Truth in the Bones

by Vickie McKeehan

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “But this house has a lot of upkeep to it. With such busy schedules we barely have time to change the filters to the heater, let alone deal with the maintenance on two homes. That sounds like even more of a hassle.”

  They sat down to dinner still batting that topic back and forth.

  “This is where we brought Sierra home from the hospital. It’s been her only home. There’s sentiment attached to living here already,” Skye pointed out. “I’m not sure I could give that up.”

  “But living here does have its problems. If the ferry’s backed up with seasonal traffic—which happens a lot in the summertime—I sometimes have to wait an additional thirty minutes for the next one.”

  “Yeah, I know. The situation isn’t perfect.”

  When the phone rang, Josh got up to answer it.

  Skye noticed Josh’s mouth went hard even though the call lasted only a few minutes.

  “That was Harry. There’s a missing nine-year-old boy from Bellevue who didn’t show up at the babysitter’s this afternoon. They think the boy disappeared after getting dropped off at the bus stop. Harry says the Bellevue PD wants help from the Foundation to hit the ground running and get flyers out to the media. And of course Harry also wants us to do our thing and find the kid as fast as possible.”

  Skye nodded. “I’ll call Judy and put her on standby. Did we get the boy’s photo yet and stats?”

  Josh headed into the office. “All that’s coming via fax.”

  Skye chewed her thumbnail. “Guess it’s time to call Travis to sit with Sierra.”

  But when she dialed Travis’s number, the phone rang and rang until it went to voicemail. Skye cut her eyes to Josh as she left her father a message. “Dad, I need you to call me back. We have a missing boy on the mainland and need you to watch Sierra tonight for a few hours. Call me back, otherwise I’ll have to move on, and call Josh’s parents, or take Sierra with us. Those are the options. Call me back as soon as you get this message.”

  “I think I’ll go ahead and call Mom and Dad,” Josh stated. “Just in case.”

  “Probably a good idea. See what I mean about Travis? It’s a little weird that he’d offer to babysit and then not even answer the phone.”

  Josh winced at the accusation. “Travis just babysat for us yesterday, Skye. All day. He might’ve made other plans. This came up out of the blue. It’s no big deal. My parents are more than willing to babysit their granddaughter anytime, anywhere.”

  “I know. I know. It’s just that I’m concerned about Travis. He’s not exactly the epitome of disclosure.”

  After talking to his mother, Josh hung up the phone. “They’ll be here in about an hour. They need to throw some things together for the night and check the schedule for the ferry so they don’t miss the next one. Otherwise they’ll get stuck in traffic on the bridge. Which brings us right back to that sore subject. I’m beginning to resent living on Bainbridge Island. At times, it’s a real pain in the butt.”

  “It’s beautiful here. I love it, but yeah, riding the ferry gets to be a headache at times, especially when there’s a time crunch involved like tonight. I’ll try to put Sierra to bed before Doug and Phyllis get here in case she throws a fit when we leave.”

  “Good idea. I’ll clean up the dinner dishes while you get her bathed and off to bed.”

  ***

  The booming burb of Bellevue had the best of both worlds. Its beautiful lowlands between Lake Washington to the west and Lake Sammamish to the east attracted upscale homebuyers with a chunk of change to spend on trendy real estate.

  The city boasted a host of new developments up and down its corridors, a boon to luring high-tech companies to the area that promised to keep the local economy flush with new jobs.

  Even as the bottom dropped out in the early part of 2008 for the rest of the country and banks were in trouble, Bellevue somehow managed to escape the downturn. Mortgages stayed healthy, which kept foreclosures here to a minimum.

  The neighborhoods offered top-rated schools, old-world charm, and safe environments. High crime was someone else’s problem. Or so everyone thought.

  “Judy’s already had the flyers printed up with the boy’s photo,” Skye muttered as she gunned the minivan off the ferry and blew past a cordoned-off section of the viaduct. “His name is Zachary Wheeler. So we might get some help from the public on that front.”

