Believe No One (22 page)

Hicks lifted the branch to let it float away, but it would not give up its catch, so she broke a smaller branch off with her hands. She was fearless, trusting him to haul her in if she fell. When she had access to the body, she eased her arms under it and gently pulled it to her, cradling it.

She backed up onto the shore with shuffling sidesteps. When she was finally out of the water, Fennimore dropped the rope and rushed forward to help. Hicks lowered the tiny form carefully onto the ground, like a mother setting down a sleeping child. But it was not a child; he could see that now. And she had not been in the water long.

Fennimore experienced a rush of triumph: this woman, small and fragile as she looked in death, might bring their killer down.

The simplest explanation is usually correct.

F
ROM THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF
W
ILLIAM OF
O
CKHAM

Incident Command Post, Westfield, Oklahoma

By 4.30 a.m. Dr Quint, Senior Forensic Medical Examiner, had arrived at Williams County Hospital. She declared her intention of taking the body back with her for autopsy. In Oklahoma, all autopsies were conducted by FMEs, and in the eastern half of the state, that meant moving the dead to the Eastern Division Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Tulsa. Detective Dunlap wanted her input to an early-morning briefing, and Team Adam offered to fly her to Tulsa on their Piper airplane. Dr Quint said she'd be glad of the ride, and could spare thirty minutes.

The dead woman had already been identified from her fingerprints. Sharla Jane Patterson was twenty-seven years old. She had a son, Riley, aged nine, who had spent a year in foster care before being returned to his mother's custody. The Department of Human Services office dealing with his case didn't open till 8.30 a.m., but the emergency team had been alerted and someone would send a copy of Riley's photograph from his file as soon as they got a key holder to open up the office. Sharla Jane's last known address was a trailer park in Osage County, fifty miles north of Tulsa. The County Sheriff was on his way there.

The storm had passed and, at first light, a team of sheriff's deputies and volunteers would return to Cupke Lake to look for the boy.

Another child missing.

The assembled investigators were hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, but wired on strong coffee, adrenaline and the possibility of finding the boy safe.

Detective Dunlap called them to order. ‘We need to decide,' he said. ‘Release details to the media or not?'

‘What harm could it do?' Sheriff Launer asked.

Dr Detmeyer said, ‘Most abducted children are dead within three hours of being taken. Sharla Jane Patterson was in the water a few hours; we don't know how long the killer had her before that. Sheriff Launer is right: if Riley Patterson is dead, the publicity can't harm him.'

Launer nodded, a smile of satisfaction on his face.

‘But if Riley is one of the twenty-four per cent of children who survive those three hours,' Detmeyer went on, speaking quietly and dispassionately, as if these were mere facts with no real people attached to them, ‘then an announcement could put his life in even greater jeopardy.'

‘Riley Patterson could still be alive out there,' Launer argued, ‘and we are not going to find him sending a couple dozen civilians out in the woods hollering his name. I say we issue a full Amber Alert.' This was a national strategy, using radio and TV networks to mobilize the public.

Ellis said, ‘Are you kidding me? Look what happened when Team Adam sent one solitary telex to State Bureaus and Sheriffs' offices.'

‘You can't contain TV and radio networks,' Fennimore said. ‘Inside of an hour, you'll have every crank, crazed well-wisher and serial confessor jamming the phone lines.'

All eyes turned to him – they knew he was speaking from experience.

The Team Adam consultant spoke up. ‘We don't know for sure that Riley
has
been abducted. He could be with a friend, or a neighbour. Could be he's sleeping safe in his own bed.'

‘And until we hear from the Osage County Sheriff's Department, we can't know one way or another,' Dunlap said. ‘Right now, Riley Patterson doesn't fit the Amber Alert criteria.'

The majority agreed.

‘Well, okay.' An irritated frown creased Launer's brow. ‘But I got to tell the media
something
– my office has been taking calls about this since four a.m.'

