by Ed Markham
But when he opened his eyes, the mint green couch cushions were still there. So was the sour-sweet smell.
He cried for a few minutes, his tears soaking into the couch’s upholstery. It was real for him now. All-the-way real. He had been kidnapped, and he was being held in some psycho’s basement and nobody knew where he was. He could be beaten. He could be killed.
Eventually, he sat up and rubbed the wetness off of his face. He could feel the imprint of the cushion on his cheek. He smacked his lips a few times, and his mouth felt tacky with mucous and salty from his tears. The smell of the couch was in his nostrils and on his clothes and in his hair, and he hated it. He was terrified and he hated the basement and wanted to get the hell out of it.
“Ughhh,” he groaned, and the sound of his own voice startled him in the stillness of the basement.
“UGHHHH,” he said again, yelling now and hearing his voice reverberate against the ceiling and floor of the room. He was quiet for a moment, waiting for the man’s footsteps and dreading what he might do to him for yelling. But he was also a little excited at the prospect of eliciting some kind of response from his captor upstairs.
Maybe he’ll send Josh back down, Carson hoped. Or maybe he’ll run down here in a rage. Even that—even the man’s anger—seemed better than sitting in the basement all alone.
Carson waited in silence for a few seconds and then sucked in a huge breath of air before screaming, “I HATE THIS FUCKING PLACE I HATE IT I HATE IT LET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
He could feel his face and neck turning red, and tears again filled his eyes. He sat on the couch, his chest heaving, and when there was no reply he screamed again and again, eventually breaking down totally into desperate sobs.
There was no reply from overhead—no sound of footsteps or an angry voice at the top of the staircase.
Eventually Carson calmed down. He stared into the blue background of the TV’s idle screen and felt the tears slowly dry on his face, the salt tightening his skin. Then he got up and walked to the bathroom. It had a sliding door and its walls were the same cheap, fake-wood paneling as the rest of the basement.
He sat down to use the toilet, and he stared at the wooden two-by-fours of the bathroom’s frame and the backs of the panels that comprised the cheap walls. He felt cold air on his bare knees. The air lifted and fell, a slight draft from somewhere unseen behind the wall. Carson shivered and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. He looked around absently for the source of the draft, but something distracted him. There was writing on the back of the wall frame to his left.
It started with a series of numbers a quarter of the way up the back of a wooden beam, where only someone sitting on the toilet could see it. The numbers were written in red pen, and counted up from one to five. Below the numbers, there was a person’s name and what looked like a birth date, written carefully in capital letters:
MARK STEPHENSON 5-18-2001
Carson did the math in his head; Mark was thirteen.
Farther down the two-by-four were several crude drawings that looked like some kind of clown or jester holding a machine gun. Carson laughed at the drawings; they looked like something he or his friends would doodle in one of their textbooks.
Then, a little lower and near to the bottom of the wood beam, he read the words:
I AM SCARED
I DONT TRUST JOSH
Carson felt a chill pass over him and he frowned at the writing. He wiped himself and flushed, and then looked around the bathroom for any other messages or drawings. He found none. He also couldn’t find the red pen Mark Stephenson had used to leave his marks.
He left the bathroom and walked to his mattress. He sat down and crossed his legs beneath him Indian-style. Looking toward the basement staircase, he thought about the words and the numbers counting up to five.
Mark Stephenson, he thought. Was Mark here for five days?
He also thought about Josh. He wished the boy were here right now so he would have someone to talk to. But, at the same time, he understood Mark Stephenson’s message. As much as Carson wished for company, there was something about the other boy that he didn’t trust. Something not right.
Carson wished he could talk to Mark Stephenson. He wondered where Mark was now.
Chapter 32
DAVID LEANED FORWARD at the table in the Jonestown P.D.’s break room and clicked open a file on his laptop. He had a secure connection to the FBI’s internal network, and he wanted to look over the reports Omar Ghafari’s team had compiled on James Ganther’s wife, brother, and son.
“I’m going to contact Ganther’s family,” David said to his father, who was standing a few yards away, pacing thoughtfully as his son worked. “I want to know if they’ve heard from him since his release from prison.”
Martin nodded. “Start with his brother Phil.”
“Why?”
“I remember they were close,” Martin said. “A lot closer than Ganther was with his ex-wife, anyway. And considering he spent the first thirty years of his son’s life in prison, I doubt Ganther’s in Ian’s good graces.”
According to the electronic files David read out loud to his father, Phil Ganther was fifty-four years old—a full decade younger than his big brother. He’d never been married and had no children, but he did have two prior arrests for marijuana—one for possession and one for growing. All of that was back in the early eighties, David read. Phil’s mug shot from those days showed a slight man with dark blonde hair, like-colored moustache, and youthful blue eyes. Like his older brother, Phil Ganther looked at least a decade younger than his years.
But he doesn’t have his older brother’s eyes, David thought, recalling the photo of James Ganther he’d stored in his phone and had regarded frequently. The two brothers looked remarkably similar otherwise. In his photograph Phil Ganther was wincing, one side of his mouth cranked upward as though he’d started to smile for the camera but realized at the last moment that his expression was inappropriate.
