by Ben Rehder
Polly Klaas.
Elizabeth Smart.
Natalee Holloway.
Laci Peterson.
Caylee Anthony.
Nancy Grace will yack about one particular case for an hour without telling the viewer anything new. Looping the same video over and over. There’s something salacious about it. It seems to be more about entertainment — and ratings — than about offering information that may somehow help solve the case.
Something else bothers me, too. The cases that receive mega-airtime almost exclusively involve a white victim. An upper middle-class white victim. An attractive, upper middle-class white victim. I’m not sure if that says something about the value we place on various members of society, but I hope not.
Regardless, for whatever reason, Tracy Turner quickly became one of those high-profile cases. When I got home and turned on the TV, there she was on the screen, hair in pigtails, and I could feel a hole open up in my chest. The news anchor was talking to an expert who was delivering statistics that I knew, unfortunately, by heart.
Roughly 800,000 children are reported missing in the United States every year. Two thousand every day. Many of them are runaways, some are abducted (usually by a family member), and some are lost or injured.
Child abductions leading to murder are relatively rare. One hundred cases a year. Most are “average” kids leading “normal” lives with “typical” families. Three quarters of the victims are female. Eighty percent of the time, the initial contact between victim and killer takes place within a quarter-mile of the child’s home.
The average abductor-killer is twenty-seven years old, unmarried, and has at least one prior arrest for a violent crime. He lives alone or with his parents. He’s unemployed or working in an unskilled or semi-skilled occupation. He’s what cops and psychologists and criminal profilers call a “social marginal.”
When a child goes missing — listen up, mom and dad; listen up, small-town deputy who thinks the kid might’ve just wandered off — you’d better get your ass in gear, regardless of what the statistics say. More than three quarters of children who are abducted and murdered are dead within the first three hours. Yes, the odds are overwhelming that a missing kid won’t be killed, but if he or she is in the hands of a killer, time is absolutely of the essence. Three hours. That’s how small the window is.
Tracy Turner had been missing for 36 hours. When — okay, if — I had seen her this afternoon, she’d been missing for about 32 hours. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I had to hope that since she’d made it past the first three hours, that she’d make it for many more.
Brian Pierce had a Facebook page.
I’ll admit that I was a little surprised. A lot of lowlifes don’t bother with Facebook because they don’t have many friends to begin with, or because they aren’t social animals. They value their privacy. They don’t want to share anything with anybody. More often than not, they are hiders, not sharers.
Even bigger surprise, Pierce had 359 friends. That’s a pretty big number. I couldn’t see his wall, so I wasn’t able to gauge how many of those were real friends versus online friends. If I could see some of his status updates and the resulting comments, I could learn a lot about him. But he had his privacy locked down fairly tight. Facebook users can still hide most of their content, despite gripes to the contrary.
I couldn’t see Pierce’s photos, either, or even his friends list.
What I sometimes do in this situation, in the course of an investigation, is send a friend request to the suspect. Not from my own account, of course, but from either “Linda Peterson” or “Robert Tyler.” They are fictitious identities that I had created in the past couple of years. Both of them have been online long enough to collect more than one hundred friends. Both of them are above average on the attractiveness scale, but their profile photos aren’t such ridiculous come-ons as to look like spam. Beyond that, both of them are average people with average tastes in music, film, and literature. They don’t post often, but when they do, it’s never about politics or religion. Examine either page more closely and you’ll notice that there is hardly any identifying information. No high school listed, no college, no job history. Just a hometown and some favorite musicians, books, and movies.
But it works, especially when Linda Peterson contacts a young, single guy. You’d be surprised how many men will accept a friend request from a strange woman if she is a pretty redhead. Sometimes I have to pretend I’m a forgotten classmate, or a former co-worker, or whatever works. Sometimes I’ll get a “Do I know you?” in response, but I can usually make up something that gets me in, especially if their wall is visible.
Did I want to do that now? I had a hard time thinking of a reason not to, so I went ahead and sent Brian Pierce a request. I mean Linda Peterson did.
10
It took me several hours to fall asleep, but I was finally snoozing soundly when my cell phone rang at 7:17 the next morning. Mia calling.
“What?” I croaked.
“Love you, too.”
“What are you doing up this early?”
“You watching CNN?”
“No, I’m busy organizing my stamp collection.”
“They’re talking about Tracy Turner’s parents. Her mom and her stepdad. You need to turn it on.”
I grabbed the remote off my nightstand and powered up the small flat-screen mounted on the wall opposite my bed. Punched in the numbers for CNN. One of their anchors was speaking with one of their crime reporters.
The reporter was saying, “ — with Kathleen Hanrahan last night, until she refused to answer any more questions and walked out of the interview.”
Kathleen Hanrahan was the mom. Remarried, so she had a different last name than Tracy Turner. I sat up in bed.
The anchor asked, “At this point, do the investigators think she had anything to do with the disappearance of her daughter?”
