Too Young to Kill (5 page)

But Adrianne—good, bad, or indifferent—was her own person. She was smarter than that. She didn’t want to die. No one who tries to commit suicide twenty to thirty times without success wants to leave this earth; they want help. Adrianne wanted the kids to stop calling her names. She wanted their respect—their friendship—not ridicule and harassment. All the bullying was getting to her. She was desperately trying to find her place in that crowd. Hell, she was trying to find her place anywhere. She had no interest in being a Juggalette, but she wanted to be part of the group, nonetheless. Part of sleeping with the two boys was Adrianne’s way of saying,
I want you to like me.

“I don’t feel right in any place, being away from my mother,” Adrianne told her therapist in 2003, “and it bothers me.”

In another section of that same Q&A, Adrianne seemed to think she had a problem with sex—as in, she felt she could not control herself or abstain.

Jo had been hard on Adrianne ever since she’d been back living with them this second time.

“I didn’t want you here,” Jo admitted to Adrianne that day as they sat and talked. “I really didn’t. Now I do. I am
so
sorry I felt that way. Let’s go to that counseling session together. I want to make things right between us.”

Adrianne didn’t need problems at home on top of the problems she had at school.

“Yes, let’s do it,” Adrianne said again.

Jo said they would go that night.

Upon returning to the station house, EMPD Officer Allen called Sarah Kolb. A woman answered and told the cop to hold on. As soon as they started asking around, looking for Adrianne, the EMPD had heard that the last two people with Adrianne were Sarah Kolb and Cory Gregory.

“Is this Sarah?” Officer Allen asked after a young female voice got on the line.

“Yes.”

After a few introductory words, Allen said, “Are you friends with Adrianne Reynolds?”

“To be honest, no!”

“Okay, but you had contact with her earlier today?”

“Yes, I did,” Sarah said.

“When was that?”

“Oh, in between twelve thirty and one.” Sarah sounded calm. Maybe even a bit concerned for someone she had no trouble saying was as a
former
friend.

“Were you and Cory Gregory giving her a ride somewhere?”

“Yes, sir.” Sarah told Officer Allen that Adrianne did not want to be dropped off at home. So they let her out at the McDonald’s near her house. “Because,” Sarah added, “she said that she didn’t want her parents to see that she was in the car with a boy. And before, when I had hung out with her one time, she told her parents that Cory was my brother, and he’s not.”

“Okay . . . ,” Allen said, beckoning Sarah to continue.

“So I dropped her off at McDonald’s, which is, like, you know, right across the street from her house.”

“Right.”

“And that was the last time I saw her.”

At one point, Sarah said Adrianne was wearing an “orange hoodie and blue jeans,” when she and Cory last saw her. Sarah gave Allen a few names of friends who might have seen Adrianne
after
they dropped her off. People the cops should be checking in with to see if Adrianne was with them.

“You haven’t heard from her since then?”

“No, I haven’t,” Sarah said before suggesting Adrianne had probably run away. “If you
do
hear anything,” Sarah added before they hung up, “I would appreciate it if you would call me and let me know.”

6

As the nine o’clock hour came to pass on Friday night, January 21, 2005, the light snow that had started to fall earlier began to come down more steadily. Standing in his living room, looking out onto Seventh Street, watching the snowflakes collect on the grass, Tony Reynolds shook his head and wondered about his daughter. She was just a tiny thing: five feet four inches, 107 pounds. Her brown hair matched the color of her eyes. Tony kept seeing Adrianne’s smile. Hearing her voice. Seeing her walk through the front door into the living room.

“It’s okay,” Jo told him, walking up and consoling her husband. “We’ll find her, Tony.”

During that counseling session, which took place the Friday before Adrianne disappeared, Jo and Adrianne had had a breakthrough. Through tears and honesty, Adrianne admitted, being the intelligent young person (maybe beyond her years) she was, that by her “defying” Tony and Jo, she had been wrong. There was no room in their lives for insubordination, disobedience, and immature behavior, Jo contended. Adrianne was smarter than that. More grown-up. Jo and Tony had not asked for a lot from Adrianne, and she finally seemed to realize this. During the session Adrianne was asked how the problems she had been causing in school and at home affected her life.

“I cannot be trusted,” she answered. It was a terse, direct response, which told the counselor that Adrianne understood the ramifications of her behavior.

A major step forward.

Later, during the same session, Adrianne added that she had done “nothing” to resolve those problems and wanted more than anything “to be able to tell the truth . . . and to know that I have earned back [that trust] I have broken.”

“I brought all of this on myself,” Adrianne said, taking full responsibility for her life.

She was on her way toward healing.

Jo couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but then again, she knew Adrianne was a smart kid, with a big heart, who just needed to understand and feel that she was being loved.

By the end of the session, they had made plans to go back in two weeks.

But Adrianne was nowhere to be found, and the time for the second session had come and gone.

Shortly after the nine o’clock hour, Jo found Sarah Kolb’s phone number and called her.

“Hey,” Jo said, explaining who she was, “have you seen Adrianne? We can’t find her.” Jo sounded more worried than scared. More concerned than snappy.

Flies with honey . . . and that whole thing.

There was concern and sincerity in Sarah’s voice, Jo recalled. Sarah said she wanted to help. She had seen Adrianne earlier that day and dropped her off, just as Cory had explained to his dad, at the McDonald’s. But she had no idea where she went after that.

“I dropped her off at the McDonald’s,” Sarah explained, “because she didn’t want you guys to know that there were boys in the car.”

“What happened? When?”

