Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  “Not that I could tell when they first came in.”

  “Good. That bodes well.”

  We introduced ourselves and spoke to each child separately for a few moments. I arrived back at my desk feeling like I’d been talking to stone walls.

  “They’re not saying much,” I observed, quite unhappily.

  “They’re probably clamming up because their parents are there. We’ll have to talk to them without the parents,” Doc said.

  “Is that wise right now? They’ve all been through a lot. You’d think that it would make them feel more safe with their parents there to support them.”

  “They’ll all have an extreme sense of vulnerability right now, not too different from posttraumatic stress syndrome. These kids aren’t big strong soldiers. They don’t have nearly the coping mechanisms that adults do.”

  “Then why should we get them away from something that makes them feel safe? Won’t they be even worse without the parents there?”

  “Maybe. I can’t say for sure. But one thing I’m certain of is that they’re all assuming their parents are angry with them over this. How many times do you think each one of them has heard Don’t talk to strangers? Probably about a hundred times. And how did this whole thing develop? A stranger.”

  He was right. Evan would be mortified if he’d fallen prey to something I’d warned him about over and over again; he would shut right down on me.

  “They’re all too young to have survivor guilt, though,” he went on. “They might later, but now I don’t think it will be a factor. Often there are delayed effects; sometimes they don’t show up for years. Of course, there are treatments—”

  I reined him back in. “Teach me later, Errol. Right now I need you to stay with me on this, let me lead. I could use some suggestions as to how we can put all this theory into practice.”

  A bit cowed, he said, “Maybe we should just start out with all three of them in one room, no parents, and see how it goes. We have to be careful not to make them feel like they’re being interrogated.”

  None of the parents objected, but it didn’t go as well with the boys themselves as we would have liked. All three fidgeted like they had frogs in their pockets; their legs dangled and jerked. They pouted like this was some sort of group punishment.

  Erkinnen guided me to the far corner of the room and whispered, “We have to get rid of this classroom aura. This may sound a bit perverse, but we need to make this fun for them.”

  What did boys like other than beasts?

  Cars.

  “Stay right here,” I told him. “I think I may have the fix.”

  Spence borrowed a hat from one of the patrol cops and pretended to be the chauffeur. Doc and I got into the passenger area with the three boys. The confiscated Mercedes limo, a shiny black behemoth that floated down the street like a hydrofoil, was our vehicle for a motor tour of the sites of all three failed abductions.

  There was a moment of nervous hesitancy until I patted the gun in my shoulder holster.

  They settled down nicely after only a few minutes. There was a VCR and a PlayStation and a phone and all the latest technological gizmos in this fantasy car, which was about to go on the auction block as required by law. We cruised around through the forest of neon, and made a group decision that it was best to go chronologically, which pleased me because I got to see what Wilbur would have had to go through to get from one site to the next. In all three locations, after some initial quiet, the conversations became animated and descriptive. I was standing right there and he pulled up, and then the door opened, and . . .

  In the safety of common experience, their near-tragedies became more like items brought to show-and-tell. Only the boy involved could specifically address what had happened at each site, but just as I hoped, the others responded with enthusiastic comparisons to their own events. There were times when all three were out of the car, comparing notes and engaging in one-upsmanship.

  The tour ended with a trip to a famous ice cream parlor in Santa Monica and a brief stint on the pier to run off the energy left over from sitting and sweets. Doc and I leaned on a railing and watched them as they pranced around on the beach to the north of the pier. All three of these boys had narrowly escaped becoming photos on my victim board, but there they were, alive and running in the sand, just like my own son would have if he were here. I considered the possibility that there is, after all, a God.

  “All young and pretty,” I observed.

  “Yes, indeed. His fetish, naked and exposed,” Doc said. “It’s not uncommon in serial situations for a predator to be driven by forces he doesn’t understand to choose victims with certain characteristics. When we get this guy, I’m going to want to ask him about it. Those qualities can have deep significance.”

  When we get this guy. It was such a pretty dream, but we were getting closer. I wondered if there would be a signed arrest warrant for Wilbur Durand on my desk when I returned.

  Seagulls screamed above the sound of the surf. The western sky was still bright orange over the gray ocean, though the sun had already set. It was gorgeous. “Look at that sky,” I said with a sigh of wonderment. “How can something so ugly as Wilbur Durand exist in such a beautiful world?”

  Doc put a hand on my shoulder. It was warm and comforting. “I thought we went over this,” he said, quite sympathetically. “Survival of the fittest. The last one standing breeds the most, and if that takes evil, then evil is what will happen. I’m not sure we’re really equipped to understand it.”

  “He’s not going to get the chance to breed.”

  They pranced, they ran, they threw sand at one another. Eventually they’d all come crashing back to reality, but now they were characters in a narrow-escape movie with a good ending. “Look at them. All that wonderful early adolescent springiness.”

  “Yeah. Very enviable.” He looked directly into my eyes. “Someone must have stolen that part of Durand’s life from him. He’s trying to recover it by stealing it back again. And look at them—practically clones. He’s patterning his victims after someone specific.”

