The camera panned the distraught parents cowering on their front porch talking to police. Their names, Ernest and Joyce Bennett, were plastered across the bottom of the screen. When Investigative Reporter Neil Parker shoved his microphone into their faces, a cop told him to back off while Ernest collected Joyce into his embrace and hurried her back inside where she’d be safe from the news crew.
Willie came back on the screen and announced that this time there was a witness who gave a description of the kidnapper to the police. He was described as a white man with long hair that was wavy, light brown, and pulled back in a loose ponytail. He’d had a bushy full beard. They showed a composite drawing.
Alarm bells went off in my head. All at once, I could see him again. It was the murderer who had whacked Howard in the head before he slammed into me. It had to be.
I started yelling at the TV, telling the screen that it was him, the guy who had killed Howard.
Ollie wanted me to quiet down so he could listen. In spite of my tirade, Willie went on. “The witness saw him running from the back door of the house.”
I raced to my basket of junk and dug through it till I came up with the card Lieutenant Fosdick had given me. I had to punch in the numbers three times to get it right.
With my speed redial, I called over and over, but I kept getting his voicemail.
Since the lieutenant had been called to investigate the assault on Howard, I wondered if he was at this most recent crime scene too. I would go find him.
I turned to the Bs in the white pages and looked up Bennett. There they were, Ernest and Joyce Bennett, only two miles from Howard’s office. I bet that was Fosdick’s turf and it would be easy to track him down. I’d just look for the flashing lights and hang a right.
I hopped into a cab and told the driver to make a beeline to the address. At the Bennett’s, several cop cars and two news vans were scattered on the street in front of the house, all parked at haphazard angles. Plastic yellow tape tied several towering trees together across the front yard. It barely held back the curious gapers and persistent reporters.
I pushed my way to the front of the crowd and yelled out to a police officer on the other side of the yellow tape, asking if Lieutenant Fosdick was around. He waved his arms toward the whole crowd and told us we had to move back. I tried again to be heard over the crowd.
“I need Lieutenant Fosdick,” I hollered above the commotion. “Is Lieutenant Fosdick here?”
Finally, the cop heard enough of what I said to lift the yellow tape and signal me under it. When we got a distance from the crowd, he asked me again what I wanted.
I told him who I was and he said he thought he recognized me. He had been at Howard’s the night he was killed. He said Fosdick was inside and he’d take me in to talk to him.
When we walked into the front room of the crowded brownstone, the cop escorting me signaled Fosdick to come over. He reminded Fosdick that I was the witness at the Kensler murder and I had something to tell him.
“I saw the news,” I told Fosdick in a rush. “And the police sketch. It was the same man. It has to be. The one who bumped into me at my Uncle Howard’s.”
We talked for a bit, until the mother who had just lost her baby interrupted us. She was a tiny thing, and so tranquil. She said, “Please excuse me for interrupting, but I saw you at the funeral and didn’t get the chance. I wanted to give you my condolences for your uncle. He was a kind man.”
“You knew him?”
“Oh, yes. He recently helped us with little Emma. We got her just last week. He was helping with her adoption. We’re foster parents and she was going to go to her new home next week. I’m truly sorry about your uncle.”
Amazing. This kind woman had just been through this awful ordeal and she was taking the trouble to comfort me in my loss.
I thanked her, finished up with Fosdick, who ended our conversation by offering me a stick of Wrigley’s, which I took to try to ease my nausea, and I headed back home.
On the way, I couldn’t get Joyce Bennett off my mind. Something about her, or what she’d said, kept pulling my thoughts back to our short conversation. Finally, it hit me.
Both babies that were kidnapped were adoption babies. Joyce Bennett knew Howard. If the other baby’s adoption attorney had been Howard, there was a connection. And if there was a connection, Anna and Joe’s baby could be in danger.
Once back at my apartment building, I flew up the stairs and banged through the door. Ollie abruptly awoke from his nap and jumped onto his tiptoes and hissed at me, but I ignored him and sprang on the sofa to dig behind it and find the newspaper I’d dumped there before.
The story on the kidnapping gave the parents’ names. Once again, I flipped open the phone book, but they weren’t listed. Great. Now what?
I’d have to be creative.
I called my hospital unit and asked for Sandi with a fake southern accent. When Sandi answered, I dropped the disguise and asked her to do something for me. I explained that my dead Uncle Howard was friends with the family whose kid had been kidnapped and left at the hospital, and I wanted to get in touch with them in case they didn’t know about Howard.
She wondered if this wasn’t a weird time to be worrying about that, with it almost one in the morning. I told her I couldn’t sleep and wanted to get the information while I was thinking about it. She said, sure, she’d help, so I explained that the family wasn’t listed in the phone directory and I wanted her to check the hospital files for their address.
Silence filled my phone for a few minutes, except for the clicking of a keyboard while Sandi searched the files.
“Okay. Here it is. Got a pencil ready?”
Did I have a pencil ready! “Shoot.”
She read back the address and phone number, then a baby cried in the background. “Gotta go. A baby has a feeding due.”
“Thanks Sandi. I really appreciate the help.”
