by Ben Rehder
“It’s Roy Ballard,” I said.
“I was just about to call you.” There was something in his voice I didn’t like.
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“That guy we’ve been talking about?” He wasn’t using names, so I gathered that he was in a public place. Being cautious. “We visited him bright and early this morning. Had all the proper paperwork, too, if you know what I mean.”
“You had a warrant.”
“Right. But, hell, the way he reacted, we could have showed up without one. He seemed genuinely confused, and when we told him why we were there — what we were investigating — he just about insisted we come in and look around. You know why? There wasn’t a damn thing there. Not a trace. Not a toy, not any kids’ clothes, not a stray goddamn hair. It looked exactly like you’d expect a house to look when a twenty-six-year-old single guy lives there alone.”
I could feel my face flushing. They’d moved her. That was the only explanation. Moved her and cleaned house. Taking no chances after The Guy discovered I’d been watching.
“You got anything to say?” Ruelas asked. The background noise had faded, like he’d stepped outside or down a hallway where it was quieter. “You just made me look like a first-class asshole.”
“I don’t know...”
“Damn right, you don’t know. Wasted my time. You need to see a shrink, you want my opinion.”
“Did you interview him?”
“Of course I goddamn interviewed him! There was nothing there!”
“I’m sorry about that. How about Erica Kerwick? You could get a warrant for her place.”
“Holy Christ. If you think I’m going off on another wild goose chase based on what you think you saw, you’re crazier than I thought.”
“Did you at least talk to her?”
He hung up without answering.
I sat there for a very long time, unmoving, holding the phone, until it buzzed with the incoming email from Heidi.
“You had nothing to apologize for,” Mia said. “That’s his job, to check into stuff like that.”
We were in the van, heading north on Loop 1, one of three major north/south highways in Austin. She was at the wheel. I figured, hey, if this was a partnership, she could do half the driving.
“Now I say it’s time to forget about it all,” Mia continued. “That was the whole point of talking to Ruelas, wasn’t it? To stop thinking about it and get back to work?”
“I thought it was to do the right thing, in case Brian Pierce had the girl.”
“Don’t be a snot. Of course it was that, too. My point is, you’ve done all you can be expected to do.”
We went another mile without saying a word. I liked her driving style; very fluid, and she wasn’t afraid to do some lane changing to get around the slowpokes.
Mia said, “So are you going to tell me about this new case or not?”
“There was a girl there,” I said. “At Pierce’s place. Maybe it wasn’t Tracy Turner, but there was a little girl in Pierce’s doorway.”
She didn’t say anything until she realized I was staring at her, prompting her to speak.
She said, “I don’t want to pick a fight, but...”
“But what?”
“You’ve wavered on that point yourself.”
She was right. Not only had there been times when I didn’t feel confident I had seen Tracy Turner, there had been times when I wasn’t even sure I had seen any little girl at all.
“Emma Webster said she saw a little girl with Pierce,” I said. “I believe her. I also believe that I saw one. You know that Ruelas must have asked Pierce if there had ever been a little girl there, and we know there has been, and if it wasn’t Tracy Turner, why wouldn’t Pierce say, ‘Oh, that was my friend’s daughter,’ or whatever? And if Pierce had said something like that, Ruelas would have told me, and he wouldn’t have been pissed, because he would have realized that I actually had seen a little girl.”
“I don’t have an answer for you, Roy. Maybe Pierce didn’t say anything because he thought it would only make Ruelas more suspicious, even if it really was some friend’s daughter. So he lied. Now tell me about the new case.”
It felt wrong to let it go, but Mia was right. It was time. I opened my laptop and clicked on the folder Heidi had sent. I had already sorted through the documents, but I hadn’t briefed Mia yet.