  Michael Gallagher’s older brother Aiden. I would be calling Moskal sooner than I thought, for another photograph. I wished I’d asked for one when we were at the Gallagher house.

  “We should take them back,” I said. “Their parents are probably going nuts by now.”

  “Yeah. I know. But I hate to leave. This is the calmest I’ve felt in weeks.”

  “Me too.”

  He whistled through two fingers. All three boys turned in our direction and came running in response to his waving hand. The universal dad, a safe haven.

  “And by the way,” he said, “nice job.”

  I went back inside the station just long enough to deliver the boys back into the custody of their anxious parents. I arranged for follow-up with all three families, but I knew it would be a while before I got to it—there was so much else to be done. But before I did anything else at all, I needed to go home. There would be sanity there, of the sort that can only be found in a good stint of mothering. Kevin was more than agreeable to bringing them back, saving me the effort of going out to his place; he did have his moments.

  I needed so badly to wallow in the sweet, warm, chaotic normalcy of my two daughters and son. They knew about my work and the effect it could have on me sometimes; I’d come home so many nights with the world’s badness just plastered all over me. They’d tiptoed around me when I slipped into a funk following the arrest of some juvenile for a crime that most adults could barely conceive of, an event that happened all too often.

  Frannie, my perceptive one, was the first to ask about the underlying distress.

  “You all right, Mom?”

  I brushed a few errant strands of hair back from her forehead. She was growing out bangs and it had become a little routine between us.

  “All things considered, honey, I’m doing okay.”

  She was not convinced. “Things are busy at work?”

>   “There’s no fooling you, is there?”

  “Why would you need to fool me?”

  Why, indeed—to save her from things she shouldn’t have to understand. “Unfortunately,” I told her, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  “I can help with the housework,” she offered sweetly. There was genuine sympathy in her voice.

  I hated the thought that my job stress made her feel she needed to take on adult responsibilities while she was still a child.

  “No homework tonight,” I told them all. “I’ll write notes to your teachers. Tonight we play.”

  Squeals of glee ensued. Video games, popcorn, ice cream, loud music, pillow fights; we did everything that represented decadence to those who are simply too innocent to know what it really is. My sullen son, who could be so distant when the mood came over him, was inexplicably friendly.

  The girls went to bed around ten. Evan seemed to want to stay up and hang out with me, for which I was almost tearfully grateful. We popped in Apollo 13, fast-forwarded to the good parts, and listened to Frannie and Julie giggling in the background through the closed door of the room they shared. Sometimes I thought Evan felt chromosomally excluded. Tonight, it didn’t seem to affect him. He had a parent all to himself.

  I could barely believe it when he snuggled up against me during the dramatic reentry scene.

  “Mom,” he said tentatively.

  “Yeah, honey . . .”

  I felt his shoulders tense. He didn’t like to be called honey. I squeezed him to me briefly and said, “I’m sorry, Evan. I forget when I get distracted. What is it?”

  “You’re not home much anymore.”

  A knife to the heart. “I know, and I’m sorry. I have a case right now that’s keeping me at work a lot more than I want to be.”

  He was all curiosity. “What is it?”

  I wasn’t sure if I should tell him. There was no way to predict how my revelations might make him feel. I decided to be as general as I could about it. “It’s a bad one, son. Some kids are missing. Boys about your age. Some of them have been gone for a long time and I’m afraid they may be dead.”

  He was very pensive for a moment, and then asked, “So how is it going?”

  It surprised me, but I answered him the way I would have spoken to an adult. “It’s very frustrating,” I told him. “Sometimes that happens in my job, though. I’ve had a suspect for a while, but I didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him until recently. I’m waiting to hear on a warrant for this suspect, and I have no idea whether or not it will be issued. It’s not like I can just call up a judge and say, I think this is my guy. I have to have what they call probable cause. And probable cause is different from judge to judge. Sometimes the same judge will give me a warrant on one case and then not give me one on a similar case. There’s no explaining it.”

  “That sucks.”

  Way too adult. But I didn’t correct him—that could wait for some other time, when we weren’t in the middle of a “moment.” “Yeah, it does suck. My advice to you, if you don’t want to get frustrated, is not to be a cop.”

  “I think your job is cool, Mom. I brag to my friends all the time about it.”

  I wanted to cry. “Evan, that’s so sweet. I had no idea.”

  “I like that you’re a cop. I like that you get bad guys.”

  I’d always hoped I could raise children who understood the value of meaningful work. Apparently I had.

  For the first time in what felt like years, I actually tucked my son away and shut off the light in his room. In the solitude that remained to me, I went to my computer and wrote the report of that afternoon’s meaningful work while the events were still fresh in my mind. It was another careful bit of writing, designed to bolster a position I’d already taken on this case: Wilbur Durand was the one perpetrator who had abducted all these boys. There was also the small matter of an unauthorized joyride in a confiscated vehicle that now belonged to the taxpayers, which required justification.

