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

by Lisa Regan

  Stryker pulled out another sheet of paper similar to the first one. Again, he placed it in front of Claire. “Meet Timothy Bush. Virginia. One count of sexual assault and battery. Same story. He made bail and took off.”

  Stryker placed another sheet in front of Claire. “Jem Nebesky. Tennessee. One count of statutory rape, two counts of sexual assault and battery. Makes bail, takes off. Next, we have Henry Kreisher. Florida. This is where our guy got a little smarter. He hooked up with a single mother. She had a twelve-year-old daughter. He ended up with six counts of aggravated sexual assault. Made bail, took off. Then he went to Colorado. Called himself Doug Spellings. Hooked up with another single mom who conveniently had a thirteen-year-old daughter. Three counts of aggravated sexual assault. Four counts of statutory rape. Made bail, took off. Next thing we hear from him, he’s living with Irene Geary.”

  With each printout Stryker placed in front of Claire, her abductor’s face looked older and older. “These are the ones we know about,” Stryker added. “Although they’re all about three to four years apart, so I don’t imagine he’d really have time to slip much in between all the moving and identity switching.”

  “Oh my God,” Claire murmured. She shuffled through the pages with trembling hands. “They’re all him,” she said. “All of them. It’s him.”

  She looked at Connor, her eyes wide as saucers. “He’s been at it a long time,” Connor said.

  Claire shook her head. There was an angry set to her jaw. She shuffled through the papers again, this time more frantically. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I don’t understand. How could he just keep doing it? So many of them.”

  She was close to hysteria. Connor stepped toward her, but Stryker leaned in and caught her eye. “Claire,” Stryker said. “We’re going to nail this piece of shit.” Despite his words, Stryker’s tone was soft and soothing. Connor had seen him do this several times with panicked or frightened victims.

  Most of the time, Stryker looked like he might pull your heart out through your rib cage if you looked at him the wrong way. He intimidated the hell out of suspects. But then there was this. A firm touch to convey comfort, determined eyes, and the slight downward turn of his mouth that made him less intimidating. He’d talk in that voice—confident, calm, even. Connor had seen his colleague talk a lot of witnesses and victims from absolute terror to relative calm in a matter of moments.

  Claire didn’t look up, but she nodded and stopped the mad shuffling of her abductor’s rap sheets. Stryker turned her chair around and crouched down in front of her. “Hey,” he said. “You need to know that what happened to you and to all of the other people this guy hurt was not your fault. He’s a predator. He was a predator before you were even born. Communications were limited for a long time from one state to another. That’s probably one of the reasons he got away with everything for so long. But now we can look things up on a computer and keep track of scum like him. We are going to nail him.”

  Claire wiped tears from her cheeks. Connor leaned over Stryker’s shoulder and handed her a tissue. Stryker continued, “Claire, I want you to remember one thing, and you keep this in the front of your mind every day until that bastard is behind bars. You saved an eleven-year-old girl from all of this.” He lifted a hand and spread the pages across his desk. “Because of you, Alison Ward is at home with her family. She’s safe. Because of you, we have a shot at this guy. We can put an end to all this once and for all.”

  Stryker watched Claire intently. She stared at the floor, tears coursing down her cheeks. “Hey,” Stryker said. “You got that?”

  Connor could practically feel Claire dismissing the idea of herself as some kind of hero, even if it was only to one girl and her family. He knew the way her mind worked, the ways in which her abductor had warped it in order to remain blameless for all the horrific acts he committed. Connor knew Claire felt guilty for having stayed his captive for so long, even after she had opportunities to go home. But it was an indisputable fact that Claire had saved Alison from a fate as terrifying as her own. Connor watched her, expecting her to protest as she always did, but instead she nodded, acquiescing to Stryker.

  After a moment, she squeaked, “But Emily is still out there. I know he has her.”

  Stryker frowned. “I know. We’re working on it. The whole state is working on it. Claire, we will find him.”

