Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  They eat small children there, Jean had written.

  For a few moments thereafter, the Bishop and I had remained silent.

  Finally, I summoned the courage to speak. But before my words came out, he said, “It is not lost on me, Guillemette, that you must have great sympathy for this woman. But she must do as I have advised her. You must know this better than most. Now, let us proceed, for God is impatient.”

  One does not keep a deity waiting.

  Another unsettling moment of silence passed, this time at Madame le Barbier’s door. Finally she said, “Have you some authority that was not revealed last night?”

  “None more, I am sad to say. But I come in sympathy and a desire to help you if I can.”

  “May God forgive my impertinence, Mother, but you had the chance to help me already and you did not.” Her words were harsh and her expression angry, and there was little I could say in my own defense. It angered me as well that I had remained silent during her plea.

  “I am as much an underling to his Eminence as anyone else is. But I did speak on your behalf after you left.”

  It was a limp offering, but her expression softened on hearing it. “And did you know success?”

  “Well . . . not precisely.”

  “Then why are you here? You will only taunt me further.”

  “No, Madame, I swear I will not taunt. That would be cruel.”

  We had not moved from our relative positions, she just inside the door, myself still in the mud outside it. “Please,” I said, “may I come in and speak with you?”

  A deep bitterness seemed to overtake her; she looked hard at me and said, “What good will it do? You, an abbess, have as much as said you can do little for me, and you cannot possibly understand how my heart breaks well enough to offer any true sympathy.” She started to close the door.

  I put out my hand to stop it and, to my own surprise, succeeded. My skirts dropped into the mud.

  “You are wrong, Madame,” I said. “I am here because I do understand. And because there are things I would know.”

  chapter 2

  Funny how some words just sound like what they mean.

  Dirrrrrrrrggggggggge.

  The mournful dirge “Scotland the Brave” looped in my head, complete with snares and big drums. I could feel a headache coming on. But by now our fellow detective Terry Donnolly was at the blue gates of cop heaven, toward which he had been piped on this rare gray day in Los Angeles. Everyone agreed it was just the right kind of weather for a funeral. Thank God, because sunshine at a funeral makes no sense to me at all.

  The mourners had disbanded and most headed toward the mass of units parked along the narrow driveways of the cemetery. Benicio Escobar was at my side, shaking his head. We walked slowly past a small group of brass, all huddled together and sharing some deep secret known only to those of elevated position.

  The only word we heard of their whisperings was himself. He drank himself to death.

  “They make it sound like he killed himself. He didn’t. The job killed him.”

  “Ben . . . come on. Don’t do this. It’s not going to change anything.”

  The autopsy had been performed almost immediately. The tissue and fluid samples had been carefully collected and cataloged, and results were coming in quickly.

  “He had a heart attack, for God’s sake. There’s no question about that.”

  Word had spread quickly around the division when it happened. They’d kept him breathing until he got to the trauma center, where one of the doctors had immediately cracked his chest.

  His heart had basically exploded. There was massive damage, and, breathing or not, he was dead the second it happened. He died of an irreparably broken heart.

  “You know, I hated that big Mick when we first paired up, but he grew on me, you know? We got to be friends. Good friends.”

  I touched Ben’s arm to comfort him. “Let it rest.”

  Escobar sniffed and wiped a few tears away with his fingertips. “Maybe if Terry had just let a few things rest he’d still be here today.”

  I had no argument.

  We walked in synchrony to the echo of the drone. The pipers had already packed up their gear and were gone, but their music hung in the air. By the time we reached the car, I’d managed to shut down “Scotland the Brave,” but no sooner was it banished than “Minstrel Boy” slipped in to take its place.

  It took “She Loves You” on the radio to finally send it away for good. I went home and tried to relax before my shift started at six.

  When I got back to the division room, things were inordinately quiet. No ringing phones, no wisecrack banter, no crackling radios or shrill cell phones. It often happens that way when there’s a sad official occasion; for some unknown reason, the perverts shut down, as if it were against their sense of fair play to grab a kid while the members of the Crimes Against Children division were all at a funeral.

  It didn’t last long. The phone rang on Terry Donnolly’s desk. I heard the desk sergeant call out, “Who’s here?”

  I took a quick look around. Escobar was in the head, and no one else seemed to be there.

  “Dunbar,” I called out, reluctantly.

  “Well, you better get that phone, Pandora.”

  I wish they wouldn’t call me that. But it isn’t a fluke, sad to say; I always seem to get the cases that are loaded with all the troubles of the world. So I looked at the phone and I thought, Don’t touch that thing, it’s going to be a box full of trouble, a moronic notion because we don’t get calls in this division from folks who just want to say, Hi, how are you. They have to go through channels of referral first, patrol cops, detectives, maybe a sergeant or two, and then it’s gonna be, They stole my car and my baby was in the backseat; they’re cooking up something that smells really bad next door and there’s a four-year-old in the apartment; or, someone’s using his kid for a punching bag. Not, Hello, ma’am, how are you today, and would you like to try our incredible six-pound vacuum cleaner for ninety days, risk free? Always something, never pleasant.

