by Chaz McGee
A child that small, barely four years of age, would be so trusting. I could almost see him lifting his innocent face to the stranger’s, listening intently to his story, wanting to be a good boy, and, believing the story to be true, slipping his tiny hand into the man’s larger hand before marching away with him like the big boy he believed himself to be. The child would be unformed, his emotions fleeting and hard to trace—which meant I needed to concentrate on the abductor. He would leave an emotional trail like a snake slithering though grass. I had tracked evil before.
Where had the boy been taken to hide? With this many people searching and no trace of him to be found, I was pretty sure the child was no longer in the park. I would concentrate on the exits and picking up the predatory scent of his abductor. I circled the edges of the park, seeking an indication of darkness that might lead me to the boy.
There.
Along the back edge of the park, I discovered what had to be lingering traces of the kidnapper. It was near the side street where my dear old lady, Noni Bates, and her lonely middle-aged neighbor, Robert Michael Martin, had discovered the rabbit’s nest. A vein of darkness lingered in the air, surrounded by more troubled emotions. Ambivalence, perhaps, and a hint of shame. Self-loathing. Lots of self-loathing. And something that felt very much like sadness.
This was either a conflicted kidnapper or someone who had never done this before.
Had he taken the boy out of opportunity? If Robert Michael Martin was telling the truth, he had seen the abductor watching the children all week. Had he been fighting his urges the entire time and then been unable to resist the perfect opportunity that unfolded before him, taking the child on a whim?
Or, an unwilling thought intruded, perhaps Robert Michael Martin was the abductor after all. He had left the nurse’s cottage and surely followed this route on his way back home. He had been angry and felt overlooked. He had been in need of power. And he certainly seemed obsessed with children. Perhaps the temptation had been too much.
I wished for my new friend Noni that it was not so, but I hoped it was him, so that the boy might be found.
I see what others miss, as mortals often overlook the nuances of their world. Or perhaps the searchers were simply moving too fast. But there, green among the green, just along the outer edge of the park’s back lawn, I discovered a plastic dinosaur, about three inches long, lying on its side in a patch of grass that concealed it from human eyes. It was a deeper green than the lawn, but it was the feeling of it that drew me to it. My intuition is akin to a sense of smell in that it affirms the existence of the invisible. But it is different in every other way. It’s just that smell comes closest to what I experience. It fills me until there is no doubt as to what I know. When I knelt next to the plastic toy, I felt the joy of a cozy kitchen on a weekend morning. The smell of pancakes and a mother’s lingering perfume permeated my mind. I tasted grape juice and heard the din of cartoon characters crashing into one another, felt the soft scratch of a favorite stuffed toy on my cheek and, to my deep joy, experienced the humanness of hunger.
Yes, the toy belonged to the boy. He had been taken out this way.
The volunteer searchers had left this end of the park. But a crime scene crew would probably come through in hopes of finding anything that might yield a clue. I owed it to them to make sure they found the toy.
I had broken the boundary between my old and new worlds once before, and the pain had debilitated me for days. I could not afford to tear the fabric between the two worlds now; I needed to keep searching for the boy. I would have to find a way to reveal the toy without attempting to move it.
In the end, the best I could do was to summon a light breeze to rustle the grass around the toy. With concentration, I was able to flatten the blades slightly around it. But it would still take good eyes to spot it.
That job done, I searched the sidewalk leading away from the park, losing the trail at a parking space halfway down the block. The abductor had driven away in a car.
I headed back to the crime scenes, knowing Gonzales would have arrived by now and wondering who would win the battle of strategy—Maggie or Calvano. The three of them were sitting in a town car parked near the nurse’s cottage, the driver dismissed in the interest of discretion. He was standing outside the car, smoking a cigarette and bullshitting the female cop who had been guarding the crime scene earlier.
The town car belonged to Gonzales. It was a luxury sedan designed for bigwigs and politicians. Gonzales was both. He had risen rapidly though the ranks of the department and had been named commander a few years before. He was impossible to pin down and therefore impossible to contradict. Like all politicians, he had no core of his own. He was as close to being a shape-shifter as humans ever get, morphing his opinions and attitudes to mirror those he was with at the time, eluding all attempts at revealing who he really was. It served him well. He’d gone far being all things to all people while, essentially, being no one at all.
This was unfortunate for Calvano. I have done a lot of watching since I died, my voyeurism extending behind closed doors. Gonzales had a soft spot for Maggie. He looked upon her as a daughter or, perhaps, a protégée. He knew her father, and I had eavesdropped on many a conversation between them. Maggie’s father was the old guard, and it would be a few more years before Gonzales could ignore their wishes. Calvano was deluded if he thought that Gonzales would take his advice over Maggie’s.
It didn’t take Calvano long to find this out. “Absolutely not,” Gonzales was saying to him. “Leave the mother alone. If you want to look for a connection, question her friends or other mothers in the park. Ask if any of them know Fiona.” When Calvano looked blank, Gonzales shook his head. “That’s the murder victim, Calvano. Her name is Fiona Harker. Just ask if anyone knows her and leave it at that for now. We’ll find the connection, if there is one.”
