Once we were all clustered again in the interview room, Crystal’s tears were gone. Instead she sat calmly behind the table, with that same strange smile she’d had on her face when I’d first met her. But I noticed she didn’t react at all, no look of concern, regret, or even of interest as Barnett said there’d be no deal. In fact, her demeanor had melted from outrage and anguish to the appearance of utter serenity.
“Well then, we’re going to proceed with booking,” Sylvia informed Barnett while staring at Crystal, eyes on eyes, intent.
“You go for it,” Crystal said, grinning back up at her. “You know, lady, that you haven’t got anything on me.”
“Crystal, shut up,” Barnett said, putting his hand on her shoulder. She glanced up at him and snickered, as if her attorney were nothing more than a fool.
“Just try proving that wasn’t some kind of a frame job, putting that money in that account,” she jeered. “Find something, anything, that says I had any part in that money hitting my bank account. You can’t because I didn’t. Nothing. I had no idea until you told me that it was even there.”
I watched her and wondered. Of the small group in the room, with the exception, perhaps, of her attorney, I was the only one who thought that maybe, just maybe, she was telling the truth. Still, I disliked the woman enough to not be sure if I cared. Part of me just wanted her punished. “Aren’t you at all worried about your son?” I said, incredulous and furious at the same time. “Is that all you care about? Your own hide?”
Crystal smirked, then her lips parted and she released a short laugh. “You know, I don’t know where that money came from, but it’s really nice to have. For all I know, someone heard that we needed money from the announcement on the news about the fund at the bank. Maybe some anonymous person decided to help me out because she felt sorry for me, with Joey kidnapped and all. When you look at it that way, that money is mine, and I don’t see how anyone can prove that it’s not. And it sure doesn’t mean I’m involved in Joey’s kidnapping.”
“Shut up!” Barnett said yet again. This time, Crystal’s eyes shot up to his and she paused, taking in his frustration. Before his client could charge ahead, Barnett turned to Sylvia and tied up the interview. “This is over. Lock her up if you have to until we get bail figured out. She can sit out the hurricane here, and we’ll get her out in a few days.”
“A few days?” Crystal screeched, her jeering instantly replaced by fury. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, he’s not kidding,” Sylvia said, still targeted on Crystal, but now with a self-satisfied grin. “You weren’t counting on that, I’m sure. But with the hurricane coming, your attorney doesn’t have any other options. The courts closed down about fifteen minutes ago, as of noon today, to make sure those who need to evacuate can. No judges on duty, no one to decide how much you have to put up to get out of jail. It’s ironic. Even if you wanted to tap into that nice bundle you say some kind soul dropped in your lap, to use the cash to buy your way out of jail, it won’t help. Not until the storm passes over and the courts are up and running.”
I couldn’t deny a feeling of satisfaction when two deputies handcuffed and escorted Crystal to a cell. “This’ll be a piece of cake,” she said as they led her away. “Once you have to drop the charges, I’ll sue all of you and the county.”
Moments later, she disappeared behind the heavy steel doors that led to the holding cells, and David, Vogel, and I left, driving separately to Vogel’s office.
With the hurricane threatening, downtown Houston was nearly deserted, more of a ghost town than I’d ever seen. On my car radio, newscasters said the freeways were bottling up on roads with people fleeing the storm. Outside the city limits, the interstates had all been reassigned to outbound traffic only, doubling the number of lanes leading out of the city. With the storm’s arrival estimated at thirty-five hours away and counting and more than a million folks who’d been ordered to evacuate, there was little time to spare.
“Everything okay there?” I asked when I called Mom at the ranch.
“Fine, dear,” she said. “They released the kids from school early, and Maggie is here helping. We’re marking the horses.” Marking meant that Mom, Frieda, and Maggie were putting breakaway halters onto the horses, marked with Mom’s name and phone number, and braiding luggage tags with the same information into their manes. The horses were all microchipped, but Mom still liked to do it the old-fashioned way. If the stable blew down or something else happened like a wall collapsing and they scattered, it was our best chance at getting them back.
“The highways are backed up, Sarah,” Mom said. “We’re hearing on the television that it’s taking folks hours to get out of the city.
When are you heading home?”
“As soon as I can, Mom, but I’ll take side roads,” I said, wondering if that would actually help. “Is Maggie okay?”
“We’re all fine. She’s still acting like the hurricane is a great adventure,” she said. “Don’t worry, but call and let us know when to expect you?”
“I will,” I said.
Soon David and I sat in Vogel’s office, on the fifth floor of Harris County’s criminal courthouse, in downtown Houston. The windows were floor to ceiling, and outside, the mirrored-and-granite skyscrapers danced in reflected sunlight. Mementos were scattered throughout the office, including a Styrofoam wig stand with bullet entrance and exit wounds drawn on it, an aid from an old trial showing the trajectory of two bullets a husband shot at a wife. Half the woman’s face was ripped off, blinding her. It was one of Vogel’s favorite cases. The victim lived, but Sylvia got a seventy-five-year sentence for the shooter by employing the old eye-for-an-eye closing argument and convincing jurors that the husband effectively imprisoned the woman for life, leaving her blind and disfigured, and they needed to do the same to him.
“What if this really is some kind of frame?” I asked, playing devil’s advocate. “You came down hard on Crystal Warner, Sylvia, saying you’d go for blood. If Crystal knew something, don’t you think she would have wanted a deal?”
“We don’t know that,” David insisted, appearing weary and discouraged. “It’s just as reasonable to assume that Crystal is guilty as hell, involved in all of this somehow.”
