More Than It Seems

by David Archer

  Steve’s eyes shot open wide. “You found hair?”

  Borden turned to him. “Yeah. Kind of surprising, given the conditions down there. Under normal conditions, hair will decompose within a year or two, but there was a fair amount of it that’s still intact. I would suspect that it’s been pretty dry down there until relatively recently.”

  Steve swallowed hard. “Could you tell—can you tell what color it was?”

  Borden looked at his partner, then turned back to Steve. “It appears to be black,” he said. “We’ll know more after we get it cleaned up, the black could be from the soil down there.”

  Steve clamped his eyes shut tightly. “Oh, God,” he said. “Scotty’s hair was as black as coal.”

  * * *

  “I think it’s time you tell us everything, Steve,” Sam said. They were back at the police station, gathered in their makeshift conference room. Detective Franklin had joined them as they sat around the table.

  Steve let out a sigh, then rubbed a hand over his face as he sat up straighter. “It’s not easy for me,” he said. “But I’ll try.”

  “Just take your time, Steve,” Summer said. “And remember that we are all here for you, all of us.”

  “Amen to that,” Denny said. Darren nodded his agreement, and Jade offered a smile.

  Eric leaned close to Steve. “Just tell it slowly,” he said. “That’s the best way.”

  Steve gave him a slight grin, then nodded.

  “Well,” he began, “I was on a short recuperative leave, because I’d been in a traffic accident. A car T-boned my unmarked car and left me pretty banged up, so they gave me a week off. Edith still had to work, so I spent that week taking care of Scotty.” He grinned. “Gave me a whole new appreciation for what mothers go through, I can tell you that. That boy could go like there was no tomorrow, he had more energy than I ever dreamed of. That last day, before—before it happened, I took him to the park and let him play for a while. The idea was to get him worn out so that by the time Edith got home, we could have a little time to ourselves. It didn’t work quite the way I planned; by the time we left the park, I was the one who was ready for a nap.”

  Sam grinned. “I know the feeling,” he said. “Kenzie and Bo can both wear me out.”

  Steve managed a chuckle. “Well, anyway, when I put him to bed that night and tucked him in, he was still kind of wound up. I remember I read him a story, something about a bunch of animals who acted like people. I don’t remember what it was, but I know he loved it. He settled down while I was reading, so I kissed him good night and closed his window, and I went back out to watch TV with Edith for a bit, then we went to bed ourselves.” He blinked. “Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t been so tired from the park, I would’ve heard something. Something would’ve felt wrong, and I would’ve gotten up to check on him. If I had, I probably could have stopped it from happening, but I didn’t.”

  He was quiet for a few seconds, then let out another sigh before he went on.

  “Edith got up that morning before I did,” he said. “She went downstairs to put on coffee and get breakfast started, the way she always did. Once that was going, she came back up and stuck her head in our room to tell me it was time to get up, and then she went to wake Scotty. I had just sat up on the side of the bed, I was thinking about taking a quick shower, and that’s when I heard her scream.”

  He fought back a sob. “She yelled my name, and I didn’t even stop to think. I got up and ran down the hall and found her standing just outside Scotty’s room, looking through the door, and I was—I was terrified of what I was going to see. I thought maybe he had hurt himself or something, so I pushed her aside and ran in—and he was gone. His window was open, the one I knew I had shut the night before, and there was no sign of Scotty anywhere. I stuck my head out the window and looked out, and I saw the ladder leaning against the house. It was my own damn ladder, Sam. The son of a bitch got my own ladder out of my garage and used it to kidnap my son. If I had only locked the window, if I had only locked the garage, maybe it never would’ve happened.”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Steve,” Sam said. “If Scotty was targeted, it probably would have happened sooner or later.”

