The Stolen (2008)
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the managing editor. Not to mention the unmistakable
odor that wafted from his desk, strong enough to make you
fail a sobriety test just by inhaling.
It was only a matter of time before somebody took a
sledgehammer to the pillar of the Gazette, and it was only
fitting for it to be wielded by someone who’d seen the
cracks up close.
Paulina turned off her office light, took the umbrella
from under her desk. Her office had a beautiful view of
the Manhattan skyline, twinkling lights amid the dark hues
of night. The skies had opened, drenching the pavement,
and the N train was several blocks away. As she strolled
through the corridors of the Dispatch, Paulina stopped by
the one office she’d asked Ted Allen to clear out for her a
few months ago. A junior media reporter had been given
the office, a reward for a promotion, but when Paulina
informed Ted Allen what she had in mind, the young man
was given a nice little cubicle by the Flavia coffeemaker.
The office was enclosed, sealed off. Exactly what she
needed.
On Paulina’s orders, the office had been cleared out; not
even a dustball remained. Instead three rows of shelves had
been installed, forming a U around the walls. What was
inside the office had to be kept a secret until her story was
ready. And then the bombshell would drop.
Only two people had a key: Paulina and Ted Allen himself.
The key was removed from the rings of the entire janitorial
staff, and Paulina only entered when she was positive there
were no looming eyes peeking over her shoulder.
Tonight, she had a tremendous urge to look inside. She
needed to be reminded of what all her hard work was preparing for.
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Checking once more to make sure she was alone,
Paulina twisted the key in the lock, opened the door and
flicked on the overhead light.
What she saw inside made her glow with delight. The
way the room glittered, the light reflecting on everything
she’d painstakingly gathered over the past few months.
And her treasure trove was growing by the day. It was only
a matter of time before the contents of this room, these
seemingly innocuous items, changed the face of New York
journalism.
Satisfied, Paulina turned off the light, closed the door
and got out her umbrella, preparing for her journey into the
rain.
9
“Right here,” I said to Wallace. He was holding a copy
of the transcript of my interview with Daniel Linwood. I’d
asked him to read it in its entirety before we spoke. So far
he’d only read what was printed in the Gazette. There
were many quotes that were cut for space, details that
didn’t make it into the final piece. I wanted to see if
Wallace noticed what I had just minutes ago.
I hadn’t noticed it upon my first few listenings. It was
so subtle, yet because I was already skeptical of the whole
situation, it stood out in neon lights.
“I’m not following, Henry,” Wallace said. He turned off
the tape recorder. “Please, placate an old man whose
hearing is going. Enlighten me as to what the hell you’re
talking about.”
“First off,” I said, “Daniel mentions he heard sirens
when he woke up. Yet there’s no record of any complaints
or investigations by the Hobbs County PD in that vicinity.
And when I spoke to the detective assigned to the case, he
was only slightly more helpful than your average retail
clerk. And then I heard this.”
I rewound to the spot in question. Then I pressed Play.
When Daniel spoke that word, I stopped the tape.
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“Brothers,” I said. “Daniel Linwood talks about seeing
his family for the first time when he got back home that
day. He refers to his sister, Tasha, but then he uses the word
brothers. As in plural. Daniel Linwood has one brother,
James. There’s no record of Shelly and Randall having any
other sons. And then he uses the word several more times.
As though he can’t help it. Once is a slip of the tongue.
Twice is a heck of a coincidence. Three times, like Danny
says on the tape, that means something’s wrong.”
Wallace looked at the transcript, found what I was referring to, stared at it so intently I expected a hole to be
seared through it.
“I think Daniel was referring to brothers because there
was another brother in his life.”
“But you just said he only has one brother, this James.
I don’t follow.”
“I think the other brother, the plural brother, was with
Danny during the years he was missing. I think whoever
kidnapped Daniel Linwood had another young boy. I think
even though he can’t force himself to remember details of
the past five years, Danny subconsciously is referring to
it. I think whoever took him had another child, and Daniel
was made to believe they were brothers. And even though
James is his only biological brother, his memory still
retains a stamp of some sort. A footprint of the lost years.”
“Is that even medically possible?” Wallace asked
skeptically.
“In 1993,” I said, “medical records showed that Sang
Min Lee, a thirteen-year-old Korean boy who’d been in a
coma for three years, suddenly woke up and claimed to
smell flowers. Sang’s mother had brought fresh roses to
Sang’s hospital room every day for the first year of his hospitalization, then stopped when it became too expensive.
