Parker says that a few days later he received an angry call from Bourdin. Although Bourdin denies that he made the call, Parker noted in his file at the time that Bourdin said, “Who do you think you are?” When Parker replied that he didn’t believe he was Nicholas, Bourdin shot back, “Immigration thinks it’s me. The family thinks it’s me.”
Parker wondered if he should let the matter go. He had tipped off the authorities and was no longer under contract to investigate the matter. He had other cases piling up. And he figured that a mother would know her own son. Still, the boy’s accent sounded French, maybe French Moroccan. If so, what was a foreigner doing infiltrating a trailer home in the backwoods of Texas? “I thought he was a terrorist, I swear to God,” Parker says.
Beverly rented a small room in a run-down apartment complex in San Antonio, and Parker started to follow Bourdin when he visited her. “I’d set up on the apartment, and watch him come out,” Parker says. “He would walk all the way to the bus stop, wearing his Walkman and doing his Michael Jackson moves.”
Bourdin was struggling to stay in character. He found living with Carey and Beverly “claustrophobic,” and was happiest when he was outside, wandering the streets. “I was not used to being in someone else’s family, to live with them like I’m one of theirs,” he says. “I wasn’t ready for it.” One day, Carey and the family presented him with a cardboard box. Inside were Nicholas’s baseball cards, records, and various mementos. He picked up each item, gingerly. There was a letter from one of Nicholas’s girlfriends. As he read it, he said to himself, “I’m not this boy.”
After two months in the United States, Bourdin started to come apart. He was moody and aloof-“weirding out,” as Codey put it. He stopped attending classes (one student tauntingly said that he sounded “like a Norwegian”) and was consequently suspended. In December, he took off in Bryan and Carey’s car and drove to Oklahoma, with the windows down, listening to Michael Jackson’s song “Scream”: “Tired of the schemes / The lies are disgusting… / Somebody please have mercy / ’Cause I just can’t take it.” The police pulled him over for speeding, and he was arrested. Beverly, Carey, and Bryan picked him up at the police station and brought him home.
According to his real mother, Ghislaine, Bourdin called her in Europe. For all his disagreements with his mother, Bourdin still seemed to long for her. (He once wrote her a letter, saying, “I don’t want to lose you… If you disappear then I disappear.”) Ghislaine says Bourdin confided that he was living with a woman in Texas who believed that he was her son. She became so upset that she hung up.
Shortly before Christmas, Bourdin went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror-at his brown eyes, his dyed hair. He grabbed a razor and began to mutilate his face. He was put in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital for several days of observation. Later, Bourdin, paraphrasing Nietzsche, wrote in a notebook, “When you fight monsters, be careful that in the process you do not become one.” He also jotted down a poem: “My days are phantom days, each one the shadow of a hope; / My real life never was begun, / Nor any of my real deeds done.”
Doctors judged Bourdin to be stable enough to return to Carey’s trailer. But he remained disquieted, and increasingly wondered what had happened to the real Nicholas Barclay. So did Parker, who, while trying to identify Bourdin, had started to gather information and interview Nicholas’s neighbors. At the time that Nicholas disappeared, he was living with Beverly in a small one-story house in San Antonio. Nicholas’s half brother, Jason, who was then twenty-four, had recently moved in with them after living for a period with his cousin, in Utah. Jason was wiry and strong, with long brown curly hair and a comb often tucked in the back pocket of his jeans. He had burn marks on his body and face: at thirteen, he had lit a cigarette after filling a lawn mower with gasoline and accidentally set himself on fire. Because of his scars, Carey says, “Jason worried that he would never meet somebody and he would always be alone.” He strummed Lynyrd Skynyrd songs on his guitar and was a capable artist who sketched portraits of friends. Though he had only completed high school, he was bright and articulate. He also had an addictive personality, like his mother, often drinking heavily and using cocaine. He had his “demons,” as Carey put it.
On June 13, 1994, Beverly and Jason told police that Nicholas had been playing basketball three days earlier and called his house from a pay phone, wanting a ride home. Beverly was sleeping, so Jason answered the phone. He told Nicholas to walk home. Nicholas never made it. Because Nicholas had recently fought with his mother over the tennis shoes he had stolen, and over the possibility of being sent to a home for juveniles, the police initially thought that he had run away-even though he hadn’t taken any money or possessions.
Parker was surprised by police reports showing that after Nicholas’s disappearance there were several disturbances at Beverly’s house. On July 12th, she called the police, though when an officer arrived she insisted that she was all right. Jason told the officer that his mother was “drinking and scream[ing] at him because her other son ran away.” A few weeks later, Beverly called the police again, about what authorities described as “family violence.” The officer on the scene reported that Beverly and Jason were “exchanging words;” Jason was asked to leave the house for the day, and he complied. On September 25th, police received another call, this time from Jason. He claimed that his younger brother had returned and tried to break into the garage, fleeing when Jason spotted him. In his report, the officer on duty said that he had “checked the area” for Nicholas but was “unable to locate him.”
Jason’s behavior grew even more erratic. He was arrested for “using force” against a police officer, and Beverly kicked him out of the house. Nicholas’s disappearance, Codey told me, had “messed Jason up pretty bad. He went on a bad drug binge and was shooting cocaine for a long time.” Because he had refused to help Nicholas get a ride home on the day he vanished, Chantel says, Jason had “a lot of guilt.”
In late 1996, Jason checked into a rehabilitation center and weaned himself from drugs. After he finished the program, he remained at the facility for more than a year, serving as a counsellor and working for a landscaping business that the center operated. He was still there when Bourdin turned up, claiming to be his missing brother.
Bourdin wondered why Jason had not met him at the airport and had initially made no effort to see him at Carey’s. After a month and a half, Bourdin and family members say, Jason finally came for a visit. Even then, Codey says, “Jason was standoffish.” Though Jason gave him a hug in front of the others, Bourdin says, he seemed to eye him warily. After a few minutes, Jason told him to come outside, and held out his hand to Bourdin. A necklace with a gold cross glittered in his palm. Jason said that it was for him. “It was like he had to give it to me,” Bourdin says. Jason put it around his neck. Then he said goodbye, and never returned.
Bourdin told me, “It was clear that Jason knew what had happened to Nicholas.” For the first time, Bourdin began to wonder who was conning whom.
The authorities, meanwhile, had started to doubt Bourdin’s story. Nancy Fisher, who at the time was a veteran F.B.I. agent, had interviewed Bourdin several weeks after he arrived in the United States, in order to document his allegations of being kidnapped on American soil. Immediately, she told me, she “smelled a rat”: “His hair was dark but bleached blond and the roots were quite obvious.”
Parker knew Fisher and had shared with her his own suspicions. Fisher warned Parker not to interfere with a federal probe, but as they conducted parallel investigations they developed a sense of trust, and Parker passed on any information he obtained. When Fisher made inquiries into who may have abducted Nicholas and sexually abused him, she says, she found Beverly oddly “surly and uncooperative.”