Suddenly, he looked at the investigators and had a thought. He wondered if the kids were with the neighbors or Pat Schnure or …
“Who’s taking care of the kids?” Ken Reinert asked.
And an investigator said, “What kids?”
Ken Reinert called his parents to learn if his children were with them. He found they were not. When he informed his parents that Susan was dead, he was astonished to discover that he couldn’t tell the truth. He told his parents that she’d been killed in a car accident.
Joe VanNort later heard about it and moved Ken Reinert up a notch on his suspect list. Why would he lie about it? the old cop wondered. But Joe VanNort had been a bachelor nearly all his life, and was childless. He didn’t understand how it would be for a father to utter a certain word when his own children were missing. It was impossible for Ken Reinert even to think the word at that time. Finally he had to.
He called his parents back and said, “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t say it. Susan. She was murdered.”
When Ken got home that night his wife Lynn was waiting. They’d called everyone they could think to call and still hadn’t located his children.
His wife dug through the trash and located two greeting cards that he’d recently received. They were homemade, one from each child. One message said:
Nobody else may know that you are the world’s greatest dad, but I know you are. Happy Father’s Day.
Love,
Karen
The other said:
There is no one better than you for a dad.
Love,
Michael
Without mentioning the cards she put them in a safe place. There was a horrifying possibility that they might become priceless.
By Tuesday afternoon Jack Holtz and the crime man designated as evidence officer were on their way to the Reinert home in Ardmore. The evidence officer was Trooper Lou DeSantis. He was a little taller and a little older than Jack Holtz and looked and sounded like a game of stickball in the old Italian neighborhoods of South Philly. He was a city guy and Philadelphia was home, as opposed to VanNort and Holtz, who rated an assignment in Philly right up there with sandhogging and gassing stray cats. Harrisburg was plenty big for them.
It was usually Joe VanNort’s style, as the sergeant in the criminal investigations unit, to come into a case after the preliminaries were finished and they’d focused on a suspect. He was the best they had at interrogation. But this one involved missing kids. He was in on the legwork from the start.
Before it was over, Jack Holtz would be inside the Reinert home a dozen times. On this first trip it was to try to determine what had caused them to leave the house so abruptly on Friday night, just after the hailstorm. He found that the house was full of cardboard boxes packed with things for the coming garage sale. In the kitchen he found cereal bowls and milk glasses with milk still in them.
He checked the children’s rooms. Karen had a Bambi bedspread. She liked books and stuffed animals close to her. Michael had a Star Wars bedspread. He preferred his favorite toys nearby, and his baseball mitt.
Both children had neat piles of clothing, enough for a day or two, folded on the foot of their beds. Michael had changed clothes after the game. The cops found his Phillies baseball shirt in the clothes hamper.
Wherever they had gone that night, they couldn’t have intended to go far. They obviously planned to return shortly.
Susan Reinert’s brother Pat Gallagher had insisted on meeting the police at his sister’s home. He sat and waited as the cops searched and took photos and tried to lift latent fingerprints in all the rooms.
Pat Gallagher was distant, cool, and not friendly. He was several years older than his sister. Jack Holtz thought he was there to keep an eye on the silverware. Of course he was a suspect. To Jack Holtz and the man who trained him, everybody’s a suspect.
Bill Bradfield received lots of notifications about the death of Susan Reinert. An early notification came from a woman teacher with whom he’d been romantically involved in the past.
Another came from little Shelly who informed Chris and Bill Bradfield of the news, exclaiming, “Guess whose name’s in the paper?”
She was obviously not going into mourning.
Sharon Lee, Susan’s friend and former colleague at Upper Merion, got the word on Tuesday from another teacher who’d heard a news broadcast. She immediately called Bill Bradfield at St. John’s, but was told he was in class. She left her name and number.
He called her at 7:00 P.M. He was whispering. He admitted he was not shocked to hear about Susan Reinert because another teacher had already told him the sad story.
Sharon Lee asked when he had planned to see Susan again and Bill Bradfield said, well, when school started in September.
And that stunned Sharon Lee. Then she got mad. Very mad, because she’d been told by Susan all about the trip to England, and the marriage plans.
When she began pointing out a few of those things to Bill Bradfield, he simply said that Susan Reinert had been pursuing him, but he had always told her he wasn’t interested.
When Sharon Lee asked if he had any idea what Susan was doing in Harrisburg, Bill Bradfield said that he believed she had a friend named Don Jones in the Harrisburg area.
By then, Sharon Lee was having trouble maintaining composure and she said, “All right, Bill, well how about the children? Do you have any idea where they might be? Is someone we don’t know taking care of them? What do you think?”
And Bill Bradfield said, “Oh yes. How old were the children?”
After Sharon Lee had hung up, she was confused and upset to think that he was trying to deny involvement with Susan Reinert. She was more upset to think that he was pretending not to know anything about the kids.
Sharon Lee had been at Susan Reinerts house once when Bill Bradfield showed up unexpectedly. She saw him making a fuss over Karen who seemed to enjoy all his attention. He had given her an autograph book for her birthday and inscribed a little message in Greek.
She was most upset when she belatedly realized that he had spoken of the children in the past tense.
“How old were the children?”
They knew about the insurance very quickly. An agent from New York Life called the state police barracks and presented them with a motive when the first news flashes hit the tube.
They also realized that this investigation probably had little or nothing to do with the Harrisburg area, for whatever reason the body was dumped there. Joe VanNort had to bite the bullet and move his team of eight investigators to Belmont Barracks in Philadelphia.
By the end of the first week, he was living in a Holiday Inn near Philly along with Jack Holtz who was stewing over having to raise his eleven-year-old son long-distance. Like Susan Reinert he was a divorced parent with custody of his only child. Fortunately, Holtz’s mother only lived a few minutes from his home and could take over temporarily. He figured the investigation would be over before the holidays.
Joe VanNort had a lot of questions for Sue Myers and made an appointment with her for Tuesday night. He said that love and murder go together like Fred and Ginger and figured she’d have something to tell them. They’d already heard about the fight in the faculty lounge.
When the cops got to Phoenixville they found Sue Myers waiting in her apartment with Vince Valaitis whom she’d called home from work. And when Vince saw them he looked as if he’d been caught in the bathtub by Jay Smith with a shampoo bottle full of acid. Wearing his hairnet.
Vince was as blanched as a dead azalea. His ear was glued to the telephone into which Bill Bradfield was saying, “You don’t have to talk to the police! You’ll get yourself in trouble! Let Sue talk to them! Keep your mouth shut!”