With her hands hugging her upper arms, Morgan shrugged. “We don’t associate much.”
He hadn’t realized she had parents in the area until a few hours before.
“He’s here tonight.”
“Yeah.”
Her expression blank, she gazed out into the darkness.
“You have to keep hoping, Morgan. Hope gives you the strength you need to take the next breath.”
They were walking on the sidewalk in front of her place. While the curb was lined with cars—his, Julie’s, her parents’, and the detective’s who’d replaced Elaine Martin and was going to sit with them through the night to monitor any possible contacts from kidnappers—the street was quiet. Searchers would resume looking for signs of the young boy at daylight.
And every hour that passed made it less likely that they’d be able to return Sammie safe and sound.
“It’s so dark out.”
“Is Sammie afraid of the dark?”
“No. It’s just…I know that the first hours are critical… .”
The first three hours were the most critical if Sammie had been kidnapped. Most child murders happened within three hours after abduction. Not that he was going to tell her that.
“You hear about children being taken, you know to keep your kids safe, and you do everything you can. But still, it’s one of those things—you just don’t ever think it’ll happen to you.”
He’d never seen it that way. Or if he had, he’d been too young to remember a time when it felt like the world was a safe place for kids.
“Eight hundred thousand kids go missing each year in the United States. That’s two thousand a day or one every forty seconds. But most are safely returned.”
She stopped pacing in front of her house and faced him, studying him in the blackness. Light from the streetlamp shone on one side of her face, giving it a white hue that was almost sickly, and throwing the other side of her into shadow. But he could see the panic in her eyes.
“I… Are you sure you want to be here?”
“I can go if you’d like.”
“No!” Her hand reached toward him and then hugged her arm again without ever making contact with him. “I… You can stay if you want. I just…I’m not sure why you’d want to. It’s late. You have to be tired.”
“I wouldn’t sleep if I went home. I’d be thinking about you and your son. Wondering if you’d had any news.”
“You don’t even know Sammie. And I’m just a student… .”
“It wouldn’t matter to me if you were a stranger, Morgan, I’d still want to help if I could. But you are far from a stranger. I’ve been reading your essays for four years. I got to know you through them. And…I’ve enjoyed our recent conversations. I’d like to help if I can.”
“Don’t you have someone at home waiting for you?” she asked, looking down the street in one direction and then the other before glancing back at him.
“A Mrs. Whittier, you mean?” Had she been hoping she’d see Sammie walking up the street toward them? He’d been looking for that very thing all night long.
“No, everyone knows you’re single. But that doesn’t mean you live alone.”
“I live with my father. He knows where I am and why.”
“Oh.”
He’d never felt such an urge to talk. To share. And just as compelling was the reticence that had become a natural part of him.
“I…we…knew someone once. A woman in the town where we lived. Her child was taken. It’s not something you ever forget.”
“Did you know her well?”
Thinking of Rose Sanderson, of things the woman had done and said, he told the complete truth. “No.”
“How old was her child?”
“Two.” He wanted Morgan to know that she wasn’t alone. That other people knew exactly what she was feeling.
“A boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
Her eyes filled with a painful mixture of compassion and fear and too late he knew what the next question was going to be.
“Did they find her?” Was the child returned safely to her mother’s waiting arms?
“No.” With a finger under Morgan’s chin, he held her face gently aloft, looking her straight in the eye, and said, “Of those eight hundred thousand kids that go missing each year, only one hundred and fifteen of them are stranger abductions and less than a hundred of them are victims of homicide.”
“Says who?”
“Washington, D.C.—the U.S. Department of Justice.”
She looked at him—and kept looking—as though the connection of their gazes was holding her upright.
She wasn’t Rose Sanderson. And this time he might be able to help.
* * *
TWELVE HOURS BEFORE, her greatest dream would definitely have included Caleb Whittier as a key player—in her home, with her.
Tonight he was included in her darkest nightmare. And her only dream was holding Sammie, safe and healthy, in her arms again. Her education didn’t matter. The day care and Saturday’s festivities were trivial. Nothing mattered if Sammie was gone.
Someone ordered pizza. The smell made Morgan sick to her stomach. Julie left, going home to be with her husband and twin daughters. Everything else stayed the same. Alarmingly the same.
Nothing was happening.
Until the phone rang just after midnight. Morgan’s body suffused with weakness even while her heart pounded so hard she could feel its beat.
“Wait,” the detective on duty, Rick Warner, said, looking at her. The hand Morgan held suspended over the receiver, ready to pick up, was shaking. The call display flashed Unknown Caller.
