Gone The Next (20 page)
Authors: Ben Rehder
So Mia approached Burke and said something. I couldn’t make out the words, but just like a week ago with Wally Crouch, it didn’t take a neuroscientist to figure out the general gist of the conversation — especially when Mia gestured across the aisle, toward the bags of cement.
Can you help me load a couple of these?
Oh, sure. No problem.
And that’s what he did. Eighty pounds each. Loaded them up, then watched with no subtlety whatsoever as Mia slowly retreated up the aisle in her well-fitting jeans. She was smart enough to proceed toward the back of the store, away from me, so as not to draw Burke’s attention my way. I recorded another few moments — long enough for Burke to stop ogling and go back to loading his cart, showing no ill effects from hoisting the cement.
A few minutes later, Mia and I met outside at the van, where we exchanged a high-five. We had been inside the store for eight minutes.
“How can guys be so clueless?” Mia said.
“Just our nature, I guess.” To be more accurate, I figured most women would just never understand why a man would respond to a woman who looked like Mia, especially when she was asking him to help with some task that would allow him to show how big and powerful he was.
“How much did we earn just now for doing that?”
I told her.
“Jesus. Really?”
“Yep.”
“We should’ve partnered up a long time ago.”
So I got the slam dunk I wanted, and I was back home by noon feeling pretty good about it. Emailed the video to Heidi, who replied by saying, “Wow, you are fast! Thank you. By the way, it occurs to me that your hottie does all the work and you just run the camera. Guess I’d better not point that out to her.”
Nothing else on the to-do list, so I ate lunch and took a nap. After that, I had time on my hands, which isn’t always a good thing. Especially for a guy like me.
There are times when I torture myself with my own thoughts. Ruminate. Weigh the odds of this or that. Contemplate all the possible actions I could have taken, and what the likely result of each would have been. Or what the result might be if I acted now. That can lead to some bad places. Bad decisions.
Or maybe that’s lame and a shrink could give a better analysis for why I decided to do what I did that night. I guess, bottom line, there could be a grab bag of reasons.
Guilt.
Shame.
Maybe a need to do something, simply because there was a time when I couldn’t do anything.
Because, let me tell you, until you’ve had your daughter snatched right out from under you at a public park — there one minute, gone the next — you have no idea what helplessness feels like.
On that horrible day, and into the night, the police interviewed me for about nine hours. The same questions, over and over. Poking, prodding, dissecting, until I realized they were looking for contradictions in my story.
“Wait a sec. I thought you said Susan Tate had brown hair.”
“No, I said blond!”
“That’s right, blond. You have no idea what you might’ve done with her phone number?”
I was starting to clench my teeth. “I told you, I never got it. I couldn’t find her!”
“I need you to stay calm, Mr. Ballard.”
“I am calm, but we’re wasting time. I need to be out looking for Hannah. Where is my wife right now?”
“Believe me, we have people looking — a huge team of people. Best thing you can do is talk to me. You might have something useful and — ”
“I’ve told you everything a dozen times!”
“And the thirteenth time might be the one that does the trick. Maybe you’ll remember a certain car in the parking lot, or a jogger who slipped your mind until now. You could have the key to this whole situation. And we really need that, because nobody else at the park saw anything. We can’t even find anyone who remembers seeing you and Hannah there. Or this Susan Tate.”
That’s when I knew things were bad. Did they think I’d gone to the dog park alone, for the purpose of claiming that Hannah had been with me and someone had grabbed her? And that I’d invented Susan Tate?
I said, “We were sitting off by ourselves. Susan Tate was the only person I talked to.”
“And that’s why I’d really like to find her.”
“So she can confirm my story?”
“Well, there’s more to it than that. Honestly, we need to rule her out.”
For a second or two, in my agitated and exhausted state, I let that get my hopes up. Of course! She was one of the abductors. She’d conspired with someone else to make it happen. That’s why they couldn’t find her now. She didn’t want to be found.
But it made no sense.
I’d gone back to look for her of my own free will. Abductors couldn’t have predicted or arranged that. So the real reason they needed to find her was simply to verify that I wasn’t making her up. Right now, she was a phantom, which was raising red flags in the cops’ minds. And word began to get out to the media. When a police spokesperson says something like, “We’re still working to confirm various events at the dog park,” reporters run with it and often speculate as to what it means.
Even more frustrating, the police wouldn’t release Susan Tate’s name and announce they were looking for her. Maybe they had their reasons, but I don’t know what they were. Maybe they were simply
that
skeptical that she was a real person. Maybe — regardless of whether she existed or not — the fact that she couldn’t be found gave the cops leverage against me, and they wanted that, until they were absolutely positive that I hadn’t harmed my own daughter. See what I mean by ruminating?
