The Snake and the Spider Page 5

  In those early years he was shot at twice, both while doing surveillance on private properties. He played a role in numerous real-life chase scenes in which he had to track down a subject who preferred to remain anonymous. And when the people weren’t exciting, his equipment was. He used cameras that could photograph the face of a person in a motel room with the blinds closed at more than a hundred yards away. There were tracking devices, transmitting devices, and nearly invisible tape recorders.

  But by the early 1970s, although he thoroughly enjoyed his work, Bob had reached a point of concern regarding his career. Because he handled mostly domestic cases, he had begun to fear that his reputation was at stake. Bob had not considered the sleazy aspects of investigating domestic affairs and at times the pictures he was forced to take turned his stomach.

  About the same time, Bob became a Christian. He wanted to do everything in a way that would please God, and almost overnight he began to question the ethical aspects of his work as an investigator.

  “God,” he prayed one day, “please show me if you want me out of this field. I will only stay in it if I can do your work here.”

  The answer came in dramatic fashion. The morning after putting the issue before God, a woman came into his office in tears. She needed to know, she said, if her husband really had been unfaithful as she suspected.

  Bob saw her tears and the pain she was in and suddenly he could relate. He had been through divorce and knew the hurt of a torn marriage. He pulled up a chair and took the woman’s hand much the way a father would do with his hurting child. He told the woman he would do what he could but that even if her husband was cheating on her, there could be nothing better than a reconciliation.

  Indeed, after confirming the woman’s fears, he arranged for the couple to meet in his office. That meeting led to another and eventually the couple agreed to get professional counseling and some time later they were reunited. Bob had his answer.

  After that, with what Bob knew to be God’s divine assistance, his reputation and income began to grow at a dramatic rate. Nationally, he became recognized as an authority on private investigations. Bob intended to keep doing investigations as long as there was someone he could help.

  This was still true the morning he received the call from James Byrd. After listening to the sketchy details of the case, Bob knew it would fit that criterion. Somewhere, four parents were suffering a great deal of pain over not knowing the fate of their sons. There was only one way to ease their pain and that was by finding them—alive or dead.

  With a confidence that was purely founded, Bob knew it was only a matter of time before he found the boys. And then, as with his other cases, he could put an end to their awful pain.

  CHAPTER 6

  In addition to being a phenomenal detective, Bob Brown prided himself on being a good father. He had two beautiful daughters, Vicky and Cindy, and years later, he and his second wife, Lois, had been blessed with a son. Over the years Bob had learned how different boys were from girls, how anxiously they sought their freedom and how they craved adventure.

  Most of the time, Bob and Lois obliged their children by allowing the necessary experiences to help them gain their independence. There were vacations with friends, overnight trips, and other typical teenage activities. But there was one place Bob never allowed his kids to go and that was Daytona Beach.

  Bob had never needed a newspaper article to understand the statistics about Daytona Beach and how it was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the United States.

  Many of his investigations took him to that area and he had seen firsthand the types of people and kinds of behavior that made the city what it was. He had seen teenage girls selling their bodies for drug money, had known of teenage boys who had gotten caught up in the motorcycle gangs and then wound up in jail for committing crimes. He knew that for the most part Daytona Beach consisted of motels and bars and drug-infested video arcades. As far as he was concerned, his children had no business being in any of those places.

  On Wednesday, November 1, he received a package of information from Byrd regarding the disappearance of Jim Boucher and Daryl Barber and everything their parents had been able to tell him about their sons.

  Bob Brown had one rule he followed religiously: know the missing people before making a move. There was no point investigating the disappearance of two teenagers without first knowing everything there was to know about the boys. And by the time Bob was finished, he planned to know them better than even their parents did.

  Although still working as a subcontracted investigator for James Byrd, Bob spent hours on the telephone talking to the boys’ parents, their friends, girlfriends, teachers, and relatives. Finally, after a week of intensive efforts, he felt that he knew Jim and Daryl thoroughly. He knew where they would go for a good time, what restaurants they would eat at, who they would befriend, and, especially, what dangers they would be unaware of.

  The boys’ Florida dream vacation was the culmination of a seven-year friendship, the details of which Bob committed to memory. The boys were utterly loyal to that friendship and the close relationship they had built as children. They knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses and one never failed to stand up for the other in times of trouble.

  Naturally, their parents had figured there could be no better traveling companions. Certainly no one would bother two grown boys when one was always looking out for the other? Jim was younger than Daryl by two years and that alone brought comfort to Roy and Faye Boucher. In Daryl’s company, Jim would always have someone watching over him, helping him should anything go wrong while they were away from home.

  What their parents hadn’t seen, and what Bob now found painfully obvious, was how their friendship might have worked against them. Both teens were equally naive, equally trusting of people they met. And neither had the ability to recognize the potential dangers that lay hidden like so many explosives across the sparkling sands and motel-lined streets that made up Daytona Beach.

  This was largely because the boys had grown up in Metamora and spent little time outside the township limits. Bob researched the town and found that it offered no training in the ability to recognize criminal types. Very simply, there were no criminal types and no crime in Metamora or its neighboring communities.

