by Steven James
“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked.
“No, but thank you for asking.”
I held up the take-out bag from Rita’s Wing Joint. “I’ve got garlic Parmesan, barbecue, and ragin’ Cajun.”
“Great.” He invited me to the kitchen.
On the way there we crossed the hallway to the bedrooms.
A door about halfway down the hall had a sheet of paper taped to it with Adrienne’s name drawn in colorful crayons and with the awkward, blocky letters that a child might use. A golden sun looked down on the letters from the top right corner of the page. Three happy stick figures stood holding hands at the bottom of the page, beneath the letters.
He never took it down.
All these years and he left that sign on her door.
The other day he’d told me how hard it was to move on.
The sign bore out how hard it really had been for him.
Love sets us free. But in many ways it also holds us captive.
It looked like his love and the lack of closure from never finding Adrienne’s killer had kept a part of his heart imprisoned all these years.
Once we were in the kitchen, he said, “You didn’t really get a chance to finish your beer the other night. You want one?”
“Naw. I’ll need to drive back to Christie’s later. But go ahead.”
“I think I have some root beer in here. Sound good?”
“Sure.”
He found two bottles of Barq’s in the fridge and after uncapping them, handed me one.
“Thanks.”
We spoke for a few minutes and I told him about my day with Tessa, about taking her to the museum and trying to relate to her. “Any advice on talking to teenagers?”
“I’m as much in the dark on that front as you are.”
It didn’t take us long to polish off the wings and while he was cleaning up, I used the bathroom. When I returned he said, “So, what does that discerning eye of yours see here so far?”
“What do you mean?”
“What have you noticed about my place that other people wouldn’t have?”
“Is this a test?”
“Just curious.”
“Um . . . well, there’s no indication that you live alone. The bathroom has women’s soap, moisturizer, body lotion. There’s children’s bubble bath by the tub. You still subscribe to Misty’s magazines and keep them beside your couch.”
“The mailing labels? You saw them when you walked in?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And you have photos of your wife and daughter—at least I’m guessing that’s who they are—in every room I’ve seen so far. In fact, I’d have to verify it, but by their orientation to the doorways, it appears that a picture would be in your line of sight as you entered any of the rooms from any direction.”
He sat quietly for a moment, then went to the counter and picked up the photo of him with an attractive blond woman and a little girl who looked like a miniature version of her. All three were smiling. They stood on a boardwalk along the beach. A gently rippling ocean spread out behind them.
He turned the photo so I could see it better. “This was taken about a month before Adrienne was abducted. We’d been thinking about moving—had our place here listed with a realtor, held an open house and everything. We’d visited the shore, thought we were going to move over there. Ended up staying. I’ve been here ever since.”
“This house holds a lot of memories for you.” I left it up to him to decide where to take things from there.
“I know—some people would have wanted to move, to escape the harsher ones, to start over, start fresh. For me, though, staying was important. It kept me focused.”
“Focused?”
“Yes.”
I waited. He didn’t elaborate, but he did set down the photo, then faced me and got right to business. “So, tell me about the case, about what happened yesterday, what you’ve been thinking about this guy who got away.”
It took more than an hour to fill him in and address all of his questions. We perused the online case files and found that when the man who’d abducted Lily Keating had brought other women to the condo, he’d managed to avoid the cameras each time. Officer Chip Hinchcliffe had posted that he hadn’t been able to identify anyone at the coffee shop who might have uploaded the masks video.
I spent even more time showing Tobin what I was doing with the geoprofile. He seemed very interested in understanding as much as he could about my approach.
Finally, the conversation drifted off into a natural eddy and in the silence that followed he said, “Hey, listen, do you play pool?”
Actually, I welcomed a breather from the case. “I’ve played a little over the years, but I wouldn’t say I know the game very well.”
“I think you’d like it. The timing and location of your shots mean everything. Very geospatial. Come on, I have a table in the basement.”
I followed him down to the rec room.
“Break?” he asked.
“Go for it.”
We racked the balls and he showed me where each one should go when you’re setting up for the break shot. He rolled some chalk onto the end of one of the cue sticks and walked to the far end of the table, lined up on the cue ball, and fired away.
When the cue ball hit it, the triangle of balls exploded apart, splaying across the table. Two striped ones dropped into a couple of the pockets.
“I guess I’m solids,” I said.
“So you do know how to play.”
“Just the basics.”
“Well, it’s all about planning your next shot before you take your current one. You want to set yourself up to take advantage of the position of everything else on the table.” Like always, there was a solemnity to everything he said, although I could sense that he really did enjoy the game. “And all the while, you try not to disturb the other balls that don’t have anything to do with the shot you’re setting up.”
