Thirty-nine

Hoping Crystal’s soon-to-be ex would pull it off, I had Sylvia on standby, and we were seated in an interview room fifteen minutes later. Evan and his parents waited anxiously in the lobby while Sylvia asked Crystal if she wanted to wait to consult her attorney.

“No,” Crystal said. “I figure we can make a good deal without him. I have information you want, and what I want is to not spend any time in jail.”

“What have you got to tell us?” Sylvia asked. “We need to know what you have to bargain with. Do you know where Joey is? Do you know where this person has taken him?”

Brokering a deal is a lot like poker, and Sylvia and I were doing our best to hide what we had in our hand. Meanwhile, Crystal grinned as if she figured she held a straight flush. “I can describe the guy. We met in the park. I know a lot about him, including his name.”

“But can you tell us where to find him?” I asked, eyes flat on Crystal’s face, watching every nuance. Despite her apparent confidence, she squirmed in the chair, displaying an ounce of discomfort. Unconvinced that Crystal could help us, I repeated what Sylvia had already warned: “Before we agree to any deal, we need to know what you have to bargain with. Listen, Crystal, the bottom line here is that if you want a good deal, your information needs to be useful to us. If it’s not, we have no reason to offer you anything.”

“Yeah. I get it. I know the guy’s name, where he lives, everything about him,” Crystal jeered. It didn’t take much to get this woman riled up, and I could see her blood pressure mounting. “I can tell you a lot.”

Sylvia and I exchanged a brief glance, and I nodded. No matter what, I needed to know what Crystal could tell us. We might be giving up some options when it came to prosecuting her, but we’d think about that later. Right now, all I cared about was finding that little boy alive. We’d come so close in the pasture, only to lose him.

Once she had my agreement, Sylvia pulled out the first form, the one that stipulated Crystal was voluntarily waiving her right to an attorney. “You have to sign this if we’re going to negotiate with you without Mr. Barnett,” she explained. “If you decide at any time you want your attorney present, the interview will stop. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” Crystal said, signing her name in a loopy, childlike handwriting. “I understand.”

“Okay,” Sylvia said, all business. She then pulled out a second sheet of paper. “This is part two, our offer. It’s a ten-year probated sentence. That means ten years’ probation, no jail time, for the charge of offering a child for sale, the Texas statute that includes selling a minor.”

“Let’s do five,” Crystal said, smiling at us. “Bring it down to five, and I’ll sign it.” She sat back in the chair, arms folded. It had been only one night, but black circles ringed her eyes, and she began rubbing her wrists, as if sore from the handcuffs she’d arrived in.

“Not much sleep in here, huh?” I asked.

“They leave the lights on,” she said. “And people talk and scream and stuff all night long. Plus, I’m pretty sure those mattresses have bedbugs. There’s something, bites all over my stomach.”

“Poor you,” I said, decidedly unsympathetic. “Imagine what it’s like in a Texas prison. No air-conditioning in the hot summers. No telephone privileges.”

Sylvia sized up the young woman, frowning. The prosecutor had been around a long time, long enough to understand how to ignite fear. When she smiled, it was cold and hard. “Mrs. Warner, you’re not listening,” she said. “You called this meeting. We didn’t. There’s a hurricane coming and the city’s closing down. You want this ranger and the others looking for Joey to go out and risk their lives to find him. That’s what you expect?”

“Yeah,” Crystal said. “I tell them where to look, and they need to go out and find my kid. That’s what cops are supposed to do.”

“Yeah, well, you, as Joey’s mother, you were supposed to protect him, not sell him to the highest bidder,” Sylvia challenged. “And how did that turn out?”

She might have been young, but it was apparent that Crystal had been around. She didn’t back down. “Five years,” she said. “Or no deal.”

“Seven,” Sylvia countered, scratching out “ten” on the form, initialing the change, and pushing the paperwork back across the table at Crystal. “If you don’t break your probation, you’ll never serve a day for selling the kid. All you have to do is keep your nose clean. My final offer.”

Smiling, Crystal picked up the agreement and read it. “I knew I could get a better deal than that Barnett idiot,” she said, placing it on the table to sign it. “I knew I didn’t need a lawyer. I told my parents that, but, like always, they didn’t believe me.”

“Good job, you’ve got what you want,” I said. “Now tell us about the guy who has Joey.”

For the next half hour, Crystal talked about someone she knew as Larry Montgomery, a good-looking, middle-aged man who approached her in the park and told her that he and his wife wanted a child and couldn’t have one. “This Larry guy, he said that his wife wanted to raise Joey. He’s got lots of money, and he can do all kinds of things for him that I can’t do. He drove me past his house, a few blocks from the park. It’s big with a big yard, and he said he’d put up a swing set and a sandbox. This Larry said he’s going to give Joey everything he asks for.”