  “Most people are headed off to bed about now getting ready for work tomorrow. If they go to bed before the news, it’s a wash.”

  “True. Then let’s hope we have some luck without relying on sightings from the public.”

  Fifteen minutes later, as the ten o’clock hour approached, they ended up standing in the chilly spring air across the street from the bus stop where the boy had last been seen. The couple walked up and down under the dim glow of the street lights along the roadway.

  Skye clutched the fourth-grader’s photograph that the Bellevue police had provided them. She stared at the little blond-haired boy in the picture, grinning from ear to ear into the camera. It had been taken last fall on picture day at his school.

  Her heart broke at times like this knowing there was a child out there somewhere who wanted nothing more than to see his mom and dad again and spend the night in his own bed.

  Skye was determined to make that happen.

  “This is what we know. Zachary’s been missing since a little after three o’clock. That’s more than six hours. According to the bus driver, he got off the bus just like he does every day, and walked south toward his babysitter’s house around that corner.”

  Pointing down the street toward 164th Avenue, she went on, “Since he never got where he was going, he was likely intercepted at that intersection.”

  Josh turned his head to follow the track and narrowed his eyes. The general vicinity was a cornucopia of upscale businesses, restaurants, hotels, and multi-family housing, with the mall in the center acting as its nearest landmark. How would they ever find one little abducted boy in this swirling mass of concrete and steel?

  The residential streets around the school bus stop were lined with houses that sold in the mid- to upper-three-hundred-thousand range. It was a curious example of how a pastoral setting could disguise itself as more rural when the confluence of urban sprawl was right around the next corner.

  Josh noticed an embankment that dropped off the caliche shoulder. He went over to inspect it and found it wasn’t all that steep. He scanned the surrounding wooded area anyway and dismissed the notion that Zachary had ended up at the bottom of the hill.

  He closed off everything around him to focus on the scene that had unfolded only hours earlier. Skye did the same.

  The meeting of like minds produced a splash of images from both.

  “Zachary didn’t go willingly,” Skye stated. “The boy fought before getting in the pickup, but the man grabbed him, overpowered him, covered the child’s mouth, and pulled him into the vehicle.”

  Josh agreed. “We’re looking for a pickup truck, green in color, an older model, Dodge Ram I think, driven by a Caucasian male. I’d say the offender is around fifty-five years old, sixty at the most. He headed off driving further south.”

  “I love it when we’re able to do that. Even though right now specifics would be much more impressive.”

  “Then we need to take the van and drive,” Josh breathed out and pointed out of the residential area and back toward the mall. “That way. There are a ton of apartments around here. He took Zachary to his apartment. I’m picking up a small interior with tan carpeting, a one bedroom with white walls, typical small kitchen. It’s an upstairs unit with a patio. We just need to find the right one and locate his damn truck.”

  “I’ll drive. You focus on spotting that car.” They jumped back in the van, Skye behind the wheel and Josh riding shotgun.

  Skye stepped on the gas and flew south along 164th Avenue. At Northrup Way, she made a sharp right.

&n
bsp; “You want to circle the mall. Keep maneuvering through these streets until we see apartments popping up.”

  “That’s a tall order,” she grumbled, all the while scanning the side streets. When she spotted the first group of apartment homes, she stomped on the brake and took another sharp right, cruising through the parking lot.

  The van bounced along over the speed bumps until they’d completed the circle. “Not here,” she muttered.

  “Try across the street,” Josh prompted. “The truck’s in this area somewhere. I know it is. This pervert lives nearby.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” she said as she pulled into another set of multi-family buildings.

  The pathways, if you could call them that, weaved and looped through several different adjacent parking lots. Some dead-ended into cul-de-sacs, others simply made a circle.

  “This’ll take way too long,” Josh asserted. “We could jumpstart this whole thing by getting the sex offender list in the area, namely all the men that fit the age group we saw. We should have brought the list with us. We built that database for just this reason.”

