by John Case
“But not in this case.”
“Not so far.”
I work with a police artist named Marijke Wilcke, trying to dredge up the image of the man with the dog. Since I just caught a glimpse of the guy, I’m not optimistic. Shoffler insists “Dutchie,” as he calls Marijke, is “real good at coaxing details outta eyewitnesses. She’s just about a genius.”
We have trouble right away, trying to establish the shape of the man’s face. The fact that he was wearing a ruff, too, creates problems, not only because it makes it hard for me to determine the length of his face, but also because it obscures the conjunction of neck and shoulder, his jawline, even his ears. The neatly trimmed goatee and mustache don’t help, either. Despite Marijke’s skill at translating my vague impressions onto the page, the result is vague and generic. The man stares blankly back from the final image, neatly groomed hair and trimmed goatee and mustache, just as I remember it, but the rest is just a guess.
Shoffler stops by to take a look.
“What do you think?” Marijke asks.
“Looks like they’re all on the same bus.”
“What?”
“Marijke and Larry – he’s another sketch artist – they been through this with three other eyewitnesses who saw this guy with your kids.” To Marijke he says: “Go on. Give him the tour.”
She brings up in sequence five versions of the man with the dog, all of which prominently feature the goatee and sharply trimmed mustache. Apart from that, the sketches vary in head shape and other features. “Facial hair,” Marijke sighs, “especially when it is trimmed into geometric shapes and clean lines – it’s just so dramatic it makes the other features fade. What you remember is the facial hair. Maybe,” she says in her slightly accented English, “it’s even pasted on.”
Shoffler shakes his head.
“And that ruff around his neck – that’s another problem.”
Marijke flicks back to my sketch. “You are happy with this one?” she asks me.
I shrug. “I guess.”
When she taps her mouse a few times, the hair and the beard and mustache disappear. Clean-shaven, the man could be anybody.
“I make a composite from all of them,” Marijke says, “then I do one with the facial hair, one clean-shaven, okay?”
The official position shifts. With the boys stipulated as the victims of a kidnapping, an FBI agent is assigned to the case. Shoffler tells me ahead of time that Judy Jones is very young but very smart. “A rookie, but a real firecracker.”
We gather in the family room. Shoffler introduces her and she explains to us that the Bureau’s involvement in kidnapping cases has been routine since the Lindbergh case.
Liz sits next to me and holds my hand, although there’s nothing intimate about this. We’re like two strangers at the site of a disaster, our touch the instinctual clutch for human contact. Liz and I present a united front in public – and that includes sessions like this one. But except for moments when she breaks down and needs – literally – a shoulder to cry on, she’s formal and distant, clearly uncomfortable with our forced reunion. I’ve yet to catch sight of her, for instance, in her bathrobe.
“The depth of the Bureau’s involvement varies,” Judy Jones says, carefully making eye contact with each of us. “Since we are satisfied with police conduct in the investigation, our role will be limited to support.”
Jack immediately protests. “What – the FBI’s so hung up on terrorists a couple of kids don’t matter? Don’t my grandsons deserve your full attention?”
I think the limited role for the Bureau is a plus, but Jack doesn’t see it that way. From the way he goes on about how the boys deserve the best, it’s clear that despite the memorable series of FBI screwups over the past decade (Ruby Ridge, Waco, the spy Robert Hanssen, the embarrassing repression of leads in the 9/11 attack, the shocking errors at Bureau labs), Jack harbors fantasies of Bureau efficiency and excellence that go back to Eliot Ness.
Jones assures us that the Bureau’s limited role is not because the FBI is “preoccupied with homeland security. We’re prepared to lend whatever support Detective Shoffler requires and requests.”
“How can you be satisfied with the police conduct?” Jack persists. “They thought Alex was the guy and while they’re putting him through the wringer, the real guy’s making tracks.” He throws up his hands.
“I understand your feelings. With hindsight, we’re all geniuses. But you have to understand that there’s nothing in the conduct of the case that warrants criticism. As soon as he was summoned, Detective Shoffler took steps to secure the scene – a very difficult scene to secure, by the way. He immediately launched a vigorous search and inquiry. In the time since the boys disappeared, he and his team have questioned a large number of witnesses, some of them more than once. He’s made a good liaison with the District police. He’s pursued the case by the book, and that includes” – she glances my way and offers a tiny sympathetic grimace – “suspecting and questioning Mr. Callahan.”
“How’s that?” Jack says, his face red with belligerence. “They waste their time with Alex here, and boom – no one’s even looking for my grandsons. Everyone thinks they’re dead.”
Jones looks down at her fingers – the nails are bitten raw. “In the field of criminal justice,” she says, “we are all to a certain extent students of history. We have to rely on known precedent. In suspecting Mr. Callahan, Detective Shoffler was going with history. The truth is that most child abductions and murders are committed by parents – especially when those parents are separated.” She hefts the police file. “This kidnapper didn’t go by the book. You just don’t come across many cases – I couldn’t find a single one – where a kidnapping occurs many miles from a victim’s home and yet the kidnapper returns to that home, where he has one of the victims place a phone call to a parent, a phone call that is not a ransom plea.” She shakes her head. “It’s all very risky behavior.”
