Finding Claire Fletcher (A Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Book 1) Page 5

  At this, Farrell’s eyes rose to meet Connor’s. “A note?”

  Connor shook his head. “No. Not exactly. Just a piece of paper with her name and the address on it.”

  “Do you have it with you?” Farrell asked.

  Irritated, Connor replied he did not, although the piece of paper in question rested in the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He just didn’t want Farrell to have it, although he wasn’t sure why not.

  Farrell nodded indifferently. “Did you sleep with her?”

  “What?” Connor said, more loudly than he’d intended. He felt an uncharacteristic flush rise from his collar to his forehead.

  Farrell eyed him. “Did you have sexual intercourse with this woman?” he asked.

  Connor shook his head. “No.”

  Farrell seemed genuinely surprised. “You didn’t?”

  “No,” Connor repeated.

  “You meet a woman in a bar. She hits on you. You chase her outside, take her home, ingest large quantities of scotch, and the two of you don’t have sex?”

  Connor shrugged, affecting the same indifference Farrell had displayed until then. “No, we didn’t have sex.”

  Farrell stared at him for a long time. Finally, he said, “And you expect me to believe that?”

  “Look,” Connor said coolly, sitting up straight and giving Mitch his best imposing glare. “I don’t give a shit what you believe. I’m not here to sell anything. I’m here as a courtesy to the Fletchers, who wanted me to speak to you, and because I want to know what the fuck’s going on.”

  A slow, appreciative smile spread across Farrell’s face. He put his pen and notepad away and leaned toward Connor. “Well, all right,” he said.

  Connor did not let his hard exterior slacken. A moment passed between the two men. Then another. And another. Farrell smiled and Connor glared. Neither spoke, but in the air between them, an intense and invisible flood of communication roared. This had happened to Connor before. Indeed, his mastery of this unspoken language between men was one of the things that made him a good detective—that is, when he wasn’t firing off his weapon indiscriminately.

  They were like two alpha wolves scenting each other warily, testing the ether for any sign of threat or weakness. Pushing each other, nipping collars, baring teeth, circling. Each one assessing the other’s strength and trying to draw out the other’s true intentions without expressing his own.

  Connor played the game well and got his way, as he usually did. The next words out of Farrell’s mouth were: “Do you want something to drink?”

  Connor relaxed and smiled. “God, yes,” he said.

  Both men laughed, dispelling the tension in the small room.

  “Come on then,” Farrell said.

  He led Connor into another room much the size of his office, although in slightly more disarray. It looked exactly like someone’s living room, though it was evident by all the surveillance equipment stacked along the far wall that this was not Farrell’s home. There was a midsized black leather couch and a small coffee table, which faced a large television and VCR ensconced in a modest entertainment center. Behind the couch was a larger table with some files neatly stacked on its surface. Beside the table was a small refrigerator from which Farrell plucked two bottles of Corona.

  He motioned for Connor to sit. Connor perched on the edge of the couch and removed his jacket. Mitch popped the caps off the beer bottles while Connor studied a framed photograph in the center of the coffee table. It was a young woman, probably midtwenties, with long red hair, delicate features, and a wide smile.

  “My daughter,” Farrell said, handing Connor a freshly opened beer. “Holly Louise. She’s on the East Coast in medical school now. I can’t believe it. My little girl in medical school.”

  Connor smiled. “Is she why you took the Fletcher case as a favor?”

  Farrell frowned at the photo, his bushy gray eyebrows meeting above the bridge of his nose. “Yeah,” he said. “In part. Holly was only a couple of years younger than Claire, but I’d known the Fletchers—Mr. and Mrs.—for quite some time. It was terrible, you know?”

  The older man shivered but not from cold. “I can’t imagine what it’s like, losing a child and never knowing what happened. The department here did good work on the case, and I didn’t interfere. I told Jen and Rick to let them do their job. But after a year or so, the trail gets mighty cold and the police have lots of other crimes piling up. Cases with better leads and tangible evidence. You couldn’t blame them for backing off.”

