by Brad Parks
“Actually, I was thinking Mr. Freeland would want to take Sam,” Alison said, adding one of those looks that mothers know how to make sail over the heads of their offspring. “Do you think he would be willing to do that?”
“Oh, yeah, Dad, could he? That’d be awesome.”
At the moment, Jeremy probably wasn’t in the mood to do me any favors. There was also the problem of his noticing that Alison and I suddenly had only one child. But I could finesse that.
“Sure, buddy, let’s go ask,” I said.
Sam took my hand and dragged me toward Jeremy’s office.
“Hi, Mr. Freeland!” he squeaked as soon as he was within view.
“Why, hello, Sam,” Jeremy said, appropriately surprised.
“Emma is with her grandma, doing girl stuff,” I explained, before Jeremy could ask. “But Sam here is hoping to run up and down the stairs. And he wants to go with Mr. Freeland. Would you mind?”
Sam’s smile was lighthouse bright. Jeremy returned it. He wasn’t going to take out his frustration with me on my son.
“Sure, let’s go.”
I smiled thinly at Jeremy. “Thanks, Mr. Freeland.”
He ignored me.
“Can I feed the fish first, can I?” Sam asked.
“Okay, but only a little.”
“Thanks again, Mr. Freeland,” I said.
I received no reply. As I left, I heard Sam cooing, “Heyyyy, Thurgood. Thurrr-goooood.”
When I returned to my office, Alison was sitting on the edge of one of the chairs in front of my desk.
“What’s up?” I asked, resuming my seat.
“I heard from the lab today.”
“The . . . lab,” I said, clearly lost.
“The lab in Williamsburg. The fingerprinting.”
“Oh yeah. Right.”
“You were right about the boxes and bags and envelopes that showed up on the porch. There were no fingerprints.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“But they did find something interesting on the keychain.”
“The keychain?”
“To the Honda? Remember how I sent that along with the toaster so they could lift Justina’s fingerprints?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they got her prints off the toaster pretty easily. But when they were looking at that big brass keychain, they saw two sets of prints. One matched the prints from the toaster, making it Justina’s. But the other wasn’t yours or mine.”
“So whose was it?”
“That’s the point. Whoever’s print is on that brass keychain is probably the person who drove the Honda—in other words, the person who took the kids. The only problem is, this is a private lab. They don’t have access to law enforcement databases.”
“Oh right,” I said.
“But the US Marshals Service does,” she said, then pulled that brass keychain—ensconced in a plastic bag—from her purse and placed it on my desk. “You know a thousand of those guys. One of them will do you a favor on the hush-hush, right?”
It is the judge in me that immediately thinks of the counterargument. “Of course, you realize, that database only has about a hundred million entries. That means two out of three Americans aren’t in there.”
“But criminals are,” she pointed out. “Them, federal employees, and anyone like me whose dad made all his kids get fingerprinted.”
I sat there for a moment, trying to think of the flaws in this plan. I turned it over a few different ways and decided that the risk was small compared to the potential benefit.
Maybe nothing would come of it. But as long as I was careful, it couldn’t hurt.
“Okay,” I said, taking the bag off my desk and sliding it into my pocket, where it made a lump in my suit pants. “I’ll get it tested.”
* * *
Once Sam had exhausted himself on the stairs, I walked him and Alison out to her car, which was in the lot down the street—no preferential parking for judges’ spouses.
I returned through the employees’ entrance, where Ben Gardner was on duty, alone.
Which was just how I hoped he might be.
“How’d your boys do against Ole Miss?” I asked as he got to his feet.
“Chewed ’em up,” he said. “Good day for the O-line.”
In his desire not to hassle us, Ben calibrated the metal detector at a setting that might or might not have alerted if you dragged a whole scrapyard through.
Not even the big chunk of brass in my pocket made the machine go off. But after I passed soundlessly through, I turned back toward Ben. He was already settling back into his chair, expecting that I would just keep hustling on toward my chambers like I always did.
“Hey, Ben, you got a second?”
“Yeah, sure, Judge, what’s up?” he said, getting back on his feet. He was medium height with gray hair and an easy smile. His blue court security officer blazer only partially hid a belly that was as round as an ice-cream scoop. He reminded me of an owner of a mom-and-pop hardware store, a guy who just wanted to help you find the right pipe fitting.
“I need a favor. A big one, actually. And part of the favor is that you can’t tell anyone you’re helping me.”
“What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“You CSOs are pretty friendly with the US Marshals Service, yes?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And the marshals service has access to the FBI’s fingerprint database, right?”
“Sure does.”
I held out the plastic bag. “I need to have the prints on this keychain run through the system. There’s a print that belongs to a young woman named Justina Kemal. She’s Turkish and here on a student visa, so I don’t think she’s on file. But I’m not worried about her. It’s the other prints I’m curious about. I want to see if there are any hits.”
“Okay. Is this for a . . . a trial or . . .”
