by Rick Mofina
The doctors had said it could be hours before Maria Colson might regain consciousness after surgery. They doubted she would live and had braced her husband for the worst. The FBI had taken him home in case Dylan’s abductors made contact.
This one sucked, worse than most of them, Grace thought. Uncertain witnesses, unreliable security tape, no linchpin evidence, and no time. She glanced at the criminalists in their white jumpsuits scrutinizing the blood pool and the stroller, measuring distances. Anger twisted her stomach. No way was she giving up. All she needed was a break. Or something to point her to one.
Anything.
The transom bells rang when she entered Kim’s.
Dominic Perelli was talking to a girl who looked to be in her teens. She had a bead ring in her brow. The open page of Perelli’s notebook was filled with his neat script.
“This is Shannon Tabor, who works here.” Perelli turned toward the back of the store and a woman in her fifties, out of hearing range with two uniformed officers. “Down there is Betty Kim. She owns the store. Shannon, this is Detective Grace Garner.”
Grace and Shannon nodded to each other.
Earlier, over the phone, Berman had briefed her and Perelli about what the women had seen. But Grace and Perelli needed to hear their accounts firsthand before taking them to the squad room later for formal statements, Grace explained, as she opened her notebook.
Shannon, who’d already been crying, rolled her eyes and sobbed.
“How many times do I have to tell you—it’s not my fault! I just want to go home!”
“Nobody’s pointing any fingers, just tell us what happened.”
“I was sweeping the front. Maria asked me to watch Dylan while she came inside. I didn’t see or hear anything. Then my friend calls me on my cell. I could see Maria was done and getting ready to come out to get Dylan. I thought she was coming out, so I went in the store, okay?”
“Who called you?”
Shannon sniffled and looked away.
“Shannon. We don’t have time. Tell me, or I’ll find out.”
“Cody, my boyfriend. He’s twenty-one and my mom would freak if she knew, okay?”
“Cody who?”
“Whitfield. He’s working on the reno of the Lincoln house. He’s a carpenter.”
“I want his name, number, everything. I want to know why he called you at that time.”
“It was just to talk.”
“About what?”
“Going to a concert.”
“Did you notice any strange vehicles, or anything out of the ordinary before it happened? Anything at all?”
Shannon covered her mouth and shook her head.
“I didn’t see anything,” she sobbed. “Is Maria going to be all right? We tried to help her. There was so much blood. She wouldn’t stop bleeding, then her whole body started to, like, convulse, oh God! Is she going to be all right?”
“We don’t know.”
“You have to find Dylan!”
“We’re doing all we can. It’s important you tell us everything you think of now, anything you can remember.”
Grace went to the back of the store to talk to Betty Kim. Her bifocals hung from a chain around her neck and she was touching a crumpled tissue to her eyes.
“Could you tell me what you saw?”
Betty Kim blinked several times.
“A van, a dark van stopped. I don’t know what type. A person got out, could’ve been a man or a woman, they were wearing a hat. They picked up the baby and got back in the van. But it was fast. Like a dream—so fast I thought it wasn’t even happening.”
Grace looked around the store.
“Do you have a security camera?”
“No, my old one broke.”
“Can you remember anything distinguishing about the van, or the suspect? Anything?”
Betty Kim buried her face in her hands and shook her head.
Grace’s phone rang.
“It’s Berman. They found the tape.”
Grace and the other detectives huddled around Arnie Rockwell’s monitor as Berman cued the tape, then played it in slow motion.
Again, because of the angle it was mounted on the wall, the camera only permitted a partial view of the street, in the top portion of the screen. Only Shannon Tabor’s shoes and broom brush could be seen. Then the small wheels of Dylan’s stroller and Maria Colson’s shoes came into the frame.
There they are.
