Thirty-six

We stopped at the desk and picked up Peter Benoit’s photograph from the night nurse, then commandeered the nursing home fax machine to send it to my office. “We’ll have this out ASAP, and we’ll start running records on Peter Benoit. Now that we have the right name, maybe we’ll be lucky and get a car description and license number. Anything that could help us spot him on the road, recognize him with the boy, could help,” the captain said when we followed up with a phone call. “Good news from the lab, by the way. They found a couple of latent fingerprints on pieces of the glass from the plantation.”

“That is good news,” I said. Although we’d identified the man and had his real name, in a courtroom, when Benoit was tried for Buckshot’s murder—a day I looked forward to—the fingerprints would be evidence. “Anything else for us?”

“Yeah. I know you’re both tired, but we have a lead down in the medical center, a convenience store clerk. She was shot, and the woman says the guy who did it had a little boy with him. They fit the description, and the boy said his name was Joey Warner.”

Hooked up to a web of machines, Sally Mae Harper lay beneath the hospital emergency room’s bright lights, their harshness leaching the color from her skin and calling attention to her dyed black hair. Nurses circulated in and out, and Harper’s blood pressure was being tracked, along with her oxygen and pulse, a heart monitor recording every beat. “It’s amazing that she survived. If that bullet had been a quarter of an inch to the right, it would have sliced through her aorta. She’d pulled the alarm, and police were on their way. Otherwise, she would have bled to death,” the young ER doc told us when we arrived. “I’m telling you all of this because I need both of you to understand that my patient is very weak. Based on her medical condition, I was against her talking to you, but she insisted. She wants to help you find the boy.”

As soon as we introduced ourselves, Sally Mae started right in, breathlessly detailing her encounter with the man and the boy that led up to her shooting. She described both Benoit and Joey to a tee, but I’d taken the precaution of pulling together a photo spread on my laptop, including the photo of his son that Alex Benoit had just given us. On my computer screen, I showed the woman six different middle-aged white men.

“Do any of these men look familiar?” David asked.

“That’s the guy,” Harper said, hacking and wheezing, holding her hands against her chest, as if to quell the pain. She pointed at Benoit’s photo. “He’s the creep who shot me.”

I then pulled up a snapshot of Joey on the screen. “And that’s the kid,” she said. “Really sweet-looking boy. He looked so scared. That poor baby. Made my heart hurt to look at him like that, so upset.”

“Anything else you remember that could help us?” I said. “Did you see a car? Anything?”

“The man was really stuck-up, not nice. The boy was barefoot,” she said. “And the man…well, he had shoes, but both of them, the boy and the man, too, tracked mud into the place. I was pretty ticked off, figuring I was going to have to clean it up. The man must have had a car, but I didn’t see it.”

Turning to me, David said, “I’m going to duck out and call the captain. Maybe that dirt’s from the pasture where the fourth bull was killed earlier tonight. Let’s get forensics to take samples at the store.”

“Good idea,” I said.

David left, and I stayed with Harper, listening as she recounted the events in full, flinching when she talked about the crack of the gunfire and the burst of pain as the bullet entered her chest.

“Does the convenience store have surveillance cameras?”

“Yeah,” Harper said, getting excited. One of her monitors beeped urgently, I couldn’t tell which. “You should get the video. That’ll help! That’s a great idea. I should have told you about that first thing.”

“Mrs. Harper, calm down. We will get it,” I assured her as a nurse ran into the room to investigate. “Believe me, we will.”

A second phone call to the detective handling the case, and we learned that he had already confiscated a video from inside the store, from a camera pointed at the counter and cash register. But there was a hitch: A second camera, one that scanned the parking lot, was out of order. It had been for months. Since the place had never been robbed, the store owner had procrastinated about spending the money to get it fixed.

“Let’s hope Benoit parked close enough to the building for the inside camera to nail the car,” I said as David and I drove to the major crimes division on Lockwood, where the Houston PD detective in charge of the shooting case had taken the video, at our request. At nearly six a.m., it remained dark, but a glimmer of light shone east of the city. In another hour it would be daylight, and out in the Gulf, the hurricane trudged ever closer. We passed through downtown, usually bustling early in the morning, even on a weekend, but on this Saturday it remained quiet, with few lights shining inside the skyscrapers that loomed overhead. Everywhere we drove, the streets were nearly empty. “It’s so deserted, we could land a chopper on these streets,” I said, and David nodded. What neither of us said was something we both understood: we were running out of time.

