Taken

by Chris Jordan

  By the time I get to the freezer in the basement, Maria Savalo is nodding, as if to some music I can’t hear.

  “No warrants, you say?”

  I shake my head. “I let them in. Gave them permission to look in the basement.”

  “No warrant,” she says, giving a little nod of satisfaction. “That’s good. That’s excellent. Now let me ask you a crucial question. Did you have any contact with the sheriff after your son was kidnapped? Did you by any chance call him?”

  “No. The man in the mask, he—”

  “We’ll get back to the man in the mask,” she says, cutting me off. “For now let’s concentrate on your use of the phone. Did you call anyone at all?”

  Wait. There is something. I’ve forgotten all about returning Jake Gavner’s phone call. How did I manage to forget that?

  “Not good,” is her response, after I fill her in. “You say that for the duration of the call, you gave Mr. Gavner no indication that you were under duress?”

  “There was a gun pointed at me,” I tell her with a little heat, aware that my face is flushing.

  “Of course there was,” she concedes. “So you did your best to convince Mr. Gavner that nothing was wrong? You told him your son was home?”

  “I didn’t have any choice.”

  “You convinced him?”

  “I must have. He never called back. Not while I was awake. Later, the man in the mask told me I had messages, but I never had time to check them, let alone answer.”

  Ms. Savalo purses her lips. “Tell me about that. You say you were injected with some sort of drug. Any idea what he used, this masked man?”

  “All I know is it knocked me out.”

  “How long did it take? Before you passed out?”

  “I don’t know. A minute? No longer than that.”

  “Good. I’m going to order a blood test. See if any residuals remain.”

  I remember something else. How had I forgotten? What is wrong with my brain? “The police took blood from me when I came in.”

  Ms. Savalo looks startled. “You gave them permission? Written permission?”

  “No, not written. Terry Crebbin said if I didn’t stop shouting he’d have me gagged, so I shut up and let them do it.” Amazing, how an incident like that had slipped my mind, until she mentions blood, then it comes flooding back. My excuse is that I’d been trying to convince the cops to do something about my son, and not really paying attention to what they were doing to me.

  “This is the deputy sheriff?” Ms. Savalo wants to know. “Crebbin, right? He threatened to gag you? So you complied?”

  “Can’t stand the idea of being gagged.”

  “Had your rights been read to you, regarding the blood sample?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This could be very important, Mrs. Bickford. Think again.”

  “I’m not sure. I really don’t remember.” That’s the truth, but how could it be? How could I possibly forget something so crucial?

  “But you didn’t sign anything? Scrawl your signature?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Ms. Savalo grins, and it makes her glow. Holly Hunter has nothing on her. “Better and better. Small-town cops. Felony murder, they get all excited. They’ve got a killer mom in custody, nothing else matters.”

  “I’m not a killer mom.”

  She looks at me with concern, radiating what seems to be genuine empathy. “My apologies, Mrs. Bickford. I was thinking out loud. Thinking like the cops, okay? We both know you’re not a killer mom, but they obviously think so, and it clouded their judgment. Which is good for us.”

  I wish I felt good about it. Wish I felt good about something. As it is, the loss of my son feels like an unanesthetized amputation.

  “What I still don’t understand is why the cops think I’m lying about Tommy getting taken, why would Crebbin think I made my own son disappear?”

  Ms. Savalo studies me with her dark eyes, gives the impression she’s utilizing some sort of self-contained lie detector on me. The beam of truth. After a pause she says, “I can shed some light on that,” and opens her briefcase, handing me a sheet of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “Photocopy of a legal document found in the sheriff’s breast pocket. That’s why it’s so blurry.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I say, staring at the smudged image of what looks to be a postcard.

  “It’s a ‘return receipt requested.’ Proof that you signed for a legal document on the twentieth of June. Looks like the sheriff’s department was serving you. Or that’s how it’s meant to look.”

  I squint. “That can’t be my signature. I never signed this.”

