An empty stroller was parked in front of the back stall. Radhauser photographed it from several angles, noting the still engaged wheel brakes. A half-eaten lion cracker stuck to the white plastic tray. Again, he snapped a photograph.
Though he knew he’d most likely find nothing, Radhauser checked each empty stall, snapped some more photographs, then examined the sinks and mirrors. He went through the trashcan and then inspected the floor marked with dozens of dusty footprints. Most of them looked like running shoes or sneakers, and many of them were child-sized. One larger set stood out—looked as if they’d been made by a pair of wide and smooth-soled bedroom slippers. Radhauser photographed them.
He’d have forensics take a look, but he was pretty certain they’d find nothing of value. He pulled open the door, then took off the gloves and tossed them into the trashcan. As the door closed behind him, it dawned on Radhauser that a child under three couldn’t reach the handle and even if she could, there was no way she’d be strong enough to pull open that heavy door. Realization of what that meant trickled over him like ice water. How many times had he brought Lizzie to this park, believing she was safe in the sandbox, while he sat on a bench reading a book? If it hadn’t been Gracie’s birthday, she and Lizzie would have been here for the fair.
Somewhere in the distance, a woman frantically called out for Emily—three syllables rising and falling into the air.
Near the playground, Detective Vernon stood in front of a bench talking to a young woman. She wore a white suit and bedroom slippers. Radhauser’s thoughts flashed to the odd footprints he’d seen on the restroom floor, then back to Vernon.
The young woman sat with her hands shoved between her knees, her shoulders slouched and a sick, terrified look on her face that told Radhauser she was the little girl’s mother.
Vernon sat beside her and put his hand on her shoulder.
Radhauser took a deep breath. Sometimes, especially in cases like this one, it wasn’t easy to find the balance between professional and sympathetic. And he knew this would be especially tough for him. This case would be different, though. This time he’d find the little girl alive.
Vernon spotted him. He stood, said something to the woman, and walked toward Radhauser. He filled Radhauser in on what he knew so far—that he’d notified search and rescue to wade the ponds and the creek. And that he’d done an initial interview with Christine Michaelson, the victim’s mother. “Both the Jackson and Josephine County Sheriffs’ Departments have dispatched officers to aid in the search. The stepdaughter and her boyfriend looked in all the places Emily liked to hide, and found nothing.”
“Where is she now?” Radhauser asked.
Vernon told him Corbin had sent the older daughter home to see if Emily had found her way back, and to notify the victim’s mother. That Christine had asked Brandy to call her father before returning to the park.
“What about the boyfriend?”
Vernon nodded toward the edge of the playground where a lanky, dark-haired teenaged boy, dressed like a disheveled Shakespearean actor, stood leaning against a tree. He held a small Winnie the Pooh bear in one hand and a funny-looking high-top hat in the other. Vernon checked his notes. “Stone Rodgers. Apparently, he’d planned to meet Brandy, the victim’s half-sister, here in the park.”
“Tell the vendors and people manning the booths to stay put,” Radhauser said. “And be adamant about it. No one leaves until we give permission. Talk to them. Search every booth. That kid’s got to be here somewhere.” Maybe if he behaved as if he believed it, it would be true.
Radhauser stepped over to the boy and introduced himself.
The kid was polite, responsive, and told Radhauser he’d arrived at the park at 3:30.
“Do you meet Brandy here often?”
“I’ve run into her here a couple times, but this was the first time we’d planned to meet.” Stone told Radhauser how they had the male and female leads in the class play and had planned to practice some of their lines.
“Where were you before you got to the park?”
“I was home, doing penance by washing my mother’s car.”
“Did you rob a Quick Mart?”
Stone shook his head. “Forgot to let my dog out. He decided the living room carpet was a good place to…” He stopped before finishing the sentence.
“What happened when you arrived here?”
“I saw Brandy running toward the duck pond. The whole place was teeming with kids. She told me what happened and that she wanted to call 911.”
Radhauser jotted down notes, then asked the question he always asked in a missing child case. “What do you think happened to Emily?”
The kid didn’t hesitate. He told Radhauser that at first he’d thought she wandered off and when they didn’t find her, he thought maybe she’d headed home. His gaze cut to Emily’s mother. “Now, I’m not so sure.”
Radhauser questioned Stone for another few minutes and then told the boy he could go home.
“I’d like to stick around, if that’s okay.” Again, his gaze shifted to Christine. “Obviously Emily wasn’t at home and Brandy’s gonna be pretty upset. Maybe I can help her in some way.”
Radhauser glanced at the victim’s mother, then nodded, realizing Brandy would need all the understanding she could get. “Good idea.”
Christine leapt to her feet and raced toward Stone. She snatched the stuffed bear and hugged it against her chest.
His empty hand hung in the air between them for an instant before he dropped it to his side.
“Where did you get this?”
He shook his head, as if embarrassed. “I’m sorry. Brandy asked me to hold it.”
