05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (21 page)

While Sharon Cave waited anxiously for sunrise, at 2:41 that morning, Laura Hall’s 1994 green Cadillac Concours was in Del Rio, Texas, driving on the nearly deserted bridge that crosses the Rio Grande and connects Del Rio with Ciudad Acuna, Mexico. At the checkpoint to enter Mexico, Laura stopped and handed over her passport and that of her passenger, Colton Pitonyak. She looked unconcerned, even happy. When the Mexican border patrol officer returned their passports and waved them on, Laura and Colton drove off, disappearing into the night.

Sixteen

At seven the next morning, August 18, a Thursday, Vanessa’s cell phone rang in her apartment. She wasn’t happy. It was her first morning among the ranks of the unemployed, and she’d planned to enjoy it at least temporarily by sleeping in. She hadn’t slept much the night before, still feeling unsettled, and an extra couple of hours in bed would have felt good. “Mom, I’m sleeping,” she said. “Can I call you back?”

“We can’t find Jennifer,” Sharon said, followed by a brief recounting of the day before. “Jim and I are meeting with Sid Smith this morning and then driving to Austin.”

Now it made sense, that gnawing in Vanessa’s chest, the suspicion that all wasn’t well. “I’m going, too,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.”

“No,” Sharon objected. She had multiple reasons. It was a long drive, she was sure everything was fine, and it would be a waste of time if Vanessa traveled all that way. “We need you at home. You can help. Take out some photos of Jennifer and scan them in the computer for us, so we have something to e-mail to the press if we need to,” Sharon said. “We’ll call you from Austin.”

Vanessa agreed, but she wasn’t convinced.

“As soon as you leave here, call the Austin police again,” Sid Smith advised over coffee at the Cracker Barrel, a short time later. Smith didn’t like what he was hearing from Jim and Sharon. A family friend, Smith had met Jennifer only once, but she’d impressed him as a sweet girl. Colton Pitonyak’s history was worrisome, but what bothered Smith more was that the kid lied about the time he’d last seen Jennifer. A former sergeant in Corpus Christi PD’s homicide bureau, Smith had twenty years’ experience suggesting that people don’t lie without a reason. “No one’s heard from Jennifer in thirty-one hours now, so you can file an official report,” he said “Get it done and get the police looking.”

At six feet and 250 pounds, Smith reminded Sharon of a redheaded Santa Claus, round and jolly, but today he wasn’t smiling. “I understand what evil people can do,” he says. “And I was concerned.”

What he told Jim and Sharon was: “Pull everything you need together, and then drive to Austin. I have a deposition this afternoon, but if you need any help, call me.”

Sharon and Jim left, and Smith got on the telephone and called Vanessa. He hoped she knew something she didn’t want to tell her mother, perhaps something she’d be willing to tell him. But when they talked, Vanessa didn’t have any real information for him. Yes, she’d heard Colton’s name, but she didn’t know much about him. What she’d heard from Jennifer was that she was trying to stay off the drugs, and that she was excited about the new job. “I want to go to Austin,” Vanessa said. “I can’t wait here.”

“Well, go then,” Smith said.

“My mom said no,” Vanessa said.

“I’ll take care of it,” Smith said. “It might turn out that she can use your help.”

As soon as she got in the car to leave the restaurant, Sharon called APD for a second time. Detective Kathleen Hector, a woman with a full face and long brown hair, answered in the missing persons department. She asked questions and took down the information, writing what would become APD report number 05–2291714. At one point, Hector asked Sharon if Jennifer used drugs.

“Jennifer has in the past,” Sharon told her. “But I don’t believe that’s what’s happening here.”

Hector sounded official, and Sharon knew the officer was duly recording all the information in her report, but she didn’t sense that Hector was as concerned as she’d hoped. At the end, the detective said, “We’ll do what we can. You know kids. She’ll probably call you soon.”

“I hope so,” Sharon said, but she didn’t believe it.

After she hung up with Sharon, Hector logged onto her computer to check NCIC, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, and its Texas equivalent for unidentified bodies or persons found who matched Jennifer’s description. Hector didn’t find anything, so she put out a BOLO, a be-on-the-lookout request for Jennifer and her car.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, Vanessa hurriedly packed a suitcase. It was about noon when she got in her car to start the three-hour drive to Austin. All the way there, Vanessa’s intuition whispered that Jennifer was dead. Vanessa thought about the possibility that her sister had overdosed. Despite her suspicions, Vanessa felt calm. On the road, she listened to CDs and thought about the music Jennifer liked, even considering what to play at her sister’s funeral. She and Sharon called back and forth along the road, but the daughter said nothing to the mother about her fears. Vanessa knew she didn’t have to. Sharon’s sixth sense would be acting up, too. They were all so interconnected, three daughters and a mother, that if something happened to one of them, how could the others not know?

