by Paula McLain
I know the pressure he’s under to get this case right. Everyone watching. The last thing he needs is something else to think about, but I have to try just the same. “Listen, we know your time is valuable,” I tell him. “If you could just take a minute to lay out the case for us.”
“Van Leer said there was a handprint at the scene?” Will presses.
“Too blurry for the computer,” Barresi replies. “If we had a suspect we could make it work.”
“Any other witnesses besides Polly’s two friends?” I ask.
“There was a renter on the property in a garage apartment. He had a friend visiting. The two were watching TV with the door open when the unsub came up the driveway and approached the back door.”
Will sits forward, his question echoing my own silent one. “They weren’t suspicious?”
“Apparently the guy just waltzed up as if he owned the place. The back door was unlocked. Maybe it’s a friend of the family, he thinks.”
“Still, that’s damned bold when you know you’ve been spotted,” Will replies.
“There were witnesses on the street, too,” Barresi adds. “A warm Friday night. People in the park. Lots of foot traffic.”
It’s easy enough to picture what the sergeant’s describing, the kind of person who doesn’t care about witnesses or time of day or repercussions or risk—who, once triggered, would take Polly no matter what.
That kind of reckless confidence is partly why some perpetrators are able to pull off abductions in plain sight, even in broad daylight. In 1991, in the small mountain town of Meyers, California, near Lake Tahoe, a car approached eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard as she walked to her bus stop. Several of her classmates watched as Jaycee was attacked by a stun gun and pulled into the car. Her stepfather witnessed the kidnapping, too, and set out in pursuit on his mountain bike, but he couldn’t keep up. The car had sped away. A massive search effort had launched immediately, but Jaycee had vanished.
Two years and three months later, she’s still gone, but very much on my mind in Barresi’s office, even as he changes gears and begins to talk about Polly’s family.
Eve recently split from her second husband, who fathered Polly’s half sister, Annie, just six. Was it possible that there were tensions between the two, or that Marc Klaas wasn’t happy with the custody arrangements? Barresi was grasping at straws.
“The suspect didn’t knock or hesitate,” he’s saying. “That could mean he knew the victim, had access to and knowledge of the house.”
I know the odds as well as he does, that less than five percent of the time is the perpetrator a stranger. But I already have a feeling this case is going to buck the odds, maybe lots of them. “Time will tell,” I offer. “Anything else you can share?”
“You can go on over to the scene if that would help. We’ve cleared the perimeter. You can’t screw anything up.”
“Thanks,” Will says. “How are the other girls doing? Polly’s friends?”
“Those are some brave little girls. They’ve done nothing but cooperate with us since late Friday night. We’ve got officers posted at both their houses. I imagine they won’t be ready to go back to school for a while.”
“I’d never go back,” I say.
“Normalcy helps sometimes,” Barresi explains.
I nod, not wanting to contradict the sergeant in his own office. But inwardly I’m thinking the only thing I can think. For those girls, just like the classmates who saw Jaycee Dugard attacked on the street in front of them, just like Gray Benson, who watched his best friend vanish into nowhere, normalcy was going to be off the table for a long time, maybe even for good.
(twenty-six)
Eve Nichol’s house is part of a sleepy and serene residential neighborhood about a mile from the town center. The block has been roped off, so we park nearby, crossing through Wickersham Park under leafy elms and plane trees. I can picture it as it should be, full of shrieking children on the lopsided jungle gym and swing sets, mothers gossiping on the wooden benches and at the picnic tables. Today, there isn’t a soul anywhere.
Police tape has been strung through the picket fencing surrounding the small blue-gray bungalow in the center of the block, cute and kept up, but otherwise indistinctive, with white trim and a large bay window. Potted flowers droop on the front porch. The mailbox is stuffed with Safeway circulars. It’s any house in any small town in America, except it isn’t.
We don’t need to knock. The door stands wide open, two uniformed officers from the Petaluma PD posted just beyond. Will flashes his badge and drops Barresi’s name. He’s called ahead for us, which makes everything easier. Apparently Eve and daughter Annie have gone to stay with friends nearby. A humane decision, I think. Two CSI officers are processing Polly’s room—still or again. The kitchen has been turned into temporary headquarters for the FBI team, led by Rod Fraser.
“Good to see you, Anna,” he says, grabbing my hand with his, warm and solid. He’s heavier than I remember, and his hairline has receded. Ten years can do that. “Wish it could be under happier circumstances.”
“Me too,” I say, though truthfully “happy” is relative in our line of work.
In Eve Nichol’s kitchen, there’s a strange feeling of suspension, of normalcy disrupted. Polly’s report card on the fridge under a Hamburglar magnet, a vacation photo of Polly and Eve curled at the edges, both of them in bright dresses, squinting at the sun with the same bold happiness, Eve’s springy hair blown over part of Polly’s smile. Every object in the room gives off a charge of intimacy and exposure. The jar of Oreos on the counter next to an envelope full of coupon clippings. The cat clock over the fridge with its tail swinging back and forth.
“I got here the night of, just after midnight,” Rod says.
“The girls were still here?” Will asks. “Polly’s two friends?”
