by Chaz McGee
Calvano cleared his throat like he was the chairman of the board about to call the meeting to order. I realized he was lost without his tried-and-true bullying approach, so I cut him some slack. “As Detective Gunn has mentioned, we are here to talk to you about the other volunteers for KinderWatch,” Calvano explained. “One reason we came down so hard on you is because the type of person who commits crimes like abducting a child frequently insinuates himself into the investigation as a way to keep tabs on how close law enforcement is to catching him. We feel the same may be true about KinderWatch and whoever took Tyler Matthews.”
Calvano unconsciously parroted Maggie’s very words to him as he launched into a deeper explanation of the type of person they were looking for. Noni probably knew Calvano was a horse’s ass, but Martin ate it up. He liked being treated as if he were a peer, never mind that the guy had wanted to throw him in prison for life just a couple of days ago. He listened eagerly, his eyes leaving Calvano’s face only long enough to admire his stupid Italian loafers and gun. I knew he’d spill his guts about the other volunteers. Maggie could bat her eyelashes all she wanted, but what Martin was really interested in was playing cops and robbers.
“So you’re looking for someone who was just pretending to be concerned about stopping online predators?” Martin asked eagerly when Calvano was done.
“It’s a little more specific than that,” Maggie said. “And you must be careful not to let your personal feelings about other volunteers color your judgment.” I felt this comment was a zinger meant for Calvano. So did Noni, who hid her smile.
“What do you mean?” Martin asked, anxious to get it right.
Maggie searched for a way to explain, but knew Martin’s limited social skills would make it difficult. “Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that there are some volunteers who are aloof, standoffish. Snobby. Who act like they are too good to talk to you.” Martin’s face finally signaled understanding, though that description probably applied to just about everyone at KinderWatch. Martin was a natural scapegoat, and he’d probably spent a lifetime being ignored or taunted by others. “Naturally, you would not like them,” Maggie explained. “No one would. But that doesn’t mean they’re the kind of person we’re looking for. We are looking for a very specific type of individual.”
“Perhaps if you told him exactly what you were looking for?” said Noni, knowing Martin’s imagination was a few seconds from exploding in wild accusations aimed at most of the other KinderWatch volunteers. It is a rare man who can resist retaliation.
“All right,” Maggie agreed. “I’ll start. Adrian, you know more than me about the profile. You add what you need to.”
Right. Maggie would remember more from her standard training on child abusers undergone a decade ago than Calvano probably retained from earlier that day.
“This person would be a loner,” Maggie explained. “He would likely give lots of their time to KinderWatch and volunteer to go the extra mile, maybe taking care of the mainframe or overall computer files in some way. He would not want to simply pose as a child online. He’d want to play a larger role, so he could see what other volunteers had picked up on.”
Noni, sensing that Martin was realizing this description fit him to a T, intervened again. “You can see why Detective Calvano and the colonel might have suspected you,” she said cheerfully. “But that’s actually good, because it means you are in an excellent position to know who else might have done the same things you did.” Maggie nodded gratefully.
Martin thought hard, both self-conscious and proud that so many people were waiting on him to speak. We waited in silence, and I was beginning to think it was useless, that the pressure was too much for him, when Martin finally spoke. “Most of the hardcore volunteers are women,” he said. “They can get pretty intense. You’re looking for men, right?”
“Yes,” Maggie said firmly. “This was a man.”
“There’s the colonel,” Martin said hopefully. “I heard that he all but accused me. Maybe I ought to return the favor.” The rare note of belligerence in his voice told me he felt betrayed by the man who ran KinderWatch. I wondered if he would ever return as a volunteer, knowing what the colonel had said about him.
“He’s in a wheelchair, dude,” Calvano pointed out. “But, yeah, he did point the finger pretty hard at you. That’s why I came at you so hard.”
It was bullshit. He’d come at Martin hard because he was lazy and unimaginative, but it was as close as Calvano was going to come to an apology. Martin was angry enough at the colonel to accept Calvano’s excuse with a nod.
“This person would have his own car,” Maggie prompted him. “He’d be alone every time you saw him. Probably a little timid, especially around the female volunteers. He’d ask you questions, though, he’d likely approach you, wanting to know what you were up to, what you’d discovered online, if you had any new screen names of predators to track, if you’d discovered any new sites.”
Martin only looked more confused.
“Why don’t you just give them the names of all the other male volunteers who are local?” Noni suggested. She turned to Maggie. “What if they’re married?” she asked.
Maggie shrugged. “The guy might be married, but he’d need a private place to take the boy. But I think Mrs. Bates is right. Maybe you should just give us all the names you know of for the local male volunteers, starting with the ones who are not married. I’m not asking you to accuse anyone, just use your gut feelings and tell us who among that group you think best fits the profile we gave you.”
“Okay,” Martin agreed, relieved he was not being asked to accuse someone and put them through what he had been subjected to. “There are three guys it could be, and about four more it might be, but they’re all married.”