  “We were in a hurry. Make the call, otherwise this could take all night. I hate to bring this up but are you getting anything about…the boy…because I’m getting that he’s still alive but he won’t be for long.”

  “Same here. He’s okay, but if we don’t find him within the next hour or so he’s…” Josh lifted his hip to dig out his cell. He tried Reggie first, hoping the guy already knew about the abduction through his relationship with Judy.

  The programmer didn’t disappoint him. When Reggie picked up on the other end, Josh asked him to reference the sex offender list they’d created several years back. They’d improved on the public information by building a database with far more details and columns of data not widely listed on the regular website. Their database covered the entire state of Washington, listing all the caveats from each sex offender that might come in handy during situations where a child had been abducted.

  “I need statistics for Bellevue, starting point Redmond Town Center Mall. I don’t have the zip codes with me, but there should only be a few dozen. Bellevue’s not that large and when you remove certain criteria, it should leave only a handful in a particular age group. I need the males between the ages of fifty and sixty, who reside in apartment complexes.”

  Based on what Josh thought the age of the offender had been, it took Reggie less than ten minutes to come up with eleven names. Josh eliminated nine right off the bat based on their addresses. All nine lived in houses, not apartment units. “Give me the two we have leftover.”

  “Roger Markham lives at the Maple Thorpe Apartments in unit 1746. Perry Delaney lives closer to the 405 at the Tradewinds Apartment Homes in number 810.”

  “Nope. Gotta be this Roger Markham guy. Delaney lives too far east. Thanks, Reggie.” Once Josh ended the call, he gave Skye the address. “It’s two blocks north of here. We’re close.”

  “Come on, Zachary. Just hang on a little longer,” Skye muttered as she took off into traffic.

  It took her ten minutes to make her way to the right apartment building. She pulled the van into the parking lot in question, perusing past the parked cars. She circled the complex twice before she spotted the green Dodge. “There, that’s the truck. Unit 1746 has to be around here somewhere.”

  She parked behind the pickup, using the minivan to hug the truck’s bumper, blocking in the vehicle just in case the man tried to leave in a hurry.

  They climbed the stairs together, but it was Josh who rapped on the door of 1746. No answer. He knocked again. “Mr. Markham, you might as well open the door because we aren’t going anywhere until you do.”

  A few seconds ticked by. “Don’t make me break this door in!”

  An overweight squat of a man answered the door, opening it about three inches and sticking his nose through the crack.

  But that wasn’t good enough for Josh. He shoved his way in and whirled Markham around, pinning his body up against the door. He wrapped an arm around the guy’s throat, securing him in place.

  Skye charged in behind him, darting past Markham without a word of explanation.

  Markham began to complain about the intrusion. But he was barely able to speak because Josh’s arm put so much pressure on his chest.

  “What the hell’s going on? What is this about?”

  “Where’s Zachary?” Skye demanded.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Markham protested, his voice raspy from the weight of Josh’s forearm.

  “Zachary!” Skye yelled out as she dashed toward the bedroom. The door was closed but all Skye had to do was turn the knob. Fear lodged in her throat at what she might find on the other side. But standing there doing nothing wasn’t an option. When she finally got up the nerve, she pushed the door open.

  There, lying on the bed, was the blond-haired Zachary, naked, crying, and scared out of his mind. The boy’s mouth had duct tape stretched across his little face to keep him quiet. Skye reached down and patted the child’s head. “Are you okay?”

  The frightened boy hiccupped and nodded.

  “My name’s Skye Cree. I’m here to get you back to your mom and dad. You’re going home, baby. Mind if I sit down on the bed so I can remove this tape from around your mouth?”

  She waited for the boy’s permission to take off the tape.

  As soon as he bobbed his head in consent, she slid gently down on the side of the bed and began to fiddle with the sticky material. She talked all the while she worked on getting the stuff to peel off. “This is always tricky. I want to go slow because it might hurt and I don’t want to cause you more distress than what you’ve already been through. You doin’ okay so far?”