“No, they are saying that they were asking routine questions, but Kathleen Hanrahan was no longer willing to speak with them. They did acknowledge that Mrs. Hanrahan has spent more than twenty hours in interviews so far, and she has been a willing participant.”
“Interesting, huh?” Mia said in my ear.
“What is this I hear about witness fatigue?” the anchor said. “Isn’t it true that even the most agreeable witness can reach a point where she’s simply had enough and needs a break?”
“Oh, absolutely, Roger.”
“Could that be what’s happening here?”
“There’s no real way to know for sure.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “This is all bullshit.”
“What? Why?” Mia said.
“Hold on.”
The anchor asked, “Has she brought in an attorney?”
“Not yet, no, but that might be the next step.”
The reporter was on audio only, because now they were showing photos of Kathleen Hanrahan. Photos of her alone, with Tracy, with her husband, all three of them together. She was an attractive and well-put-together woman. Maybe forty years old. Impeccable clothes, precise makeup, expensive jewelry. Your garden-variety affluent white woman with good taste. The headline at the bottom of the screen said: MISSING TOT’S MOM ENDS INTERVIEW.
“What about Patrick Hanrahan?” the anchor said. “Where does he stand in this? Is he still speaking with the police?”
“That’s a good question, and we’re looking into it. The interview last night took place in the Hanrahan home and it’s unclear if Patrick, Tracy’s stepdad, took part. However, he has been interviewed at length several times already and we’ve seen no sign that there has been any sort of problem as it relates to him. I also understand that he has offered a one million dollar reward for information that leads to her safe return.”
“Are the investigators making any comment about the possibility of kidnapping?”
Good question, I thought. A lot of people lump kidnapping and abduction into the same category. They are a world apart.
The reporter: “Nobody is raising that possibility at the moment, but nobody has ruled it out, either. The fact is, Patrick Hanrahan is worth upwards of fifty million dollars — ”
“Jeez,” Mia said.
“ — and it’s only natural to wonder if that played a role in this situation. There is one other adult with regular access to the Hanrahan house — a nanny — but she has been interviewed and cleared.”
They continued to talk, speculating on this or that, but nothing substantial or factual came up. I turned the TV off.
“Why did you say it was bullshit?” Mia asked.
“About the mom ending the interview?”
“Yeah? Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”
“Not even a little bit,” I said. “First of all, we don’t even know if that report is accurate. She might have said, ‘Guys, look, I’m beat, and I need to take a break.’ By the time it gets to the reporters, it sounds like she’s got something to hide. But even if she is refusing to talk anymore, let me tell you, sometimes there are good reasons.”
“Such as?” She wasn’t being snotty. It was an honest question.
“The parents are always the first suspects. Always. Everybody knows that. When you’re the parent, you want to answer their questions as quickly as possible and get them moving on to other things, to the real investigation. But sometimes they don’t move on. They keep asking you questions — totally irrelevant questions — and the clock is ticking, and you start to lose your patience. You know they are wasting their time, but they won’t let it go. Just a few more questions. One more interview. Finally you just want to throw your hands up and say, ‘Enough!’ You want to make them move on. They’re used to that kind of behavior, the stonewalling. They know it might mean nothing at all. But the public — well, they’re ready to believe just about anything. You’re guilty until proven innocent. Worse than that, you’re probably a goddamn murderer. You killed your kid and dumped her in a lake, or you chopped her into pieces and flushed her down the toilet. Doesn’t matter how whacked out the theory is. And the media? Hell, they’ll keep pimping whatever draws the ratings.” I realized my voice had been rising and my fists were clenched. I took a deep breath. “Do I sound cynical?”
Mia didn’t say anything.
“You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” A pause. Then: “I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, but I’m really sorry for everything you went through.”
By now — again, being totally honest — my ninety percent certainty from last night had dropped even further. Had I really seen a little girl in Brian Pierce’s doorway? I had been a long ways away, looking through binoculars. Sometimes light can play off a screen door in odd ways. The eyes can do tricky things. For instance, who hasn’t heard of a hunter mistaking a stump or a shadow or a fellow human being for a deer? Happens with alarming regularity. People “see” Bigfoot, leprechauns, and UFOs. Your brain tricks you into seeing what you want to see.
So I did what I would have done anyway if I hadn’t possibly spotted a missing girl: I loaded up all of my regular supplies — my laptop and an ice chest full of food and drink — and headed out to conduct surveillance on Brian Pierce. It was, after all, my job.
But as I drove down Thomas Springs Road toward Pierce’s place, I saw something unexpected. A marked deputy’s cruiser was parked in the church parking lot, shaded, and fairly well concealed by the canopy of a towering oak tree. Almost exactly where I had parked yesterday. In that position, the deputy would be able to see Pierce’s driveway where it met the road.
I had to wonder — was this cop simply running radar, just like the deputies had said yesterday? Or had Ruelas perhaps changed his mind and decided to keep tabs on Pierce after all? That could make sense. Hide in plain sight with a marked unit. As I passed, I gave a little wave. The deputy — one of the deputies from yesterday, I think — glared at me, stonefaced, and didn’t wave back. He probably recognized my minivan.