  Savalo’s smile is tight. “I bet you get lots of mail having to do with your business. Maybe you forgot.”

  I shake my head. “I never got any legal documents. Not recently, and certainly not last week. Besides, what does this prove?”

  “The cops think it proves that you were aware that your son’s natural mother was attempting to regain custody of her child,” she says, speaking very carefully.

  My hands begin to tremble and the photocopy flutters to the floor of the holding cell. “That’s impossible,” I tell her, my voice sounding hollow. “Tommy’s mother is dead. Both of his parents died in a taxicab accident. In Puerto Rico.”

  Ms. Savalo scoops up the photocopy. “The suit was filed by one Enrico D. Vargas, Esquire, office listed in Queens. I checked. He’s an attorney, duly registered in the state of New York.”

  “I don’t understand.” Thinking that should be my mantra, so many things I didn’t understand.

  “The petition to reassign custody was filed by a Teresa Alonzo, no address given, other than the lawyer’s office,” Ms. Savalo explains. “In the long run they can’t prevent us from discovering where she resides, but it will take a while. We’ll have to petition the court.” She pauses, locks eyes with me. “Are you absolutely sure you’ve never heard from Enrico Vargas? That Attorney Vargas hasn’t contacted you, or a lawyer representing you?”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” I respond weakly. “Birth mother? This can’t be real. It can’t. Tommy’s parents are dead. They told us.”

  “Who told you, Mrs. Bickford?”

  “The adoption agency. Family Finders.”

  “You saw the death certificates of the child’s parents?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t recall seeing death certificates. We had no reason to disbelieve the agency. Ted checked them out before we applied, they were legit. Expensive but legal.”

  “So you took them at their word, that the baby was available for adoption, free and clear. Nobody trying to assert custodial rights?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Okay. We’ll check into that,” she says, tucking the photocopy back in her briefcase.

  “What was Fred doing with that copy?”

  “Fred? Oh, the deceased. No one knows for certain, apparently, but the supposition is that he went to your home to serve you with notice, or possibly discuss the possibility that you were about to be embroiled in a custody suit, or both. That he stumbled upon your plans to spirit your adopted child away from the authorities, attempted to intervene, and that you shot him. That to cover up the crime you invented a kidnapper. The man in the mask, as you call him.”

  I can feel my jaw drop. “Oh, my God.”

  “Obviously your position is that the abductor exists and that he’s attempting to frame you.”

  My jaw snaps shut. “It isn’t my ‘position.’ It’s the truth! That’s what happened. Exactly as I told you. He took my son, he took my money. I assume he killed poor Fred.”

  “Why would he do that? Frame you? Any theories?”

  “I’ve been racking my brains,” I tell her. “No idea. Why would they care? They’ve got my son. They’ve got the money. Why bother going to all the trouble of framing me?”

  After
a pause, letting it soak in, Ms. Savalo says, “That’s interesting, the way you always say ‘they.’ I thought it was just this one guy in a ski mask?”

  “He talked on his cell phone to others. Gave orders. I got the impression this was his business, kidnapping children and holding them for ransom.”

  “Hmm. And we have evidence of the wire transfer. Not easy to trace through the Cayman Islands, but we’ll give it a shot. Okay, Mrs. Bickford. You’ve given me enough so I can have a conversation with Jared Nichols, the county prosecutor. Jared and I go way back, which may or may not be useful. At least he’ll give me a straight answer.”

  She snaps shut her briefcase, slips into her heels and stands up.

  “What do I do?”

  “Wait,” she advises. “I’ll be gone an hour or two. Three at most. Then we’ll see?”

  “See what?” I ask.

  The attorney gives me a bright, reassuring smile. “See if I can work the old Savalo magic. Hang in there. Like the Terminator said, ‘I’ll be back.’”

  A moment later I’m alone again.