“Did you ever meet his wife?” Sylvia asked.

“No,” Crystal said with a shrug. “I asked to meet her, but Larry said he wanted to surprise her, to bring Joey home to her like a present.”

“You weren’t even curious about the woman who’d be raising your son?” I asked. “Not at all?”

“Larry said she was a wonderful person,” Crystal said, visibly defensive. “He told me she loves kids, and that she always wanted a kid like Joey. They had a girl once, a little girl Joey’s age, who looked like Joey, with kind of brown hair, not dark but a blondish brown like Joey. I guess the little girl, well, she had kind of big blue eyes like Joey’s, too.”

The description of the child Benoit had attempted to murder in New Orleans came to mind. “What happened to her?” I asked.

“A terrible accident. She drowned when they were living in Louisiana, in a bayou,” Crystal said. “When Larry talked about it, he cried.”

It was all lies, of course, twisted half-truths, memories out of the past contorted and manipulated. Like everything else Benoit had done, it was all a game, symbols and clues left behind to heighten the excitement. David was right: Benoit wanted us on his trail, just a step behind him. If we hadn’t found his father to guide us, Benoit had made sure that he’d told Crystal just enough to suggest what he planned to do with the boy.

“What else do you know about him?” I asked.

“I can give you his address,” she offered. “I know where he lives. He even said I could visit Joey once all the publicity about the kidnapping is over and you cops stop investigating.”

“Write it down,” Sylvia said, scooting her legal pad and a pen across the table. Crystal complied, writing out an address. Once she did, I tore off the page, copied the address in my notebook, and then walked over to a D.A.’s investigator Sylvia had brought with her, a carefully dressed man with a graying pompadour who’d been standing off to the side, listening. “Call major crimes. Tell them this is a lead on the Warner case and ask them to have the house checked out. See if the boy’s there.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” he said, nodding, and walked away. I returned my attention to Crystal, who sat across from Sylvia, literally twiddling thumbs, fingers interlocked, thumbs circling each other, as if she were bored. I wanted to shake her, but instead I hung back and bit my tongue. It wasn’t time to unload yet.

“Did this Larry ever talk about Galveston?” I asked, my voice calm.

“How did you know he’d talk about Galveston?” Crystal asked. She’d stopped playing around with her hands and looked at me, curious.

“This is your turn to answer questions, not mine,” I said, determined not to give her any reason to stop talking. “Tell us what we need to know.”

Crystal thought for a moment. “He told me that he has a place there, a place he likes to go, with a fishing pier and a beach, near a park. He said he was going to take Joey one day. He said it’s a beautiful place.”

That seemed to confirm what David had deduced, that Benoit would head to Galveston. I thought of the beaches with piers I knew, extending out into the water, and how the storm surge was already rising on the island. I wondered if David and the captain would make it across before the causeway became impassable. But before I called David, I needed more from Crystal Warner.

“Tell me about his car. Describe it,” I said. “License plate number, anything you remember.”

“It was some kind of an SUV, one of those Japanese ones, but not a Toyota. I don’t remember what brand. Navy blue with big wheels,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t remember the license plate, but it had a sticker on the back bumper with kind of a weird drawing on it.”

“What kind of a drawing?” I asked.

“Well, kind of…,” Crystal said, grabbing the pen and pad again. She drew a symbol, like two capital Es, with an I in between, the second E turned backward to face the first. “Maybe not exactly, but something like that. I said it reminded me of a butterfly, and I asked him what it meant, but he said he didn’t know, that he just thought it was pretty.”

“Is there anything else?” Sylvia asked. “Do you know anything, anything at all, that could help the lieutenant and the others find Joey?”

“No, that’s it.” Crystal thought for a minute and then shrugged. “I’m not a bad mom. I’m not. I love Joey. I just couldn’t take care of him, is all. I was at the park one afternoon while Joey played with a bunch of kids, and Larry and me started talking. Well, I couldn’t support Joey, and my parents wouldn’t let us live with them, there wasn’t room. And Evan had that blond bimbo he was shacking up with, and suddenly his parents took him back. They took him back as if Joey and me, well, we weren’t ever part of his life. It was like they were saying if he dumped us, they wanted him and they’d help him. If he was with us, no deal.”

“That must have been infuriating,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. “I can appreciate why you were so upset and desperate.”

“I was desperate,” she said, looking relieved that I understood. “I couldn’t find a good job. I applied for a few, but nobody hired me, and I had the kid to take care of. Plus, I couldn’t go out. Couldn’t do anything. I mean, my friends, they weren’t willing to have a kid come along, and Joey was there all the time.”

