Silenced Girls Read online

  “He had it,” Tori stated. “We all poured from the bottle.”

  “And you had how much?” Johnson asked.

  Tori looked to Johnson, then to Cal, and back to Johnson. “Jessie and I went back one more time, maybe an hour before the fireworks show. We poured just a little into our cups.”

  “Just a little?” Johnson asked skeptically. “Come on.”

  “Victoria, are you sure about that?” Cal added. “You have to be honest here.”

  “I am,” Tori insisted and then looked at Cal, her eyes matching his. “The sheriff knows we drink sometimes. He said to us both once that he knew we’d start going to parties with our friends and there would be drinking. His instructions were to be careful and if we ever needed his help, call. No questions, no judgments, just call. We were having fun, but we were being careful, I swear.”

  “After you refilled your cups, what happened next?” Cal asked.

  “The fireworks are going to start any minute,” Jessie called out and then took one last sip from her lemonade before tossing it into an overflowing garbage can. “Let’s get a spot to watch the show!”

  Jessie led their ever-expanding group over to the east side of the beach and the playground where everyone found a spot to sit or rest on the assortment of swings, slides, jungle gyms, and climbing mazes. Tori held Jason’s hand as they sat down on a bench off to the side to take in the show. Jess was walking along with Katy, plus their soccer teammates Mickey Olson, Corinne Whitworth and Lizzy Cowger, and they all grabbed swings at the swing set. The boys in their friend group all grabbed spots on the jungle gym. Tori made eye contact with her sister who beamed a smile back to her. Tori could tell her sister was happy, almost giddy for her.

  Manchester always went big on the fireworks for the Fourth. Synchronized to music, they were launched from the end of the long fishing pier at the public boat launch at the opposite end of the beach. A massive crowd gathered in lawn chairs or on blankets on the beach and in the park and then along South Shore Drive, which was barricaded for several blocks to allow for more seating. A flotilla of speed boats and pontoons were anchored in the placid waters of the bay, as well as in front of Mannion’s on the Lake, a restaurant farther northwest up the shoreline of the bay.

  As they took their seat on the bench, Jason casually put his right arm gently around Tori’s shoulder. Self-conscious to a fault, she almost always held back her emotions and affections. Yet, in this moment, she was…content. For once, she stopped caring what anyone else thought or saw. Instead of keeping just a little distance between them, she snuggled closer to Jason and then turned her face to his. Rarely the initiator, she almost surprised herself as she leaned up and kissed him, first just a little peck on his lips and then a second, softer kiss that she held for an extra second as the fireworks show began.

  It was a long show, lasting nearly forty-five minutes before there was a rapid-fire launching up into the sky.

  “I think this is the grand finale,” Jason observed as one rocket after another shot up into the sky, exploding loudly into a kaleidoscope of colors over the waters of the bay. With his arm wrapped lightly around Tori’s shoulder he pulled her a little closer and then leaned down and kissed her again. “Do you want to get out of here? Just you and I.”

  Tori froze. She knew what this question meant, to go off alone with him, where this was leading. She’d talked about this with Jessie, who’d already taken this step. Tori had openly wondered whether she was ready for this. It had been a frequent discussion topic between the two of them.

  “You are,” Jessie had assured her. “You’re ready.”

  “How do you know? How do I know?”

  “Because you’re asking the question. If you ask the question, this question, the big question, then you know…”

  “The answer,” Tori finished the sentence, her body a jumble of nerves at the thought of…sex.

  “Tori, he’s a really nice guy. I’m pretty sure it’ll be his first time, too. Enjoy it. It’s a night, an experience, you’ll never forget.”

  She thought back to that conversation one more time as she pondered Jason’s offer. She was ready. “Yes, let’s go.”

  Tori looked for Jessie and caught her sister’s eye and tilted her head ever so slightly toward Jason and mouthed, I’m leaving.

  Jessie smiled and winked back at her sister.

  “And that’s the last time you saw Jessie last night?” Cal asked.

