Cold Case (18 page)

I wondered why.

Since Thea had last been seen at the Avon Hill School Thursday afternoon, the Cambridge cops came in swinging. Not a single interview had been conducted by lowly patrolmen. Top brass had handled things from the get-go.

Miss Eva Walters, then headmistress at Avon Hill, had declared Thea an extremely intelligent and gifted girl given to odd behavior. Such as? Well, she smoked cigarettes. Dear God, who didn't, before the Surgeon General's warning? She wore ragged pants and sweatshirts. Miss Walters thought the young lady actually changed her clothing in the rest room, substituting rebellious jeans for the ruffles favored by her mother.

Way to go, Thea! I cheered silently.

And then, the
book
. Well, Miss Walters doubted the officer would have read
Nightmare's Dawn
, but the book, “the novelette” as she called it, was extremely vulgar and inappropriate. Really, if the child hadn't been a Cameron, the girl would most likely have been expelled. Miss Walters knew for a fact that other parents were concerned: such a child might infect their own sweet girls with knowledge the headmistress could only term “sexually precocious.”

Bet there'd been a run on copies of
Nightmare's Dawn
at the Cambridge cop house.

An entire paragraph of print had been completely covered with thick gobs of wite-out.

A Cambridge officer openly wondered if Thea's disappearance was some sort of publicity stunt, arranged by her publisher. He was immediately replaced.

Maybe Miss Walters had done away with Thea, I speculated, afraid she'd smear the school's shining reputation with her bad language and active sex life. Miss Walters had not been replaced.

I checked my faculty list. She was no longer on board. Retired? Dead?

Each of Thea's teachers had been interviewed. Without exception they had declared her “bright,” or “clever,” damning her with faint praise. Her English teacher, a Mr. Henreid Symmes, seemed particularly defensive, stating that the girl would have been better off with a private tutor. She hardly ever came to class, he said. His age was listed as sixty-four.

Small wonder Henreid Symmes was not among the current faculty.

The search for Thea's school friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, met with denial on all sides. No one admitted to friendship. No one sat with her at lunch. Angrily, I considered Anthony Emerson's belated testimony. Thea had been good enough to bed, but not good enough to share his cafeteria table. Bastard.

Keeping Thea's reputation unbesmirched may have smacked of honor to an Avon Hill boy like Anthony Emerson. Not to mention the fact that he'd have feared repercussions, possibly expulsion.

On the other hand, Thea could have been pure as a vestal virgin. Emerson could have lied. I had only his word for Thea's wanton behavior. And her words, in her novel. Which was a novel, a work of fiction.

Back to the files. The facts.

One Madeleine Pierce, senior student, the same student who'd spotted Thea at the school at ten past two Thursday afternoon, stated that Thea often wandered around the school grounds. She had been observed speaking with the gardeners. One, a casual day laborer no longer at the school, had departed with no forwarding address. The second gardener was a black man named Edgar Barrett Jr.

I'm not saying the cops at the Cambridge PD were more racist than those of other departments at the time, but from the moment they happened on Edgar, it was as if nobody else existed. They extracted such damning evidence as the fact that he'd once told a neighbor that there were some damn fine-looking chicks at that rich folks' school.

Amazing they hadn't lynched the man.

Edgar Barrett Jr. had no criminal record, not even a juvie offense. Fourteen officers had examined him at length. Tape recordings were cross-referenced, but the tapes were not included, nor were any transcripts of his testimony. I wondered why. Maybe because he'd been beaten during interrogation.

I took a sip of tepid coffee that made the bitter taste in my mouth worse. I'd already given up chipping away at the doughnuts. Sucking the sugar coating seemed safer.

Several audiotape cross-references had been inked out, blackened so thoroughly they were unreadable. Had they been effaced by the same hand that had earlier wielded the wite-out?

Back to the FBI. A hot line had been set up, a ten-thousand-dollar reward offered. Thea was swiftly sighted in New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville, as well as every town within fifty miles of Massachusetts. Her home phone had been tapped, but there were no ransom calls. Also no hang-up calls, the kind runaways typically make, just to assure themselves that everything's okay at home, Mom and Dad are in the living room, all's right with the world.