“Phil Ganther hasn’t made much of himself as an adult,” David said to his father as he read from the file. “When he wasn’t being busted for pot, he worked on a road construction crew. He spent seventeen years laying blacktop across Pennsylvania before he was clipped by a passing automobile and spent two months in the hospital recovering from eight broken bones in his arm, shoulder, and chest. That was in 1998. The resulting disability comp was enough to permanently relieve him of his day job. From what I can see here, he’s spent his time since the accident doing nothing in Allentown.”
As he dialed Phil Ganther’s phone number on the room’s conference phone, David checked the time on the wall clock. It was nine forty-five in the morning. He heard the line ring half a dozen times and was about to hang up when someone lifted the receiver. There was a short pause, and line static hummed in the small office. Then a man’s voice came on the line.
“This is Phil Ganther.” The voice was high-pitched and unmistakably midwestern—the vowels coming out as much through his nose as through his mouth.
“Mr. Ganther, this is Special Agent David Yerxa. I’m with the FBI. I’d like to talk with you about your brother, James.”
There was another pause on the line. “Jimmy?” the voice said. “Shit, what’s he got himself into now?”
David didn’t answer this question. “Mr. Ganther, when was the last time you spoke with your brother?”
Phil Ganther was quiet for a moment, as though he were deciding whether or not to answer the question. Finally he said, “Oh hell. Five or six years ago? I don’t know. Whenever he got out of prison. Jimmy and me aren’t too close these days, and neither of us is exactly the talking-on-the-phone type.”
“So you’ve had no contact with your brother in five years?” David asked.
“Yeah, at least that probably.”
“Do you remember anything he said to you the last time you two spoke?”
Phil Ganther let out a long sigh. “Whoo boy, that’s tough to
recall exactly. I remember it was awkward as hell—talking to him after all those years he was locked up. I know he said a lot more than I did. Talked a lot about how prison had changed him, and how he was sorry for things he’d done. Wanted to apologize to me for any pain he might have caused me. That kinda thing.”
David looked at his father and shook his head once to let him know the call was going nowhere. “You’re not going to be leaving Allentown any time soon, are you, Mr. Ganther?”
“Leaving town?”
“On vacation, or to visit friends? We may need to speak with you again.”
Phil Ganther laughed as though the idea that he might go anywhere was absurd. “No, I ain’t going nowhere. No vacations for me.”
“All right,” David said, ready to end the call. “Thanks for your time.”
“Hey, listen,” Phil said. “Can you tell me what this is about? I mean, I know my brother. He was a messed up guy. Vietnam scrambled his brains—screwed him up pretty good. But he did sound better when I spoke to him. Reformed, or some shit like that. I was hoping he’d put a lot of his old anger to bed.”
“His old anger?” David asked, glancing again at his father.
Martin quit his pacing and turned to the speakerphone.
“Yeah, over Vietnam,” Phil said. “You know they made him shoot little kids over there, right? Messed him up good. He was a mean guy when he got back. Angry all the time. Tried for years to get his head straight—checking into mental hospitals and that kind of thing. But it didn’t do no good, and he turned to drugs. Started talking about how all these rich sons-a-bitches had sent him over there to kill Vietnamese kids while they’re own little shits were tucked away safe and sound here in America. It didn’t make much sense to me—what he was talking about back then—and I told him so. Said, ‘The war’s over Jimmy! Let it go!’ But he didn’t listen to me.” After a pause, Phil added, “But he seemed to have gotten past a lot of that after he got out of prison. Seemed better to me—calmer and not so angry. I hope he hasn’t gotten himself into trouble again.”
David scribbled out a few notes. “I wish I could give you more information, but I can’t right now.” He gave Phil Ganther the number to the Bureau switchboard, which would send the call on to his personal cell phone. “If anything else comes to you, or if you have to leave town for any reason, give me a call and let me know.”
“Yeah, okay,” Phil said. “Will do.”
David hung up.
Father and son were quiet until David broke the silence. “Did you talk to Phil Ganther much during your investigation back in seventy-eight?”
“A bit. Why?”
David watched as his father crossed his arms and sat on the edge of the break room table. “What he just said about James’s anger after Vietnam—about him blaming wealthy Americans for sending him over there to murder children. Remember any of that back then?”
Martin’s eyes searched the floor as he tried to recollect the long-ago conversations. “I remember some of that. Him mentioning the anger about Vietnam. But I don’t remember any of that about rich Americans or their kids, and I think I would have.”
David thought about Phil’s words, and his mind jumped back to the conversation he and his father had had with Graham and Lori Grow about their missing son, Joshua. He thought of their plush house nestled in the wealthy suburbs of Philadelphia.
“But you recognized that all the murdered children back then were from good homes,” David said.
Martin nodded, but looked a little unsettled. “That was just the pattern. I didn’t get that from talking with Phil Ganther.”
