“We got him,” Streeter growled, his eyes fixed on the screen.
Tony whistled and repeated, “We got him.”
“How many names do we have so far on the narrowed list of violent sex offenders?” Streeter asked.
“Well, by process of elimination—those we could account for, such as those who are incarcerated—we’re down to this.” He handed Streeter the sheets. I peeked over his shoulder. Thirty-six names. None I recognized. A lot of people to follow up on.
“Any that fit the description we have on this guy so far?” Streeter asked.
Gates nodded. “Six of them. I have surveillance people in the field as we speak waiting to pull them in, if you’d like.”
Streeter studied the list the chief handed him. So did I.
“Watch these clips,” Linwood said as the images flashed quickly on the screen. He pointed at the image of the cars departing DIA. One image was of a lone man in a two-tone brown station wagon. “The time lapse would be about right for this guy leaving the parking ramps. I can’t really tell, but doesn’t that look like him? No dark coat, but aren’t those the same coveralls he was wearing when he entered DIA? The sunglasses? The greasy-looking hair?”
“That’s him,” Streeter said confidently.
“Any sign of little Max?” I asked, nausea roiling.
“No.”
Streeter answered, “He’s probably got him hiding on the floor in the backseat, covered by a blanket or something.”
“That’s what we figured,” Linwood said.
Streeter asked, “Jack, what does the profile from BSU look like?”
Jack shuffled quickly through his stack of papers and computer printouts. “If I had to guess, this guy is probably an introverted preferential child molester, rather than a seduction or sadistic type, although I haven’t ruled out the sadistic type altogether.”
Jack was amazing. And smart. I asked, “What is the introverted type?”
Streeter said, “It means our guy is a dirty old man, the type of guy who gets off on targeting strangers and very young children. He’s the flasher we find at playgrounds and school yards.”
“That’s sick,” I said, grimacing in disgust.
Jack added, “Introverted preferential child molesters tend to range in age from sixteen to eighty, are typically male, engage in minimal conversation with their victims, prefer hanging around places children frequent like playgrounds as Streeter suggested, and target total strangers, particularly the very young. Although introverted types often engage in passive sexual encounters with their victims, such as exposing themselves, they can become more aggressive, which is why I said I haven’t completely ruled out that this guy may indeed be more of the sadistic type.”
Streeter said, “The good thing for us is that if this man is an introverted preferential child molester, that means he will likely have left a trail. It’s so hard to prove child molestation cases, but with repetitious behavior patterns, it makes it a hell of a lot easier.”
“Precisely,” Jack agreed. “He has taken a big risk to acquire his victim at DIA. He might move unexpectedly after this. He’s probably never been married, lives alone, lived with his parents most of his life, has a nearly nonexistent social life, never dates, has no relationships with his peers, and has an obsession with young children, treating them almost as if they were his possessions. If I had to guess, it’s highly likely he was sexually abused as a child and has already molested several, maybe dozens of young kids already. Most likely we will never know how many children this guy has molested because he’s probably a master at manipulating young children to get what he wants from them, and seduces them with attention and gifts to assure their silence.”
I added, “These perverted ass … asinine people have a sixth sense for sniffing out the vulnerable,” I added, noticing Jack’s and Streeter’s stares. I ignored them. “It’s almost like a predator’s instinctual ability to single out the weakest of the prey before pouncing.”
Holding up the reports Jack had handed him, Streeter added, “These people can single out the one child in a crowd who comes from a broken home or who has been molested before.”
Jack turned back to the video and the grainy image of the creep in the overcoat. “This guy reminds me of a vulture who circles his prey from miles above. He targeted little Max once he sensed the young boy was suffering from parental neglect.”
“Oh my gosh, Streeter! You were right all along. Your instinct. This isn’t a kidnapping for money. Never was,” I said.
