Chasing evil, p.34
Chasing Evil, page 34
In the office, John shuffled the cards. The air smelled like sage.
“Ask your question,” he said.
“Will I ever find Fran?” I asked.
John gave me a look, like: I already knew you’d ask that.
He spread the cards across the table into a messy pile, then pulled them altogether, and picked out a card. He turned it face up and laid it on the table. It was a picture of a man standing among a bunch of rods.
“The Nine of Wands,” he said, tapping the card with his finger.
“What does it mean?”
“The Nine of Wands teaches patience in battle and healing. It’s a about resilience, courage, persistence, and a test of faith.”
“Soooo … does that mean I will find Fran or not?”
John paused in that thoughtful way he always does.
“They’re telling me yes … but…”
“But what?”
“But … not yet.”
I laughed and sat back in my chair.
But they didn’t say I wouldn’t find her, right? So I kept going.
* * *
One of my final elaborate searches for Fran was in the middle of a freak snowstorm on April Fool’s Day in 2012.
I went back to Smith’s old house in Milford, Connecticut, with the New Haven FBI Evidence Response Team and more cadaver dogs, more ground-penetrating radar, and another excavation team. We dug next to the foundation of the house after neighbors remembered Smith digging there at the time of Fran’s disappearance.
Nothing. Just a few buried, frozen animal bones, like our disappointing results from the Boone House dig in 1999.
Who was the fool, yet again? Me. I was.
I drove back to Virginia that night, and as the snow pelted my car on the New Jersey Turnpike, I yelled out loud at Fran.
“I quit! Do you hear me? I don’t give a shit anymore! If you want to be found, you’ve got to give me a fucking sign or I’m done with you! I’m done with this case!”
I didn’t see any lamplights burst to life and blaze like a torch, like I’d seen seven years earlier, the last time I asked Fran for a sign.
This time, she sent me flames on a grander scale. It was at Smith’s old factory again, but it wasn’t a flickering lamplight.
I got a call the next day from the owners of Carborundum, Smith’s industrial factory. Somehow, in the middle of the night, the factory had caught fire and burned down to the ground in a dramatic, blinding inferno.
Whoa.
I wasn’t giving up on her. Not yet.
25
NOAH’S FIGHTER PLANE
Five-year-old Noah loved Batman and Star Wars … and he touched our hearts. (COURTESY OF THE FBI)
Some cases break your heart more than others.
That’s how John and I felt about a five-year-old boy with carrot-colored hair and a dimpled smile that would melt you.
Little Noah Thomas loved wearing his black-and-yellow Batman shirt and playing with his Star Wars X-wing fighter jet. He loved riding his Big Wheels up and down the path by his family’s trailer home in Dublin, Virginia, without his coat on in the winter. His little ears stuck out like Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, and he gave hugs to the school lunch lady. His favorite food was birthday cake. Noah wanted to be a farmer when he grew up.
At midnight in the spring of 2015, I frantically climbed the bumpy hill behind Noah’s home with John Edward in my ear, giving directions. We were looking for the little boy, who’d been missing for nearly three days.
John always excelled at keeping his emotions at bay when we worked. I was usually stoic and professional out in the field.
But this time, with this case, John and I were both gripped and driven by the same feelings of fear and love. John’s son, Justin, was now 12. My son, Connor, was now 19. John and I had both grown up with absent fathers and vowed to always love and protect our own boys fiercely.
So, on the hill that day, John and I were fueled by a similar, profound, grief and urgency:
This little boy could be my son.
On the morning of Sunday, March 22, little Noah went missing from the family’s single-wide trailer in Dublin, a small town in Pulaski County, four hours west of Richmond, Virginia.
Noah’s mother, Ashley, had driven her husband, Paul, to his factory job earlier with Noah and his little sister, Abby, 15 months, in the car.
She returned to the trailer with the kids, she told the police, put the baby back in the crib, and fell back to sleep. Little Noah, filled with the zip of a kindergartener, stayed awake to watch cartoons.
When his mother woke up a little later, she reported, the baby was crying and Noah was gone. One of the doors of their trailer was ajar. She went outside to look for him, thinking he went outside to play, but she couldn’t find him. She called 911.
* * *
By the time I got to Dublin, Noah had been missing for 24 hours.
I drove throughout the night and arrived at the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office early Monday morning for a briefing.