  Steve nodded. “I know that, up here,” he said, tapping his head. “That doesn’t change what I feel down inside, though. There’s a part of me that will always believe it was my own fault, that I could have prevented it from happening if I had only taken an extra minute with some locks.” He rubbed his hand over his face again. “We called the station, and they came and did what they do, but there were no clues of any kind. We figured out that the bastard climbed into the window, but then he picked Scotty up and carried him right down the stairs and out the front door. There were no fingerprints, no marks, no footprints outside at the bottom of the ladder, absolutely nothing to go on.”

  “What steps did the police take?” Darren asked.

  “Oh, they did everything they should,” he said. “They rounded up all the local pedophiles and questioned them, but that led nowhere. I talked to my bank and found out I could get a second mortgage for over fifty grand, so I put up a reward for any information about what happened, but no one ever tried to claim it. I talked to every snitch I knew, but none of them had heard anything about a child being kidnapped. I talked to psychics, three different ones, and got three different stories about what happened, but I followed up on each one just in case. Still nothing, no sign of Scotty, and no leads on who might’ve taken him.”

  “How did Pastor Jensen get involved?”

  “Edith and I had been going to Grace Baptist, and he was the pastor. We didn’t really know him all that well, but when he heard about what happened, he showed up at my front door. We sat and talked with him for hours, probably more than a dozen hours over the next few days. He prayed with us for Scotty’s safe return, and now it looks like he was probably the son of a bitch that took him from us.” He shook his head. “This will get Edith all torn up again. She was convinced for a while that those prayers were going to bring Scotty home. Imagine what she’ll think when she finds out she was praying with the very man who took Scotty from us.”

  “We aren’t certain of that yet,” Jade said. “There could still be hope that your son is alive, somewhere.”

  Franklin looked at her and she caught his eye roll. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what it meant: any child gone that long was probably long dead and buried, somewhere.

  Steve nodded. “I used to think so,” he said. “I even did one of those DNA kits a while back, because they say sometimes people take them and find out about relatives they didn’t know they had. I was hoping maybe Scotty would take one someday, and find out I was his real father, but now…”

  All of them sat there in silence for a moment, then Steve continued talking.

  “I went back to work a couple weeks later, and naturally, I drove the detectives crazy asking if they had come up with anything. I had only made detective myself about six months before, and of course I wasn’t allowed to actually work on the case because I was too close to it, but they let me look at the file now and then. Nothing, of course, they didn’t have any kind of leads at all. That was the hardest part for me, being a detective myself. I believed in the system, I believed that criminals always leave some kind of evidence behind, but this guy—it was like he was a ghost. He didn’t drop a hair, not a skin particle, nothing off his shoes, nothing. Except for the ladder and the fact that Scotty was gone, it was like no one had been in my house at all.”

  Silence fell again, and lasted for several seconds before Sam broke it.

  “Had Jensen ever been to your house before?” he asked.

  Steve looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, once. It was kind of customary for everybody in the church to invite the pastor to have dinner once in a while, so Edith did. I ended up working that night, so I wasn’t there, but she said he was a polite guest, a perfect gentleman. He was a widower, did you know that? Yeah
, of course you did, it’s in his file. His wife had died of cancer a few months earlier, one of those things that wasn’t a surprise to anybody, we all knew it was coming. She was a very nice lady, I remember her. A week before she died of lung cancer, she stood up and sang for the church, and you never would’ve believed she was sick. I don’t remember what it was she sang, but it was a beautiful song, and she had a voice that should have been making records. Beautiful voice.”

  “Okay,” Franklin put in suddenly. “That means he could have gotten the layout of your house, maybe even saw the ladder in the garage. How long was this before…”

  “About a month,” Steve said. “And he probably did see the ladder, because I almost never closed the garage door before I got home each night. We lived in a pretty nice neighborhood where nobody ever bothered anything, so I just never thought about it.” He shook his head. “If I had only locked the garage…”

  “Well, all we can do on this for now is wait for the DNA results,” Sam said. “We still have a case, however, and we need to work on it. I think, considering we now have reason to believe that Jensen had taken at least one child and held him prisoner, that we should probably look into the possibility he had done it before.”

