Finishing School

by Max Allan Collins

  The Clark home—a two-story clapboard house painted a faded maroon that almost looked like brick from a distance—had a gravel driveway that led to a new garage. Wentworth had phoned ahead, so they were expected. The local detective made the introductions at the front door, and then the Clarks invited the little group inside.

  In a modest but immaculate living room, the Clarks shared a couch to the wall at the right; opposite, a flat-screen TV perched on a stand, electronic equipment on lower shelves. Potted plants covered a long table under the front picture window. No family photos were on display—no altar, this time, to a missing little girl. Several folding chairs were set up, waiting for their guests.

  The three FBI agents took those while Wentworth occupied a wing chair next to the table of plants.

  Prentiss didn’t take long before profiling Brian and Michelle Clark as a kind, hardworking couple. Their son, five when his sister disappeared, had sprouted into a gangly teenager who made an appearance for introductions, then disappeared when his parents sat down to talk with the federal agents.

  Like her deceased daughter, Michelle was a pretty blonde, with wavy tresses spilling down over her shoulders, bright brown eyes and porcelain skin. She wore jeans and a V-necked T-shirt with a small gold cross. Her husband—in a drab gray suit and dark tie, having just gotten home from work—was a broad-shouldered man with a blond crew cut and a guileless expression belied by sharp blue eyes.

  This meeting did not prove to spark the emotional devastation Prentiss had witnessed in the Davison home. Rather, the Clarks seemed almost relieved, finally knowing they could surrender that final shred of hope of seeing their daughter alive again. Tears came, but relatively few.

  ‘‘If we could,’’ Rossi said, ‘‘we’d like to ask you a few questions.’’

  The couple shared a look, then silently nodded consent. To Prentiss, they seemed of one mind—to survive their tragedy, a bond special even for a husband and wife had been formed.

  Rossi said, ‘‘I know you’ve been over this again and again, but we need to hear it. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through it one last time.’’

  ‘‘We understand,’’ Brian Clark said. He sighed, traded brave smiles with his pretty wife, then began: ‘‘We had taken the kids down to the park. It was a Saturday.’’

  ‘‘Beautiful day,’’ Michelle Clark said. Her voice carried a soft Southern lilt.

  ‘‘Michelle was on a blanket reading,’’ Clark said, ‘‘and I was watching the kids. Lee Ann had been on the swings and Brandon was climbing the monkey bars. Lee Ann started chasing something, a butterfly, or maybe a moth. I was watching her, but she was running away from us, and when Brandon slipped on the monkey bars, he squealed, and Michelle and I both just rushed to him. He’d fallen, but he was okay. A scuffed knee, was all. Then, when we turned around, Lee Ann was . . . she was just gone.’’

  Rossi frowned. ‘‘There were other people in the park, right?’’

  ‘‘Quite a few, actually,’’ Michelle said. ‘‘That’s always frustrated us. Thing was, we had just moved to town a couple of months before, when Brian got a job selling insurance. We both grew up down the road, in Anniston, but when Brian got the chance to become a partner in the insurance company here . . . well . . . we just jumped at it. Anyway, we didn’t know hardly anybody, and nobody knew us. They might’ve thought the kidnapper was with us, even. That’s one of the hardest things to bear.’’

  Prentiss asked, ‘‘What is?’’

  ‘‘Knowing that if we’d lived in Heflin all our lives, Lee Ann might still be here.’’

  Prentiss was thinking that the UnSub must be an unthreatening presence—if the other people there hadn’t thought to intercede, and if the little girl had gone off willingly, then he wasn’t some brute with a sack who stuffed the little girl in it and bounded off.

  Rossi asked, ‘‘How long between Lee Ann’s disappearance and when you called the police?’’

  The couple looked at each other again.

  His wife shrugged and so did Clark, whose answer was a question, ‘‘About half an hour?’’

  Prentiss asked, ‘‘What did you do for that half hour?’’

  ‘‘We looked all over the park together, and talked to almost everyone who was there. No one saw anything.’’