Calvano looked as if he had been just passed over for captain of the football team. Pouting is not an attractive trait in a grown man.
“Have you got anything else?” Gonzales asked him.
“Yes,” Calvano said, refusing to meet Maggie’s eyes. “There was one guy I talked to, a neighbor. There’s something wrong with him. I can feel it. He tried to interject himself into the investigation. The boy was taken right after he left the first crime scene. It could be he came sniffing back around after killing the nurse to see what we knew, and when I blew him off and didn’t play his game, maybe he got angry and took the boy?”
“Because nurse-murdering pedophiles are our number one problem in this state,” Maggie offered, although sarcasm was not one of her preferred weapons. Calvano was starting to get to her. Partnering with him would be like babysitting a chimpanzee.
Gonzales tried not to smile. “Take a team and talk to him. Do you have his address?”
“Right here, Commander.” Calvano held up his notebook.
“If he gave you the right address,” Maggie pointed out.
Calvano looked momentarily alarmed, but recovered. “I know what he looks like,” he said confidently. “We can smoke him out.”
Oh my god, better that I had been a broken-down lush than a total dweeb like this guy.
“Fine,” Gonzales said. “Pull six men from across town to visit your suspect. No lights, keep it low-key. They should be out of uniform. Ask for a voluntary search of the house. Get back to me if the owner refuses, and I’ll arrange for a warrant.”
Calvano left the car as supremely confident of his abilities as when he had first entered it. Nothing, not reality or the scorn of others, could put a dent in his ego. The sad thing was that it had carried him this far.
With Calvano gone, there was plenty of room for me. I made myself comfortable in the driver’s seat and pretended to steer as I eavesdropped on Maggie and Gonzales. There were times when I badly missed my old life or, rather, badly missed the life I wish I had lived. This was one of them. I wanted to be one of the good guys. The best I could do was to eavesdrop while they ta
lked.
Gonzales had relaxed the moment Calvano left the car and became as close to human as he can manage. “Don’t say it,” he said to Maggie.
“Don’t say what?” she asked innocently, though she was trying not to smile. Maggie’s plain face is transformed when she smiles, but she doesn’t smile very often. She feels the world’s pain a little too much than might be healthy for a woman her age, but it’s the price she pays for being a better detective than I ever was.
“You’re angry I put Calvano with you,” Gonzales said.
“You couldn’t have put him with one of the other mouth-breathers?”
Gonzales looked apologetic. “I can’t afford another nonfunctioning team,” he explained. “I’m still paying the price for Fahey and Bonaventura.”
Ouch. That hurt. The reference to my old partner and me stung. Were we never to be posthumously rehabilitated? They did it for politicians all the time.
Maggie started to say something—I let myself imagine she had been about to spring to my defense—but Gonzales stopped her with an upturned palm. “For another reason, too,” he said. “I can’t take another lawsuit in the department. You don’t put up with his crap. If I let him partner with any other woman, it would be a disaster. If I let him interact with witnesses or victims without someone like you to keep him in line, it would be a disaster. That’s why he’s in your lap. I promise it won’t be forever.”
“Sir, why have him at all?” she suggested. “I’m just asking.”
“Being a pigheaded bully is not incompatible with law enforcement,” Gonzales said. “You just have to know how to use his special talents.”
“And the fact that his uncle is a councilman has nothing to do with it?”
“Of course not,” Gonzales assured her with his politician’s grin, but at least he had the decency to know he was full of it. His smile faded. “Maggie, I need you to take the lead on Fiona Harker’s murder. It means a lot to me.”
“I heard about her treating your son.”
“She didn’t just treat him, she saved his life,” Gonzales said, his voice taking on an edge of genuine emotion I had never heard in him before. “I owe her. The emergency room was crashing in around us. It was a Saturday night and the ER was crowded with drunks bellowing and people brawling and all the doctors were just pushing the cases through and that—” His voice broke and he stopped to regain control. “That woman cared enough about my son to take a second look at his scan when the doctors had dismissed it and, because of her, they had him in surgery within half an hour. It saved his life. She deserves some justice. It’s all I can give her, but I owe it to her.”
“I understand, sir,” Maggie said. “I won’t let it go.”
“I know you won’t. That’s why I put you on it.”
“Unfortunately, that means Calvano needs to be lead on the missing kid case,” she said for him. “They might be related.”
“Do you think they are?”
“Only in the sense that whoever took the boy used the first crime as a distraction and was able to get away unnoticed.”
“You’re sure?’ Gonzales asked.
“The time frames are different. MO is different. No connection between victims.”
“What about the mother?” he asked. “Could she have harmed her boy?”
Maggie looked so sad at the mention of the missing boy’s mother. She wasn’t just empathetic to people, she assumed their sorrow and carried it inside her for the duration of a case. “It’s not her, sir. I talked to her briefly, but I had to have her taken to emergency psych. She’s broken. Lost her husband a year ago. Her kid is all she has. She thinks it’s her fault. It’s not her.”
“You’re sure about that?” Gonzales was being very careful; he’d had enough public relations disasters thanks, in part, to me.