  The boy nodded again. But as soon as he could talk, Zachary began to ramble. Words poured out of his mouth in a frantic lifeline to make sure Skye didn’t leave. Or maybe to solidify that his rescue was for real. “I thought I was dead. I thought he was going to kill me. He would have. I know it. As soon as he yanked me into the truck though I tried to send out powerful signals, powerful brainwaves hoping someone would help me. You know, like Batman signals.”

  Skye grinned and wrapped her arms around his small, trembling shoulders. “You know what? I bet those must be the same ones we picked up on, the ones that brought us here. You did great, Zachary.”

  “You think so? For real?”

  “Yep, for real. You’re okay now. That’s what’s important. Your eight hours with this monster are done. It’s gonna be all right, I promise you.”

  “Am I really going home?”

  Glancing around the room, she looked for the boy’s clothing. Spotting his T-shirt and jeans, she tried to get up, but the boy held on tight.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “I won’t. Not until you see your mom and dad anyway. I’m just going over there in the corner to retrieve your clothes.”

  “’K.”

  She grabbed up the clothing and handed the bundle off to Zach. “Do you need help getting dressed?”

  Zachary shook his head and quickly stretched his T-shirt on over his head.

  Skye helped him stand up to pull on his pants.

  “What happens now?” Zachary asked.

  “I get you out of this place and take you to the closest hospital.”

  “Do I have to go there?”

  Skye smiled at the typical response. It sounded just like a normal kid who didn’t want to go see the doctor. “Sorry, but yes, you have to go get checked out. It’ll be okay. The doctors and nurses will look you over and make sure that bas...” Her voice trailed off as she almost used the word bastard. Correcting herself, she went on, “The doctors and nurses will make sure you’re okay. The police will call your parents. They’re probably already on their way now. That’s why we should hurry. You ready to blow this joint?”

  “Will I really get to see my mom and dad?” the boy whispered, barely able to choke out the words.<
br />
  “You bet you will,” Skye reassured him. Using her camera phone, she began to snap pictures of the messy bed and a now fully-dressed Zachary.

  “You okay in there?” Josh yelled from the living room.

  “We’re coming out. Zachary’s okay. I’ll make the phone call to the police once I get him out of here.”

  “Good idea. I’m taking this piece of shit out to the curb so Zachary doesn’t have to look at him again.”

  A nosy neighbor stuck his head into the living room. “I’ve called the police. You guys better have a good explanation for why you’re bothering Roger like this.”

  Skye walked out of the bedroom with Zachary beside her. “How about a known sex offender kidnapping a child in broad daylight and holding him for eight hours against his will? Is that good enough for you? Now go back home where you belong. Calling the cops is fine. It’ll save me a phone call. Now get out of here. Go back to your own apartment because this place is about to become a fully involved crime scene.”

  Zach slipped his hand into Skye’s. “That Roger guy hurt me.”

  “I know he did, baby. But he won’t hurt you again. I promise you that. Want me to carry you outside or do you want to walk out of here on your own?”

  Big fat tears rolled down Zachary’s face. “Will I have to see that man again when we get downstairs?”

  “Nope. My partner already took care of that.”

  Zachary sniffed and wiped his nose on his shirt. “Will you carry me then?”

  “Absolutely.” Skye scooped the boy up and into her arms and sailed out the door.

  At Seattle’s Children’s Hospital, Skye and Josh were waiting near the ER with a swarm of police officers when Alan and Deborah Wheeler arrived to check on their son.

  “Are you the ones who found our baby?” Deborah Wheeler asked, tears running down her cheeks.

  “Bellevue PD called us earlier tonight. And yeah, we’re the ones who found Zachary,” Skye acknowledged. “We work for the Artemis—”

  Alan didn’t let her finish before he wrapped her up in a bear hug. “Thank you. Thank you for what you did. We thought Zachary was gone for good. We thought he’d be dead by now.”