Too Young to Kill (6 page)

“No, I have not heard from her.” Jo could tell Sarah was with someone. She heard voices in the background. “Here,” Sarah said, “talk to Cory. He might know what’s going on.”

Jo waited.

“Yup?” Cory Gregory said.

“Have you seen or heard from Adrianne? We’re really worried about her.”

Cory had a noticeable Midwestern drawl, with a heavy Southern effect. A cocky attitude.

“We done let her off at McDonald’s,” Cory said. Then explained why, giving Jo the same answer Sarah had already given them.

Jo and Tony did not know Cory that well, other than what Adrianne had said about him. They had seen him one time, and he was sitting inside a car. They had heard about Cory enough from Adrianne, but even Adrianne was guarded regarding what she shared. No doubt she wanted to protect his image because she wanted to hang around Cory without Jo and Tony worrying about her. There was something between Cory and Adrianne—that much was no secret. The one time Jo and Tony had seen Cory, Sarah had shown up at the house to pick up Adrianne for a party. It was the previous year, 2004, a few weeks before Christmas.

“Who’s that?” Tony asked about the boy sitting in Sarah’s car.

“Sarah’s brother,” Adrianne lied.

“Yeah,” Sarah added, backing her up. Cory gave the old man a wave and smile.

“It’s Sarah’s brother. He’s cool, Dad. Don’t worry.”

Yes, she said those often regrettable two words mothers and fathers hear repeatedly: “Don’t worry.”

Everything is going to be just fine.

Except it wasn’t.

Adrianne was missing. And Sarah and Cory, supposedly the last two people to have seen her, had not heard from Adrianne, so they claimed, and had no idea where she might have run off to. It was as if Adrianne Reynolds, a sixteen-year-old girl who never had direction in life, to begin with, had turned into dust and had blown away with the wind.

8

Fox Pointe Apartments on Seventh Street in East Moline, a two-lane road with a snow-covered grass divider between, was a place Tony and Jo knew Adrianne had hung out at, once in a while. Near Wiman Park, Fox Pointe was not one of those places Tony would have chosen for his baby girl to be running off to, if it was up to him. But what was a father to do? Adrianne was going to go where she wanted. As much as he would have liked to do it, Tony couldn’t lock his little girl up in the house. She was sixteen going on thirty. Giving her that freedom and space to be her own person, to come and go as she pleased (with restrictions), even though she had messed up in the past, was something Tony had wrestled with, but decided Adrianne needed it. After all, he and Jo wanted Adrianne to understand that they trusted her to make the right choices.

Jo and Tony drove to Fox Pointe. Trolling slowly through the parking lot, Jo looking at cars, Tony staring toward the front doors of the apartments, they hoped to recognize a car or maybe even bump into one of those boys Adrianne was coming to visit. They didn’t know why Adrianne came here. All she had said was that she had “friends at Fox Pointe.” Tony, more than Jo, knew what her “friends” looked like, who they were by face, but not name.

After a careful drive through the parking lot, once again they met a dead end.

From there, they drove to the EMPD. Tony wanted to pass on to the cops a few names and addresses and see what was going on, if they had uncovered anything new.

“We wanted to give them the Fox Pointe address, mainly,” Jo said. “Maybe they could find out more than we did.”

A strange thing happened as Tony and Jo stood inside the EMPD. On the desk of the officer they were giving the Fox Pointe address to were several photos of those “friends” Adrianne had visited at Fox Pointe. Tony recognized them.

Jo felt Tony bump her with an elbow; then he nodded in the direction of the photos.

“Is this the people who live there?” the cop asked.

“Yeah,” Tony said.

Come to find out, these were friends of Sarah Kolb’s. She had introduced them to Adrianne.

More Juggalos.

The cops said they were looking into it. And it appeared they had a bead on someone. There was nothing Tony and Jo could do standing inside the police station, asking questions the police could not answer.

Go home. Wait for her to call. Continue to contact Adrianne’s friends. Let us do our jobs,
they were told.

She’s going to turn up somewhere,
Tony told himself as he and Jo left the station house.

Soon.

Leaving the EMPD, Tony and Jo took the same route they had the previous night, going back out to Port Byron to see Adrianne’s friend.

He wasn’t home.

Next, they trekked back to the school to conduct a more thorough search of the grounds.

Déjà vu.

“Let’s try McDonald’s,” Jo suggested. They hadn’t been there.

The snow continued to fall as the wipers on Tony’s vehicle knocked back and forth against the sides of the windshield; fear and worry swelled inside the car like a stink.

Silence became the enemy.

“I am going to beat her ass when I find her!” Tony said to Jo at one point.

“No, you’re not. You better not.”

It turned into an argument.

At McDonald’s, they found nothing. Not one sign of Adrianne. They showed photos of Adrianne to patrons and employees. No one seemed to recognize her. Or could think of anything they had seen out of the ordinary recently.

They were back at square one.

The sad and sobering statistics regarding runaways and missing children in the United States suggest a bit of confusion and misinterpretation on the public’s part—that is, if crime television, the media in general, and the Internet are the places you get your data. Watching television, one might think that child abductions happen every hour of the day. And yet, breaking the data down, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the truth of the matter doesn’t quite add up to the frenzy of fear and worry we have shown in recent years. One in seven kids between the ages of ten and eighteen will run away from home at some point in his or her life. Shockingly, there are 1 to 3 million runaway/homeless kids living on the streets in the United States. Of these children, 797,500 (younger than eighteen) were reported missing in a one-year period of time, which equates to an average of 2,185 children being reported missing each day.

That’s a lot of kids—no matter how you add it up.

Yet most of these children have left home by their own accord.