  ‘‘Not even a friendly-looking man talking to your daughter?’’

  ‘‘No. Not even that. Then, finally, Michelle took Brandon home. Even though Lee Ann wasn’t quite four, and she had been taught not to cross the street without one of us with her, we hoped that she’d for some reason tried to find her way home by herself.’’

  ‘‘When I got here,’’ Michelle said, picking up the narrative, ‘‘Lee Ann wasn’t anywhere around. Still, I looked through every room in the house before I called the police.’’

  ‘‘Mr. Clark,’’ Prentiss said, ‘‘where were you at that time?’’

  ‘‘Walking every block of this neighborhood,’’ he said, shaking his head in a frustration that would never die, ‘‘calling Lee Ann’s name. I searched everywhere.’’ The stoic husband’s eyes were filling with tears.

  Abruptly, Rossi said, ‘‘Thank you for your time. We’ll not intrude on you any longer.’’

  ‘‘Thank you,’’ Clark said.

  His wife said the same thing.

  Rising, Rossi said, ‘‘We’re sorry for your loss, truly.’’

  ‘‘Thank you,’’ Clark repeated, rising as well.

  The man of the house walked them outside. On the front porch, Rossi turned back to the grieving man. ‘‘Mr. Clark, for what it’s worth, I’ll tell you this—we’ll do everything we can to catch whoever did this to your daughter.’’

  ‘‘I saw you on TV.’’

  Rossi blinked, as this momentarily felt like a non sequitur. ‘‘Yes . . . I wrote some books.’’

  ‘‘I read one of them. I believe Michelle and I are lucky to have you on the case.’’

  ‘‘Thank you. But I can assure you that everyone on my team is the best the FBI has to offer. Again, for what that’s worth.’’

  When Clark went back inside the house, the agents bade farewell to Detective Wentworth and thanked him for his assistance. Rossi promised to keep him informed.

  On the road, heading back to Atlanta, Prentiss said, ‘‘You ended that pretty quickly.’’

  Shrugging with one shoulder, Rossi turned to her in the backseat. ‘‘That half hour they spent searching for their daughter gave the UnSub a thirty-minute head start getting out of town. You figure the local police wasted another hour or more searching around town. Even if the locals called the state police as soon as the Clarks called them, the UnSub still had over a thirty-minute lead. Everything that happened in Heflin after the girl disappeared was about chasing a ghost. The UnSub was long gone.’’

  Carlyle asked, ‘‘Do you think the UnSub picked them because they were new in town?’’

  ‘‘Maybe,’’ Rossi said. ‘‘But more likely, pure dumb luck. Otherwise, he drove across Georgia into Alabama, to case this particular park? Very doubtful. I think this whole series of crimes started even before the kidnapping in Jesup. That one was planned. These other two, why come clear across the state to stalk families over here? No, this was part of a spree.’’

  ‘‘What’s next?’’ Carlyle asked, but Prentiss already knew.

  ‘‘Tomorrow,’’ Rossi said, ‘‘we’ll go to Jesup. The beginning is there, and the beginning always holds the answer.’’

  Chapter Six

  Hibbing, Minnesota

  He was in Hibbing on business, which also gave him time to start shopping for the perfect present to keep His Beloved happy. She had been sad for months, His Beloved, ever since Paula left for finishing school, and now the time had come to start anew.

  When he’d last gone shopping, the world had been a different, more innocent place. Now there were AMBER Alerts, video cameras everywhere, and the Internet to contend with. Things moved at a much fa
ster pace and on such a larger scale—how he longed for simpler times.

  And if he slipped up, they would never have a family to love and nurture again.

  He would be gone overnight. With good planning and a little luck, he could go shopping today, and pick up His Beloved’s present tomorrow, on the way out of town.