Vanessa never truly worried until, on the road on the way to Austin to find her sister, she had a disturbing vision. She saw Jennifer dead, but not in a peaceful sleep. “I saw Jennifer suspended in the air,” Vanessa says. “She was held up by ropes tied around her wrists and her neck.”

“We’re coming to Austin,” Sharon told Scott when she called him that afternoon from Jim’s Suburban. “We should be there by four o’clock.”

“Let me know if I can help,” he said. “But I bet she’s fine, just out partying somewhere.”

“I hope so,” Sharon said. “But then, why hasn’t she called?”

That Scott couldn’t answer. He knew Jennifer lived on her cell phone.

Sharon and Jim’s drive seemed to take forever. Everything that day, in fact, would feel as if it unraveled in slow motion. Two hours after leaving Corpus Christi, Sharon’s cell phone rang. Detective Hector had news.

“We found your daughter’s car,” she said, explaining the steps she’d taken after she’d talked with Sharon. First, she’d called Colton’s cell phone, the number Sharon had given her for him. When Colton didn’t answer, she called Denise and Scott, reconstructing the day before Jennifer disappeared. Then Hector pulled Colton’s driver’s license up on her computer and found his address at the Orange Tree. Not long after, a squad car found Jennifer’s car parked across the street from Colton’s apartment.

When Detective Hector arrived at the West Campus complex, she looked over Jennifer’s Saturn, saw nothing amiss, and then walked upstairs to unit number 88. Once there, she rang the doorbell and pounded on the door. No one answered. She rang the bell and pounded again. Still, no one answered. She watched the mini-blinds, to see if anyone peeked outside. They didn’t move.

She’d brought photos with her, Jennifer’s from her driver’s license and Colton’s mug shot from his previous arrest. Hector looked around for a building manager to let her into the apartment, but found instead a workman with a paint bucket, who explained that the Orange Tree was a condominium project with individual owners. There was no one on-site to give her permission to enter unit 88. She returned to the station, and then realized there was something else she should have done.

“I drove back to the condo and left my card tucked in the peephole on Mr. Pitonyak’s door, asking him to call,” she told Sharon. “Then I went down to Jennifer’s car and left one on her windshield. I wrote ‘Jennifer, call me and your mother,’ on the back. Maybe she’ll see it and check in.”

That Jennifer’s car was parked outside Colton’s condo suggested more to Sharon than to Hector. “You have to go inside that apartment,” Sharon told the officer. “My daughter’s in there. I know she is.”

“We don’t have probable cause to enter the apartment,” Detective Hector said. There were regulations and laws that determined when officers could break into private property. This situation didn’t fit any of them. “We can’t.”

“You have to,” Sharon said. “I’m telling you Jennifer is in there.”

When Sharon said she wanted to pick up Jennifer’s car, Hector gave her the address, and then the detective said, “You know how kids are. Jennifer’s probably fine. The best thing to do is stay with her car and wait for her to come back to get it.”

“You don’t understand. I know Jennifer is in that apartment,” Sharon said. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was certain, and she was growing angry. Her voice trembled, and she had the feeling that Hector was treating her like a hysterical mother.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Cave,” Hector said. The detective knew the law, what she could and couldn’t do, even if a parent thought otherwise. “We can’t go in.”

When Sharon hung up, Jim said, “Well, at least now we have a plan. We’ll drive to his apartment.”

Jim called Sid and brought him up to date, and then Sid relayed the information to Vanessa. She was to meet her parents at the Orange Tree. Since Vanessa was an hour ahead of them, she’d arrive first.

Once Sharon had an address, she called Scott and got directions, writing them down on a pad of paper she was filling with notes. Soon after, Laura Ingles called Sharon’s cell phone. Ingles was tired of trying to convince Eli he needed to call. “You need to go right to Colton’s,” Laura said. “If Jennifer’s with him, she’s in trouble.”