“Guy’s name is Timothy Burke. Thirty years old. He’s a roofer for a local homebuilder. Claims he slipped off a ladder and fell. Injured his back, which can be difficult to diagnose, meaning it’s hard to prove he didn’t injure it. That’s something you should know: Almost all of the cases we’ll investigate involve injuries that are hard to diagnose.”
“Makes sense. If they were easy to diagnose, your clients wouldn’t need you to verify or discredit the injuries, would they?”
I turned toward her again. “Our clients, Mia. Our clients.”
She smiled broadly but kept her eyes on the road. “Thank you.”
What I needed today was a slam dunk — something that would give me a sense of accomplishment and closure, all rolled into one.
Timothy Burke was kind enough to deliver.
Not twenty minutes after we parked down the street from his small three-bedroom home in northeast Austin, he came out, climbed into his truck, and hit the road. Mia followed at a discreet distance.
“It’s weird, but my heart is actually racing,” she said.
“Feel like you’re doing something a little sneaky?”
“Exactly. Worried that he’ll catch me following him.”
“Remember that he’s the one who should be worried.”
“Have you ever gotten caught?”
“By a subject?”
“Yeah.”
“A couple of them have looked at me kind of funny — like they were getting suspicious — but most of them are too dumb to piece it together.”
Timothy Burke followed Parmer Lane over to Interstate 35 and went north on the access road. Before he reached Howard Lane, he pulled into a McDonald’s and went through the drive-through. Made me hungry. Then he drove to the Home Depot right next door.
“Oh, this could be good,” I said.
“What?”
“I bet he’s collecting workers’ comp and doing some small jobs on the side. Double-dipping.”
Timothy Burke had already parked and was walking inside. Mia parked two rows over.
“Just use your amazing skills,” I said, “and I’ll be hanging around.”
There was a moment after we walked inside that I thought we’d lost him, and that would’ve been a major bummer, but we found him in the lumber aisle. It simply could not get any better than that. The lumber aisle.
Mia grabbed one of those low, flat carts and slowly moved in his direction. Burke had a cart of his own, and he stopped it beside the cedar pickets and began to load up. Pretty good indication he was building a fence.
I used the video camera on my phone, which would be plenty good enough, because I was no more than fifteen yards away, poking my head around the corner just enough to see him.
Mia stopped her cart near Burke — who was still methodically loading pickets onto his cart, so focused on his task that he hadn’t even noticed Mia yet. She looked back at me, as if to say, ‘Isn’t that enough?’
I shook my head. Those pickets didn’t weigh more than about two or three pounds apiece. I needed something better. Something heavier.
So Mia approached Burke and said something. I couldn’t make out the words, but just like a week ago with Wally Crouch, it didn’t take a neuroscientist to figure out the general gist of the conversation — especially when Mia gestured across the aisle, toward the bags of cement.
Can you help me load a couple of these?
Oh, sure. No problem.
And that’s what he did. Eighty pounds each. Loaded them up, then watched with no subtlety whatsoever as Mia slowly retreated up the aisle in her well-fitting jeans. Sh
e was smart enough to proceed toward the back of the store, away from me, so as not to draw Burke’s attention my way. I recorded another few moments — long enough for Burke to stop ogling and go back to loading his cart, showing no ill effects from hoisting the cement.
A few minutes later, Mia and I met outside at the van, where we exchanged a high-five. We had been inside the store for eight minutes.
“How can guys be so clueless?” Mia said.
“Just our nature, I guess.” To be more accurate, I figured most women would just never understand why a man would respond to a woman who looked like Mia, especially when she was asking him to help with some task that would allow him to show how big and powerful he was.
“How much did we earn just now for doing that?”
I told her.
“Jesus. Really?”
“Yep.”
“We should’ve partnered up a long time ago.”
32
So I got the slam dunk I wanted, and I was back home by noon feeling pretty good about it. Emailed the video to Heidi, who replied by saying, “Wow, you are fast! Thank you. By the way, it occurs to me that your hottie does all the work and you just run the camera. Guess I’d better not point that out to her.”