  Connor sipped his Corona slowly, enjoying the taste. “You used to be on the payroll?” Connor asked.

  Farrell kicked one foot onto the coffee table and took a long swig from his bottle. “Yeah,” he answered. “But not here. I worked homicide in Atlanta for twenty years. Ten on Special Victims in Oakland after that. Then I moved to Crescent City. I met the Fletchers when I moved there.

  “Rick was a public relations guy for some local corporation, and he and Jen came to all kinds of functions—banquets and benefits and the like. They were a great couple. Real down-to-earth and funny. Rick and I used to fish together. Our kids were near the same age—I have a son too; he’s in college in Colorado. So I used to bring mine down sometimes and they’d hang out with Claire, Bree, and Tom while me, Rick, and Jen shot the shit. My wife died shortly before I came out here, and Rick and Jen were great friends to me. I needed it then. Jen helped me a lot with Holly. With her mother gone, someone had to do the woman-to-woman stuff, and I wasn’t exactly fit. A few years after I met the Fletchers, I retired, went private.”

  “Then Claire went missing,” Connor said.

  Farrell drank the rest of his beer and rose to get another. He glanced at Connor’s bottle, which was still half-full. “Help yourself if you want more,” he said as he resumed his seat on the couch.

  Mitch continued. “Like I said, after a while the police backed off. Jen begged me to keep working the case. She would have paid me, but I wouldn’t let her. You see, all this time, even to this day, Jen has never given up hope that Claire will come home. She still believes with all her heart that Claire is alive. Even keeps her bedroom exactly the way it was the morning Claire left, right down to the dirty clothes strewn on the floor.”

  Connor smiled. Then his heart gave an uneven thud. Quickly, he sucked down the rest of his beer and rose to get another. He thought of Claire, of the Claire he’d met and spent the night with. She’d asked to see Denise’s room. Well, the dining room, which Connor had always considered Denise’s territory. A room he hadn’t gone into since Denise left him.

  He remembered the way Claire had walked around the room. So slowly—taking in everything, skimming her fingers over the furniture, the lines of her tensed body a mixture of curiosity and sadness.

  Had she wondered if her own bedroom remained in the same fashion, ten years’ worth of dust lying heavily on all of her old things? She must have known the Fletchers still lived there. She’d given him their address.

  Mitch popped the cap off Connor’s second beer and Connor took a sip. “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, I couldn’t turn Jen down. I mean what if it had been my Holly?” Mitch smiled lovingly at the photo of his daughter.

  “So I agreed to do whatever I could, which hasn’t been jack shit in the last ten years, I’m sorry to say. But me doing it seemed to give Jen some peace, so I kept on. Rick, on the other hand, he couldn’t hold out day after day the way Jen could. Hoping like that every day. After a couple of years, he kind of gave up. He really believed Claire was dead, and he just wanted to grieve her and move on with his life. That didn’t suit Jen.

  “Eventually he left. Took off to Maryland. Been there ever since. He looks after Holly for me now and then. They never did get a divorce, Rick and Jen. I think they still love each other. They just can’t live in the same reality, I guess.”

  Mitch snorted. “The kids, they’re the same, you know? It’s funny that way. Tom sticks by his mother, never s
ays a word to dampen her hope. Brianna, on the other hand, is just like her father. She can be a real wrecking ball, that girl.”

  Connor gave a little humph of understated agreement, remembering Brianna’s unholy glare.

  “She thinks Claire is dead. In a way I think she even wants Claire to be dead so they can all move on. She won’t hear a single word on the possibility of recovering Claire alive. It just pisses her off.”

  “You don’t say,” Connor interjected.

  Mitch laughed. “Oh yeah, I forgot you’d met her.”

  “God save me from her wrath.”

  Mitch laughed uproariously, and his genuine affection for Brianna, wrecking ball or not, was evident.

  Connor set his beer down and looked curiously at Mitch. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Visibly sobered by the question, Mitch turned his brown gaze toward Connor. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Connor pressed on. “You’re a professional. You must have some theory.”

