JD05 - Conflict of Interest Read online

  “Sources tell me that an unknown perpetrator may have used a ladder to reach Lindsay’s second-floor bedroom window,” Baldasano said. “My information indicates that Lindsay was last seen around 10:00 p.m. last night when her mother put her to bed. One source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that a ransom note was left on Lindsay’s pillow, although I have not been able to confirm that information.”

  The guy actually used the phrases “unknown perpetrator” and “my information indicates.” He reported unconfirmed information about a ransom note. It was broadcast journalism at its finest. Caroline walked over to the television and turned it off.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “To Jonesborough. Lindsay is one of my girls. We’re going to go help look for her.”

  Caroline had owned and operated a dance studio for more than twenty years. The relationships she formed with her students were deeper than those formed between most teachers and students. Typically, a teacher is involved with a student for a year, maybe two. Even high school coaches only have kids for a couple of years before the athletes graduate and move on. But Caroline’s girls, for the most part, came to her when they were three or four years old, and some of them stayed through their senior year in high school. Many of her students left dancing around the age of ten and moved on to things like cheerleading or gymnastics or volleyball or softball or swimming, but there were dozens of girls who had taken dance from Caroline for ten years or more. She watched them grow from babies to little girls to young girls to teenage girls to young women. She knew their families, their friends, their favorite colors, their birthdays, their favorite foods. She became an integral part of their lives.

  I’m convinced that those young girls kept Caroline alive during the worst of her five-year battle with breast cancer. No matter how tired she was, no matter how sick she’d been, she always, always went to the studio to teach and she would always come home rejuvenated. It was as if the enthusiasm and the optimism and the life in those young people transferred to her through some sort of spiritual osmosis and kept her going for one more day, one more week, one more month, one more year. It was a beautiful thing to behold.

  Lindsay Monroe was a cute, feisty, spirited child, and had quickly become one of Caroline’s favorites. Caroline often spoke of her when she returned home from the studio. She’d tell me stories about things Lindsay said or did. Caroline often affectionately described her as a “hot mess.”

  “They’re already turning it into a circus,” I said to Caroline. “Why don’t we just let the police handle it? They’re trained—”

  “I’m going with you or without you,” she said. She was standing at the door leading to the garage.

  “At least let me change my shirt,” I said. “I smell like a horse.”

  “Now,” she said over her shoulder.

  As I started after her, I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach. I’d defended one child murderer and prosecuted two others in my career. I’d been involved in dozens of other murder cases. I’d dealt with rape and robbery and violent assault, but I’d never, not once, had to endure a case that involved a young girl vanishing in the night. I had no idea what was going on and I had no idea what would happen in the future, but the gnawing in my stomach told me that nothing good would come of this, nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Caroline and I arrived in Jonesborough around 10:30 a.m., we parked in the old courthouse lot and walked the three blocks to the Monroe’s. There was a large group of people gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house and crime scene tape had been stretched around the edge of the lot. Caroline ducked under the tape and started up the concrete sidewalk toward the front door. I went after her. We were met halfway up the walk by a young, uniformed Jonesborough policeman named Will Traynor. I knew Will from my time at the district attorney’s office. He smiled, although it appeared to be a reluctant smile, as we approached.

  “Mr. Dillard,” he said as he reached out to shake my hand. “It’s been awhile.”

  “Nice to see you, Will.”

  “I’d like to talk to Mary Monroe,” Caroline said. “We’re friends. Lindsay takes dance at my studio.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t let you go inside. It’s a crime scene. I have strict orders not to let anyone past the tape.”

  “But I need to talk to her,” Caroline said.

  Traynor looked at me for help, and I took Caroline gently by the elbow.

  “He’s right,” I said. “They’ll skin him alive if he lets you in there.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Dillard,” Traynor said.

  “No need to apologize.”

  “Can you at least tell me if Lindsay is alright?” Caroline said. “Do you have any idea?”

