Songs for the Missing (35 page)

Back in Columbus, instead of missing Kim, J.P. missed Nina.

Lindsay was a junior, and starting to think about colleges. Her grades were unnatural—she was first in her class. She was leaning toward Northwestern and the University of Chicago, partly because she wanted to live in the city, which they’d visited just once, when she was ten. The idea terrified Fran and Ed, but they promised each other not to discourage her. A larger problem was the money. Their hope was that she might qualify for some merit-based scholarships.

Lindsay was aware that they wanted her to go somewhere cheaper and closer to home. She’d already started preparing for that battle. It wasn’t just Chicago they didn’t like. Case Western was in Cleveland, Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. Anywhere she went would be expensive. She was planning on taking out student loans and working to pay her own way.

She was still at Quizno’s, saving for a car. For her birthday her father said he’d match whatever she put up, but he wanted to help pick it out. The next few weekends they rode around the county, test-driving tired Hondas and rickety Neons. The one car they could agree on—a black Paseo—had a leaky transmission, and they widened the search to include Erie, the two of them printing out possibles from
cars.com
.

Fran envied their afternoons together. Lindsay could still be sweet, running to the market for her, or spontaneously making cobbler for dessert, but like Kim before her, she spent more and more time away from the house, working and hanging out with friends, too many of whom were new. She and Dana were still inseparable, but Fran hadn’t seen Micah since school started, and Lindsay couldn’t give her a reason for it, other than they were both busy. She also had a brand-new boyfriend, Matt, who took her out every Friday and Saturday, dropping her off right at midnight. Lean and shaggy, he was on the cross-country team and played the bass in the jazz band. His father was an ex-cop from Rochester who worked at the new prison and was a big Cubs fan. Other than that they knew little about him. When Ed came back from a day of car-hunting with Lindsay, Fran pumped him for details, but he didn’t know anything—proof that she should have gone with her.

Ultimately they bought a pale green Ford Escort, Ed spending a little more to make sure Lindsay had something reliable, and getting out of the driveway was a puzzle again. They’d just been through this with Kim—the job, the car, the boyfriends, the whole college process—and their familiarity made it all feel strangely secondhand. They agreed that Lindsay was easier, more reasonable, more mature.

“Some of that’s her nature,” Fran said, “but it’s also because she’s had to be. She’s grown up a lot in the last year and a half.”

They’d all changed, Ed could have said. Whether for better or worse he wasn’t sure. He still had moments when everything that was wrong with his life settled on him at once, inescapable and rigidly interconnected, and he clenched his fists to bleed off the urge to kill whoever had taken her. They passed, yet he feared at heart he’d become vengeful and bitter. Sundays he prayed for forgiveness. The rest of the week he believed the feeling was justified.

The investigation remained open, though the term was misleading. In November, thanks to the department’s mishandling of the case (or so he liked to believe), Perry failed to win reelection. Whatever satisfaction Ed took from his defeat was hollow. The new sheriff, Jim Trucks, immediately cleaned house. The next week the detective called to let them know he was retiring, but that he’d briefed his replacement and made sure the files were in order. He wished he’d been able to do more for her.

“I know,” Ed said. What he should have said was “We do too.” The new man made a point of coming to the house, shaking their hands like a politician. Detective Braden was young, and short, which made him seem even younger. He’d driven a patrol car in Akron for seven years before making the grade, he said, as if to prove he was old enough. He’d been involved with several missing persons. In his experience they were all different. Once he had his office squared away, he planned to revisit the case from the beginning, with no assumptions. There was a lot of material to digest. He knew he was coming into the situation late, so he hoped they didn’t mind if he called them from time to time with questions they may have already answered. He gave them his card and shook their hands again, but after he’d left, Fran said what Ed was thinking: “It’s like we’re starting all over again.”

Ed used the opportunity to push for a new search of Wozniak’s property, and in a perfect example of how the system worked, in early December Jim Trucks went to the district judge, who happened to be an old hunting buddy, and procured a warrant.

