by Laurel Dewey
Jane closed the door and meandered to an empty chair in front of Bo’s desk. Weyler slid into the seat next to her as Bo readjusted the sinking waist on his trousers, zipped up his standard issue police chief’s jacket and walked with an unsteady gait to his beaten-down office chair. He plopped down hard into the seat, wincing almost imperceptibly. The cluttered room was hot and stuffy. Jane removed her jacket and scanned the disorganized office. Sure, there was the building remodel but she figured that Bo’s office space had probably always looked like the aftereffects of a tornado. His desk was littered with paperwork, a cluster of old coffee cups, opened and unopened files, pens, and dried rinds of oranges that were beginning to petrify. There were also three mismatched lamps, all with a thick coat of dust on their shades, and a myriad of sandwich wrappers and Styrofoam containers that held some kind of food that was eaten during the Clinton administration. A wooden sign—at one time displayed on the wall—now lay across a stack of papers. It read: IT IS WHAT IT IS.
Two file cabinets stood to Jane’s left, both topped with another pile of papers and files bursting with even more documents. A calendar was taped to one of the file cabinets. Large black Xs filled the dates that had already passed. The square eleven days from that date was circled in a thick red pen. Behind Bo’s desk was a large window that overlooked Main Street. In front of the window stood a strange assortment of file boxes, each a different color and each marked with either a !, ?, a thumbs up and a thumbs down drawing. The patchwork chaos made no sense to Jane. For her, sitting in this office was like inhabiting the center of Bo Lowry’s brain—an unbalanced place, indeed.
“Looks like you have your hands full with the remodel,” Weyler offered in an attempt to inject a neutral statement.
“Yeah, we’re charging feet first into the Twentieth Century,” Bo snorted, obviously not happy with the whole upheaval.
“Don’t you mean Twenty-first?” Jane asked.
“I got bad knees. I can only handle one jump of a century at a time,” he snarled, his liver still spitting bile knowing that he had to deal with Sergeant Detective Jane Perry. He took a puff of his cigar. “It’s what the new police chief asked for. He’s one of them young, techno boys. It’s costing the town a bundle but they don’t care. Throw enough money around and you know what it buys.”
Jane wanted to say, “Whores, silence and beauracracy” but decided against it.
“Too much goddamn technology for my blood! They try to tell me it’s all 10-8,” Bo grumbled, using old cop talk for a good piece of equipment, “But it’s all over my bald head.” He tapped his pudgy fingers nervously on his cluttered desk. “Everybody texts and emails these days! Whatever happened to callin’ somebody up and actually talkin’ to them?” Quickly, he sat up in his swivel chair, waving his hand toward the activity on the other side of his half-opened Venetian blinds. “That’s not my style, Morgan. See what I’m sayin’? They start usin’ all these fancy techno words and I can’t figure heads or tails what they’re talkin’ about. Makes what’s left of my hair hurt.” Jane sensed an uneasy edge to Bo’s voice. Fear crept in at the corners of his tenor.
“You still have seven or eight good years in you, Bo,” Weyler offered. “You’re not that close to Social Security.”
“Hell, Beanie, I could have a massive stroke, completely paralyzed, livin’ in a wheelchair, drool drip pin’ down my chin and unable to speak my own name and these fine people would still keep me around!”
“Then stick around for another few seasons,” Weyler stressed.
“10-74, my friend,” he said, using the 10-code for the word, “No.” “It’s time. I see the writin’ on the wall. I’m old hat.” Bo ran his fingers across his sparse comb over. “Eleven days and I’m outta here. Day after Easter. Jesus resurrected and so will I! I can’t wait to retire. I’m gonna sleep for weeks. I love to sleep. The only drawback is, you can’t enjoy it fully since you’re unconscious.” Jane wasn’t sure if Bo was nuts or just pleasantly eccentric. He turned away, letting out a stiff breath. “You know, Vi’s cuttin’ out too. She’s sixty-five. Takin’ the dole and ditchin’ this place.”
Weyler turned to Jane. “Vi has been with Bo since his first day in Midas. She’s his right arm…”
“Right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, ears, eyes and lungs,” Bo quickly interjected, his breathing sounding shallow to Jane. “I couldn’t see my way clear without her!” His voice was desperate, like a man clutching onto a sinking life rope.
