Taken

by Dee Henderson

  “If I said no, would you believe me?” Matthew answered mildly.

  “I’ve seen her photo from when she was sixteen. I might recognize her, but figure it would be just a guess after this many years. What can you tell me about her?”

  “Beyond the fact she’s alive, in reasonably good health, and beginning to share what happened, I’m not planning to say much.”

  The appetizer sampler arrived, along with their drinks. They both placed main-course orders, choosing the day’s special.

  The manila envelope with Adam York written on it lay on the table between them, but Adam didn’t reach for it. He ate one of the stuffed mushrooms. “I’ve got eighteen kids who would like to tell Shannon thank you,” he mentioned around a bite.

  Matthew relaxed. Maybe a touch too aggressive, like the proverbial bull in a china shop, but also a guy with a clear sense of the important to go with that direct approach. He thought he might come to like this FBI agent.

  “Your Shannon was getting very early photos of the kids in their new locations,” Adam said, reaching for a napkin. “By the time we received the package and were on scene at the various addresses, the kids’ hair would be dyed a different color, it would be shorter, they’d have papers giving them a different age, different birthday, a few had new names, but it was them. None of the abducted children ever told us who had moved them to their new location. None ever mentioned Shannon or gave a description that might be her.

  “The most surprising thing,” Adam continued, “was that we’d get them returned home to their rightful parent, only to realize the kids were terrified to be there. They were convinced someone was going to come grab them again. In every case we ended up advising the parent to move, change their names, give their kid a sense of a new, safe start in order to find balance again. The abductions and how they were done put a deep scar in these kids’ lives.”

  Matthew absorbed that information while he ate his share of the fried zucchini. “What were you able to tug loose about how the abductions were arranged?”

  “As a group, the parent arrested illegally holding the child all had a variation on the same story. When the case looked like it would go against him or her, the lawyer suggested someone might be able to help. They could circumvent the courts and get their child—that was guaranteed. But it would be expensive and criminal. If they paid the fee, they were told to walk away from their present life, set up in a new place with a new name, then wait for the child to be delivered. The parent didn’t know the person who dropped the child off, and none were willing to give a full description. A white guy, maybe in his forties, a white panel van with muddy license plates—that was pretty much it for what we could get them to say.”

  Their dinner orders arrived, and the conversation paused until the waitress had moved away. The seafood looked good. Matthew considered ordering the same as a carryout for Shannon when this meeting was over. “Did pursuing the lawyers get you anywhere?”

  “All the abductions were different lawyers, some in Northern states, some in the South. The four lawyers who finally ended up cooperating with us said they’d received a business card at a family-law conference. They had a phone number, a description offering ‘special assistance for special circumstances.’ They got paid a cut of the fee to provide information and a photo of the child. The distance between where a child was grabbed and where they were dropped off, along with the timing involved, suggests two or three drivers trading off to get the kid delivered as soon as it could be done. One of the kids confirmed that, in a roundabout way.”

  Adam picked up an onion ring, split it in two, and ate half. “There was one rather odd thing we realized early on. Put the location where the child was abducted on the map, where each ended up, and it was always east to west across the Northern states, or west to east across the Southern states. A regular circuit. Also, the abductions in the North happened in the summer, while abductions in the South in the winter.”

  “So they weren’t accepting every job they were offered, only those that fit their travel plans?” Matthew guessed.

  Adam reached for his drink. “Had to be. I’d receive a package by first-class mail from Shannon in the spring, another in the fall, addressed to my attention. The return address would be real but taken at random from ads in the Yellow Pages in the town where it was mailed. She managed to get the packages put together without leaving any useable prints inside or out. She had to be with the group doing the abductions. Either that or in direct contact with someone in the group.”

  The implications of that were worrying, but Matthew merely nodded. He pushed the manila envelope on the table over to Adam. “The people doing the abductions are dead,” he said. “Shannon doesn’t know who was hiring them. I think there was one more layer between the business card and these people. They’d have a photo of who to grab, a location, an address of where to make the delivery. Terror did the job. If the young child told anyone, gave the other parent any trouble, they would come take them again, keep them this time—implying a threat to kill the parents.”

  Adam winced. “That would indeed terrify a child into keeping quiet.” He opened the envelope. Five photos spilled out. Four men, one woman. On the back of each was a name, the letters DOD followed by a date. A note with neat printing read: The children abducted over the years should be able to pick these people out of a photo display with ease. It will help them to learn these people are gone and cannot hurt them or their families again. Gravesite locations are coming. Adam picked up some of the photos, turned them over. “The date of death is the same for these three. Right at a year ago.”

  Matthew checked the other two. “These are also identical—four months ago.”

  “I’d hoped for something interesting when you told me there was another envelope, but I wasn’t expecting this,” Adam said, studying the photos with a frown. “We can run these names and photos through the databases, see what aliases and locations pop up. You don’t turn into people smugglers without getting caught for lesser crimes along the way.”