  “Yes,” Tori replied nodding, tears streaming down her face, her hands clasped and trembling.

  “So, you and Jason went off by yourselves,” Johnson accused.

  “Yes.”

  “And what time was it you left your group of friends?”

  “I think ten forty-five, around there. It was after the fireworks.”

  “And you two were off doing what?”

  Tori looked to Johnson and then to Cal, panicked.

  “Victoria, where were you and what were you doing?” Cal pressed.

  She looked down, the tears cascading, “We were…parked, just Jason and me.”

  “Where?”

  “Cal…” Tori pleaded.

  “Answer the question, Victoria,” Cal pushed. “Where were you?”

  “At the college. There’s that narrow road behind the visitor’s stands for the football field that goes into the woods. We were back there.”

  “For how long?”

  Tori wiped her cheeks with her left hand, “A few hours. We were back there for a few hours.”

  “Just the two of you? Nobody else?”

  “Just us.”

  “No other cars back there?”

  Tori shook her head.

  “And you were doing what exactly?” Johnson questioned.

  Cal cut in, “I think we have all we need on that for now.” He looked back to Tori, “When did you get home?”

  “I think two or maybe two-fifteen. That’s when I snuck into the house through my window.”

  “And you went to check on your sister?”

  “Yes,” Tori replied sniffling, wiping her puffy eyes with the back of her right hand.

  “And she wasn’t there. Your twin sister wasn’t there and that didn’t alarm you?” Johnson accused.

  Tori shook her head. “I figured she was just sleeping over at Katy’s, Mickey’s, Corinne’s or Lizzy’s house like we’d always do.” She looked to Cal, whose face remained stoic, “We do that all the time, Cal. All the time. So, I went to my room and to sleep.”

  “I see,” Johnson answered, jotting down notes, shaking his head. “And the next thing you remember is what?”

  “I guess the phone ringing,” Tori answered. “But that happens in the middle of the night all the time, people calling the sheriff because something bad happened. But then the sheriff came into my room and…” Tori started sobbing, now struggling to breathe, to speak. “Oh…my God…” she croaked.

  The door burst open and Sheriff Big Jim Hunter stormed in. “That’s enough!” the sheriff barked and then looked to his daughter. “I’d need some time with Tori.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cal replied.

  “Sure, Sheriff,” Johnson added.

  The two of them quickly packed up and left.

  Through nearly swollen shut eyes, Tori peered up to her father.

  Big Jim Hunter was a force of nature. Tall and sturdy, he had a barrel chest and broad shoulders that supported a large square head with salt and pepper hair cut high and tight. A menacing, bushy horseshoe mustache ran down to a bulbous chin, framing his square jaw. He had a commanding voice and an imposing presence that demanded respect and instilled fear.

  Yet in this moment Tori could see the giant bear of a man was a shell of himself. His face was ashen, his normally piercing eyes were panicked and his typically booming voice faintly quivered. He took a chair next to Tori and slowly sat down. Even in this moment, her own emotions roiling, she could sense that the man in front of her had aged twenty years in the matter of hours.
Her father bent over, his elbows on his thighs, and he looked despondently to the floor.

  “Sheriff, what’s going on? Where’s Jessie?”

  “I don’t know, honey.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? What happened? Nobody has told me what happened.”

  The sheriff paused for a moment. “The car was found abandoned on County 48. We know that Jessie dropped off Katy at her house a little after one a.m. We can only assume she was on her way home then because 48 is the shortest route back to our house. It appears she had to pull over to the side of the road because the right front tire went flat. One of my deputies found the car. He found it locked and the hazard lights were not on. Your sister’s purse, her keys, were gone. The spare tire and jack are in the trunk and it doesn’t look like they’ve been touched. I have investigators at the scene but…”

  “You can’t find her.”

  “No,” the sheriff replied, looking down to the floor.

  “She was abducted, wasn’t she?”

  “We don’t know for sure.”

  “Someone grabbed her off the side of the road, didn’t they?”