“There’s an art to it.”
“A strategy at least.” He eyed down the cue stick at the eleven ball. “Listen, Patrick, I have to admit, one of the reasons I invited you over was to apologize.”
“For what?”
“For the other night when we were at Mally’s Pub and Toffee Shop, for getting into the whole story of what happened with Adrienne and Misty. For dumping it on you out of nowhere.”
“That’s nothing you need to apologize for, Tobin. I was just honored you felt comfortable sharing it with me.”
Earlier, Christie had been apologizing to me, now Tobin was, both for something they hadn’t done wrong—trusting me, being honest, sharing something deep—Christie about her future, Tobin about his past.
He took his shot and banked the eleven in, and the cue ball rolled gently into place to allow him to drop the fifteen into the side pocket. This man had clearly played this game before.
“Do you know the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin?” he asked.
“I’m afraid my folktale repertoire is a bit limited, but that’s the one with the rats, right?”
“Yes. In Hamelin, Germany, the town’s official record begins on June 26, 1384, and here’s the first line: ‘It is 100 years since our children left.’ That’s how it begins.”
“That’s chilling.”
“No kidding. And no one knows what happened to the children. The way it’s phrased—I mean, it doesn’t say they died, but that they left. Well, it’s stumped historians to this day.”
He put in the fifteen, walked to the other side of the table to take aim at the nine.
“And that inscription,” I said, “is that what the story grew out of?”
“The story might have come first, no one knows for sure. According to the most common legend, the village was infested with rats,
and the people tried everything they could think of to get rid of them, but nothing worked.”
He called the nine in the corner pocket and delivered, then said, “So one day a stranger from out of town appears dressed in these colorful clothes—that’s what the term ‘pied’ refers to. He makes a deal that if he can rid the village of the rats, the people will have to pay him a certain amount, an exorbitant amount, actually.”
“And they agree because they don’t think he’ll be able to pull it off.”
“Right. Well, he plays the flute—the pipe, that is—and when he does, the rats follow him. He’s able to lead them out of the city and into the hills. So he delivers Hamelin from its plague of rats.”
“But that’s just the first part.” It came back to me now. “Then he lures the children away.”
Tobin nodded.
With his next shot he sank the twelve ball and set himself up for a perfect bank with the fourteen.
“The people of the village refuse to pay him for getting rid of the rats, and then he returns and plays a new tune. And this time, yeah, it’s the kids who follow him out of town. And they’re never seen again.”
He pocketed the fourteen and the cue ball rolled into position, offering him a chance to finish off the game by dropping the eight ball with a straight shot across the length of the table.
I wasn’t getting much of an opportunity here to pick up any practice. He hadn’t missed a shot and now he was about to win without even giving me a reason to chalk up my cue stick.
“And they still don’t know what really happened to those children?” I said.
“Right. But according to an inscription found on a stained glass window in the town from the early 1300s, one hundred and thirty children did disappear.”
“The plague, you think? The Black Death?”
“That didn’t break out in Europe until after these events in Hamelin occurred.”
“Huh.”
He lined up and stroked smooth and easy at the cue ball. It rolled across the table, tapped in the eight ball, and then followed it, falling into the pocket as well.
He clicked his tongue and shook his head. Based on how effortlessly he’d cleared the table and how accurate his shots had been, it didn’t seem likely that he would have made that mistake by accident and I wondered why he’d just handed the game to me.
Also, I wasn’t clear on why he’d brought up the story of the Pied Piper.
“That last shot is always the kicker. Everything depends on how you wrap up the game.” He leaned his cue stick against the wall. “I also needed to tell you that I’m sorry about my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“For lying to you about that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I wasn’t at a nursing home with her yesterday and this morning. She died two years ago.”
“Where were you?”
“I need to show you something, Pat.” He gestured toward what I assumed to be a guest bedroom.
Without another word he opened the door.
“Where were you, Tobin, if you weren’t with your mom?”
“You’ll understand when you step inside.”
He ushered me into the room.
46
The walls were covered with photos of children, some from missing persons posters, others from case files, still others from newspapers or printouts of websites.
A large road map of the Northeast seaboard hung on the wall. Eighteen pushpins had been stuck into it in locations ranging from Maine to North Carolina. Strings connected them, creating an intricate web. The nexus of the web was in a location in New Jersey.
This city.
And, if I was correct, this address.
A pile of overstuffed file folders sat on a desk in the corner of the room.
“This is about Adrienne, isn’t it?” I said softly.
“They wouldn’t give me the case, Patrick. They told me it would be too personal.”