“And my instinct tells me we won’t find anything with these six violent sex offenders, but Gates, tell your surveillance teams to get going and move in on them,” Streeter said. “This is no time for my instincts to be wrong. In the meantime, let’s focus on the nonviolent list of sexual predators involving children. Lengthy, but I bet our guy is on this list.”
Gates hurried to the other side of the room, cell phone in hand, and started barking orders. Streeter set the short list aside and studied the long list of offenders. Names. Addresses.
At the thought of poor little Max’s fate, my voice squeaked, “This creep has no intention of returning little Max.” I felt the color drain from my face as quickly as I spoke the words.
As if on cue, Tony’s cell phone rang at the exact time my cell phone rang.
I answered and Frances’s voice said, “Liv, I need help.”
“Not now, Frances. I’m in the middle of something.”
“It’s Noah. He thinks he talked with the missing boy.” Her words were choppy, troubled. Serious. She hadn’t called me Boots, which alarmed me.
“Sis?” My eyes flew up to meet Jack’s, then Streeter’s, both men studying me carefully.
To remain focused, I lowered my eyes to the long list in Streeter’s hand. An address popped out at me, one in nearby Wheat Ridge, Colorado, on the street where my sister lived.
Gates ended his call first. I could hear him tell Streeter and Jack, “Sorry for the interruption, but a man called who thinks there’s something suspicious with a little girl who’s visiting at his neighbor’s house, and he wants to meet with me.”
Jack said, “Are you going?”
He shook his head. “I’ll let my chief deputy handle it until we’re done with our raid on the short-list suspects. Experience tells me that when something like the Maximillian Bennett Williams III abduction floods the networks and media outlets during the holidays, we’ll get plenty of people whose imaginations have run away from them.”
Everything came flooding toward me at once. I could hear the men talking while I was trying to decipher my sister’s story about Noah crying, having a seizure, banging his knuckles on the glass, banging his head on the window, the five-finger message of “girl,” and the laugh. Something about Dad polishing his shoes. And the address on Streeter’s list. Something gnawed at me. As Frances ended her call with me abruptly, my sense was that my sister was hysterical and was headed to the Denver Police Department to make a report, to meet Gabriel. I stood for a moment staring at the phone in my hands, then at the list in Streeter’s.
“Wait!” I said, stuffing my cell phone in my pocket. Tony was leaving, and I had only half heard what was happening. I asked him, “What was his name?”
“Who?” Tony asked, stopping just short of the door.
“The guy who called you.”
“Hogarty. Why?”
“Gabriel Hogarty’s my brother-in-law.” The men swung their gazes toward me. I pointed at the name on the long list of suspects in Streeter’s hand. “2291 Hedge Road in Wheat Ridge. Jason Horace Fletcher. That’s my sister’s neighbor. Noah says he talked to the girl with black hair. But he thinks she’s really a boy. He heard her laugh and thinks it’s not a girl at all but little Max in disguise.”
“Who’s Noah?” Chief Gates asked.
“A very brave, very smart little boy, and my nephew.”
CHAPTER 51
Noah
MOM HUNG UP THE phone wit
h Auntie Liv and ruffled my short brown hair. I arched my back and tried to stretch my bent arm toward her, succeeding with one quick, spastic movement long after she had walked away.
I talked to my mom as she hurried through the house grabbing last-minute items and turning off lights. A string of vowels was all I could manage, but my thoughts were clear. I wanted to tell her to calm down and to hurry up at the same time. She was doing the hurrying just fine, but I didn’t sense her calm. She was mumbling as she moved about.
Normally, I preferred being with my mom over anyone else because she listened to me as if my moans and gurgles were more than that, as if they were words in conversation, even if it was all just in my imagination. I loved being alone with her. Not that I didn’t love being with the rest of my family. I did. It was just that my mom was always so calm, open, and attentive when we were alone. Nothing distracted or troubled her. She was usually totally relaxed. She was the most beautiful when she was relaxed.