Maria vanished, leaving only Shannon and the stroller. A moment later, Shannon left the frame, leaving the stroller alone. Seconds ticked by until a shadow entered the frame. Only a partial view of the lower part of a van—its wheels, rocker panels—maybe a Dodge. It was red. It stopped and blocked the stroller from view. A shoe emerged from the van but the image flared, then disappeared from the frame.
Only the van was visible now.
Then nothing.
Then the van began pulling away, leaving the stroller rolling toward the curb where it was about to topple just as Maria Colson’s shoes streaked into the frame—blurring, getting in front of the van before disappearing. As the van left the frame—
“Dammit!” Berman said.
Maria Colson’s head smashed into the curb and bounced from it like a basketball bouncing from the rim. Betty Kim’s shoes, followed by Shannon Tabor, then Arnie Rockwell hurried to the street. The three of them comforting Maria. Berman advanced the tape until paramedics arrived. Arnie trotted back to his store and the screen went blank.
“Hold it!” Grace said. “Back it up to when the van emerges.”
“What is it?” Berman rewound the tape.
“There! There!” Grace tapped her pen to the monitor’s lower corner. A person stepped into the frame. It was clear they were watching everything. “There’s a witness in a position to have seen it all. Up close. Looks like a woman. Who is that?”
Arnie swallowed hard, nodding.
“One of my customers. She lives a block away on the other side of the park. She was in the store just before it happened. I think she’s on the start of the tape.”
Berman began rewinding.
7
Jason Wade walked back to the scene trying to make sense of what the Colsons’ neighbor, Annette Tabor, had told him.
What did she mean by “they had already been through so much”?
He’d check that out later. Right now, he had to find Tabor’s daughter Shannon and any other people who were at Kim’s. He needed an account of what had happened. He needed to dig deeper into this story.
Walking through the neighborhood, Jason considered what he had so far: a mother who’d likely been killed when her baby was stolen from her in a sleepy northwest neighborhood. It was in-credible. He needed more facts, more witnesses, and more color because this story was going to explode.
His phone rang.
“It’s Spangler, what’ve you got?”
“Maybe a murder mystery. Looks like the mother, Maria Colson, late twenties, early thirties, isn’t going to make it.”
“TV’s reported that already. What else do you have?”
What else? Give me a break, Fritz, I just got here.
“Anything else, Jason?”
Tell him, or hold back? All right, tell him before he finds out.
“They took her baby. Whoever ran her down took her son, Dylan.”
The silence told Jason that he’d hit on something Spangler didn’t know.
“Is the abduction all ours?”
“At the moment.”
“Do you have the abduction confirmed by the FBI?”
“Not yet.”
“Call me when you do. We’ll get it up on our site. We need to be first to break news on this one. That’s all you got?”
There was the bit the neighbor told him. But he’d better hold on to that. It was his angle, he’d check it out. Don’t tell Spangler everything. Don’t oversell.
“For now, yeah.”
Spangler ended the call without
another word. The prick. Jason rejected pondering him a second longer when his phone rang again. He checked his caller ID. Thankfully it was not Spangler again.
“Jason, it’s Hodge. Where are you?”
“About two blocks from the scene. What’s up?”
“Got a whole mess of detectives looking pretty serious in Arnie’s Hardware Store. It’s got to be important. Get your ass back here ‘cause I’m telling you something’s going on.”
Hurrying through a small corner park, Jason saw an old woman sitting alone on a bench. Heavyset. White hair curling from her colorful babushka. She appeared forlorn, he thought, passing her until he was stopped by a detail.
The small plastic bag she was holding.
The writing on it said “Arnie’s Hardware Store” and his gut linked it to the detective he’d spotted earlier inside the store, Nate Hodge’s alert, and now this woman sitting before him, gazing off at nothing.
Maybe she knew something?
Might be worth a shot. He went to her, identified himself, then showed her Maria and Dylan’s picture on his phone.
“Do you know who these people are, ma’am?”
Studying the photo, the woman’s head tilted with the tender affection of a grandmother. A smile rose on her face then died. Her high red cheeks accentuated her Slavic features, pushing her bright eyes into tiny slits, as if to shut out the world—or her memories of it.