“Gillian Pelham and Kate McLean. They’re our main witnesses. Mom was sound asleep and didn’t hear anything. Neither did Annie, Polly’s sister.”
“That’s a blessing, I guess,” Will says, while inwardly my heart breaks for her. When this monster had come for her daughter and held a knife to her throat, Eve had been unconscious, incapable of coming to Polly’s rescue.
“Mom and Annie went to bed around nine-thirty,” Rod adds. “The girls were having fun all night, playing dress-up and board games, putting makeup on each other. At ten-thirty or so, Polly went out to the living room to get the girls’ sleeping bags, and the guy’s in the hall with a knife drawn. Big guy, heavy and bearded, middle-aged. He’s got a duffel bag, too, with rope and a hood inside. All premeditated, obviously.”
“Where was the print you found?”
“On the top bunk bed.” He points. “It’s just a partial, and pretty smeared. We’ll see if we can use it.”
“Why didn’t Mom hear anything?” Will asks.
“She had a bad migraine and went to bed early. She probably couldn’t have stopped him anyway,” Rod goes on. “She’s a slender woman, and he had the knife, remember?”
“Barresi mentioned that he asked the girls which one of the three lived in the house,” I say, jumping in. “That seems to suggest a stranger, right?”
“Not necessarily. I’ve seen custody issues where the parent hires someone to snatch the kid and make it look like a stranger.”
“Right,” I say. “But in this particular family, the parents are amicable, it seems. Six years in and no court orders or restraints in place. No domestic disputes.”
“Not that we know of,” Rod adds. “But apparently he told the girls, ‘I’m just doing it for the money.’ Then when Polly offered him fifty dollars from a box on her dresser, he ignored it.”
“That’s odd,” Will says. “Though I guess if he’s a gun for hire as you say, he could have gotten stressed out or disoriented. Afraid of getting caught.”
�
��Why would he ask which girl lived in the house?” Will wants to know. “If he was a family acquaintance, he wouldn’t be confused about that.”
“Maybe,” I allow. “Or maybe he is a stranger. A sociopath who says whatever occurs to him in the moment.” This is where my mind is headed, though it’s a long shot. Only one percent of the time does a missing child involve a full-on predator, true, but the usual markers for family drama don’t seem to be obvious here. Also, the details we do have, like the silk hood and ligatures, feel too specific to be props.
If the guy who took Polly really was paid off, as Rod is suggesting, he wouldn’t have taken any more risks than necessary. He’d have waited until much later at night. He’d have thoroughly scoped out the place to make sure the family was asleep first, and that Polly was alone. But another type of guy, with no motivation but the sick story in his head, wouldn’t follow any clock or care about being recognized. Once he’d decided to attack his victim, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. Risk wouldn’t matter. Nothing would, just the girl.
“Can you walk us through the rest?” I ask Rod. “What happened next?”
“He ties them all up using the ligatures he brought, plus cord he’s cut from the Nintendo game. The whole time, though, he’s telling them he’s not really going to hurt them.”
“Sick bastard,” Will mutters, and I have to agree.
“He gags them all,” Rod goes on, “puts hoods over their heads, and tells the other two girls to start counting. Then he carries Polly away. The girls hear the front screen door creak and know he’s gone. It takes them a few minutes to wrestle free of the bindings and wake Eve. Then she calls 911.”
“What’s the tape like?” Will asks. “Anything unusual?”
“Not really. Mom’s a little groggy and confused, as if she can’t quite believe this is happening. The call goes on and she starts to crack. To break down.”
I feel a tingling of unease as the story he’s telling veers too close to mine. Eve’s grief and mine blurring, colliding. “Have you heard about Cameron Curtis?” I ask Rod, deliberately changing course.
“The actress’s kid?”
“That’s right. Fifteen-year-old girl disappears from her own house sometime after ten p.m. a little over a week ago. No sign of forced entry, no leads, no obvious motive, no reason to think she ran. Just poof.”
Rod turns to me, thumbing the rim of the coffee cup in his hand. “What are you thinking for this, Anna? Any reason to believe it could be the same guy?”
I’m still trying to collect myself when Will jumps back in. “This girl’s not a runner. And I don’t think we can ignore the geography piece. Sometimes these violent offenders have territories, right?”
“Sure. But the behavior doesn’t really line up, let alone the victimology. Twelve and fifteen look completely different, particularly to a predator. And you have to think about the zone of control. Where these girls would be allowed to go. Who they might run into inadvertently.”
“Do you remember the hitchhiker murders around Santa Rosa in ’72 and ’73?” Will goes on, as if he hasn’t heard Rod, or doesn’t want to. “That killer struck often and very specifically before he went underground, always within the same hundred-mile radius.”
“That was a long time ago. It would be pretty atypical for a guy like that to strike again in the same area after being dormant for twenty years.”
“I guess so.” Will leans back against the kitchen counter, but his muscles stay tensed. “I just can’t stop thinking there’s some sort of precedent here that we shouldn’t ignore.”