Nothing else on the to-do list, so I ate lunch and took a nap. After that, I had time on my hands, which isn’t always a good thing. Especially for a guy like me.
There are times when I torture myself with my own thoughts. Ruminate. Weigh the odds of this or that. Contemplate all the possible actions I could have taken, and what the likely result of each would have been. Or what the result might be if I acted now. That can lead to some bad places. Bad decisions.
Or maybe that’s lame and a shrink could give a better analysis for why I decided to do what I did that night. I guess, bottom line, there could be a grab bag of reasons.
Guilt.
Shame.
Maybe a need to do something, simply because there was a time when I couldn’t do anything.
Because, let me tell you, until you’ve had your daughter snatched right out from under you at a public park — there one minute, gone the next — you have no idea what helplessness feels like.
On that horrible day, and into the night, the police interviewed me for about nine hours. The same questions, over and over. Poking, prodding, dissecting, until I realized they were looking for contradictions in my story.
“Wait a sec. I thought you said Susan Tate had brown hair.”
“No, I said blond!”
“That’s right, blond. You have no idea what you might’ve done with her phone number?”
I was starting to clench my teeth. “I told you, I never got it. I couldn’t find her!”
“I need you to stay calm, Mr. Ballard.”
“I am calm, but we’re wasting time. I need to be out looking for Hannah. Where is my wife right now?”
“Believe me, we have people looking — a huge team of people. Best thing you can do is talk to me. You might have something useful and — ”
“I’ve told you everything a dozen times!”
“And the thirteenth time might be the one that does the trick. Maybe you’ll remember a certain car in the parking lot, or a jogger who slipped your mind until now. You could have the key to this whole situation. And we really need that, because nobody else at the park saw anything. We can’t even find anyone who remembers seeing you and Hannah there. Or this Susan Tate.”
That’s when I knew things were bad. Did they think I’d gone to the dog park alone, for the purpose of claiming that Hannah had been with me and someone had grabbed her? And that I’d invented Susan Tate?
I said, “We were sitting off by ourselves. Susan Tate was the only person I talked to.”
“And that’s why I’d really like to find her.”
“So she can confirm my story?”
“Well, there’s more to it than that. Honestly, we need to rule her out.”
For a second or two, in my agitated and exhausted state, I let that get my hopes up. Of course! She was one of the abductors. She’d conspired with someone else to make it happen. That’s why they couldn’t find her now. She didn’t want to be found.
But it made no sense.
I’d gone back to look for her of my own free will. Abductors couldn’t have predicted or arranged that. So the real reason they needed to find her was simply to verify that I wasn’t making her up. Right now, she was a phantom, which was raising red flags in the cops’ minds. And word began to get out to the media. When a police spokesperson says something like, “We’re still working to confirm various events at the dog park,” reporters run with it and often speculate as to what it means.
Even more frustrating, the police wouldn’t release Susan Tate’s name and announce they were looking for her. Maybe they had their reasons, but I don’t know what they were. Maybe they were simply that skeptical that she was a real person. Maybe — regardless of whether she existed or not — the fact that she couldn’t be found gave the cops leverage against me, and they wanted that, until they were absolutely positive that I hadn’t harmed my own daughter. See what I mean by ruminating?
It wasn’t until the following day that Susan Tate surfaced, and it quickly became obvious why it had been difficult to locate her. Yes, I’d seen her jogging several times, but she actually lived about three miles away. The cops had only been looking in my neighborhood for someone by her name.
Second, because she was currently separated from her husband, she had been using her maiden name, but in all legal documents, she was identified by her married surname, Weiser. No Susan Tate in the tax records, in the voting records, or even in the phone book.
And in the worst stroke of bad luck, right after she’d been at the dog park, she’d flown to Miami for a convention and had heard nothing about Hannah’s disappearance until the next morning. Fortunately, she’d called the police immediately and confirmed my account of events.