When Vanessa arrived at the Orange Tree just before three that afternoon, she searched until she found Jennifer’s car. It didn’t take long. The black Saturn Ion was just around the corner. Vanessa peered through the car’s windows, but found nothing out of order. She then gazed up at the three-story condo project across the street, walked toward it, and trudged up to the second floor. As she turned to the right at the top of the stairs, she saw the University of Texas clock tower soaring above the treetops. As soon as she entered the condo’s second-floor common area, she spotted a red door marked with two brass eights. She knocked. No one answered. She knocked again, but no one came. She banged on the door, hard, then on the windows, but heard nothing stir inside.

“Mom,” Vanessa said, when she got Sharon on her cell phone. “I’m going to kick in a window and go inside.”

“No!” Sharon shouted. “Absolutely not. We’ll be there soon. You wait for us.”

They argued, but Vanessa reluctantly agreed. When she hung up, she beat on the door again, to no avail. Then she called Sid Smith.

“Let’s see if the kid’s car is there,” he said. “Call me from the garage.”

In the first-floor, under-the-condo-unit parking garage, in slot 88, Vanessa found a white Toyota Avalon with Arkansas plates. “Right apartment number,” she told Smith, rattling off the license plate number.

“Well, then, we’d better check that one out,” he answered.

With Jim and Sharon an hour away, Vanessa didn’t know what else to do. She walked back to her car, glancing at Jennifer’s car on the street, her eyes filling with tears for not the first time that day. Halfheartedly, she got back in her car and drove to a friend’s house, where she showered and changed clothes. Then she called someone she’d known since eighth grade but hadn’t talked to in years, a lanky, clean-cut preacher’s son named Aaron, who lived outside Austin. She picked him up, and they drove to the Orange Tree, where they sat on the steps that led to unit 88.

When Jim and Sharon finally pulled up in his Suburban, Vanessa ran to her mother, and they embraced. Then Vanessa showed them Jennifer’s car. Detective Hector’s card was on the windshield, and Sharon used a key she’d brought with her to open the door and look inside. They saw nothing that appeared strange, no signs of a struggle. From there, they walked into the parking garage, where Vanessa pointed out the white Toyota Avalon. They peered inside, hoping to find something with the owner’s name on it, without luck.

Minutes later at the red door that led to Colton’s apartment, the one with another of Hector’s cards stuck in the peephole, Sharon, Vanessa, and Aaron stood by as Jim pounded. No one answered. He knocked again, but still no response. Worried, Sharon called Detective Kathleen Hector back, at APD. “I think Jennifer’s inside that apartment,” Sharon said. “I think Jennifer is being held hostage in there.”

Hector reiterated that the police had no probable cause to enter unit 88, and, before she hung up, insisted again that Sharon’s best option was to stake out Jennifer’s car and wait for her to return.

From the lush grounds of the stately sorority homes around them, the small group gathered outside Colton Pitonyak’s door heard young women chanting; pledges at houses practicing the chapter’s song. On the hour, half hour, and quarter hour, the UT clock tower’s melodic bells resonated, reminding them that time was passing, and Jennifer still hadn’t been found. Tired of pounding on the unanswered condo door, Jim considered the situation. Not sure what they should do next, he suggested to Sharon, “Let’s go to the hotel and think about this. We’ll take Jennifer’s car with us. If she comes back and finds it missing, she’ll call you or the police.”

Sharon agreed, and at the foot of the stairs, they split up. Vanessa and Aaron left for her friends’ apartment, while Sharon drove Jennifer’s car behind Jim in the Suburban to the Omni Hotel, where they had a reservation. At the hotel, Jim checked in, and they went upstairs. Sharon unpacked, but they talked little. The air between them felt charged with anticipation and danger. Wanting a cigarette, Jim took the elevator back downstairs to smoke in front of the hotel.

Meanwhile, Sharon sat at the desk and called information for the phone numbers of every Pitonyak listed in Arkansas. Once she had them, she started dialing. The first to answer turned out to be Eddie’s sister-in-law. Still, the woman said, there was nothing she could do to help: “The family is estranged. We don’t talk to Eddie and Bridget.”

When Sharon explained that she desperately needed to talk to Eddie and why, however, the woman agreed to get her brother-in-law a message. Moments later, Eddie called. Relieved to have contacted someone who could help, Sharon quickly filled him in on the situation, stressing that they’d been searching for Jennifer for more than a day. “Colton called here Tuesday night and asked to use his mother’s credit card to take Jennifer out to dinner,” Eddie said. “That’s all I know.”