Fraser’s eyes move from Will to me as I think of how to safely weigh in. I’m still rattled about Eve, but more than this, I feel pressure coming from Will to agree with him about the possibility of a serial predator. The stakes are high, and this is the first chance he’s seen at getting some outside resources. Rod has reason to trust my instincts, too. If I tell him I see a link between the two cases, it might convince him to take a risk and send some of his own men our way. But pressure or no, I have to be honest.
“I don’t see it,” I finally say. “No way it’s the same guy.”
As Fraser bobs his head, I feel confusion and disappointment radiating from Will’s body. His mouth is a tight line. The tips of his ears are almost fuchsia.
“Someone took this girl,” he snaps. “I need some help here.”
Rod crosses his arms over his chest, clearly uncomfortable. He has a big heart, I know, and will be feeling for Will and the whole situation, whether or not he can act. He’s not callous, hasn’t overspent his compassion along the way. “I don’t know what I can do,” he finally says. “I’m at my limit and then some.”
Will’s sigh rattles. He cups his forehead with one hand, squeezing his temples, the headache there. The strain. “Maybe you could just make a call and remind the Bureau that we’ve got another missing girl up here. Possibly two. The Gualala PD has just posted a missing persons report for a seventeen-year-old who vanished in June.”
Clearly Fraser hasn’t heard. “Gualala?”
“Shannan Russo,” I jump in. “We have a psychic who says this is related somehow to the Curtis girl.”
Rod’s eyebrows shoot up. “A psychic called here, too. Wonder if it’s the same woman.”
“Did you get her name?” I ask.
“Barresi did. She said she wanted access to Marc Klaas’s apartment in Sausalito, something about sensing Polly’s vibrations.” Rod’s look dismisses her credibility and closes a door simultaneously. Even if I do plan to interview Tally Hollander, now’s not the time to bring it up.
“You know how it is, Rod,” I offer finally, working to shift us back to sounder footing. “We don’t want to get confused here, thinking everything is connected, but we don’t want to miss anything, either. Whatever’s between those two things, that’s the line we’re trying to walk.”
He nods, hands on his hips, saying nothing. He knows the territory all too well. He’s one of the good ones—the best. But that doesn’t mean he can solve his mystery, or ours.
(twenty-seven)
As I’d told Will, women like Tally Hollander aren’t unknown to me. Searchlight has used them occasionally, with some success. And then there was Eden.
She was “sensitive”—her word—able to see the future in dreams and visions that arrived when she could sense someone was in trouble, doubled over the bathtub after a bad fall, or under a truck at the side of the highway, trying to remove a flat. These were real people, as I understood it, but almost always strangers. She was simply at the receiving end of an image, a flash of telegraphed panic, as if her unconscious was a kind of cosmic phone line. Occasionally she intervened or tried to, when the events in question were to happen nearby, to people she could identify, not too far in the future or the past to be useful. Never, ever, was she in her own visions, which she found a relief.
“I don’t want to know what’s going to happen to me,” she explained once. “I don’t know anyone who does.”
“What if you could stop the future, though? Do something different?”
She shrugged almost imperceptibly, her head bent over the bowl where she was kneading dark studs of raisins and pecans into pale bread dough. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“No one can change anything? Like fate, then?”
“No, I don’t mean fate, Anna. I mean character. We do what we do because we are who we are.”
Her words dropped through me like polished stones. “Do you dream about me?”
Eden’s eyes glanced up. I caught the edge of a troubled thought before she cleared it away, like drawing a broom across a corner of the room. “Sometimes.”
I was afraid to ask my next question. It hung there, weighted, while I looked at her.
“What do you want to know, Anna?” Her voice was tender and patient.
“Nothing.” Without moving, I wrestled with myself. “Just…do you think I’m a good person?”
“What?” She shook the bowl upside down over the oiled pan, which caught the dough with a satisfying thump. “What kind of question is that? Of course I do, honey.”
Suddenly Lenore made a strange sort of noise from her chair, almost a growl, and it rattled me. It was one of those moments when I thought the bird knew too much, could sense things. “Never mind,” I retracted.
Eden opened the oven and put the pan inside, then she came over and sat next to me at the kitchen table, untying her apron so that it hung over her lap. Particles of flour fell to the floor like dust, but she ignored them. “Are you thinking about your brother and sister, Anna? We can try to find them if you want. You must still worry about them a lot.”
Lenore flapped her good wing out and began to preen, separating and rearranging her feathers with her beak. It seemed a calculated gesture to me. As if she was pretending not to listen, but in fact had begun to pay even closer attention. “They’re probably fine, right?” I threw out.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “They’re how old now?”
“Eight and nine.”
“Ah. Well, there’s one way to find out. Let us call Linda. Maybe you could even visit them. I’m sure that kind of thing gets arranged all the time.”
A sharp pinch came at my side, just below my rib cage. “I don’t think I want to visit. Not right now. You can ask, though. Call Mrs. Stephens. I’d like to know if they’re okay.”
“Sure, honey.” She reached for her apron strings and cupped the loose bundle in her hands, thinking for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t know anything about those kids, but I can tell you they don’t blame you for what happened.”
“How do you know?” I couldn’t look up.