand. “Mrs. Fletcher, hi. Come in.”

  He ushered her into the living room. Jen Fletcher smiled, her eyes taking in the place. “Uh, make yourself comfortable,” Connor said.

  She took a seat on his couch, her dish resting neatly on her knees. “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Something to drink?”

  She smiled. She was an attractive woman. She didn’t resemble Claire in any strikingly obvious way, but she was still lovely. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, curly, and pulled back with a shell barrette. She was short, probably only five feet, but she exuded a strength that belied her stature. Worry creases enclosed her mouth, and when she smiled, laugh lines accentuated the deep blue of her eyes.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you.” When Connor said nothing for a moment, she added, “She always looked more like her father. Claire, I mean.”

  Connor swept one hand through his hair and sat in the chair opposite her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

  “It’s perfectly okay,” she said. Her voice was soft and genuine, almost musical.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said.

  “Mitch called me. He told me you’d been to the house, and then he explained about the fingerprints. I hope you don’t mind that he gave me your address,” she said.

  Connor smiled. “Not at all. I’m glad to finally meet you. I didn’t receive a very good reception when I visited your home.”

  For the first time, uneasiness crossed Jen Fletcher’s face. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “Normally the kids aren’t even there. Any other day you would have gotten me, but I had asked them to meet me there for dinner, and then I ran late at work. Brianna, she can be very, how can I say this? She was always a challenge, but she feels very strongly about Claire, or rather, what happened to Claire.”

  “People deal with things in different ways,” Connor said.

  “Yes. They do.”

  Silence drifted between them like dust motes floating through the air. Finally, Jen said, “Detective Parks, I have always known that my child is still alive.”

  Connor nodded but said nothing. She continued, “I don’t know how. I don’t know why. A lot of people tried to tell me that I was only saying that because I needed hope to survive—that I could never face the possibility of Claire being dead, so I clung to that hope to get me through the days.”

  “Mrs. Fletcher, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to hold on to that kind of hope over many years,” Connor pointed out.

  Her face lit up. “Yes! That’s what I’ve always thought. Sometimes I envied Rick—that’s my husband—because it seemed easier for him to mourn our daughter and just move on with his life. I could never do that. I just knew”—she placed a hand on her heart—“in here, that she was still out there.”

  Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes. “When Mitch told me you’d found proof, I felt …”

  “Vindicated?”

  She smiled. “Yes. But also more hopeful than I’ve ever felt. I wanted to thank you.”

  “That’s really not necessary,” Connor said.

  “It is for me.”

  “Well, okay. You’re welcome. But this is my job, and when I met your daughter, she, ah, she made an impression.”

  Jen laughed, and Connor was impressed by the ease with which she held both the loss of her daughter and the joy of having Claire as her child so close to the surface. Clearly, her pain did not eclipse the love she held for Claire.

  “Yes,” Jen said. “She always did.”

  She held out the Tupperware container. “I brought you something. Mitch said you were a bachelor.”

  Connor took it and thanked her. “Divorced,” he said. “She left me, but that was two years ago.”

  Jen nodded. “I was wondering if you could tell me about Claire,” she said. “The other men …” She made a face of revulsion. “Well, for one thing, we were never sure if they were telling the truth. The whole thing was so strange. But I never felt comfortable talking with them. Now that I know”—she motioned toward Connor—“Claire is really alive, that you saw her, it would mean a lot to me if you would tell me what she’s like.”

  Connor stretched back into the padding of the chair and cradled the warm container in his large hands. He sighed. Claire’s image was permanently seared into his mind. He had only hours of time with her from which to draw on, but from that short time he’d managed to collect about a half-dozen mental snapshots. How she looked the first time she spoke to him in the bar—a puzzle. The hard lines of her face when she told him off and left. Her wide mouth turning up slightly as she considered him in the street. Her blank, almost dazed wonder at the flowers framing his walkway. Her head thrown back slightly, corners of her eyes transforming her face when she laughed. The intense crease of her brow as she studied the dining room. And his favorite mental picture of her was her face as she slept, brown curls resting on her cheek.

  “She’s beautiful,” Connor said.

  Again, as if he’d flipped a switch, tears gathered in Jen’s eyes. “Is she? Is she really still beautiful? He didn’t—he didn’t destroy her?”

  Jen’s voice trembled, and Connor joined her on the couch. She slid one hand easily between both of his. A single tear made its way down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly with her free hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Connor murmured. “Listen, Mrs. Fletcher. I don’t know what Claire has gone through in the last ten years. Since she was abducted, it’s a pretty sure bet that she’s seen her fair share of torment.”

  Jen nodded and put her other hand atop their joined hands. The skin on her face pulled tight as she tried to rein in her emotions. Connor thought of Claire’s anguished eyes. He wondered if he could prepare this mother for the sight of those eyes.

  “When you see her,” he tried.

  He hadn’t been comfortable talking with anyone about those eyes that, at moments, had provoked unmitigated terror within him. But Jen Fletcher deserved to know. He could not imagine what it was like for a mother to lose her child and not know, year after year after year, what was happening. Was she being tortured? Raped? Beaten? Neglected? Deprived? No matter what had happened to Claire, Connor sensed that it would not diminish Jen’s love for her daughter in any way.

  He started again. “When you see her, there might be moments, looking into her eyes that you can tell. You can see that she’s been”—he searched for the right word but could not find one so he settled on—“hurt.”

  “Ten years is a long time,” Jen agreed. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I understand.”

  Connor squeezed both her hands gently. “But you know, whatever happened to her is not all there is to her,” he said. “I mean she’s interesting and funny and witty.”

  Jen looked up at him and smiled brightly through her tears. “She was always like that.”

  “Tell
me about her,” Connor said.

  Jen sank back into the couch and wiped her tears away. “Claire was always extremely persistent. Very stubborn but in her own quiet way. She was not one to give up easily when she wanted something. She loved animals. Over the years we had so many different pets. She always wanted a dog more than anything else in the world, but my husband is allergic so there was just no way we could have a dog. That didn’t stop Claire from lobbying for one. Every time a new allergy drug came out, she’d ask Rick to try it. She did so much research trying to find a way around Rick’s allergies.”

  “What about cats?”

  Jen nodded. “Yeah, we had a cat. Actually, it had just gotten out of the house and run off a couple of months before Claire went missing. We never did find that cat.”

  Connor thought of the yearbook recitation Claire had given when Connor asked her about herself. “She was a good swimmer?”

  Jen’s eyebrows shot up. “How did you know?”

  “She told me.”

  “Yeah, she was a great swimmer actually but she had no real interest in it. Rick was so disappointed. She could have done something with that, but like I said, she was more interested in animals. She wanted to be a veterinarian. I was always glad that she had found her calling so early in life. My other kids never really knew what they wanted to do, and now they are both approaching thirty and have changed careers twice already.

  “Claire loved to read too. She always read way above her grade level. She was never without a book to read. She was your typical teenager too. She loved to go to the mall or the movies. She didn’t have a ton of friends, just a few that she hung out with. She idolized Brianna. They’re only two years apart, you know. They were really best friends. So it has been very difficult for Brianna.”

  Connor pictured Brianna’s glare. “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?” Jen asked.

  “I have a brother. He’s three years older than me. He teaches seventh-grade history in Elk Grove. My mom died of cancer when we were teenagers so it was just us and my dad.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Is your father still living?”