Fennimore wondered how the media had got to know
anything
with an electrical storm raging, and only the interstate Task Force aware of what had happened. He turned towards the meeting-room doors, half expecting to see Launer's tame newspaper editor hovering outside.

‘We think this murder and disposal was rushed?' Fennimore got a nod from the FBI behaviourist. ‘So maybe he didn't have time to clean up her trailer. And if he left forensic evidence, it could give us his identity.'

‘
If
he rushed it, and
if
he didn't clean up,' Launer said. ‘And how long's it going to take to process the scene?'

‘All right,' Dunlap said. ‘Compromise: we withhold information from the media until we search Sharla Jane's home, but issue a state-wide BOLO to law-enforcement agencies for the boy.'

Launer looked sour, but Dunlap had the consensus.

This agreed, they turned to a comparison of Sharla Jane with the other victims. She fitted the victimology: she had served a six-month prison term eighteen months earlier for a DUI offence; she was a former prostitute and an ex-addict. Vulnerable, single women; addicts and ex-addicts – easy targets for paedophiles. Fennimore had heard it said again and again over the past week, but something about it didn't ring true.

‘Why have the women been found, but not the children?' he asked.

The question came out of his mouth before he'd had time think it through, and Fennimore did like to have at least a partial answer to questions he posed. But that was just professional vanity; sometimes the best strategy was to ask the niggling questions in the hope that someone – anyone – would come up with an answer.

Deputy Hicks looked uncomfortable. ‘You said it yourself, Professor: kids don't float the way adults do.'

‘Divers searched Guffey's pond – Billy Dawalt wasn't in there,' Fennimore countered.

‘We got twenty per cent of the nation's standing water here in Oklahoma,' Launer said. ‘That's a lotta places to dump a body.'

‘Yet six women have surfaced, but only one child.'

Ellis shrugged irritably. ‘It's obvious – he dumps the women with the trash. It's the
kids
he wants.'

Fennimore blinked away the image of a sombre teenage girl in a sundress, a girl that could be Suzie, stepping lightly beside an older man on a sunny street. ‘And after he's … finished with them?'

Launer rolled his eyes. ‘He murders them, dumps them – like he dumped the mothers.'

‘So,' he repeated, ‘why have we found only one child's body?'

The Sheriff threw his arms wide. ‘I don't know – maybe he buried them, threw 'em down a well, sold 'em on – hell, you had
five years
to think about how a pervert disposes of a kid when he's finished having his fun, why don't
you
tell
us
what he did?'

Dunlap said, ‘Hey now, come
on.
'

Deputy Hicks spoke at the same time: ‘Sheriff Launer. Sir—'

Launer waved her away. ‘I'm not gonna tiptoe around him 'cause of his “personal tragedy”.'

Into the shocked silence, Fennimore said, ‘He's right. You can't avoid making the arguments, however crudely put, just to spare my feelings.'

Launer eyed him suspiciously, uncertain if he'd won the argument.

‘Paedophiles target a “type”?' Fennimore said.

Launer nodded, still wary.

‘But if the women they target are a type, then the men who prey on them are too. They fixate on the kids; the mothers are only a means to an end – access to the children. The man who murdered these women had
total
access; he could've abused the children in their own homes, and if he wanted to steal them away, he was in the perfect position. All he had to do is offer the child a lift to school, or to take them for a treat to the video store, or to pick up groceries, and just never go home again.
But he didn't.
He took the mothers along with the children.'

He locked gazes with Simms, and her eyes shone.

Launer raised his shoulders. ‘What's your point?'

‘Two people are much harder to control than one, especially if one of them is an adult,' Fennimore said. ‘He took a huge risk. But a risk worth taking, if it was the
mothers
he wanted, and
not
the children.'

‘What?'
Launer laughed. ‘Did you
see
the mugshots?'

Of course they had. Arrest photographs; faces so grey and deeply lined they might have been fifty, rather than twenty-five. The skin of their foreheads and cheeks flecked with red, as if they'd been peppered with buckshot.

‘That was before they went through rehab,' Fennimore said.