“It belongs to my baby. It belongs to Emily,” Christine said. “She doesn’t go anywhere without…”
When Radhauser believed Christine was out of earshot, he asked Vernon to compile a list of sex offenders and pedophiles within a twenty-mile radius of Lithia Park. Just saying the word, pedophile, stung the back of his throat. “Organize a door-to-door search of their houses. You don’t need a warrant to do a risk assessment. But if anything looks suspicious, get one and rip out the wallboards if you need to.”
If it turned out to be a kidnapping by a stranger, the outcome was usually the same—with any luck, the child would be released after the sexual assault or photography session. If not, the child would most likely be killed during the first forty-eight hours. “And see if you can get some other officers to canvas houses bordering the park.”
Radhauser lifted his sleeve to check the time. He’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing his wrist watch.
“It’s 4:14,” Vernon said.
Emily had been missing for forty-six minutes.
“Call for an AMBER Alert,” Radhauser said. Ashland was only twenty-seven miles over the state border. “That kid could be in California by now. I’ll see if I can get a photograph from her parents. Make up some flyers. We’ll plaster the whole town with them. And notify the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.” He asked Vernon to phone the technician to schedule polygraphs for the victim’s family members. “Set up a hotline number for tips.”
Vernon wrote everything down in his notebook, then stepped back over to the bench where the missing kid’s mother sat, still hugging the stuffed bear. He introduced Radhauser to Christine and then excused himself. “I’ll go back to the office and take care of those matters we discussed.” Vernon headed out of the park.
“What matters?” Christine asked. “What’s more important than searching for my baby?”
“It’s all related to the case. We’re calling in backup from other counties,” Radhauser said, his gaze landing on her bedroom slippers. “Were you in the park restroom earlier today?”
“I just got here. What are you getting at?”
He glanced at her feet. “I found some prints near Emily’s stroller that looked as if they were made by bedroom slippers.”
“It wasn’t me. I wore new shoes to a luncheon
for my mother’s birthday. When I got home, my feet hurt, so I took them off. But after I heard Emily was missing…I forgot I was wearing the slippers.”
That sounded reasonable to Radhauser. Gracie often did the same thing.
Christine grabbed his wrist. “Promise me you’ll find her.”
Behind them, Ashland Creek rippled and swirled haphazardly over its rocks as if it were drunk on the waters of springtime.
“I wouldn’t worry too much yet,” he said. “Kids like to wander. And most of them turn up on their own.”
Her blue eyes widened. She looked like a beautiful, but frightened kid—her face so pale that the reddish freckles across her nose and cheeks stood out beneath her makeup as if they’d been drawn with ink. “And what happens to the rest of them?”
A vision flashed through his mind. The Tyler Meza kidnapping—one of Radhauser’s first cases as a detective. The six-year-old had been snatched from the men’s restroom at a Tucson little league park. It remained the one case that haunted him most.
“What happens to the rest of them?” Christine asked again.
“We find them,” Radhauser said. And they did, one way or the other.
* * *
After Brandy waited fifteen minutes for someone to locate the classroom where her father was administering the SAT, she closed up the house and ran toward the park. She raced across the parking lot, over the bridge spanning Ashland Creek, and into the playground, coming to a skidding stop in front of the park restroom. Yellow tape with black letters that said, Crime Scene. Do Not Cross, was strung across the entrance.
A few feet away, she spotted a man who was probably a detective or a police officer talking with Christine. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair just edging into gray at the sideburns visible beneath his tan Stetson. A hint of black beard showed on his chin. With his denim, western-cut jacket, jeans and boots, he looked more like a handsome cowboy than a police officer. He used his hands as he talked. They were calloused like an authentic rancher, not one of those wannabes who just dressed for the part. For some reason, this made Brandy trust him more.
When he moved away from Christine, Brandy hurried toward him. “Are you here to find my sister?”
“Yes,” Radhauser said, showing her his badge. He had dark blue eyes that looked intense, but sincere—not fake sincere like Doctor Sorenson’s. “In order to locate your sister, I need to ask you a few questions.” He gestured toward a park bench.
Brandy forced her legs to move in that direction, but once she got to the bench, she remained standing.
While Radhauser took a black notebook from his inside pocket, Brandy watched another uniformed officer take her stepmother aside. They stood about twenty feet away. Her stepmother’s eyes were still as she looked at the officer, like someone searching a crystal ball.
Radhauser patted the empty place on the bench.
Brandy sat beside him. She held her own hands to keep them warm.
He asked dozens of questions about her little sister and wrote down everything she said in his notebook. Had Emily walked up to strangers in the park? How well did she talk? Did she play with other children here? Had Brandy noticed anything suspicious—heard sounds of a struggle in the bathroom, like someone had put a hand over Emily’s mouth?
The Children’s Health Fair had been shut down. Costumed workers took off their masks and bear heads. And in the grassy areas around Brandy and Radhauser, vendors and booth workers packed up their goods. One by one, as the police officers questioned and then dismissed them, they quietly left the park.
Brandy answered every question, then told the detective about Emily’s love of speed, the way they raced to the park almost every afternoon, the way she loved the merry-go-round, to go high on the swings. “I tried to warn her about strangers. Last year the kid’s fair had a booth from the Missing Children’s Clearing House. They showed a Barney film about not talking to strangers. They took her picture, fingerprinted her and everything.”