I scribbled down Edgar Barrett's home address and phone number. After twenty-four years, there wasn't much hope he'd still be living in the same place, but I could use his old locale to track him down.

The Cameron family, in stark contrast to poor Edgar, had been granted kid-glove treatment of the type usually reserved for embassy personnel and visiting royalty. Doctors had signed various statements explaining that Mrs. Cameron was too agitated to speak about her beloved daughter's disappearance. Her husband, Franklin, suffered from markedly high blood pressure that had kept him off the campaign trail for six months; questioning might trigger a heart attack. Thea's older sister had been whisked from the house once the kidnapping fear erupted. Beryl also had a doctor's note, explaining that she was “in a highly excitable state, given to hysterical outbursts, and unfit to interview.” Several more passages had been thoroughly blacked out. I tried to decipher the doctor's signature, wished I'd smuggled in a magnifying glass. It was one of those infuriating horizontal-line rush jobs that you see so often on prescriptions, but I thought I could make out an initial “A” and a second initial “M.” Andrew Manley, psychiatrist, deceiver, and disappearance artist. As far as I could tell, the older sister had never been questioned. Thea's brother, Garnet, had been on campus at the Halloway School in New Hampshire the day Thea disappeared. Several schoolmates could vouch for his whereabouts. Not that there had ever been more than routine disagreements between the two younger siblings. They were close in age and temperament. Garnet led a search of the family's Marblehead summer home, calling his sister's name, investigating their childhood hideaways on the vast estate with its private beach.

A brief note declared that the Marblehead house, while still owned by the Camerons, had been abandoned, uninhabited since the disaster.

A smudge on the side of a sheet of paper caught my eye. A coffee stain? No. An erasure. I turned it upside down and sideways, held it to the light. Nothing. I ran the lead of my pencil softly over the broken fibers: 902869432. I added the numbers to my notes, thinking that I was probably copying part of the long-distance phone number of some retired lieutenant's girlfriend. On impulse I turned back a few pages. Another erasure. I couldn't get the same fidelity with my lead pencil, but it shared several of the same digits.

A new folder. I tugged at the rubber band, smoothed the curling pages. The Marblehead cops who'd played a role in the summerhouse search entered the fray in earnest two weeks later.

A dog, later identified as a Russian wolfhound named Petrov, had returned home to his family bearing a gift, a lone size six ballet flat, black. The dog's walker—his walker! I thought, give me a break!—had noticed that the hound veered from his usual morning path to dig about in the beach grass. Said walker—an Irish housekeeper named Caren or Karen, Midgeley or Migely, depending on who was filling out the form—had watched idly as Petrov unearthed a frilly white blouse, tearing it with claws which should have been trimmed the previous week except the Doggy Delite van broke down and clipping a dog's nails was beneath the status of a housekeeper, walking the huge animal being penance enough.

The only reason the buried clothes had come to official attention was that Caren-Karen was dating a cop's brother. By the time the actual officer heard about the discovery, dogs and seagulls had reduced the find to cotton and linen rags.

Extensive and expensive lab tests had been done on those rags. Thea's mother bought her daughter only natural-fiber clothing. Only natural fibers were detected. Not a single dead or mauled polyester.

The Marblehead officer plus his chief of police plus a clergyman had ferried the tattered remains and the single ballet shoe to Dover.

They were consistent with Thea's clothing in substance, style, and size, and “could have belonged to the deceased.”

I wrote down the date of the report: April 25, 1971. It was the first occasion on which Thea had been referred to as the “deceased.” Since there were no bloodstains on the clothing I wondered why. There was no mention of a suicide note, and it seemed a big jump to assume that Thea's clothes on the shore meant Thea's body in the ocean.

I'd been at it for over three hours and papers were spread over two rectangular tables. I'd kept them in chronological order, separated by location.

I was searching for the hard-hitting questions: Did Thea smoke pot, shoot heroin? Drink? Sleep around? Use birth control? Was she pregnant? Either nobody'd asked or nobody'd recorded the answers.