  Stryker stood and gathered the pages to put back in his file. Connor moved behind Claire and put his hands on her shoulders, grateful that the tension in them dissipated instead of escalating. “So who is he?” Connor asked. “What’s his real name?”

  Boggs’s voice boomed across the room. “Hey kids,” he said. He was grinning from ear to ear. Connor felt a flutter of excitement. It had to be good because Boggs rarely smiled. The older detective waved a piece of paper in the air as he approached them. When he saw Claire, his face fell. He looked from Stryker to Connor. “You told her,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You okay?” he asked Claire.

  She smiled wanly. “I’ve been worse,” she said.

  Boggs plopped into his own chair across from them. “Well then, let me be the bearer of good news. We got some leads.”

  “The bail money?” Stryker said.

  Boggs nodded, looking every bit like a cat that just swallowed a bird. He looked at Connor. “All right. Here it is. Every single time this guy gets arrested, he makes bail, which we thought was odd since he never had his own lawyer and had no family or close associates in any of the places he got nabbed.”

  “We’re going on the theory that this guy has a lot of cash,” Connor said.

  Boggs stuck an index finger straight up in the air. “Right. But while he’s sitting in jail waiting to be assigned a public defender, who is taking care of his business?”

  “You won’t believe this,” Stryker said.

  Boggs went on: “Every single time this guy gets arrested and charged with a crime, in every state in which he resided, the same law firm arranged to have his bail paid so he could walk out of there, flee the state, and never face the charges against him.”

  “A law firm?” Connor said.

  “Yeah. The same one. A firm in Texas. Obviously they’re representing someone, whether it’s him or someone he knows. But all they do is front the money. No one from their office ever went to any of this guy’s arraignments or bail hearings for that matter. They just kept paying and paying and paying and not a peep out of them.”

  “You think it’s some kind of trust fund?” Connor asked.

  “We don’t know,” Stryker said. “But it’s a damn good place to start.”

  “Did you check for similar crimes and prints in Texas?” Connor asked.

  “Yeah,” Boggs said. “We got nothing. But we’re gonna talk to the locals and the DA there and see what we can come up with,” Boggs said.

  “So who is he?” Connor asked again.

  Boggs shoved a file across the desk to Connor. “Reynard Seymour Johnson of Houston, Texas, born May 13, 1958, to Seymour and Sheila Johnson of the Johnson Oil Company. He was their third child. Two older brothers, Seymour Jr. and Lawrence, and two younger sisters, Carolyn and Jane. Seymour is deceased, but the mother runs the company side by side with her eldest son. She claims she hasn’t heard from or seen Reynard since he was twenty years old and left home.”

  “The law firm that paid his bail?” Connor asked.

  “Hired by the family,” Boggs said. “At least they handle most of the family’s affairs. His estate money, trust fund, or whatever you want to call it—all the money goes through there. It’s all handled through that office. Reynard gets in a jam, calls his contact there, and they just wire cash to wherever he specifies. That way the parents—well, now, just the mother—can claim no involvement. That they didn’t know what he used the funds for or even when he withdrew cash from the estate.”

  “How much are we talking?” Connor asked.

  Boggs shrugged. “Don’t know for sure, but it’s a lot
of money. A bottomless pit of cash. The family is wealthy enough to have the state of Texas renamed after them.”

  Connor looked at Claire. She was pale, and her hands trembled when she took the Johnson file from his hands. As she leafed through it, she asked, “Are you sure? Are you sure this is him? The same guy?”

  “It’s him,” Stryker said.

  “It took us a while to pin him down,” Boggs added. “He has no priors in his home state. But that’s him all right.”

  “His real name is Reynard?” she said.

  Stryker laughed. “Yeah, I know. No wonder he made up aliases.”

  Claire looked up at the two detectives. “If he had so much money, why did he keep us in such dumps? Every place he ever took me or Tiffany was practically falling apart.”