It wasn’t until the following day that Susan Tate surfaced, and it quickly became obvious why it had been difficult to locate her. Yes, I’d seen her jogging several times, but she actually lived about three miles away. The cops had only been looking in my neighborhood for someone by her name.
Second, because she was currently separated from her husband, she had been using her maiden name, but in all legal documents, she was identified by her married surname, Weiser. No Susan Tate in the tax records, in the voting records, or even in the phone book.
And in the worst stroke of bad luck, right after she’d been at the dog park, she’d flown to Miami for a convention and had heard nothing about Hannah’s disappearance until the next morning. Fortunately, she’d called the police immediately and confirmed my account of events.
Didn’t matter. The damage had been done. In many people’s mind, I was a viable suspect. Rumors were swirling. I was back home by then, and my own wife was treating me with a degree of hostility that I had never experienced. Some of my friends called and dropped by, but there was a reserved nature to their behavior — as if they were wondering if I could be trusted. Did they know the real me?
Not that I cared at that point. I just wanted to find my daughter. But where do you start? How do you find a puff of smoke that has disappeared in the wind?
Helpless.
Now, nine years later, I had to wonder if either Patrick or Kathleen Hanrahan — or maybe even both of them — were feeling that way.
I knew that the circumstances didn’t look particularly good for either of them. It started when Kathleen grew tired of being interviewed and refused to speak to the police anymore. Then Patrick couldn’t pass a lie detector test, which raised enough suspicion that he’d hired an attorney and joined his wife in refusing further interviews. Then it came out that Kathleen had recently seen a divorce attorney and had been considering a split for years. Even I had thought that looked bad for Patrick, making me wonder how he might’ve reacted when he learned what Kathleen had been contemplating.
It was worth reminding myself now that none of those facts meant either of the Hanrahans were guilty of anything or that they were involved in the disappearance of their daughter. Especially when you threw in the things I had learned about Brian Pierce and Erica Kerwick.
So, yeah, there was a chance — maybe a slim one, but I don’t know — that they were feeling as helpless as I had. That’s why I couldn’t just let the whole thing go.
It’s easy to spend three or four grand, or even a lot more, on a pair of night-vision goggles. Or you can do what I did a couple of years ago and get a six-hundred-dollar Generation 1 pair that would satisfy just about anyone short of a Navy Seal or that psycho in
Silence of the Lambs.
Truth is, since I’d bought them, I hadn’t had much opportunity to use them. But they’d come in handy tonight.
An hour after sundown, I drove the van west again, to Thomas Springs Road. Drove past Brian Pierce’s gate, which was closed, as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary going on, as far as I could tell.
When I reached the intersection at Circle Drive, I pulled in to the Circle Country Club. It was a Tuesday night, but there were a fair number of cars and trucks scattered around the paved lot. I found a parking spot as far away from the front door as possible, and I sat in the van for a few minutes, until I was sure nobody else was in any of the nearby vehicles. Then I climbed out, locked up, and casually walked out of the lot to Thomas Springs Road and headed back toward Pierce’s place.
At most, it was half a mile. I kept to the shoulder, with the NVGs and my holstered Glock dangling in one of those plastic sacks they give you at a convenience store. I looked like a guy walking back home with a six-pack. Not unusual. But it didn’t matter, because nobody drove past the entire time.
I passed the little church on the other side of the road. No deputies hanging around. As soon as I reached the near corner of Pierce’s tract, some fifty yards before his gate, I veered off the shoulder, toward the barbed-wire fence running along the front property line.
Anybody who’s spent time in rural areas knows there are three ways to cross this kind of fence. Climb over, and probably end up with a tear in the crotch of your jeans. Slip between two strands, and get a tear on the back of your shirt. Or the third option, the one I chose: Drop to the ground and shimmy under the lowest strand. Works fine as long as you don’t have a big gut. I reached back for the plastic sack and hurried into the cover of the cedar and oak trees.
Now I couldn’t see much of anything. Very little light under the canopy. The crescent moon wouldn’t be up for several hours. I slipped the NVGs onto my head and turned them on. Ah. Much better. I tucked the plastic sack into my pocket. I kept the Glock in my right hand.
Over the next ten or fifteen minutes, I worked my way extremely slowly and carefully through the woods toward Pierce’s house. There were so many dried leaves and twigs on the ground, it was impossible to walk silently, but I came pretty close. It was comforting that I couldn’t see anything moving anywhere in the green-tinted woods around me. The Guy wasn’t lurking behind a tree, as far as I could tell.
