John told me he had uploaded the photos and sent them to my terminal. I was exhausted, really ready to go home, but my curiosity overcame all of that. I saw a photo of a boy, captioned as Troy Fletcher. Cute kid, but not one I recognized. The next one, labeled Aaron Fletcher, made me sit bolt upright.
“My God-it’s Luke Serre.”
“Luke Serre?” John said, as he crossed the room toward my desk. “The murdered man?”
“No, that was Gerry Serre. This is his son. Didn’t you recognize him?” I called up the photos Jane Serre had given me a few days ago, when I interviewed her after her ex-husband’s body was found on the Sheffield Estate. I placed the photo of the boy now going by the name of Aaron Fletcher next to the most recent photo she had given me of her son.
Only two years had gone by, and while Luke had gone from toddler to little boy in that time, the likeness was unmistakable.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Frank said.
“Better call your friends about it,” John said, but Frank already had his cell phone in hand and was calling Reed Collins.
“Two of those four kids were kidnapped from Las Piernas,” John said, and barked for Mark not to go home.
My phone rang. It was Caleb, calling from our house. He had stopped by earlier in the evening to visit Ethan. Ben was there, too-he had stopped by to work with Altair, and ended up waiting with Caleb and Ethan for word about my adventures in the high desert. Since I had to go to work before coming home, they ordered pizza and kept Ethan company.
“On the news!” Caleb said. “The younger girl-she’s my sister!” He had just seen the photos on television. As he spoke to me, I pulled up the image of Genie Fletcher and agreed I could see a strong resemblance to him. He told me he was certain Genie Fletcher was Jenny.
“I don’t want to create false hope,” I said. “And you’ve done enough work in your field to know one photo isn’t enough to make anyone certain of an identification.”
“You sound like Ben,” he complained.
“Ben’s right. I don’t know if Genie Fletcher is your sister, but you and your mom may want to talk to Detective Joe Travers of the Huntington Beach police. Do you think your mom is still awake? Maybe you should call her.”
There was a long silence, then he said, “I’ll call when I know for sure it’s Jenny.”
Despite this, I could tell the bit about false hope had been a useless caveat.
THE television screens in the newsroom were full of stories about the events of the day and showing photos of the children,
Roy, and Bonnie/Victoria. A forensic artist’s sketch of Cleo showed up, too-no one seemed to have any photos of her. Speculation was laid on thick by various commentators, but that would be nothing compared to the hours of live guesswork that were bound to come. I was already thoroughly tired of seeing the clips some of them had captured out in Palmdale. My fifteen minutes of fame, and I looked as if I had stepped out of a sandblaster.
I kept hoping that all the coverage would result in solid leads, thinking that surely someone would have seen Roy and the three children. Calls did come in to the police. Frank told me that if all the sightings were accurate, Roy and the kids had been able to manifest themselves in more than six hundred places in the United States and Canada, almost simultaneously.
As the hours from the time of Roy’s disappearance lengthened, worries grew.
JUST before I left work, Edith Fletcher, a daughter of Graydon Fletcher who lived with him, called on his behalf. She said he wanted me to know that the police had been informed that Giles Fletcher had been seen leaving an SUV-registered to a corporation none of them had ever heard of-parked in front of Graydon’s house. “And apparently Roy came by very early and unloaded it.”
“What did he take out of it?”
“The security cameras didn’t catch many details, but apparently it was sports or camping equipment-duffel bags and an ice chest, things like that. The police have the vehicle and the tape. We’re hoping this might help them to locate Roy before…before anything happens.”
“How often was Roy’s family over there?”
“Oh, Roy would stop by every few weeks or so, but we rarely saw the children. Still, I’m very fond of them. I know the girls better than the boys. They like to help me in the greenhouse. Such smart girls! They were here just after Sheila died.” She paused. “I didn’t really know Sheila, but-well, I’m now wondering if I knew Giles or Victoria or Roy! I can’t believe all of this is happening. And Carrie’s father-to have worried so about her for all those years! Thank goodness you were able to save her. I’m so grateful to you for that, I can’t begin to tell you. As for Genie and Aaron and Troy, I do hope nothing bad has happened-” She wasn’t able to finish. I found myself trying to reassure her. We talked for a while, and I found myself liking her. I thanked her for calling, and passed word on to Mark about the second SUV.
Just when I wanted to write them all off, I’d meet one of the kinder family members. If Edith Fletcher wasn’t genuinely concerned about those kids, and genuinely appalled by what she was learning about certain other family members, she was the best actress I’d encountered since becoming a reporter.
John Walters stopped us on the way out of the newsroom. “Kelly, you look like hell. Take the day off tomorrow.”
“Are you sure? I already took-”
“Don’t argue with me, Kelly.”
“Don’t argue with him,” Frank chimed in, and steered me out the door.
FRANK got another call as we headed home that night, from his new lieutenant, Jake Masuda. I caught Frank’s attention and said, “I wonder if the woman Gerry Serre dated before he was murdered bore any resemblance to Cleo Fletcher?”
“We do sometimes think of these things,” he said to me, and went back to talking to Jake.
Well, if he was going to be like that…
When he hung up, he told me there was a lead on the third child, Troy Fletcher. “A preschool teacher called to say she remembered him as Troy Sherman, one of her brightest, so I’m going to go talk to her tomorrow.”
I smiled and wished him luck, and if my tone made him suspicious, he didn’t say anything.
At home, we found that Caleb and Ben had left, and Ethan had fallen asleep. I made one more phone call, to a night-owl friend down in San Diego, Tonya Pearsley. She’s a school psychologist. Apparently my misadventures had made the news down there, so she was glad I called. I was glad she already had some background on the day’s events. I asked her about IQ testing of young children, and she verified that there were intelligence tests for preschoolers.
“Yes, but it’s not foolproof. There is some question about the reliability of the results based on socioeconomic factors and the home environment. You can’t tell how bright a child is just from a test score, you have to look at the whole child. In general, if you wait until a child is in second or third grade, you’ll get more reliable information from testing.”
“But it can be done?”
“Yes. Beyond reliability, though, the controversy surrounding the testing of preschoolers is mostly over how the information from the tests is going to be used.”
“You mean questions over whether to put kids in accelerated classes early on?”