At the time I served as a Supervisory Special Agent in the Richmond Division. One of the programs I oversaw was Crimes Against Children.
The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office and the local FBI supervisor had set up a command post and led a team of investigators through the night. I arrived to relieve my colleague and supervise the command post.
We posted Noah’s photo everywhere, but no tips came in from the public.
The sites out my window on the drive into town were depressing—Pulaski County suffered from a high rate of unemployment, poverty, and opioid abuse. Noah’s parents, Paul and Ashley, were recovering drug addicts. The town was very isolated and rural, real Dukes of Hazzard country, but bleaker. A desolate wasteland. It looked like the land of the unwell.
In the 24 hours since Noah had gone missing, hundreds of law enforcement agents and volunteers searched high and low for the little boy.
The FBI’s Evidence Response Team combed the area by Noah’s home, the woods nearby, and the local dump. Agents interviewed parents and neighbors and scanned phone records. Search-and-rescue teams spread out on ATVs, horseback, and foot.
But when I arrived, they’d found no witnesses, leads, or suspects.
At the briefing, I ratcheted up the search. We needed to identify any sex offenders in the area and find them. I sent agents to gas stations, pharmacies, and banks in the area—any business that might have a CCTV—to get security footage.
And I called up Travis, a polygraph examiner I knew in Richmond, and told him to grab his go bag and polygraph equipment and start driving over.
It didn’t take long for me to realize something was awry regarding Noah’s mother, and we needed to test her. Her cell phone records and the timeline she gave police didn’t match up. Agents described her as “ambiguous” when they pressed her for details about Noah’s disappearance. But the biggest red flag was her 911 call, which we played out loud at the morning briefing. She had no emotion in her voice, no panic, not a spec of urgency.
Until the moment I heard that 911 call, I held on to hope that Noah was alive somewhere. After the morning briefing and Ashley’s deadpan request for help, that hope was gone.
I pulled aside two investigators and asked them to set up a meeting with me and the parents, Paul and Ashley, that afternoon. I needed to see Ashley’s face. I needed to see how she’d react when I questioned her.
“Tell them to get here at two o’clock,” I told the investigator. “But don’t tell them they’re coming here to take a polygraph. Tell them they’re coming because the FBI supervisor overseeing the investigation wants to meet with them personally and tell them what we’re doing to find Noah. Make it a very friendly thing.”
When they got to the sheriff’s office, I took Paul and Ashley into a private room to talk. Meanwhile, Travis had arrived and was setting up his machine in another room.
I began the way I usually do, showing empathy and building rapport. Ashley looked stringy-haired and pale. Paul looked sad and bewildered. After about ten minutes, I gave Ashley a test, and her first chance to tell a different story.
“I’ve been in the FBI a long time and I’ve worked many, many cases like this,” I told the couple. “You need to understand there’s not a lot of things that could have happened to Noah.”
Ashley furrowed her forehead.
“Number one, he could have been outside and an accident happened. Number two, we could have a situation where a stranger came and abducted him. Or, number three, maybe another kind of accident happened that was unintended, something no one meant to happen…”
Ashley shook her head: “No, it didn’t happen that way.”
I was sitting knee to knee with her. I lightly touched her leg with my hand. Here was the second test.
“Ashley, I promise you I’m going to find Noah no matter what it takes. I’m not leaving until I find Noah. Period.”
I’ve promised this before, to other parents of missing children. An innocent mother who wants her child found grabs my hand and cries and squeezes my hand tightly and thanks me.
Ashley sat there, frozen.
Nothing Paul did made me suspicious of him. But everything Ashley did—and did not do—rang alarm bells.
“I pray that my grandma and dad are taking care of Noah right now,” she said, and she began crying. Rather, she tried to cry … but no tears were coming out. Crocodile tears, we call them.
Ashley’s father and grandmother were dead, I knew. So, without knowing it, she was affirming that she knew Noah was dead, too.
“Hey, listen. I really need your help,” I told them. “We have to rule people out from the investigation, so I need you guys to take a polygraph right now. We just want to corroborate everything you’re saying and eliminate you from the investigation, you understand.”
Paul nodded. Ashley froze again, like a deer in headlights.
I took her down the hall to Travis, she was the first to be polygraphed.