“No problem. I can’t believe they suspended you. I hope whatever trouble is going on, it clears up soon.”
“Thanks. I hope so too. Goodnight.”
Of course she knew all about it. Probably more than I did, the way gossip spread through the hospital faster than a nosocomial staph infection.
It was one in the morning—my best time lately, since that seemed to be the only time I wasn’t feeling sick—and there was no way I could sleep. So I decided to go pay a visit to the first kidnapping victim. I didn’t know what I’d do once I got there, but I had a compulsion to go that I couldn’t ignore.
I took a cab there and watched their house for a few minutes once we drove up in front. The driver wasn’t the talkative type, so we just sat in silence while the meter ticked away.
Then a light came on in an upstairs room. It made sense someone with a new baby in the house would be up at all hours of the night. I asked the cabby to hang around for a minute while I went to the door.
I couldn’t believe I was doing this. What nerve. What audacity.
I rang the bell. A baby cried. Some footsteps sounded on the other side of the door, then the porch light snapped on. A voice shot through a window to the side of the door.
He demanded, with a string of profanity, to know who I was and if I had any idea that it was the middle of the night.
His voice had no hint of a welcome. But what would you expect after what they’d been through lately?
I hoped he wasn’t holding a baseball bat. Who could blame him if he pummeled me first and asked questions later? Most people would have just shot me for ringing their bell at two a.m., even if their kid hadn’t just been snatched.
“I’m Howard Kensler’s niece. I need to talk to you.” I thought the name would mean something to him. And I dreaded it.
The latch clicked and the door opened to the end of its chain. In the crack I could see a long narrow piece of a brown man with one shiny eye blinking out at me. “And this can’t wait till the god-forsaken morning?”
I think he was softening.
“I saw your light on, so I didn’t think I’d wake you up.”
“What about Howard?” he barked out at me. “I heard he’s dead.”
“You knew him then?”
“Sure I knew him. What’s this about?” He shut the door and the chain rattled on the other side. He opened it again, a little farther this time, but he didn’t invite me in or open the screen. My knees were too wobbly anyway. I don’t think I could have taken a step forward if I wanted to.
“I just have one question. Did Howard do your adoption for you?”
“What if he did?”
“I just need to know. He did my cousin’s adoption and I’m afraid the person who took your baby is trying to find hers.”
He stared at me a long while, like telling me would reveal some deep family secret. Finally, he grunted out, “Yeah, he did the work.”
My stomach knotted. I was hoping against all hope he’d say no, that he’d only heard of him through the news. Now, I had to get to Anna. If that scary, hairy man had found Howard’s client list and was searching for the babies he’d adopted out, Anna had to be on that list.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked the man standing in his pajamas at the doorway.
“Now you want to use my phone?”
“Please,” I begged.
He cursed again, but with less vitriolic words, and opened the screen with a shrug of resignation and waved me in. I turned really quick to the cab and signaled to wait for just another minute. Then I went in. He directed me to the kitchen phone. I dialed up Anna’s cell but it went right to voicemail. I tried their landline and the phone began ringing. While I stood there counting rings, the frowning man leaned against his kitchen counter with his arms crossed tightly and waited.
“Do you want a sandwich too, as long as you’re here?”
I shook my head. Though I wasn’t currently puking, my stomach wasn’t interested. I knew he didn’t mean it anyway. That bite in his voice gave it away. I was exasperating him a little.
Okay. A lot.
On the two-thousandth ring, I gave up and hung up. “No answer.”
“Imagine that. And at this time of day.”
The baby was crying again in the background. I heard a woman’s cooing through the fussing.
“I better be going.”
“So soon?”
“Thanks a lot for your help.”
“Sure thing. Any time. Why not? Want to come back tomorrow night? How about Christmas. Can you come for Christmas?”
“Thanks. I’ll let you know.”
I hustled out to the cab and gave the cabby Anna’s address. I had gone this far. I wasn’t going to stop now.
Chapter 21
A picture of Howard on the floor in a puddle of blood flashed into my head as I approached Anna’s house. My stomach twisted and turned inside-out with dread that I’d find Anna or Joe clubbed to death and the baby gone.
When the taxi pulled into their driveway, everything was dark, silent.
They could have been lying dead inside already, the scary, hairy guy long gone.
Once again, I told the driver to wait. By now I owed him so much, I was confident he wasn’t going anywhere without me.
I started first with the doorbell. If the scary, hairy guy was anywhere near by, I wanted him to vamoose out the back door before I went in. After ringing the bell incessantly, I pounded on the door, now more panicked about their well-being than meeting up with the murderer.
I opened my mouth to scream out Anna’s name and the door flew open. There stood Joe, his eyes like two silver CDs. He was strung tighter than a sharp piano and was ready to spring.
When he saw me, he relaxed—or tried to—and grabbed his chest over his heart.
“What on God’s green earth are you doing here this time of night, Kate? You scared me to death!”
“Are you all right? You and Anna and the baby? All of you are all right?”
“We were until you woke us up. This was the first night the baby slept through her night feeding. We were sacked out, Kate.”