In Houston, the weather remained unseasonably hot and muggy, with a slight breeze barely ruffling the trees, but a radio announcer described Galveston as experiencing the first signs of the approaching storm. “The waters are rising along the Seawall,” she cautioned. “In four more hours, everyone needs to be off the island, as authorities predict flooding will make the causeway impassable.”

In the robbery division, the HPD detective cued up the video from the store and pushed play. On the screen, a man and a boy walked into the store, while Harper, behind the counter, sat in her wheelchair. They approached her, and the three of them talked momentarily, Harper gesturing toward the back of the store, as she’d told us she had, indicating the location of the bathroom. The man nodded, his head down, as if trying to shield it from the cameras he must have assumed would be pointed at him. But while Benoit ducked the cameras, Joey, bless his heart, looked straight up at them. He stared sadly at Harper and therefore directly into the camera above her, as if willing her to recognize him.

“You can’t see a car in the parking lot,” David pointed out, running his fingers over the window area visible on the screen. “Benoit kept it far enough back to make sure you couldn’t.”

“Yeah,” I said. “If the parking lot camera had been working, it would have picked up the car. Our luck, the parking lot camera is broken and this video doesn’t help.”

On the screen, Harper filled the cigarettes and then turned, suddenly alarmed. She opened the cash register and pulled out the bills that triggered the alarm. Instantly, Benoit rushed forward, using the boy as a shield. Meanwhile, Harper wielded the shotgun. “It would have been poetic justice if she’d fired that thing at his head,” I said.

“She did the right thing, Sarah,” David cautioned. “She could have hit the boy.”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course, you’re right.”

In the video, it appeared Benoit intended only to flee, until Joey said his name, then Benoit’s hand swung out with the gun, fired, and he turned and ran, while Sally Mae Harper collapsed in her wheelchair, her body slack. She held up a hand to her chest, and when she pulled it away, it was covered in blood.

“We catch him, this’ll work in court on the shooting,” David said. “But how’s it going to help us find him?”

“It’s not,” I said, dismissing it as another lost lead.

Moments later, the captain called. Buckshot’s autopsy was completed, and as we’d expected, he was dead when Benoit set him on fire. “No soot in his trachea,” the captain explained. “And they found a gunshot wound in the back of the skull.”

“Have you notified his family yet?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “The daughter took it hard. We had a couple of counselors from the university go over to tell her. She’s coming in after the storm to make arrangements. Once the hurricane passes, the ex-wife is planning to fly in from California for the funeral.”

I thought about the conversation I’d had with Buckshot standing over the first longhorn, about Peggy and his disappointment that she’d left him. He’d be happy that she was coming home to bury him. I had the impression he’d never stopped loving her. Maybe, despite everything, including the new millionaire husband, she still had some love in her heart for Buckshot.

“Great,” I said sadly. “The least we can do is give Buckshot a good send-off.”

“By then, we better have the crazy bastard who murdered him behind bars,” the captain added.

“Let’s hope,” I said. “On that end, anything to help us?”

“Not really,” the captain admitted. The captain had found no car registration records or driver’s license in Texas for a Pete or Peter Benoit, so we still didn’t have a license number or a description of a car to go out with the alert asking officers to be on the lookout for Benoit. “We’re checking Louisiana,” Captain Williams said. “But being a weekend, it may take a while. We’ve got other folks on this now. While you’re waiting, you two should get some rest. It’s been a long night without sleep.”

It wasn’t what David and I wanted to do, but there seemed little choice. The sun was up, the storm lurked offshore, and neither of us had slept in more than twenty-four hours. I called the ranch. “We’re just finishing up, Mom,” I said. “What’s going on there?”

“Frieda, Maggie, and I are done with breakfast,” she said. “We’re going to keep battening down the hatches. This morning, we’re nailing the shutters on the stable shut.”

“Anything you need?” I asked. “Anything I can do?”

“No, Sarah,” she said. “We’re okay. We really are.”

“I think David and I will stay downtown for a while, then grab some breakfast and see if any new leads come in,” I said. “I’ll drive out to the ranch late this afternoon, in plenty of time to beat the storm.”

“That’s fine, but just don’t wait too long,” Mom cautioned. With that she lowered her voice, confiding, “Maggie’s been asking for you. We saw about Sergeant Buckshot on the news this morning, and she got pretty upset. That poor man. It’s awful, so awful.”

“I know,” I said, wishing I’d remembered to call and warn Mom before Buckshot’s murder hit the news. “It is.”