Eventually, the trees thinned a bit and I began to see the glow coming from Pierce’s windows, about thirty or forty yards away. I took a few more steps, right to the edge of the clearing that surrounded the house, and I stopped. Removed the NVGs. Stood totally still for ten solid minutes.
Nothing.
No dog lunging at me. No sounds except for some crickets and a screech owl. No movement in any of the windows. Pierce’s white Ford F150 was parked out front, but I didn’t see the Jetta or any other vehicles.
Fortunately, none of the exterior lights were on — not even a porch light. That was good, because it meant I could walk right up to the house. And it was bad, because it meant I could walk right up to the house. Yeah, I’ll admit I was nervous. Not only was I trespassing, I was armed, and that was not a good combination for a guy on probation. Not that I was expecting or wanting a confrontation. Just the opposite. I was here to sneak up and install a tap on Brian Pierce’s phone. Illegal as hell, and nothing I learned would be admissible, but if I was able to discover Tracy Turner’s whereabouts, I didn’t care if I did it illegally or not.
I waited another ten minutes. Still nothing, although I did hear two cars pass on Thomas Springs. Time to get closer.
The front of the house faced south. I approached up a slight slope from the west side, where two windows were lit and one was dark. Could be somebody in that window watching me, or aiming a shotgun, but it was a chance I had to take. I didn’t see the exterior telephone box mounted anywhere on this side of the house, but I wanted to get closer anyway, because if there were people inside, it would be good to know where they were.
Ten more minutes. That’s how long I took to cover the distance. When I was within five yards of the house, I was far enough up the gentle slope that I could begin to see into one of the windows. Saw a dresser, so I knew it was a bedroom. A few steps closer and I saw the bed. Nobody in it. Nobody anywhere in the room. The door into the room was closed. But now I could hear something. Murmuring. A conversation from somewhere inside the house.
I went to my left, toward the rear of the house. Past the darkened window. Now I could see that curtains were drawn across it, with no light showing around the edges. Relief. It was probably a bedroom, too. If there were people in there, perhaps lying awake, they wouldn’t see my form passing across the window.
I reached the corner at the rear of the house and peeked around it. There was enough stray light from the windows in back that I could see a large patio with four wrought-iron chairs encircling a limestone fire pit. A good place to kick back with friends and enjoy a crisp winter evening, telling stories around a crackling fire. But right now, it looked bleak and desolate and sort of sad in the darkness.
My Nikes were quiet on the concrete as I edged past the first rear window, which also had curtains drawn. After twenty more feet I could see through the three small ascending windows built into the back door. I was looking up a hallway which led past the two bedrooms on the right. There were also two open doorways on the left — more bedrooms, or more likely a bedroom and a bathroom. Couldn’t see into them from here. No light coming from those rooms either. It appeared that the hallway fed into the living room at the front of the house. I could see the back of a couch and, beyond it, a bookshelf against a wall, but I wasn’t willing to get any closer to the back door for a better view. Nothing moved, but the murmuring was louder. Sounded like two men talking, maybe sitting in the living room, just out of sight from my vantage point.
I continued in a clockwise fashion around the other rear corner of the house, and now proceeded slowly along the east-facing exterior wall, past windows with more drawn curtains.
Slowly. Carefully. Toward the front of the house.
And now I was approaching a lighted window that likely looked into the living room. I stopped beside the window, my back to the wall. The conversation I’d been hearing was at its loudest yet, although I still couldn’t make out any specific words.
Was it The Guy? Talking to Brian Pierce?
Only one way to find out. Go ahead and peek. I knew that with the lights on inside, they wouldn’t be able to see me outside. The glare on the inside of the pane would prevent it. Still, I’d feel obvious and vulnerable.
But I did it.
I leaned ever so slowly past the edge of the window, and the room slowly came into view. First I saw that same bookcase against the front wall. Leaned a little farther and saw a loveseat against the far wall of the room.
Then I saw the TV viewing area — two easy chairs facing a flat-screen mounted on the wall. The TV was tuned to a talk show of some sort. Not like a Letterman or Leno type of talk show, but more of a PBS one-on-one type of show — host and guest, around a table, with no band, no sidekick, no audience, no elaborate set. That was the conversation I’d been hearing.
The Guy was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Erica Kerwick or Tracy Turner.
But Brian Pierce was there, stretched out on the floor between the chairs.
Well, I think it was him. It was hard to tell, because a big piece of his face was missing, and what was left was covered with blood.