  “We don’t know, honey. There is no sign of a struggle...”

  “She’s…gone. Gone!”

  “Tori, we don’t know that for sure.”

  “Don’t you dare lie to me, Sheriff!” Tori wailed, the tears flowing again. “You’ve told me, told us before that when girls go missing they don’t come back!”

  “I know I said…”

  “You said that some crazy man gets them and…they don’t come back. Ever!”

  “That’s not always the case. We have to believe…”

  Tori knew. Deep down, she knew.

  Twenty months later Big Jim Hunter died. Tori Hunter left Manchester and didn’t return. Jessie Hunter was never found.

  CHAPTER 2

  “MY NAME IS TORI HUNTER. I’M AN FBI AGENT.”

  July 2, 2019

  “A gent Hunter, we’ll be on the ground in ten minutes,” the FBI chopper pilot reported.

  “Copy that,” FBI Special Agent Tori Hunter replied through her headset and then looked over to her fellow agent, Geno Harlow. “And the locals, are they sitting on the house?”

  “For the last hour now, since the call came in,” Harlow answered and handed Tori a map. “The house is a rental. Two units are surveilling it right now. There are no lights on at the house, it’s all very quiet.”

  Tori looked down at a map of Allentown, Pennsylvania. The house in question was surrounded by a privacy fence as well as mature trees. With the house identified, the question remained…was Jenny Welker there?

  It was at moments like this, as she approached the potential end of another long case, she contemplated how she’d arrived at this point.

  It had not been her life’s plan.

  After graduating from Boston College with a government and political science degree, Tori went to work for the Massachusetts governor’s office. Law school in a few years was the next logical step. In fact, there were three completed law school applications sitting on her apartment counter with an LSAT score more than enough to get her into all three. Then life threw her another curve.

  Eighteen months into her tenure with the governor’s office, an eight-year-old girl named Libby Walton was kidnapped in Lowell, a suburb north of Boston. Libby was brazenly abducted in broad daylight from a street corner on her way home from school. Her mother, a mere hundred yards away sitting on the front steps of their house witnessed it, the van pulling up and a man grabbing her daughter off the sidewalk and tossing her inside. Eight-year-old girls kidnapped in broad daylight off leafy street corners in safe suburbs draws instant attention and not the good kind. The mother’s frantic 911 call was played on the local evening news that night and Libby’s abduction quickly became a national news story. With that kind of profile, the investigation escalated, involving the resources of not only the Massachusetts State Police but the FBI, including two special agents from the Bureau’s vaunted Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) flown in from Quantico, Virginia.

  Tori was assigned to the liaison team from the governor’s office that worked directly with the investigation. Her staunch refusal to accept any form of Commonwealth governmental bureaucratic red tape was welcomed by the FBI and state police professionals. Drawn to the case both intellectually and emotionally, Tori refused to leave the case. Down to her core Tori could feel the mother’s pain. Her sense of instant loss, the unbearable anguish and the suffocating worry, made all the worse by her father’s warnings years ago that when girls go missing, they don’t come back.

  Then Libby came home.

  She was rescued a week later by the FBI from a cabin deep in the woods of northern Maine. Tori saw and felt the relief and exultation when that little girl came through the front door and rushed into her mother’s arms.

  She’d done everything she could to put her sister’s disappearance and later, her father’s death, in her own personal rearview mirror. Yet, the Libby Walton case crowbarred open the locked mental file drawer of her past, but for once, in a good way. Despite the return of those long-suppressed gut-wrenchingly raw feelings, Libby’s rescue spurred in Tori a sense of hope, for she’d seen someone who’d been thought lost come home alive.

  It could happen. It could be done.

  In the weeks following Libby’s return, Tori couldn’t stop thinking about the case and that moment Libby came through that front door. She wanted to relive it. And more than that, she wanted to be the one responsible for making it happen. Tori saw a new path for herself and was determined to make it happen. In a sign of how she would operate her life going forward, Tori went about making sure things turned out exactly as she wanted, rules, regulations and procedures be damned.