  After we got back from our honeymoon trip, Ted and I talked seriously about having children. We’d been having unprotected sex for more than a year and I hadn’t got pregnant, so a visit to the gynecologist was in order. I was put through a battery of tests—blood work, tissue samples, sonograms—and the results were not encouraging. Fibroid tumors. Not cancerous, but large enough to make pregnancy unlikely. I went through a long, painful procedure that was intended to reduce them in size. More than half of such procedures resulted in substantial reduction, supposedly, but it turned out I was in the unlucky half. No long-term reduction, no increase in the likelihood of impregnation. Most of the patients in my category eventually opted for hysterectomies. My option entirely. The fibroids were fertility threatening, not life threatening.

  I offered to let my eggs be collected and fertilized by Ted’s sperm, in hopes of finding a surrogate mother. Ted ruled that out, in no uncertain terms. He was going to make a baby with me, in the normal way, or he wasn’t going to make a baby at all. Never mind all the legal and technical problems with finding a surrogate womb. And so we discussed adoption. Ted was especially enthusiastic about the idea of adopting—what did it matter of the child carried his DNA? It was raising a child together that mattered. Making a family.

  As it turned out, finding an adoptable infant was nearly as difficult as dealing with the whole surrogate-mom issue, but of course we didn’t know that when we started. It helped that we weren’t insisting on a blond, blue-eyed baby. Hispanic origins were fine with us, although Ted was uneasy with the agencies who specialized in South American babies. Too many stories about poor women being more or less forced to sell their newborns, or having them stolen away and sold to intermediaries. Best to stick closer to home, where U.S. law applied. Eventually we found an agency with connections in Puerto Rico, were put on the list, and at last the great day arrived and baby Tomas came into our lives.

  Could his mother still be alive? Had a woman calling herself Teresa Alonzo hired the man in the mask to take him back? But it didn’t make any sense—why hadn’t I been notified? Obviously if his birth mother wanted to reestablish contact, we could have worked something out. I wouldn’t have been so selfish as to deny my son contact with his birth mother. Would I?

  Honestly, I don’t know how I would react. The notion that a birth mother might be involved is strangely reassuring, because if true it means that he’s still alive. But why empty my bank account? They’d have had no way of knowing that the money was intended for Tommy’s use eventually, would they? The man in the mask could access my accounts, pry into all my records, but he couldn’t read my mind, could he?

  Truth is, I’m not sure of anything. I’ve never felt so lost, not even in those first nightmare days after Ted passed. Nothing is what I thought it was. The world is upside down, or inside out, and I’ve no idea where I fit in the scheme of things.

  Except for this. I raised him, nurtured him, loved him to pieces, and this one thing I know: I’m the only mother Tomas “Tommy” Bickford has ever known.

  15

  what he lives for

  After an eternity—nearly four hours, by my later reckoning—Maria Savalo returns to my holding cell with a smile on her face and a bounce in her step. She’s carrying her briefcase in one hand and a shopping bag in the other.

  “The good news is you’re getting out of here,” she announces brightly. “The bad news is you can’t go home. Not yet.”

  She hands me the shopping bag, which contains my personal effects, meager as they are, with the exception of my purse. Ms. Savalo explains that my purse, a simple black Coach bag, was specifically mentioned in the search warrant that was issued after I was taken into custody, and will be retained for “further examination,” whatever that means.

  “What do they hope to find?” I ask, bewildered. “A letter of confession?”

  “They didn’t say. They never do. The important thing is, the county prosecutor’s office has decided not to file charges ‘at this time.’”

  I let that sink in. “Meaning they might still arrest me?”

  Ms. Savalo shrugs. “Can’t know for sure. My instincts tell me there’s still a strong possibility an indictment will occur, assuming they can develop the evidence, link it together.”

  She goes on to explain that as far as the prosecutor is concerned, there are problems with the police theory of the crime. Not the least of which is how a woman of my size and strength managed to hoist the body of a 248-pound man into the freezer. Plus, anything the deputies discovered upon entering the house might come under “fruit of a poisoned tree”—Ms. Savalo’s phrase—because they entered and searched without a warrant.