  “That sounds like a job for Indie,” Denny said.

  Sam nodded. “I agree,” he said. He took out his phone and dialed her number. “Hey, babe, it’s me. I need you to look up any children who went missing between twenty-five and thirty years ago, probably around the Golden area.”

  “Children who went missing?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “We found the remains of a child in a hidden basement under Pastor Jensen’s house. It looks like he kept him chained up down there, so we’re looking into the possibility that it wasn’t his first victim.”

  Indie was quiet for a couple of seconds. “It was a little boy?” she asked cautiously.

  “Yes. We’re waiting for DNA analysis to determine whether it might be Steve’s little boy.” He grimaced as Steve winced. “The remains do seem to be about the right age and size, and they found some of the child’s hair that may be the right color. It’s too soon to know for sure, but we have to accept the possibility that this may have been Scotty Beck.”

  “I’m okay, Indie,” Steve said. “At least, if it turns out to be him, I’ll know what happened.”

  “I’m so sorry, Steve,” she said. “Sam, I’ll start digging. I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “Thanks, babe. Love you, and I’ll talk to you soon.” He cut off the call and looked around the table. “Anybody got any suggestions?”

  There were none.

  SIX

  Back in their makeshift conference room, Sam answered his phone and put it on speaker. "Indie," he said. "What have you got?"

  "I did what you wanted and tried to find any other missing child reports that might be connected to Jensen," she said, "and you were right. I found four more.”

  “Good,” Sam said. “Give us the details.”

  “It all seemed to begin about two years before he moved to Boulder. A boy named Ricky Sykes, six years old, disappeared from his bedroom in the middle of the night. Ricky’s family lived in Arvada, but Ricky had been going to Pastor Jensen’s church the week before for Bible School. That was the first one. Next, we have Randy Grossman, who lived in Boulder and was also six years old. There’s no indication of whether he had any connection to Pastor Jensen or not, but he only lived about a block away from the house Jensen ended up moving to, which led me to getting curious about that house. It turns out that Pastor Jensen’s mother and stepfather had bought that house a few years before, and he inherited when they passed away. He had owned it for several years before he moved there.”

  “So he could have been using it to hide these kids, even before he lived there,” Sam said. “Good work. You said you found four; who were the other two?”

  “The third one was a boy named Kenneth Givens, five years old, from Boulder. He disappeared about two months after Steve’s little boy, again taken right out of his bedroom in the middle of the night, but then he was actually found alive about a month later, the only one of these who was ever recovered. He couldn’t tell anybody where he had been, just said it had been a dark place and somebody brought him food and took care of him, but he never saw who it was. He called him ‘the bunny man,’ because of a mask he wore.”

  “That’s strange, but better than the alternative. And the last one?”

  “The last one disappeared the same day the Givens boy turned up, and that was only a couple days before Jensen was killed. He was snatched out of a shopping center, so it may not be connected. That boy was Ronnie Lindell, and he was six years old. Again, no visible connection to Pastor Jensen at all. He was never found, either.”

  Sam and the others had all been taking notes. “Okay, do me a favor,” he said. “See if you can track down the families of these missing kids. I’d like to speak to the parents or siblings, if they’re still living and in the area.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Indie said. “Love you.”

  The line went dead and she was gone.

  Steve got to his feet. “I need coffee,” he said. “Anybody else?”

  One after another, they all got up, except for Eric, who was staring at the table. Steve looked over toward him.

  “Eric? You want a cup of…”

  “He doesn’t need any,” Sam said. “He drinks too much coffee as it is.”

  Denny had not gotten out of his chair. He grinned at Sam and said, “I’ll stay here and keep an eye on the lad. He looks like he’s lost in thought, anyway.”

