The Criminal Mind

by Thomas Benigno

  After identifying himself as a private investigator, Paul announced to the merry divorcee that he was canvassing the town for any information that might lead to the finding of a missing boy.

  When she asked Paul to step inside, he slipped off his wedding ring and dropped it into his pants pocket. If she thought he was single, maybe she would fess up more.

  The house was a prefab, which meant it was built somewhere else, and then delivered and dropped onto a concrete slab foundation. As Paul entered what looked more like a railroad car than an actual home, the fetching lady of the house invited him to sit down in a tiny living room that consisted of a small sofa and a coffee table.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Paul. My name is Betsy, Betsy Carter. By the way, my ex is the deputy sheriff here in town, but don’t let that scare you off.” She giggled, sat down next to him, crossed her legs, and let her nightie creep up her thigh accordingly. Paul looked because he knew it’s what she wanted him to do. He had to be careful, though. She might no longer be Deputy Carter’s wife, but Deputy Carter was still an asshole.

  When necessary, Paul could be quite charming, but in the confined recesses of his psyche, behind his handsome features, athletic build and six-foot-two frame, he was all business. Betsy wasn’t the first flirty blonde to cross his path, and she most certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  Paul leaned forward and smiled. “Maybe you can help me with something, Betsy.”

  “Oh sure,” she said softly.

  “I’m a private investigator trying to find a little boy who went missing two days ago. Any information you might have about anyone or anything that could help—however insignificant you may think it is—would be very much appreciated.” Paul closed with a smile.

  “I heard about that,” she said. “That boy’s parents are teachers, aren’t they?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, you work for them?”

  Paul didn’t answer, which lead her to believe that he did. “I’m here for the boy, to help find him,” he said solemnly.

  “The parents must be out of their minds with worry.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “The mom teaches at my son’s school. He’s in fourth grade. She teaches first. I think the missing boy may be her only child.”

  “Actually, there’s also an older sister. She’s a teenager. The dad is their stepdad.”

  “Thank God there’s another child in the home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked away, got up, walked toward the kitchen, then spun around. “Can I get you something? I have some bourbon if you like. Oh, but you’re working.” She looked away and giggled again. “I’ll add ice.”

  “No, thank you, but what did you mean by: ‘Thank God there’s another child in the home?’”

  Betsy adjusted her nightie by pinching the shoulder straps. “Just…you know…good thing they have another child to comfort them.”

  “At a time like this, a teenage girl may not be much of a comfort. I’m sure she misses her brother, too.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, I suppose. What do I know?” She threw her hands in the air and the nightie rose in unison.

  “Besides,” Paul added. “We’re going to find him.”

  “Find who? The kidnappers?” She dropped her arms.

  Paul looked at her inquisitively. “We’re not sure he was kidnapped. He could have just run off.”

  “Of course. True, maybe he just ran away. That’s possible.”

  Paul made a mental note that Betsy said kidnappers—not kidnapper. He looked around and then focused on the clock on the wall. It was 3:30 p.m. “I guess your son will be coming home from school soon.”

  Betsy glanced at the same clock and said: “He probably stopped at the park with his friends. We still have some time to talk—if you like.” She smiled and leaned back against the kitchen counter that abutted the living room and everything else in this tiny house. Paul smiled back, while wondering why she wasn’t the least bit concerned about her own son walking home from school alone, when a boy his age had gone missing less than forty-eight hours ago.

  Disheartened by the early path of the investigation (the evidence gathered thus far consisting of a bulging tire tread), I could barely put one foot in front of the other as I went door-to-door on the north side of Cartersville—until I came across the Johnsons—a family of devout Baptists who gave me a welcome that was so warm and inviting, I wanted to forget why I was there.

  At first, I was skeptical. Were they setting me up for a fat contribution for the upcoming church fair? Generally speaking, the folks in Franklin, Tennessee were a lot friendlier than my neighbors on Long Island, but inside the Johnson house, friendly was taken to a whole new level.

  After inviting me to sit on a couch that had more pillows than seating space, Mrs. Johnson joined me in a nearby wing chair, while over a dozen other Johnsons—from grade school age to a grinning great-grandma—looked on.

  Mrs. Johnson, a seventy-plus-year-old black woman and matriarch of the family, began with a simple question: “Are you Baptist?”

  “No Ma’am,” I answered. “I’m Catholic.”

  “Well then,” she said, smiling from ear to ear. “We both believe in Jesus and that’s good enough for me.” The rest of the family grinned and nodded in unison.

  “Thank you, but I should tell you why I’m here.”

  “You’re here,” Mrs. Johnson said, “because God put you here.” At this point, the front screen door opened and a seventeen-year-old the size of an NFL middle linebacker walked in with two school-age children, seven and eight years old.

  Mrs. Johnson turned to the teenager then to me. “Marlon, this is…what is your name exactly?”

  “Nick Mannino, Mrs. Johnson.”

  Marlon walked over and shook my hand. At five-foot-nine, I measured Marlon to be about six-foot-four. The two little boys with him said “hi,” and then ran, bags in hand, to the rear of the house, where I figured a television inside a den was their intended target.

