Briggs sighed. For a moment he looked weary, as if the story were tiring to tell. Then he shrugged it off. “A special agent from D.C. He showed up the following week, wanted to go back over the whole investigation. The Davenports had connections.”
This was new information, but not all that surprising. At Blackburne, we had all thought that the Davenports would call the FBI or a private investigator. Some classmates, like Fletcher Dupree, had said the local cops were too incompetent to handle something like Fritz vanishing into thin air.
Briggs gestured with his hand as if discarding an unpleasant thought. “I don’t have a problem with the FBI in general. But it just muddied the water when they came in. Who’s in charge? Who has jurisdiction? Who makes decisions, and who carries them out? Those are all the sorts of things you don’t want to have to deal with in the middle of an investigation. The feds wanted to review everything we’d done so far, which slowed us all down. They did their own interviews. They were thinking kidnapping and ransom. Mr. Davenport’s company did a lot of business with the military, which meant money and national security issues.” He paused to sip his coffee.
Listening to Briggs was surreal, like eavesdropping on a movie set. Kidnapping, ransom, national security. “Are you telling me,” I began, and then lowered my voice. “Are you telling me that Fritz disappearing might have had something to do with national security?”
Briggs put down his coffee. “No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m saying what some theories were at the time. Thousands of people go missing every year, for all sorts of reasons. They get lost, they run away with someone, maybe from someone. They’re mad at their parents, or at their girlfriends, and want to give them a scare. Someone wants to step out of his life and into another one. A kid running off to the city to make it big, that kind of thing.”
And this got at the crux of the issue—why Fritz had run away. Guilt flushed through me. At a remove of almost ten years, it seemed ridiculous and even self-centered to think that Fritz had run away solely because I had lied to him, even though at the time I had thought it was true. Yet I still felt guilty. “If the FBI hasn’t found him by now,” I said tentatively, feeling my way around the idea even as I spoke it aloud, “then all those scenarios you just listed don’t make a lot of sense.”
Briggs looked at me with something like resignation. “The FBI hasn’t found him because they’re not looking for him,” he said.
I blinked. His words didn’t fully register. “Excuse me?” I said. “What, they—did they find something, or . . . Wait, is this because of the legally dead thing, or—”
Briggs shook his head. “The feds stopped looking for him a week after they showed up,” he said.
I stared at him. He looked back at me impassively, patient as a clock. “Why the fuck would they do that?” I said, my voice rising. In her corner, the waitress stirred.
Briggs didn’t blink. “Somebody had them stop looking,” he said. He wasn’t being playful or coy, just relaying facts. “One morning the special agent in charge went to Sheriff Baines’s office, and after he left, the sheriff told us that the feds were out and it was our case again, along with the state police.”
I realized that somewhere in the conversation I had taken hold of my coffee spoon and was now gripping it hard enough to leave a welt in my palm. I put it down on the table. “Why—why would they do that? What would make them just stop looking without some sort of . . .” I trailed off, uncertain how to end that thought and not sure I wanted to.
Briggs hesitated. “It was more like they realized they’d made some sort of mistake and pulled out,” he said. “I don’t know for sure. The official word was that the FBI had found no reason for its involvement. And to be honest, there didn’t seem to be. There wasn’t ever any ransom demand, for one thing, and no real clues about anyone being involved in any sort of kidnapping or abduction or any other federal crime. But once the feds get out of their chairs, they don’t tend to just sit back down and call it a day without having done something first. All they did was get updated on the case, run down a few leads, and then head back to D.C.” Briggs looked at his coffee cup, as if considering whether to take another sip. “Ricky Townsend must’ve been thanking his lucky stars when that happened.”
Incredulous, I asked, “Why, do you . . . Do you think the sheriff had something to do with Fritz’s disappearance?”
Briggs frowned, causing an ugly wrinkling of his face. “God, no,” he said with a trace of disgust. “No. He’s a lot of things, but . . . just no.” He ran a hand over his forehead, which was probably his equivalent of extreme agitation. “That’s not what I’m suggesting. I’m talking about perception. Spin. Ricky’s theory about Tofer Jones was shot full of holes by the state police, but all that got forgotten when the feds showed up. And by the time they left, folks half thought the feds had come up with that theory and got egg on their faces. Meanwhile, Ricky was around to talk to the media again, standing beside the state police and nodding at press conferences. He dropped the abduction story and started quoting statistics about runaways.” Briggs stopped abruptly, as if he felt he had said too much.
I thought I understood. “You’re saying Townsend did some sort of verbal jujitsu and made the FBI look stupid instead of him,” I said. “And then he took your theory about Fritz running away and made it his.”
Briggs hesitated and then gave me a resigned shrug. “And now he’s sheriff and I’m a retired deputy,” he said. “He didn’t like how I’d argued with him, and Ricky Townsend doesn’t forget. When he got elected sheriff last year, I knew it was just a matter of time before I found myself at a desk job, so I retired early. Got my pension and health benefits, so it’s okay.” He sounded like a man working to convince himself.
“So why are you telling me all this?” I asked. “You thought I had an agenda. What’s yours? Is this just about some beef you have with Sheriff Townsend?” I was a bit surprised by my own words. A knot tightened in my gut.
But Briggs just considered the top of the table, as if looking there for an answer. Then he looked back up at me, and his face expressed sorrow and a kind of pain. “It was when I heard about that boy who shot himself,” he said quietly. “For a school to lose two boys . . . Well, it brought up a lot of old memories. I thought you deserved to know.”