by Rick Mofina
“And what about the other side of the Green?” one of the officers asked Greer.
Something in the officer’s tone betrayed to Ryan that a secret exchange of information had passed between the officers, something important.
“Yeah,” Greer said. “We’ll get our people to start a canvass along DeBerry Street and the others that border the woods.”
“Hold on. Isn’t that where the new halfway house for paroled criminals is supposed to open next month? On DeBerry?”
“It’s been operating for about six months now,” Greer said.
“Six months? What the—Six months? Why didn’t we know?”
“It opened quietly. They wanted it low profile. Mr. Lane, take it easy.”
“Take it easy?”
“Those residences are monitored under tight restrictions. This will be a matter of routine that we’ll check everyone, everywhere.”
Ryan bit his bottom lip, angry at himself for not thinking, not remembering about the halfway house and not putting up a better fence and security. How could he let his guard down? His mind had been focused on his business.
More people had arrived from Karen’s store and were gathered around her, comforting her and Tyler.
The nightmare’s real, Ryan thought as he stood there, helpless amid the chaos of the growing search, stubbled face, hair messed, still wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, although he’d managed to get sneakers on his feet.
Time is ticking down on Maddie, and we need more help.
Feeling his phone in his hand, he made the call he had to make and it was answered on the third ring.
“It’s me,” Ryan said.
“Hey bro, what’s up?” Cole Lane said.
So positive. That can-do, climb-any-mountain drive of his just floods through—I don’t know if I can say it. How do I say it?
The silence hissed until Cole broke it.
“What is it, Ry? Why’re you calling?”
“Maddie’s gone.”
“What? What do you mean, Maddie’s gone?”
Ryan took a breath and slowly relayed all he knew to his older brother.
“We’ve got police but we need your help, Cole.”
“Okay. Who’s there from the Syracuse police leading things at the moment?”
“Officers Dalvin Greer and Eve Porter.”
“Don’t know them. Did they protect the scene, seal the house?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll call some of my guys. I’ll get Jill and Dalton and we’ll be right over. Hang in there. It’s going to be fine, okay? You hang in there.”
Hang in there.
Ending the call and taking stock of everything around him, Ryan thought it was ironic because “hang in there,” were the words he and Karen had used all those years ago to help save Cole’s life.
6
Miles across the city in Sparkling Brook Ridge, a relatively new upscale community of large homes—some would say mansions—Cole Lane looked out the glass doors of his kitchen breakfast room at his patio and his pool, and processed what his brother, Ryan, had just told him.
Maddie was missing, taken from her bedroom in the night. He read the police advisory on his phone to confirm it was true, and his breathing quickened.
This is a nightmare.
He sent prayers to Maddie, Karen, Tyler and Ryan, then thought of his own son, Dalton, thankful he was sleeping in his room.
At fourteen, Dalton was a handful. In full-blown adolescent rebellion. He’d given Cole and his wife, Jill, plenty of attitude these days, but at least he was home and he was safe. Cole couldn’t imagine what his brother, sister-in-law and nephew were going through right now.
I’ve got to help them find Maddie.
He needed to alert Jill, but she was out for her morning run. He scanned their long driveway, which twisted through their treed lot to the street.
She’ll be home soon. I’ll tell her then.
Cole walked through their spacious house to Dalton’s room. The door displayed the handmade sign reading Danger Zone and was shut, signaling that Dalton was sleeping, or wanted privacy. Cole and Jill couldn’t enter without knocking in keeping with what Jill called the “period of respect and trust” they’d all agreed upon.
Cole banged his fist on the door.
“Dalton, get up! We’ve got bad news and I need you.”
A groggy groan seeped from the room, then nothing.
“Dalton!”
“What!”
“Maddie’s missing. I’m coming in.”
Cole was hit with the smell of cologne and body spray, and he nearly tripped over a bowl of corn chips, buried in the pants, shirts, dirty socks and underwear strewn on the floor. The place looked like a disaster site. Dalton’s computer games, paintball stuff, his charging stands and schoolwork were cluttered on his desk, dresser and night table.
Dalton was under the blankets, and Cole shook the bed.
“Maddie’s missing, and we’ve got to get to Uncle Ryan’s to help look for her. Let’s go, son.”
Dalton sat up. “Maddie’s missing? Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.”
Dalton reached for his phone and began tapping and swiping.
Cole said, “Police are with them now. Someone took her in the night.”
Dalton rubbed his face, studying the police advisory he’d found online. His mouth opened slightly with disbelief. As Dalton read it, Cole took quick stock of his son’s messed hair. He wore it long, parted in the center with the sides that nearly covered his face to his chin, some kind of rock-star style. Dalton had blotchy skin, his eyes bloodshot, and Cole’s pulse kicked up a notch with suspicion.
Dalton broke his curfew and he wasn’t tired—he looked hungover.
In working together during this “period of respect and trust” to allow Dalton to demonstrate his maturity and improve his behavior, Cole and Jill had set his Friday night curfew at midnight. Last night Dalton went to a friend’s birthday party and was to be picked up and dropped off by a friend’s older brother. Cole was disappointed with himself because after he and Jill came home from going out to dinner, he’d been exhausted, had gone to bed and never heard Dalton come in. Jill was up this morning before Cole, and he hadn’t asked her if she’d heard Dalton.
“What time did you get home last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you break your curfew? Hey, look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“It was late, Dad. The Slades’ car died, and it took a long time to get it going again, so I got home late. I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you call me? I would’ve come for you.”