“The sergeant’s death and that darn hurricane, I’m thinking maybe Maggie’s getting a little scared. The weather reports look pretty bad, and she’s been watching nonstop. I finally made her turn off the television. But most of all, I think, she’s worried about you. She keeps asking where you are and when you’ll be home. Sarah, it wouldn’t be good if you were stuck somewhere and not here when the bad weather hits.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, again thinking about Maggie. Under the best of circumstances, cops’ kids worry. They grow up knowing instinctively that a job that requires their mom or dad to strap on a gun every day isn’t, by definition, safe. Thinking about Maggie at the ranch, anxious about the storm and perhaps even more about what danger I might be in, especially now that a ranger she grew up knowing was dead, his body on a slab at the county morgue, I had a hard time not feeling guilty. I wondered, not for the first time, if my job was at all fair to my daughter.

Worn out, David and I went to his house in the Heights, where he made bacon, eggs, and English muffins while we reviewed everything we’d done, everything we knew about the case, looking for some way to figure out where Benoit would take Joey. Shelters were set up north and west of the city, and David wondered if he’d take the boy there, where they could blend in and hide in the masses of evacuees forced from their homes. There they’d be just faces in the crowd.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Benoit has something planned. Something he’s working toward. Otherwise why all the symbols, all the prep work to get here?”

“But maybe the hurricane’s changed his mind. Made him postpone,” David offered. “Maybe he’s had to come up with a new plan?”

Before I could, David answered his own question. “No,” he said. “Joey was abducted on Wednesday afternoon. By then the hurricane was already in the Gulf and there was a good chance it would hit here. Some of the experts were already predicting that conditions were right and Galveston was a likely target. This is a guy who pays attention, who works things out. He knew the hurricane could be coming, if not here, close. Somehow, he didn’t think it would affect his plans.”

A few moments of silence, and then I threw out another possibility. “Maybe it’s part of his plan.”

“What is?” David asked.

“The hurricane.”

Again, we considered. Instead of brainstorming ideas, we kept quiet, each of us trying to understand the distorted mind of a dangerous killer. I thought back to our meeting with Peter Benoit’s father and the mention he’d made of the day his son held a child hostage. The elder Benoit had made the event sound relatively unimportant. The girl hadn’t been molested or abused. David and I had endured a long, hard, emotional day, and perhaps we weren’t thinking as clearly as usual. I began second-guessing, wondering if we should have asked more questions. I picked up my cell phone and called the nursing home, asking the nurse on duty to patch me through to Dr. Benoit’s room.

I waited what felt like an eternity before Benoit’s voice was on the telephone, then turned on the speaker so David could listen. “Yes, Lieutenant. And how may I help you?”

“Dr. Benoit, I want you to tell Agent Garrity and me more about that little girl, the one your son tied up and kept hidden,” I said. “I believe you said he kept her in a garage?”

“Yes, he did,” the old man said. “But is this really necessary? How can it help you?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But we have nothing else to work with.”

We could hear the old man sigh. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell us,” I suggested. “Whatever comes to mind about that day.”

The old man was silent. These were painful memories of an event he had no desire to relive, but slowly he began talking, his voice ragged with emotion. That morning, the professor had classes, and he returned home early. “It was spring,” he explained. “I thought I’d get my wife and son, take them for a ride in the countryside. Abigail, my wife, always loved that. She said a change of scenery made her feel like she’d had a little vacation, time away to reawaken her senses.”

“What happened when you got home?” David asked.

“Well, I couldn’t find anyone. The house was empty,” the professor said, sounding as tentative as he must have felt that day. “I called out for Abigail and Peter, but no one answered. Peter was about twelve at that time, and he’d been in a little trouble, but nothing important, nothing serious. I never thought…I never thought anything truly bad could happen, that he was capable of hurting anyone.”

“Go on,” I urged. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I was home only a few minutes when a neighbor woman rang the doorbell. She asked if my wife was home yet, explaining that Abby had gone to drive the neighborhood in our old Ford station wagon, looking for the woman’s daughter, that the girl was missing. She was a pretty little thing, four or five, all blue eyes and dark blond, or maybe kind of light brown hair.”

I thought of Joey, a boy who fit that same description.

“Anyway, I told the woman I hadn’t seen my wife, that she wasn’t home when I arrived,” the professor continued. “We walked out onto the front porch to wait. While we stood there, the neighbor woman explained that her daughter had been missing for much of the day. The woman started crying. I tried to calm her, but she was inconsolable. Very afraid. Very worried, not knowing where the girl could have gone or what could have happened to her.”