Wozniak was back in Iraq with his unit, so they served his grandmother and occupied the farm for three days, tramping the woods and dragging the ponds, sifting the ashen bed of the fire pit. The state police assisted with their ground sonar, a black-clad team creeping through the withered orchard like minesweepers. From the house they removed sheets and pillowcases and items of women’s clothing, samples of a rug that had recently been washed and a piece of floorboard beneath it, a toolbox and assorted hand tools, a computer hard drive, two digital cameras and their memory cards, a video camera and tripod and assorted tapes, a DVD player and assorted disks, two rifles, a shotgun, two handguns, and approximately a thousand rounds of ammunition, several hunting knives, a samurai sword and ceremonial dagger, pornographic magazines, videotapes and DVDs, working handcuffs, dildos and other assorted sex toys, a large cache of fireworks, butane torches, glassine envelopes, a triple-beam scale, and approximately three thousand dollars in cash.

The TV trucks reappeared on Lakewood, reporters in overcoats and gloves doing their stand-ups from the sidewalk. To fend them off Fran took down the wreath she’d bought at church and hung a sign that said: THE LARSEN FAMILY ASKS THE MEDIA TO PLEASE RESPECT OUR PRIVACY. THANK YOU. On the news the cameras zoomed on it.

For two weeks they waited while the police went through everything. In the end the only thing the police could charge him with was possession of illegal fireworks. Ed wasn’t surprised—he’d had forever to clean the place.

There were pictures of Kim.

“You don’t want to see them,” the detective said. “They’re private.”

It was the last they spoke of it, but the idea haunted Ed. While he was proud of her beauty, from the time she started to develop, the attention men paid her worried him. As her father it was his job to protect her. He imagined the detective looking through the pictures, and Wozniak. What about
her
privacy? If she was gone, he thought, no one should have them.

After the search he was even more certain that Wozniak was guilty. Just the fact that he hadn’t come forward was enough. Ed was sickened that Kim would be with someone like him. It was the drugs, that had to be the answer, and blamed himself for not realizing she was in trouble.

Christmas passed, and New Year’s, like reminders. His whole focus now was on convincing Braden to bring in Wozniak for questioning, though he was overseas and protected by the whole balky bureaucracy of the Marines, so it was a surprise when the detective called him at work one snowy afternoon in late January to say there’d been a break in the case. Nothing was official yet, but he wanted to give them a heads-up. The Indiana State Police had just called. They had a suspect in custody they’d linked to at least three other murders along I-90. From what he’d told them, they were pretty sure he was their guy.

The Killer Next Door

On the way home, they were subdued. With the radio off, the only sound was the heater, and the wipers slapping away snowflakes. Outside, Kingsville slid by, drab and overcast. They’d had false alarms before, but this was different.

“What do you think?” Ed said, to break the silence.

“I don’t know,” Fran said. “He’s obviously crazy. Who knows how much of what he’s saying is made up.”

“Braden sounded pretty sure.”

“What do
you
think?” Fran asked.

“I think it would help if they had some evidence. I know for sure there was no gas can in the car.”

“If she ran out of gas, she would have just called someone.”

“And what happened to the car?” Ed seconded. “He doesn’t even try to explain that.”

“That’s the big thing.”

His name was James Wade. He was sixty-seven and divorced and lived in a suburb of Elkhart, Indiana, right off I-90, as if that proved anything. The police seemed to think he was serious. He’d been arrested for trying to abduct a college student. He was bipolar, and a convicted sex offender. In custody, he claimed he’d killed more than thirty women, beginning when he was a teenager. He’d drawn maps to show where he’d buried some of his victims—not Kim, of course—though so far the police had found nothing.

“I don’t know,” Ed said.

“I don’t know either.” She sounded tired, as if the news had sapped her. “I noticed Perry was there.”

“Yeah, nice, right? Thanks for showing up.”

At least Braden had held off telling the media, for now. There were no TV trucks lurking outside the house.

“Nice and quiet,” Ed said.

“That won’t last.”

“We’ll have to say something.”

“
I’ll
have to say something. You’ll just stand there.”

