Page 34 of The Night I Lost Him

Chapter 14

April

“Walter Givens, right?” Caitlin looked up at me sharply from the articles she’d been scouring.

I nearly dropped my phone. “Yes!” I cried, jumping up to join her as I prayed she’d finally found something useful.

“Here,” she said, pointing as I reached her, “I found his birth announcement in the newspaper. Thirty-nine years ago.” She’d searched that far back already? I had to hand it to her, she was much better and faster at it than I could have ever dreamed of being. We hadn’t known his actual age, we’d been guessing. “He was born to Mary and Christopher Givens of Crystal Shores, Florida at 3:14 a.m. on February fifth in Angel of Grace Hospital in Tallahassee.”

“Oh!” Amber spoke up, already on it, “Tallahassee is about forty-five minutes from Crystal Shores. It is a little beach town. But really little. It doesn’t look very touristy. I don’t think it’s a well-known place. It doesn’t really look like much to brag about.” We were all looking at her phone now, where she had the street-view up. She wasn’t kidding, the town was small. We stared at the rows of houses and stores and streets that looked pretty average, not sure what to make of it.

“It seems a little small for all of those hidden places he kept going on about, doesn’t it?” I mused, thinking about all of the places he kept telling Jamie he wanted to take him. I knew his mom didn’t live there anymore. So where would he have gone there? “It doesn’t give a home address in the announcement, does it?” I was doubtful, but hopeful, too.

Caitlin shook her head. “No. And we know his mom is down here which is probably why he was in this area. I don’t know about any other family, or if they own any property up there, but I’m on it now that I have a place to look.”

“Hold on,” Jesse spoke up, “There’s an obituary for a Christopher Givens three years ago. He lived in Crystal Shores. Being that it’s such a small town, I’m going to assume it’s Wally’s dad, especially since he was twenty-three years older than Wally.”

“So they were probably divorced, then,” Caitlin mused, “because the cops seemed to act like Wally had lived here a long time and where he grew up was irrelevant. I doubt he would have come down here without his mom, since he seems like such a mama’s boy. He called her when he knew he was in trouble. So I’m sure they’ve both been here for a long time.” She paused, looking through more articles. “Hey, look. I found his dad’s address. The house went into foreclosure three years ago, shortly after Christopher’s death.”

For a moment I held out hope that the house was still sitting empty in limbo, maybe in a lonely area outside of town, a place Wally would know well and would be comfortable in. The perfect hiding spot. Caitlin dashed my hopes with a search on a real estate site. “Here it is. The price they paid makes me think it was probably auctioned off. It sold to a family by the name of Jollie. It hasn’t sold since then.”

Amber was sitting beside her, pulling up the address on the map of the town. “Well, it looks like it’s lived in and they’re taking good care of it. Ok. So if he took Jamie home, he took him somewhere other than the home he grew up in. Unless he knows them.”

I looked doubtfully at the little house with a picket fence and a children’s playground and sandbox in the side yard. “No,” I sighed because none of it was fitting together. “He was close to his mother, but his car was accounted for the whole time, as was hers, and Crystal Shores is hours away from here. That looks like a family’s home, and even if they were related to him or friends of the family, I doubt he’d show up at their house with someone he kidnapped. What would he say? ‘Oh, this bleeding, unconscious guy? He’s my boyfriend, and he loves me. Just ignore any banging on the walls and cries for help. He does that to be silly.’ I mean, you’d think he’d go somewhere secluded, anyway, and that house is right in the middle of town. A little town, at that, where people watch strangers closely. He wouldn’t want to attract that much attention. Unless he knows someone up there who’s as crazy as he is.”

I was feeling discouraged, and I knew it was obvious. At that point I was wondering if his hometown was just a red herring. Maybe I’d been way off, and he’d been somewhere around us the whole time.

“Well,” Caitlin said, arching an eyebrow in thought, “An accomplice is a possibility, and one we haven’t really considered. But where is this person now? They weren’t at the hotel with Wally.”