“Ma’am.” Jason softened his voice. “Do you know what happened to these people? Did you see what happened?”
She looked at him for several moments before smiling.
“Tak.”
Jason didn’t understand, but, given her intonation, interpreted it as yes and opened his notebook.
But the old woman went away. Without moving a muscle, without leaving the bench, Lani Tychina resumed the journey she was on before Jason had interrupted her.
She was a retired professor at the University of Washington; a linguist fluent in five languages; a widow who lived alone in her house a few doors from the Colsons, the young couple with the beautiful baby.
Lani had gone to Arnie’s first thing this morning to get a new hinge to repair her cat door so Buttons would no longer have to scratch the screen to get in and out. Walking home, she’d remembered she needed lightbulbs, turned around, and started back.
That was when she saw the van, the baby, Maria—everything.
It catapulted Lani back to Kiev, back through her life, before she married her American sweetheart—the handsome history student—and moved to Seattle. Back to when she was a little girl, back to Kiev’s old castles in the hills, the silk-weaving mill, the market. Back to that day her Uncle Taras took her to the Podol and she was playing near the Dnieper River with her little cousin, Analise, back to when they heard the Soviet army trucks coming like sudden, angry thunder.
They came upon them so fast.
“Leave the ball, Analise! Take my hand! Analise!”
But her cousin’s hand slipped from hers as the first truck launched Analise skyward. She fell to earth under the next truck, its big wheels firing her body like a rag doll to the gutter.
Lani rushed to Analise, took up her hand, refusing to let go, screaming. Then today, the horror she thought she’d buried in Kiev returned when she’d witnessed the horror in front of Kim’s store.
Lani was paralyzed by it.
Too stunned to help or call, shocked with fear, she’d simply walked away, seeking comfort in the park that was like the banks of the Dnieper before the Soviet trucks; before death had brushed against her. And now this young man, Jason Wade from the newspaper, wanted Lani to tell him about it. She tried, but each time she replayed the details she was jolted.
It was too painful.
He kept speaking to her, this nice young man, repeating himself.
“Ma’am, please, can you tell me again? You said you saw the incident. What did you see? Can you tell me, please?”
Lani struggled. She wanted to help—had to help, but all she could see were the trucks and Analise until her thoughts shifted. Someone else was talking now. There was a woman with a pretty face also asking questions, like the police officers in Kiev.
“Lani Tychina?”
How does she know my name?
“Tak.”
“I’m Detective Grace Garner.” She showed her ID then abruptly turned to Jason. “Who are you?”
“Jason Wade, Seattle Mirror, and I was interviewing Lani Tie-Chee-Na,” he said to Lani. “Is that correct, ma’am? Is that how you say your name?”
“Your interview’s over,” Grace said. “Leave.”
“This is a public park, Detective.”
“Don’t make me tell you twice. This is police business.”
Jason stood there, appraising her smooth skin, the way her hair was pulled back. She looked about his age, maybe a year or two older. Her face held something bright, strong. Behind her eyes, he perceived a hint of sadness. Maybe for the crime. Maybe for something personal.
“Did you hear me?”
Grace stepped closer, assessing him, the silver stud earring in his left lobe, then the few days’ growth of whiskers that suggested a Vandyke. He was about six feet, strong build, with deep-set eyes that radiated an intelligent intensity bordering on dangerous.
“Police business, get lost.”
“I got a right to ask questions.”
“I’ve got the authority to arrest you for obstructing a police investigation.”
Jason’s jaw muscles pulsed, then he glanced at Lani, who had raised her hand, signaling that she had remembered.
“There was a man.” Lani’s voice still carried the thick accent of her childhood. “A man and a woman in the van.”
“Describe them,” Grace said. “Were they old? Young? White? Black?”
Narrow slits replaced Lani’s eyes as she worked to remember.