  Traynor looked around and lowered his eyes. “As far as I know, she’s still missing,” he said quietly. “We’re doing everything we can.”

  “Thanks, Will,” I said. “Good luck.”

  I turned Caroline around and we walked back under the yellow tape. Nate Baldasano immediately stuck a microphone in my face.

  “What can you tell us, Mr. Dillard? Are you involved in this case?”

  “No, I’m not involved and I can’t tell you anything,” I said. “Please get out of my way.”

  Caroline and I started walking back down the street in the direction of the courthouse, just to get away from the crowd.

  “Is Lindsay the kind of kid that might wander off early in the morning?” I said.

  “She’s precocious and independent-minded, but I don’t think she’s reckless,” Caroline said.

  “Let’s assume she wandered off, since we’re here. Where would a little girl go?”

  “She’d probably go into the back yard, but I’m sure they’ve searched it.”

  “But what could draw her away from the back yard? An animal, maybe? A stray dog or a cat?”

  “Maybe. Kids like water. Maybe she came around front and went to play by the creek.”

  A small creek ran all the way through town about a half-block from Main Street. It cut right through the Monroe’s front yard.

  “There are people all around the creek, Caroline. If she was there, somebody would have found her.”

  Not only were there people all around the creek, there were people everywhere. The news about Lindsay was out, and the street was quickly filling up. I could hear calls of “Lindsay!” “Lindsay Monroe!” coming from side streets and the alleys between the buildings, from the banks on either side of the creek, from the railroad tracks a block away. Several people had dogs on leashes, and almost everyone was carrying a cell phone.

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do here,” I said.

  She gave me that look of hers, the one where she sets her jaw and her eyes become lasers. It means, “Don’t give me any trouble right now.”

  “What do you want to do?” I said.

  “Look for her. Let’s just look. Maybe we’ll see something somebody missed.”

  We walked down Main Street to Fox and turned right toward the railroad tracks.

  “Do you think there’s really a ransom note?” Caroline said.

  “I hope so,” I said. “There’s a lot better chance of catching him if he tries to pick up a ransom.”

  “Him? You’re sure it’s a him?”

  “Women don’t do ransom kidnappings. It’s a man thing.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Inside the house, suspicion and angst hung in the air like thick fog. Leon Bates, the sheriff of Washington County, had just walked into Lindsay Monroe’s bedroom along with Special Agent Ross Dedrick of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Agent Mike Norcross of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and Jonesborough Chief of Police Mitchell Royston. Bates stepped carefully, as did the others. They scanned the room, hoping to spot something, anything, that might offer some insight into the disappearance of a six-year-old girl.

  Bates glanced briefly at the othe
r men. Norcross was a giant, six-feet-seven and rock hard. Dedrick was around the same height as Bates – six-feet-four – but while Bates was gangly, Dedrick was thick and powerful. Royston was short, maybe five-eight. Throw in a guy about seven feet tall, Bates thought, and they’d have the perfect makeup of a basketball team.

  The room was large; Bates guessed maybe sixteen by twenty feet. The floors were gleaming oak, the walls painted in soft pastels, the bed covered in a lacy, white canopy. A white ceiling fan spun slowly above a decorative light. The pink comforter on the bed was ruffled where the child had slept; a typewritten note lay on the pillow where her head had rested only hours earlier.

  Two windows, each of them four feet wide by six feet high, looked out over the back patio and yard. Both were open, but the screen that covered the one to Bates’s right had been cut near the edges of the window frame and was laying on the stone patio fifteen feet below.

  “No blood,” Bates said. “No sign of struggle. I reckon that’s a good thing.”

  Bates walked over and peered down at the ransom note. He’d read it earlier. It demanded three million dollars in cash within seventy-two hours.

  “We need to decide how you guys want to organize and delegate,” Dedrick, the FBI agent, said. “We have statutory authority to investigate missing children cases, but it’s your jurisdiction and I don’t want to step on any toes.”