  She reached out to the BAU agents she’d met, inquiring about a career with the FBI. She used connections through the governor’s office to assure a one-on-one meeting with the Director of the BAU at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. To the Director she stated she would join the FBI but only if she could have a career focused on child abductions.

  “Well, Ms. Hunter, we don’t necessarily let people choose like that,” the Director of the BAU replied.

  Tori was direct in her reply. “It’s that or I don’t come. And Director, with all due respect, you want me here.”

  Such a blunt demand and statement would normally lead to an immediate deep-sixing of one’s application. Yet, two things made this situation different. First, not only did she have sterling credentials, but in the interview the Director saw firsthand Tori’s fearlessness, passion and drive, not to mention her sharp analytical mind. Second, Tori assembled an impressive collection of endorsements, with telephone calls to the Director on her behalf from the governor of Massachusetts and one of the Commonwealth’s United States senators along with a letter from the other. Then there was the grateful letter from the parents of Libby Walton. The BAU Director decided Tori was right, that he indeed wanted her in the Bureau.

  She had a new purpose, dedicating her life to preventing families from having to experience what she did. Tori lost her family, but on her watch, she was going to do everything she could to prevent it from happening to anyone else.

  Tori proved worth the Bureau’s investment and rose quickly. She was part of the group of agents that advocated for and established the FBI’s Child Abduction Response Deployment (CARD) Team. Thereafter, her prolific success, including the recovery of children in two separate high-profile celebrity child disappearances gave her a certain profile and cache within the Bureau. She was the Bureau’s go-to on higher profile child disappearances.

  Tori had her career and she dedicated her life to it. Beyond work, what little time she had left she used to train for triathlons, enjoy fine wine and even finer clothes. While popular with and admired by her fellow agents, there were only a few truly close friends. Attractive and athletic, with deep green eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair, men were often int
erested yet rarely seemed to hang around for long, perhaps because of Tori’s workaholic nature, or perhaps just because of her nature. She was feisty on and off the job. It was the reason her work friends recently gave her a fitting t-shirt that read Honey Badger Don’t Care.

  “One minute,” the pilot’s voice called out as the chopper made its final approach, dropping from the sky. Upon landing, they all hurriedly made their way to two waiting unmarked Allentown Police Department surveillance vans.

  Two months ago, a nine-year-old blonde-haired girl named Jenny Welker was abducted while riding her bike home from her friend’s house in Syracuse, New York. All that was found was her abandoned bike in an alley a block from home. Nobody had seen Jenny abducted but the police were immediately convinced that’s what happened. Stationed in New York City, Tori was in Syracuse within six hours and had worked the case nonstop for two months. For five weeks they had few leads and had effectively eliminated everyone in the family’s neighborhood. In going through the activities of Jenny’s father in the week before her disappearance she noted he’d gone into his office on a Saturday and took Jenny with him.

  “But you’ve gone through the people I work with,” her exasperated father stated. “Many times.”

  “Does anyone work on a Saturday that doesn’t otherwise normally work?” Tori asked, grinding away on the case, certain there was someone or something they’d overlooked.

  “No.” But then Hank Welker stopped. “Well, there is a weekend cleaning service we bring in.”

  “And who is that?”

  Within two hours they had a suspect. Ernie Lewan.

  Lewan’s real name was Earl Leary, a registered sex offender in Alabama. Earl Leary had a history of fondling young girls and hadn’t been seen in Alabama in two years. After Jenny’s disappearance, Leary also vanished from Syracuse.

  Leary had few job skills and his limited employment history was of drywall finishing and janitorial work. Tori and her team searched open job postings for drywall workers and janitors throughout the United States that were posted after Jenny Welker’s abduction. Two hours ago, they got a hit, a call from the Allentown police. A man matching the description of Earl Leary, now going by the name of Ellis Lowe, was working the second shift as a janitor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital and renting a house on Salisbury Street in town.