“What are you going to do?” Weyler asked.
“Florida coast,” Bo touched the edge of a bright yellow folder on his desk. “Warm, you know? Lookin’ forward to it.” Jane watched as he pulled a page over the yellow folder, covering it completely. It was a gestural extension of shame—a literal covering up of what he was saying. Bo’s mind seemed to drift momentarily.
“I didn’t think you liked the humidity or the ocean.”
Bo looked up at Weyler, lost in a private moment. “Yeah, well, we all gotta make the hard choices in life, Beanie.” Jane noted that Bo continued to call Weyler “Beanie.” Obviously, it was a term of endearment but what did it signify? Weyler might have been considered a beanpole in stature in his youth when Bo and he were FNGs…”fucking new guys.” Jane noted a moment of sadness coming from Bo, only to be quickly buried and replaced with a back to business approach. “I got a shit pot of crap to go over with you.” He spoke only to Weyler, making a point to ignore Jane with his body language. He proceeded to unearth sundry pieces of paper—all protected in clear, plastic evidence bags—and a book, also placed inside a clear bag. “The day after little Juice Box’s disappearance, his folks found this in their mailbox.” Bo handed Weyler a book, clearly leaving Jane out of the discussion.
“Little Juice Box?” Jane questioned in a confused manner.
Bo wedged the cigar into the corner of his mouth. “Juice Box Jake Van Gorden,” Bo replied, never looking at Jane. “I look at him and I think of a juice box. Small kids drink them. Jake is small for his age. He’s like one hundred and twenty pounds and a song. It follows. You got a problem with that?” Bo snuck a chary eye toward Jane.
Jane wasn’t sure if the song was a short song, but she wasn’t about to ask Bo to decipher his odd verbiage. “No problem, Bo. It’s perfectly normal.” Her tone was laced with sarcasm.
Bo looked at Weyler. “You put up with this shit from her?”
Weyler would have none of it. “Getting back to the clues?”
“Inside that book was a sympathy card,” Bo handed the card to Weyler, “sealed and addressed only to BAWY.” Jane reached for it but he laid the white envelope encased in a plastic evidence bag on the desk in front of Weyler.
“Been dusted for prints, I assume?” Jane asked, irritated.
“Yes,” Bo replied in an over-the-top manner, “and we found nothin’ so he wore gloves when he touched it. Same thing with the book.”
“Find any DNA on the envelope flap?” Jane wasn’t about to back down.
Bo let out an exasperated sigh. “10-74. It’s a peel ’n’ stick flap.”
“Whoever did this knew his DNA could be found on the flap from his saliva and thought ahead of time to buy self-sealing envelopes,” Jane rejoined.
Weyler considered it. “You only do that if your DNA’s in the system. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.”
“So, somebody with prior convictions, somebody smart and someone who likes to plan things out.”
“Why don’t you get a pad and write all these ideas down,” Bo said in nasty tone, “so we can make a long list and then we can solve this before lunch.”
That was it for Jane. Between jonesing for a cigarette and dealing with Bo’s dismissive manner, she’d reached her maximum capacity for arrogance. “Listen, I don’t want to be here anymore than you want me here!”
Bo jerked the cigar out of his mouth. “That is the exact attitude I saw comin’ down the pike!” He yelled, pointing over Jane’s shoulder. “There’s the do
or, little lady!”
“Enough!” Weyler insisted.
“Boss, I can’t work with this!” Jane’s voice sounded almost too desperate.
Weyler realized he had to take a stand. “Bo, here’s the deal: either you back off Sergeant Perry and try to maintain civility or we walk. What’s it going to be?”
The blood drained from Bo’s face. He suddenly looked like a big kid being disciplined by the principal. Taking a nervous puff on his cigar, he moved uncomfortably in his chair and gestured with his chin to the book and card in Weyler’s hand. “So, see, that’s the first clue,” Bo said, reluctantly acquiescing.
Weyler handed Jane the envelope. The letters on the front, BAWY were written in a hesitant hand. “This looks like the way a kid writes who is just learning to hold a pen,” she mused.
“Could be right handed and he purposely used his left to disguise his handwriting,” Weyler offered.