  “May I suggest that you take it slow with this information? I think Shannon has more that will be useful to you before you start knocking on doors.”

  “One or more of these people abducted her?”

  “That’s my guess,” Matthew said.

  “Maybe the names and locations for these five, set alongside the lawyers’ information, will yield a common denominator—someone was putting these players in motion. At least it will give us beginning and end points for the money that had to move hands. Maybe the guy that’s the key will show up in the money trail.”

  Matthew was still focused on the implications of what Shannon had told him. “We need to know if someone in Shannon’s family set her up to be abducted, or if someone arranged it to pressure her family,” he told Adam quietly.

  “The kids she’s given me—the oldest was ten. Shannon was sixteen when she was taken. That’s old for a custody dispute.”

  “Maybe they shifted to only custody disputes and younger children after what turned out to be a debacle with her. Shannon said she was grabbed, taken by these people to a specific address where she was to be delivered, there was a problem at that location, and she was forced to stay with them. So someone paid them to take her, gave directions on where to take her. We need to identify that person.”

  “Who’s working this in Chicago?”

  “Paul Falcon and his wife, Ann, are involved. Paul’s going to need a look at this envelope’s contents.”

  “He’ll have it tonight.” Adam gathered up the photos. “If someone paid to have Shannon grabbed, if they are still around, they’re going to react badly to the fact Shannon turns up. I’d be careful about the ones you trust.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to sort out now. The fact that her brother’s running for governor of Illinois isn’t going to help matters.”

  “Politics and crime make for very interesting press,” Adam agreed. “I need to talk with Shannon, and soo
ner rather than later,” he insisted.

  “That’s not going to happen in the near term,” Matthew replied flatly. “Neither of us can afford to cut off the flow of information. If you push, she’s going to stop talking.”

  “Are there more kids to rescue?”

  “She says no.”

  Adam pulled out a business card, wrote a number on the back. “I looked you up. I’m sorry about your daughter.”

  “Appreciate that.”

  “Becky’s the reason Shannon found you?”

  “Yes.”

  Adam pushed the card across the table. “I’ll keep that in mind when we butt heads on the timing of things.”

  Matthew smiled and offered a card of his own. “I might come to like you, but don’t take it for granted.”

  “Ditto. I’ll call when I’ve got something useful on these five. Tell Shannon thanks.”

  “I will.”

  Matthew waited until Adam had left the restaurant before he paid the bill and exited with a carryout order for Shannon. He drove south for ten minutes, watching to see if he was being followed, then turned north and headed back to the hotel. Rooms had been booked for them by Ann under names she’d selected at random from the phone book.

  Matthew wasn’t surprised to find Shannon still up. They had adjoining rooms at the hotel, and the connecting door between them stood open. Shannon was curled up on his couch, watching television. She didn’t ask how the meeting had gone, but he offered something anyway. “I like Adam York.”

  “I figured you might.”

  Matthew set down the bag he carried in. “I brought you a meal if you want to add something further to that room-service tray.”

  She uncoiled from the couch. “Yeah, thanks, I am hungry again.”

  “Becky taught me early on that food started to taste really good to her again in the first months she was home.”

  Shannon lifted the lid on the container, and her pleasure was obvious. “This is great.” Matthew pulled out a chair for her at the table, then stepped out to retrieve beverages from the vending machine. He settled in across from her at the table while she ate, working on a package of M&M’s as his dessert.

  “Did you enjoy being a cop?”

  He was surprised at the unexpected question. “Yes. I was good at it. I liked solving robberies.”

  “You didn’t aspire to something else . . . maybe like homicides?”

  “No. I liked property crimes. All too often it was someone poor stealing from someone equally poor. It mattered that the theft be solved.”

  “You quit because of your daughter’s case?”

  He nodded. “I needed more income than my salary could provide in order to hire people to stay on the case full time. Starting my own private firm let me keep working my daughter’s case as I wanted to have it run.”

  “I like that about you—that you kept a full press on to solve your daughter’s case. A dad’s instinct, I know, but it says something that you persevered through all those years.” She gestured with her fork. “Will you ever go back to being a cop?”

  He shrugged. “Probably. It’s what I enjoyed for the first eight years of my daughter’s life. They’ve asked me back. I’ve got staff who can run the day-to-day of Dane Investigations without me.”

  He waited for something else, but she didn’t offer anything further. “What prompted the questions?” he asked.

  “I know where something is that was stolen. I might have us stop and pick it up tomorrow.”

  He lifted his root beer, considered her over the rim. This was getting even more interesting. He wondered what had been stolen. “People smugglers. Also thieves?”

  “Think of it as a family of smugglers. Half the family liked the money that came from dealing with people. The other half preferred dealing only in objects. They smuggled art goods mostly, some jewelry. They’d let things sit for five years or more, then deliver them to a trusted broker in another part of the country.”