  All three boys were accosted by a man disguised as a trusted intimate of each victim. The attempts occurred at approximately one-hour intervals; in the course of our re-creation of the events, we confirmed that the routes taken between sites could easily be negotiated in less than fifteen minutes, even considering traffic, which allowed adequate time for one perpetrator to change disguises if they were created with speed of change in mind. All three boys were of similar height, weight, coloring, and age, in keeping with a victim pattern previously established in multiple cases suspected also to be the perpetrator’s work.

  My professional training and experience have led me to the conclusion that the abductor is very aware that we are pursuing him vigorously and that he wanted all three of these victims to escape as a means of confusing the investigator(s) and throwing the case off track. The attempts were made at sites where witnesses were not likely to be present, though in one case there was a witness, who has been uncooperative and might be deemed unreliable. None of the victims were of sufficient strength to resist a truly determined abductor, but all managed to slip out of the perpetrator’s grip with relative ease and very little struggle, which supports a theory of staged failures.

  He would have gotten at least one of them if he’d really wanted to—if he was using only a mask and wig as his disguises, there would be plenty of time. The boys all agreed that they were pulled, but not hard enough to yank them into the car, and that it had felt to them like the man in the car was acting at the abductions rather than really trying to complete them.

  I wished I’d been able to include this in the warrant application.

  When I got into the squad room the next morning, I discovered that it wouldn’t have mattered. Spence and Escobar were standing on either side of my desk, both grinning as wide as a mile.

  I got the good judge again.

  “We’re good to go,” Spence said.

  “I guess we are,” I said, in some disbelief. “Only question now is, where?”

  twenty-seven

  Jean de Malestroit sent private word to me that he would spend that evening in the company of de Touscheronde and Friar Blouyn as they conspired on the morrow’s proceedings. I took my dinner with other ladies of the convent, who fussed over my pecked hand like a bevy of physicians. Though there was much I would have liked to discuss with his Eminence of the day’s events, I confess that the company of women was a pleasant change from the masculine congress in which I had been immersed of late. We assembled around the long table in the main room of our convent. I had never seen such rapid crossing in all of my years here: a touch on the forehead, swipe swipe across the chest, and then the whispering over the day’s intrigues began. But there was none of the desperation in their gossip that I had heard in the square, the absence of which was as nourishing to me as the meal that had been set before us. I retired to my own chamber refreshed thereafter and found the additional blessing of solitude.

  Solitude; thought. One naturally followed the other. And what else would I think of than the things I had learned in Champtocé? What ought to be revealed, if anything, and to whom? I had not written to my son in Avignon in a fortnight, though I had had two letters from him in that time, both full of warm sentiments for me and great curiosity about our growing intrigue. I wanted to answer with a history of what had transpired in the proceedings so far, but I did not know how I could put quill to parchment without telling him that I now knew the fate of his brother and that a terrible suspicion had invaded my soul.

  Beloved Son, We have had a visit from the devil himself in the form of a crow. And your brother was eviscerated, though not by a boar. . . .

  I could not achieve a satisfying start. After a time I surrendered to my own illiteracy and took up embroidery, at the great expense of several candles. But as each thread went through the cloth and was pulled into position, I came a stitch closer to resolution. When I slipped between the linens to sleep, there was determination, if not peace, in my heart.r />
  In the morning it all commenced again. De Touscheronde started the day’s session with another witness whose child had been taken.

  Frère Demien whispered to me, “These stories bring more yawns now than tears. How many more must we hear?”

  I shrugged; the weeping woman resumed her seat. De Touscheronde went to the bench, where there took place much grave whispering as he, Jean de Malestroit, and Friar Blouyn worried over some point of law. After nods of accord, de Touscheronde turned back to the court again. He called out the name Perrine Rondeau. A woman I recalled having seen in the previous day’s crowd rose up from her seat near the front of the chapel.

  My husband has been sick for many years on and off, and during one period when he was particularly ill I took lodgers into my house to help meet expenses. It was a great source of shame to him, but of course I would not hear of him working. The Marquis de Ceva and Monsieur François Prelati were lodged in the upper floor for a while; I myself slept up there, though usually in a lesser room. I was so upset one night in thinking that I would lose my husband that my nurse installed me in the room where Prelati and the Marquis were lodged—she thought the good beds would benefit me. The gentlemen had gone to Machecoul and we all thought they would stay the night there. But the Marquis and Monsieur Prelati did return sometime later in the evening, both quite stupid with drink. When they discovered me in the better room, to which they had laid a claim whether justified or not, they were sorely agitated.

  I was in a state, I will admit; nevertheless, they had no right to treat me as they did. First they cursed me vilely, and then they grabbed hold of me, one taking my feet and the other my hands, and tried to throw me down to the first floor. Had my nurse not reached out, I would have gone straight over the railing and fallen, perhaps to my death! Then who would have cared for my husband? Surely not the Marquis or Monsieur Prelati.

  While I lay there on the second floor, they both kicked me squarely in the back, many times with their pointed boots, and I have not been the same since.