The Night Thief

by Barbara Fradkin

  “Now it’s your turn. You put down that gun!”

  Marian shrieked. I had to grab her to stop her running straight at Steele. Her eyes burned with hate.

  I thought fast. “You don’t want to make things worse, Lenny. These kids have been through hell, and if you care about them—”

  He snorted. “I don’t care about the Croat’s little bastard. He’s nothing but a wild animal—already tried to shoot me once. I’ll shoot him if I have to. But her…” He jerked his head toward Marian. “She’s coming with me. And if she wants to save her bastard son’s life…”

  He started to drag Robin backward toward the road. The rifle was still jammed against the boy’s head. I could see the whites of Robin’s eyes. But there was fury in them as well as fear. He was not going down without a fight.

  Marian was trying to yank the shotgun from my grip. I hung onto her and the shotgun as best I could. But this left no free hand for me to work with. All I had were words. Not my strongest suit.

  “Lenny,” I said, “I know something bad happened in the past. I get that. But this will only make it worse. Do you want to end up in jail—”

  “You think I’m an idiot? I’m already going to jail. This is my only shot.”

  “It won’t work.” I took a small step. “The police—”

  “Back off !” Steele shouted. He jerked the rifle barrel from Robin to me. “You looking for a bullet in the head too?”

  Marian had grown very still. She squeezed my arm. Hissed something in my ear. At that moment I noticed a flash of metal about six feet from Steele’s big boot. The jagged edge of a trap, half buried in the snow. I peered closer. My old bear trap! I glanced around. Saw a line of smaller indents in the snow. More traps. The kids had tried to protect themselves the only way they knew.

  I started circling toward the bear trap. I pulled Marian with me, hoping Steele would follow. She didn’t resist. She leaned against me, weak and limp. Robin played his part too, stumbling sideways in the snow. Steele cursed and lurched.

  Four feet.

  Steele’s boot slipped. He shifted his grip. Clamped the boy tightly for balance. Robin met my gaze. Too excited to be scared.

  Two feet.

  “Snow is a funny thing, Lenny—” I started. And Robin dived. Out from under Steele’s arm, rolling over and over in the snow. Steele roared with surprise and leaped to grab him.

  Planted his big boot right in the middle of the trap.

  My bear trap was built to snap shut when more than 150 pounds hit the center plate. Leonard Steele easily fit the bill. The jaws snapped shut over his foot, biting deep into his ankle. He howled. The rifle sailed through the air and landed in the snow. Robin grabbed it. I think he would have killed the guy on the spot if I hadn’t stopped him. He screamed and kicked and cried as my arms pinned him.

  The angriest boy I’d ever seen.

  Seventeen

  It was a long hike back to my house through the snow and cold. No one said much, not even the cops when they came to take Steele away. But bright and early the next morning, Jessica Swan’s cruiser came down my lane. It was followed by an ambulance and another car that looked new and shiny. Two people climbed out of it. I knew without asking who they were.

  Children’s Services.

  Marian had hardly said a word since yesterday. Now she closed her eyes while the paramedics strapped her onto a gurney. Robin looked at me as Children’s Services packed him into their car. His eyes were pleading, but he said nothing. I could only manage a wave.

  There was a lot to sort out, Jessica said. But for now they had found a good foster home for Robin in the city while Marian was in hospital.

  I wanted to fight it right then and there. But I knew you don’t win against Children’s Services.

  I watched the two vehicles disappear down the road. “Why can’t they stay here until it gets sorted out?” I asked.

  Jessica gave me a sad look. “Let’s go inside and make coffee.”

  I knew that meant she had bad news. Once the coffee was poured, she sighed.

  “I don’t make the rules, Rick.”

  “But Marian is old enough. When she’s better, she’ll get him back, right?” I’d lain awake half the night figuring it out. My vegetable business was growing. It had been nice having Robin around, and I could use the extra help. There were two extra bedrooms in the back of the house. Never been used. And the local school bus already drove by my lane.

  “It’s complicated. The Americans are coming up to interview them. Start the process to bring them home.”

  “Home!” I hadn’t even thought about that. The homestead was the only home Robin had ever known. “What home?”

  Jessica toyed with her spoon. Added way too much sugar. “The girl is Nika Horvat. Abducted from her home in Mobile, Alabama, when she was eight years old. DNA will confirm it, but we believe the body you found is her father, Luka.”

  “Robin says Steele shot him. I hope you guys can prove that.”