I rushed in and flipped on the lights, dashing around the room like a ball in a pinball machine, making sure no one was lurking behind the drapes or under the dining table.
“What are you doing?” he said from the entryway where he still held the door open.
“I called and called. Why didn’t you answer?”
“We turned off the phones. Kate, for heaven’s sake, what’s wrong?”
I told him. I told him my whole theory—except the cloning part—that the scary, hairy guy, hired by the evil biological father, had taken files from Howard’s office which had information about the families my uncle was representing for adoptions, and now he was going to their homes and abducting their babies to find the missing baby. And I was certain Joe and Anna could be the next target.
He couldn’t contain the skepticism that leaked out of his expression, but when Anna came downstairs halfway through my oration, she stopped squinting from the lights and her face took on a mixture of panic and dread.
“Joe, we can’t stay,” she said. “He’ll know to find us here.”
“Relax, Anna,” he said. “No one is going to come after us.” Then to me, “Have you talked to the police about this? If there were any real danger, I’d suspect they’d be the ones here telling us about it.”
“I haven’t had a chance. There isn’t time.” I couldn’t tell him alerting the police might get my new boyfriend in trouble. I still hadn’t figured out if turning in Carl would implicate Mack too. “You’ve got to get away, go to a hotel, rent an RV, anything. At least until something is figured out,” I insisted as I dropped to the floor and looked under the sofa.
Anna agreed and pushed Joe to comply. He finally gave in and said they could go to his parents’ vacant condo in the morning, the sun-lit morning.
That wasn’t good enough for Anna, who was pulling her windbreaker on over her smocked cotton nightgown.
“I’m going to get Charlotte and drive there tonight. I hope you’ll come, Joe, but I’m not going to stay here, not until I know we’re safe.”
It took thirty minutes before Anna had everything assembled that she’d need for a few days away. Sometime during the process, Joe joined in her frenzied packing, swept up by the tension and energy produced by the fear that something dangerous was imminent.
When they were finally ready, they loaded up the car, got Charlotte in the car seat, and disappeared into the night. With a huge sigh of relief, I waved to the red dots fading up the distant hill as their tail lights grew too small to see. Then I got back in my cab and tried to figure out where to apply for the loan I’d need to pay the fare.
When I got home, I ran inside and raided the teapot hidden in the oven for my Christmas money and trotted back down as fast as I could to pay the driver before I’d owe him my quarter collection as well. I’d probably need that to pay the rent, since I no longer had a job.
I dragged back up the steps, ready to collapse now that I’d made sure Anna and Joe and their baby were safe. Each step seemed twice as high as the last.
Ollie wondered about my frantic entrance and exit, and now my sluggish reentry. I scratched him behind his brown velvety ear and said, “Let’s get some sleep, your Highness. I’m beat.”
He purred like a Jacuzzi and followed me to bed.
Chapter 22
I woke up way too early. But I could catch Mack before he went to work. I wanted to tell him what I’d done the night before and talk out my theories with him. I’d forgiven him about the sudden departure at the restaurant. He was a doctor anyway. Doctors often had to fly off at a moment’s notice to save lives and change the world.
I tried not to remember he was in research. The urgency of a summons to doctors of research came in just behind dermatologists.
When Mack answered, he sounded uptight and angry. His hello snapped out like an over-stretched rubber band, and it stung when it hit me.
“Hi,” I
said.
He sucked in a deep breath before he said anything. My stomach knotted. Maybe I shouldn’t have called. His voice was hushed, like he didn’t want someone to hear him talking to me.
“Hi, Kate. I can’t talk now.” His voice didn’t give anything away.
“Okay. Sorry to bother you.” It sounded a little hurt, like I had been slighted. Rather juvenile of me, but I couldn’t help it. I’d made myself vulnerable by calling, and now I was being told I wasn’t wanted.
Then I heard a noise. Either Mack had a new cat or a baby was crying in the background.
“Is that Tutu the cat, or is that a baby?”
“I have to go.” Dead air. He’d hung up on me.
***
I stood outside of Mack’s door listening for some sound on the other side, like for his new cat-baby. I knocked a couple of times, but there was only silence, so I pushed open the mail slot in his door to see if I could see anything on the other side.
The door swung open. I snapped up and hid alongside the doorframe. That was really dumb. Even if Mack hadn’t seen me at first, I think the doorframe imitation was bad enough he’d be on to me. He stood there with a very stinky cloth diaper held far from his body, looking at me like I was a fool.
“What are you doing?” he said.
Hmm. I had two choices here. I could stand very still and hope he’d realized the Kate-looking doorjamb was just playing tricks with his eyes in the bright morning sunshine, or I could fess up and admit I was spying on him.
I chose the former and stood as stiff as a board.
“Kate, what are you doing?” His voice was irritated. Maybe I should’ve answered.
I gave up the charade and stepped out of my well-concealed hiding place.
“Hi, Mack.”
“Kate?”
“Something disconnected us. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
So cool. I could think on my feet.
“I’m fine.” He came out of his condo, closing the door most of the way behind him before he proceeded to the trash chute.
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