  Mitch sighed and heaved his other foot atop the table, crossing his legs. “Everything about this case points to Claire Fletcher being dead. Long gone.”

  Connor hunched forward, elbows on his knees, head turned to look at Mitch. “You don’t think she is,” Connor stated. A flutter of excitement took hold of his stomach. “Tom told me there were others.”

  Mitch looked at him sharply. Farrell was a professional. Connor recognized that he carried with him the uneasy burden of all the men and women like him who worked horrific cases of murder, violence, and unexplained disappearances. When you dealt with families of victims or even the victims themselves, it was often necessary to hide your gut instincts behind a cool facade of neutrality. You didn’t want to lend too much hope to the loved ones of victims of violent crimes.

  Farrell had remained carefully neutral about the subject of Claire Fletcher for so long, he wasn’t immediately able to discuss his own theories.

  “The others?” Mitch echoed carefully.

  “Three men in the last eight years. All approached by a woman claiming to be Claire Fletcher. All given the Archer Street address, same as me,” Connor said.

  Mitch said nothing for almost a solid minute. Connor waited. Then the older man asked, “You really didn’t sleep with her?”

  Not what Connor was expecting, but he answered nonetheless. “No,” he said. “Well, yes, I literally slept with her, but we didn’t have sex.”

  Mitch’s eyebrows rose. “You slept with her?”

  Connor hid his irritation by finishing off his beer. “Yeah. I went to sleep with her.”

  Mitch turned his whole body toward Connor. “Where?”

  “What?”

  “Where did you, ah, go to sleep with her?”

  Connor’s brow wrinkled. “My bed. Where else? What’s this got to do with anything?”

  Mitch stared at him, awed. “You’re not like the others at all. But why? Why you? Why now?”

  “What are you talking about?” Connor demanded.

  “What did she look like?” Mitch asked instead, his more practical manner returning.

  “She looked exactly like the picture of Claire Fletcher that I saw at Archer Street, only older, longer hair and—” Connor broke off, deciding it best not to try to explain about her eyes. “I know it was the same person,” he concluded instead.

  Mitch considered this. Then he asked, “So why are you here?”

  “Because I—” Connor began but stopped abruptly.

  The shock of the scene at Archer Street and all he’d found out had sent him racing to Mitch’s office with no consideration of why. Claire Fletcher was a ghost to all who’d known her. Connor had spent a single night with a woman he believed in his gut to be exactly who she said she was—Claire Fletcher. Yet the Claire Fletcher had vanished ten years ago without a trace. There was indeed a mystery. But for Connor it was much simpler than that.

  “Because I want to see her again,” he said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Connor went home shortly after nightfall with a moderately thick copy of Claire’s file under his arm. He didn’t bother turning on any lights. Tonight he needed the quiet and the darkness to let the strange events of the day sink in. He plopped down onto the couch without taking his jacket off and watched idly out his front window. The curtains were white, almost sheer, so he could see the occasional car pass or the figure of one of his neighbors walking a dog. He could watch the small square of world beyond his home without being seen.

  Faces, conversations, and random words from the day tangled in Connor’s mind. A confusing mass of revelations. He fingered the file under his arm, running his index finger over the corner of the pages. If he got into this, there would be no turning back. Mitch had searched for Claire for ten years with no luck.

  But Connor had met Claire, walked through this very room with her, her hand in his. He pictured her long limbs and creamy skin. He’d heard her laugh, saw her haunted eyes in his mind. She wasn’t a naive teenager anymore. She was a woman whose eyes had secrets to tell.

  Connor would find her again.

  He stood and strode into the dining room, switching the light on. He took a small trash can from the living room and swept the contents of the dining room table into it, calculator and all. He opened Claire’s file and began spreading the pages across the table. He froze when he noticed the quarter-inch-wide streak where Claire had run her finger through the dust.

  She had been there. It wasn’t his imagination. He wasn’t creating invisible women to distract his mind from his failed marriage or the stress of his job.