This was a side of her I don’t think I’d ever seen before. Totally not relaxed. Not calm. She was frazzled. She’d already put two sweaters and a coat on me and seemed to have forgotten she’d done it. Scatterbrained. I’m glad she’d managed to call Auntie Liv because it seemed to have calmed her enough to think. At least a little bit.
My mom leaned against the kitchen counter and combed her long hair with her splayed fingers, holding her palm against her forehead. She was stressed and deep in thought. The top three buttons of her denim work shirt were unbuttoned, revealing the white cotton T-shirt underneath. Her faded blue jeans hung loosely on her thin frame and had the initial frays of a hole above her right knee. She wore oversized white cotton socks on her feet. Her fair skin had a glow, not like the one after her early morning workout, but instead due to the tension of worrying about the child next door. Although she normally wore mascara, today was a holiday and she hadn’t planned to go anywhere, so she’d skipped it. Her clear blue eyes, normally so pure and kind, looked wild. Even still, she was a striking beauty, just like my dad says.
But stress didn’t look as good on her, if you ask me. She looked more like a caged animal. And it was kind of scaring me.
The nine o’clock news program was blaring from the living room and the anchorwoman recounted the top news of the day, which of course was about the missing boy from yesterday. The news reporter was saying “ … and closer to home, the top news story in national news is the disturbing story about the disappearance of Maximillian Bennett Williams III from the Denver International Airport yesterday.” Images of the boy and the airport flashed on the screen as the woman summarized the story of the boy’s mysterious disappearance.
Mom grabbed the handles of my wheelchair and pushed me toward the door that led to the garage. I heard her go back to the counter and grab her car keys and then go into the living room.
“… unconfirmed reports that it might be a kidnapping. No news so far on the boy. It has been more than twenty-four hours since his disappearance and all of America is hoping and praying for his safe return …”
“Noah, I am so proud of you for sticking with it.”
Great, but Mom, we’ve got to move, I demanded in my head.
“I didn’t understand what you were trying to tell me. Now I understand. You were trying to tell me that Sammy was the missing boy from the television, weren’t you?”
I smiled tenuously at my mom, my eyes darting upward. Move fast, Mom.
“Well, I’m proud of you, Noah.” Her voice was shaky. “Now, let’s get that boy some help.”
Finally!
I felt my mom unbuckle my harness and slip a coat over my arms—again—and a cap on my head. She tucked a thick blanket around me and strapped me back into my harness, scooping my blue chair from the wheelchair frame and carrying me into the garage.
I heard the little blond boy on the television run back and forth from the camera to the slide, wave and greet his parents, giggling throughout the clip. I heard the giggle. It was a very distinct giggle. Contagious. Happy.
“Oh my God,” my mom choked. “It really is the same child.”
Yes, Mom, I said, flashing her a sad smile.
While she strapped me into the backseat, Mom explained, “We’re going straight to the Denver Police Department, Noah, to tell them all about this. That the girl, Sammy, is really Maximillian Bennett Williams III. I told Auntie Liv on the phone and she said she’d look into it right away. Dad’s meeting us down there. They’ll want our statement. They’ll want to talk with you.”
I moaned, offering a smile.
She closed my door and ran around to the driver’s side and slid in behind the wheel. I saw the garage door open as she started the car, easing us out of the garage into the dark night.
“Oh, darn it. I forgot the bath. The water’s running.”
My mom opened her door, dashed back inside the house through the garage, leaving me in the purring minivan in the driveway.
Then I heard it.
The garage door creaked open next door and a car pulled out. I heard the car stop in the driveway and the garage door close. As the car idled, I heard screaming from inside the car. It was Sammy. Little Max. I was sure of that. Mr. Fletcher was taking him somewhere.
I started to yell for my mom but all I managed to do was push my stocking cap over my eyes again. I felt tears welling in my eyes and my throat go raw from my screams. I couldn’t help it. I was scared. For Sammy. For myself.