David drummed his fingers on the table next to his laptop, thinking. Then his phone rang. The display showed the call was coming from Quantico.
“This is Yerxa,” he said.
“David, it’s Omar. We just got a call from police in Germantown. They have a kid who says he saw Carson Affeldt and the man who grabbed him.”
Chapter 33
DAVID STOOD LOOKING at the conference phone in the small Jonestown Police Department office.
He was waiting for Omar Ghafari to patch through the young witness from Germantown. Martin paced along one side of the room, his eyes on the floor as he snapped his old Ronson lighter open and closed. He stopped pacing when he heard Omar’s voice on the line.
“You and your dad still there, David?”
“We’re still here.”
There was a brief pause, and then a muffled click. David heard Omar say, “Mr. Crawford? You’re now on the line with Special Agent David Yerxa.”
“Mr. Crawford,” David said.
“Um, hello.”
David could hear Ryan Crawford’s mouth open and close as he started to say more but decided not to.
“I understand your son Matt saw something that might be relevant to our investigation,” David said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
David could sense Crawford nodding into the phone. He said, “Is Matt there with you now?”
“Yes, he’s right here.”
There was the sound of movement, and David imagined Crawford clutching for his son.
“Would you mind if I asked him a few questions?” David said. “You’re welcome to stay on the line with him, or put our call on speaker.”
“Sure, that’s fine. One second please.”
Sounds of adjusting the phone, and then a boy’s voice. “This is Matt,” the voice said, sounding every bit like a young teenager surrounded by worried-looking adults.
David could tell he needed to put the boy at ease. “Hey, Matt. My name’s David. I’m the FBI agent responsible for making sure Carson Affeldt gets home safe. I hear you have some information I can use?”
“Yeah,” Matt said.
“Yes, sir,” Ryan Crawford corrected from somewhere in the background.
“Yes, sir,” Matt repeated.
Crawford said, “Go ahead and tell him, pal.”
David waited as the boy decided how to begin.
“I saw a guy carrying Carson in the woods the day before yesterday,” Matt said. “The guy said he was Carson’s dad, and that Carson was taking a nap, but I think he was lying. I played soccer with Carson, and I’d never seen the man who was carrying him.”
David glanced at his father, and Martin mouthed the word “soccer.” They nodded to each other.
David leaned forward toward the conference phone. “Carson is a classmate of yours?” he asked.
“Uh, no. He’s two grades below me. I’m at Hickory High, and he’s at Simon Cameron.”
“Gotcha. But you’re pretty sure it was Carson you saw, and not another boy who maybe looked like Carson?”
There was silence for a few seconds. “Yes, I’m sure. We walked right past them.”
David looked at the photograph of Carson Affeldt on his open laptop’s screen. While Omar had worked to set up the conference call, he had also sent David and Martin information on the missing boy.
“You said we just now, so I guess that means your were with other people?” David asked.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir, I was with two of my friends. Ricky and Wood.”
“Did they see the man carrying Carson, too?”
Matt was quiet for a second. “Yes, but I don’t think they paid much attention to him.”
“Can you tell me what the man looked like who was carrying Carson?”
“He had a beard,” Matt said. “And he was wearing some kind of hiking backpack.”
“What color beard did he have?”
“Not dark. Like, blonde I guess,” Matt said.
“So he was a white guy?”
“Yes.”
“Big guy, or small?”
“Um, he was a smaller guy. I remember he wasn’t that much taller than me, but he seemed strong.”
“How tall are you, Matt?”
“I’m five-four-and-a-half.”
David paused, thinking of James Ganther—his compact but muscular build. “How old did
the man carrying Carson look to you?”
“Oh. I’m not sure. Pretty old.”
“Like, your dad’s age? Or older than your dad?”
“I think my dad’s age maybe. My dad’s forty-eight.”
Smart kid, David thought. “And you got a pretty good look at him?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. I was, like, two feet away from him when he walked by.”
“Can you tell me exactly what he said to you?”
“I think so. He said, ‘My son’s asleep.’ Wait, no. It was, ‘My son’s taking a nap.’ I remember because Carson taking a nap like that was really weird.”
David thought for a minute. He knew it helped witnesses recall more information if you asked them to focus on specific traits or features. “What did his eyes look like, Matt?”
“His eyes?” the boy said. “Um, they looked nice. Like, kind. He looked right at me and smiled, and I remember smiling back. I remember that because afterward I felt weird about smiling at him, because he was a stranger I didn’t know.”
“What else?”
Carson thought for a moment. “He had some little marks around his eyes, like he’d been wearing sunglasses. That was weird because it was really cloudy that day. I turned and watched the guy walk away, and I saw Carson’s hands kind of flopping on his shoulders, like he was passed out. And I thought that was weird, too.”
“Did you see where the man was headed with Carson?”
“No, sir. We were walking in the other direction. Away from him, I mean. There are a lot of trails up there, so he could have gone a bunch of different places.”
David wiped at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger, trying to imagine it. “So you and your friends Ricky and Wood were walking in the direction this guy had just come from.”