Maggie nodded. “She didn’t have the time, she doesn’t have the motive, and she didn’t have the means. Witnesses saw her with her kid seconds before the crime scene distracted everyone, and there’s no way she could have killed him and hidden the body far enough away to avoid detection. We’d have found something. He was taken, sir. I put three offices on a closer search of the park, though it’s been trampled by volunteers. I doubt they’ll find anything.”
“We can’t stop people from wanting to help.”
“Not when there are six of us and sixty of them.”
“We’re going to have a lot more than six people on our side, and you don’t have to worry about Calvano screwing it up. I made a decision, and then I made a call. The feds are coming in on the missing child case.” Gonzales noticed Maggie’s smile. “Yes, Gunn, Calvano will have to deal with them instead of you.”
“When will they be here?”
“They’re in Baltimore wrapping up another case, but they’ll be here tonight.”
“You know that Calvano’s going to roust that poor neighbor before they get here,” she predicted. “He’ll want to get his licks in while he can.”
“The guy might be involved,” Gonzales warned her. “Calvano’s been right before.”
“From what I hear, Robert Michael Martin is just some poor guy who wants to be a hero,” Maggie said. “He’s not organized enough or motivated enough to have done what this abductor did. I think we’re looking for a pro.”
Gonzales sighed. “What kind of world has professional child abductors?”
“Our world?” Maggie suggested.
Gonzales regained his professional detachment. “I want you to ignore the media, ride herd on Calvano, and find out who did this to Fiona.”
“What about the boy?” She sounded wistful. Like everyone, she wanted to help.
“You’re going to work on that, too.”
“How?”
“Use the Harker case as a cover but, when you can, I want you to pursue any local angles on the kid, all right? You and I know the feds are going to come in with a profile and they’re going to broaden the search—but this is a small enough town that someone, somewhere, knows who it was. Or at least suspects who it was. He was taken from the heart of town. There’s got to be a local connection. I want us to be the ones who find it.”
“So you want me to solve the Harker case, and find out who took the boy, and keep Calvano in line all at the same time?”
“That’s about it,” Gonzales agreed.
“Do I at least get overtime?” Maggie asked, joking.
“I know you can do this,” Gonzales told her solemnly. “You can do it and more, if you need to.” For once, I agreed with Gonzales.
Chapter 7
If ever I am sent back to the world of the living, I want a friend like Noni Bates to be with me. She beat the cops to Robert Michael Martin’s house, having correctly surmised that Calvano would set his sights on him. But it was more than that, I realized, when I found her on his front porch. A vein of anxiety ran through her, a fear he might turn out to be the most evil of beings her schoolteacher’s heart could imagine. I realized it took courage for her to be there at his house in pursuit of the truth. She was sturdy, but she was small, and she was no match for a man Martin’s size.
I wanted to search his house before anyone else arrived and polluted it with their own agendas. I didn’t think Martin was connected to the boy’s disappearance, not after feeling the residual emotions the kidnapper had left behind. But I’d racked up a lifetime of being wrong. So I felt it was prudent to check, just in case.
I lingered in the front hallway, soaking in the loneliness of the dusty old house, while Noni rang the bell outside. Martin appeared promptly, shambling along like a bear awoken from hibernation. I get to see the things people do when they think no one is looking, and sometimes it’s not pretty. Martin was sleepily scratching his belly and blinking as if surprised to find it was still daylight outside.
“Mrs. Bates?” he said when he opened the door—without checking to see who it was first, I might add. He was lucky he’d not been swept off his feet by a sea of cops and flattened ag
ainst the hallway walls. “What are you doing here?”
“Get dressed,” she said firmly. “And call a lawyer now. I am certain that detective is on his way to arrest you.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.” He sounded so dumbfounded, I almost felt sorry for the poor slob. He actually thought being innocent might protect him. That only told me he’d never run into cops like Calvano before.
“May I come in?” Noni asked. He stepped aside and she entered his front hall as if it were Buckingham Palace. If she noticed the musty air, the dust on the furniture, or the lingering smell of fried meat, she gave no sign that she found it in the least important.
But she did eye his attire. He’d ditched the flour-dusted jeans and was wearing a dingy T-shirt and boxer shorts. “Really, dear. I taught men like that detective when they were still boys and pushing other children around on the playground. He will be here soon. You get dressed and call a lawyer.”
“I don’t need a lawyer,” Martin said again, affronted at the implication that he might.
“Then at least get dressed.” The steel was back in her voice, and he blinked once, then obeyed, climbing the stairs to the upper chaos of his second floor. I followed.
It was as uncared for as the rest of the house. I moved from room to room, picking up on the vague fear that had driven his mother’s existence. It permeated every room, including the one where she had died: a hospital bed still dominated the interior and pill bottles still littered the bureau surface. Only the bed, stripped clean of its linens, had been touched since the body had been removed—what had he said? A year ago? The dude seriously needed to move on.
I felt sorry for the guy. He was just some schlep who’d never been loved enough as a kid because his mother had been too overwhelmed and afraid of sliding into poverty to spare the time. He didn’t have friends because he didn’t know how to make them.