The next thing I heard chilled me to my bones.
A car door opened.
Boots crunched through snow coming closer.
I quit my attempts at yelling and held my breath to stop the tears so I could hear what was happening outside the minivan. A rush of cold air blasted my face.
Someone had opened my car door.
Clammy, unfamiliar hands were unbuckling my seat and pulling me into the cold air.
And it wasn’t my mom.
CHAPTER 52
IT WAS TIME.
He hated to do it, but it was time to say goodbye. It was not his fault. It was that nosey neighbor lady and her husband. They had seen Sammy earlier today playing outside and then came over with the cookies to check on Sammy.
But her eyes had betrayed her.
And then she made a mistake, a big mistake. She ran off and left her son alone in the car. And the broken boy had seen everything. He would have ignored the entire mess, but the boy’s eyes made him nervous. Actually, this kid’s haunting gray eyes totally freaked him out. It was his mother’s ghost, he was sure. She had come back to haunt him, to judge him, after seven relatively peaceful years, through the broken boy.
The lady next door was the reason his time with Sammy had been shorter than he’d planned. He wanted more.
So much more.
She would lose her boy just like he had to lose his. He didn’t want to draw more attention to himself and was already terrified of getting caught. The smart thing would be to ignore the boy, pretend he didn’t exist. But then when he came back home, the broken boy would still be next door, judging him with those eyes.
He tried to decide what was best.
Surely the kid wouldn’t be missed. He was broken. His parents had the redheaded girl. They would forget about the broken boy in time. Besides, this kid was possessed. By his dead mother. They shared the same murky gray eyes.
And without Sammy, there was no proof that he had done anything wrong.
But he would be thankful for the time he’d had with Sammy.
Sammy was special.
A gift.
He was different from the others.
Sammy was the son he’d never had. The son he wished he could have been for his own parents. Innocent and good. Compliant and carefree. Maybe if he’d been more like Sammy when he was a kid, his parents would have treated him more kindly. Maybe. If only he’d been obedient. Like Sammy.
Obedient to the end.
The screams of his parents still ricocheted in the corners of
his mind.
The sound would quiet, eventually.
It always did.
CHAPTER 53
I DON’T KNOW HOW long I was with Frances and Gabriel, but it seemed like an eternity. My sister was a mess and I wasn’t much better. Noah was their world and my earth angel. My mind could not wrap itself around the idea that his fate was in the hands of a monster like Fletcher.
As the story unfolded, we all realized Noah had figured it out. He’d known all along. I should have listened more closely to Frances earlier today, asked more questions. She was thinking the same thing. Blaming herself.
I had to make this right.
Elizabeth and Michael were upstairs with Emma in her room. Gabriel had called them right away. We might have needed Emma’s help, but she certainly didn’t need to be a part of all the drama that was going on down here. She didn’t need to know that her big brother, Noah, was missing.
Frances grabbed my hand right before I left the house and had me say a prayer together with Gabriel. She prayed for little Max. She prayed for Noah’s safe return. She prayed that while Noah was gone he wouldn’t have a seizure or need his medication. She prayed for me, thanked God for having me here with her on the case to find Noah.
I felt totally helpless and inadequate.
Frances was another one of my earth angels. But even God couldn’t keep me from getting booted off this case. I was too personally involved. Way too personally involved. And despite all my sister’s prayers, there was no way her dream that I help would come true.
I had to face the music and let Streeter do what he needed to do.
As I approached the car parked in front of Fletcher’s house, I wiped my puffy eyes and took a deep breath. Streeter was standing by Agent Steve Knapp, who was sitting quietly behind the wheel of the Bureau car with his window rolled down.
I heard Streeter ask, “Any word from Mills?”
Knapp shook his massive head. “Nope. He’s around the corner watching for Fletcher.”
They saw me. Their expressions changed. I hadn’t seen either one look like this before. I must have looked frightful.
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