“Keep going. What occurred next?” I asked.

“Abby drove down the street in our car, then pulled up in front of our house and parked,” Benoit explained. “As the woman said, my wife had been riding through the neighborhood, helping to search. She hadn’t seen the child, and she looked upset as well. Looking back, maybe I had a hunch, a sense that somehow our son was involved. I asked Abby where Peter was, and she said that he’d told her earlier in the day that he’d be playing baseball at the park. I remember being pleasantly surprised, since he had so few friends. The boy was something of a loner, even back then.”

“You said he was how old?” David asked.

“Twelve,” the professor said. “Peter was about twelve, a handsome child but quiet, and always very much to himself.”

“Did you help the women search?” I wanted to know.

“Yes, I did,” the professor said. “Actually, before long, we had nearly every parent on the block looking for the girl. They were circulating through the streets, talking to other children, but no luck. We thought maybe she’d wandered off. We called the police, and a couple of officers were sent in a squad car to the neighbor woman’s house. They took a picture of the girl out of a frame to use to identify her, and that’s when the woman became hysterical. ‘You think she’s dead,’ she screamed. ‘You think my daughter is dead.’ It was horrible.”

At that, the professor grew silent, lost in his memories. “How did you find Peter and the girl?” David asked.

“I didn’t. My wife did,” he explained. “It had been a wet spring in New Orleans, more so than usual, and the bayous were high. It had rained the day before, torrential rains, and the pumps hadn’t been able to keep up. The water was rising. The Corps of Engineers had said they were going to fix it, but while we lived there it was a constant problem. I don’t know if they ever did. The bayou backed up often, but especially so that spring. My wife and I had spent a lot of time worrying about the rising water, talking back and forth, wondering if the bayou would overflow and the water would make its way toward the house, perhaps flood our home.” He drifted off, as if having a difficult time focusing, continuing with his story.

“Go on, Professor,” I prodded. “Please.”

“Yes. Of course,” he said. “So that afternoon, after we’d spent hours looking for the girl, we gave up. Abby and I were both upset, worried about the child, and I went in the house to change from the clothes I’d worn to the university that day. Meanwhile, my wife said she wanted to check on the bayou. She walked back through the trees, to see how high the water was, how much it had risen with the latest rain. Abby was gone a few minutes, and I had thrown on some clothes. The bedroom window was open, and I heard her scream.”

The old man stopped. The longer he talked, the more ragged his voice became, the more agonizing it must have been to relive those moments. “Please, Professor,” I urged. “I need you to tell me everything. Please continue.”

For a moment, only silence. “Why?” the old man finally asked. “Why does this matter now? I’m sorry about your friend, that my son might be responsible for murdering that ranger, but how can this help?”

At the nursing home, David and I had told the old man only that his son was a suspect in the murder of a Texas Ranger. We didn’t tell him that he was also a suspect in a kidnapping. I’m not sure why, other than that the professor was already so upset and appeared so fragile that we took pity on him, thinking there’d be time enough in the future for him to hear the whole story. But now, I had no choice. “We believe your son has abducted a young boy,” I said.

Again, a horrible silence. “Another child. He’s taken another child?”

“Yes, so I need to know what happened to the little girl,” I said softly. “And I need to know now.”

“Oh,” he said, more a grunt than a word. “Well, I understand. I do. Another child. A boy.”

“Yes, a little boy named Joey Warner, about the same age as the girl you’ve been telling me about, four, with light brown hair and large blue eyes,” I said. I gave him a moment to understand fully, then urged him, “So pick up your story. Tell me what happened.”

I heard a long, deep breath, then: “I ran, following my wife’s screams to the bayou. The earth was wet from the recent rain, and it was slippery. I had on an old pair of shoes with smooth soles, and I lost my footing, tumbling down the slope behind the house, as I reached the woods. When I got to the bayou, I was covered in mud. It was then that I saw the girl. I didn’t understand at first why she was in the water, why she was so still. Then I saw the ropes. She was tied up, wrists and ankles, to tree branches extended along the bank. She had her head up, trying to keep above the water, to breathe.”

Again a brief pause, then he went on. “Peter stood just above the waterline, with my wife screaming something I couldn’t understand. I realized she was trying to get to the girl, but our son was pushing his mother back. It may seem odd, but at first I didn’t comprehend what was happening. Then I realized that he’d been sitting on the bank, watching the water rise, waiting for the child to drown. He had a strange look in his eyes, an emptiness.”

“What happened next?” David asked.

