by Ninie Hammon
He stepped out into the empty hallway, walked down it and out the front door of the school, and saw exactly what he expected to see. News had spread of the child's disappearance and other parents had panicked and come rushing to the school. He was sure that despite the best efforts of his deputies and the state police, traffic was gridlocked for blocks leading away from the school. Concerned parents had likely abandoned their cars in the streets when they weren't allowed to get close to the building and now an anxious crowd of several hundred people stood uneasily outside the yellow-and-black police line perimeter.
Buses couldn't move until the traffic mess was cleared.
He went to his cruiser and pulled a megaphone out of his trunk. Then he went out toward where the crowd was gathered outside the police tape and climbed up into the back of a pickup truck parked there. He knew he made an imposing figure standing there like that, even out of uniform. And that was his point.
"I completely understand that all of you are concerned about the welfare of your children," he said into the megaphone, which delivered his words after a set-your-teeth-on-edge screech of feedback. "They are all perfectly safe. One little boy, a first-grader named Riley Campbell, is missing and we are doing everything we can to locate him. But every other child in this building is sitting perfectly safe at their desks in their classrooms."
"We heard there were several children missing."
"The radio said it was a little girl, not a little boy."
"Are you looking for a van? My neighbor said she saw a woman dragging a little boy toward a van in front of the furniture store this morning. The boy was crying."
Other questions fired at him out of the crowd but he ignored them and held up his hand for quiet.
"I need you to listen to me and believe what I'm telling you. I don't know or care what you heard. Reality is that one little boy is missing and we're hoping to locate him very soon, but …"
He let that word hang out there in the air, then repeated it.
"But … your children — all of them safe in their classrooms right now — are going to be stuck in those classrooms in that building unless you go home! We've delayed the buses for more than hour already, and you've blocked the streets so they can't run now. If you want your children to be delivered to your door safely, go home!"
A few people peeled out of the crowd and started walking away. The vast majority remained resolutely where they were. Their children were in that building, after all, their babies. They were staying.
"I have instructed my officers to begin towing away every car that is parked illegally in the street — or legally at the curb — on any side street leading to this school." That was a bluff, of course. He had nothing like the manpower it would take to tow away all the cars blocking the streets. And there were only a handful of tow trucks in the whole county. But these people weren't thinking logically right now. If they had been, they wouldn't have rushed here in the first place and remained here after he instructed them to leave.
"Unless you want to walk home, and then get a ride to the impound yard tomorrow so you can wait in line with all these other people to pay the two-hundred-dollar towing fee and the fifty-dollar overnight storage charge, you need to leave. Now."
That got them moving. Nothing like threatening to tow someone's car to put the fear of God into them.
He got out of the back of the pickup truck and looked at his watch. The last time the child had been seen was at 1:20. It was 4:25. He'd been missing for more than three hours. He motioned Deputy Fletcher to him.
"Issue an Amber Alert for Riley Campbell," he said.
Fletcher paused for a beat, looking at him, then nodded.
In less than a minute, every police department in the state and in neighboring Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia would receive Riley's picture and description, an alarm would sound on hundreds of thousands of cell phones and his face would start popping up on electronic interstate signs all over the five states.
Amber Alerts were wonderful tools. But you couldn't overuse them or the public would start to ignore them. Law enforcement officers used their own discretion about the circumstances under which they would proclaim a child missing on that network. You didn't do that if there was any hope that a child had just wandered off.
Issuing that alert gave voice and substance to the conclusion Brice had reached after talking to the witnesses.
Riley Campbell had not merely wandered away from the playground three hours ago.
Somehow, the boy had been taken off the school property. Kidnapped.
Brice made the next call himself, keyed in the number for the Pittsburgh field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Chapter Five
After the last of the school buses pulled out of the pickup lane in front of the school, Brice took a few moments in the mostly empty building to walk the route the little boys had taken from the front door, down the hallway toward the bathroom, then out to the playground. He didn't take big steps, studied sightlines — who could have had eyes on them. The room on the right of the front door with the only unobstructed view of the front of the building was Gwen Ragland's room and she had been on playground duty. The room would have been empty. Anyone in the hallway could have seen—
"Sheriff McGreggor." The voice was soft but it carried. He turned to see Melody McCallum standing in the doorway of her classroom.
"Brice, remember."
"I don't want to take any more of your time, but …" She stepped out into the hallway and held out her hand. In it was a plastic baggie with a photograph inside, a snapshot of Riley. "I just wanted you to have this. I take pictures of all the children for the bulletin board." He could see a small hole in the top of the photograph where a stick-pin had been removed. "I know you already have his school picture. But it's so … serious. He's smiling that sweet little crooked smile of his here." She pressed the baggie into his hand. "This … is the little boy you're looking for."
She whirled around quickly, sucking back tears, hurried into her classroom and shut the door behind her. He could hear her inside crying as he slipped the picture into his shirt pocket.
