Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  Scribbled on the side of the box that faced me was the name Donnolly.

  The bagpipes from his funeral were still ringing in my head. “Oh, jeez.”

  For the last few weeks of his life, before Terry Donnolly’s heart blew, he’d seemed stressed and anxious and occasionally depressed; he talked incessantly about getting out. I can’t stand these tough ones anymore was all he would say when any of us asked why.

  “His last two cases. Both sort of stagnating at the moment. I looked them over again this afternoon while you were out. The thing that brought them to mind—and he was very frustrated by this—is that the initial suspect in both of these cases was an intimate, based on a seemingly reasonable eyewitness account. Just like in your case now. But the evidence directly contradicted what the witnesses said, and Donnolly came to the conclusion pretty early on that the intimates weren’t involved. He didn’t know where to go with either of these. One of the parents knows he died and keeps calling for the case to be reassigned.”

  I put my hand on the box. Pandora Pandora Pandora, it was screaming, open me, open me. Fred didn’t seem to hear it. The cardboard began to feel hot, as if my touch had started some sort of chemical reaction. I pulled my hand away.

  Fred saw it and frowned. “I had all this stuff gathered together because I thought it would help you. So I think you better take a look.”

  Which meant that they had been reassigned.

  Ours is a big division. I have enough trouble keeping track of my own cases, never mind everyone else’s. I knew Donnolly had two missings, but the details were completely foreign to me. The files were pretty meaty, judging by the weight of the box. In my lower drawer there were two accordion files left over from previous cases, both well-solved cases and with very good karma; maybe if I put the Donnolly cases in those folders, a little serendipity would rub off and speed things along.

  The names of the victims were emblazoned on the front and side spine of each of Donnolly’s thick folders. It was too late in the day to sit down and really dig in, but I read enough of each one to get a rough sense of what had happened. The first case was the disappearance of Lawrence Wilder, male Caucasian, age thirteen, height five feet three inches, slight build. Light brown hair on the blondish side, blue eyes, lots of freckles. Last seen approximately one year earlier getting into the vehicle of his mother’s brother, which, according to three witnesses at a sidewalk café, was purportedly driven by same. Problem was, the uncle had an irrefutable alibi—he was a firefighter, on duty at the time, punch card, coworkers, and all. There were no real physical clues except trace evidence in the uncle’s car, in which we found a few fibers from clothing known to belong to Larry. But that meant nothing—the boy had been in that car dozens of times. Believing the uncle to be innocent, the boy’s family had posted a reward for information leading to his recovery. Thousands of calls had come in—they always do when there’s money to be claimed—but no real leads had developed.

  The bulk of the paper seemed to be the result of Donnolly’s interviews with the witnesses, with family and friends, with school chums, teachers, coaches—he’d done an exhaustive job. Some of these people had been interviewed a number of times, perhaps for clarification, but also perhaps because Donnolly didn’t want to stop working on the case. It’s something we all do when we have nowhere new to go—we go back to the previous witnesses. Sometimes we get lucky when we do that, but usually it gets us nothing more than a continued sense of activity and involvement. It’s hard to let go, especially when you want so badly to solve a case and it just isn’t happening.

  I could feel Terry Donnolly’s frustration even in this quick scan. He was a good report writer; everything was clear and concise and, where possible, well documented. But the reports were colored with the bitter truth that it all led nowhere.

  Boy number two from Donnolly’s box was named Jared McKenzie. He had made his unexplained exit about six months before the Wilder boy. When I read the missing-child report, I did a bit of a double take—I thought maybe something had been misfiled from the Wilder case. His physical characteristics were remarkably similar, with the exception that Jared’s hair was more red than blond. He was last seen walking off a soccer field in the company of his coach, a longtime adult friend who spent a good deal of time with the McKenzie family and often gave Jared a ride home. On the day of the disappearance, however, the coach claimed to have gone back to his accounting office after practice to pick up some papers for a later meeting with a client. Another parent reported seeing the two leave together in the coach’s car and remembered the time exactly because she had just used her cell phone, which displayed a broadcast time. But the security guard at the coach’s place of employment verified his arrival there precisely five minutes after the other parent reported seeing him. It was at least a ten-minute drive from the soccer field to the coach’s office. Impossible.

  No wonder Terry Donnolly had had a heart attack. What was he supposed to do with stuff like this?

  What was I supposed to do with it?

  Three cases where intimates were all the initial suspects and the victims were shockingly similar—all white adolescent males, slightly built. There was the relative lack of evidence in all three cases, which meant that the three perps were being very careful.

  Or the one perp was.

  I told Fred what I was thinking and asked him to give me someone to help with the integration of the data.

  “You think we have a serial abductor on our hands?”

  “Well, it’s hard not to think that way . . .”

  “It’s a little early yet to be saying that.”

  The kiss of death, so tenderly delivered.

  I now had the unenviable job of contacting people who had already suffered a terrible loss, with the purpose of reopening their old wounds. Donnolly’s reports were excellent, but I wanted to talk to these folks myself.