  “Anonymity,” Connor said. “If you’ve committed as many crimes as this guy has, and you’re holding someone against their will, you don’t want to draw attention to yourself. You’d want to be out of the way, which he was, living out in the middle of nowhere, but you also want to make sure you’re as indistinguishable as the thirty other people around you. If he’d bought up land out in the woods and built a palace, people would notice. People would talk. People would come around.”

  “That’s probably how he went undetected for so long,” Boggs added.

  “Have you tried contacting the family?” Connor asked.

  “Yeah. That’s the bad news. His family lawyered up,” Stryker said.

  Claire looked at Connor, puzzled. “They got an attorney,” Connor explained. “It means they don’t have to tell us anything. We, or any other authorities, can question his family about his whereabouts but only in the presence of their attorney, who I’m guessing has already advised them not to answer any questions.”

  Claire’s shoulders slumped.

  “Sorry,” Boggs said to her.

  “So what now?” Claire asked.

  “Well, there isn’t much we can do now,” Stryker said. “If the family doesn’t want to talk, they don’t have to, even if they do know where he is, and we don’t know for sure if they do.”

  “Can’t you get a subpoena for them to reveal what they know?” Connor asked. “It’s obstruction, harboring a fugitive, aiding and abetting if they know and don’t give that information to the police.”

  Stryker grimaced. “Yeah, we’re working on it, but we have to coordinate with the local boys now. We gotta let them handle it. We’re trying to get the FBI to come in on this since he’s wanted in so many states, but now they’re trying to decide which field office they want to work out of. It’s going to take a while.”

  “We already have a BOLO out on him,” Boggs said. “Now we have a name to go with it.”

  “BOLO?” Claire interrupted.

  “Be on the lookout,” Boggs explained. “We send out his photo and all his information, get it to as many agencies as we can, and hope someone runs into him. Now that we have a name, we get the press in on it. Son of an oil tycoon, a kidnapper, and sexual deviant? It’ll go national in all of thirty seconds, and then the Johnsons will wish they had told us what they knew from the start and kept the whole thing quiet.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  In the months since my homecoming, my family, Connor, and Mitch had formed an unofficial committee. They liked to discuss me and what my brother had once referred to as my recovery.

  “She’s not a hurricane-ravaged city, Tom,” Brianna had scoffed.

  “Well, her reentry into the world,” my father had put in quickly, coming to Tom’s defense.

  Brianna gave him a cutting look.

  Connor, who had been sitting silently at the dinner table that night, laughed. “That makes her sound like an ex-con.”

  Mitch, who remained silent throughout most discussions, nodded and chuckled.

  My mother threw her arms into the air, losing patience. “The therapist said we should think of it as her assimilation into her new life. Let’s just call it that.”

  “You all know that I’m sitting here, right?” I finally interjected, drawing blank stares from them all. I popped a piece of my mother’s delicious steak into my mouth and talked around it. “I like what Mom said.”

  Thus the unofficial committee for the assimilation of Claire Fletcher into her new life was formed. Under different circumstances, I might have been annoyed, angry even at their discussing me and my future this way, but having been robbed of ten years with the people who loved me most, I appreciated their earnest commitment to my happiness and well-being.

  That’s what they were really discussing—my well-being—as if I were a child they had just adopted. The day after I found out the true identity of my abductor, the committee was in session again. It was unplanned, of course. They all just happened to be there for dinner that night. They were already worried about me—my insomnia, the number of hours I spent watching news coverage of the search for Emily and googling her case. I watched a broadcast one day where a wall of people waded through a barren field in Bakersfield, moving slowly, scanning the sparse brush for any sign of Emily. I knew they were looking for her body. I also knew there would be no body. Reynard had taken her, and he would use her until there was nothing left of the girl she had been or until he tired of her—maybe both.

  Connor and Mitch thought it would ease my anxiety if Mitch went to Texas and tried to scare up what background he could on Reynard, perhaps find something that might help police in California locate him and Emily. Brianna agreed. My parents and brother thought it was a terrible idea. My obsession with Emily’s abduction was unhealthy, they said—I needed to move on. None of us even knew for certain that Reynard had taken Emily. What if we were just chasing our tails?

