If Bryan had any illusions that finding the connection to Poole’s partner would be easy, he was wrong. Even with a task force of brains picking apart Poole’s life year by year from the time he started to crawl, they were coming up with nothing. The two detectives from Hendry and Glades – Austin Velasquez and Dave Minkhaus – travelled to Deltona to interview teachers, principals, and classmates from elementary through his second year of high school, when Poole went to Haines City. They’d hoped to come back with a long list of friends that Poole had made over the years – they didn’t. There were none. The task force pulled social security records and tax returns and detectives personally visited every place Poole had ever worked in the state of Florida: Walgreens, Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, AMC Theaters, Universal Studios for a summer, H&R Block, Ernst & Young. Fast food to college internships to career moves – there was nobody. No one Poole ever ate lunch with consistently or went out for a beer with. No one that he socialized with. Other than the names of a couple of girls he’d dated casually through work, there was nothing serious, and of the girls who could even remember him, all said there was nothing remarkable about him: quiet, reserved, shy. Forgettable. Derrick Alan Freeley Poole was the very definition of the word ‘loner’.
Bryan knew the most significant authority on Poole’s past would be his mother, Bethany Freeley. First he’d tried talking with her on the phone, but she’d been resistant. So he’d flown to Phoenix to interview her. He was back the next day. The woman was a clam – she wouldn’t even confirm that she hadn’t seen her son in over ten years. As for getting any information from grandma, Linda Sue Poole was indeed a mental mess. She couldn’t remember her own name.
The geniuses in the computer crime lab were dissecting Poole’s Facebook contacts – of which there were eighty-seven, and of those, most were professional associations, like every professional NFL and MLB page and fan pages for movies, TV shows and video games. Considering that most young people Poole’s age had hundreds, sometimes thousands, of friends, and lived their life on social media, the fact that he didn’t was troubling. Now they were busy sorting through emails and chat room visits, searching his cookies, trying to pull up his surfing history, and running his hard drive through REDS to see what files had recently been deleted or written over.
The most convenient place to hook up with a like-minded sociopath, Bryan would’ve thought, would’ve been in lock-up in sex offender therapy. Tatiana and Pat Genovese had run every guy who did time with Poole during his two years at the Orange Youth Academy, narrowing down the list to who was alive, who was incarcerated somewhere, who was out, who had reoffended, and who was presently living in the state of Florida. They had narrowed the list to thirty-nine, and were currently going through each name, marrying names with intake shots from ten years back and comparing them to the latest sketch Cuddy had done with Faith Saunders – treating each name as if he were the partner, trying to find a relationship with Poole from their end, since Poole’s personal life was cloaked in secrecy. The fact that nothing had popped out yet was both disappointing and frustrating. So Bryan had taken a ride up to Orange Youth to meet with the warden, Ravi Lee, who’d headed up the facility since 1999 and was there when Poole was incarcerated. In addition to looking at the facility, he wanted to look at the disciplinary records that were not kept on computer back in 2004, and interview staff who might still be working there who had known Poole.
Lee leaned back in a tired vinyl chair in his microscopic office. If this was the digs the boss gets, Bryan couldn’t imagine the cubicles the rest of the staff had to work out of. The room smelled of must and old paper.
‘I pulled his file after you called, Detective. So that I could review it, because I honestly didn’t have an independent recollection of Derrick Poole from ten years ago. We have forty-eight boys here at any given moment. Not one bed is ever empty, which goes to show you the disastrous course our youth are on today, and how poorly parents are parenting. Anyway, I pulled his file and I do remember him, but I have to tell you that what I remember isn’t bad: Derrick was a model prisoner. He got his GED here, took extra classes, including Spanish and woodwork. He got along well with staff. I’ve assembled for you a list of employees who worked here at the time, and outside volunteers, along with their pictures. Everyone who works or volunteers or visits on this property has to provide a photo ID and we maintain those as public records. Some of the staff and volunteers are still with us today, although most have moved on. I’ve also supplied you with the facility’s visitor logs from the period that Mr Poole was incarcerated. Perhaps that will help.’
‘Thank you,’ replied Bryan as he thumbed through the staff directory. It was substantial. ‘The visitor logs might be worth looking into.’
‘The case you’re here on is … um, quite disturbing,’ commented Lee.
‘As was the case that Mr Poole was sent here for. Model prisoners don’t make model people; that’s why they get locked up.’
The warden nodded.
Nill set aside the staff directory and flipped through the volunteer folder full of pictures and dossiers. He was about to have them all brought to an interview room so that he wouldn’t have to do this with an extra pair of eyes watching from across the desk, when he spotted a picture. ‘Who’s this?’
The warden took the thick folder back. ‘Hmmm. That’s Ed Carbone, he was a volunteer who taught GED classes, and tutored boys interested in Spanish. He taught Mr Poole, but I’d have to say, he was more like a mentor to the boy. He was one of the younger staff members. He was about ten years older than the kids. We don’t normally like to have our staff or volunteers so close in age, but he was a positive role model for them.’
‘Not so fast,’ muttered Bryan as he pulled out Cuddy’s sketch and held it up next to the volunteer ID. ‘Where’s he at now?’
‘I have no idea,’ replied Lee. ‘Ed left about five years back. He hasn’t kept in touch with anyone.’
‘I’m not so sure I’d agree with you on that, Mr Lee.’ He picked up his cell and dialed Tatiana first. ‘Maldonado,’ he said before she could answer.
‘I was just gonna call you,’ she said, somberly.
‘I need you to run someone, find out where they are, who they are,’ he started. ‘I might have something.’
‘We got something, too,’ she replied. ‘Velasquez says they just found a body in a ditch off US 27 in Hendry County. He thinks it’s the rest of Noelle Langtry.’
‘Damn it!’ Bryan slapped the folder with the back of his hand. Dossiers and pictures spilled out and onto Lee’s desk. He hadn’t really held out hope that Noelle Langtry was going to be found alive, especially after the slaughter he’d seen in the shack, but it still stung to know that a beautiful little girl, the same age as his own daughters, would never come home. He stared at the face that had landed, fittingly, at his feet. ‘All the more reason we need to move on this, Maldonado. I think I might’ve found Poole’s partner. And his name is Ed Carbone.’