“Maybe they took off in separate directions as soon as things went south,” Jeff suggested.

Caitlin, still looking thoughtful, went back to the articles, while simultaneously pulling up something on her phone. “I wish I could find one damn social media account they missed,” she muttered to herself.

I wanted to go up to Crystal Shores and tear the town apart to make sure it wasn’t important, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. According to the detective, the police in Wally’s unnamed hometown hadn’t seen any signs of Wally or Jamie the entire time. It was obvious they didn’t think his hometown was important, but that in itself made me wonder if they were keeping as good of a watch as they told me they were.

Even if I did go up there, with nowhere to really look I would be wasting precious time by wandering around a little beach town aimlessly looking for clues I might not understand even if I saw them. I could not believe that a deranged man who’d spent most of his spare time in a gay strip club pining obsessively over one of the dancers was actually clever enough to make someone disappear without a trace. He’d left Jamie’s bike right on the side of the road; he hadn’t even tried to hide it. He didn’t have that much of a head start. He wasn’t that careful in anything he did. How had he managed to pull it off?

“Interesting,” Jesse suddenly spoke up, looking at his phone. Every single one of us swiveled our heads in his direction. “The obituary stated that Christopher Givens died after a long health battle, so I did a little digging. It looks like he was injured in some sort of accident when Wally was a kid. He used a wheelchair. It sounds like whatever happened back then caused him a lot of problems throughout his life.”

“Wow, and his wife and kid just up and left him, I guess,” Caitlin said with disdain.

“I mean, you don’t know what really happened, Caitlin,” Jeff pointed out, and that was true, but I wasn’t going to defend Wally or his mom. I also didn’t know if the new information was actually helpful, or just something else to lead us off in a random direction.

I sat back down, and my mind wandered back to my memories, trying to figure out how a guy like Wally had actually pulled off a kidnapping without getting caught until it all went sour. There had to be a point where he’d messed up. He’d never been careful, not even before he’d taken Jamie. He continuously went back to the club even though they continued to make him leave. He insistently tried to talk to Jamie in front of other people, even though it had always been obvious Jamie didn’t want to talk to him. He created a shrine in his home, and though it had been hidden, it hadn’t been hidden well and he left it there when he decided to go through with his plan. He messaged Jamie online, where he should have known that everything can be saved, photographed, and traced. He cornered Jamie in the back room of the club, even though he knew that could get him banned and in trouble with the law. Maybe he’d already been planning on carrying out the abduction, so he didn’t care about being banned, but what about being beaten to a pulp by two bouncers? What about the possibility of being arrested before he could accomplish it?

So what was I missing? How was a guy like that smart enough to capture the object of his obsession, then disappear off the grid completely for weeks, only to reappear at a motel alone with a frantic phone call to his mother and then a claim that he didn’t say anything he’d been recorded saying? “How did he do so many stupid, careless things for so long and then manage to get away with this without anyone figuring out where he had Jamie?” I wondered aloud.

Jeff looked at me. “Passion? Obsession? Those definitely make you stupid sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Caitlin said, still looking through the articles in front of her, “But they don’t make you smart later when you hatch a plan. He acted carelessly and recklessly consistently for a long time, and then all of a sudden, he got away with murder? Caden’s right. It doesn’t make sense.”

“He didn’t get away with it, though,” Jeff said, “He got caught.”

“Yeah, in a stupid way, yet again,” Caitlin said, looking up at us, “Still acting carelessly, still being reckless. So par for the course, but how did he manage to actually take Jamie, disappear for weeks, until whatever happened? And how is Jamie still missing?”

“So maybe there was someone else?” Amber suggested, “Someone who was the brains?”

“Do you really think Wally would share Jamie, though?” Jeff said, “I mean, if there was someone else, what was the person getting out of it? We know Wally isn’t rich, and they haven’t found anyone claiming to be a friend, just people who vaguely knew him. The guy was a loner. I don’t know if I buy the whole accomplice thing.”

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