Angels & Imperfections
Chapter 3
My three o’clock appointment was going to be unpleasant, at best. I would rather have had an appointment for a root canal, or even a colonoscopy. This meeting was likely to be more painful and uncomfortable than either of those, on several levels.
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Winslow, ‘Bob and Sandy’, wanted me to investigate the disappearance of their 10 year old daughter, Victoria.
I had seen the story on the news.
Mrs. Winslow had left her daughter in the car, doing her homework, while she went into the supermarket. When she came out with the groceries, Victoria was gone. At first Sandy figured Victoria (she hated to be called Vicky) had just followed her into the store, so she went looking for her. She had the store manager page her. The store manager sent employees searching for her. Sandy started to come unglued and became hysterical. The manager called the police.
The police determined Victoria was not in the store, her mother’s car, or the parking lot. They reviewed the video tape from the surveillance cameras.
The parking lot cameras had recorded an average-sized man, in a hoodie sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, wandering through the parking lot, kind of looking under cars near Sandy’s vehicle. He was seen approaching Sandy’s car and engaging Victoria in conversation.
Victoria got out of the car and went with the man to look under other cars. They disappeared from view. Neither Sandy nor Bob (who had been called in from work), had any idea who the man in the video images might be.
After the search of the surrounding neighborhoods by the police, friends, and volunteers, after all the usual investigation and interviews of known offenders, after grilling members of the family and all the friends of the family, even after the video tape was shown on the local and national news channels, the police had nothing.
My friend, Detective Sergeant Tony Escalante of the Tyler PD, had told the family, I might be able to help.
It had been nearly a week since the little girl went missing.
“I know Tony Escalante recommended me to you, but the police have done a very thorough investigation. I don’t want to take y’all’s money and end up telling you the same thing they did. I’m so sorry, but in a case like this, there is seldom a happy ending. We just don’t have any real leads to follow,” I said.
“I don’t care what it costs. We’ll mortgage the house. We have to know what has happened to our little girl,” Bob said.
Sandy just sat there, crying.
“I understand completely, but I don’t want to benefit from your tragedy. I’ll do what I can. I’ll do some investigating and I’ll pray for you, and for her. I can’t make any promises beyond that. In the meantime, it would probably be best, if you just concentrate on remembering Victoria as happy and healthy. I’ll give you the name of my pastor; he’s excellent at counseling folks in a crisis.”
“We want you to help us find our daughter, please help us,” Sandy Winslow sobbed.
“We’ll pay you a retainer,” Bob added.
I held up my hands.
“Please, Mr. Winslow, I don’t want your money. I told you, I’ll do what I can, but I can’t promise you anything.”
“Business is business.” Bob said, as he wrote out a check. “This is to secure your services, not as payment for anything certain. Maybe having to earn the money will provide additional motivation.”
He handed me the check. It was made out to me, for one thousand dollars.
I said thank you, and put it in my pocket. I had no intention of ever cashing it.
The next morning, Tony called me.
“Did you take that job for Mr. and Mrs. Winslow?”
“Not exactly, Tony. I told them I would look into it, but there is very little chance I can help.”
“Can you shoot this evening?”
I knew by “shoot,” he meant meet him at the shooting range, where we practiced.
“OK. I’ll meet you there.”
When I entered the indoor range, Tony was already set up in a shooting lane. He had reserved the next station for me. There was no one else there.
When I arrived at Tony’s shooting station, he looked grim.
“Hey, J.W., how’s it going?”
“Super, how are you?”
“I have good days and bad days.”
I nodded, and then I asked him.
“Have you made any progress on the missing child case?”
He shook his head.
“Not really, but now we have this.”
He reached into a pocket inside his jacket and removed a plastic sleeve, with a Polaroid photo in it.
“This morning we got a call from a citizen at the supermarket where the Winslow girl disappeared. We sent a uniform over there, and this is what the person found lying in the parking lot.”
He passed me the plastic sleeve.
“We checked out the citizen and she’s clean. We ran the photo for prints and did a battery of tests. The lady who found the photo has her prints on it, and there are other partials.”
I looked at the picture. Then I started studying it.
“Were any of the partials enough to get a match?”
“Apparently not, we thought maybe so, but not one of them was complete enough. We didn’t get a hit from any of the data bases.”
“I didn’t know you could still get Polaroid film. How old is it? How long do you think it may have been lying out there?”
“The techs say the picture is only a couple of days old. It wasn’t out in the elements for long. It hadn’t been run over, and it wasn’t blown into the parking lot by the wind. It hasn’t been faded by the sun. They think it was probably dropped there last night or this morning.”
“…Nothing on the surveillance cameras?” I asked.
He shook his head, as his only response.
“Why are you showing this to me?”
“We’ve done everything we can do with it. It’s just information, another dead end.”
I took a long slow breath. I wished he hadn’t phrased it that way.
“Have you tried to get a match on the car’s make, model and year?”
He nodded and said, “We haven’t been able to get anything firm. It’s probably American, maybe a nineties vintage, maybe newer, maybe not-like I said, nothing for sure. I’ll ask the FBI if they can identify it from the photograph.” He shrugged.
“Have you shown this to the Winslow’s yet?”
“I don’t want to, but I’m supposed to. You know, to get a positive ID. Matches the description and the other photos they provided us exactly, though.”
“What do you know about the other one?”
“Hard to tell from the photo, we might have a lead, but I can’t discuss it with you, yet.”
“As disturbing as this is, it’s kind of encouraging at the same time.”
“How’s that, J.W.?”
“Victoria was taken nearly a week ago. The picture was probably dropped here deliberately. The perp may still be in the area.”
He nodded.
“Yeah, but only you could see something positive in that.”
“There’s something else even more significant.”
“What’s that?”
I handed the Polaroid back to Tony
“These kids were both alive when this picture was taken.”
The photo showed two children lying in the trunk of a car. They were bound and had been gagged with duct tape.
From the pictures I had seen and the video of the abduction, I could see the girl was clearly Victoria Winslow. The boy was younger and smaller than Victoria. She was lying in front of him, partly obscuring him. The duct tape over his mouth covered most of the whole lower half of his face.
I felt the old anger at the evil permeating and perverting humanity and poisoning this world. It helped me focus on my shooting. I chose my favourite .45 an
d set the target at fifteen yards. Tony was shooting his service Sig .40. He started at fifteen yards also.
We both fired fifty rounds. We both shot well.
Out in the parking lot, I looked at Tony and said, “We both know that’s Victoria Winslow in the photo, right?”
He nodded silently in response.
“Do you really have to show the picture to the Winslow family?”
Tony opened the trunk of his car to put his gun bag into it. We both stood there, looking into the empty trunk.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe I will.”