  The woman he adored needed children as much as oxygen. She had such a large capacity for love, and when there was no one to share it with—except for him, of course, and he wasn’t able to fill the depths of her needs—the melancholy leached into her system and seemed to suck at her soul, like a ravenous beast. This he had learned long ago. But his love for her was so great, he only wanted her to be happy, and would do anything to fulfill her needs.

  She was scarred from a childhood of verbal abuse that had become something far worse, once she was old enough to (as her father had so crudely put it) “go on the rag.’’

  He was appalled by how terrible some people could be—and the man had been her father!

  Her mother had been almost as bad, taking His Beloved to a back-alley abortionist who’d butchered the job so badly that she could never have children of her own. Unlike the horrible father, though, the mother might have felt some small measure of guilt, eventually killing herself with sleeping pills. Later, His Beloved’s father had been killed when his shotgun had mysteriously discharged while he was cleaning it—a terrible thing for a young girl to have to witness.

  She had run away then, His Beloved, and lived on her own briefly, doing whatever she could to survive, until he had met her—“My little knight in shiny armor,’’ she called him. They had fallen in love on their very first date and been together ever since. On their way east from his college graduation, headed to his first job, they had stopped for their first “shopping trip.’’

  She had been wearing him down for months with talk of how easy it would be for them to find a child, a nice blonde girl, like herself, and how much happier they would be with kids in the house. With so many terrible parents out there, giving a really good home to a child would be a blessing for all concerned. Finally, on that trip, he had given in.

  A doting mother, His Beloved cherished the children until that dreaded time when they would reach that “special’’ age. She trusted no men at all, except him of course, although in this one area, he could not convince her that he would never, ever consider doing what that monster of a father had done to her. She would imitate her father’s deep voice, mimicking one of the terrible things she’d heard him say: “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed!’’

  His Beloved knew she was scarred—she was nothing if not self-aware—and had seen several shrinks along the way, to try to ease her pain. Mostly, their solutions had involved pills—pills she took to control nearly every aspect of her life: anxiety, depression, mood swings, and, of course, sleep. The nightmares were the worst but the sleeping pills allowed her some peace and seemed to keep her dream demons battered back into their cave. These pills also came in handy when the time came to send their precious girls off to finishing school.

  The first girl had been sent to finishing school while he was away at work one day. If he had been home, he would have tried to prevent it; she knew it, he knew it, so His Beloved simply waited for him to leave for work one morning, then made the girl a good-bye breakfast.

  Unable to face losing His Beloved, and knowing there was no way to tell anyone—they had adopted the child through decidedly unofficial means that the authorities, indeed society at large, would neither understand nor condone—he had remained silent.

  That had been difficult.

  But not any more difficult than going shopping had been, when he’d had to come to terms with the price of making His Beloved happy, which was to deprive some other mother and father of their child. That part, however, had become more and more easy to cope with when he had seen how good a mother His Beloved was. She was the best, most nurturing mother on God’s green earth. Thinking about it now, sitting in his rental car, he knew that they had done the right thing. Those girls had been so much better off with the two of them than the neglectful parents who had turned their backs and made it possible for him to retrieve the children. After all, if they had been good parents, they never would have made it so easy for him to go shopping.

  He was parked near a day care center on East Twenty-fifth Street, tucked where no one could easily see him in the parking lot of Vic Power Park. With his binoculars, he could sit in the car and easily see who came and went from the day care center.

  That presented a tiny risk—someone might notice the binoculars and get suspicious; but this November afternoon was passing on the wings of a harsh north wind that kept traffic to a minimum. The park, except for two high school kids on the far side who had apparently skipped afternoon classes to hang out and smoke, was vacant. The two teens wanted nothing to do with the adult in the big blue car. They not only kept their distance, but they kept their backs to him, more worried that he would recognize them than the other way around.

  Didn’t take long for the children to parade out, their parents picking them up and leading them to cars parked along the street. Not long after dismissal, he saw what he was looking for, and she was perfect—perky and blonde, with a smile so wide that he knew His Beloved would fall in love at first sight with the child. Normally he was not an impulse buyer, but this time he knew at once that he didn’t have to shop any further.

