by Mark Gimenez
The abductor had nothing to put on the bargaining table.
He couldn’t close the deal.
Her deal was dead.
Elizabeth was also standing at the window staring in at the abductor, so close to him she could reach out and strangle the son of a bitch if they were not separated by the glass, and wondering if she could make it inside the interrogation room and choke the life out of him before Chief Ryan and Agent Devereaux could react. She turned to John; he was leaning into the glass, his forehead plastered against the pane, his arms hanging at his side, staring at the abductor like a kid looking in at the gorilla exhibit at the zoo.
Elizabeth turned back to the abductor, imagining him on top of her daughter while she lie motionless, silent tears streaming down her face, wondering why God had forsaken her. Heat spread across Elizabeth’s body; her fists clenched. Her entire body ached to strangle the bastard.
She glanced over at Ryan and Devereaux, standing a few steps behind her, engrossed in conversation, paying no attention to the victim’s distraught mother over by the interrogation room. She inched toward the door. Her pulse raced with anticipation.
“We got an anonymous tip,” Chief Ryan said to FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux.
“You should’ve got a warrant,” Devereaux said. “Paul, your man conducted an illegal search—under a floor mat and a bed cover ain’t in plain view. That picture and the jersey, they won’t ever see the inside of a courtroom. What else you got?”
“The coach ID’d him.”
“Positive?”
“Pretty much.”
Devereaux raised an eyebrow. “Pretty much ain’t much in a courtroom. Any other tangible evidence?”
“Well, nothing at this time.”
“Nothing in his apartment?”
“No.”
“Nothing else in his truck?”
“No … but your people are on it, checking for DNA.”
“Well, they damn sure better find some, Paul, ’cause we can’t take what we got to a grand jury.”
Ryan almost laughed. “The hell we can’t. Our county grand jury will indict a goddamned Greyhound bus if we tell ’em to!”
“Chief!”
A police officer came running up the corridor toward them.
“Chief,” the officer said when he arrived, “we got his cell phone records. Nine calls last week to the Brice residence.”
Elizabeth had worked her way almost to the interrogation room door when the police officer’s words jolted her. She turned to him but pointed sharply at the abductor behind the glass.
“He called my house?”
“Not any of your numbers, ma’am,” the officer said. “He called Gracie’s phone number. It’s listed in the book.”
“He stalked my daughter?”
That did it. A sudden surge of rage propelled Elizabeth to the door and inside the interrogation room before the others could react. The abductor recoiled as she lunged across the table at him and landed in his lap. They toppled over backwards in his chair onto the cement floor. He couldn’t break the fall with his hands and feet shackled. Elizabeth fell on his chest, knees first, knocking the air out of him. His mouth gaped and he sucked for air as she punched him in the face, again and again, trying to drive her fist through his face, the adrenaline and rage giving her strength she had never known, spit spewing out of her mouth along with her words.
“Where’s my daughter, goddamnit?”
She tried her absolute best to break his nose with the knuckles of her fist. He groaned.
“You killed her, didn’t you?”
She extended her right leg, as if she were doing her tight buns exercise, then drove her knee into his groin, hoping to drive his balls into his brain. His eyes rolled back and he screamed in pain.
“You’re not on top now, you sorry fuck!”
She grabbed his neck and commenced choking the bastard that took her daughter.
“You fucking pervert!”
Thick black arms suddenly wrapped around her midsection from behind, and she was lifted off the abductor until she was dangling in midair—but her strong hands remained locked around the pervert’s scrawny neck. She held on for as long as she could, but her grip finally gave way. She got in one last good kick, a Nike cross-trainer right in his ribs, which produced a low groan from the bastard.
“Mrs. Brice, control yourself!”
Devereaux’s arms were wrapped around the mother’s torso, and he was trying to back out of the interrogation room with her kicking and screaming and spitting at the suspect. She was no longer just halfway to nuts—she was all the way there! He got her to the door, but she grabbed hold of both sides of the doorjamb and held on for dear life, still screaming profanities at the suspect, her eyes blazing with feral rage.
“You’re gonna die, you sick bastard! You’re gonna die and go to hell!”
Christ, she was incredibly strong for her size! Devereaux was trying to pry the mother’s fingers loose while holding her with one arm. He could feel her rock-hard midsection expanding and contracting rapidly; her adrenaline was pumping big time.
“I’ll inject the poison myself, you fucking pervert! You killed my baby! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Devereaux outweighed the mother by at least a hundred pounds, but he’d be damned if he could get this woman out of the room. And choke-holding a victim’s mother was entirely out of the question. He decided to lean backwards slightly to see if she could hang on with his big self pulling against her. She hung on. Damn. It must be the adrenaline, giving her this kind of strength. He looked to Chief Ryan for help.
But the chief was trying to get the suspect, who was bleeding profusely from his nose and mouth, bound by leg and wrist irons, and cupping his genitals with both hands, up off the floor and back into his chair. The suspect struggled to his knees; Ryan stood behind him and yanked up on the iron belt shackled to his waist, practically lifting him off his feet. The suspect stood. Then he puked.
