“What rabbit?” said Jane.
“This stuffed pink rabbit. It was lying on the floor, in the hallway. And I started to get a really sick feeling. No one had told me there was a child in the house. I went down the hall, looked in the next bedroom, and it was clearly a kid’s. Pink curtains, princess comforter on the bed. I looked everywhere. The bedrooms, the cellar, the area outside the house, but I didn’t find her. Neither did the search team, who combed all those woods.” He shook his head. “That little girl was gone.”
They sat in a café in downtown Waterville, a twenty-minute drive from the late Eloise Creighton’s residence. The torrential rains had kept most people at home, and only one other table was occupied, by a couple too engrossed in their smartphones to pay attention to each other, much less to anyone else. As thunder boomed and rain pounded the street outside, inside there was only the sound of quiet conversation and the hiss of the cappuccino machine.
“I never stopped thinking about the case, even all these years later,” said Thibodeau. “I wasn’t the investigating officer, but at that particular time in my life, it hit me hard, because of that missing little girl, Lily. She was only three years old when she vanished, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what she might have gone through that night. Did she see what happened to her mother? Was the killer someone she knew, maybe even trusted? My daughter was a year old then, and I thought about what it’d be like to have her taken. To not know if she was even still alive. Four years ago, when I joined the Major Crime Unit, Dan Tremblay had just retired, so I pulled out his cold case files and took another look at the Eloise Creighton murder. That folder I gave you contains copies of his notes and interviews, and I’ll email you the autopsy report. I’ve gone over the case again and again and I keep coming to the same conclusion Tremblay did. It was her ex-husband who did it. It had to be him.”
Jane paged through the sheaf of interviews. “There were no other viable suspects?”
“Tremblay considered just about everyone who came into contact with the victim. In the end, he still believed it was the ex-husband, James. Their divorce was pretty much a knock-down, drag-out fight. Truth is, their marriage seemed doomed from the start. She was an academic, he was a musician—and not a very successful one. He played guitar in bars at night and taught music part-time at the high school in Bangor. It must’ve been a case of opposites attracting. Women always seem to have a thing for scruffy musicians.”
“Do they?” said Jane.
“You tell me.”
“I never got the musician bug myself.”
“Well, a lot of ladies seem to catch it. Maybe it’s the bad-boy mystique. Whatever, it didn’t last long for the Creightons. They were married for four years and then she filed for divorce. They fought over everything—the furniture, the bank account, the kid. They finally agreed to share custody of their three-year-old daughter, but even then they were barely speaking to each other. So you can see why he was Tremblay’s number one suspect. Especially since whoever killed the mother also made off with the kid.”
“What other suspects did Tremblay look at?”
“The victim taught four classes a semester at Colby, so her students came under consideration. Maybe she’d pissed off a student with a bad grade. Maybe she became the object of a student’s obsession. She was a nice-looking woman, with no current man in her life as far as anyone knew. And a week before the murder, she’d hosted a wine-and-cheese reception in her house for a few dozen of her senior students, so they knew where she lived and the layout of the house.” He paused. “And they would have seen her little girl that night too.”
“You said her name was Lily?” asked Frost.
“Yeah.”
“You ever consider the possibility that the mother wasn’t the target? That maybe the child was the real prize?”
Thibodeau nodded. “Yeah, and that girl was cute as a button. Long blond hair, just like her mother’s. Tremblay wondered if maybe someone saw Lily around town and decided he wanted her for himself. That maybe the mother’s murder was just incidental, a kidnapping that went wrong.”
“Who took care of Lily while her mother was teaching at the college?” asked Jane.
“She attended a private daycare. It was run by a local woman, and she checked out totally clean. Forty-five years old, lived in Waterville all her life.”
“You make that sound like a badge of purity,” said Jane. “Being local.”