I continued down Thomas Springs until it teed into Circle Drive, where I pulled into the empty parking lot of the Circle Country Club, a modest little beer joint I had visited once or twice in years past. It wasn’t open this early, so there wasn’t a soul around. I let the engine idle.
What now? I hadn’t planned on this at all.
If the cops were watching Pierce, by all means, I should leave them to it and stay out of their way. On the other hand, I wasn’t going to lay off if the deputy was in fact on traffic patrol and had no interest in Pierce. If I pulled up beside the deputy and simply asked him what he was doing, what would he say? Well, he sure wouldn’t admit that he was watching a suspect. But I could think of one good way to find out.
I pulled out of the parking lot and went back the way I had come. But this time, instead of observing the posted speed limit of 35 miles per hour, I floored the gas and held it there. The deputy saw me coming from at least fifty yards away. Blew past him at about seventy, and then watched in my rearview, fully expecting him to come after me. Maybe I could talk my way out of a ticket by explaining what I had just done and why.
But the cruiser didn’t budge.
Interesting.
I continued down Thomas Springs, hit Highway 71, and stopped at the light. Then I continued straight across the highway, onto Old Bee Cave Road, simply driving, pondering what I was going to do next.
Should I call Ruelas? Couldn’t see how that would do much good. He wouldn’t tell me anything.
Should I call Heidi and tell her that Pierce might be a suspect in the abduction of a child, in which case his workers’ comp claim might very soon be rendered moot? Bad idea. Heidi might be as skeptical as the cops, and she might even think I’m a little nutty, and I didn’t need my best client thinking I was a space case. Especially when I was starting to have doubts myself.
What, then?
I found another spot to pull over and killed the engine. Climbed into the back seat and opened my laptop. Thanks to a USB modem, I had a broadband connection nearly everywhere I went. Worth every cent.
First, I checked CNN, just to make sure Kathleen Hanrahan hadn’t broken down and confessed in the last hour. Of course she hadn’t. I knew that.
Then I checked Facebook. Brian Pierce hadn’t responded to Linda Peterson’s friend request yet.
Next I opened my folder on Pierce. I had scanned all the documents Heidi had given me, so everything I needed was right at my fingertips, including the name of the restaurant where he worked.
I checked the restaurant’s web site to see if they were open for breakfast. As luck would have it, they were.
11
The name of the place was La Tolteca which, if I recall correctly, means “The Rabid Squirrel,” but I’ll admit my Spanish isn’t so great. It was in a shopping center in the posh little village of Lakeway, on the western outskirts of Austin.
The hostess was waiting there to greet me as soon as I walked in, and she led me through the sparse breakfast crowd to a two-top against one of the walls, under a neon sign for Corona beer. It was your typical Mexican food joint — lots of pastel colors, framed bullfighting posters and velvet paintings, a large mural of a man in a sombrero taking a siesta beneath a stucco archway. Colorful woven blankets acted as curtains in the windows up front. Mexican music — with plenty of accordion, of course — played softly over the sound system.
“Good morning.” A waitress had slipped up beside me. Not Mexican at all. Probably Scandinavian. Her ancestry, I mean. Fair-skinned. Blond hair pulled back. Cute. Very cute. Mid-twenties. “My name is Jessica and I’ll be your server today. Can I start you off with something to drink?”
“Yes, I’ll have a 1979 Château Lafite Rothschild Pauillac. Bring the whole bottle. I’m celebrating my expulsion from the priesthood.”
She knitted her brow for a second. Grinned just a little.
I said, “No? Okay, let’s go with iced tea, please.”
She handed me a menu and came back a few minutes later with a large plastic tu
mbler full of tea. “Have you decided?”
I was still looking at the menu. “How are the migas?”
“Really good. They taste a lot like eggs.”
I like a waitress with a sense of humor. “That’s what I’ll have, then.”
She started to write on her little pad. Now that I was getting a longer look, I could tell that she was in her late twenties or maybe even early thirties.
“With or without chorizo?” she asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous. With.”
“Cheese?”
“Please.”
“Refried beans?”
“Absolutely.”
“Tortillas?”
“Of course.”
“Flour or corn?”
“Both.”
“Potatoes?”
“You bet.”
“Salsa?”
“No, I’m watching my figure.”
“I’ll have that right out.”
While she was gone, I pulled out my cell phone and checked the news on the Internet. Still nothing new about Tracy Turner or her parents. No emails for me. No texts. Fine. I had other things to do.
About seven minutes later, the lovely Jessica returned with a large platter of food. It smelled great. Then she refilled my tea and said, “Anything else I can get you right now?”
“Yeah, I was wondering — is Brian Pierce working today?”
“No, he hasn’t been in for about a week.”
“Vacation?”
“No, he hurt his arm.”
“Bummer. Please tell me it didn’t involve some sort of high-powered kitchen implement.”
“No, he slipped on a wet floor, I think. I wasn’t here.”
“Did he break it?”