I closed my eyes, checked my watch. Back to work. Abruptly Sergeant Woodrow MacAvoy took control of the presumed Marblehead suicide, gathering all paperwork in Boston. Why? MacAvoy was a homicide dick. Suicide's not even against the law in Massachusetts.

The files were starting to look like documents released under the Federal Freedom of Information Act, words erased, entire paragraphs obliterated. I lifted a heavily blacked-out sheet to my nose, sniffed. No recent smell of ink.

A body—what remained of a female body—was netted by an unfortunate Gloucester fisherman ten days after the discovery of the clothing. May 3, 1971. Franklin Cameron had quickly identified the remains and services were already scheduled when a second family requested a dental records check. The Foleys' daughter, Heather, had drowned after falling off a cabin cruiser, too drunk to swim. Prom night.

The coroner's verdict took two full days: Daughter number one, Dorothy Cameron aka Thea Janis. Dorothy, not Heather. I blew out a long breath. What an eternity those forty-eight hours must have lasted for each family. The Foleys issued an apology for causing the Camerons to delay their elaborate funeral. A Cameron family spokesman declared that anyone might have made such a mistake given the condition of the remains, the emotional stress surrounding such a devastating loss. He asked the press to restrict their idle speculation.

The idle speculation—what little of it there was seemed confined to the
Herald
, the
Globe
never touched it—concerned filthy lucre, Thea's will, and who might benefit substantially, and more quickly, by having the girl declared dead.

In my notebook I wrote: What's a fifteen-year-old doing with a will? Underlined it twice.

In a May 14, 1971, report from Beverly—Pride's Crossing actually, the upscale,
upscale
part of Beverly—I first saw the name Albert Ellis Albion.

Albert Ellis Albion. The man now residing at MCI Walpole. Thea's convicted killer.

I took down the killer's vital stats, read his collected confessions, studied his mug shot. Albert, at twenty, had never made it out of high school and not for want of trying. It seemed inconceivable that this was a man Thea would have voluntarily selected as her Thursday night companion. Had she been kidnapped from school? Had she been planning to spend the night at the Marblehead house? Most likely the latter. Albion said he'd picked her up in his van on Route 1A in Swampscott. He said she'd been hitchhiking, carrying a duffle bag. He'd only stopped to help.

His testimony might have been more credible had he not “stopped to help” two other missing teens, Anne Katon, age sixteen, and Eileen Evans, fifteen. Anne lived close to Albert's Lynn apartment, waitressed at a fast-food joint where he breakfasted each morning. He might have known Anne in a casual sort of way, offered her a ride home from work one night. Eileen's bicycle had been abandoned in the woods six weeks before her body was uncovered in scrubby brush near Rocky Ledge Road in Swampscott. There was no evidence he'd ever met Eileen; she hadn't been acquainted with Anne Katon. Neither girl had any tie to Dorothea Cameron. If Albion hadn't confessed to Thea's murder as well, she'd probably have been declared a suicide.

I pored over three forensic studies. Three autopsy reports. Hours Postmortem: unknown for each. Clinical Diagnosis: most of that was beyond me, but I took careful notes nonetheless. Gross Diagnosis: Albion seemed to favor the blunt instrument to stun, a knife for close work. A rock spattered with blood had been found near Eileen Evans's nude corpse. A hammer in the back of his van revealed blood of the same type as Anne Katon's. No knives had been recovered, but a local shopkeeper had sworn to selling Albion at least two instruments that could have inflicted the deadly wounds. Only Thea's body had been found in water. It was more difficult to determine which injuries had been caused before she entered the ocean, which after. Her autopsy report was the only one with paragraphs whited out. Clinical Summary: again beyond my ken. A list of postmortem tests was appended to each girl's report. Each had been sexually violated. Albion was a secreter. His blood type matched the blood secretions in the recovered sperm. No sperm had been recovered from Thea Janis. Floaters—bodies found in water—yield few clues.

I reread his confession concerning Thea, committed it to memory.

I checked the time, raised and lowered my aching shoulders. Rearranged the files carefully, replacing rubber bands, matching the wide bands to the wide indentations, the narrow to the narrow. My goal: to make the stack look as though it had never been touched.