To Probe A Beating Heart (20 page)

             
Finished, Averell packed his shovel and tarp in his SUV and calmly drove out of the cemetery. He headed back toward Erie and then east to Rochester. As he crossed into Pennsylvania, he again felt that warm calm of safeness. He pulled into the laundry that he had used previously and washed all the bloodied clothing twice with bleach and ran them through the dryer. When finished, he bagged the clothes and made a few stops at Salvation Army drop points that he had visited previously. He cleaned the knife, broke it and deposited the trash in convenient receptacles in a few gas stations. When he got to his town house in the Rochester area, he took a close look at his lip and decided that he had to go to the emergency room and have it properly treated. His concern was that he would be questioned about how it happened and he wanted his story to be believable and provable. He looked around the town house and decided to make an accident scene in the kitchen just in case the police wanted proof that it happened as he was going to describe. He opened a kitchen cabinet door and lined himself up with it. Then he turned around and rehearsed turning into an open cabinet door several times. A glass of water in his hand when he hit the door would look convincing. He removed the bandage and peeled away the dried blood and scab starting to form. He squeezed the lip forcing a flow of blood to the wound and positioned himself with water in hand. He turned slowly and let his lip make contact with the door, leaving a trace of blood and dropped the glass. He then tossed his head to the left, throwing a spurt of blood across the counter and another cabinet door. Then grabbing a handful of paper towels, he placed them on his lip encouraging flow. He left a few bloodied paper towels in his kitchen, picked up his keys and drove to the Emergency room.

             
His story told, a doctor put four stitches in his lip and filled out a report form that was required of all such injuries. The doctor wrote a prescription and gave Averell a few extra bandages and he went home, stopping at the pharmacy to fill the prescription and buy some additional bandages. He sat down in his living room, turned on the television, took out his log book and started to figure his mileage balance when his door bell rang. Not surprised, he answered the door and was greeted by a police officer.

             
“This is a follow up to your hospital visit,” said the officer.

             
“Sure, c’mon in,” and he backed up a step.

             
The officer entered and said, “Tell me what happened and I can get out of here and you can get some sleep.”

             
“Sure, I was getting a glass of water and I guess that I left the cabinet door open. Turned right into it.”

             
Averell showed the officer to the kitchen and said, “ I have to clean up this mess” he said, referring to the broken glass and spilled water, “But I’m not in the mood right now.”

             
The officer grinned, noted the open door and the blood on the

edge and on the wall. Everything looked in order, there was no reason

to question the events as reported and after taking a few notes, he said,

“drinking and walking around your own kitchen don’t mix.”

They both laughed and Averell said, “don’t make me laugh, it hurts,”

and he half smiled.
The officer returned the smile and left. Averell cleaned up his mess, picked up his log and got back to his calculations.               “Another negative 360 miles, damn it.”

             
“Damn it.”

* * *

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

What makes a man do this sort of thing . . .

Averell had several weeks of explaining the stitches in his lip and the lumpy scar that remained, until he had made a complete loop of his customers. Consistency was the key, not necessarily in the words, but in the facts. He told the story as he walked through it to his town house, before going to the hospital, varying the wording but sticking to the sequence. The ribbing continued for several more weeks, and as long as the scar was there he would be teased about walking into open doors. The treatment was not pleasant but much better than being found out and paying the price, and he derived pleasure in knowing he had gotten away with something else.

             
Healing is uncomfortable when there are stitches in your lip and he avoided spicy foods until the wound was closed and the stitches were removed. The doctor pulling out the stitches told him to wait a few months and then see a plastic surgeon about getting rid of that nasty scar. As time passed, Averell sort of grew to like the scar. It implied some sort of violent encounter that he may have had when in the army or perhaps some encounter with a gangster.

             
“Or maybe a fist fight with another office supply salesman.”

             
“Okay, okay, I’ll get it fixed, and no lies about being wounded in

combat.”

              His want to again find a ‘subject’ and play in the barn grew stronger each day. He was still angry about being kicked, losing his temper and ruining his fun and he wanted to do it again, this time without the kicking. What he really wanted was to have Sarah in the barn. He thought about her and how much he was hurt each time she repeated the words “She hates you.” As they grew up together, his want to probe her neck and her chest increased, he wanted to open her chest and see if she had a heart, and if it really pulsed blood through her veins. The thought was constantly with him. The vision of blood flowing out her mouth as her heart tried to beat again was his nightly dream. He wanted to do all of this in front of Ellie. In his dream she watched while sipping her coffee and as he finished with Sarah and approached Ellie with his knife in hand, he would awaken.