“What about the T-shirt?” I ask. “Do you have any theories about that?”
She sighs and glances at Detective Shoffler. “There’s nothing in the database, really nothing. Maybe some kind of animal sacrifice. We’re looking into that.”
Shoffler grimaces. “What I think is maybe the T-shirt was just to throw off pursuit. Not that we let up on other suspects or possibilities. You got two kids missing, the search is really relentless. But until that lab test came back, it was natural to focus certain resources on Alex.” He wags his head sadly. “I think the T-shirt was deliberate and it worked like a charm.”
“A red herring,” Jones says, “almost literally. Except the fish on the T-shirt was a whale instead of a herring.”
Liz groans and her head droops.
“This guy is too fucking cute,” my father says.
“Detective Shoffler has asked me to pick up a couple of threads in the investigation,” Jones tells us. “First, that folded rabbit – I’ve already checked into that.”
“Really – what did you find out?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Not much. We ran it by an origami expert. He said it was cleverly constructed and of high intermediate level, but that’s about all he could tell us. It’s now with a second expert, but I’m not very confident this lead’s going anywhere. Like any other subculture you get into, from skydiving to candlepins – origami has more devotees than you’d think possible.”
“What about the material?” Liz asks. “That skin or whatever it is.”
“Apparently it does feel like skin. It’s called elephant hide. But in fact it’s a special kind of paper used in origami.”
“Really.”
“It stands up to being folded wet, the expert explained. Very commonly available and pretty much the paper of choice at a certain level, especially for animal forms. I’m afraid tracking the source of the paper does not look promising. The Internet alone has dozens of sources.”
Liz looks as if she’s going to start crying.
“The other area Det
ective Shoffler has asked me to pursue,” Jones says, “is the question of Mr. Callahan’s possible enemies. I’ve got a copy of the list Mr. Callahan supplied, and when we’re done here” – she shifts her gaze to me – “I’d like to go over it.”
My mother sticks up her hand, as if she’s in a classroom. Her face is bright red. “What if it’s because they’re twins,” she blurts out. “I keep thinking about that Nazi doctor… his experiments.” She presses her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at Liz and me.
My father puts his arm around her shoulder. “I thought of that, too,” he says.
This is a possibility I try to keep out of my head. I can’t handle it, can’t stand the idea of some modern-day Mengele doing things to the boys. They’d be better off dead. And so would I.
“I checked on twins,” Judy Jones tells us, with a negative shake of the head, “and I can tell you that in the past twenty years, there are very few cases of twins being kidnapped. Or twins going missing. None at all that seem relevant to this case.”
“What about those boys out in L.A.? Lopez? Some kind of Hispanic name.” This from Jack.
“The Ramirez twins,” I say.
“It sounds like Alex knows why that case isn’t relevant,” Jones says, with a nod my way.
“Police caught the kidnapper with the bodies of the boys,” I tell them. “Then he committed suicide.”
“That’s about as closed as a case can get,” Jones says. “So…”
Liz’s mother, Marguerite, flies in from Maine, and nearly requires hospitalization again after fighting in through the press crowd.
Although, already – just one week after the abduction – that is beginning to diminish.
Compassionate strangers keep on volunteering for the search teams – which continue, weather permitting, to comb the area around the fairgrounds. When we can, we join them – Liz, Jack, Liz’s mother, my father, and me. Outfitted in cutting-edge gear donated by Tenleytown Outdoor Sports (a friend of a friend of mine owns it), we drive the hour and a half to Cromwell and then separate, according to police direction, each of us joining a different search team.
Mom’s eyesight won’t allow her to stumble around in brambles and ravines. She stays behind to help with the Power-of-Prayer outreach group launched by one of her friends, working a vast network of e-mail circles.
The single telephone in my study has been joined by half a dozen other receivers, spillover lines installed by the authorities. “If the kidnapper does call,” my mother explains to one of her group, “we don’t want him to have any trouble getting through.”
The phone never stops ringing. When we’re at home, we all pitch in to answer calls, logging name, number, and purpose of call on printed information sheets.
Shoffler stops by one afternoon, now ten days after the disappearance. Everyone else is busy so we talk alone.
First he tells me he’s getting a lot more information about the man with the dog. “What we’re getting is that this guy had kids around him all the time. It’s the dog, right? It’s a very cute dog. It works like a magnet for this guy. A kid magnet.”
“That’s what I saw – a bunch of kids petting this dog.”
“We got some confirmation from one of the ticket sellers at the gate. He remembers the boys leaving with a man and a dog.”
“Remembers them leaving? Really? Where’s this ticket seller been?”
“He’s kind of a reluctant witness. Has a rap sheet. He wasn’t coming forward to volunteer, that’s for damn sure. We got to him the second time around. We’re going through the whole employee roster again, see – and this time we ask did he see a tall man with a dog and two kids leaving the park. Well, this kid, basically a kind of nervous Nellie, a law-abiding citizen except he likes to smoke pot, you know – he worries about it. What if he keeps his mouth shut? Would that be lying? Would that be obstruction? Would that be a parole violation? So, he comes forward.”