Shortly before five o'clock, the dispatcher notified Brice that the FBI had arrived at the sheriff's department — Pittsburgh to Shadow Rock in under an hour. They'd made good time. He was out with other officers, canvassing the neighborhoods surrounding the school, going door to door, showing pictures of Riley and asking if anyone had seen the boy, and questioning them about any vehicles they might have seen today that they didn't normally see in the neighborhood, any strangers hanging around, anything at all out of the ordinary. The problem was that there were precious few people at home in those neighborhoods to see anything. Stay-at-home moms had not totally gone the way of the homing pigeon and the white rhino, but sightings of them were more and more rare. In this working class neighborhood, most of the houses held families in which both parents worked. If there was a father at all. In many of them — not most, it would have been most in the Regis Hills area of town but this neighborhood wasn't that poor — there was only one parent and she had been away at work all day.
The sheriff's department took up much of the first floor of the Kavanaugh County Courthouse — an ostentatious white stone building constructed long enough ago that the Historical Society Nazis wouldn't allow the county clerk's office on the second floor to install a window air conditioner.
He had left instructions that the department's conference room be turned over to the agents for their use. The sheriff's department had been the command center in July for the manhunt for Derrick Osbourne, the man who shot Deputy Fletcher and blew up the dam on the sludge impoundment lake at the top of Turkey Neck Hollow. Brice had coordinated that operation out of his office. The FBI would need more room than that.
The sheriff made sure all his men got the message that the FBI agents were to be extended every courtesy and given full cooperation. As a general rule of thumb, outside agencies �
�� particularly federal ones — were not particularly welcome additions to a local investigation. It was a crap shoot. He'd worked with Drug Enforcement Agency agents who acted like they should be provided gold-plated urinals, and conducted their affairs to the absolute exclusion of his department. "We got this," one of the smug senior agents had informed him condescendingly, then proceeded to screw up not only the investigation but the arrest, so the meth dealers they caught walked on technicalities.
He had only worked with one other FBI agent in his nine years in law enforcement and it wasn’t a total catastrophe, but neither had it been a particularly enjoyable or mutually beneficial relationship either. He was girding his loins in anticipation of meeting this contingent of investigators.
The dispatcher informed him that six agents were setting up shop, installing computers and commandeering phone lines and internet access in the conference room, and that the senior agent wanted to meet him.
When Brice got to the station, he changed from street clothes into his uniform, then stepped into the office marked Sheriff Brice McGreggor in gold lettering on the door to find a man seated in his desk chair rather than on the sofa or in either of the other two chairs provided for visitors to his office. Goody.
He was Asian, Japanese. He looked up and immediately rose to his feet. He was probably five-foot-six or seven, roughly a foot shorter than Brice.
The agent was obviously making the same comparison.
"Your grandfather would have fit right in on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay," he said.
Brice had heard the story — that Admiral Nimitz had commandeered the biggest sailors in the fleet to be present when the Japanese contingent came aboard to sign the peace treaty ending World War II. The agent said it pleasantly, and Brice understood that most Asian humor was delivered deadpan. Still, he didn't know the man. The remark was either a good-natured reference to his size or the words of a man suffering a raging case of Little Man Syndrome.
"I'm Senior Special Agent Haruto Nakamura." He extended his hand. "I will be in charge of the investigation."
"Brice McGreggor, Kavanaugh County Sheriff." Brice shook the man's hand. Firm handshake, though formal — once up, once down — and he looked Brice in the eye.
Nakamura sat back down in Brice's chair then. He didn't apologize for commandeering Brice's office, just said he needed fast computer access and the command center wasn't completely operational yet.
"I'm almost finished here, then we need to talk. Five minutes."
He returned his attention to the screen and only shook his head when Brice offered to bring him coffee or a soft drink.
Brice left to get himself a cup of coffee. He stepped into the once conference room that was being transformed into a — he hated the words "command center" but that's what it was. Three coat-and-tie-clad male agents and two female agents in dark pantsuits were working feverishly with equipment they'd obviously brought with them in the black van parked out front. Its only identifying marks were the federal plates, no FBI insignia on the side. He introduced himself and they reciprocated, with brief perfunctory handshakes or nods, clearly totally focused on the task at hand.
Agent Tom Hardesty, a big black man whose shoulders strained at his suit coat, hauled in a piece of electronic equipment Brice couldn't identify and set it on the former conference table in front of Agent Ashok Arya, an Indian man wearing round, rimless, Gandhi glasses. Agents Nikki Trimboli, who wore her brown hair in a spiky boy cut and Emma Gomez, whose hair was pulled back in a bun so tight it might have pulled her eyebrows up, were setting up keyboards and monitors.
When Brice asked if they needed anything, a skinny bald man who'd introduced himself as "Elijah Gascoyne, but Eli will do," said, "Tommy could use a whiteboard." His thick Pittsburgh accent turned Tommy into Twommy.
Brice went into the dispatcher's office and instructed a deputy to get the whiteboard and stand that was set up in the city council's chambers on the top floor of the courthouse, and anything else the agents might need, then asked to hear the recordings of two 911 calls that had come in after the news hit that the boy was missing. He'd been told their content; one was a hysterical mother who was certain her child in nursery school was in danger and would the police please send a unit to pick him up and bring him home.