             
Jim read the newspaper on June 24, 1992 and saw an article describing a missing girl in McKean, Pennsylvania. He read all that there was to be read, but as with Annette, there were no witnesses and no body. The disappearance of Candice made the news nationwide and Jim McClarry, always searching for answers about Annette collected information from other, similar cases and tried to understand, tried to build a profile of the person who may have taken her. He wanted to know, one way or the other, how she was, where she was and what he could do for her. Could she be saved, could she be found. He hoped for the best, and planned for the worst. If she could come home and be with her family again, he wanted to help make it happen. If on the other hand she was dead, he wanted to find her and give her remains a proper burial, then he wanted to find the person responsible for her disappearance and pain. He wanted to be sure that he or she or they were properly arrested, tried and punished for what they did.

             
Jim had started a file in his home computer where he recorded everything he could about Annette and information on a number of other missing child cases that remained unsolved. It began as a single spreadsheet with columns for age, sex, hair, eyes, height, weight, school, and other items and soon became unwieldy. He found out that there are thousands of children that go missing each year across the country. The numbers were staggering. According to the Department of Justice, nationwide, over 2,000 kids go missing every day, and well over half a million kids each year. Out of those numbers, over one hundred kids are abducted each year by a stranger for any of several reasons, including abuse or hurting or killing the child. Some abductions are for ransom, some are kept for a day and they are let go. The ones that are missing for a long period with no trace are probably dead or adopted by the abductors or sold to who knows.

             
As he gathered more information, he added columns until the single spread sheet was more easily divided into two sheets. He recorded information in a uniform way, on each spreadsheet on his computer so that he could go back and forth between the two sheets. As he read about a new case and found a new category, he added columns to include the new information. He was getting frustrated by the limiting factors of the spreadsheet and needed a different tool to track the information.

             
An IT consultant had been brought in to help organize the station’s computer system and Jim offered to buy lunch in return for a few helpful hints on his home system. His new friend, Geoff, immediately told him that he thought a data base was probably in order for his analysis.

             
“You put information in small bundles like ‘First Name’ is a field by itself, then ‘Middle Name’ is another and ‘Last Name’ is a third. Addresses can be broken down similarly, including fields for ‘Street Number’ ‘Street Name’, ‘Apartment Number’, ‘City’, ‘State’ and so on. You can have as many fields as the data base will allow, which could be hundreds and as many entries per case as the data base will allow, which could also be hundreds or thousands. So the data base will hold a lot of information and you can sort the data by field or fields as you wish.” With that and a few more lunches with Geoff, Jim was ready to put together a data base to track the information that he could and would accumulate. It could be a short lived project or it could be an ongoing task for a number of years. He started with what he knew about Annette and added every detail he could think of. Then he looked at the information he had on Candice, she became number two in his data base. He continued with every missing child he could identify. Initially the information went in easily as he entered everything he had on the spreadsheets.

             
As he progressed with this project, Jim found that he had two basic sets of information. One was all based on the victims and the other was based on the predators. He had more on the victims than on the criminals and he had no idea if the predator who took Annette would turn out to be a regional hunter, killer or it could possibly be a nationwide or even an international mass murderer, it could even be a onetime killer. He had no frame of reference, so he entered everything, even the insignificant information.

             
Time passed and Jim scoured the newspapers and paid close attention to the nightly news, constantly increasing his information base. He put the information he gathered with his collection of facts about Annette. The newspaper indicated that Candice was six years old, had strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. He had also gathered information on a number of other cases surrounding several disappearances over the last ten years and tried to draw parallels between those and Annette’s case. There were some similarities in several cases, but never enough information was published to properly evaluate the possible parallels.

             
His notes showed Annette in Cleveland Heights and Candice in McKean and he pinned these locations on a map. These two were relatively close together and he gave them a little more attention. The other missing children were also tracked, but the next closest one was in Missouri and that seemed out of a reasonable area of consideration. More data was needed to properly profile the predator who took Annette. He researched back one year at a time, intending to go back as far as the records would allow, even though it would become less and less meaningful after an unidentifiable point. He had no fear of ever reaching that point, there was enough data generated each year to keep him busy.