“Make sure to ask her these two questions,” I told him:
Are you withholding information about Noah’s disappearance?
Do you know where Noah is now?
Travis nodded.
I went back to the room and continued talking to Paul, trying to get more information.
“Is it your understanding that Ashley went straight back to the trailer with the children after dropping you off at work?” I asked.
“As far as I know.”
“Could she have stopped somewhere else? Who else is she friends with? When was the last time you both used drugs?”As I pressed him, he grew upset. But more than anything, he was a father worried about his son and tried to be helpful.
A couple of hours later, Travis knocked on the door, and I went out in the hall.
“Mom’s results were deceptive,” he said, “and she’s changing her story.”
We never had the chance to test Paul. Ashley became outraged and fetched Paul before storming out of the sheriff’s office.
“Whatever you do,” I said, “make sure you follow them. Put a car on them. Don’t let them out of your sight.”
* * *
Wednesday morning. Noah had been missing for three days.
We’d given press conferences and posted Noah’s picture in local stores and on telephone poles. Usually, this action evokes a flurry of tips coming in from the public. Somebody sees something. Even with the John Smith case, we had that neighbor, Patricia Donnolly, call on the hotline with the tip that she’d seen Smith putting a bundle into a backyard grave—and that tip came in two decades after the murder!
If Noah had been taken from home, someone would have seen something.
That afternoon, I drove from the command post to Paul and Ashley’s trailer in Dublin. It was time for another talk.
Paul answered the door and was hopeful when he saw me.
“Any news?” he asked.
I told him no and I glanced at Ashley, who was standing behind him. She was not happy to see me.
They invited me in, and I was shocked by what I saw. Their trailer was covered in layers of filth, cobwebs, and stains on the couch. Instead of curtains, they’d hung black garbage bags on the windows. The air was thick with smoke—both Paul and Ashley chain-smoked Marlboros. It was so foul, I wouldn’t let a dog live there, never mind two children. My heart went out to those kids.
They offered me a seat on the shit-stained couch, but I was afraid to touch anything. I crouched, instead, like a catcher in a baseball game.
“It’s been three days now, and I wanted to check if you thought of anything new that would help the investigation?” I asked.
They hadn’t, they said.
I asked if I could speak to each of them separately. Paul went to the back of the trailer and now I was alone with Ashley. This time, I was harder on her. Like with football player Michael Vick, I tried to give her an “out.”
“Look, Ashley, I’ve been around a long time and I’ve seen a lot of things, and I know you love Noah. No doubt about it. And I know you’re a good mom. Whatever happened to him, you can help me find him…”
Ashley sat with her left arm clutching her chest and a Marlboro in her right hand, puffing continuously, as cigarette ash tumbled onto her lap, the couch, the floor. She answered my questions with vague deflection, refusing to make eye contact.
I got nothing out of her.
* * *
At the command post that night, all the leads had dried up, so I decided to shut it down for the night. I sent the agents and officers to their hotels and homes to get rest. We were all exhausted and frustrated.
Around 10:30 P.M., I was about to leave for my hotel when I realized my wallet was missing. I started looking around, and my phone rang.
John. Thank God. I’d been trying to reach him for days.
He’d been traveling and called after landing at La Guardia. When I picked up, I didn’t know he was already on the Noah case without me even telling him a word. As he drove out of the airport parking lot minutes before, his head began to throb. Information flooded his senses.
“John!” I began, “I need your help. I have a missing boy…”
It was like Annie Le all over again.
“Little boy, bright red hair?”
“Yeah”
“An N-name … not Nick, but … like Norman, or … Noah.”
“Yes!”
“I feel drugs. Mom and dad and a drug guy.”
“Makes sense.”
“The mom’s not telling you the truth. She’s not being honest. Oh, man. Where are you? I’m getting a feeling like wherever you are, it’s like The Walking Dead.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like here.”
“Hold on a second…”
I braced myself. John was putting me on hold to take a call from the Other Side, that’s how I always saw it. It meant crucial information was about to come.
His next outburst was like a repeat of his finding Annie Le.
“Oh my god, Bob. He’s right there. He’s right there!”
My heart jumped.
“Right where?!”
“You guys literally walked over him. He’s right there!”
“John, where’s there?”
“By a trailer. They live in a trailer?”
John began describing the trailer—even the stains, cobwebs, and smoke.