“Remember what they told you, Morgan.” George Lowen stood over her, having come in from the business papers he had strewn all over the kitchen table as soon as the phone pealed. “Keep them talking. Stay calm. Be agreeable…”
She tuned out the voice. She couldn’t deal with her father and kidnappers at the same time.
“You’ll do fine.” Cal Whittier dropped quietly onto the couch next to her. Not touching her. Just there.
The detective nodded and Morgan picked up, the call broadcast to the room on a special speaker they’d hooked up. “Hello?”
“Your father killed my wife. I got your kid. Fair trade.” Click.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.
No one spoke at first, as the caller hung up far too soon for anyone to put a full trace on the call.
“What the hell?” George Lowen turned his back just as Grace came into the room. Morgan’s mother had been lying down on Morgan’s bed. Her usually immaculate, tastefully dyed brown hair was mussed. Her eyes were swollen, her lightweight navy slacks and white blouse wrinkled.
“Who was on the phone?”
Detective Warner spoke into a cell phone. And hung up. Caleb Whittier took the receiver out of Morgan’s grasp.
“The call came from a prepaid cell phone. No way to trace it,” the detective said. “But they got the tower the signal came from. First and Main.”
“Fifteen miles from here,” George bit out.
“He’s still in the area?” Hope shot through Morgan even while she was falling apart at the seams.
“We know the area the call came from,” Detective Warner said softly, his brown eyes warm but tired looking. He didn’t try to hide the graveness of the situation from her.
Morgan couldn’t move. “He said he has Sammie.”
“I know.”
“So what do we do now?”
Those dark eyes were so hard to take. “We wait.”
“We wait.” How could her voice sound so calm when she was screaming inside? Seething with panic and dread and anger and fear and… “For what?”
“For him to call again.” Detective Warner’s voice was as calm as hers. Did the man also have feelings underneath? Things she couldn’t see? Or was this all just another job to him? Did he know what his words were doing to her?
Did it matter?
“What about that tower?” George demanded, standing halfway across the room. “I want every inch of that area canvassed. I’ll provide the resources. If you people can’t man the search I’ll hire someone who can.”
Her father’s autocratic tone cut through her—and gave her hope at the same time.
“It’s a multiple base station site. The call likely came within a mile or two of the tower, but the range could extend as much as thirty miles or more, depending on the strength of the phone used. It’s late at night so there are fewer transmissions going out, which means that range is wider.”
Oh, God. Is there no hope?
“Calls connect through to the closest tower.”
So they could narrow the search dramatically?
“Not always. And that depends on the phone’s operator, as well. Cars and alerts are already out, Mr. Lowen. Believe me, we’ve got every resource possible on this one.”
“I want more.”
“We’re doing all we can.”
“Then I’ll do it myself.” Her father’s dismissive tone followed him out of the small living room.
Grace and Morgan exchanged looks but Morgan was no longer sure what they were saying to each other.
“You said we wait,” Grace addressed Detective Warner, who was working at a card table set up along the front wall of the duplex. Morgan’s mother was sitting in the armchair where earlier she’d gone through address files, making notes regarding run-ins her husband had had over the years.
George Lowen, when questioned by Detective Martin, had put his wife on that job.
And apparently Detective Martin had been right on cue, looking for people who had it in for Morgan’s father. Now they could narrow the search more. To a male who’d lost a wife—and blamed her father.
“Right now this guy is in control,” Detective Warner was saying. “Until we know more, we have to wait for the next call.”
Caleb Whittier sat beside Morgan throughout the exchange. It was as though he was her hard drive, taking in everything and storing it in meticulous order for her to call upon later.
“What makes you think he’s going to call back?” she asked Warner.
“Because it fits the profile. This man is out for revenge. One phone call isn’t going to satisfy him.”
Okay. There’d be another call. Another chance. She had to make it count.
“The next time he calls, you need to ask to speak to your son the second you pick up. This guy’s playing with you. He’s letting you know he’s in charge. And now he’s going to bait you. He’s going to wait until he knows you’re on the line, give you another one-liner and hang up.”
“And then what?”
“Profiling suggests that he’ll get around to asking for a ransom. Eventually. When he’s satisfied that you’ve suffered enough. Or when the satisfaction of torturing you runs out. For now, the only chance for communication you’re probably going to get is when you first pick up the call.”
“So instead of saying hello, I ask to speak with Sammie.”
“Right.”
Foggy-headed from exhaustion and stress, Morgan studied the detective. “You think he’ll let me talk to my son?”