  “Homework first, then TV!” Mrs. Johnson shouted.

  “That’s right,” yelled another woman who was half Mrs. Johnson’s age who followed the boys out.

  “Nice of Marlon to pick up his younger brothers from school,” I said.

  “They’re his cousins.” Mrs. Johnson was quick to correct me. “And I just want my grandkids home safe is all.”

  “But isn’t Cartersville pretty much a safe community?” I asked tentatively.

  She took a breath and smiled weakly. The great-grandma had stopped smiling entirely.

  Mrs. Johnson looked at me with somber eyes. “You’re here to ask me about that missing boy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am, Mrs. Johnson.”

  “I figured as much. You don’t exactly look like the welcome wagon.” I smiled weakly back at her. “Little boys have gone missing around here before. But then a little white boy from a decent middle-class family disappears and someone like you shows up at the door. No offense to you, Mr. Mannino.”

  “Actually, that’s not the only reason I’m here.”

  “Really?” There was cutting cynicism in her voice.

  “Can I trust you with something, Mrs. Johnson?”

  She gave me a look filled with both charm and indignation. “What do you think?”

  “I think I can, but can we talk in private?”

  She got up and escorted me through the kitchen, past the den where her grandkids were doing their homework, and into a large backyard with a small vegetable garden and a plush green lawn that abutted a deeply wooded area. We stopped midway into the yard.

  “This is as private as it’s going to get, Mr. Mannino. I don’t like keeping things from my family. So, what is it that I can do for you?”

  “I’m here because of those missing boy
s you spoke of. One is too many—but up here in this small community, it appears to be much more than that.”

  Mrs. Johnson took my hand into hers and looked me dead in the eyes. “And you don’t know the half of it. You want answers, Mr. Mannino? Go to that home for boys along the river on the north side of town. It used to be an orphanage, and has been run since by one crooked priest after another. No telling what happens there. Check their records—if you can get your hands on them.”

  After the cryptic counsel of Mrs. Johnson, I was done for the day and anxious to get back to the hotel. I was looking forward to meeting up with Paul, Lauren, and Charlie, hearing their stories, and in particular, finding out more about that home for boys by the Seneca River that Mrs. Johnson spoke of.

  Upon returning to The Red Mill Inn, I couldn’t help but notice the weak smile on the old man working at the front desk––an expression of mandatory politeness––unforced, habitual, but no less disingenuous. It wasn’t the natural ‘small-town smile’ I was expecting. Maybe I was just getting a little paranoid. That can happen on investigations as you inch closer to the truth.

  As I walked into the lobby, I saw Charlie sitting in his chair next to Lauren. I knew they weren’t talking about their day when utterances that included “artillery fire” and “Syrian attacks” wafted into the air. As I went to sit down on a couch across from them, Paul hurried in from the parking lot, the keys to his rented SUV still in his hand. “There is definitely something going on up here that no one is eager to talk about. Considering how dangerous it may be, hopefully we can find someone stupid enough to tell us something.”

  “Maybe we’re not looking for stupid,” I said, as thoughts of Mrs. Johnson came to mind. “Maybe we just need to find somebody with the goodness and courage to speak up.”

  “Courage and goodness?” Paul spoke much too loud for my comfort level, although his sarcasm was not lost on me. “We’re talking about decades of heinous criminal activity that has gone virtually uninvestigated in a community of roughly three thousand people. Courage and goodness have been woefully missing in and around Cartersville, so I doubt it will suddenly emerge like some sunken shipwreck.”

  Paul then filled us in on his meeting with the deputy’s ex. I followed by briefing everyone on my visit with the Johnson family—how their children needed to be picked up after school, while the deputy’s son could wander home on his own—and just two days after a local boy went missing. Was Mrs. Johnson just being overprotective? Was the deputy’s ex-wife simply an irresponsible mother? Not one of us believed either proposition—only that it seemed that some children were safe, while others weren’t. “But why?” I asked.

  “Because some kids are in the target group, while others aren’t,” Lauren said.

  “And people go about their daily lives and just don’t care how dangerous it is here for certain children?” I asked.

  “You mean you’re just beginning to figure out that most people aren’t worth a damn, and the weak and the innocent are always screwed in this world?” Charlie’s cynicism was not lost on me.

  “I wouldn’t be here if I thought that, Charlie, and neither would you,” I replied. “All four of us have had to cope with close personal disappointment and tragedy in our lives, but we’re still here, trying to put a halt to the cruelty and the madness.”

  I realized Charlie knew little of our pasts: Paul and Lauren’s murdered sisters—one lost to a maniac husband and the other to a serial killer—while I still bore the emotional scars of my mother’s childhood abuse. But truth be told, if you live long enough and manage to escape the curse of tragedy in its infinite forms, you are in the minority—at least as far as I can tell.

  “What are we—philosophers?” Paul said jokingly.

  Lauren laughed, and since I rarely saw her laugh, it was a welcome distraction that made us all take a breath.