  “Which side of the family did you spend most of the eleven years with?”

  She shook her head.

  He tried another query. “Were they good smugglers?”

  “They liked boats. They moved a lot of goods up and down both the East and West Coast. The people side of the business was a strictly pickup and drop-off affair. But the objects—sometimes they’d wait a few years and have someone in the circle claim the reward for the item’s return. Most of the time they would sell it. They didn’t actually steal the items; they acquired them from those who were fencing the goods or from brokers who had a deal fall through.”

  “How many from the family can you identify for the police?”

  “Identifying is easy. Locating is hard. They travel the country in a way that’s somewhat predictable by season, but they never stay within a hundred miles of a place they’ve been before. And they have trip wires all over the nation—people they do business with, places they stop, names that change, even check-in calls. Have a cop ask the wrong question, mention the wrong name, raid the wrong place, detain the wrong person, and the entire family folds up shop and disappears like ghosts.”

  He thought about that and realized her dilemma. “You’re aiming to get them all.”

  Shannon nodded. “I chose my time when I could run with enough information to tear the group apart. Some of the information I needed was on the West Coast, some on the East Coast. It took a while to get enough.”

  And the danger in that decision she’d made was breathtaking. He forced himself not to follow up on her comment, kept his voice casual. “It sounds to me like a conversation with Paul is in order.”

  She shook her head. “The children side of this is first, if there’s someone who hired them that can be traced. The five are dead, but I don’t know who was hiring them.”

  “How did they die?”

  “A family dispute settled with guns. The two sides of the family are like the Hatfields and McCoys right now. What was left of the kidnapping side of the family shut down and disbanded a year ago. These last two girls taken were an outlier—it’s what got the last two people in those photos killed. The rest of the family has gone quiet, sort of hibernating, shaking off the internal implosion.”

  “Could you have gotten out earlier?”

  “When Flynn was around, I could . . . maneuver is probably the right word. It’s how I got the packages mailed. But getting out would have meant someone left behind got killed. They were good at controlling people, making you responsible for someone else’s well-being. If you exhibited no concern over what happened to your assigned person, they assumed you were uncontrollable and put a bullet in your head.”

  She glanced up, caught the expression of horror on his face, wiped hers clean of any emotion. “Sorry.”

  He simply shook his head. “How big is this family?”

  “Eighteen deserve to be in jail. Another six are . . . ‘mercy cases’ is how I think of them. They knew, but couldn’t do anything about it without such a price being paid that staying silent was all they reasonably could do.” She pushed back from the table.

  Matthew reached over and rested his hand on hers before she could rise. “Shannon, did someone die because you ran?” He asked it as gently as he could, but he had to ask, had to know. Nothing would destroy her faster than carrying around that kind of crushing guilt.

  She blew out a breath. “No. They think I’m dead. I was one of the names on the cleanup list after the family implosion. Flynn was assigned to do it, but he didn’t use a bullet. He simply said ‘good luck’ and let me try to swim back to land.” She faintly smiled, remembering. “I’m pretty sure he was hoping I would make it, because he tucked a locker key to one of his private stashes in my hand before he pushed me overboard.”

  “Where was this? How far did you swim?”

  He caught a very brief change in her expression before she gained control again. Whatever the answer, at some point she’d thought she wouldn’t make it, that she’d drown. She shook her he
ad.

  “Is Flynn someone who deserves mercy?”

  “Flynn is . . . nearly as dangerous to the family as I am.”

  7

  Matthew, you’ve got to convince her to have a conversation with us,” Paul said early the next morning after he heard the update on what Shannon had shared.

  “I’ll see once we arrive. She’s dumping the story at such a pace I think I’m going to have most of it by the time we reach Chicago. That may in fact have been her intention all along.”

  He had his phone on speaker, making notes as they talked. He reached for his coffee and stilled as he saw movement. He lifted a hand in greeting to Shannon and motioned her to come on in. He’d pushed open the connecting door a foot when he heard her moving around. He pointed to the box of donuts he’d gone out early to buy, and the quart of orange juice he had opened. She smiled her thanks.

  “If we knew the address where she was to be dropped off, we could very likely solve the reason for her abduction and who paid to have it done,” Paul pointed out, his voice sounding slightly hollow on the speakerphone.

  “I know.” Matthew looked over at Shannon, who shook her head. “Whatever her reason is for holding it back, I think it’s deliberate. I’ll ask her on the names, see if she recognizes anyone. Anything else you have on your short list?” He turned the pad of paper toward Shannon as he offered the comment so she could read the list. She looked over the nine names, shook her head no.

  “John Key has arrangements made for a safe place to stay in Chicago. You’ll need two security codes for the entrances, but not a key. I’ll direct you once you hit town, as its location is a bit tucked away.”

  “Tell him thanks. Once we’ve arrived, give us a day to shake off the travel fatigue, then call her brother and set up a meeting.”

  “That works for me,” Paul agreed.