  “Real sticky problem for them is what to do about the phone call,” she explains, plopping down on the bunk.

  At first I assume she’s referring to my call to Jake Gavner, when I lied under duress and convinced him my son was safe and sound at home. But no, it seems there was another phone call, one I had nothing to do with.

  “Think about it, Mrs. Bickford. What were the police doing knocking on your door? Had to be something that alerted them to you. That something was an anonymous call to the 911 line, which means they have it on tape. So far they haven’t let me listen to the call—they will eventually—but from what I was given to understand by the prosecutor’s office, the caller implicated you in the disappearance of Sheriff Corso. Why Deputy Sheriff Crebbin didn’t apply for a search warrant at that point, I don’t know. Certainly on the basis of the call, one would have been granted. But what happened is, as soon as they got the call they raced over to your place and knocked on the door. Guess maybe he thought Corso might still be alive.”

  “They were close friends,” I tell her, feeling ill, despite the good news of my impending release. “Terry must have been frantic to find him.”

  “Whatever,” says Ms. Savalo, somewhat cavalierly. “The point is, who made the call? Leaves the prosecutors with an unknown quantity, and they hate that.”

  “Must have been the man in the mask,” I suggest. “He called me just before they knocked on the door, and made sure to mention the basement.”

  Ms. Savalo shrugs. “All this will be sorted out eventually. We have more to discuss, but first I’d like to get you situated. Your home is still a crime scene, so I took the liberty of booking you a motel room for a few days. Nothing fancy, I’m afraid. Just four walls, a shower and a bed.”

  “Anything, I don’t care.” I’m in desperate need of a hot shower, having been stuck in the same clothes I had on when Terry Crebbin and his deputies hustled me down to the station. Clothes I’d already been passed out in for who knows how many hours.

  Ms. Savalo pauses, studies me. “There’s a reason it’s nothing fancy. I’m not really worried about spending your money at this point, Mrs. Bickford. But we’ve got a situation outside the station and we have to come to an agreement on how to handle it.�
�

  “Situation?”

  “A media situation. They’ve obviously gotten wind that you’re about to be released. I counted five TV-news vans. Cable and local affiliates. This is your chance, Mrs. Bickford, if you want to take it.”

  I’m confused not only by what Ms. Savalo is saying, but by her whole attitude, which has shifted. As if she’s in the process of judging me, much to her regret, and expecting the worst.

  “What are you talking about? What chance?”

  “Your fifteen minutes of fame. You can hold a press conference as soon as you walk out that door. Proclaim your innocence on camera, and there’s a very good chance the footage will be carried by Fox News and CNN, as well as every local station in the tristate area.”

  I bury my face in my hands. Whatever muted euphoria I’d been experiencing at the idea of getting out has just been extinguished by the prospect of a media swarm. Strangely enough, I hadn’t even considered the possibility. Too many other things to obsess on. But the very idea of appearing on TV at a time like this makes my skin crawl. Never really understood why so many victims of crime, or those accused of it, are so eager to exploit face-time on TV. Hi, your infant daughter just drowned in your swimming pool, would you care to say a few words? Sure thing, but let me do my hair first, and while I’m at it, hire a media consultant.

  Ugh. Revolting.

  A wave of nausea doubles me up in stomach cramps. Gorge rising as I imagine microphones being shoved in my face by leering reporters. Hey, Killer Mom! What have you got to say for yourself!

  “You’ve got to get me out of here,” I tell her, gasping back the bile in my throat. “Is there a back way?”

  “You don’t want to speak to the media? Appear on TV? Tell your story?”

  “Please help me,” I say, involuntary tears rolling down my face. “I’m begging you. Can’t you make them go away? Please?”

  All of a sudden Ms. Savalo’s tight smile relaxes and turns warm. She reaches out, patting my arm, reassuring me. “Of course there’s a back way out. There’s always a back way out, but I had to know your intentions.”