             
On Thursday, August 13, 1992 in Syracuse, New York, an eight year old girl, Megan Norris, disappeared sometime between two and four in the afternoon. At the time of Megan’s abduction, Averell was in Elyria, Ohio, in a meeting with a client. Megan became number three in Jim’s database.

             
Jim added a pin for Megan in his map. He now had a triangle from

Cleveland Heights, Ohio to McKean, Pennsylvania to Syracuse, new York.
He still needed more information. No one knew what happened to these three children. Why had they been taken? Had they been sold into some sort of slavery? Had they been abused in some perverse way? Had they been tortured? Were they still alive? The answers to these questions could lead to one or more kidnappers. Jim wanted to understand as much as possible, the mind of someone who could do these things, someone who might abuse or kill a child. He wanted to know so that he might find the individual who took Annette.

             
The Cleveland Heights Police Department had a psychologist that

advised them on special cases where the deviant mind played a significant
role. Jim had seen him and attended two ‘lunch and learn’ sessions where he spoke on related topics. Dr. Alexander Robertson was also an instructor at Cleveland State University in the Psychology department. He had written several articles that dealt with child abuse and predatory behaviors and was doing research at a state facility with convicted child molesters. Dr. Robertson was in the station several times a month and usually used an empty office on the second floor. The door was open when he was available and closed when he was not. On August nineteenth, Jim was coming off a night shift when he saw Dr. Robertson drive up and park in the lot.

             
When he had cleared all his paperwork and was about to change and go home, Jim went to the second floor and saw that the door was open. “Good morning Dr. Robertson, could I pester you for a minute?”

             
“Come in, please. I don’t think we have formally met.”

             
“My name is Jim McClarry and I have been on the job a little over a year.”

             
“What can I do for you?”

             
“Well, I’m a patrolman, not a detective, but I am very interested in a specific case and I am trying to understand some things a little better.”

             
“Which case?”

             
“Annette Shelton . . .”

             
“Oh yeah, I’m familiar with that one. She is still missing, and there is not one new clue that I am aware of. What is your interest?”

             
“Annette is my cousin.”

             
“Oh, well, that puts a spin on everything, doesn’t it? Should you be working on this?”

             
“I’m not working on it, officially, I want to understand, and yeah, I want to help. I watch the news and read the papers and have started to collect information on a couple of other cases that look similar to Annette’s. I do not want to get in the way of what’s being done officially, but if I turn something that might help, I’ll just hand it to the guys in the suits and back away.”

             
“You have to be very careful not to cross the line and hurt the investigation. you understand that?”

             
“Yeah, I do.”

             
“Okay, so you are collecting data, what have you gathered so far?”

             
“Well, not much. I thought that there would be a lot of stuff that I could look at, but I don’t know what specific information would be significant and what I should concentrate on trying to find.”

             
“First, there is no such thing as too much information. The key to what will tie one thing to another may be as simple as the color of somebody’s hair, or the way they say hello. You don’t know until you have collected a lot of data and compared it.”

              “So, if there are three cases of missing kids, the common factor could be something that is not obvious to you or me at first and we depend on the next victim to add to the data base and that may open our eyes.”

             
“We have to look pretty hard at everything, and it could be several

factors that together flip the switch. Why don’t we look at what you
have thus far and maybe we will see something?”

             
“Okay, I don’t have my data with me, it’s at home. When will you be here again, Doctor?”

             
“My name is Alex, and I was planning on next Wednesday. Will you be around then?”

             
“I’ll be sure to be here, same time?”

             
“Okay, next Wednesday, the twenty sixth, nine am,” he said as he

made a note on his calendar. “See you then.”

              “Thanks Alex.”

             
Jim went home, reviewed all his data and was ready the following Wednesday for his meeting with Alex. At nine am he was on his way up to the second floor office with his data. “Good morning Alex.”

             
“Jim, I am anxious to see what you have, come on in.”

             
“What I have is three little girls kidnapped over the last two years in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, McKean, Pennsylvania, and Syracuse, New