“Yeah. What is a BAWY?”
“Maybe an acronym?” Weyler considered. Now it was Bo who was left out of the discussion.
“If it is, I’ve never heard it.” Jane tried to sound it out. “Be Aware…” She shook her head. “It’s anybody’s guess.”
Weyler slid the card out from the plastic bag and opened it. “’So sorry for your loss. JACKson sends his regards.’” Weyler compared the shaky printing from the outside of the envelope to the inside of the card and was confident the same hand wrote both. “The boy’s name is Jake. Why is he referring to him as Jackson and emphasizing the Jack?”
Bo nervously shuffled through the papers on his desk. “Let me see here.” Spotting a bright green sheet of paper, he grabbed it and handed it to Weyler. “I had Mr. Van Gorden write down the boy’s full name. That’s what they gave me.”
Jane took a gander at the page. It read: JACKSON JAKOB VAN GORDEN. Her thoughts immediately turned to the misspelling of Jacob she’d given Betty earlier that morning. “Does he call himself Jackson?”
“10-74,” Bo said gruffly. “Parents told me that was his given name but he hated it and went by the shortened version of his middle name.”
“What’s the book?” Jane asked.
Weyler handed it to her. “You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe.”
“See, You can’t go home again pretty much tells me what the kidnapper is planning for Jake,” Bo surmised.
Jane was beginning to feel into the person who had kidnapped the boy. Her prior assessment of someone who was exceptionally smart and a planner was becoming more evident now. Wolfe’s book wasn’t exactly fluffy pulp fiction. Written in the 1930s, Jane remembered reading it in a college lit course. The main character in the book, George Webber, is a writer who pens a successful novel about his family and hometown. However, when he returns to that town, he is shocked by the rebuke and outright hatred that his family and friends feel toward him for exposing their lives to strangers. The story then shifts to Webber’s life as he leaves his hometown and ventures around the world in search of his true identity. In the end, Webber returns to the United States and rediscovers his reality with both sadness and love. It’s about a man coming to terms with himself, his family and his purpose. And in Jane’s mind, it had to have a hidden meaning that the kidnapper was eager to convey in a veiled, intellectual manner. She slid it out from the plastic bag and thumbed through the pages, finding page 243 freshly dog-eared. “Did the book come like this?” she asked, showing the page to Weyler.
“10-4,” Bo affirmed. “See, that’s also where the card was stuck in the book.”
Jane factored that it’s one thing to just slide a card into a book and quite another to make sure that others notice the page by turning down the corner.
“What came after this?” Weyler asked.
“We got the next clue here at the office in the form of a voicemail message.” Bo then hollered out toward his office door, “Vi! Can you come here? And bring in Copeland’s file, would ya?”
Jane turned and saw Vi opening up a file cabinet, finding a folder and tearing off the top page that was stapled to the outside of the folder. Odd, Jane thought. But what was even stranger was that Vi took the top page and slipped it into her top drawer before heading into Bo’s office.
She nodded toward Jane and Weyler with a short and to the point, “Hey!” Vi’s wavy salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a no-nonsense style and fell just below her ears. She didn’t wear any makeup but she didn’t need to as her skin was surprisingly vibrant and youthful for her sixty-five years. Her 5’ 5” frame was solid and grounded, fully in charge of whatever needed to get done at any given time. Jane could tell that she and Bo shared an understanding. His demeanor clearly became more relaxed when she was in the room and he was, strangely, more than happy to let her control the events.
“Vi,” Bo said succinctly, “Morgan Weyler and Jane Perry from Denver.”
“Nice to meet you,” Vi said, “What do you need, Bo?”
“I can’t remember how to use this damn thing,” he groused, pointing to the phone. “Wanna play them the voicemail.”
“Sure.” With insouciance, Vi maneuvered her way around the clutter and, after pressing a few buttons, entering the voicemail code and releasing the SPEAKER button, a computer-distorted voice could be heard loud and clear.
“Do you know what it’s like to feel as if you’re two seconds from your last breath? DO YOU? It feels just like this…” There was a scratchy sound on the phone as if something was brushing against it, followed by the whimpering and pleading of what sounded like a very young male child from across the room. That lasted all of ten seconds and abruptly stopped before the scratchy sound against the phone reappeared and the distorted voice of the kidnapper spoke again. “He pounds on the window and you do nothing.” Click.