As he provided the names, Calvano wrote them down in his notebook, occasionally referring to the information he’d gleaned from the license plate check but not finding a hit. His cockiness was returning, I realized, now that he had some leads. His kind of leads, too—all he had to do was intimidate the men Martin had named.
“What are you going to do to them?” Martin asked warily. “They’re good people. Look what they volunteer their time for.”
“We’re not going to hassle them,” Maggie said firmly, with a warning glance at Calvano. “We’re going to start by finding out where they were on Thursday morning when the boy was taken. Most of them were probably at work, and that will rule out a lot. Don’t worry, we’ll be careful. No one will know their names came from you.”
“It isn’t that,” Martin explained. “I’ll probably never see them again. I’m not going back. Not after what the colonel said about me.” He glanced at Noni Bates. “Not after what the colonel thought about me.”
“I knew it wasn’t you, dear,” Noni said firmly. “I did not doubt you for an instant.”
“After all I did for him,” Martin added, his ire growing. “I was his best volunteer.”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Maggie advised. “You work in that field long enough and you start to develop a very dark view of human nature. It can change you. He just wanted to help find the boy.”
“I never want to be that way,” Martin declared, and I was unclear whether he meant like the colonel or like the predators the colonel tracked.
“You won’t be that way,” Noni said simply. “You aren’t and you won’t.”
“Well, I think that will do for us,” Maggie said, rising. She smiled at Martin. “You know, this area has a very active neighborhood watch organization. We train civilians for it. They get uniforms and ride around in cars, keeping an eye on things for us. They call in any problems they see. It’s a lot like what you’ve been doing, only on wheels. I think you’d be good at it.”
“Really?” Martin’s face lit up. “I’ll look into it.”
Calvano followed Maggie out the door, but did not wait until they were far from the house to make his opinion known. “Alfredo is going to kill you for sending
that guy to him for neighborhood watch. He’s going to be one of those gung ho, fake-cop, live-for-the-job kind of guys who wear their uniforms all day, every day and scare the other volunteers away.”
“We all have our uses, Adrian,” Maggie told him with a smile. “We all have our uses.”
Chapter 21
The hard work of being a detective—all the phone calls, the interviews, chasing down scraps of information in hopes of catching a break—had never been for me. Clearly. My partner and I had performed so dismally that our ineptitude became part of the department’s permanent lingo: whenever a case remained unsolved, others on the force had taken to calling it “in FBL” as “in Fahey and Bonaventura Limbo.”
The Tyler Matthews case was definitely in FBL, but Maggie and Calvano were going to put in their fair share of work to get it out of limbo. Calvano was following up on the list of volunteers Martin had given him; Maggie was going to lend a hand once she started the trace on the gun used to shoot Fiona Harker.
That was the kind of grunt work I’d avoided while alive. I avoided it now as well.
Using the names Robert Michael Martin had given them, Maggie helped Calvano pull together a list of addresses where the KinderWatch volunteers lived, or at least the ones that Martin felt might match the profile of Tyler’s abductors. I memorized the list and headed over to the house where I knew Tyler Matthews was being held in hopes of finding a match. It would mean help was on its way to the boy, sooner or later.
None of the addresses provided by KinderWatch volunteers matched that of the small cedar-shingled house nestled among the grasses and flowers that thrived in its landscaped yard. I had no clue what the name of the man inside might be, but chances were good the house had not been rented under his real name. And that, if he had volunteered for KinderWatch, he hadn’t signed up under the same name, either.
There would be no one coming for Tyler Matthews anytime soon.
By then it was Saturday afternoon and Tyler Matthews was facing another night without his mother. It was the best I could hope for. I had watched over him during the night before, noting that the man who held him had slept in a separate bedroom down the hall from Tyler. But anything could have happened to the boy since. He was being prepared for something terrible, I knew. I entered the house, fearful of what I would find. But it felt calm inside. The living room was empty, the cameras still there but clearly turned off. They were probably controlled remotely. The man who was staying in the house with Tyler had no say in the matter.
I checked the kitchen. No sign of the boy.
I got a bad feeling about that. I could feel the boy near—his innocence was unmistakable—and I could both smell his abductor’s sweat and pick up on his internal conflict over protecting the child or destroying him by taking all that made him innocent. I searched a den, small bathroom, and one of the back bedrooms before finding the man and Tyler in a corner of the second bedroom, far from camera range.
That gave me a bad feeling, too.
But the little boy looked safe. He was wearing new clothes and sitting on a pillow placed on the floor, drinking chocolate milk while eating tiny powdered doughnuts from a bag. The man who had taken him was reading to him from a Batman comic while lying on his back on the floor, a pillow beneath his head. Had I not known the situation, I would have guessed that they were father and son.
“You can have another one,” he told Tyler when he saw the small boy hesitating to pull another doughnut from the bag.
Tyler took a doughnut and nibbled it. “When is Mommy coming for me?” he asked.
The man put the comic book down. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Your mommy is sick and in the hospital. You have to stay here for now.”