“Bob. Here’s what I’m seeing. When I walk out of the trailer, I want to go left. And when I go left, I feel I’m going down a hill, the property slopes down.”
He paused.
“Where are the propane tanks?”
“I don’t know!”
“I want to go down, behind … move the propane tanks, Bob, and Noah is right there. Hold on a second…”
I waited. I was holding my breath.
“Oh my god, Bob. Look for an X-wing fighter.”
“A what?”
“It’s a Star Wars toy. The X-wing fighter! That thing Luke Skywalker flew in Star Wars?”
“Oh. Okay. I have no idea what that is, but…”
“Bob, I literally see people walking right over Noah. They’re walking right over him!”
“Holy shit.”
“Where are you now?”
“At the sheriff’s office.”
“As soon as you get to the trailer, call me.”
“What? I can’t go out there now.”
“Bob, you have to. You have to go right now.”
I’d known John for 17 years and never heard him talk with such urgency. It was close with Annie Le, but not like this.
“John, how the hell do I go out there at this time of night and justify it? It’s almost 11 P.M.!”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just do it. If you go out there right now, you will find him. Believe me.”
* * *
Wednesday night, 11 P.M.
As I drove out to the trailer, I imagined finding Noah. I also imagined getting jammed up.
Fuck, I’m going to get fired, I thought.
The phone rang. This time, it was Jonathan.
“Jonathan! I have a missing boy…”
He already knew. John had called him and told him to get in touch with me ASAP. John’s urgency kicked Jonathan’s father instinct into gear, too.
It kicked his guides into gear, as well. He began getting all the details John got, with some new ones.
“Look for the big pile of tires,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“And down a hill, look for an open trailer with a toolbox mounted to the frame.”
“Okay.”
Besides the time all three of us were at the pumphouse together at Smith’s factory, this was the first time the two psychics were doing a relay-team psychic race with me. Jonathan’s call fired me up even more.
But after I hung up, I was still worried about how I’d explain to my superiors why I went out near midnight to the home of a victim’s parents.
Then I got an idea: the missing wallet!
It could have easily fallen out of my pocket onto their filthy trailer floor when I was in baseball-catcher position earlier. Even if it didn’t, it was a decent enough excuse to go.
“Ask your question,” he said.
“Will I ever find Fran?” I asked.
John gave me a look, like: I already knew you’d ask that.
He spread the cards across the table into a messy pile, then pulled them altogether, and picked out a card. He turned it face up and laid it on the table. It was a picture of a man standing among a bunch of rods.
“The Nine of Wands,” he said, tapping the card with his finger.
“What does it mean?”
“The Nine of Wands teaches patience in battle and healing. It’s a about resilience, courage, persistence, and a test of faith.”
“Soooo … does that mean I will find Fran or not?”
John paused in that thoughtful way he always does.
“They’re telling me yes … but…”
“But what?”
“But … not yet.”
I laughed and sat back in my chair.
But they didn’t say I wouldn’t find her, right? So I kept going.
* * *
One of my final elaborate searches for Fran was in the middle of a freak snowstorm on April Fool’s Day in 2012.
I went back to Smith’s old house in Milford, Connecticut, with the New Haven FBI Evidence Response Team and more cadaver dogs, more ground-penetrating radar, and another excavation team. We dug next to the foundation of the house after neighbors remembered Smith digging there at the time of Fran’s disappearance.
Nothing. Just a few buried, frozen animal bones, like our disappointing results from the Boone House dig in 1999.
Who was the fool, yet again? Me. I was.
I drove back to Virginia that night, and as the snow pelted my car on the New Jersey Turnpike, I yelled out loud at Fran.
“I quit! Do you hear me? I don’t give a shit anymore! If you want to be found, you’ve got to give me a fucking sign or I’m done with you! I’m done with this case!”
I didn’t see any lamplights burst to life and blaze like a torch, like I’d seen seven years earlier, the last time I asked Fran for a sign.
This time, she sent me flames on a grander scale. It was at Smith’s old factory again, but it wasn’t a flickering lamplight.
I got a call the next day from the owners of Carborundum, Smith’s industrial factory. Somehow, in the middle of the night, the factory had caught fire and burned down to the ground in a dramatic, blinding inferno.
Whoa.
I wasn’t giving up on her. Not yet.