“No, no. Nothing like that. It’s personal. We had it taken to a private lab but, of course, they don’t have access to the FBI database. We think . . . Alison and I, we think someone is stealing from us. But we want to be sure before we, you know, take action.”
All of which was basically true.
He smiled. “And you don’t want to fire the cleaning lady when it might not be the cleaning lady?”
“Yeah, something like that. I’d bother the chief deputy marshal, but I’d just like to keep this real quiet. It’s not a huge deal or anything, but you’d really be helping us out.”
“I gotcha.”
“And as long as I’m pushing my luck, I need it done, like, yesterday.”
“The missus wearing you out?”
“You know it,” I said, smiling that beleaguered-husband smile.
“You got it. I can probably get it to you by the end of the week.”
“That would be terrific. Thank you.”
“Roll Tide,” he said.
“Roll Tide,” I confirmed.
FIFTY-FIVE
They turned the house inside out. The older brother had joined in the search—after berating the younger brother for his stupidity, of course—but he had been no more successful in finding whatever tiny hole the little girl had disappeared into.
They had gone through every possible hiding spot, haphazardly at first, then systematically. The closets. The bedrooms. The bathrooms. The ventilation system, even though they couldn’t figure out how she would have been able to climb up there. Then they repeated the process, to no greater success.
After a while, the younger brother got tired of being cursed at, so he started cursing back. It didn’t help.
Long after darkness fell, they were still at it, when finally the older brother said: enough. The little girl would get hungry and thirsty eventually. Then she’d come out.
In the meanti
me, they just had to make sure she didn’t escape the house. They dragged their air mattresses against the two exterior doors. The older brother lay down on the one barricading the front door. The younger brother took the side door. They slept in their clothes.
And that was where they still were, both snoring, when the alarm shrieked.
The younger brother bolted upright, looking around wildly until his vision locked on the one moving object in the room: the upper half of the little girl’s body just before it disappeared out of the window above the kitchen sink.
“Hey!” he yelled.
He ran toward the window—a stupid impulse, since he couldn’t slither out of it like the little girl. Then he went back toward the side door, opening it and throwing on the outdoor floodlights in time to see her slipping into the woods.
FIFTY-SIX
It’s peculiar how certain phrases can just stay with you, attaching themselves to the inside of your skull.
At first, maybe, it seems like there’s no good explanation for it. Then you start to wonder if there’s some deeper reason why one particular arrangement of words has gotten to be so sticky.
The thing that kept going through my head—all through what turned out to be another long and mostly sleepless night—was Ben Gardner’s Alabama twang asking me, “The missus wearing you out?”
And, well, was she?
Was this whole keychain business some kind of make-work assignment to keep my eye off the ball? Was it another O. J. Simpson–like piece of subterfuge, Alison’s equivalent of the bloody gloves? Was Paul whispering in her ear, telling her she just needed to keep me distracted a little while longer?
It was the next morning, while I was having these thoughts, when something Alison said during breakfast entered my ear canal at an odd angle. I had asked her what she and Sam were planning to do that day.
Her reply had been: “Oh, it’s Aunt Karen to the rescue. She has those friends who run that organic farm, and she got them to invite us over. They’ve got pigs and goats and chickens and hay bales. Sam ought to have a blast.”
I had strung together the expected reply about how that sounded great. But all the while, I was thinking about how that was the exact setup she had relied on the last couple of times she had left Sam alone. There was always something—a museum, a game, and now a farm—to distract him. And there was always Aunt Jenny, Aunt Karen, or Grammy to provide backup.
Was this another one of those days when she was going to visit Emma? To see Paul?
There was no hiring another private investigator to answer those questions. Not in anything resembling good conscience. Even if I told the PI not to go on my property and to watch his tail wherever he went . . . No. I was never going to forgive myself for Herb Thrift. If the new man found tragedy, it would be something far worse.
But maybe I could follow Alison myself. Just this once.
Then I’d know.
My plan was already forming as I finished breakfast, knotted my tie, and prepared myself for launch. I could play hooky from work—at least for the morning, which was when the organic farm visit was allegedly taking place. The Palgraff lawyers weren’t going to need me. There were no other matters pending before the court that would require my immediate presence. I could do this.
I kissed Alison and Sam good-bye, like absolutely nothing unusual was about to take place. But as I drove up our driveway, I dialed Mrs. Smith’s number and left her a voice mail informing her that a judicial errand was taking me out of the office that morning.
Then something Herb Thrift had written in an e-mail came back to me: Next time you try to hide your identity from a private investigator, don’t drive your own car to his office.
I thought about the big, rolling box of conspicuousness that was my Buick Enclave and pointed myself toward an off-brand rental car place a mile or so away.
Fifteen minutes of paperwork and one credit card swipe later, I was back on the road in a slightly used and perfectly anonymous Chevy. I silently thanked Herb Thrift for his teaching.