  The fact that Denny could tell he was nervous was making Eric feel even worse. He kept his eyes firmly locked on the table in front of him, to the point that he lost any sense of who was in the room around him, sinking into the dark parts of his own mind as he tried to figure out what was bothering him.

  "You gotta learn the proper time and place to zone out, Eric," Denny said with a chuckle, laying a hand on his shoulder and sinking into the empty chair next to him. Suddenly, Eric noticed that the entire room had emptied out. Everyone had left except for him and Denny.

  Denny grinned. "Yeah, mate," he said, "you were out of it for a bit. Ten or fifteen minutes, at least. The others went to get some coffee." Eric looked up hopefully, but Denny shook his head. "Sorry, Sam ordered me to stay here and keep you off the stuff for now. He thinks you drink too much of it, right?"

  Eric frowned in disappointment, but his conundrum came back to him and his hopeful face turned into a scowl, one that Denny couldn’t help but notice instantly.

  "Hey, what's eating at you, mate?”

  Eric shook his head. “It’s nothing,” he said.

  Denny made a face. “Don't tell me it’s bloody nothing, Eric, 'cause it’s a mite obvious. So, come on, tell me; what's got you all bollixed up?"

  After only a second's hesitation, Eric sighed and lowered his head, his hair falling down to cover his eyes. "Pastor Jensen’s house," he mumbled. "I can’t stop thinking about it."

  "All right," Denny said carefully. "What about it, then?"

  Eric shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think I may have known one of his victims.”

  “Really? What makes you think so?”

  "It could be nothing," Eric said.

  Denny narrowed his eyes. "A gut hunch," he said, nodding slowly. "A lot of investigators get them, and sometimes they’re absolutely right." He looked at Eric intently. “I’ve gotten to know you pretty well, Eric. That brain of yours is probably the smartest one I’ve ever come across, so I’m having a little trouble believing you don’t have any idea what’s making you believe this. Are you sure there isn’t something else you want to tell me?

  Eric bit his lip nervously. "Well," he said, "I—if I do, can we keep it between us for now?”

  “Of course,” Denny said. “Eric, what is it?”

  Eric wrinkled his brow. "Well," he said uncertainly. �
��A year or so before I was committed, there was this guy I met through the Internet, and we kinda became friends. His name was Kenny Givens.”

  Denny’s eyebrows rose. “Givens? That was one of the names Indie gave us a bit ago. Is that why you zoned out?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I used to talk to Kenny online about a lot of stuff. He taught me a lot about hacking, but he wasn’t part of the black-hat crowd. He was a lot older than me, in his twenties, but we used to talk a lot, late at night.”

  He paused, so Steve encouraged him. “And?”

  Eric grimaced. “Kenny lived on Grand Junction Boulevard, here in Boulder. He had a lot of anger inside him, and one of the things I knew he hated was—well, people who hurt kids. Pedophiles, people like that. He used to write stories about that kind of thing, and it was one of his stories that made me think of looking under that cabinet for the key to the trap door. In that story, there was a trap door under the kitchen stove, just like in this case, and that’s where the key was kept.”

  Denny waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “Are you saying you think he might be involved in this case? He would’ve only been a child when Jensen was killed, Eric.”

  Eric shook his head sadly. “I know that,” he said. “The thing is, after I was arrested, I lost contact with him. I tried to look him up after you guys got me out, but I haven’t been able to find him.”

  "I see," Denny said. "And now you’re wondering why his name came up in this case?"

  Eric nodded, still seeming confused. “I think something may have happened to him,” he said, and then he hurried out of the room, leaving Denny standing there, lost in his thoughts.

  Denny watched him go, then pulled his phone from his pocket and punched in a number.

  "Denny?" Indie asked as she answered the call.

  "Indie," he said. "I have a favor to ask you."

  “Okay. I'm a little swamped with trying to track down the families of the abducted kids, so is it something quick, or another bigger problem? I wouldn't mind if it was something big, of course, it will just take a little longer."