  Metamora, Michigan, was founded in 1832 after a pioneer named Jesse Lee moved to what was nothing more than an area of wilderness and built his wife a log cabin. Fifty years later an additional seventeen people had moved to Metamora, and in the years that followed, the township grew at only a slightly faster pace. So that by the 1970s, when Jim and Daryl were growing up, there were still less than five hundred people in the township of Metamora and another two thousand five hundred in the surrounding areas. So small was Metamora that when townspeople wanted to get out of town and head for the big city, they went to nearby Lapeer, which with 6,500 people was a regular metropolis in comparison.

  Actually, the nearest big city was Detroit, some sixty miles south. People in Metamora heard rumors of the things that went on in Detroit: riots, armed robbery, killings. But for the most part there was never anything they could actually prove, because there were many people in Metamora who had never in all their lives traveled as far south as Detroit. After all, they had a civic center in Lapeer and there were clothing shops, auto repair garages, and certainly grocery stores. What possible reason could there be, most people reasoned, to leave a beautiful place like Metamora, or even Lapeer for that matter, and travel to a forsaken place like Detroit?

  For all its big-city problems, Bob figured had even one of the boys been from Detroit he might have seen Daytona Beach for what it was. The drug dealers and thieves would stick out as clearly as if they carried billboard signs.

  Instead, upon their arrival at Daytona Beach, Jim and Daryl probably saw the same thing Jim’s girlfriend had seen: a teenage playground the likes of which had never been seen in Metamora or anywhere else in Michigan.


  The playgrounds where Jim and Daryl sought a good time in the early days of their friendship had been much safer.

  Daryl, the youngest of five children, had grown up in his family’s sprawling home on Baldwin Road. The Barbers owned quarter horses and kept them on their ten-acre lot. They also had what was probably one of the only private swimming pools in all of Metamora or the surrounding townships. For that reason, Bob learned, the Barber children always had a stream of friends flowing in and out of their home, and there were times it seemed more like a clubhouse than the family’s private backyard.

  Daryl’s parents loved the busyness of their home and did all they could to encourage it. They believed that if their children were spending time at home, they weren’t spending it in places where they might get in trouble. The theory had proved effective and as Daryl’s siblings grew to be productive adults, the Barbers never regretted having opened their home to the neighborhood children.

  With his four older brothers and sisters entertaining their friends at the house, Daryl often hung around kids who were older than he. In addition to his place in the family birth order, Daryl’s friends were older because the children who had grown up on Baldwin Road tended to be older, also. Most of the families had purchased land and built homes at about the same time and at first none of them had children Daryl’s age.

  Outgoing and personable even at the impish and mischievous age of seven, Daryl never minded or even noticed that he lacked friends his own age. He enjoyed playing with the friends of his brothers and sisters and thrived on the attention they gave him.

  “Your little brother is so cute,” his brother’s girlfriends had said on more than one occasion.

  Bob could imagine how Daryl’s brown eyes must have danced, his dimples punctuating his precocious grin. Who needed friends one’s own age when one was getting that kind of attention from older girls? When he wasn’t spending time with the older kids, Daryl rode horses or fished from the family’s private pond. He was an athletic boy with tanned skin and an easy, friendly smile. Especially as he grew older, more than one girl in the neighborhood began paying attention to the handsome youngest son in the Barber household.

  Bob smiled at the picture of Daryl. Indeed, the boy had lived a charmed childhood, one which only got better the summer of 1971—the summer Jim Boucher moved into the house down the street.

  Ron and Faye Boucher had lived in Troy, Michigan, since shortly after getting married. Although Troy was not the city Detroit was, it seemed to be heading that way and the Bouchers were not pleased. Sometime after Jim and Timothy were born they began dreaming about moving to the country: vast open space, trees to climb, horses to ride, friendly neighbors. In Troy, they feared that soon enough there would come the crime and violence and crowded conditions that accompany life in the city.

  By 1971 the Bouchers had four children, all of them boys, and they were ready to make their dreams of owning a country home a reality. That year the Bouchers spent many weekends piling the boys into the station wagon and driving through the countryside. Eventually they located several areas, each of which would be a wonderful place to raise their sons. Their favorite place was Metamora, with its rolling green hills and houses set back on several-acre lots along country lanes. Ron began searching for work in the area.

  In a few months things fell into place. Ron was hired by G. P. Plastics in Lapeer, just six miles from Metamora, and the family purchased an old farmhouse on ten acres along Baldwin Road. Jim discovered Daryl the same day they moved in.

  At that time, Jim was ten and Daryl, twelve. While his parents were unloading boxes from the moving truck and rearranging their new home, Jim wandered down the street and found a sandy-haired boy about his age walking along the road carrying a fishing pole. Bob had heard the story from a few people.

  “Where are you going?” Jim had asked, hurrying his pace to catch up.

  “Fishing,” came Daryl’s answer and he turned toward Jim with a curious glance. “Who are you?”