Didn’t matter. The damage had been done. In many people’s mind, I was a viable suspect. Rumors were swirling. I was back home by then, and my own wife was treating me with a degree of hostility that I had never experienced. Some of my friends called and dropped by, but there was a reserved nature to their behavior — as if they were wondering if I could be trusted. Did they know the real me?
Not that I cared at that point. I just wanted to find my daughter. But where do you start? How do you find a puff of smoke that has disappeared in the wind?
Helpless.
Now, nine years later, I had to wonder if either Patrick or Kathleen Hanrahan — or maybe even both of them — were feeling that way.
I knew that the circumstances didn’t look particularly good for either of them. It started when Kathleen grew tired of being interviewed and refused to speak to the police anymore. Then Patrick couldn’t pass a lie detector test, which raised enough suspicion that he’d hired an attorney and joined his wife in refusing further interviews. Then it came out that Kathleen had recently seen a divorce attorney and had been considering a split for years. Even I had thought that looked bad for Patrick, making me wonder how he might’ve reacted when he learned what Kathleen had been contemplating.
It was worth reminding myself now that none of those facts meant either of the Hanrahans were guilty of anything or that they were involved in the disappearance of their daughter. Especially when you threw in the things I had learned about Brian Pierce and Erica Kerwick.
So, yeah, there was a chance — maybe a slim one, but I don’t know — that they were feeling as helpless as I had. That’s why I couldn’t just let the whole thing go.
33
It’s easy to spend three or four grand, or even a lot more, on a pair of night-vision goggles. Or you can do what I did a couple of years ago and get a six-hundred-dollar Generation 1 pair that would satisfy just about anyone short of a Navy Seal or that psycho in Silence of the Lambs.
Truth is, since I’d bought them, I hadn’t had much opportunity to us
e them. But they’d come in handy tonight.
An hour after sundown, I drove the van west again, to Thomas Springs Road. Drove past Brian Pierce’s gate, which was closed, as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary going on, as far as I could tell.
When I reached the intersection at Circle Drive, I pulled in to the Circle Country Club. It was a Tuesday night, but there were a fair number of cars and trucks scattered around the paved lot. I found a parking spot as far away from the front door as possible, and I sat in the van for a few minutes, until I was sure nobody else was in any of the nearby vehicles. Then I climbed out, locked up, and casually walked out of the lot to Thomas Springs Road and headed back toward Pierce’s place.
At most, it was half a mile. I kept to the shoulder, with the NVGs and my holstered Glock dangling in one of those plastic sacks they give you at a convenience store. I looked like a guy walking back home with a six-pack. Not unusual. But it didn’t matter, because nobody drove past the entire time.
I passed the little church on the other side of the road. No deputies hanging around. As soon as I reached the near corner of Pierce’s tract, some fifty yards before his gate, I veered off the shoulder, toward the barbed-wire fence running along the front property line.
Anybody who’s spent time in rural areas knows there are three ways to cross this kind of fence. Climb over, and probably end up with a tear in the crotch of your jeans. Slip between two strands, and get a tear on the back of your shirt. Or the third option, the one I chose: Drop to the ground and shimmy under the lowest strand. Works fine as long as you don’t have a big gut. I reached back for the plastic sack and hurried into the cover of the cedar and oak trees.
Now I couldn’t see much of anything. Very little light under the canopy. The crescent moon wouldn’t be up for several hours. I slipped the NVGs onto my head and turned them on. Ah. Much better. I tucked the plastic sack into my pocket. I kept the Glock in my right hand.
Over the next ten or fifteen minutes, I worked my way extremely slowly and carefully through the woods toward Pierce’s house. There were so many dried leaves and twigs on the ground, it was impossible to walk silently, but I came pretty close. It was comforting that I couldn’t see anything moving anywhere in the green-tinted woods around me. The Guy wasn’t lurking behind a tree, as far as I could tell.