“Oh, there was an argument in the car . . . ,” Sarah offered, but didn’t say between whom. Jo assumed it was between Sarah and Adrianne; she had been given some of the details from Adrianne about her on-again, off-again relationship/friendship with Sarah. “Adrianne wanted to go home. She told me McDonald’s because of the boys in the car, and she didn’t want to get into trouble.”

Jo thought this was odd for Adrianne to be concerned about someone being home at noon.

Tony and I are both at work then....

Not a chance of anyone being around.

Why would she care about that?

On the other hand, Adrianne felt Jo and Tony were always on her back, asking her who she was “running around with.” They would certainly have a few questions about Cory Gregory being in the car with Adrianne. Tony didn’t like him, the way he dressed, his attitude, or that look in his eye. Tony knew the type of people Cory hung around with and judged them. Tony wanted and encouraged Adrianne to do better. Cory looked like trouble.

“That’s it?” Jo asked Sarah. Now that she thought about it, perhaps Adrianne was worried a neighbor would see Sarah and Cory drop her off and then blab to Tony.

“Yeah, I haven’t seen or heard from her since then.”

“Call me if you do, okay?”

“Sure,” Sarah said.

On a questionnaire Adrianne answered during a return trip to the psychologist back in 2003, she said she had no religion. Her hobbies, she listed, were singing, drawing, and dance. She said growing up was “hard,” the drugs she watched people do around her, she claimed, made life “hard.” She said the two things she liked best about school were “friends and lunch.” She listed the two most important people in her life as a “deceased uncle” and “two friends, also deceased.” She claimed to be only ten years old when she started dating, and fourteen when she lost her virginity. One of the questions Adrianne was asked on that day seemed to draw the most jarring answer.

What do you read?

Murder.

Sleep was not going to come with smiling sheep jumping through their dreams, singing “Kumbaya,” offering Tony and Jo beautiful thoughts on this night. Tony’s daughter was out there . . . somewhere.

In trouble.

He could feel it in his bones.

Yet, Tony and Jo needed to try to find some rest if they were going to be any good to Adrianne.

Jo and Tony’s bedroom was in the basement of their ranch-style home. Adrianne’s room was directly above them on ground level. Jo’s twins, Joshua and Justin, also had rooms on the same floor as Adrianne.

Before heading downstairs to bed, Jo and Tony discussed what they should do.

Tony had an idea. They’d done it before.

He and Jo placed several empty cans on the top of Adrianne’s door, so if she tried to sneak in during the middle of the night, the cans would fall, make a racket on the floor, and wake them up below.

A booby trap.

If nothing else, it helped them to cope. Gave them hope. Maybe a false sense that Adrianne was out and about, perhaps drunk, high, or finding trouble with a boy, and she would be coming home eventually when the bender was over.

Optimism. In this situation, you grasp on to any thread you can.

“Typical of Adrianne,” Jo remarked later, “because she loved to talk so much, we
honestly
believed at that time that she had maybe gone over a friend’s house, got to talking, and lost track of time.”

Tossing and turning, every time a car drove by the house and the headlights bounced off the top of the wall in Tony’s bedroom, or an engine roared, maybe footsteps outside, he opened his eyes and looked up. A few times, he even got out of bed as a shadow passed by the head-level basement windows, because he thought someone was walking into the house.

Adrianne?

Nope, just the trees blowing in the wind. Kids out on the street messing around.

Nestled back in bed, Tony considered tomorrow to be another day. If she didn’t come home tonight, they’d find her in the morning. It was a good bet Adrianne hightailed it back to Texas, and her mother was covering for her, allowing Tony time to blow off some steam. Adrianne was probably fed up with all those kids at school she called friends and decided she was better off in Texas.

This thought, if nothing else, was enough to cradle Tony to sleep.

7

Early the next morning, Saturday, January 22, Jo and Tony got up, had their morning coffee, showered, and hit the road. It was slow going, because the overnight snow had turned back into freezing drizzle, which put a slippery glaze over everything.

There had been no word from Adrianne throughout the night.

Something was wrong. Tony knew it.

They drove out to Port Byron, a twenty-minute ride northeast, snaking along the bank of the Mississippi. Adrianne had a friend there. She had sometimes gone over to his house to hang out.

“Nope. Haven’t seen her,” her friend said.

They drove over to the Black Hawk College Outreach Center, Adrianne’s high school. Parked. Got out. Began searching around the premises, like detectives.

“We were actually looking through the bushes at this point,” Jo recalled. “We knew there was a fight in the car”—something Sarah Kolb had told them the previous night—“and now our imaginations got the best of us and we were searching on our hands and knees through the bushes.”

Looking for what?

“Adrianne’s body,” Jo said.

Anxiety now dictated their actions. So many different scenarios ran through their minds. Tony and Jo had a hard time keeping reality on track. They allowed their emotions to control their thoughts and what they did. There had been no indication that Adrianne was in trouble, other than her not calling and not coming home. Yet, they expected the worst.

Then they didn’t.

That roller-coaster ride had begun: one minute, things were fine and they presumed Adrianne was going to be home when they pulled in the driveway. The next, they were burying her, writing a eulogy.

“Adrianne,” Jo said, “had never gone twenty-four hours without contacting us.”

They were closing in on that hour.

With no luck at the school, they drove home. Throughout this time, Tony and Jo had called the EMPD to see if the cops had uncovered any news of Adrianne’s whereabouts.

The EMPD said they did not have any new leads, but they were working on the case.

Jo called Sarah Kolb again to see if Sarah had heard from Adrianne throughout the night. If she was in trouble, Adrianne would likely call her friends first. She did not have a cell phone—so Jo and Tony could not track her down that way.