The conclusion was obvious: “So you’ve been digging into things yourself, all these years, looking for her killer.”
“I couldn’t just let it be. You understand that, don’t you? She was my daughter.”
I pointed to the pushpins. “These are all child abductions?”
“Those are sites where their bodies were found. Eighteen of them over the last decade.”
“And you think they’re related to Adrienne’s case?”
“Yes. I was looking into one of them yesterday.”
“I don’t like being lied to,” I said.
“The lies end here.”
“Tobin, if you found anything specific regarding any of these cases, you need to pass that along to the detectives assigned to their investigations.”
“Oh, I have. Believe me. Everything I find, I share, and it gets put into the system.”
“But”—I anticipated what he was going to say—“it’s a big system.”
A nod. “Things get lost in the shuffle, officers get reassigned, new cases take precedence over older ones, time marches on. In the eight years since Adrienne was taken, her case has been handed off to four different detectives, but each one has eventually been transferred or retired up until this current guy, and his caseload doesn’t give him a lot of time to look into an eight-year-old cold case.”
“Okay, tell me what you have here.”
He pointed to the pins. “Eighteen children of different ages, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds spread across nearly as many states over the course of ten years and four months, killed different ways, abducted under different circumstances.”
“Both sexes?”
“Yes.”
“So there’s nothing on the surface linking them?”
“No.”
“What about Stewart’s mailing list?”
“Their names don’t appear.” He picked up the stack of file folders. “What I have here aren’t solid leads. It’s more like the back of a rug—you know, where you see the tangle of threads. You realize there has to be a pattern there, but you just can’t see it.”
“Until you turn the rug over.”
“Right.”
“Who else knows about this? About what you’re doing here?”
“No one.”
“Why are you showing me this, Tobin? Why are you telling me all this?”
“I want you to help me flip over the rug.”
“Why me?”
“From what I can tell, you see things—patterns, relationships, connections that other people miss. You have an eye for it. And location and timing—it’s your specialty. And that’s what we have here. I’ve been looking at all this for so long by myself that I need a fresh pair of eyes on it. I want you to help me find the person who took my daughter.”
“What makes you think all these deaths belong to the same rug?”
As I asked the question I was scanning the maps, the missing children’s posters, and the newspaper articles regarding when their bodies were found.
Timing and location.
Timing and—
Aha.
I answered my own question: “They were all kept alive for at least six months before they were killed. That’s what ties them together.”
“See what I mean?” He sounded pleased that I’d picked up on that. “It took me sorting through hundreds of pages of case files to pull that out.”
“That’s not something that would show up on ViCAP. It’s good work on your part.”
If we were on the right track with this, it was huge.
“Someone is taking children,” Tobin said, “keeping them locked up for months or even years, and then killing them. He’s been doing it for a decade and I think he did it to my daughter.”
Based on what’d happened to D’Nesh, it might be re
lated to our current case as well.
“Have these children’s pictures appeared online? Any record of them in the ICSC database?”
“No—at least not where we’ve been able to see.”
So that linked them together as well. Lack of evidence where you’d expect it is evidence in itself.
“Why did you tell me the story of the Pied Piper?”
“In many of these cases, the abductor led the children away right under the eyes of their parents. I’ve found images of flutes and passing references on the Dark Web to someone out there whom people refer to as the Piper. I think whoever that is, he’s engineering all this. Maybe even modeling his work after parts of the folktale.”
“And there, in Hamelin, one hundred and thirty children were taken.”
“Yes.”
A deep chill.
“You think the Piper might be the one behind Adrienne’s death?”
“I do.” He walked over to his desk and picked up a file folder. “Because of this.”
47
He laid out the papers. They were copies of official police reports from a variety of law enforcement agencies. I didn’t ask how he’d gotten them. With his job and his connections, he could simply have requested most of them. He might have called in favors for the rest. Right now I didn’t worry about that.
He indicated the top police report. “The last of the eighteen bodies found: a four-year-old girl, Haley Furman. She was abducted from her home in Maryland while her parents were sleeping just down the hall. It happened two states away and seven years later, but it’s the same m.o.”
“As when Adrienne was taken?”
“Yes.”
“If I’m going to help you with this, Tobin, I’ll need you to tell me the details of Adrienne’s disappearance. Are you up for that?”
“Yes.” But he didn’t answer right away.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, first, tell me exactly how she was taken.”
“It was April. The twenty-fourth. Misty and I were asleep in bed and I heard the front door close. At first I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining things, you know how, when you’re somewhere in between being awake and asleep, and you think you hear something but it’s really just your mind playing tricks on you.”