  Nancy Wilder was surprised to learn, when I called her, that Terry Donnolly had died, which saved me the trouble of having to ask Fred which family had been pushing for reassignment, a detail we somehow managed not to discuss. “I figured he just wasn’t getting anywhere on the case, and that’s why we didn’t hear from him in a couple of weeks,” she said when I told her. “I’m very sorry to hear that he passed away. Did he leave a family?”

  “A wife and two children.”

  “Oh, how terrible.”

  “We’re all pretty unhappy about it. He’ll be missed.”

  “I have to say, he was a very vigilant detective. Very thorough. I was always grateful for that.” She sighed and was quiet for a moment. “Oh, dear,” she said finally, “This is very upsetting. Such a sweet man. Are you going to be taking over the case now?”

  “I’ve been given the task of cleaning up a few loose ends. Terry’s cases have to be looked into, so they can either be closed or given out for further investigation. I’m gathering information so those decisions can be made.”

  A half-truth, one I hoped would sound more convincing to her than it did to me. “I just want to hear for myself what you have to say. Detective Donnolly was very good about documenting everything, but it really makes a difference to me to talk to the families. I apologize for opening up old wounds, and I hope you’ll understand that this is in the best interest of the case.”

  “Well, I do understand that,” Mrs. Wilder said. “And I appreciate your regrets. But you don’t have to worry—the wound hasn’t healed yet, so you’re not opening anything up. It never closed, at least not for me. Larry’s father is ready to just walk away and give it up, to just assume that Larry is dead somewhere and we’ll never find him. But I’m not there yet.”

  Larry’s father was probably right, but it’s cruel to take hope away from people, if that’s all they have left. It was all too typical for a married couple to experience difficulties in the aftermath of a child’s disappearance. There is always blame on one side or the other, even if it isn’t overtly stated.

  “I’d like t
o meet with you in your home, if that isn’t too much of an imposition.”

  I would visit the following day. I was able to make similar arrangements with the McKenzie family, though Jared’s mother was quite a bit less civil. She seemed to think it was terribly inconvenient for Donnolly to have dropped dead of frustration, that it somehow served him right, that he should have moved heaven and earth on her behalf. I’ll admit that there are some of us who close out property crimes as “unsolvable” just to be done with them, but Terry Donnolly always busted his hump, never more so than when there was a kid involved. His pressures were self-imposed. And he paid for it in the end.

  I made some discreet inquiries around the adjacent sectors, asking for overviews of stalled cases where boys had gone missing. Then I copied all of Terry Donnolly’s interview summaries and put them in a folder. Evan was waiting at the curb when I got there. Jeff Samuels, his best friend and shadow, was beside him.

  He tossed his school bag and soccer bag in the wayback of the van and then slid in next to me in front, all legs and arms and straight straw hair. Just like his father.

  “Did practice get out early?”

  “No. You’re just late.”

  I looked at my watch. He was right. “I’m sorry, Evan, I guess I need to replace the battery again.”

  I leaned closer, hoping against hope that he would forget his adolescence long enough to plant a little kiss on my cheek. With eyes rolling, he acquiesced.

  “Oh, come on, that wasn’t so bad, was it? It makes old ladies happy to have a little kiss now and then.”

  “Mom, knock it off . . . you’re not really old.”

  I could have lived without the accent he’d placed on really.

  “What are we having for dinner?”

  “I don’t have a clue. I’ll figure it out when we get home.”

  “Can Jeff stay?”

  “Of course. You like a mystery meal, don’t you, Jeff?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Dunbar.”

  Frannie and Julia were both at the dance school, where Kevin had dropped Julia so I wouldn’t have to pick her up at his place. By now there would be a woman there, one of the endless stream he seemed to have going. I didn’t care that he had a steady rotation of women, but I didn’t want them paraded in front of the kids. He’d behaved very decently so far, at least on that issue.

  I’m not sure that Frannie could look any more like my mother than she does; Julia defied resemblance classification completely. Unsolicited, each of them clambered forward to give me a kiss before settling down and buckling up. I grinned triumphantly at their brother.

  “They’re girls,” he protested. “They’re supposed to kiss their mother.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Frannie said.

  “Yeah, what?” Her sister echoed.

  “Whatever Jeff wants.”

  They were all over him with suggestions. I ended up agreeing to Spaghetti-O’s and canned string beans, the classic four-appliance meal: can opener, microwave, disposal, and dishwasher. Jeff went back to his parents’ nearby apartment in the same complex, and then the rest of us did our homework around the kitchen table, myself included. I woke up, after nodding out, to find Julia standing next to me, struggling to read the Donnolly report I was drooling on. She put her finger on a big word and looked at me with innocent curiosity.

  I sounded it out, syllable by syllable, as I’d been taught to do. “Per-pe-tra-tor,” I said.

  She repeated it slowly. “Does that mean bad people?”

  God bless context.

  When I came in to work the next morning after sleeping ten hours straight, there was a very noticeable stack of faxes on my desk. Attached to the top one was a yellow Post-it note from Fred. All it said was Hmmm.