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Somehow Sang’s brain retained the memory of those
smells, despite the fact that the boy himself wasn’t even
awake.”
Wallace scratched his beard, put the papers down. I
could tell he was thinking about this, debating whether my
discovery warranted looking into, or was just a dead end
that would eat up time and resources.
“Let me dig a bit,” I said. “I know there’s no way to tell
right now, but if there is, and we can report exclusively…”
Wallace’s head snapped up. I stopped speaking. He
knew my engine was running, that if he unleashed the
harness I’d be on this like a dog on fresh meat. I was
aching to run with this story. It burned to think that nobody
else seemed to care where Daniel Linwood had been for
five years, why he couldn’t remember anything about his
disappearance or why the HCPD seemed content to
vacuum it all up. I hated that if nobody stepped up, Daniel
Linwood would just be another headline. A child with no
past, whose future would always be clouded.
“This is awful thin,” Wallace said. “You realize it might
have been a slip of the tongue. A fault in the recording. My
mother used to call me Beth—that was my sister’s name,
but she was just absentminded. There are a dozen ways to
explain what Daniel said, not all of them having anything
/> to do with some Korean boy.”
“But you and I both want to know whether there’s
more.”
I looked at Wallace, trying to will him to say it. Then
he looked up at me, hands folded in front of him.
“Check it out. Report back if you find anything. And if
it turns out there’s another way to explain it, you stop
digging immediately. We promised to treat the Linwood
family with respect—the last thing we need is to acciden- The Stolen
91
tally hit a nerve that doesn’t need to feel pain. There’s a
family at stake here, not to mention a town trying to
rebuild. So use a pipe cleaner to dig instead of a pickax.”
“Gentle is my middle name.”
“That’s a goddamned lie,” Wallace said, “but I’ll give
you the benefit here. Good luck, Parker.”
With Wallace’s blessing, I went back to my desk and
took out the Linwoods’ phone number. I held the Post-it
between my fingers and thought about the promise I’d
made to Shelly. Her family had been torn apart, and it
would take years before they could even hope to begin the
reparations. By giving me access to their home and to
their son, the Linwoods trusted me to do what was right.
And I had every intent of doing just that.
First I had to make sure there wasn’t a simpler explanation.
I called the Linwood house. It went right to voice mail.
An automated system saying, “The person you wish to call
is not available at this time. Please leave a message at the
tone.” I figured they’d disconnected their phone, changed
their number to confuse the vultures. Only now I’d become
one, too.
At the tone, I said, “Hi, Shelly, Randall, this is Henry
Parker. I wanted to thank you for the other day. I did have
one follow-up question, and I was wondering if one of you
could give me a call back at the office. Again, this is Henry
Parker at the New York Gazette. ”
Then I hung up. And sat there. Twiddling my thumbs,
chewing a number two pencil, praying the wait wouldn’t
be long.
Perhaps the most difficult thing about being a reporter
was waiting for a callback. If I was on deadline, and knew
that one transforming piece of information was available
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yet just beyond reach, the minutes crawled by like hours.
Waiting for that callback could drive you insane. I propped
my feet up on the desk, stuck a pencil between my teeth
and waited.
Thankfully I didn’t have to worry about my sanity,
because my phone rang barely a minute after I’d hung up.
“This is Parker.”
“Henry, it’s Shelly Linwood.” She sounded apprehensive, a little concerned. She had probably assumed once
my story ran I’d be out of her life.
“Shelly, thanks so much for getting back to me.”
“It’s no problem. We have to screen our calls, otherwise
we’d never get off the line. We’re probably going to have
to change our number.” She said this with an air of
apology. She still saw me as a friend. Unlike the other
vultures who wanted to pick the bones.
“I understand that. Again, I appreciate you and Daniel
talking to me the other day.”
“It’s Danny,” she said, her voice less than enthusiastic.
“That’s what he wants to be called now.”
“Right. I remember. Anyway, Mrs. Linwood, Shelly, I
was going back over the tape of the interview, and something seemed a little strange to me.”
“Strange? How so?”
“When Danny is talking about reuniting with his
family, he says the word brothers. As in more than one.
And he says it several times. I know this is a silly question,
but Daniel doesn’t have any other siblings besides Tasha
and James, right?”
“That’s right.” The acceptance was gone. At that
moment I knew I was an outsider again.