25
NOAH’S FIGHTER PLANE
Five-year-old Noah loved Batman and Star Wars … and he touched our hearts. (COURTESY OF THE FBI)
Some cases break your heart more than others.
That’s how John and I felt about a five-year-old boy with carrot-colored hair and a dimpled smile that would melt you.
Little Noah Thomas loved wearing his black-and-yellow Batman shirt and playing with his Star Wars X-wing fighter jet. He loved riding his Big Wheels up and down the path by his family’s trailer home in Dublin, Virginia, without his coat on in the winter. His little ears stuck out like Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, and he gave hugs to the school lunch lady. His favorite food was birthday cake. Noah wanted to be a farmer when he grew up.
At midnight in the spring of 2015, I frantically climbed the bumpy hill behind Noah’s home with John Edward in my ear, giving directions. We were looking for the little boy, who’d been missing for nearly three days.
John always excelled at keeping his emotions at bay when we worked. I was usually stoic and professional out in the field.
But this time, with this case, John and I were both gripped and driven by the same feelings of fear and love. John’s son, Justin, was now 12. My son, Connor, was now 19. John and I had both grown up with absent fathers and vowed to always love and protect our own boys fiercely.
So, on the hill that day, John and I were fueled by a similar, profound, grief and urgency:
This little boy could be my son.
On the morning of Sunday, March 22, little Noah went missing from the family’s single-wide trailer in Dublin, a small town in Pulaski County, four hours west of Richmond, Virginia.
Noah’s mother, Ashley, had driven her husband, Paul, to his factory job earlier with Noah and his little sister, Abby, 15 months, in the car.
She returned to the trailer with the kids, she told the police, put the baby back in the crib, and fell back to sleep. Little Noah, filled with the zip of a kindergartener, stayed awake to watch cartoons.
When his mother woke up a little later, she reported, the baby was crying and Noah was gone. One of the doors of their trailer was ajar. She went outside to look for him, thinking he went outside to play, but she couldn’t find him. She called 911.
* * *
By the time I got to Dublin, Noah had been missing for 24 hours.
I drove throughout the night and arrived at the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office early Monday morning for a briefing.
At the time I served as a Supervisory Special Agent in the Richmond Division. One of the programs I oversaw was Crimes Against Children.
The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office and the local FBI supervisor had set up a command post and led a team of investigators through the night. I arrived to relieve my colleague and supervise the command post.
We posted Noah’s photo everywhere, but no tips came in from the public.
The sites out my window on the drive into town were depressing—Pulaski County suffered from a high rate of unemployment, poverty, and opioid abuse. Noah’s parents, Paul and Ashley, were recovering drug addicts. The town was very isolated and rural, real Dukes of Hazzard country, but bleaker. A desolate wasteland. It looked like the land of the unwell.
In the 24 hours since Noah had gone missing, hundreds of law enforcement agents and volunteers searched high and low for the little boy.
The FBI’s Evidence Response Team combed the area by Noah’s home, the woods nearby, and the local dump. Agents interviewed parents and neighbors and scanned phone records. Search-and-rescue teams spread out on ATVs, horseback, and foot.
But when I arrived, they’d found no witnesses, leads, or suspects.
At the briefing, I ratcheted up the search. We needed to identify any sex offenders in the area and find them. I sent agents to gas stations, pharmacies, and banks in the area—any business that might have a CCTV—to get security footage.
And I called up Travis, a polygraph examiner I knew in Richmond, and told him to grab his go bag and polygraph equipment and start driving over.
It didn’t take long for me to realize something was awry regarding Noah’s mother, and we needed to test her. Her cell phone records and the timeline she gave police didn’t match up. Agents described her as “ambiguous” when they pressed her for details about Noah’s disappearance. But the biggest red flag was her 911 call, which we played out loud at the morning briefing. She had no emotion in her voice, no panic, not a spec of urgency.
Until the moment I heard that 911 call, I held on to hope that Noah was alive somewhere. After the morning briefing and Ashley’s deadpan request for help, that hope was gone.
I pulled aside two investigators and asked them to set up a meeting with me and the parents, Paul and Ashley, that afternoon. I needed to see Ashley’s face. I needed to see how she’d react when I questioned her.
