Fractured, page 29
part #2 of Will Trent Series
Instead, he pulled out his cell phone, holding the pieces together so he could make the call.
“Can I go in?” Faith asked, her words rushed. She had been standing outside Bernard’s house for the last hour, waiting for Will to give her the word that they had enough evidence for a warrant.
Will thought of the teacher, the smug look on his face, his certainty that he was going to get away with this. “Call the county,” he said. “Tell them to pick up Bernard’s trash, then go through whatever they put in the truck. I want you to photograph every step you take.”
“What am I looking for?”
“A pair of black pants.”
“What about his apartment? Can I go in?”
Evan Bernard came out of his classroom, his hands cuffed behind his back, a cop on either side of him. Amanda would be angry at Will for not being the one to escort the prisoner outside, but he wasn’t up to smiling for the cameras. The Atlanta Police Department could have this photo op. Will would be better off spending his time looking for evidence that would convict the bastard.
For his part, Bernard’s composure had returned, and he looked down at Will with something like pity. “I hope you find her, Officer. Emma was such a sweet girl.”
He kept his head turned, watching Will even as he was being led up the hallway.
Faith asked, “Are you there?”
His hands shook as he struggled not to break the phone into more pieces. “Tear the fucking place apart.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FAITH WATCHED IVAN Sambor swing back the metal battering ram and slam it into Evan Bernard’s front door. The wooden jamb splintered in a satisfying way, the cheap dead bolt breaking in two as the metal door swung back on its hinges.
She had easily seen inside the apartment from the outside, but Faith walked through the four rooms with her gun drawn, checking the kitchen, the bathroom and the two small bedrooms. Her impression now was the same as when she had first arrived on the scene: Evan Bernard had known they were coming, known that his earlier arrest for sex with a teenage girl would come to light and that the obvious conclusion would be drawn between what happened on the coast and what happened to Kayla Alexander. Bernard had probably stripped the apartment the minute he had gotten home from school that first day.
Faith could smell bleach in every corner of the house. The closet doors had been left open, easily seen from the bedroom windows. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere—not on the kitchen table, the many bookshelves or, when out of curiosity she decided to check, the blades of the ceiling fans. Even the tops of the doors had been dusted.
Faith holstered her gun and called in Charlie Reed and his team. She leaned her shoulder against the door outside the second bedroom. The walls were pink. Blue and white clouds were painted on the ceiling. The furniture was cheap, probably secondhand, but it reminded Faith of a bedroom set she had seen in the Sears catalogue when she was a little girl. The small chest of drawers and the four-poster bed were laminated in white Formica with swirly, gold trim outlining the knobs and various other architectural details. Fluffy pink pillows were scattered on the bed. There was framed artwork of Winnie the Pooh with Tigger. It was the sort of room every girl dreamed about in the 1980s.
Outside, she heard Will Trent asking one of the cops where Faith was. He had probably blown through every light on the five-mile stretch between Westfield and Evan Bernard’s apartment.
Will’s jaw was clenched as he walked down the hallway. He had an air of fury about him, and seeing the girly bedroom did nothing to change his disposition. His throat worked as he took in the pink curtains and lace bedspread. Several seconds passed before he could speak. “Do you think he held her here?”
Faith shook her head. “It’s too obvious.”
Neither one of them walked into the room. Faith knew there would be no evidence in the white sheets, no telltale strands of hair in the freshly vacuumed carpet. Bernard had kept this showcase for his own benefit. She could imagine him coming into the room, sitting on the bed and living out his sick fantasies.
“It’s younger than seventeen,” Faith said. “The room, I mean. It’s the kind of stuff you’d buy for a ten-or eleven-year-old.”
“Did you get the pants?”
“They were in the garbage,” she told him. “Do you think we’ll get any DNA off them?”
“We’d better,” he said. “The second ransom call had the same proof of life from yesterday. Maybe the kidnapper got spooked because he saw us around the school.”
“Or she’s already dead.”
“I can’t accept that,” Will told her, his voice firm.
Faith chose her words carefully. “Statistically, children taken by strangers are killed within the first three hours of their abduction.”
“She wasn’t taken by a stranger,” Will insisted, and she wondered where he got his certainty. “The kidnapper prerecorded the part about calling back at four. He obviously needed more time. We’ll get the new proof of life then.”
“You can’t be certain of any of that, Will. Look at the facts. Evan Bernard’s not talking. We have no idea who his accomplice is. There’s not a chance in hell we’ll find something here to—”
“I’m not going to have this conversation with you.”
So they were back to him being the boss again. Faith bit her lip, trying not to let her sarcasm escalate the situation. He could live in fairyland all he wanted, but Faith was fairly certain that there would not be a happy ending to this story.
Will pressed the point. “I can’t believe she’s dead, Faith. Emma’s a fighter. She’s out there somewhere waiting for us to find her.”
The passion in his voice was unmistakable, and instead of feeling irritated, she now felt sorry for him.
He said, “I should’ve gotten more from Bernard. He was so smug, so sure that he was in control. I feel like I played right into his hands.”
“You got him to admit to having sex with Kayla.”