Bo was visibly shaken by the recording. “You…wanna here it again?”
Vi replayed the sickening message. Jane timed it using the second hand on Bo’s wall clock. It was thirty seconds exactly, short and untraceable—not that Midas had the ability to trace a call when the kidnapper left the message. But for Jane, it was a new aspect of the man’s personality. He knew the drill and he knew that it took at least forty seconds to trace a call if a live system was up and running when the call came in.
“We checked the incoming number,” Bo said, resting his cigar in an ashtray. “It’s one of them throwaway cell phones.” Jane added another element of the kidnapper’s personality to her visual list. Methodical. “Well?” Bo asked Weyler. “What do you get from the message?”
“He had to remove the voice disguiser in order to get the sound of the boy screaming,” Weyler offered. “That’s the scratchy sound you hear right before the boy screams and then right after when the last sentence is distorted again.”
“But the boy sounds like he’s six or seven the way he’s whimpering, not fifteen,” Jane argued. “And the screams just stop suddenly on cue before the guy re-fits the disguiser and starts talking again. Wouldn’t there be whimpering and screaming in the background during the whole message for better effect?”
“Hell, it’s a not a goddamn Hollywood movie here,” Bo said, irritated.
“No, Jane’s got a good point,” Weyler nodded. “It’s too rehearsed. Too planned out. And the kid does sound much younger than fifteen.”
Jane felt finally vindicated. “Like I said, Jake ran away and he’s pimping his parents with this shit! Look, I called…” She was just about to mention her conversation with Betty at the runaway shelter that morning when Bo interrupted.
“But if it’s a setup, the kid’s not askin’ for money!” Bo argued. “So, if there’s no ransom, what’s the point of all this? Scaring the shit out of your parents?”
“Maybe so!” Jane replied. “Maybe he’s trying to teach them a lesson…”
“10-74. That ain’t Jake’s style, see! He’s a quiet kid, a little offbeat perhaps. If I had to describe him in three words, I’d say, scrawny, shy and…artistic.”
Jane noticed that whe
n Bo said the word artistic, there was another word he wanted to use but chose not to. “What do you mean by offbeat?”
“He’s got a ponytail ‘bout seven inches long,” Bo emphasized this statement with an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Usually stuffs it inside these hats he likes to wear. You know? The hats from the 60s that those fellas in the Rat Pack used to sport.”
“Fedoras?” Weyler asked.
“Yeah, them. ’Round here, it’s either ball caps or a cowboy hat, but not fedoras.” There was a slight mocking tone to Bo’s voice. “Nah, Jake’s the sensitive artist type. I mean, come on, he’s got a goddamn ponytail. No matter how pissed-off he might be at his folks, he’s not gonna go this far! He’d draw a picture before he did this!”
“What kind of stuff does he draw?” Jane asked.
“When we searched his room, we saw a bunch of sketch pads with doodles all over them. Nothin’ with guns or monsters. Just harmless doodles.” Bo turned to Vi. “Didn’t we start a file on little Juice Box?”
Vi nodded and left the room momentarily to grab Jake’s file.
Jane sat back in her chair, furtively glancing over her shoulder at Vi. Amazingly, she repeated the same pattern of removing the file from the cabinet, ripping off the sheet on the front of the file, securing that sheet in her drawer and then returning to Bo’s office. She handed the file to Bo.
“See what I’m talkin’ about,” Bo stated, laying several pages on his cluttered desk.
The drawings were hardly what Jane would call doodles. They were well-executed drawings, mainly of cars, dirt bikes and fedoras. However, in the corner of the last page was a small but precise drawing of pretty girl’s three-quarter profile. Jane recalled what Betty at the runaway shelter mentioned about Jake leaving town to meet a girl. “Who’s that?” Jane asked, pointing to the girl on the page.
Bo turned the page around. It didn’t take him long to respond. “That’s Mollie. Jake’s girlfriend. Daughter of the Methodist preacher in town. He and his wife also own the B&B you two are gonna be staying at. Jake was real smitten with Mollie.”