“Any close friends he might consider a part of the
family? A cousin so close he might call him a brother?”
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“No.”
“Has he mentioned anything to you about his abduction? Any memories that might offer a clue as to why he
said that?”
“I said no, Mr. Parker.” Not Henry. Mr. Parker. “It’s just
the five of us. Thank God. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have
a pot roast in the oven.” I checked my watch. It was eleven
in the morning. Kind of early for a pot roast.
She didn’t wait for me to respond, and I knew when the
line went dead Shelly Linwood would no longer be returning any more of my calls. I sent off a quick e-mail to Wallace.
Shelly Linwood doesn’t know where “brothers” came
from. Got very defensive. Will update you on progress.
H
I tapped my pencil against the desk. Wherever Danny
Linwood was during those years, there was another person
he’d called “brother.” I was sure of it. Of course, there was a
chance his mind had simply been damaged from the absence,
but something in Shelly’s voice and the lack of cooperation
from the HCPD told me if I asked more questions, I’d find
very unhappy answers. Which meant they had to be asked.
I decided to take a stab at something, then work from
there.
I performed a LexisNexis search for child abductions
within the past ten years, then narrowed the search to cases
where the child returned alive. Sadly, there were over one
thousand reported cases of child abductions in the United
States during that span, and less than fifty of those
thousand children had been found alive. The others had
either been found dead, or never found at all.
I searched through the results looking for any simi-94
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larities, specifically cases, like Danny Linwood’s, where
the abducted was returned to his or her home with no
memory of their time gone.
I was surprised when one hit came back. Seven years ago,
an eight-year-old girl named Michelle Oliveira disappeared
outside of Meriden, Connecticut, following a playdate at a
neighbor’s house. The Oliveiras lived just four houses down
the block from their friends, a family of four named the
Lowes, which explained why she was unsupervised upon
her return home. The investigation turned up nothing but a
tassel from Michelle’s hair that had been caught on a nearby
branch. After a month the search was called off. Two years
later Michelle Oliveira was declared deceased.
And three years after that, Michelle Oliveira appeared
in her parents’ front yard in Meriden, in perfect health with
the exception of some vitamin deficiencies. According to
a newspaper report, Michelle had no recollection of the
intervening years.
The police had conducted numerous interviews with
Michelle, her parents and younger brother, as well as with
the Lowe family. The records had been sealed off due to
the victim’s young age. The abductor or abductor
s were
never found. And Michelle went on with her life.
While Michelle clearly wasn’t a “brother,” it did make
me wonder. Meriden was just a few hours from Hobbs
County, and more important, it set a precedent for this kind
of unexplained absence and subsequent reappearance.
I needed to see those records. Fortunately I knew
someone who could help. Time to add another lunch to my
growing tab.
Curt Sheffield picked up, but it took major convincing
to get him to not hang up on me.
“Ain’t no way I’m going to even touch a child abduc- The Stolen
95
tion case, bro. Not to mention that it’s in a different state,
and I’d have to explain why I’m asking those kind of questions. If I tell them it’s to sate some reporter’s curiosity, I
might as well tell them I deal crack while downloading
underage porn. I’ll get booted faster than you can say
‘Starsky minus Hutch.’”
“So how could I get hold of those records if not through
the police?” I asked, praying Curt’s reach extended beyond
that of his precinct.
“Only other firms who have access to those kinds of
documents are the legal aid societies. They keep a database
of all child-related abuse cases. I’m guessing this falls
under their jurisdiction.”
“Even if there was no evidence of actual abuse?”
“Just ’cause there ain’t no scars on the outside don’t
mean they’re not on the inside.”
“That’s deep, Curt. You write poetry, too?”
“Yeah, I’ll Robert Frost your ass if you try to squeeze
anything else out of me. Good luck, sorry I couldn’t help
more.”
“Yeah, thanks for nothing.”
“When can I collect on that tab?”
“I’ll have my people call your people.”
“Yeah, whatever. Later, Parker.”
I had to get more information on Michelle Oliveira’s abduction, but I wasn’t going to be able to go through the
police department. I sat there in silence, thinking about
what Curt had said. The legal aid society.
I knew one person who worked at the legal aid society.
But calling her would touch nerves much closer to my
heart than Daniel Linwood.
I opened my desk drawer. I could almost sense it down
there. It had been months since I’d spoken to her. But
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rarely a day passed when I didn’t feel that ache, that
gnawing in my gut that seemed to only get worse over