“So then it was like, huh, both doing something on Wednesday evenings. Are they taking tango lessons, then a room at a hotel, and don’t want humorous digs from family? They tuck Joe in with a friend or relative, have an evening away on their own, a date-they’re married, why not?”
She glanced again at Gabriel, but he simply signaled that she should keep going. She looked back at the crime wall. “Joe’s schedule, such as they had for him, says baseball coach, Decatur, on Wednesday nights. To work on his hitting, throwing, and field work? I’m thinking, wow, I wish my parents had sprung for private coaching when I was learning to hit a ball. So I looked at Joe’s game records-he kept information like that for himself. His performance over the two years in his actual league goes down, even with a weekly coaching session. Joe’s running a bluff, same as the parents.”
“They were covering up family counseling, or counseling for Joe. It fits better than marriage counseling,” Gabriel suggested.
Evie nodded. “That’s what I thought at first, but it doesn’t track. Counseling for a kid is triggered by something, and his school reports are fine. Good attendance, good grades, a rather popular boy. I checked his medical records. Precautionary X-rays after a bad fall and tumble on his bike are in file. The kid has fewer broken bones than I do, less stitches than I have right now. I checked for changes in his behavior the last two years-disruptive, grades changing, fights with a classmate-nope, it’s all good, the boy is cruising through life on a happy arc. There’s no sign of a trauma-walked in on a crime, got molested or did some molesting, walking in his sleep, developed a serious disease. The last one kind of made sense, actually. The kid is sick, got a childhood cancer or something, get him counseling to help along with the doctors.
“So I went looking at medical claims against Scott’s insurance, Susan’s. There’s nothing for doctors of any kind for Joe beyond normal checkups and shots for school and league play. There are single prescriptions written to Susan for anxiety, Joe for sleeping pills, issued once and not refilled. Issued two years before they disappeared, by a doctor in Decatur, a private practice, same date on the prescriptions. So I tracked down the prescribing doctor.” She pulled over her laptop and opened it.
“Some interesting things about Dr. Richard Wales,” she said as she typed his name into the search box. “He’s a psychiatrist, works with cops who have discharged a weapon in the line of duty or had to take a life in the line of duty. He does the general ‘you’re fit for duty’ psych eval most cops have to pass before they’re hired. One of the other things he’s known for is counseling couples after they have lost a child due to a tragic accident or a miscarriage.” She turned the screen so he could see the doctor’s web page.
“Deputy Florist never fired his gun on the job that I can find. But he no doubt got cleared by Wales before he was hired here. Dr. Wales’s business card is probably tacked on your employee human-resource board. Susan Florist is holding down her job, her friends see her as happy, the photos show a contented woman. Maybe they lost a child to a miscarriage. It hurt, made them sad, but it wasn’t crippling. They hadn’t told family yet that she was pregnant again.
“They want some counseling. Maybe they were trying to decide if they would try for another child, or adopt, and the decision was making the marriage a bit rocky, they wanted some help sorting matters out. But two years? It’s either a lot of small things or the issue has some size to it. Friends aren’t seeing problems in the marriage, neither Scott nor Susan are talking about troubles, neither expresses a worry about Joe. But these two are keeping Wednesday in Decatur on their schedule and hiding the fact they are both going over there.”
“Why do they take Joe along with them to Decatur if they’re the ones getting counseling?” Gabriel asked as he turned the laptop back to her. “Where is he during those hours? For two years, Joe doesn’t say anything about his parents seeing a therapist every week? That doesn’t fit any kid I know. A kid has a secret, eventually he has to tell at least one of his friends.”
Evie reached for the sweet-tarts roll, took one, gave the last to Gabriel. “I think Joe’s there at the office with them. Maybe they didn’t feel comfortable leaving a then-nine-year-old with friends, didn’t want to explain where they were going or why.” Evie pulled another folder out of the stack, thumbed through the photos inside, slid several over to him. “From the photos of his room, Joe had several well-thumbed books about how to play and win DDM. It’s a multiplayer online video game that charges users by the hour, the kind a young boy would relish playing. In one of the boy’s notebooks, there are pages diagramming levels and moves and ideas for how to proceed. But he doesn’t have the computer hardware to run the video-intense game, and there are no charges on his parents’ credit cards for game time. He’s playing the game somewhere. I think he’s playing it at the doctor’s office.”
“Interesting…” Gabriel said.
“Yeah. I think the kid was getting to play video games for two hours if he would keep his mouth shut about what the family was doing on Wednesday nights. A decent trade-off. If asked, say you were practicing baseball. Some weeks, one or the other parent might actually take him to that coaching session. Other weeks he’s at the doctor’s office playing video games while the parents talk with the doctor.”
“All right, we need to talk with this doctor,” Gabriel decided. “And I need to find out if anyone around the sheriff’s office had any suspicion this was going on. I sure didn’t. But others worked with him more closely.”
Evie nodded. “I’ve already called the doctor. We’re on his schedule for Wednesday lunch, the first decent-length interval he had open. I don’t want a ten-minute ‘I can’t say anything because of client privilege’ round robin with him. We need him to confirm the appointments were going on for that length of time and who in the family the sessions were with. It may tell us absolutely nothing about the crime, but if it tells us more about the family, that itself might point to something useful. What was it that caused them to begin going to counseling? I want to know that detail.”
Gabriel nodded. “This is big, Evie. We didn’t have this.” He leaned back, arms linked behind his neck as he looked over at her. “Nice job finding it.”
She appreciated the compliment but did her best to shrug it off. “If I can’t find something, I’m not looking hard enough. We see if and where this leads, then we decide how frustrated you should be at not having discovered it before.”
He looked from the crime wall back to her. “You’ve been searching for a day and you’re finding things. The cop in me is both impressed at that and bothered I didn’t have these results before. Seriously, thanks.” He nodded to the finance paperwork. “This will still be here tomorrow. It’s late. You need to get out of here and get some sleep. ”
“I know. Ann will be here in the morning. We’re going to put a pause on this one and shift over to the Dayton girl’s disappearance.”
“That won’t slow things down much. I’ve got names on my list to finish interviewing, and I want to talk with officers in the department about what you’ve found here. Wednesday lunch, you said, to interview the doctor?”