The mother screamed: “Choke on it, you sonofabitch!”
Once Ryan had the suspect in place, he hurried over and pried the mother’s fingers loose one by one, first her right hand—the mother craned her head around Ryan and got in one final “Fuck you!” at the suspect—and then her left hand. Devereaux almost fell backwards into the corridor with her in his arms. Chief Ryan shut the door to the interrogation room behind them.
“Put me down, goddamnit!” the mother demanded.
Devereaux released her. She pushed his arms away and straightened her clothes. She was wearing a black-and-white nylon sweat suit over a black tee shirt; her face was red and shiny with sweat; her chest was heaving with each gasped breath. She cleared her face of tears, saliva, and snot with one swipe of her sleeve.
“I want to know what he did with her!”
“So do we, Mrs. Brice, but he’s in police custody and you can’t beat it out of him!”
“Then you beat it out of him!”
“Mrs. Brice!”
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux had never before yelled at a mother of an abducted child. But then, he had never met a mother like Elizabeth Brice. Most mothers fell apart: some started smoking again, some drinking, some didn’t get out of bed, some ended up in the psych ward with nervous breakdowns. Elizabeth Brice beat the hell out of the prime suspect. Devereaux was glad she wasn’t his wife, but she was an impressive woman nonetheless.
She was now pacing around like a caged animal, allowing her adrenaline to ease and examining the traces of blood on her raw knuckles; she stuck her knuckles in her mouth and sucked the blood clean.
“Now everyone just calm down!” Chief Ryan said. To several uniforms who had come running to see what the commotion was about, he said, “Get someone in there to clean that mess up … and a paramedic for the suspect.” Then, satisfied that the mother was under control, he turned to the young officer who brought the news of the phone records. “That it? The phone calls?”
“No, sir. He
works for Mr. Brice.”
“What?”
“Yeah, Chief, the guy works at BriceWare.”
The chief turned to the father: “You don’t know him?”
Most victims’ fathers begged Devereaux for five minutes alone with the abductor. But this victim’s father had maintained his position at the window throughout the mother’s attack on the suspect. Mr. Brice shook his head.
“No.”
“Chief,” the officer said, “the phone company can identify the cell tower nearest the call’s origination. There’s a tower next to the BriceWare building.”
Chief Ryan gave Devereaux an I-told-you-so shrug. As the new information slowly sank in, all eyes turned and fixed on the young man bleeding and sobbing at the table in the interrogation room. The mother turned to Devereaux and pointed a finger at him.
“Find out what he did with my daughter.”
7:38 A.M.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney prior to questioning and to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, you have the right to have one appointed for you prior to any questioning.”
Chief of Police Paul Ryan looked up from his Miranda card at the prime suspect. “Gary, do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?”
The interrogation room reeked of the cleaning solvent used to disinfect the floor and table where Jennings had vomited. Ryan was sitting with his back to the two-way mirror; Agent Devereaux sat at one end of the rectangular metal table, and Jennings sat across the table. His nose was swollen and his lips were fat; the area under his left eye was already turning purple. It looked to be one hell of a shiner. He nodded at Ryan.
“Son, you gotta state your answer for the tape recorder.”
A recorder sat in the middle of the table. They had decided to audiotape rather than videotape; Jennings’s battered face would give his lawyer ammunition to claim any confession was coerced. A judge was not likely to believe that while in police custody the victim’s mother beat up the prime suspect.
“Yes,” Jennings said.
“Yes, you understand your constitutional rights?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re waiving your right to have an attorney present during questioning?”
“Yes.”
Once a lawyer enters the room, any hope of a confession exits. Obtaining a quick confession was particularly urgent in this case because the evidence collected from Jennings’s truck would likely be inadmissible in court—but mostly because a confession got the story off the evening news and the mayor off Ryan’s back. So Paul Ryan put the Miranda card in his shirt pocket, folded his hands on the table, and said in a soft voice, one of disappointment in a teenage son who had taken the family car without permission, “Gary, why’d you take Gracie?”
“I didn’t take her!”
“Mr. Brice said she went to the BriceWare office over the Christmas holidays, nearly every day. Is that when you first became acquainted with Gracie?”
“Yes … I mean, no! We weren’t acquainted.”
“What were you?”
“We were … nothing! I work for Mr. Brice, that’s all!”
“But you saw her in the office?”
“Yeah. She delivered mail, on rollerblades.”
“And you knew she was Mr. Brice’s daughter?”
“Sure, we all did.”
“Has Mr. Brice been a good employer to you?”
“Yeah, it’s a great place to work.”
“Good pay, good benefits?”
“Yeah.”
“Stock options?”
“Yeah.”
Ryan threw a thumb at the two-way mirror behind him. “Gary, Mr. Brice is standing on the other side of that mirror, looking at you, listening to everything you’re saying.” Jennings looked up at the mirror. “For God’s sake, son, at least tell him where his daughter’s body is, so he can bury her properly. Don’t just leave her out there in some field, buzzards picking over her.”