‘I'm with the Sheriff on this,' Ellis said. ‘It's not like they're a physical type – you got blonde, dark, tall, short, nineteen years old up to thirty. What they
do
have in common is their kids.'

Fennimore turned to the rest of the gathering. ‘How many mother-and-child abductions have you investigated where the
child
was the target?'

Silence.

‘Okay, let me put it another way: how many abductions by child predators where the mother was taken as well?' They looked from one to the other, and Fennimore saw raised eyebrows, a couple of head shakes. He sought out Kent Whitmore, the Team Adam consultant who had stood up for Hicks at the first meeting. ‘Mr Whitmore?'

The consultant stroked a finger and thumb over his grey goatee. ‘I never did investigate a case like that.'

‘Of course not. Because child predators lie in wait and snatch the child when they're most vulnerable – which is
when they're on their own
.' It was a massive generalization, and Fennimore hated generalizations, but if he wanted to be heard there was no room for scientific hedging or equivocation.

Around the room, people made eye contact. What he was saying made sense.

Dunlap turned to the FBI psychologist. ‘Dr Detmeyer, any thoughts?'

‘Professor Fennimore may have something …' Detmeyer paused to glance at his notes. ‘So far as we can tell, none of the victims was using drugs at the time of death. Rita Gaigan sent her son to her sister's the day before she disappeared, possibly because she feared he was in danger. Laney Dawalt took her brother out of a foster home because she thought she could take better care of him. Sharla Jane Patterson got clean and stayed clean in order to regain custody of her son.'

Detmeyer swept the room with his cool, calm gaze. ‘Flawed as they were, damaged as they were, these women
did
care about their children. It
is
possible that the killer chose them for that reason – that he used the children to control their mothers. Threaten a child, and the mother is defenceless.'

‘What does that tell us about the man?' Dunlap asked.

‘In other circumstances, it would suggest that he might be physically impaired, or that he doesn't feel confident he could overpower his victims,' Detmeyer said. ‘But he carried Laney Dawalt a quarter of a mile from the road to a farm pond. Fallon Kestler's body was found ten minutes' walk off a dirt track in swampland – her daughter with her – which means he probably made two journeys from his vehicle to the deposition site over hazardous terrain, probably at night, carrying shifting and unstable weights.' He looked around the room. ‘It may be that he enjoys the element of control, that he takes sadistic pleasure in making them fear for their children.'

‘Well,' Launer said, ‘you're a psychologist, and I guess it's your job to try to understand people. I'm a cop, it's my job to catch this guy, and I don't see how all this talk gets us any closer to getting that done.' He jabbed a finger towards the door. ‘There's families out there scared for their kids. There's a boy out in the storm in the hands of a monster. You can call him what you like – paedophile, psychopath – I don't care. But I am not going to sit on my butt. Deputy Hicks, you can stay here. The rest of my guys're coming with me to Cupke Lake, see if we can't find that boy.'

Fennimore knew that this was one of those occasions where he should keep his head down and his mouth shut. But tact had never been one of his strengths.

‘I thought you said we wouldn't find the boy with a posse hollering his name out in the woods,' he said.

Launer picked up his hat from the table in front of him. ‘Better'n doing nothing.' He made his way to the exit.

‘Better, or just more photogenic?'

The Sheriff stopped, already part way through the doors onto the landing. But he seemed to think better of making a fight of it. He jammed his hat onto his head and carried on without looking back, his deputies following close after.

The trunk leaks, and Red is so thirsty. An hour into the storm, he licked some rainwater that found its way in through the damaged rubber seals of the trunk, but it made him sick to his stomach and he threw it all back up and now he feels feverish. He tried again and again but he can't get out – he worked the lock of the trunk for hours, his fingers wrapped in bandages stripped from his T-shirt, but it will not open. At last, shivering, he struggles into his jacket and zips it up tight, feels a small hard rectangle against his hip. The Sony is still in his pocket. He takes it out and turns it on low, pillowing his ear on it for comfort.