Lying bastard. Tyler frowned at the news that his mother was sick and I felt anxiousness tug at his little heart. Even at his age, he knew his mother was fragile. How could this man have used that against him?
A cell phone rang and the man reached for it quickly, fear rising in him. I could hear the man on the other end. It was the same authoritative voice that had spoken from the other side of the camera feed. “Where are you?” he demanded.
“We’re in a back bedroom,” the first man said.
“Leave the boy alone until it is time,” the unseen man ordered him.
The man looked up at Tyler, who had started to flip the pages of the comic book while he pretended to know how to read.
“Did you hear me?” the second man asked.
“Yes,” the man in the house said abruptly. “I hear you.” He was filled with so many different emotions that it was impossible to separate them out: rage, anger, fear, guilt, lust, shame, hunger—and evil, too, I thought, but I could not be sure if it was coming from the man or something the man himself had sensed.
“Get back in camera range now,” the unseen man ordered. “You’re getting sloppy about this.”
“I have followed your orders precisely,” the first man argued, his voice growing in pitch. The emotions in him roiled and I felt his shame and guilt grow.
“You’ve been sloppy. Haven’t you been reading the papers? They’re getting closer. I’m moving the timetable up.”
“I’m not ready,” the first man insisted, panic in his voice.
The second man laughed. It was an ugly sound that filled me with darkness. It was so ripe and evil and filled with certainty that the first man would fall. “You’ll be more than ready when the time comes. Then it will be all I can do to control your appetite.”
“I’m not like you,” the first man insisted.
“Aren’t you?” the second man challenged. “Now get back into camera range and take the boy’s shirt off.”
The first man started to argue, but changed his mind. He hung up his phone and coaxed the boy back into the living room. He did not remove the boy’s shirt. “I’ve got to go out for a moment,” he told Tyler. “I’ll be right back. I’ll bring you a treat.”
“Can you bring me my mommy?” the boy asked hopefully.
“Not yet,” the first man lied. “But soon. When she’s feeling better. How about some French fries. Do you like French fries?”
“I like the toys that come with them.”
“Okay, I’ll bring you some. In the meantime, here are your other toys.” The man arranged the plastic soldiers he had bought earlier in front of the boy and left. His cell phone was ringing again before he was even out the door. “What are you going to do?” he said into the phone. “Come over and make me?” The front door shut behind him and I was alone with the boy.
Or maybe I wasn’t.
Tyler Matthews picked up a toy solider and held it out, like an offering, speaking to someone I could not see.
“I share,” he said proudly. “I learned how in preschool. I will give you a soldier.”
He smiled at whatever answer he alone had heard. He arranged the soldier on the rug and added a few more plastic men. “That’s you, Pawpaw,” he said, pointing to a toy soldier dressed in a paratrooper outfit. “See his gun?”
The boy touched a tiny gun painted on the plastic soldier’s hip. “Let’s play army.” He cocked his head, listening intently. “No,” he told his invisible friend. “I’m not scared. I’m a big boy. But I think Mommy will be mad about the doughnuts. Do you want one? I can get one for you.” Whatever he heard in reply, he settled back into place on the rug, then stretched out on his stomach and, with the deep intensity of small children, became lost in his imaginary world, unaware that the cameras above him were recording his every move and that the man who would soon return was not his friend.
A few minutes later, the man who had abducted Tyler Matthews returned to the apartment, carrying a Happy Meal and a newspaper. He left the food with the boy and took a seat at the far end of the kitchen table, where the cameras could not see him. He lit a cigarette and began to read the newspaper intently. The front page was splashed with the news about Tyler’s abduction. He pulled on a cigarette as he scanned through the articles
on the front page. Both excitement and dread danced in him as he read of Tyler’s abduction, the adrenaline overcoming any fear he had at being caught. Then I felt something in him catch, a curiosity and some sort of recognition. He let his cigarette drop and reread the article he’d been scanning, frowning as he did so. Images flickered across his mind as he searched to find meaning in something he remembered. Confusion followed, then a revelation, and, right on its heels, guilt again and a sense of obligation. He stood up abruptly from the table and joined Tyler in the living room, coaxing the boy to eat. I lingered behind, curious to see what he had been reading.
It was not an article about the abduction of Tyler Matthews. The article that had triggered his internal turmoil had been a story about the murder of Fiona Harker, relegated to a spot on the second page, juxtaposed ironically above a story detailing the success of a recent fundraiser for the hospital.
What in the world could Fiona Harker have to do with him? I wondered. What was the connection?
The man’s cell phone rang again. This time he sounded angry rather than obedient when he answered it. “What do you want?” he demanded.
“Have you been smoking in the house?” the man on the other end asked.
“No,” the first man said.
“You’re lying. The smoke is spoiling the clarity of the shot. It’s a filthy habit.”
“You should know about filthy habits,” the first man snapped. He was staring at Tyler Matthews, who was trying to feed French fries to his plastic soldiers.