Before the interview ended, I had some housekeeping to do, a few final questions I wanted answered, things that had been nagging at me. “When you went out last Saturday night, I heard your parents couldn’t babysit. That must have been disappointing,” I said. “What did you do?”

“Oh, it wasn’t so hard,” she said with a shrug. “I’d done it before. I just gave Joey cough medicine, the adult stuff. It put him to sleep.”

“I see,” I said, wondering how any woman, any mother, could be so callous, so fixated only on her own needs. Crystal didn’t even look upset admitting that she’d drugged her child so she could have a night in a bar. Something else still puzzled me. “If you really sold the boy, if you knew he wasn’t coming home, why didn’t you put his toys away?” I asked. “Why leave them scattered around the house?”

She sat back in her chair. “I wanted to,” she said with an exaggerated frown. “My mom wouldn’t let me. I started to and she made me put them all back, right where they were, like it was some kind of a shrine or something. I told her Joey wasn’t coming home, but she didn’t believe me. She got really upset. It was sick.”

“Yeah, it sounds pretty sick,” I said, not meaning Crystal’s mother. “So tell me about the thirty grand. You know, you almost had me believing you didn’t know about it.”

At the mention of the money, Crystal looked even more pleased with herself. “I figured you’d find out about it pretty quick, so I’d thought about it a lot, about how to react. And the more I thought about it, I didn’t see how you could prove it wasn’t a gift from some donor, especially if I went on TV and asked for donations, like I did,” she said with a slight chuckle. “I wanted fifty, but I couldn’t get Larry to go up past thirty. Thirty wasn’t bad, though.”

“Yeah,” I said, fighting to keep my face from reflecting my utter disgust. “Good negotiating. You’re a real pro.” Crystal didn’t catch the sarcasm, and she continued to grin, smug about her skillful bargaining. “Weren’t you afraid he wouldn’t pay you?”

“Nah,” she said. “I made it clear to Larry that if that money didn’t hit my account first thing the next morning, I’d be screaming about how I suddenly remembered a guy I saw in the park, the one who kept looking at Joey. I’d say I saw him drive home once and knew where he lived. With a good description, y’all would have found him in no time.”

Moments passed, and none of us talked. I was absorbing all we’d learned, and I suspected Sylvia was as well.

As if to wrap up the conversation, Crystal asked, “You’ll tell Evan how I helped, won’t you? Make sure he knows I told you everything I could to help find Joey. We’re getting back together, and once you find Joey, we’re going to be a family again.”

“If we find Joey. If he’s still alive,” I said, deciding it was time to jerk her out of never-never land and reveal what was really going on. She frowned at me as if she didn’t understand. “The thing is, Crystal, that this man who has Joey, he doesn’t plan to raise him like he told you.”

With that, I took out the photograph of Peter Benoit from the nursing home, the one his father had at the front desk out of fear his son would murder him. “Is this the Larry guy you sold Joey to?”

Crystal looked at the picture and frowned. “Yeah. How did you get a picture of him? Did you already find him?”

“His name’s not Larry. It’s Peter Benoit, and he’s not planning to raise Joey, he’s going to kill him,” I said.

She eyed me, unsure. “I don’t believe it. He was older, but pretty good-looking. A really nice guy. Smart, too. He said he had the money to give Joey a good life.”

“Peter Benoit has tried to murder before, his father and at least one other child we know of. And he has Joey. You sold your son to a killer, a sick, sick man,” I said. Crystal shook her head, disbelieving. “Crystal, Benoit is playing some kind of game, sending us messages that tell us that’s precisely what he’s going to do. Whether you believe it or not, this man is going to murder your son.”

Despite everything, Crystal still looked unimpressed. “You’re right. I don’t believe it.”

“You know, I don’t have time to try to convince you, but it’s the truth,” I said. “I’m leaving now, and so is Sylvia.”

“Do you know how to pray?” Sylvia asked the girl as we all stood and one of the guards moved forward. He had the handcuffs out, and he grabbed Crystal’s arms and clicked them into place behind her back.

“Why?” she asked.

“I thought that perhaps you’d want to pray for your son. Barring that, you may want to pray for yourself. Because the agreement you signed was only for one offense, offering a child for sale,” Sylvia said, giving her a look of absolute distaste. “What’s not covered is what happens if Joey dies. Then the charge is different. Then we indict you for being a party to a murder.”

For the first time, the young woman looked more than vaguely concerned. “What’s being a party to a murder?” she asked. “You mean, like I helped?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like you did when you agreed to turn your back in the park so this creep could take your son.”

Crystal thought about that, and her eyes opened wider. “But he never said he’d murder Joey,” she said, her voice small. “I didn’t know.”

“You can tell that to the judge and jury. I’m sure they’ll be impressed,” I said. “In the meantime, like Ms. Vogel suggested, assuming you know how, this is a good time to pray.”