The other was from a well-meaning citizen who had seen someone dragging a crying child toward a car in the parking lot in front of Hollingsworth Furniture Store — likely the same woman seen by the neighbor of the man in the crowd outside the school that afternoon. Deputies had already checked it out. The boy was being dragged by his mother because he'd thrown a tantrum in the store and refused to leave. He was five years old and black, and the incident had taken place before Riley had gone missing.
"Sheriff McGreggor." Brice looked up and saw the senior agent in the doorway. "May I have a moment of your time, please."
Though Brice was sure this man was several generations removed from immigrant ancestors, the culturally polite flavor was still there.
They went into Brice's office and the agent sat this time in the visitor's chair facing Brice's desk. Brice decided to forego his office chair, ensconced almost throne-like behind the big cherry desk, and sat down instead in the chair beside Agent Nakamura.
"Let's get the elephant out of the room first thing, Sheriff McGreggor. I am here to find that little boy — and find him alive." He looked at his watch, likely doing the math. Riley had last been seen at 1:20. He'd been missing now for more than four hours. "That is my single-minded pursuit and I have no tolerance for petty jurisdictional rivalries that get in the way. This isn't my first rodeo. I know how local authorities feel about the FBI. I welcome your input and your help. You know things about this place and these people and I don't have time to learn. Just make no mistake about it. This is my investigation and I will run it. If you get in my way, I will freeze you out and you'll be directing traffic outside my crime scene. Are we clear?"
"I understand who crows in this chicken house and who lays eggs, Agent Nakamura."
The agent smiled a small smile.
"I can help you find Riley Campbell, and I don't give a Fig Newton who gets the credit when we do. I don't want to butt heads."
"Good." A one-beat pause. "I'd need a ladder."
Brice's smile was bigger.
The agent stood.
"I'd like you to brief me and my team, tell us what measures you've taken, what you have discovered."
The two adjourned to the conference room/command center and while deputies moved in a portable white board, affixed a borrowed cork board to the wall and the agents continued to install and check equipment, Brice filled them in on the case, what had happened and everything that his department had done from the moment the school notified them that a child was missing.
He described cordoning off the building, using tracking dogs, quadruple searches, and containing the restroom for an FBI forensics team as the last place the child was seen. He'd instructed the school staff — teachers, administrators, janitorial staff and lunchroom staff — to remain on the premises, available for questioning by the FBI.
"The biggest horsefly in our buttermilk is the festival that’s doing setup." He described the Cottonwood Festival and explained that its presence had turned a firehose of unvetted people loose on the property next to the school.
"There were approximately fifty people there when we arrived and sealed the area. But the boy was last seen almost an hour before we were summoned and anybody and his Uncle Hurl could have left the area and been across the river into Ohio before we got there. My officers detained everybody and took down ID information before they were allowed to leave the property."
"And those people were …?" Hardesty asked.
"The carpenters and other construction people assembling the bandstands and the portable stage for the festival, the vendors setting up booths—"
"What kind of booths?" Gascoyne wanted to know.
"Local craft
speople sell their wares at the festival, anybody from Sue-Sue Bentley, who looms her own wool, dyes it and makes hats and scarves to Ancil Brunswick, who carves miniature train sets. Potters, jewelry makers, artists, homemakers' circles who make quilts, sculptor wannabes who make duck lawn art. The Kavanaugh County Craftsman's Association sells small furniture items, end tables and Adirondack chairs." Like the one that'd saved the life of Macy Cosgrove six weeks ago, but not because she grabbed it in the water while she was drowning. "Those people are predominantly local, but there were a few Away-From-Heres."
"Away-From-Heres — an interesting way to put it," Nakamura mused, unsmiling.
"That used to include anybody who couldn't trace their ancestry back at least three and preferably four generations. But in the past twenty years or so the population has exploded. Shadow Rock has become a tour-bus destination. Whispering Mountain Lake is a watersports mecca. The Carnegie-and-Friends historic homes draw tourists in droves. And since the opening of the Nautilus Casino and adjacent hotels on the other side of the lake, this place isn't a small town anymore where you'd necessarily notice an unfamiliar face."
"Anybody else besides craftspeople?" asked Emma Gomez.
"Food vendors — those might or might not be local people. Some of them are food trucks from Charleston, drove down here to make some extra money during setup and at the festival this weekend."
"When does it start?" Nakamura asked.
"It doesn't officially open until Friday noon. All the schools in town are scheduled to let out early. There'll be live entertainment Friday night, a Bluegrass band from Kentucky — carpenters are building a small stage — contests and kids' games and a kiddie parade down Whitlow Street on Saturday. A disc-jockey dance on Saturday night. The Knights of Columbus have a license to sell beer, so it'll get rowdy. Festival's not officially open today, but gawkers, lookie-loos and bargain hunters always show up early."