  And it was creepy that the phone was ringing on Donnolly’s desk, just after we’d planted him.

  “Crimes Against Children, Detective Lany Dunbar,” I said.

  “My son is gone.”

  Trouble.

  “How do you mean, gone?” I asked the woman.

  “Missing. Disappeared. Just gone.”

  I hate to tell you what we usually think when we first hear “missing kid,” and I hate to tell you how many times we hear it. Kids take a walk on the wild side for all sorts of reasons, and it’s not always just the screwed-up ones. Lots of nice, normal kids bolt, and they do it for the most bizarre reasons you can imagine. For that reason we don’t spring right into action until we eliminate a few of the more common possibilities first.

  I asked the caller to tell me her name.

  She snapped it out. “Ellen Leeds.”

  “Ms. Leeds—”

  “Mrs.”

  I could understand why she might be feeling a little bit tense at the moment. “Mrs. Leeds, has a patrol officer been to your home yet?”

  “No. I called 911 and they sent me right to you.”

  It had to have been a new operator. “Give me your address and phone number, please.”

  She blurted it out.

  Escobar’s desk was the closest one. I had to dig around to find a scrap of paper—his work space is always so disorganized. But he’s amazingly productive, against all probability. I scribbled, then said, “I’m going to put you on hold for just a moment. I’ll be right back with you.”

  I called the patrol sergeant for that district and asked him to send a car to that address to wait for me. The call would give her a few seconds to settle down, but I didn’t want to leave her holding too long. She was about to go through a series of highly insulting questions designed to hack right through the bullshit—when was the last time you punished your child physically is one they all just love.

/>   My own desk is pathetically neat. When I need a pencil I know just where to put my hand, and if it’s dull there’s an electric sharpener in the right-hand drawer. I used to keep it on the corner of my desk but it walked a couple of times. It’s only because I’m a detective that I figured to look in Frazee’s cubicle for it.

  There’s a stack of fresh notebooks in the lower right drawer, which no longer squeaks because I oiled it the day before. There was a nice, soft whoosh when I opened it, and it made me smile.

  That might have been the last time I smiled.

  Notebook open, pencil sharpened, I pushed the button. “Mrs. Leeds,” I said into the phone, “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  “Detective Dunbar, my son is out there somewhere, alone and afraid. Every second is precious.”

  Stuff like that still stings me, but we have to follow procedures, especially in these cases, because the sad fact is that it’s almost always a close friend or intimate—we can’t say “relative” anymore because family structures have changed so much—at the bottom of a kid’s disappearance.

  “I understand your anxiety right now. I’m sorry to say that I have to ask you a number of questions, some of which may be upsetting to you. But I hope you’ll also understand that we have to determine a few things right away to know how we should proceed in the case of a missing child. It saves a lot of wheel-spinning later.”

  “Get on with it, then. But I can tell you right now that somebody took him. Just took him.”

  So much for procedures. “What makes you think that?”

  “He’s not the kind of kid who would run away.”

  They never are. “I’m sure that’s true, but we do have to eliminate that possibility. So please, just bear with me. This will take only a few minutes and then we can get to the specifics. Does the boy live with you?”

  “Nathan. Yes, he does.”

  “What about his father?”

  “We’re divorced. He lives in Tucson.”

  “Any other children?”

  There was this little hesitation, then she said, “No.”

  “Any other adults in the household?”

  “No. Just me and him.”

  “How old is Nathan?”

  “Twelve last July.”

  “What grade in school?”

  “Seventh.”

  “You say you are divorced. What is the nature of your relationship with Nathan’s father?”

  “Tolerably cordial.”

  She’d been asked that question before and had a ready answer. I wondered who had done the asking and scribbled on my notepad a reminder to ask.

  “How about his relationship with Nathan?”

  “They adore each other.”

  “How often do they see each other?”

  “Not often enough. Maybe once a month. My ex flies in as often as he can. And Nathan spends summers in Arizona.”

  “When did they last see each other?”

  “About a week ago. Nathan’s father came here.”

  “I’ll need contact information for him before we finish.”

  “Of course.”

  I took a long breath before asking the next question. I’m sure she heard it. “Mrs. Leeds, do you have a regular companion of any kind?”

  I always hate that question. My first impulse is to say boyfriend, but we can’t do that anymore either. It’s getting silly, the way we have to talk now. Frazee had a great call once—female-sounding voice says, My lover is missing. After the usual round of questions Frazee asks for a description. It took him about twenty minutes to figure out that the caller was a cross-dresser, and the missing lover was actually a woman but was being described as a man, the point of the whole story being that you can’t always assume things about people by looking at them or listening to them, because people do all sorts of things to make themselves look different than they really are.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend, if that’s what you mean. I date occasionally, but there’s no one special or significant. And no one who’s had any contact with Nathan.”