  Careful not to disturb the streak Claire had left on the table, Connor sat down and began reading Mitch’s first reports on Claire Fletcher’s case.

  On the morning of February 21, 1995, Claire left 1201 Archer Street at 7:30 a.m. to walk to school. Her high school was six blocks from her home. She never arrived. At 8:15 a.m., her homeroom teacher reported her absence to the school’s main office. At 9:00 a.m., the school secretary called the Fletcher home and left a message that Claire had not shown up at school that morning. Rick and Jen Fletcher did not receive the message until Jen returned home from work at 4:00 p.m. that day.

  Jen Fletcher searched her home and then called all of Claire’s friends. No one reported seeing Claire that day. Jen Fletcher called her husband at his office and then contacted the police.

  Connor made a note to himself to get all the police reports on the case. They likely said the same things as Mitch’s reports, but one never knew. Sometimes the outcome of a cold case depended on some small, seemingly insignificant detail that had been overlooked.

  Connor turned to the second part of Farrell’s initial report. The morning of Claire’s disappearance, there was a 911 call made by a thirty-six-year-old housewife named Dinah Strakowski. Strakowski reported seeing a white male, approximately five foot ten, 180 pounds with light-brown hair, pushing a girl into a blue station wagon just outside her home at 656 Miller Avenue.

  Connor went to the kitchen and pulled out a city map from one of the drawers. He brought it into the dining room and spread it out on the opposite end of the table. He found Archer Street and circled the 1200 block. He did the same with the 600 block of Miller Avenue. It was roughly four blocks from Claire’s home.

  “So close,” Connor muttered to himself.

  He’d known of children being abducted right in front of their homes, sometimes without a single witness. Vanished into thin air, as if a great void had opened up in the ground beneath them and swallowed them whole. One moment they were there, the next moment they were gone.

  The thought chilled Connor. He knew that stranger abductions were rare. The majority of missing children were either taken by their noncustodial parent or had run away from home. He also knew that most stranger abductions ended in the worst-case scenario. The children’s bodies would later be found abused and violently killed, as in the cases of Polly Klass, Megan Kanka, Samantha Runnion, and Danielle Van Dam. F
ew stranger abductions actually remained unsolved. Even fewer saw the children returned alive to their families.

  Both the police and Mitch had interviewed Dinah Strakowski. In fact, emergency responders arrived at Strakowski’s residence five minutes after she placed her 911 call.

  “Not bad,” Connor said.

  Strakowski said she looked out her living room window and saw the man forcibly push a young girl into the back seat of his car. She estimated the girl to be about twelve or thirteen years old. She saw neither the man’s face nor the girl’s. She didn’t get the plates on the car.

  Police canvassed the area, four miles in every direction, but turned up nothing. They gave up after that. They had no corroborating witnesses, and no child had been reported missing so far that day.

  That evening, of course, Jen Fletcher would report her fifteen-year-old daughter missing.

  There were no leads in the case. Nothing at all. Missing child posters went up statewide. The press got involved. Claire’s abduction was featured on all the local news channels. Nothing. Not a single legitimate lead. It was as if Claire and her abductor had driven off into a black hole. There was no composite of the abductor because Strakowski never saw his face. She wasn’t even certain of the make or model of the vehicle.

  Then, almost three years later, twenty-two-year-old Rudy Teplitz showed up at 1201 Archer Street and asked for Claire Fletcher.

  Teplitz claimed to have met her at a bar the previous night, gone with her to a motel room, and slept with her. He claimed she left the address while he was asleep. Teplitz was interrogated, investigated, and cleared as a suspect by Farrell. Whether the woman Teplitz met was really Claire Fletcher or not, she disappeared as if she had never existed.

  Connor flipped through the pages of the file, checking the dates on each report. The trail picked up every two to three years. Always with a man arriving at 1201 Archer Street, expecting a romantic interlude with a woman he’d just spent the night with. Instead, like Connor, he found himself an unwitting participant in the Fletcher family tragedy.