Elizabeth Heiter - Vanished

“ Even now? Does that mean he’s been here before? Is it the same guy from eighteen years ago?” Tomas’s voice vibrated with dread.

Nervous whispering rippled through the room.

“I’ll get back to that.” She knew discussing those details first would distract everyone. And she didn’t want them to miss anything that could help them find Brittany.

“First, let’s talk about how the abductor fits in. He lives close by, either here or in a nearby community, and has for a long time. It’s possible he moved away and came back, but he’s recognized here. He’s accepted as belonging, which gives him a plausible reason to be in the vicinity of the crime scene.”

“Hold on,” Jack demanded. “You think the asshole we’re looking for belongs here ? He’s well liked?”

“Probably. It’s unlikely he has a lot of close friends, but he is socially competent. He doesn’t stand out. If asked about him, people would probably describe him as being decent, and if not likable, at least not unlikable. And he’s intelligent. He doesn’t act inappropriate around children, although a closer look into his background may reveal a suspicious incident. I’ll get into that later, when we talk about motivation.”

“This guy is grabbing kids ,” the officer beside Jack argued. “How can he be decent?”

“I didn’t say he was decent,” Evelyn clarified. “Just that people view him that way. We’re not talking about the usual suspects here, because this guy is too smart to attract attention to himself. When we find him, people aren’t going to say they always thought something was off about him. Quite the opposite. Everyone will be shocked, because he’s been living among you.”

Officers shuffled, looking down at their feet, frowning. When they looked back up at her, their faces showed a mixture of trepidation, wariness and disbelief.

“The offender drives a vehicle that doesn’t stand out, and it is conducive to hiding someone inside. It could be a van with tinted windows or a sedan with ample trunk room. He also has a job with flexible hours. He works for himself, has hours that change, or a job that would require him to be away from the office for periods of time. The kind of thing where people wouldn’t notice unusual absences.”

“But Brittany was taken at night,” an officer near the podium pointed out. “Why would he need to miss work during the day?”

“Because he stalked her first. This offender is a planner. He knew Brittany’s routine and her family’s schedules. He wrote this note in advance and it fit the situation when she was abducted. She was in the yard alone at that time. And he knew she would be, because he’d watched it happen before. So he waited for the right time to grab her.”

Evelyn glanced around at the attentive officers and added, “He’s probably developed a ruse to approach children. He may have used it when he abducted Brittany, so she wouldn’t be concerned when he approached her in the yard, or he may have used it beforehand, to test her response. A lot of serial criminals do this, especially those who target strangers.”

“I thought you said this guy was known in the community?” Carly Sanchez spoke up, her voice clear and loud.

“Yes, but not necessarily to the children he’s abducting. So, he may try to test them. A child who’s eager to please or naive about strangers is a more likely candidate than one who’s street-savvy. Of course, this is also dependent on his motivation.”

“Which is what?” Carly pressed.

Evelyn wished she had one absolute answer for them. “There are two possibilities,” she began. “The first is that his motivation is exactly what he’s telling us in the notes—that he believes the child is being neglected. If that’s the case, he sees himself as her savior. And he has a tragedy in his own past involving an important young female. It could be a daughter, a sister or someone else he cared for deeply. He’s using that loss to justify his actions now.”

Jack jumped in. “What’s the other possibility?”

“Well, as I said, this offender is intelligent. He may be leaving the notes to throw us off track. And if that’s the case, then his true motivation is molestation.”

“Damn it,” Jack burst out. “We’ve got to go talk to Wiggins again.”

Before Evelyn could ask who Wiggins was, Carly demanded loudly, “Which do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.” It galled her, but pretending to have the answer when there wasn’t enough behavioral evidence to conclusively support either option would do more damage than admitting the truth.

Except perhaps to the stock these officers put in her profile, Evelyn thought ruefully as Jack shouted, “Isn’t it your job to know?”

The room went quiet, and Evelyn tried to pretend it didn’t bother her. “When I know more, so will you. But it’s possible both motivations are right. If the abductions are driven by molestation, the offender might have tried to convince himself as well as us that he’s saving his victims. An excuse he tries to believe to make himself feel better.”

Jack just scowled at her, but Tomas cut in. “What about the connection to the earlier abductions? You said you’d tell us if this was the same abductor.” He rubbed a hand across his temple and asked, “Is it?” as though he was afraid to hear the answer.

“Yes.”

Evelyn had expected an eruption of voices, but instead Tomas’s voice, barely above a whisper, seemed to echo as he asked, “Are you sure this isn’t a copycat?”

“Yes.” She’d gone over it again and again in her hotel room and it was the only way to explain the similarities.

“Take the notes, to start. I know there’ve been a few false confessions over the years, and those people always knew nursery rhymes were left at the scene, because that was in the papers. But the station has done a good job of keeping exactly how the nursery rhymes were changed out of the press. And these notes are too similar—in tone, content, style, everything—to be from a copycat.”

“Damn it,” she heard Tomas muttering, new stress in his voice.

“I’d like to have an expert in handwriting from the FBI give a second opinion, but the notes are our best indicator. And this perpetrator just knew too much to be a copycat.”

She frowned down at her profile, not really seeing the words, not really needing them. “The abductions are also much too similar to be a coincidence. The lack of forensic evidence and the pattern of abducting the child from her own property late in the evening or at night after stalking her first suggest a patient, determined predator.”

She surveyed the room, wanting everyone to understand why she’d concluded that they were looking for the same person. “I reviewed all the evidence from this case first, separately from the older cases. And everything about this abduction points to someone who’s done it before. It was way too savvy for a first abduction, and way too close in the details from the older cases that were never released to the public.”

“And he’s either molesting these girls or trying to ‘save’ them, whatever that means?” an officer asked.

“That’s right. Although, this time around, his motivation has definitely shifted. With this latest abduction, he’s enjoying the actual act of kidnapping more. He’s fantasizing about it beforehand and it’s part of the thrill, maybe as much as his ultimate motivation of molestation or his idea of saving them.”

“Then why did he stop for so long?” Tomas asked, his voice even wearier than it had been a few minutes earlier.

“There are a number of possibilities.” Evelyn ticked them off on her fingers. “He was jailed for another crime and recently released. He’s had an illness that prevented him from carrying out the abductions and he’s since gotten well. Or he was otherwise prevented from carrying them out for a period of time—because, for example, someone in his life would have noticed.”