“I doubt it. Not at this stage, in any case. He’s not out to give you any comfort. Just the opposite, in fact. So we play on his need to make you and your family suffer by letting him hear how desperate you are to speak to your son.”
“Why would she give this guy what he wants?” Grace asked.
“So he’ll give us what we want, proof of Sammie’s existence. He has to get pleasure out of giving us the information or we aren’t going to get it.”
Morgan’s stomach threatened to give back what little she’d eaten. “What kind of proof?”
“He’ll call back with a tape recording, maybe. Or a description of Sammie’s clothing. The idea is to keep him calling back. Every time we get him on the line we have that much more chance of pinpointing where he’s calling from. And every bit of communication gives us more clues to go on in helping us figure out who this guy is.”
“You said he’d be calling back, anyway.”
“That’s right and we want to take control of his plan.”
She nodded. And would do exactly as she was told.
She wanted to ask what the chances were that Sammie was still alive. Wanted to ask Detective Warner his professional opinion regarding her chances of ever seeing her son again.
Not trusting her ability to handle the answer, she withheld the question.
They’d had the dreaded call. Sammie wasn’t just a runaway. He’d been kidnapped.
CHAPTER SIX
“DO YOU MIND IF I sit outside on the front step for a few minutes?” Morgan directed her question to the detective sitting at his makeshift desk. Cal watched her, taking in the whiteness around her too-tight lips, the glossiness in eyes that normally glinted with eagerness, the strands of hair surrounding skin that had been devoid of makeup since she’d first cried it off more than twelve hours before.
He recognized the signs of a woman at the end of her rope. He’d watched the same thing happen to Rose Sanderson when she’d transformed from his future mother to the stranger who’d thrown him and his father out of their home.
“If my phone rings, I’ll come back in.…”
“Stay close.” Detective Warner’s tone held warning more than acquiescence.
Morgan nodded and stood. Unlike the last couple of times she’d left the room for some fresh air, she didn’t glance at Cal. Didn’t invite him along.
On a hunch, he went anyway.
And was glad he had as soon as he stepped out the door and saw his star student bent over, one side of her propped against the corner of the building as she sobbed.
It was the first time he’d seen her lose control all day. There’d been tears, plenty of them, but they’d been slow, silent drips down her cheeks, not this full-out explosion of anguish.
Cal went to her, pulled her away from the building and against him, half carrying her over to the steps and settling her against his body as they sat. He didn’t say anything. There were no words that could help. Nothing anyone could do to ease the pain that was eating her alive, short of returning her son to her.
But he could share the pain with her. It helped not to suffer alone. That much he understood.
He didn’t take it personally when she turned her face into his chest. Or when her hands worked their way around his neck and clung to him. He held her. Stroked her hair.
And cried inside—a little boy manifested into a man who’d outgrown the ability to shed tears.
“They’re hurting him, aren’t they?” Her words, muffled against his chest, were completely clear to him.
Cal had no sense of how much time had passed. His arms didn’t loosen their grip on the body he held. “We don’t know that.”
“But…” A dry sob interrupted
her. “If his goal is to torture us…”
Wanting to tell her not to let him win, not to torture herself with what-ifs, Cal said instead, “We don’t know his ultimate goal.” He’d read everything he’d ever found written about child abductions. He knew the profiling as well as any detective.
“And we don’t know who we’re dealing with. Some people just aren’t killers, no matter what life has done to them. They just don’t have it in them to hurt someone else physically. So they retaliate with mental and emotional abuse.” He wasn’t educating her. He was just talking in case hearing another voice made her situation better. He wasn’t even sure she could comprehend what he was saying at that point. Or that it mattered.
“If his ultimate goal is ransom, as is probable, chances are good that he won’t do anything to hurt Sammie. At least not until he’s made his deal.”
He had to be honest with her here.
“And chances are also good that the authorities will catch the guy before he gets to close his deal.
“Less than one hundred out of eight hundred thousand abducted children die each year,” he reminded her. “Sammie’s chances are very, very good. More than 99 percent.”
“But the girl you knew about—she had those same chances.”
“Which is why I’ve always believed that she’s still alive.”
Morgan’s breathing slowed. She pulled back slowly, dropping her arms, sitting up on her own. Hands wrapped around her stomach, she stared downward.
“Do you know how many kids are taken that aren’t found dead, but are never seen by their parents again?”
“The less than one hundred that are killed includes those that are assumed dead.”
Which, technically, included Claire Sanderson. She was one of the less than 1 percent who weren’t safely returned. But… “In the case I knew about, they never had contact from the kidnapper,” he told her. “There were no calls. Nothing for them to go on.”
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