Now, here is where the statistics get interesting. Of those nearly 800,000 reported missing kids, 203,900—a little over a quarter—are said to have been victims of family abductions; 58,200 of those are victims of non-family abductions (meaning neighbors, friends, acquaintances, strangers). But here’s the shocker: 115 children are victims of what the Department of Justice refers to as “stereotypical” kidnappings, a snatch and grab by
someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child fifty miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently,
the DOJ reports state.

In other words, that pedophile in the park, the one all parents fear will snatch their kid out of thin air and do God knows what to him or her, is a rare culprit.

So, based solely on the numbers, there was a good chance Jo and Tony should have considered that Adrianne—had she been abducted—would have been taken by someone she knew. Or, as the data seemed to bear out, it was a good bet that Adrianne had left home on her own accord.

By late afternoon, Saturday, January 22, 2005, Jo and Tony hit the local airwaves pleading for Adrianne’s return.

“We seriously thought—and firmly believed at that moment—she was hiding out at a friend’s house,” Jo said.

Family and friends printed flyers. Adrianne’s photo—her sad brown eyes, a stray bang floating down off to the right side of her blemish-free face, her long, bulky signature earrings easily noticeable—was positioned front and center, the largest item on the flyer. Jo and Tony, along with Justin and Joshua, their spouses, Brooke and Kristen, Adrianne’s friends from the YMCA and neighborhood, along with cousins and other relatives, tacked flyers up wherever they could, passed hundreds of them out to passing motorists, and hoped for the best. One important location was on the drive-through window of the Checkers restaurant where Adrianne had worked. Tony had never thought he’d see the day, but there was his Lil’ Bit’s photo, the word “missing” scrawled in large font across the top, a description of her below, posted on the window where she worked.

Adrianne Reynolds was now one of those numbers—every parent’s nightmare.

Jo’s niece was also deeply affected. She drew a photo of herself staring at a telephone pole with one of those missing person flyers tacked at eye level, an arrow pointing to the child and the rock she stood on to step up and look at the flyer. It was more of a note to Adrianne, written by the innocent mind of a seven-year-old.
I miss you,
it said.
I miss you very much.
She pleaded for Adrianne to
come back home . . .

For we all miss you.

The late edition of the local paper on Saturday night printed a brief article that would run again in the morning. It displayed the same photo under the banner headline:
SEARCH FOR MISSING E.M.
GIRL EXPANDS
.

Looking at that, Tony felt his heart race. The situation was becoming more unwelcoming as each hour passed.

For the first time, a description of Adrianne was published. But it wasn’t the publication of her features that led police to believe they were dealing with a runaway—it was a line in the article that suggested Adrianne had taken off. The second-to-last paragraph, after describing what Adrianne might be wearing, said:
She may have been carrying a backpack.

This one implication, allegedly given to the newspaper by a source inside the police department, suggested to law enforcement that Adrianne was a runaway. Why else would she be carrying a backpack?

To Tony and Jo, however, that nagging feeling, turning more dire in the pit of their stomachs, was becoming a thing of its own, too strong not to notice. The more time that went by without a call or indication from Adrianne that she was okay, Tony felt, the better the chances were that Adrianne had met up with trouble. And if there was one thing about Adrianne, it was that trouble for her could include any number of things—all of which spelled disaster.

9

Adrianne’s sometimes friend Sarah Kolb was at work on Saturday afternoon, ushering at the Showcase Cinemas just across the Mississippi River, in Davenport, Iowa, when Jill Hiers drove boyfriend Nate Gaudet, Cory Gregory, and Sean McKittrick—Sarah’s “boyfriend” when she swung the pendulum toward the male persuasion—to a local Best Buy store to look around. It seemed they were all waiting for Sarah—their archetypal leader—to get out of work.

As they walked into the store, under the blue-and-yellow Best Buy logo, Cory caught Jill off guard when he whispered in her ear, “I’m going to prison.... The cops won’t stop calling me. They are going to just come and get me.” Then he laughed. “They won’t stop calling me about Adrianne.” This was in response to the breaking news that Adrianne was considered officially a missing person. Police had called Cory’s house looking for her after hearing he was one of the last two people to see her.

“What are you talkin’ about, Cory?” Jill asked.

He put on a mock sad face: “Will you come visit me?”

“Is it your fault that Adrianne is missing, Cory?” Jill asked. What in the world was Cory implying with this conversation? Jill knew Cory was off-the-wall and said some crazy stuff, but was he just toying with her?

“No, [Jill]! But let’s keep it quiet.”

Jill shot Cory a look of confusion and decided to heed his direction not to talk about it again, at least for the time being.

At the Davenport, Iowa, Showcase Cinemas, Sarah clocked in for her 3:00 to 10:00
P.M.
shift. Primarily, after punching in, Sarah spent as much time as she could hiding out and talking on her cell phone. At one point late into the evening, Sarah was talking to a coworker friend of hers, when another employee, a girl she knew from school, walked by and overheard part of the conversation.

“Yeah,” Sarah bragged. “I beat her ass. Broke out four of her teeth.”

Sarah was always talking about how tough she was, how big and badass she could be whenever she wanted. This time, she’d had a brawl, it appeared, with another girl, and was playing up the idea of how badly she’d whooped the girl’s butt.

“Why did you get into the fight?” the employee asked. “What happened?”

“Bitch was dipping in my Kool-Aid—and she knew the fucking flavor!” Sarah said.

“No kidding?”

“I have her blood and one tooth in my car,” Sarah said, never mentioning who she was talking about. Everyone knew it was Adrianne, however. “You know how I can get rid of the blood?” Sarah asked them.