“Tell them to get here at two o’clock,” I told the investigator. “But don’t tell them they’re coming here to take a polygraph. Tell them they’re coming because the FBI supervisor overseeing the investigation wants to meet with them personally and tell them what we’re doing to find Noah. Make it a very friendly thing.”
When they got to the sheriff’s office, I took Paul and Ashley into a private room to talk. Meanwhile, Travis had arrived and was setting up his machine in another room.
I began the way I usually do, showing empathy and building rapport. Ashley looked stringy-haired and pale. Paul looked sad and bewildered. After about ten minutes, I gave Ashley a test, and her first chance to tell a different story.
“I’ve been in the FBI a long time and I’ve worked many, many cases like this,” I told the couple. “You need to understand there’s not a lot of things that could have happened to Noah.”
Ashley furrowed her forehead.
“Number one, he could have been outside and an accident happened. Number two, we could have a situation where a stranger came and abducted him. Or, number three, maybe another kind of accident happened that was unintended, something no one meant to happen…”
Ashley shook her head: “No, it didn’t happen that way.”
I was sitting knee to knee with her. I lightly touched her leg with my hand. Here was the second test.
“Ashley, I promise you I’m going to find Noah no matter what it takes. I’m not leaving until I find Noah. Period.”
I’ve promised this before, to other parents of missing children. An innocent mother who wants her child found grabs my hand and cries and squeezes my hand tightly and thanks me.
Ashley sat there, frozen.
Nothing Paul did made me suspicious of him. But everything Ashley did—and did not do—rang alarm bells.
“I pray that my grandma and dad are taking care of Noah right now,” she said, and she began crying. Rather, she tried to cry … but no tears were coming out. Crocodile tears, we call them.
Ashley’s father and grandmother were dead, I knew. So, without knowing it, she was affirming that she knew Noah was dead, too.
“Hey, listen. I really need your help,” I told them. “We have to rule people out from the investigation, so I need you guys to take a polygraph right now. We just want to corroborate everything you’re saying and eliminate you from the investigation, you understand.”
Paul nodded. Ashley froze again, like a deer in headlights.
I took her down the hall to Travis, she was the first to be polygraphed.
“Make sure to ask her these two questions,” I told him:
Are you withholding information about Noah’s disappearance?
Do you know where Noah is now?
Travis nodded.
I went back to the room and continued talking to Paul, trying to get more information.
“Is it your understanding that Ashley went straight back to the trailer with the children after dropping you off at work?” I asked.
“As far as I know.”
“Could she have stopped somewhere else? Who else is she friends with? When was the last time you both used drugs?”As I pressed him, he grew upset. But more than anything, he was a father worried about his son and tried to be helpful.
A couple of hours later, Travis knocked on the door, and I went out in the hall.
“Mom’s results were deceptive,” he said, “and she’s changing her story.”
We never had the chance to test Paul. Ashley became outraged and fetched Paul before storming out of the sheriff’s office.
“Whatever you do,” I said, “make sure you follow them. Put a car on them. Don’t let them out of your sight.”
* * *
Wednesday morning. Noah had been missing for three days.
We’d given press conferences and posted Noah’s picture in local stores and on telephone poles. Usually, this action evokes a flurry of tips coming in from the public. Somebody sees something. Even with the John Smith case, we had that neighbor, Patricia Donnolly, call on the hotline with the tip that she’d seen Smith putting a bundle into a backyard grave—and that tip came in two decades after the murder!
If Noah had been taken from home, someone would have seen something.
That afternoon, I drove from the command post to Paul and Ashley’s trailer in Dublin. It was time for another talk.
Paul answered the door and was hopeful when he saw me.
“Any news?” he asked.
I told him no and I glanced at Ashley, who was standing behind him. She was not happy to see me.
They invited me in, and I was shocked by what I saw. Their trailer was covered in layers of filth, cobwebs, and stains on the couch. Instead of curtains, they’d hung black garbage bags on the windows. The air was thick with smoke—both Paul and Ashley chain-smoked Marlboros. It was so foul, I wouldn’t let a dog live there, never mind two children. My heart went out to those kids.
They offered me a seat on the shit-stained couch, but I was afraid to touch anything. I crouched, instead, like a catcher in a baseball game.
“It’s been three days now, and I wanted to check if you thought of anything new that would help the investigation?” I asked.
They hadn’t, they said.