  “Jim.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause as the boys continued to walk together. “Well, where you from?”

  “Just moved in. Down the street.”

  Daryl nodded appreciatively. “Good. We can do a lot of fishing. My brothers and sisters don’t fish much anymore. You like to fish?”

  “Sure,” Jim shrugged. He had wondered if there would be guys his age on Baldwin Road. He had left behind his entire Little League team, not to mention his fifth-grade class in Troy.

  “Go get your swimming trunks,” Daryl said, still walking toward the pond and pointing toward a break in land several hundred yards ahead of him. “I’ll be up that dirt road a ways.”

  So was born a friendship that came as easily as the fish from the clear, cold pond behind Daryl’s house, as naturally as the maple trees turned colors each season. The friendship between Jim and Daryl was effortless from the beginning, almost as if they had lived down the street from each other all their lives.

  They spent summers fishing and playing baseball, and in the middle of winter when the pond froze over, the boys would ice-skate, using a tennis ball for a puck and pretending to be professional hockey players. In the spring there was Little League baseball and flag football. The boys were always together, always in motion, their friendship grew until their parents rarely saw one boy without the other.

  In his research Bob came across several people who said the boys were more like brothers than friends. But there was a difference: brothers fought with one another; Jim and Daryl did not. Even when they reached their teenage years and were sometimes interested in the same girl, nothing came between them.

  It was during those early days of friendship that they grew fiercely protective of each other, completely loyal to the bond they shared. If someone threatened Jim they would have to face Daryl. And if Daryl missed a fly ball in center field during a Little League game, then Jim was the first one defending him in the dugout.

  Of course, much of the time Daryl was the one looking out for Jim, since Jim was two years younger. Bob thought it must have been an interesting switch for Daryl, who as the youngest in his family had always been watched over by his older siblings. Likewise, Jim was not used to having someone to look up to, a role model older than himself. As the oldest in his family, he had always had to set the example and take care of his younger brothers. But with Daryl it was different and Jim thought the world of his older friend.

  There was nothing, it seemed, that Daryl couldn’t do. He could hit home runs easier, run faster, and swim farther than any of his peers. He caught the biggest fish and was an experienced horseman before he hit his teenage years. He could talk his way out of a punishment and if necessary fight his way out of an argument. In Jim’s eyes, Daryl was larger than life, the older brother he never had. As time passed, Jim knew from years of experience that whenever they were together he had nothing to worry about.

  Bob decided that was probably how Jim felt about traveling with Daryl to Daytona Beach in the summer of 1978. After all, Daryl had been to Florida before, even if he had been quite a bit younger then, and even if his parents had been with him. Jim figured Daryl was worldly and wise, and beyond that Daryl knew how to have a good time. There was probably no one Jim would rather have gone with on his first trip away from home without his parents.

  Jim was quiet and reflective. If Bob knew the younger boy like he thought he did, Jim had probably considered the trip and the things that might go wrong. They could run out of gas or have car trouble. They might get lost or sick or lose their money. And once they were on the beach they might encounter deadly riptides or a man-eating shark in the Atlantic Ocean.

  But as far as Bob could tell neither Jim nor Daryl ever voiced such concerns. After all, Daryl had been to Daytona Beach before and successfully returned without any problems. And because of that Jim probably believed that with Daryl in control they could also steer clear of any trouble this time.


  In Bob’s opinion the flaw in that thinking was obvious. Neither Jim nor Daryl would recognize Daytona Beach trouble if it walked up and introduced itself.

  CHAPTER 7

  As Bob learned about Jim and Daryl, he quickly realized that the boys shared more than common interests and pastimes. They were both responsible teenagers with a deep respect for their parents. This was no accident in Bob’s opinion. The teens came from large families in which having respect for one’s siblings and parents was equally important as doing one’s chores. Children did not have an option when it came to being respectful or responsible. It was simply expected.

  As a result, Jim and Daryl were the types of boys to do their chores as asked and clean up after themselves, all while practically thanking their parents for the opportunity to help. And if they weren’t perfect, they were certainly not rabble-rousers and they certainly did not possess the kind of defiant attitude that some of their peers often expressed toward their parents.

  But above all, Bob learned, they never made their parents worry about them. Both sets of parents developed a system as soon as their children were old enough to leave home by themselves. It was a system that guaranteed the parents would always know the children’s whereabouts. To break the rule would be to have privileges taken away for upwards of a month or more. Besides, letting parents know of one’s whereabouts was a matter of courtesy, and for the children in both households it was something they took for granted and never complained about.

  The system worked this way. Note pads were left on the kitchen tables at both homes so that children coming and going could always leave messages. Even if previous permission had been given, the children were to write down where they had gone, when they had left, and when they would be home. If they were running a little late, they were to call home immediately. Never, under any circumstances, was one of the ten children belonging to the Barbers and Bouchers ever to go somewhere without notifying their parents. None of the Barber or Boucher children ever thought this a strange way of life. It was a matter of respecting their parents’ wishes and being responsible enough to obey them.