  All were still listed as active cases, but in reality they were all on hold, though no one would say that officially. One was more than three years old—after that much time, a case of this nature is virtually unsolvable unless striking new evidence appears out of nowhere. Witnesses move, their memories of the crime dim. None of these disappearances were particularly horrific, at least on the surface. I saw the car pull up and the boy got in and that was the last time I saw him or (the intimate in question) that day.

  Dead end after dead end, except for one surprise; it had been “solved.” A twelve-year-old boy had been abducted, supposedly by his mother’s boyfriend, one Jesse Garamond, who had a previous conviction for child molestation, the details of which were not included in the overview report. The missing boy’s body was never found, but Garamond was prosecuted for the crime anyway and convicted solely on the eyewitness testimony of a middle-aged clergyman who had supposedly seen the man and the boy together about an hour before the boy’s mother called the police to report him “missing” because he was late getting home.

  The crime had been a violation of Garamond’s parole, so he went back to jail immediately to serve the remainder of his original sentence. The new one was tacked on; he would be toothless by the time he got out.

  The case grabbed me for two reasons: first, because it’s so unusual to get a conviction without a body, and second, because it was Spence Frazee who had interviewed the guy.

  I was kind of surprised to find Spence at his desk because he hates being there. It’s not on a lake, and fishing poles are not allowed. When he’s forced to work in his cubicle, he gets fidgety and short-tempered and no one can stand to be around him. Otherwise, he’s a really nice guy. I think he’d still be out on the street if the difference in pay weren’t so stark. We all make a lot more money pushing a desk than we did pushing a cruiser, and we don’t come into anywhere near as much contact with the scumbags of the world as we did on the streets. That gets to be important at some point, especially for those of us who have kids. I always felt like I should delouse my uniform and myself before I went home so I wouldn’t bring anything in.

  I put the fax down in front of him.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “The Garamond case.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Well . . .”

  Spence had worked Jesse Garamond like a real pro. He built up his confidence, established a rapport, created a real sense of responsibility, all the things we’re trained to do to get a suspect to speak freely. By the time he got through with him, he had this Garamond saying that he’d love to confess, he wanted so badly to admit to Spence that he’d abducted his girlfriend’s son and killed him.

  “Problem is,” Garamond said to him, “I didn’t do it. Hey, if I could tell you truthfully that I did it, I would. But I didn’t.”

  Of course, they all say that. But Garamond went one step further and bolstered his credibility when he said, “I’ll cop to the first one, you’ll pardon the expression. The one I got sent up for. But I didn’t do this one. There’s a sicko out there that you’re not gonna get because you want it to be me and you’ll do whatever you have to do to make it be me. So some other little kid is gonna have to suffer because you got the wrong guy.”

  He had no alibi because, at the time the abduction supposedly took place, he was cheating on his girlfriend—the missing boy’s mother—with his brother’s wife.

  “Hey, what the hell am I supposed to do here? I love my brother. I don’t want his kids to suffer through this stuff. He might walk out on her if he found out I was sackin’ her. I can’t be responsible for that. No way. I’d rather do time.”

  Honor among thieves, or something like that—among adulterers, maybe. But, again, it was a story line that had been used many times before—I have a great alibi but I can’t use it because someone will be hurt or compromised—and it was easy to discount. Usually we yawn and chuckle when we hear it.

  But Spence wasn’t laughing right then.

  “I don’t know, Lany, there’s just something about this one. I don’t get this guy for this crime. It’s just not his style. He’s a bad dude, but he’s not that kind of sicko.”

  With a promise of secrecy, Spence got the
brother’s wife to corroborate the story. She would not, however, agree to testify on her brother-in-law’s behalf, nor would she allow us to consult with her husband on the matter. So much for fraternal loyalty.

  Spence handed the papers back to me. “Let’s go get some fresh air,” he said.

  The Los Angeles County Corrections facility is located in Lancaster, about an hour and a half away, through the lower mountains. Sixty miles or so, but half the time is spent going the first ten miles. The second half of the journey was quite scenic, but we had to get through a forest of billboards first. I think sometimes that L.A. is a billboard museum with rotating exhibits. Just when you get used to the last big obnoxious sign, another one takes its place.

  Spence was driving a company unmarked unit; I was in the front passenger seat. We had the police radio going, and I was trying to hear the garbled chatter over the AC fan. I was totally absorbed by the scratchy transmissions when a new sign caught my eye. It had a black background and a short silver sword with a jeweled hilt as the main design elements. Emblazoned in medieval-type lettering were the words THEY EAT SMALL CHILDREN THERE. Some sort of red liquid—probably a few gallons of fake blood—was dripping off the lettering.

  “Look at that,” I said to Spence. “Damn. Now they put special effects on the billboards too.”

  Spence peeked out from behind the steering wheel. “Oh, yeah, I saw that the other day. Just what we need, another weird movie for the copycats to mimic in their spare time.”

  I hated to admit it, but that sort of thing always caught my attention. There was a time, before it became fashionable to emulate the crimes shown in some of these films, when I was actually a little bit of a horror aficionado. I couldn’t tell you why I like to be scared, but I do. I followed the sign with my eyes as we drove past it in the mid-afternoon traffic, which was heavy enough to allow a good, long look. The whole thing gave me the creeps.