  “So he wouldn’t have gone with anyone else and not told you.”

  “No. Not that I can think of at all.” Then her voice got really hard. “Detective, don’t you think I’ve already exhausted all the other possibilities on my own?”

  I let the comment pass without reaction. “When did you first begin to suspect that something might be amiss?”

  “Just a little while ago. He left for school this morning at the usual time and that was the last anyone saw of him. He generally meets up with a couple of other kids on the next corner, but not always. When they do meet they walk the rest of the distance together. It’s only three blocks from here.”

  When she told me the address I recognized it as an apartment building in one of the better sections of the precinct. There had been a suicide a couple of years ago before I came to CAC, and I’d been the primary on it.

  “I know that building.” I didn’t tell her how. “Nice and clean.”

  “And safe, or so I thought,” Ellen Leeds said.

  But not safe enough.

  So began another quest for the proverbial needle, the one that has the nasty habit of leaping into the haystack at the most inconvenient time. Nathan’s description went out immediately to all the patrols and precincts. Adolescent male, about five feet six inches tall, slight of build, dark-blondish hair, blue eyes. Probably wearing a red or maroon jacket and jeans. Sneakers, but they all wore sneakers—it would have been noteworthy if he had anything else on his feet. Beat cops all through the city would hear his description over the radio, and for a couple of hours they’d really be vigilant about looking for him. Then another call would come in, and a description would be sent out for the next needle, and Nathan’s image would begin to blend with that of every other missing teenager. He would enter into that great neutral amalgam of unfound children, those kids, whose smiling images on milk cartons make us all feel so smug about our own success in raising children.

  Just before our initial phone contact ended, Ellen Leeds asked me, “How long do you think it will take to find him?”

  “There’s no way to answer that question until we do. We’ll try our very best.” Anything else would have been an ugly lie, not that the probable truth was exactly pretty.

  All the way to her neighborhood I brooded over that truth. Sometimes we get lucky and they turn up. Sometimes they just walk through the door after staying out all night and we get a “never mind” call from the parent, who’s not only angry but really embarrassed to have missed the signs that the kid had it in him to do that. More times than I like to tell you we get no call at all when they turn up at home, and we expend all sorts of effort looking for a little lost bird who’s already back in the nest. That really annoys me.

  But when it’s the real deal, our success rate is humiliatingly low. The likelihood of us finding Nathan Leeds if he didn’t want to be found—or his abductor didn’t want us to find him—was really small. We just don’t have the resources to get out the kind of search that will turn up a grabbed kid if he’s still alive—big if there. Volunteers are the best bet, but they still have to be organized, and that takes manpower. We just don’t have it.

  There were a couple of patrol cars parked outside Ellen Leeds’s apartment building. I talked with the guys briefly—I knew one of them, but the other was too new. When I was on patrol myself, I had lots of reasons to associate with my brothers and sisters in arms. The locker rooms were a great place to hang out. But detectives wear street clothes, so I rarely go there anymore.

  A few people were standing around, curious about the presence of patrol units. Good security; it took two buzzes to get past the lobby. The Leeds apartment was on the fifth floor, at the back of the building, what I imagined was probably the quieter side, since the street that ran behind was narrow and one-way.

  There was a hand-painted welcome sign hanging on the door, a cheery, homespun kind of thing. The woman who answe
red the ding dong was surprisingly small and thin, leading me to wonder if this was the same woman who’d made the call. Her voice had sounded bigger.

  “Mrs. Leeds?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Dunbar.” I handed her one of my cards. She took it quickly but didn’t bother to look at it.

  “Come in.”

  I stepped into the apartment; it was immaculately clean and decorated in warm colors. Very homey and safe-looking. She closed the door behind me, and I heard the turn of a dead bolt and the slide of a chain. She was careful. “You have good security in the building lobby, and up here too,” I said.

  “I wish they would put a guard at the front door, though, at least after dark. I picked this building in part because of the security. And I asked for something above the second floor so no one could come in and grab my son out of an open window.”

  It was a bitter and ironic reference to the high-profile abduction of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas, who was dragged out of her bedroom window as three slumber-party friends watched in horror. The mother was asleep in a nearby room at the time—can you imagine the balls of this perp? There was never any doubt about what happened to her—she didn’t just decide to take a little break from no video games until your homework is done. Her parents were articulate and pretty well-connected, and right away a whole bunch of very visible people got behind the search. The shame of it is that she was probably still alive and only about fifty yards away while a pair of cops questioned her abductor after he had car trouble. Lucky son of a bitch. We got him in the end. Too late for Polly, but we got him.

  But if Ellen Leeds thought that her son’s disappearance would bring about the same kind of response, I was going to have to disappoint her.

  She pointed me to a couch and offered something to drink, which I refused politely. We can’t get too sociable, because it’s tough to stay in charge if you’re acting like a visitor or a guest, especially if you’re a woman. We sat opposite each other on separate couches, and I opened up my notebook. “Please recount the events of the day for me, if you would.”