“We need to tell Lindsay.”

“You need to tell your mother.”

“Fuck,” Fran said, closing her eyes. “I was having a really good day at work.”

Inside, Cooper pranced at her feet, asking to be let out. “Mr. Frantic,” she said.

She hoped Ed would stick close, but he retreated to his office. She listened to him clacking at his keyboard. She couldn’t help but feel skeptical about the news, partly because it was all happening at a distance, and partly because it was unimaginable. After not knowing for so long, she couldn’t believe the answer was so simple, and so remote, as if it had nothing to do with them. She hoped James Wade was lying, yet at the same time she was impatient for their waiting to be over, one way or another. She wanted to go and make Wade tell them where Kim was—by torture, if necessary.

Even now it was hard to admit she was dead. Wade said he’d forced her into his car and drove her to a deserted self-storage place. Telling it, Braden had edited himself, and now each time her mind called up the scene, Fran shied back from picturing Kim in his car, let alone Wade raping and murdering her, though these were details—unlike the gas can, or the car—that she couldn’t factually refute. It was like a blind spot right in front of her face.

As always, she had to come up with a statement. She cannibalized one from last month, cutting and pasting. She’d grown so lazy. In the beginning, she’d been if not hopeful at least conscientious, as if Kim’s return depended on her. At some point she’d stopped believing that, though she still prayed every day.

She was mulling what she should put on the website, cleaning up some old fundraising stuff, when Ed came in for a cup of coffee.

“They’re starting to roll in,” he said.

“How many?”

“Just one.”

“Looking for a scoop.”

“You’re not going to give it to them.”

“Hell no.”

School was letting out. She called Lindsay to warn her, but got her voicemail.

“Uh-oh,” Ed said, peeking through the drapes. “We’ve got Cleveland.”

She tried Lindsay again, and again a couple minutes later. “I’m not getting through,” she told Ed. “You better keep an eye out for her.”

He dug in the front hall closet and found the sign asking the media to respect their privacy. When he opened the door, one reporter waved as if Ed might join him for a friendly chat on the sidewalk. Ed waved and closed the door.

“You know what,” Fran said, and jabbed at the calendar on the fridge. “She’s working today.”

“Good. Let her work.”

But already she was calling.

“No,” Fran told her, “you can stay there. I just wanted to let you know what’s going on. And be careful when you come home. You might want to park at the Hedricks’.”

Ed was surprised. He’d been ready to take Lindsay’s side.

“There’s no point in her being here,” Fran explained. “You agree?”

“Yes.”

“They can call me a crappy mother. I’m going to work tomorrow.”

“No one’s going to call you a crappy mother.”

“Ed,” she said, “I’m not stupid.”

“You’re a good mother.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know what I am. I’m tired of this shit.”

“We all are,” he said, though he didn’t really see an alternative.

At the press conference they learned that a former babysitter for the Wades had come forward and said he’d molested her. They tried not to show surprise, knowing the cameras were rolling. “We’ve been asked not to comment on the investigation,” Fran said. “That’s all we can say right now.”

“Jesus,” she said when they were back inside, “it would have been nice to know that.”

Braden apologized. He was out of the loop on that one too. Indiana had released the information without telling them.

“Why did I think he’d be different?” Fran said when they got off.

“Are we still going to work tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

They watched the news together. In the video, Wade was balding and dull-eyed, slumped over a sack of a gut. He shuffled in his jumpsuit as if drugged, and maybe he was. To Fran he seemed sloppy, not dangerous, but she knew it was impossible to tell. Anyone could be a monster.

The coverage wasn’t about Kim or any of his other supposed victims, but an amazed appreciation of his double life, as if he were fiendishly clever, duping his family and coworkers (he had no friends, Ed noted). So far there was no proof, but the botched kidnapping may have been intentional, one expert said. Wade was suffering from stomach cancer. Worried about his own mortality, he wanted credit for his life’s work.

There was nothing they could do. It felt like they were back at the beginning, at the mercy of the same dizzying possibilities, except she no longer had the strength for it. They’d been through enough.