“Maybe. Maybe,” I said. This was something new. David and I had never been on opposite sides of an investigation before. “But like I said, Sylvia, you were pretty scary in there. I think we have to look at this from all sides, David, including if we’re wrong.”
“Yeah,” David said. “You’ve got a point. But we need a lead, something to go with. That kid’s still out there somewhere, and we’ve got nothing. The storm’s coming tomorrow night, and once it hits, all bets are off.”
David’s agreeing with me didn’t sit well with the prosecutor. “Agent Garrity, I don’t like being in this situation,” Sylvia said with a penetrating glare. “This could put us in a bad light if it turns out your assessment of the evidence is wrong. If we’ve arrested that mom and she’s not involved, with all the publicity, it won’t be pretty.”
“I understand, but we’re at a loss here. We don’t have any other leads,” he said. “You have to—”
“No, maybe you have to, but I don’t,” Sylvia broke in. “I thought we all agreed on this, but the unmistakable problem here is that if we don’t have the evidence to go against the mom, this arrest is going to look like harassment.” She looked unhappy, not a good situation. I’d once seen her lay into a detective who’d misrepresented evidence with so much venom that the man literally limped out of her office. “The mom’s already screaming that we’re incompetents on national TV, that we’re messing with her instead of looking for the boy. Think about the publicity she’ll get if it looks like she’s right. That happens, I’m going to let the two of you explain to my boss why we arrested the mom of a kidnapped kid without enough evidence to make the charges stick.”
David rubbed his forehead with his left palm, as if to quell a migraine. “Listen, how about this?” he said. “We’ve got Crystal’s computer on premises, still in the process of being examined. We haven’t looked through all the e-mail accounts yet. It appears she has a dozen or more.”
“Your point?” Vogel asked.
“Maybe this guy communicated with her via e-mail. Why don’t we let her cool her heels in the holding cell for a couple of hours while Sarah and I see if we can find anything else on the computer that ties her to the abduction?” he said. “Then we figure out what to do, where to go with this investigation and the charges against her.”
The prosecutor considered David’s proposal and then said, “Okay. Just remember that it’s your heads on the block along with mine. You don’t find anything, you think about this and figure we’re skating on thin ice, you call me, and I’ll make a phone call and spring the mom from jail before the hurricane. All right?”
“Yeah,” David said. “All right.”
Two hours later, after sitting in the tech room at the sheriff’s department with a tattooed computer geek named Salvatore, David looked at me and shrugged. We’d run searches on all Crystal Warner’s e-mail accounts, looking for two dozen keywords including payoff, $30,000, the name of the park, polygraph, lie detector, Wednesday (the day Joey disappeared), Crystal’s bank account number, and police. We’d come up with a few matches on “park” and “Wednesday,” but nothing connected with the case.
“We have nothing,” David said. “Do I call Sylvia, tell her to release Crystal?”
I thought about that and hesitated. While I wasn’t sure she was guilty, the toys around the apartment, her convincing confusion when we first told her about the thirty grand, all made me second-guess my instincts, which still cautioned me that she had to be involved. “I know I’m the one who rained on the parade,” I admitted, wishing I had a clearer take on what to say. “Still, I’d like to keep Crystal in jail. We know she’s not telling us the truth. We know she’s hiding something. Right?”
“Right,” he said.
“So I vote we keep her locked up, and keep trying to track down where that money came from, find out what her involvement is,” I said.
“I agree,” he said. “But we’ve got to think about possible repercussions.”
I knew he and Sylvia had a point. I could picture Crystal and her parents back on the Today show, telling the reporter, who’d be übersympathetic, how we kept her in jail during a hurricane without the evidence to back it up. But was it that out of line, based on what we did have: an uncooperative mom, the thirty grand, her own words that she wanted the kid to disappear, and the tape-recorded conversation?
“When you take a good look at all this, I think Sylvia’s overreacting,” I said to David, voicing my thoughts as they were forming, as if testing them on him. “Crystal may not turn out to be involved, but we legitimately still had enough to book her. The judge signing the warrant verifies that. And that means we have enough to keep her in jail while we investigate.”
David frowned, ruffling his brow, and then closed his eyes. “You’re right. The judge thought we had enough when we got the warrant or he wouldn’t have signed it, and nothing has really changed. That evidence all still stands,” he said. “The problem is, as vocal as this woman and her parents are, whether or not it’s justified, the arrest could be a public relations disaster.”
I thought about that. It was hard not to agree. “Yeah, I know you’re right.”
“I wish that we could figure out where the kid is, and get out of this quagmire,” he said. “What’re you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I feel better with Crystal Warner in jail for the time being,” I said. “I’m thinking we leave her there. I know it’s risky, but I’m willing to take the heat if you are.”
He barely considered the alternative before shooting me a warm smile. “Okay,” he said. “We’re in this together. Only one problem.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. Before I went any further, he said what we both painfully knew to be true.
“We haven’t got a freaking clue what to do to find the kid,” he said. “Not a damn idea here. Or am I missing something? Have you figured this out and come up with a plan?”
I was about to admit that I had no idea what to do next, that I couldn’t suggest a single alternative. The truth was that I didn’t have even a plausible theory on what we could do to find the boy. Looking back later, I’d believe that either we were simply due for a break, or God, or fate, or flat-out luck interceded—for just then one of the detectives on the case motioned at us.
“Caller on the line for Agent Garrity,” he said. “Joey Warner’s dad.”
“Evan Warner?” I asked, surprised.
“One and the same,” the detective said. “Sounds like maybe he wants to talk.”