  As it turned out, Lauren and Charlie’s day was no less eventful. Lauren met a man who had a special needs daughter, low on the autism spectrum, her communication skills limited to grunts and a few words. She was overweight and short for her age of sixteen. When Lauren asked the father about missing children, he evaded the question and asked her if she thought he would be able to place his daughter in a nursing home when she turned eighteen. He worked long hours installing underground hydraulic pumps and claimed he was unable to care for her properly.

  Lauren responded with: “She seems to be doing okay the way things are.”

  He didn’t like her answer and shouted back: “But I’m not!”

  Startled by his outburst, Lauren quickly excused herself, but not before the father said: “Too bad there isn’t a home for special needs kids, like the one they got upriver for them boys.”

  Then it was Charlie’s turn.

  Seems his wheelchair didn’t stop a white supremacist who thought he had a sympathetic ear in one disabled Vietnam veteran from almost having a go at him. The man was wearing what was known in my Brooklyn days as a ‘wife-beater’ T-shirt that barely covered a variety of tattoos up and down his arms, as well as a Nazi swastika down each side of his neck.

  In excess of six feet—fat, bald, with a face marked by acne scars and patchy stubble—when he started trashing “the Jews and the spics,” Charlie put his hand up. “You dumb fuck!” he shouted. “You forget who we fought in World War II. If the Nazis had their way, we’d be slaves to the Third Reich today.”

  “Only the niggers, spics and Jews—not us decent, pure-white Americans,” the man answered, with an arrogance which only served to incense Charlie more.

  They were talking through a screen door, and when the exchange got heated, the man pushed it open, only to have Charlie slam it shut with his wheelchair.

  “Damn it to hell!” Charlie shouted. “You are one colossal dumbass!”

  The man tried to push the door open again. In turn, Charlie smacked it closed again.

  “Listen, shit for brains.” Charlie wasn’t done. “Why not try reading a fucking history book before you open your big, fat mouth?”

  After Charlie wheeled himself away from the front door, the man freely kicked it open. “Lucky you’re in that chair, you crazy fucker.”

  “Yeah, lucky me,” Charlie answered. “Lucky me.”

  While we four were traipsing through Cartersville, two other investigations were in progress at Paul’s behest—one in Franklin, and the other in cyberspace.

  Paul had dispatched an investigator with instructions to get to Tennessee and find out what he could about the assault on Maureen. A retired FBI man, Donald Riggins was a spry seventy-five-year-old with a large stocky frame and a full mane of wavy gray hair. He was smart, patient, and best of all, unassuming. Unnoticeable and forgettable, he was in appearance and demeanor an every-man, but when it came to the delicate and difficult task of investigating, he was anything but. His success rate at solving crimes, finding missing persons—and identifying those responsible—was off the charts when compared to any other FBI agent. As a result, Paul had every confidence that Riggins would report back with valuable information.

  While Riggins may have been our trusted man on the street, Jasmine was our cyberspace warrior—and she did not disappoint when it came to getting the lowdown on the home for boys by the river.

  Her report back contained the following:

  The Mount Seneca Seminary was built in the 1930s as a school for young men of faith studying for the priesthood. With a combined high school and college curriculum, the courses were almost entirely comprised of theological studies in one form or another. The lofty ideals of its founders, however, were not nearly enough to rescue the seminary from the scandal that occurred in 1953, when one of its priest-professors was caught bedding down with a sophomore. The seminary administration, along with the bishop, tried its best to sweep the incident under the sacristy rug, but were, for the most part, unsuccessful. The reason? The father of t
he young sophomore was none other than the editor-in-chief of the Cartersville Gazette, who refused to believe that his only son was a willing participant. In turn, he accused the priest-professor of rape—a bold and shocking allegation; especially in the early 1950s, and especially in a small town like Cartersville.

  As word of the incident spread, and attendance at the seminary dropped to an unsustainable level, the monsignor decided the only way to survive financially was to turn the school into a state-funded orphanage for boys. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, orphanages were increasingly phased out and replaced by state-funded foster care systems. Therefore, what began as an orphanage in purpose, soon became a group home for boys. In consideration of the move, the state allowed the administration to keep its nontaxable religious status, which also made it eligible for large government state and federal subsidies. As an added bonus, those in administration were also allowed to take salaries commensurate with the number of young boys under their care. Since priests, unlike nuns, do not take a vow of poverty, as attendance at Mount Seneca rose to full capacity (over one hundred and fifty), so did the pay and net worth of the priests who ran the place.

  Jasmine, however, found it hard to believe that in the 1950s—or at any time thereafter—there were that many homeless young boys in and around Cartersville and Upstate New York. Were they brought there from all over the country? Were any of the children ever eventually adopted? Records that dated back that far were either nonexistent, or in the case of adoptions—confidential. In her search for answers, Jasmine went a step further, and back-checked the staff records at Mount Seneca, and lo and behold, found someone on their books in 1953 who was still alive and still working. Her name was Fran Manz, and she was currently employed by USAdoptions.com.

  Jasmine immediately called the company.

  After a brief hold, a member of the executive board got on the line. Jasmine introduced herself as a PI conducting an investigation into missing children in Cartersville, New York. After which, there was dead silence. Jasmine thought she lost the connection and repeated “hello” several times until the deep and succinct voice of an elderly woman cut in.