  Bates didn’t know Dedrick. He’d heard rumors about why Dedrick had been transferred to Northeast Tennessee, but this was the first time the two of them had laid eyes on each other. Bates didn’t really care why Dedrick had been transferred. He wasn’t much for gossip, and he stayed too busy to worry about the inner workings of a federal agency he regarded as top-heavy, inefficient and sometimes arrogant. But at the same time, he knew the FBI had resources and manpower at their disposal far beyond anything Bates could muster.

  “I think we all recognize that I don’t have the people to deal with a case like this,” Chief Royston said. “I’ll defer to Leon.”

  Bates removed his cowboy hat with his left hand and started scratching his head with his right. From all appearances, it was a kidnapping. A ransom kidnapping of a six-year-old girl.

  “This is a nightmare,” Bates said. “Have any of y’all ever worked a ransom kidnapping?”

  The question was met with silence.

  “But the FBI has people who specialize,” Bates said. “Am I right?”

  Dedrick nodded. “They’re called C.A.R.D. teams,” he said. “Child Abduction Rapid Deployment. All I have to do is put in a request. They’ll have a team here in a few hours. Profilers, tech people, field agents. We can also make use of the AMBER alert system and get the word out to every law enforcement agency in the region, in the nation if necessary. It’ll spread fast.”

  “Do it,” Bates said. “What else?”

  “The CARD team will set up a command post somewhere close by. They’ll start searching databases for sex offenders who live in the area or who might have passed through the area last night or this morning. They’ll set up a communication system to field leads from the public. They’ll make use of your people and Mike’s people and Mitch’s people and my people and coordinate grid searches, conduct and catalog interviews, run down leads and suspects.”

  “We need a forensic team in here pronto,” Bates said. “This scene looks pretty clean, but you never know. They might find something.”

  “I already made a call to Knoxville,” Norcross said. “They’ll be here within the hour.”

  “What do y’all think about the parents?” Bates said.

  “They’re suspects,” Dedrick said. “They seem genuinely terrified, it looks like they reported it immediately, and they’re both saying all the right things, but it’s too early to make any kind of judgment. We need to separate them as soon as possible and interview them in depth. Who do you want to handle it?”

  “You do it,” Bates said, “but I want to be watching and listening.”

  “No problem.”

  “You up to handling the media?” Bates said to Royston.

  Royston nodded his head, and Bates felt a twinge of sympathy for him. Mitch Royston oversaw a police force of fourteen men and women in a sleepy little tourist town that rarely experienced a serious crime. He’d been the chief in Jonesborough for several years, and Bates knew him to be a quiet, thoughtful man who disliked attention and avoided controversy.

  “You sure, Mitch?” Bates said. “It’ll be like fending off a pack of wolves.”

  “It’s my town,” Royston said, “my responsibility.”

  Bates took a deep breath and put his hat back on.

  “All right, boys,” he said. “A little girl is out there somewhere and nobody’s happy about it. Let’s get to it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Caroline and I wandered the streets for the next four hours beneath a darkening sky. It was late September and had been pleasant in the morning, but as the afternoon wore on the temperature began to drop and the breeze picked up. We probably covered about ten miles in ever-widening squares. By mid-afternoon, the search had become a free-for-all. The streets downtown were lined with parked cars. All of the city lots were full, the church parking lots were full, the lot behind the courthouse was full. People kept showing up, asking how they could help, what they could do. Around one o’clock, the police finally realized that it would be prudent to block off Main Street at both ends, but by that time, any hope of conducting a thorough search or inventory of every vehicle that was in the area when Lindsay was reported missing was gone. Around one-thirty, people started saying the Jonesborough chief of police was going to hold a news conference on the courthouse steps at four. Newshounds were everywhere, lugging cameras and microphones and sound equipment, diligently interviewing anyone who would talk to them, taking notes on their little notepads. It was complete chaos.