“He’s going to make bail in twenty-four hours. If his lawyer’s any good, he’ll get the trial postponed until no one remembers who Emma Campano is. Even with the parents pushing for a prosecution, he could end up walking.”
“He admitted on tape to having sex with her.”
“I hadn’t read him his rights. He could argue that I coerced him.” Will shook his head, obviously angry with himself. “I screwed it up.”
“He knew we were coming to his apartment,” Faith said. “This place is immaculate. He didn’t clean like this overnight. He prepared the space for us. He’s playing some kind of game.”
“I should have run a background check on him yesterday.”
“There was no reason to,” she countered. “We both assumed that the school had checked him out.”
“They did,” Will reminded her. “Just not recently.”
Charlie called from the other room, “Hey, guys.”
Faith and Will went into the master bedroom, which had a decidedly more masculine flair. The furniture was heavy, stained a dark charcoal and sitting low to the ground in a sterile, modern way. Over the bed was hanging a huge canvas of a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl. She was obviously young, though not so young that the painting could be deemed child pornography. It was certainly pornographic, though. The girl was naked, her chest thrust out, her legs wide open. There was a sexy twinkle in her eyes, a kittenish pout to her lips. Everything glistened unnaturally.
Charlie was sitting at a desk that was built into an armoire.
“His computer,” Charlie said. “Look at this.”
Faith saw that the monitor showed a live image of the second bedroom.
Will said, “The camera must be mounted in the Winnie the Pooh poster.”
“Christ,” Faith whispered. “Are there any files?”
Charlie was clicking through the directory. “I’m not seeing anything,” he told them. “We’ll have the forensic techs look at this, but it’s my guess that an external hard drive was used.” He pulled some loose cables out from behind the computer. “These would’ve recorded sound and video onto the drive. He could completely bypass the computer’s hard drive.”
“The main computer wouldn’t keep any records?”
Charlie shook his head, opening and closing files as he checked for anything incriminating. Faith saw spreadsheets, homework assignments.
She asked, “What about e-mail?”
“There are two addresses on here. One is through the cable company for Internet service. All that’s on there is spam—Viagra offers, Nigerian money laundering, that sort of thing. There’s no address book, no sent mails, nothing. The other one looks like his school e-mail. I read through everything; they’re just correspondences with parents, memos from the principal. Nothing suspicious and nothing personal.”
“Could he have kept a new e-mail address on the hard drive?”
“You’d have to ask someone who knows more about computers than me,” Charlie said. “Blood and guts I can tell you about. Computers are just a hobby.”
Will said, “He wouldn’t put a camera in that room unless he was taping himself so he could watch it later. We need to find that hard drive.”
“I didn’t find anything in Adam’s room,” Faith reminded him. “His computer was stolen a week before the crime was committed.”
“What about Gabe Cohen?”
“Nothing jumped out,” Faith told him. “I checked his computer, but like Charlie said, I’m not an expert.”
“It’d be a stretch asking to see it again.”
She wondered if that was some kind of dig at her for not arresting Gabe Cohen. They were both frustrated and angry. She decided to let the comment pass. “Did you find anything in Bernard’s desk at school?”
“Nothing,” Will answered. “Maybe the accomplice is keeping the hard drive or a computer for him? Maybe there’s a laptop?”
“What about his car?”
“Cleaner than the house,” Will said. “Smells like bleach and vinegar.”
Charlie stated the obvious. “If you find the video files, that’s the smoking gun.”
Will said, “I’ll get copies of all his phone records, landline and cell.”
“This guy is smart,” Faith pointed out. “He’d have one of those pay-as-you-go lines. There’s no way we can trace them.”
“We’ve already fucked this up twice from making assumptions. Bernard is smart, but he can’t think of everything.” Will asked, “Charlie, can you check his Internet history?”
Charlie clicked the icon for the Internet browser. A page popped up with a scantily clad teenager doing a split over the words, “Barely Legal.” He opened the root directory. “Looks like he emptied the cache, but I can still recover some of the pages.” After a few more clicks, he found Bernard’s recently viewed pages. The first linked to Westfield Academy’s grading program. The next few were retail outlets you would expect a teacher to be interested in—Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart. Apparently, Bernard had been searching for a copy of Wuthering Heights.
“Here we go,” Charlie said, pulling up a chat room. Faith leaned in for a closer look, but the site was one intended for teachers who were looking to retire. Another chat room was for West Highland terrier lovers.
Will asked, “What about the first site?”
Charlie went back to Barely Legal. “It’s got a disclaimer on the front that says all the girls are of age. As far as the Internet is concerned, as long as they’re not obviously underage, like, children, then that’s all you need.”
Faith looked around the room, feeling a slight sense of disgust as she thought about Evan Bernard sleeping here. She went to the bedside table and opened the drawer from the bottom with her foot. “More porn,” she said, not touching the magazines. There was a girl on the front cover who looked about twelve, but the masthead insisted otherwise, proclaiming, Legal Horny Honeys.
Will had slipped on a pair of gloves. He pulled out the magazines. All of them had teenage-looking cover girls. All of them implied that the girls were of legal age. “Perfectly legal.”