Radhauser lifted his eyebrows. “Emily has prints on file?”
Brandy nodded.
“That’s good.” He jotted a note.
“Do you think someone took her?”
Radhauser waited until she looked at him. “It’s too soon to tell, but we need to treat it like a kidnapping while we explore possibilities. Tell me what you think happened.”
She told him how she’d first thought Emily was hiding someplace nearby or that she’d gone to feed animal crackers to the ducks. “But now, I think someone must have carried her out of the restroom.” She shook her head. “I always told her to scream if someone she didn’t know tried to pick her up. We even practiced. Em is a good screamer. But she didn’t make a sound. Please, Detective Radhauser, you have to find her.”
“We will. Kids wander off every day. Sometimes they curl up under a tree or a picnic table and fall asleep.”
“Are they okay?”
The skin on his right cheek twitched. “Almost always.”
Grief crept up her throat and tightened it. “Almost?”
The word weighed a ton.
Chapter Seven
For Winston Radhauser, facing the one person—usually a family member—who felt responsible was the most difficult part of a missing child case. It sometimes caused him to freeze and remember things he’d tried hard to forget. Things like the look on Janet Meza’s face when she’d told him about working the Little League snack bar that afternoon and not realizing Tyler had disappeared until her shift had ended.
All around them, Lithia Park seemed still. Despite the muted chatter of children and the sounds of traffic moving along Winburn Way toward the Plaza, he heard his pencil whisper as it glided across his tablet. “This is important,” he said to Brandy. “Was the main door into the bathroom closed?”
“It closes automatically.”
Radhauser nodded. “I know. But sometimes I’ve seen it propped open with a garbage can.”
“Not today. I remember because I had to struggle to keep the door open while I pushed the stroller inside.”
“Was your sister angry with you over anything?”
She told him that Emily had wanted to swing, play in the sandbox and watch the singing bears, but that Brandy needed to go to the restroom. She relayed the precautions she’d taken and how’d she’d kept talking to Emily, checking the stroller wheels, and telling her they’d go back to the playground in a few minutes.
“Some reason you didn’t take her into the stall with you?”
Her face and neck got red, and the scars she’d tried to cover with makeup stood out even more. They ran like a railroad track up her left cheek where they disappeared into the hairline just above her ear. “I tried to bring the stroller inside, but I couldn’t close the door. I…you see I…I had a problem.” She seemed to shrink inside her clothes.
While he waited, he wondered what had happened to her face and couldn’t help thinking it was a damn shame. Radhauser was pretty good at sizing people up, and there was something special about this kid. Something deep and genuine. “Go on,” he finally said.
“It wasn’t supposed to…It came early…I…I started my period.” She stared at the tips of her boots, and then up at Radhauser, her face even more flushed. “I didn’t want Emily to be scared.”
“You and your sister have a pretty big age difference,” Radhauser said. “Do you ever resent having to take care of Emily?”
She flinched and leaned back against the bench. “Sometimes. But she’s my little sister. Well, my half-sister. But people say she looks like me. And she does, except…well…she’s perfect. I’m always careful with her. I’d never do anything to—” Her words rushed out, but then stopped abruptly, as if she realized what she’d intended to say was no longer true.
Radhauser hated to mention the scars, but needed to see how she reacted. “I know how bad you must feel about your face.”
She looked away. “I’m only a few weeks post-surgery. Doctor Sorenson says
it’ll get better in time.”
“Still. Must be hard to have a little sister who’s so perfect.” Sometimes he hated his job, the way he’d deliberately hurt someone to get at the truth.
“It’s not her fault. Emily wasn’t even born when—”
“I’m sure you care a great deal about her,” he said, not convinced yet it was true. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Emily that might help us find her?”
Again, she looked at her cowboy boots. “There are hundreds of things I could say about her. She’s a pretty cool little kid. But probably none of it would help you find her.”
He held Brandy’s gaze. “You get along with your stepmother?”
“We do okay. Considering.”
He glanced at Christine, now talking with Officer Corbin, then returned his attention to Brandy. “She doesn’t look much older than you are.”
“Is that supposed to make me hate her?”
He glanced over at the boy in the renaissance shirt. “Do you ever take your eyes off her when she’s playing here? To talk to your friend or something?”
“Stone didn’t get here until after—”
“How about other days?”
“There haven’t been any other days. This was our first…well…I guess it was kind of a date. Before today, if Stone happened to be in the park, we’d talk about acting sometimes. But Kathleen always watched Emily.”
“Kathleen? Who’s Kathleen?”
“She used to be my nanny. My mother’s dead.” The girl winced as if it still hurt to say those words. “Kathleen took care of me until my dad married Christine.”
“What’s Kathleen’s last name?”
“Sizemore.”
“Where does she live?”
“Kathleen would never take Emily.”
“We’ll talk to everyone who knows your sister. It doesn’t mean we suspect them. Now tell me where Kathleen lives.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Brandy said. “Kathleen loves Emily.”
“I’ll find out where she lives. And my having to do so will waste time I could spend looking for Emily.”
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