  Jonesborough is a small town of about six thousand in Northeastern Tennessee. It’s a quaint, quiet little town nestled in the hills between mountain ranges. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, which has brought a significant amount of government grant money to the town. That money has been used to preserve much of the original architecture, promote tourism, and to develop the downtown area, which is only about five blocks long, into an attractive place with cobblestone sidewalks and small, individually-owned shops and restaurants. But none of that government grant money has been used to fund a police department, and on the day Lindsay was kidnapped, the Jonesborough Police Department employed fourteen police officers and only one – that’s right, one – criminal investigator. The department was completely unprepared to handle a crime of such magnitude, let alone deal with the deluge of do-gooders and rubber-neckers and news vans and trucks and reporters.

  The ministers and deacons of the Jonesborough Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, which were across the street from each other and just a few doors down from the Monroe’s, set up a couple of large tents on the front lawn of the Presbyterian Church and were doing their best to lend some kind of organization to the search, but it was a futile effort. Hundreds of people were wandering aimlessly through town, up and down the side streets, along the creek and the railroad tracks. They covered the same ground over and over and over. I heard Lindsay’s name called at least five thousand times.

  Finally, around two-thirty, I said, “Caroline, this is useless.”

  I could see she knew it was true. She seemed to deflate a little. Her shoulders slumped just a bit and her chin dropped.

  “You’re right,” she said. She was looking at the ground.

  “Let’s just go home and wait, let the police handle it, and hope for the best. I’m sure there’s an AMBER alert out by now, which means the TBI and the FBI will be involved. They’ll have her picture on billboards and highway signs. Everybody in the country will be looking for her. Think positively. They’ll find her soon.”

  A tear ran down her right cheek and I reached for her.

  “Sh
e’s out there somewhere, terrified and alone,” Caroline said. “What if he’s… what if he’s doing something to her…?”

  She let the question trail off, and I didn’t answer. I knew that if Lindsay had been taken by a stranger, the chances of her being sexually abused were great and the chances of her making it home were minimal. I took Caroline’s hand in mine and we walked slowly back to my truck as a cold drizzle started to fall and the light faded even more. We drove out of town in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts, both of us hoping against hope that we would watch little Lindsay Monroe dance on a stage once more.

  The press conference, which was televised live by all of the local networks, was typical of those held by police early in an investigation. The Jonesborough chief of police, a middle-aged, red-haired, rather fierce-looking man named Mitchell Royston, spoke from the courthouse steps surrounded by a gang of reporters and hundreds of people. He made a brief statement that divulged virtually nothing outside the fact that Lindsay was missing. He asked people to please allow the police to do their jobs, to have confidence in them. He told the group of volunteers that a temporary command center would be set up within the hour on the grounds of Christopher Taylor Park to organize the ground search into grids. He expressed hope that Lindsay would be found before nightfall and assured everyone that if Lindsay had been kidnapped, the persons or persons responsible would be brought to justice. He declined to answer questions and immediately left in an unmarked police car.

  My heart went out to the Monroes. I couldn’t help thinking about what it would be like to be in their situation. I had a daughter, Lilly. What if someone had taken her when she was only six years old? Someone who had broken into the house in the early morning when Caroline and I were both in a deep sleep? We were living in a tiny, two-bedroom apartment in Knoxville when Lilly was that age. I was in law school. Jack and Lilly shared a room, slept in the same bed. We didn’t have a dog or a security system. There was a window in the kids’ room that opened onto a common sidewalk in the complex. What if some pervert had noticed Lilly, whether she was at school or with me or with Caroline or whether the whole family was together at a mall or a gas station or a movie theater or fast food drive-through or a bank? What if he’d fixated on her and stalked her? What if he’d taken his time, been discreet, and learned everything he needed to learn to be able to sneak in and grab her in the blackness of the early morning? What if Caroline, Jack and I woke up one morning and Lilly was gone?