I asked if I could speak to each of them separately. Paul went to the back of the trailer and now I was alone with Ashley. This time, I was harder on her. Like with football player Michael Vick, I tried to give her an “out.”
“Look, Ashley, I’ve been around a long time and I’ve seen a lot of things, and I know you love Noah. No doubt about it. And I know you’re a good mom. Whatever happened to him, you can help me find him…”
Ashley sat with her left arm clutching her chest and a Marlboro in her right hand, puffing continuously, as cigarette ash tumbled onto her lap, the couch, the floor. She answered my questions with vague deflection, refusing to make eye contact.
I got nothing out of her.
* * *
At the command post that night, all the leads had dried up, so I decided to shut it down for the night. I sent the agents and officers to their hotels and homes to get rest. We were all exhausted and frustrated.
Around 10:30 P.M., I was about to leave for my hotel when I realized my wallet was missing. I started looking around, and my phone rang.
John. Thank God. I’d been trying to reach him for days.
He’d been traveling and called after landing at La Guardia. When I picked up, I didn’t know he was already on the Noah case without me even telling him a word. As he drove out of the airport parking lot minutes before, his head began to throb. Information flooded his senses.
“John!” I began, “I need your help. I have a missing boy…”
It was like Annie Le all over again.
“Little boy, bright red hair?”
“Yeah”
“An N-name … not Nick, but … like Norman, or … Noah.”
“Yes!”
“I feel drugs. Mom and dad and a drug guy.”
“Makes sense.”
“The mom’s not telling you the truth. She’s not being honest. Oh, man. Where are you? I’m getting a feeling like wherever you are, it’s like The Walking Dead.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like here.”
“Hold on a second…”
I braced myself. John was putting me on hold to take a call from the Other Side, that’s how I always saw it. It meant crucial information was about to come.
His next outburst was like a repeat of his finding Annie Le.
“Oh my god, Bob. He’s right there. He’s right there!”
My heart jumped.
“Right where?!”
“You guys literally walked over him. He’s right there!”
“John, where’s there?”
“By a trailer. They live in a trailer?”
John began describing the trailer—even the stains, cobwebs, and smoke.
“Bob. Here’s what I’m seeing. When I walk out of the trailer, I want to go left. And when I go left, I feel I’m going down a hill, the property slopes down.”
He paused.
“Where are the propane tanks?”
“I don’t know!”
“I want to go down, behind … move the propane tanks, Bob, and Noah is right there. Hold on a second…”
I waited. I was holding my breath.
“Oh my god, Bob. Look for an X-wing fighter.”
“A what?”
“It’s a Star Wars toy. The X-wing fighter! That thing Luke Skywalker flew in Star Wars?”
“Oh. Okay. I have no idea what that is, but…”
“Bob, I literally see people walking right over Noah. They’re walking right over him!”
“Holy shit.”
“Where are you now?”
“At the sheriff’s office.”
“As soon as you get to the trailer, call me.”
“What? I can’t go out there now.”
“Bob, you have to. You have to go right now.”
I’d known John for 17 years and never heard him talk with such urgency. It was close with Annie Le, but not like this.
“John, how the hell do I go out there at this time of night and justify it? It’s almost 11 P.M.!”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just do it. If you go out there right now, you will find him. Believe me.”
* * *
Wednesday night, 11 P.M.
As I drove out to the trailer, I imagined finding Noah. I also imagined getting jammed up.
Fuck, I’m going to get fired, I thought.
The phone rang. This time, it was Jonathan.
“Jonathan! I have a missing boy…”
He already knew. John had called him and told him to get in touch with me ASAP. John’s urgency kicked Jonathan’s father instinct into gear, too.
It kicked his guides into gear, as well. He began getting all the details John got, with some new ones.
“Look for the big pile of tires,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“And down a hill, look for an open trailer with a toolbox mounted to the frame.”
“Okay.”
Besides the time all three of us were at the pumphouse together at Smith’s factory, this was the first time the two psychics were doing a relay-team psychic race with me. Jonathan’s call fired me up even more.
But after I hung up, I was still worried about how I’d explain to my superiors why I went out near midnight to the home of a victim’s parents.
Then I got an idea: the missing wallet!
It could have easily fallen out of my pocket onto their filthy trailer floor when I was in baseball-catcher position earlier. Even if it didn’t, it was a decent enough excuse to go.
