Linwood Barclay - Bad Move

She nodded, sniffed again, looked at the folder of newspaper clippings on my desk.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Just some stuff,” I said. “Why don’t you go to bed, and I’ll be up in a bit. And in the morning, we can talk some more about what we should do.”

When she left, I closed the door and returned to my desk and opened the folder. Back when I had first collected these clippings, with the idea of possibly doing a book on the case someday, I had arranged them in chronological order.

The first story, dated October 9, carried this headline: “Police Comb Neighborhood for Girl, 5.”

My recollection was that this story hadn’t made the front page. It had been splashed across the top of page three, six columns, with a picture of Jesse Shuttleworth. It was a blurry photo, no doubt blown up from a cheap snapshot, and the larger it got, the poorer the definition. She had curly red hair, brown eyes, a smile to melt your heart. The story rated about fifteen inches. The editors probably hadn’t wanted to go crazy with it. Not yet. She would only have been missing a few hours by the time the first edition closed. She could be at a friend’s, she might be lost. You didn’t want to go and put it on page one, then, just as the paper hit the streets, have people hear on their car radios that she’d been found at a sleepover. So you hedged your bet, you put it on three.

The story, by Renata Sears, one of the paper’s tireless police reporters, read:

The city was holding its breath last night as police combed the Dailey Gardens neighborhood in their hunt for little Jesse Shuttleworth, a 5-year-old kindergarten student who vanished from the park sometime yesterday afternoon.

Jesse’s mother, Carrie Shuttleworth, 32, of Langley Ave., told police Jesse had been playing across the street from their home, in the Dailey mini-park, around 4:15 p.m. when she went missing.

The teary-eyed mother, at a hastily called news conference on her front porch last night, said Jesse had been playing on the swings, and was always good about coming straight home.

“I just want her to be okay,” she said. “I’m just praying that she gets home safely.”

Police refused to speculate about the nature of Jesse’s disappearance, but they have set up a command post at the park, and asked neighbors with any possible information to please drop by. “At the moment, this is a missing-child case, as simple as that,” said Sgt. Dominic Marchi. “We’re hoping that she’ll turn up any time now.”

Police would not discuss a rumor of a scraggly-haired man who was seen near the park earlier in the day.

The second day, however, the Jesse Shuttleworth disappearance was the only story in the city. It took up three-quarters of the front page, with a simple two-word headline in a font size normally reserved to announce the end of the world: “Where’s Jesse?” Sears was still on the story.

Her dolls are lined up along the top of her pillows, as though waiting for Jesse to come home.

Renata knew how to lay it on.

It has been more than 30 hours since little Jesse Shuttleworth went missing from a park in Dailey Gardens, and despite one of the most intensive police searches in the city’s history, there’s so far no sign of her.

A mother sits in anguish at the kitchen table, waiting for a call, any news, good or bad, about Jesse’s whereabouts. Carrie Shuttleworth, a single mom who works by day in a laundry and at a coffee shop at night to support herself and her only daughter, says Jesse is a wonderful child, who loves Robert Munsch stories and, perhaps most wonderful of all, shuns Barney the purple dinosaur.

Neighbors have joined in the search, examining their own backyards and pools and garages. Perhaps, police say, Jesse wandered off and injured herself and no one has heard her cries for help. That’s why, they say, it’s so important to find her quickly.

Today, police are asking for volunteers to meet them at Dailey Park at 9 a.m. From there, they intend to have teams of people walk shoulder to shoulder through the nearby ravine looking not only for Jesse herself, but any possible clues to her disappearance.

Randy Flaherty, a father of two who lives next door to the Shuttleworths, is among those who plan to be at the park this morning to help.

“We can’t imagine what might have happened. This is such a nice neighborhood, the families know each other, we all look out for each other, and we’re all thinking the same thing.”

Police still refuse to say whether they think Jesse’s disappearance is an abduction. They’ve already ruled out family abduction-Jesse’s father, who lives in Ohio, flew in yesterday to console his ex-wife and help in the search.

As for whether it could be an abduction by a stranger, Sgt. Dominic Marchi would only say, “We have to accept that that is a possibility. While we don’t know that it is at this time, it is one of the avenues we have to explore.”

The third-day story focused on the search and Carrie Shuttleworth’s continued anguish. And they kept finding new pictures of Jesse, at a community pool, on a nursery school trip to a petting zoo. It was for faces like hers that cameras had been invented. I knew. I had seen her at Angelo’s Fruit Market.

The ravine search turned up nothing. No Jesse. No scraps of clothing. No discarded shoe.

On the fourth day, the story went in the direction everyone feared most.

A woman about ten houses up from Jesse’s, who rented out rooms, had gone looking for some overdue rent from one of her boarders, a man named Devlin Smythe. She hadn’t seen him around for a couple of days, not since the news broke about that poor girl down the street. She had wondered if maybe he’d volunteered for the search, and that had made her hold off for a day on demanding the money she was owed. How would that look? she thought. A guy’s trying to help find some little girl and you throw him out on the street.

But she hadn’t seen Smythe around, not even at night, and she began to wonder whether he’d skipped out on her for good.

She went upstairs and banged on the door of his room, but there was no answer. So she used her passkey to go inside.

It was as she’d feared. There were no shoes or boots by the door, no clothes in his closet. He’d packed up and gone, but not without leaving her a mess. There were dirty dishes in the sink, cereal bowls filled with ashes from his smoking. The place reeked of cigarette smoke. It was going to take a few days to clean up before she could rent to anyone else.

How bad, she must have wondered, had he left the fridge?

Sears wrote:

She had been jammed in with a container of sour cream that had turned green, some wilted celery, and an open can of chicken noodle soup. It was a final resting place of such monstrous indignity that even hardened officers found themselves turning away.

Jesse Shuttleworth had been suffocated.

Subsequent stories yielded further details. The landlady was interviewed at length and put together with a police sketch artist. The man known to police as Devlin Smythe had a shaggy head of dirty blond hair, a moustache, strong chin. He was described as stocky and stood an inch or two under six feet.

They reproduced the sketch in the paper. I tried to imagine him without the hair and the moustache. How he might look with a shaved head.

He was a chain-smoker. “You never saw him without a cigarette,” the landlady said.

He did odd jobs. He was, according to one man, a talented electrician. He had rewired a house for someone in the neighborhood. “He was good at it, and quick, too. He liked to get paid under the table.”

He possessed the skills, I thought, to bypass an electric meter.

Another man came forward to tell police Devlin Smythe had done some landscaping work for him. It was from this man that police learned Smythe had a tattoo.