  She was so gorgeous in her jeans, sneakers, and little pink parka zipped to her neck, a Bratz backpack slung over one shoulder as she toddled over to meet a woman, presumably her mother, who also wore jeans, sneakers, and a parka, though the woman’s coat was purple, with a Minnesota Vikings logo on the back. She, too, was blonde and slim. Were she here, His Beloved would be jealous of the way his eyes relished the mother as she held the hand of the little girl and led her to a black Lincoln Navigator parked at the curb.

  After the girl was strapped into her car seat, the mother climbed aboard, started the vehicle and merged into the eastbound traffic on East Twenty-fifth. He had set aside the binoculars while the little girl was being tucked into her seat. When the Lincoln pulled out, his car was already started and he put two cars between his and the black Navigator. He was pretty sure the woman had not noticed him, but then hardly anyone ever noticed him, in or out of a car. Still, no point in tailgating—wasn’t like he was some simple brigand getting ready to carjack her. This took an element of . . . grace.

  He stayed well back as Twenty-fifth changed into Dupont Road. East of town, where North Dublin Road ran south to the airport, she crossed eastward, the road changing names yet again, becoming Lake Carey Road. He was having more trouble now. He had to lag back as the cars between them had all turned off. Following too close might spook the mother and that was the last thing he needed.

  As the road turned north, to loop around Lake Carey, he stayed far enough back that she was occasionally out of sight for a second or two. When he came around a corner and she wasn’t there, he blurted, “Darn!’’ Then, off to the right, he saw tail-lights blink on in the garage of a log-cabin-type house, and recognized the Navigator before the electric garage door started down.

  All right—that was home.

  His options seemed limited—attaining the child on the route home seemed impossible; equally hard would be trying to get the girl at home. Darkness was settling in, the days getting short fast this far north. That left the day care as the most vulnerable spot. He would follow them from the house tomorrow, just in case, but he expected the retrieval would happen at the day care.

  That meant he had a lot of planning to do between now and tomorrow.

  Which was fine. He would do anything for His Beloved. And anything worth doing was worth doing right.

  Bemidji, Minnesota

  Frustration was an emotion with which Dr. Spencer Reid was of course familiar, but rarely in his work, which was after all his refuge.

  Dealing with his schizophrenic
mother had obviously been, and continued to be, a frustrating experience—she was still housed in the Bennington Sanitarium in their hometown of Las Vegas. Being eighteen years old and forced to deal with his mother’s illness had matured him fast (Reid’s father had been MIA since the young man’s youth). He had been among older kids from very early on, jumping grades, graduating from high school at twelve, always doing his best to seem older than his age.

  But the truth was, he’d always felt younger than his age, until the day his mother had been committed, anyway. That day, at eighteen, he’d been a man. He had to be.

  Even with all his extensive reading, his three doctoral degrees, and the benefit of an IQ of 187, he had still not been able to help his mother. That frustration had never been quelled. Work helped him hold his frustration at bay—usually.

  This particular case, however, was frustration squared, holding a plethora of suspects who fit different aspects of their profile, but none fitting every aspect of the profile. Did this mean the BAU team was on the right track, just not quite there? Or did it mean their profile was wrongly skewed?

  Another question nagged at Reid—had they overlooked a suspect, while centering in on Billy Rohl and the other members of the hunting party?

  He recalled sylviculturist Lawrence Silvan saying several inspectors spent a good deal of time in that forest. The profilers should probably be interviewing those inspectors, both as suspects and possible witnesses. Though the UnSub was clearly careful, one of the inspectors might have seen something, and not realized its significance.

  After running this past Hotchner and Morgan, Reid got out Silvan’s card and phoned the cell number on the back. With evening settling over Bemidji, Reid did not expect to find the forester in the office. He was wrong.

  Silvan answered on the first ring. ‘‘Lawrence Silvan.’’

  ‘‘Mr. Silvan, this is Dr. Spencer Reid, with the FBI?’’