  She nodded. “They did the postmortem yesterday. Found the bullet. A Nosler Partition 150 grain. Not from a .308 like the rifle we found in the barn. From a .270 like the rifle Steele had. Ballistics is working on a match. But…Steele says he didn’t shoot the girl. He says Robin fired the .308, trying to hit him.”

  “Robin’s hardly bigger than a matchstick!”

  “Hurley says that’s probably why he missed and hit the girl.”

  “The kids said it was a hunter. An accident.”

  Jessica looked at me over her coffee cup. For what seemed like forever, she said nothing. “There are lots of duck hunters out, for sure. I’ll pass that on to the Ossington team.”

  I didn’t dare say more. I hoped the cops wouldn’t look too hard at the story. Leonard Steele belonged in jail way more than Robin did. “Did Steele confess to killing the guy?”

  “Luka Horvat?” She nodded. “Oh yeah. He’s singing like a canary. The FBI down in Alabama have confirmed his story. Apparently, Luka Horvat was a refugee from Croatia back in the early 1990s. He had some pretty rough times over there—saw his parents massacred by the Serbian army. Sounds like he had post-traumatic problems. Anyway, he settled in Mobile, Alabama, and married a local girl, Leonard Steele’s sister, and they had a daughter named Nika. According to Steele, the sister tried to help Luka, but he was suspicious of everyone. Freaked out over small things and by the end hardly left the house. She knew it wasn’t good for Nika. She finally told Luka she was leaving him. She asked her brother to come pick her up. Instead, he found her dead of multiple stab wounds, and the little girl missing. Steele’s been looking for his niece ever since.”

  I pictured Steele finding his sister dead. Vowing to track down her killer. Filled with hate and fear, never giving up the search. “So he killed the killer.”

  “Steele claims it was self-defense. Says Luka came after him with the .308.”

  I remembered the padlocks, the chains, the deadly traps. Luka was one desperate guy. “That’s possible,” I said.

  But Jessica shook her head. “He was shot in the back, Rick. No matter how understanding the courts might be, that’s murder.”

  I shivered. God is my co-pilot, Steele had claimed. If so, hate had knocked him way off course. Steele could have been the family the kids needed. But that hate, and a bullet in the back, had changed all that. “So if the brother’s going to jail, why send the kids to strangers?”

  “Her parents want them, Rick. Nika is all they have left of their daughter.”

  “But they won’t want Robin.”

  She shrugged. “They said they’ll try. They sound like really nice people.”

  Try. Try! What kind of welcome was that for a kid who’d known nothing but a cup, a bowl and a bedroll in a barn all his life? Who’d never been taught to read or even talk, let alone play baseball and video games.

  My eyes prickled. I knew if I talked any more, I might lose it. Robin was going into a world of strangers. Big city, strange school, kids
who wouldn’t understand. He might as well be landing on Mars. But the worst was that whenever his new family looked at him, they would see that Croat’s little bastard. Not their grandson, not a scared little boy. But a killer’s son.

  “It won’t work,” I managed to say.

  She reached across the table. Her fingertips touched my hand. “We don’t make the rules, Rick. But he’s young. And he’s a fighter.”

  Fighting isn’t what he needs, I wanted to say. I looked at her fingers on mine. Slipped my own around them, just for an instant. Before Robin, I’d never felt alone. Never wished there was someone else.

  Maybe that was the night thief ’s gift.

  Acknowledgments

  The village of Lake Madrid and Madrid County are fictional, but their resemblance to real communities is not coincidental. Lake Madrid stands for all the struggling rural farming communities whose traditions and ties run deep.

  I would like to thank Andrew Wooldridge and Bob Tyrrell, publishers of the dynamic and innovative Orca Books, for continuing to believe in me and in this series, and my terrific editor, Ruth Linka, whose insightful questions and critiques made The Night Thief a better book. I’d also like to thank Barry Brown of Port Dover, Ontario, for his expertise in rifles, and my good friend and fellow writer Vicki Delany for her thoughtful suggestions on an earlier draft.

  BARBARA FRADKIN is a child psychologist with a fascination for how we turn bad. Her compelling short stories haunt numerous magazines and anthologies, but she is best known for her gritty, psychological detective series featuring Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green. Barbara won Arthur Ellis Best Novel Awards for both Fifth Son (2005) and Honour Among Men (2007). Barbara’s work as a school psychologist helping adolescents and younger children, many of whom struggle with reading, has also made her a strong advocate of programs that help to develop reading as a lifelong passion. For more information, visit barbarafradkin.com.