“Huh.”
“I was skeptical, too. How can he remember this? Thousands of people coming and going every single day – half of ’em dressed like Friar Tuck or King Arthur. And we’re talking about more than a week ago now.”
“Ten days.”
“Right. So anyway, here’s what the guy tells me. He doesn’t really remember the twins, just two kids about the same size; he didn’t really look at ’em. What he remembers is that the group struck him as weird.”
“The group?”
“The two kids, the man, the dog. I ask what does he mean. He’s got knights and princesses up the kazoo, he’s got boatloads of Goths and… this little group strikes him as weird? Weird how? Weird why? And what he tells me is he noticed that the man was in costume, the dog was in costume – but the kids were not. That didn’t make sense to him. Usually, he said, it’s the other way around.”
“Hunh.”
“When he said that, it rang true, you know? It’s not the kind of thing you’d make up. Plus, he nailed the dog.”
“Said it was a whippet?”
Shoffler pulls out his notebook, puts on his glasses. He’s very attached to his notebooks, and he writes everything down. Sometimes he’ll refer to notes several times in the course of a conversation. He’s got hundreds of notebooks. He jokes that one day he’ll write his memoirs.
Now he finds what he’s looking for. “Yeah, so here it is. I ask him what kind of dog the tall guy has, and he tells me it’s ‘one of those fast dogs. Like a greyhound, but not as big.’”
“There you go.”
“So then I ask him what the owner was wearing. And he says: ‘I told you – a costume.’ I keep at it: what kind of costume? He tells me his sister got him the job, he’s not into this Renaissance shit. Then he points out the obvious – people don’t come to Renaissance fairs dressed up like cowboys or superheroes.”
“Right.” I can tell Shoffler is excited about this, but I can’t see where he’s going.
“The guy’s getting real tired of me,” the detective says, “but I press him. Can he be more specific? Well, the tall man wasn’t a king. He wasn’t a knight. The guy didn’t know what he was. His costume – it had this ruff, same crazy neckware as the skinny dog. And then he tells me the guy wore some kind of tights and he had a flute.’” Shoffler looks up at me, peering over his reading glasses. “I say hold it, he had a flute? Cause I got that from one other source, but I didn’t make much of it. The kid brightens, you know, like he’s just had a realization. ‘I think that’s it,’ he tells me. ‘The guy wore this jacket, you know, four different colors. And the flute. That’s what he was supposed to be: the Pied Piper.’”
Shoffler closes his notebook. He looks pleased with himself, but I feel a skitter of dread down the back of my neck. How did the fairy tale go? The way I remember, the Piper got rid of the village’s rats, but the town wouldn’t pay up. He piped a tune and all the children followed him. And then – didn’t the children disappear?
CHAPTER 13
I always know how long it’s been since the boys disappeared. I don’t have to do the math; it’s instantly available. Today, as I drive my parents to the airport, it’s been twenty-one days, eight hours and change.
I suggested they go home (as Jack and Marguerite did a week ago) and it didn’t take much to get past their token resistance.
In the terminal, my mother hugs me for a long time, then dabs at her tears. My father gives me a manly abrazo. I linger outside the security bay and watch a bald man with bulky shoulders pull my mother aside for extra scrutiny. Stripped of her bright yellow linen blazer, she stands with her arms outstretched so he can pass the wand around her. He does this so slowly and methodically, her arms begin to shake from the effort of holding the position.
This is how unreliable my grip on my emotions has become: One second I’m just observing the bald man harass my mother and the next I’m incandescent with rage. It takes a real effort not to bust through the security gate and go after the guy. I’d like to take him dow
n. I’d like his head to hit the floor. I can already hear the mantra – “I was just doing my job” – but I don’t buy it. If he’s trying to focus on likely terrorists, he’s wasting everybody’s time and money harassing my mother. He’s not “just doing his job”; he’s on a power trip.
As the days roll by, the media hoopla continues to fade. Kevin and Sean are relegated to the occasional news update. The calls and e-mails, volunteers and donations fall off too. The hotline grows lukewarm, the yellow ribbons start to tatter and fade, the posters of the boys disappear from store windows, displaced by announcements of choral music programs, missing dogs, Run for the Cure bulletins.
Meanwhile, the police are doing “everything we can” – which isn’t much. At least for a while, there continue to be leads, and each one causes in me a brief hope before Shoffler declares it a dead end.
He drops by one night with packages of Chinese food. He tells us they’ve been working hard on the subculture of Renaissance festivals, “looking for the tall man, circulating everything – sketches, descriptions, the dog, the whole shebang. You wouldn’t believe how many medieval enthusiasts are out there.”
“How many Pied Pipers can there be?” Liz asks.
“You shouldn’t think of him that way,” the detective cautions between bites of lo mein. “The costume might have been deliberate – you know, a disguise. It’s like guys in uniform. Say we have a burglary, a bank job – whatever. Man’s in a UPS uniform, mechanic coveralls, maintenance man blues – that’s all anyone remembers.”
“So what about the guy,” I ask, “the tall man? You getting anywhere?”
Shoffler makes a face. “So far,” he says, “nothing but Elvis sightings.”