Then I settled into a parking spot in the strip mall that was on the southwest side of the intersection where our road met Route 17, and I waited for Alison to make her appearance.
* * *
By nine forty-five, I was worried that perhaps the rental had taken too long and that I had missed Alison and Sam as they slipped out on their way to the organic farm. I was starting to wonder if I should just return the rental car and try this another day.
Then I saw a vehicle emerge from around a curve in the distance. I took a moment to be sure, but as the grill plate came into better view, I was sure it was Alison’s Lincoln MKX.
She applied her brakes to stop at the light, which was red, coming within maybe twenty feet of where I had parked. But her eyes were fixed straight ahead. As soon as she passed me, I started the engine and got moving.
She turned left to head north on Route 17, and I followed. Once in the flow of traffic, I eased back a bit. After the Walmart shopping center, then Walter Reed Hospital and the cluster of buildings around it, the businesses started to thin out, as did the spacing of the lights. We soon passed into Middlesex County, our more rural neighbor to the north. I started wondering how long a trip I was in for.
But it turned out to be not much of one. From the other side of the pickup truck that I was keeping between us, I saw her turn signal flash. She was taking a right.
This was where shadowing her got riskier. I lagged farther back. After a mile or two of farms and forest, the road forked and she bore to the left. Before long, she was going to hit water—most of these offshoots to the east side of Route 17 dead-ended at a variety of Chesapeake Bay tributaries.
Soon, she was slowing. I was about two-tenths of a mile back and decelerated to a commensurate degree.
She disappeared into a gravel driveway on the left. I stayed straight as I passed a thin dirt lane with a sign next to it that read SWEET EARTH ORGANIC FARM.
As I cruised past, I managed to make out some hoop houses, a chicken coop, a barn, a smattering of goats. Definitely a farm.
A few hundred yards down, I found a spot to turn around. I crept back up the road just a little, then pulled off in a spot to the side where I could just see the farm’s entrance.
And that was where I stayed. Really, the duration of my wait would tell me everything I needed to know. If Alison was there for two, three, four hours, then all was exactly as it seemed: a mother and son making a trip to an organic farm; nothing to see here.
If it was otherwise, Alison was up to something. It was really that simple.
I made it a point to mark the time on the Chevy’s small digital clock. It was 10:04 A.M.
FIFTY-SEVEN
The younger brother was well beyond infuriated.
He had seen the exact spot where the little girl had vanished into the forest. He went in after her, sure his longer legs would catch her in no time.
The older brother had shut off the alarm system less than a minute later, then bellowed for quiet. It was dark. They had to use their ears, not their eyes, to find her.
Sure enough, the younger brother heard some rustling, coming from . . . where exactly? It was hard to tell. Whatever made the noise was too big to be a raccoon and too clumsy to be anything else. It had to be the little girl.
He had trained his ears toward what he thought was the spot. There was no further sound. She had obviously hidden somewhere.
That had been, what, three o’clock in the morning?
They waited and listened until dawn, knowing they were close, knowing if she moved they would hear it. They called for her, offering her every kind of inducement they could think of—chocolate, ice cream, dolls. Then they switched to threats.
Once the sun rose, they started looking for her in a more orderly fashion. They calculated how far a little girl might be able to run in a minute, th
en doubled that amount, then used that distance to form a search grid. When they still didn’t find her, they doubled its size.
There was no trace of her. It was like she had vanished into the forest floor.
Finally, after several hours, they convened at the center of the grid.
“This is not getting us anywhere,” the older brother said. “It’s time to be smart about this. You stay here. Do not leave this spot. She’s somewhere very nearby.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out. We need some technological help.”
“Why do you get to go?”
The older brother fixed him with a withering look and stomped off.
The younger brother stood rooted to his spot for a while. He wished he had his iPad game to help pass the time. Maybe he could sneak into the house and retrieve it. Surely, there was no danger in that.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Exactly twelve minutes after Alison had turned into the farm, the nose of the Lincoln appeared at the head of the driveway. Alison paused briefly to look to her left, then hit the gas, her tires kicking up gravel.
Like she was in a hurry to get somewhere.
She had been at the farm just long enough to get Sam introduced and settled in with Karen. Then she hightailed it out. Was there any doubt now?
“Oh, Alison,” I moaned.
As I gave chase, back in the direction of Route 17, I could feel the betrayal, like someone was unspooling a roll of barbed wire in my veins.
How could Alison do this to Emma? To Sam? To me? I was already thinking about the trial that would result. Kidnapping. Times two. In the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, that was life in prison.
But was that what I wanted for the mother of my children? To be put in one of those inhumane cages forever? To have Sam and Emma go through all the milestones of their lives, big and small—everything from losing their first tooth to having children of their own—without the woman who birthed them?
A memory leapt into my head unbidden. It was from when I was in my early thirties. I had contracted a particularly virulent strain of the flu that was making the rounds in Washington.