  They were split—three of them for the trip, three of them against it. The next morning my therapist cast the deciding vote, and two hours after that, Mitch was on a plane bound for Houston.

  I didn’t sleep at all until Mitch returned. It took a few days. He got back just after dinner, and Connor was with him. It was only me and my parents that night, as Tom and Brianna were at their own homes. The three of us went out to the deck at the back of Mitch’s house while my parents cleaned up from dinner.

  “So what did you find out?” I asked.

  Mitch got right to the point. “Reynard Johnson grew up in rich town, USA. Huge house—a compound actually, complete with tennis courts, in-ground pool, horses, stables, the whole nine yards. Couldn’t get much on family life. But I found a housekeeper who worked for the family while the kids were growing up. It cost me, but I got her to talk on the condition that she wouldn’t have to testify in a court of law.”

  Connor shrugged. “I don’t think that will be a problem. We’re talking about when he was a juvenile, right?”

  Mitch nodded. “Yeah. The things she told me anyway. Turns out our boy was a Peeping Tom as young as fourteen. The housekeeper said she caught him spying on his younger sisters several times. Apparently he also exposed himself to them. There was some trouble at school with him groping girls. One lady I talked to went to school with him. She said he would just kind of sneak up behind them and start touching them whenever he found one of them alone or away from the pack.”

  My stomach felt hollow. “My God,” I muttered.

  “Yeah. Sick shit. When he was fifteen, the parents sent him to an all-boys boarding school. The mother was against it, but the father insisted. I think old Mr. Johnson figured that the kid would have to stop acting on his urges if there were no young girls around.”

  “But he managed to find one,” Connor supplied.

  “More than one. The faculty lived on campus and a few of them had twelve-and thirteen-year-old girls. Johnson went back to his peeping routine, and when the opportunity to expose himself came along, he took it. Get this—the families of these three girls got together and decided to press charges. The Johnsons tried to buy them off to keep them quiet.”

  I wrapped my arms around my middle and rocked back and forth on
the edge of my chair. It was almost too horrifying to hear. I was glad I had only picked at my dinner because what little I had eaten threatened to come back up. “No,” I said.

  Mitch held up a hand. “Well, the families weren’t having any of that. They pressed charges and Reynard got sent to juvie for his senior year of high school.”

  “Juvie records are sealed,” Connor pointed out. “How did you find that out?”

  Mitch smiled. “People love to talk, my friend. They just love to talk. So he gets out of juvie, turns eighteen, and somehow gets into college. Family probably arranged that as well. He only lasted one semester. He stopped going to classes and started a relationship with a thirteen-year-old local girl. Claimed it was consensual. Maybe it was, it’s hard to tell, but her dad found them going at it in a motel room and beat the piss out of him. The girl’s father pressed charges, but this time the Johnsons were able to make it go away.

  “They brought Johnson home, where they could keep an eye on him. Then he gets caught twice trying to lure thirteen-year-old girls into his car. The Johnsons paid and kept it quiet, but that was it for them. They kicked him out and told him never to come back—not to their home and not to the state of Texas. The mother convinced the father to set up the fund through the law office so he would be taken care of.”

  “I am going to be sick,” I said.

  “We don’t have to talk about this, Claire,” Mitch said.

  I shook my head, shored myself up, and met Mitch’s gaze. “No,” I said. “I have to. I have to hear it.”

  Connor reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “So the reason he has no priors in Texas is because the parents bribed people to keep quiet,” he said.

  “Yeah. That was over twenty-five years ago, though. I found a lot of people who were willing to tell me the details just so long as they never had to go to court.”

  Connor’s mouth twisted in revulsion. “So the parents knew that their son was a pervert well before he turned eighteen, and their solution to that problem was to give him unlimited funding and turn him loose on the rest of society?”