He sat there, calm as an ice floe. I couldn’t read his expression. Absently I realized this must have been a useful skill for a cop. When he spoke, it was with the same even tone. “I know you became an author. You wrote a novel. So I wondered if you were doing some sort of research here, for another book.”
Then I understood. Briggs was checking to see if I was exploiting Fritz’s disappearance as material for a book. The idea was so ludicrous, I had to laugh, more of a short, rueful bark than actual laughter. “I’m sorry,” I said after a moment. “I . . . It just struck me as funny. It’s . . .” I sighed. “I’m sorry I bit your head off. Look, the last thing I’m interested in doing is writing a book about this. I just . . . I’ve spent years avoiding this, and now I’ve . . . come back to the place where it happened. I need to put it to rest.” I briefly thought about telling him what I’d learned from Pelham Greer—that Fritz had come back to our dorm room that night while I was in the library talking with Trip Alexander—but that was my secret, and I was reluctant to give it up just yet, especially to someone I barely knew. Plus, he was a former cop who might not look kindly on how I had kept Fritz’s medal to myself for almost a decade. So I held back even as I leaned forward in my seat toward Briggs. “If you know anything about Fritz, anything that could help find him, or help me understand what happened to him . . . please,” I said, “please tell me.”
Briggs thought for a moment, looking out the window at the night, and then exhaled sharply through his nose. As he spoke, I felt a growing excitement. This was one of those key moments in life, when everything gets reduced to what is said and what is heard in the next few minutes.
“The night your roommate disappeared,” he said, “I was the officer on duty. We got a call from Blackburne, from Sam Hodges, saying that a student was missing. I drove out there, thinking that it was probably a homesick boy who was just hiding somewhere, or at most that he’d run away and someone would pick him up in Staunton or Waynesboro. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. But after talking with Mr. Hodges, I got the sense that it was more serious than that, and then I met with you and that settled it for me. You all were worried and frightened. I called in and requested a search party.” He paused and quirked his mouth. “I was in CID then, our criminal investigations division, and I wanted to handle this quickly and quietly. Sam Hodges had told me about the boy’s parents. Anytime you have a prominent family involved, you have to be careful about investigations getting too public. But Ricky Townsend—he wasn’t sheriff yet, though he was on his way—he was in charge of my division, and he wanted a press conference and media coverage. He thought Fritz might have been abducted. He wanted this all out on the news to get the public involved in the search.”
My throat was dry. “You didn’t agree,” I said.
Briggs shook his head. “Ricky was a good deputy, but he was slick. He is slick. He likes talking to the press, getting on television. Me, I like keeping my head down and doing my job. We’d butted heads more than once, but this was different, with a lot more at stake. Fritz was eighteen, which meant we couldn’t treat this as a child abduction. Heck, we didn’t have any evidence to suggest that a crime of any kind had taken place. I can’t tell you how much I hoped we’d just find him out in the woods somewhere, with maybe a broken leg at worst. But after the search party didn’t find Fritz, Ricky and I argued about what to do next. That ATM receipt in Charlottesville the weekend before, when Fritz had obviously taken a lot of cash out of his account, made me wonder if Fritz had planned this. But Ricky figured someone had taken Fritz, grabbed him off the road, and was holding him in a basement somewhere.” He saw the look on my face and raised a hand as if to ward off my reaction. “I’m sorry the way this sounds. I don’t mean to upset you. But you need to know how we were thinking. Fritz didn’t own a car, and none were missing from Blackburne, or the whole county for that matter, so he must have walked away without anyone seeing him, had a car we didn’t know about, or was picked up by someone, either a stranger or somebody willing to help him run away. Ricky even had a suspect, a guy named Tofer Jones, who worked at Blackburne and had a record.”
I nodded. “I remember that. He was a cook. But you interviewed him and let him go, right?”
Briggs snorted. “Tofer couldn’t catch a cow, much less kidnap a rich white kid and keep him hidden somewhere. When he was nineteen, he tried to walk out of a mall in Richmond with some clothes in a backpack, said he wanted to get his mother a Christmas present but didn’t have any money. Few years later, a rape victim in Mechanicsville ID’d Tofer in a photo lineup, but he was visiting family in D.C. at the time and even had a job interview an hour before the rape occurred, so all charges were dropped, and rightfully so. It was a no-brainer that he wasn’t involved in Fritz Davenport’s disappearance. But Tofer got hotheaded when Ricky and I interviewed him, pushed Ricky’s buttons, and Ricky thought Tofer was a good suspect. Ricky and I got kind of heated. Sheriff Baines had to cut both of us off.” Briggs sat back. “Didn’t matter in the end, anyway.”
“Why not?”
“State police got involved, for one thing. Sheriff called them in the day after Fritz went missing. They’ve got more manpower and expertise for this kind of thing than we do. They interviewed Tofer themselves, realized pretty quick that he wasn’t a viable suspect, and cut him loose. Interviewed a few other Blackburne employees, too.”
Like Pelham Greer, I thought. “Some folks were upset,” I said.
“You might be, too, if you were being interrogated about something you had nothing to do with,” Briggs said. “Happens a lot. Most folks are cooperative, some are nervous, and then you’ve got the ones full of righteous indignation who take it personally. That’s not unusual. But we had to ask everyone. How did Fritz walk down off that hill in the middle of a rural county, at night, and vanish? We had dogs track him as far as the main entrance, but then the trail went cold. Wind and cold played hell with the scent. Folks figured he had to have gotten in a vehicle. And we needed to know if someone at Blackburne had helped him leave. But then the feds got involved, and that changed everything real quick.”
I had been thinking of the main entrance to Blackburne, the two lions on their pedestals. Fritz would have passed by them if he had left campus that way. If the lions could talk, what would they report they had seen? Had Fritz walked out confidently, knowing where he was going? Or had he been scared to death of leaving everything behind? Or—and this was the worst thought—had someone abducted him? Then I realized that Briggs was waiting for me to respond, and I recalled with a start what he had said. “Did you say . . . the feds? You mean the FBI?”