“I ran toward the water, grabbed Peter’s arms, pulling him off of my wife. Once she was free, my wife rushed into the bayou and untied the child, rescuing her from the water. The girl kept gasping for air, and my wife wailed and screamed at our son, ‘What did you do? Why? Why? Why?’ The poor little girl, the beautiful child, cried as if the world were ending. I carried her to our home. She felt wet and heavy in my arms, and she sobbed, her face pressed up against my muddy shirt.”

Such horrible memories from agonizing days long past.

“Why drowning?” David asked.

“Pardon me?” the professor asked, sounding confused.

“Agent Garrity wonders why your son would try to drown the girl,” I explained. “Did something happen, anything at all, that in any way helps this make sense?”

Benoit again seemed reluctant to continue, but then he began talking, his words a slow, aching progression. “When Peter was a toddler, about three, I believe, my wife once went to answer the phone while she was bathing him. She was gone only minutes, but somehow he slipped, and when she walked back into the room, our son was unconscious, facedown under the water,” he said. “Abigail was a registered nurse. She began CPR and resuscitated him, but for a short time Peter wasn’t breathing. We talked of it often, and he grew up fascinated with that story, how for a few brief moments he didn’t have a heartbeat.”

I wished again that we’d asked more questions sooner, but at least now we understood. “I thought that you said the girl was kept in the garage and that she wasn’t hurt,” I pointed out.

“Well, what I’d said was that she hadn’t been molested, and what I’d meant by unhurt was that she’d suffered no permanent scars. Reconsidering, I admit that it was an unfortunate word choice. Perhaps I should have said no physical scars,” he said. “But, as I told you, Peter had kept the girl in the garage. Our son told us that was what he’d done up until shortly before we found him at the bayou, and we later found evidence that suggested that was true, including the remainder of the rope he used to tie her.”

“Was this reported to the police?” David asked.

“No, which was now, perhaps, in hindsight, a mistake,” he said. “At the time, we thought it would never happen again. We moved away, which is what the girl’s mother wanted to keep what happened quiet. She didn’t want her child’s name sullied, people speculating what Peter had done to the girl, so she was amenable to keeping the event a secret between our two families.”

“So you left and never spoke of it again?” I asked.

“Not exactly. As I told you, we did take Peter to counseling, years of therapy,” he said. “And it seemed to be the correct decision, when nothing else terrible happened. Nothing, at least, as far as we ever knew. Not until my son attempted to murder me.”

“Did you report that to the police? When your son tried to murder you, what did you do?”

Again a pause. “No. I didn’t tell anyone,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I just wanted to get away. I moved to this nursing home and gave instructions not to admit him. And I tried to forget.”

 

“So what do we take away from that?” David asked after we thanked the professor and hung up. “Is Peter Benoit going to drown Joey? And if so, is the hurricane part of his plan?”

“I don’t know, David,” I said, pacing his dining room. “I just don’t know. Some of this doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Maybe the hurricane is simply playing into his hands. He’d already made up the plan, fashioned the symbols he’d leave as clues, and when the hurricane changed course and headed toward Galveston and Houston, he decided to take advantage of it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But why now? If he’s had this fantasy, why did he wait until now? Why aren’t there other victims?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there are, and we just haven’t tied him to the cases yet,” David said. “Maybe Joey’s the first. Maybe we’ll never know.”

“What about those unidentified kids, the ones I did the facial reconstructions on? We don’t know cause of death, but they’re the right age and race.” I’d thought about them often since the Warner case began, wondering if they could be connected.

“They’re so different, skeletons found in fields, none of this staging with the bulls and the symbols. Age and race are the only factors connecting them,” David said. “I don’t know. Could be, I guess, but I don’t know.”

I thought about that for a few minutes, digested it. “Maybe it doesn’t matter right now. Maybe this isn’t the time to think about it,” I said. “All that’s important is that for whatever reason, Peter Benoit has Joey, and he’s playing some kind of hideous game.”

I thought about what we’d learned and wondered what it all meant, if it told us anything useful, especially about where Benoit had the boy.

“So what we do know is that this guy is into drama, right?” David offered. “The symbols, all this ritual, including the sacrificing of the bulls. It’s all a grand play. Some kind of theater he’s constructing by mixing what he knows from his father’s work in African culture with his own fantasy of murder, drowning, and death.”

“I guess,” I said. Then, after more thought, “Yes, of course, that’s true.”

“So where would you go? What would you do to heighten the drama?” he asked. “In the middle of a hurricane, if you wanted the setting to give the biggest thrill, where would you take the boy to drown him?”