“I don’t know where she’s at!” Jennings tried to stand but the leg irons restrained him. To the mirror, he said, “Mr. Brice, I swear to God, I didn’t take her!”
He looked like he might start crying again.
“But you’ve done this sort of thing before.”
Jennings fell back into the chair. “No, no, no, that was in college, a frat party, we were drunk … How was I supposed to know she was only sixteen?”
Agent Devereaux gestured to Ryan for Jennings’s file. Ryan slid it down the length of the table to Devereaux, who thumbed through it while Ryan continued his questioning.
“The law doesn’t require that you know, only that the victim be under the age of seventeen when you had sex with her.”
“The victim? She was putting out for a bunch of guys at a frat party the next weekend—I saw her!”
Ryan shrugged. “You’re required to register with the police department when you move into town. You didn’t do that, Gary.”
“Yeah, and have my photo plastered across the newspaper again with ‘sex offender’ in big print. I’m branded a sex offender for life and she’s married to a doctor.”
“Why didn’t you register?”
“Because I didn’t want my wife to find out. I wanted a clean start.” Tears welled up in Jennings’s eyes. “I just got drunk at a frat party. I was five days too old for her.”
An exception to the Texas statutory rape statute states that if the defendant is less than three years older than the victim, there is no crime. Jennings was nineteen years, ten months, and twenty-seven days old at the time of the sexual act; the girl was sixteen years, ten months, and twenty-two days old. Five days difference made him a sex offender for life.
“You’re not a child molester?”
“No!”
Ryan reached over to the file and removed the plastic-wrapped picture of the naked adolescent female found in Jennings’s truck. He pushed it in front of Jennings.
“Well, son, why do you look at pictures like this?”
Jennings glanced at the picture and recoiled.
“I’ve never seen that picture before!”
“It was in your truck, under the floor mat.”
“In my truck?”
“Yes, son, in your truck. Possession of child pornography is a federal crime, Gary—that picture alone can put you in prison for most of your adult life.”
“I don’t know how it got in my truck.”
“Well, what about her jersey? How’d that get in your truck?”
“What jersey?”
“Gracie’s soccer jersey. It was in the back of your truck, under the bed cover.”
“Her jersey was in my truck?”
“Yes.”
“This has gotta be a joke, a big mistake!”
“What about the nine phone calls you made to Gracie last week, are those a big mistake?”
“I never called her!”
“We traced the calls to your cell phone.”
“My cell phone? I don’t know … I leave the phone in my truck. I never lock it.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no crime out here, just like the mayor says! Do you lock your car? Maybe someone used my cell phone while I was at work.”
“Oh, okay, someone’s framing you?”
“Yes!”
Ryan leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and studied Gary Jennings. Twenty-eight years old with a boyish face and frame, he didn’t look like your typical sexual predator; in fact, he looked like Ryan’s son-in-law, a proctologist in Dallas. And most predators weren’t nearly so convincing in their claims of innocence—the boy was good. But he had made a prior trip through the system, so he knew to deny, deny, deny; juries liked that when they listened to the interrogation tape. Ryan decided to ratchet up the pressure, give the boy something to think about.
“Okay, Gary, let’s sum
marize your defense for the jury: a sexual predator premeditates his abduction of Gracie weeks in advance. He searches the state’s sex offender database and finds you, a convicted sex offender who just happens to fit his description to a T, who just happens to live three miles from the park, and who just happens to work for Gracie’s father. Then, during the week prior to the abduction, he goes to your place of employment, finds your truck unlocked, plants child pornography in it and uses your cell phone to place nine calls to Gracie. Then, after he abducts Gracie and rapes her and kills her in the woods behind the park, he dumps her body and drives over to your apartment and tosses her jersey in your truck to frame you.” Ryan turned his hands up. “Gary, you’re a smart fella. Do you really expect a jury of adults to believe that?”
Jennings was shaking his head slowly, as if in disbelief. “No … I mean, yes! I guess he could’ve done that, I don’t know. But I didn’t do it!”
“Gary, who’s the jury gonna believe when Gracie’s coach takes the stand and points his finger at you”—which Ryan was now doing—“and says, ‘He’s the man that took Gracie’?”
“I didn’t take her!”
“Okay, Gary. One last question: what else are we gonna find in your truck? FBI’s best people are examining every square inch of that vehicle—are they gonna find Gracie’s fingerprints, her hair, her blood?”
“No! She’s never been in my truck!”
Ryan stood and walked to the door, then turned back to deliver the clincher that would surely have this boy making a tearful confession later today.
“I hope you’re right, son, ’cause if they find her DNA in your truck, that puts her in your vehicle and you on death row.”
8:26 A.M.
Ben had arrived while Agent Devereaux and Chief Ryan were interrogating the suspect. The boy’s face seemed familiar. After a moment, Ben placed him: he was the young man with the pregnant wife who had come up to John at the candlelight vigil Sunday night and offered his sympathy. Ben was standing at the window to the interrogation room when Devereaux and Ryan emerged.