“Lani, what about the van? Do you remember anything about the van? The model, color, license number?”
Her eyes opened.
“Tak, I maybe remember something about the van—on the back was a small picture of the sun and trees.”
8
Two hours and forty minutes after Dylan Colson was stolen from his mother, images recorded by the hardware store’s security camera filled the computer monitor at the desk of Seattle Detective Wes Delucca.
He worked flat-out to identify the red van.
The security tape only revealed the wheels to the lugs and the extreme lower portion of the vehicle. He studied the bottom door contours, lower front and rear quarters, and the beginnings of the bumper configurations. He enlarged, reduced, then checked the images against a list of other similar models. He compared the recovered wiper to manufacturer databases. The wiper pointed to a Chrysler but could’ve been a generic replacement part.
If anyone was going to identify this van, it was Delucca. He was a veteran of the Traffic Collision Investigation Squad, a court-certified expert on crimes involving vehicles. As his nine-year-old daughter smiled at him from the framed picture next to his phone, he clicked with the cadence of a heartbeat.
Let’s go. Every second counts.
Delucca estimated tire size, wheelbase, and ground clearance, again consulting a database of vehicle makes and models. Then, using a scaled template, he matched the attitude of the suspect vehicle and transposed images of existing makes and models over the security tape images. He clicked faster because he almost had it. Glancing at the time, he needed to be absolutely certain.
As his computer processed one more check, he consulted his notes. Lani Tychina, the confused eyewitness, was unable to provide any details on the plate. She didn’t know if it was a Washington tag or an out-of-state plate. But she said the rear door had a small, customized mural showing the sun and trees. The computer beeped with confirmation. Delucca exhaled then sat up. Here it is. The van in the security tape is a 2002 Chrysler Town & Country.
Delucca reached for his phone.
Tw
o hours and fifty-eight minutes after the abduction, Grace Garner, phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, took down Delucca’s information.
“Good work, Wes, thanks.”
Grace called the coordinator for the Washington State Patrol, who was poised to activate the alert system.
“We’ve got our lock on the vehicle from Records; the van is a 2002 Chrysler Town and Country.” Grace paged through her notes from her preliminary interviews, quickly reviewing all she had from Lani Tychina, Betty Kim, and Arnie Rockwell.
“A 2002 Chrysler Town and Country,” the coordinator repeated.
“Correct. You have everything now.”
“Stay on the line, Detective.”
The coordinator put Grace on speakerphone, connecting her with the analyst who was finalizing the text for the alert, double-and triple-checking details, facts, and circumstances with Grace.
The Seattle Police Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation were coinvestigating agencies on the hit-and-run abduction. The SPD had already preapproved a hotline for tips. FBI Special Agent Kirk Dupree was at the Colson home with Lee awaiting a potential ransom call or other contact from the suspects. Nothing had come at this stage. Dupree had been updated by e-mail and joined the call on his cell phone. The analyst read the script aloud to Grace and Dupree twice for accuracy.
“It’s good. Move it,” Dupree said.
“Good with me. Kick it now,” Grace added.
Less than four minutes later, every TV and radio broadcast across Washington State was simultaneously interrupted with a burst tone alert followed by three shrill beeps, then the message:
This is an activation of the Alert System. The following is critical information on an abducted child in the Ballard area of Seattle in King County, Washington. The FBI and Seattle Police Department are seeking assistance locating Dylan James Colson, age seven months, abducted from the 3400 block of Calvington Avenue during a hit-and-run of his mother, Maria Jane Colson, age twenty-nine. Dylan James Colson is believed to be in danger. He has light hair and was last seen wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers. He may be in the company of a White female approximately 30 years of age and a White male, approximately 30 years of age. They may be traveling in a red 2002 Chrysler Town & Country minivan that is missing a windshield wiper. The rear door has a small customized mural showing the sun and trees. If you have any information on this matter contact the Seattle Police Department or the FBI immediately.