“Detective?” Ivan Sambor’s large frame filled the doorway. He held a couple of plastic evidence bags in his meaty hands. Faith saw a large pink vibrator and a set of fur-lined handcuffs, also pink. “Found these in the other room.”
Will said, “Tell the lab those have priority.”
Ivan nodded, leaving the room.
Faith told Will, “Bernard doesn’t have any other properties in his name either in the state of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee or Alabama.”
“Let’s broaden the search,” Will said, though Faith thought that was a shot in the dark. Bernard would not use his real name if he had a silent partner to act as a front.
She said, “I’ve got a team calling all the storage rental places within a thirty-mile area.”
“Check under the names of any family members,” Will told her. “We need to know who his friends are. Maybe there’s an address book.” He glanced around the room, scanning every piece of furniture, every painting on the wall. “The judge limited the scope of our search warrant to evidence tying Kayla Alexander to Bernard. We could argue that we’re looking for names of other victims. Even if he’s convicted for Kayla, Bernard could be out in two to three with good behavior.”
“He’ll be a registered sex offender. He’ll never teach again.”
“That’s a small price to pay for kidnapping and murder.”
“You’re sure he’s involved in the other crimes, that it’s not just what he said: he had sex with her, she went her way, he went back to school?”
“You saw that bedroom, Faith. He’s into young girls.”
“All that means is that he is into raping them, not murdering them.”
“He learned in Savannah that it’s dangerous to leave witnesses.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Charlie said, “but maybe you should consider the fact that he was also looking into retiring.”
Will seemed puzzled. “How do you know that?”
“The Web site?” Faith asked, wondering how he had forgotten about it so quickly. “Charlie, pull it up again.”
Charlie did as she asked, finding the correct Web page. He scrolled through the list of questions and responses. “I’m not sure what screen name he went by. They’re all pretty innocuous.” He clicked to the next page. “Basically, they’re talking about what benefits they retain after retirement, consultancy jobs to help pay the bills—that sort of thing.” The screen changed as he selected a new link. “Georgia’s teacher retirement program.” He leaned closer to the screen to read the details. “All right, this deals with private versus public school teaching. With the state retirement program, you have to have a certain number of years vested to qualify for a pension. Private, you’re on your own.” He scrolled down, skimming the text. “It says here that they have to go thirty years to get full retirement.”
“Maybe he decided he couldn’t wait it out,” Faith said. “A million dollars would certainly help pave the way toward a comfortable early retirement.”
Will told her, “Bernard’s only been at Westfield for twelve years. He told us he was teaching in the public school system at one point. Let’s find out where he taught before that.”
“He would’ve left in the mid-nineties,” Faith said, doing the math in her head. “Maybe there was some impropriety they swept under the rug.”
“I know teachers don’t make a lot of money, but don’t you think it’s odd that he’s living in this crappy apartment at his age?”
Charlie suggested, “Maybe he’s been spending all his spare cash on flights to Thailand to pick up underage girls.”
Faith asked, “Do you think we have enough cause to look at his financial records?”
Will shook his head. “We didn’t list financial documents in the search warrant.”
Charlie cleared his throat. Faith looked at the computer screen. He had pulled up Evan Bernard’s accounts at the local credit union. “Let this be a lesson not to store your passwords in your key-chains.”
Will said, “Check to see if he made any payments to storage facilities.”
Charlie moved the mouse around, highlighting each account as he read through the details. “Nothing’s popping up. He pays twelve hundred a month for this place. His utilities are about what you’d expect. Groceries, dry cleaners, car payments, a couple of PayPal payments.” He read through the rest. “It looks like most of his money goes into his 401-K. The guy’s socking it away for retirement.”
Faith asked, “What does he bring home every month?”
“Around twenty-three hundred.”
Faith stared at the computer screen. She could hear policemen outside the window, laughing about something. Traffic noise from the street filled the air with a low hum. This was the sort of place you rented when you were fresh out of college, not heading toward your fifties and looking to retire. She said, “Evan Bernard’s been teaching for how many years and he doesn’t own his own house?”
“Could be divorced,” Charlie suggested. “An ex-wife could have bled him dry.”
“We’ll check court records,” Will said. “If he’s got an ex, maybe she found out what he was doing and left him. If we can corroborate that Kayla was a pattern, we might be able to get a judge to deny bail.”
“We already tried the neighbors. Most of them were gone—probably at work. There’s a stay-at-home mom in the unit across the garden. She says she’s never met Bernard, never seen anything suspicious going on.”
“Send a couple of units back around seven tonight. More people should be home by then.” Will went to the closet and checked the top shelves. “Maybe he’s got a photo album or something.”
“We won’t find anything he doesn’t want us to.”
Will kept searching the closet, taking down boxes, checking their contents. “We know he was gone from the school for two hours.” He pulled out a stack of yearbooks and dropped them on the bed. There were almost twenty in all, their cheerful covers screaming school spirit. He picked up the top one, which was emblazoned with the Westfield Academy crest, and started thumbing through the pages. “That’s not enough time to do the murders, hide Emma and get back to school. The accomplice must have done the heavy lifting. Bernard would have known Emma came from a wealthy family.”