“I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“Were you drinking at the party?”
Dalton looked his father in the eye. “I had a couple beers.”
“A couple beers.” Cole shook his head. “How many?”
Dalton shrugged. “Two or three maybe?”
“Any drugs?”
“Just beer.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Want me to pee in a bottle?”
Cole pursed his lips and inhaled to diffuse the situation and set the matter aside.
“We don’t have time for this. Get up, get dressed.” Cole tapped Dalton’s phone. “Ask around about Maddie, see if anybody’s heard anything.”
“What do you think happened? Maybe she ran away or something?”
“Don’t know, just get moving.”
* * *
Cole walked to his den, sorting out what he needed to do to help find Maddie, still upset with Dalton for testing his patience. He’d come clean on the beer, but it troubled Cole that Dalton was running with the wrong crowd. Their agreement to give him the freedom to make the right choices w
as not working.
I should be harder on him, Cole thought before the truth pricked him with the memory of his own wild teen years, and he realized what goes around comes around. But you got your shit together, and if you can do it, so can Dalton.
Yeah, but it’s not easy.
Cole was thinking who he had to call as he passed the wall in his home office with the gallery of cherished framed photos and awards marking the achievements and triumphs in his life.
There was Cole, the young Syracuse cop in uniform, Cole the US soldier in Afghanistan. There he was in hospital getting the Purple Heart after he was blown up when his unit was attacked. There he was learning to walk on his prosthetic legs at Walter Reed. There he was with the president. There was Cole and Jill on their wedding day, then the two of them with Dalton. Then the framed cover of Cole’s bestselling memoir, One Man’s Victory Over Adversity, and pictures of Cole interviewed by network news celebrities. There was Cole cutting the ribbon opening his first private security office in Syracuse, with pictures of the satellite offices in Chicago, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles and Manhattan.
At his desk he made calls to the senior investigators in his Syracuse office, all of them ex-cops, detectives who worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Cole’s first call went to Vince Grosso, who was conducting surveillance on an infidelity case.
“Grosso,” he answered on the first ring.
“Vince, my niece is missing.”
“What?”
“I need you to put your case aside and help me.”
“Absolutely.”
“I’ll text you my brother’s address. Meet me there as soon as you can.”
“Sure thing, boss. I’ll see you soon.”
Cole scrolled through his phone, then called Sally Beck, who was wrapping up a child custody case.
“I just saw SPD’s advisory,” Beck said. “I’ll be there.”
Then Cole’s phone rang. The caller was his investigator, Grant Leeder.
“Cole, Grant. I saw a post about Maddison Lane, a missing girl on the west side. Isn’t that your brother’s daughter?”
“Yeah, Grant, Maddie’s my niece.”
“What can I do to help?”
“I’m pulling the senior team together to help find her. We’re meeting at my brother’s home as soon as possible. I’ll send you details now.”
“I’m there, buddy.”
Cole released a long, slow breath and looked at the framed photos next to his computer monitor. There was one of him with Jill and Dalton at Niagara Falls, then another of Ryan, Karen, Tyler and Maddie.
Cole stared at his niece, at the light in her eyes, shining like stars.
I’ll move heaven and earth to find you.
Then Cole looked at his brother.
It was no secret that Cole and Ryan had their differences. Ryan had never forgiven him for his falling out with their old man—talk about a hard-ass—in the last years of his life, and Cole’s refusal to partner with Ryan to carry on their dad’s drywall business.
Ryan never accepted that I couldn’t do it because I didn’t get along with dad the way he did. I needed to go my own way.
But the path Cole followed had nearly resulted in the end of his life.
Nearly—if it hadn’t been for Ryan and Karen.
Cole was grateful for what they had done, but his attempts to reconcile with Ryan over the years were futile. Sure, their families got together on holidays, birthdays, barbecues, and everyone got along. Karen and Jill liked each other. Maddie and Tyler looked up to Dalton. But Ryan’s resentment toward Cole simmered just beneath the surface.
He’ll never let go of it.
Still, it would be forever fused in Cole’s DNA that he owed Ryan and Karen for what they did for him during the darkest days of his life. That’s why he was glad that, despite Ryan’s bitterness toward him, that now, when it really mattered, his brother had reached out to him.
I swear I’ll bring Maddie back to you.
Cole heard Jill in the house and hurried to catch her in their bedroom before she got in the shower.
“Jill,” he said. “Ryan just called. Maddie’s missing. They think someone took her from her bedroom last night.”
“Oh, dear God!” Jill covered her face with her hands, worry filling her eyes. “We have to find her, Cole!”
“We will. I’ve called people in. I got Dalton up. We’re going to meet at Ryan’s house just as soon as we can.”
Several minutes later, Cole, Jill and Dalton were in Cole’s new Land Rover cutting across the city to the west side.
7
The sky above Ryan and Karen Lane’s home thundered as Air-1, the helicopter for Onondaga County, approached Lucifer’s Green.
The pilot, Deputy Ken Nulone, and flight observer, Deputy Gary Blay, calibrated the Bell 407’s equipment as they made several radio dispatches with the county deputies on the ground assisting Syracuse PD in the search for Maddison Lane.
“We’ve got some pretty dense cover down there,” Blay said, scanning the trees flowing under them as they made their first flyover. “We’ll use the infrared on the next pass.”
Nulone banked, they came around and Blay activated the aircraft’s infrared camera, which sensed heat sources in low-light conditions and transformed them into light images on a video monitor.
They slowed over the woods, and soon the glowing ghostly image of a figure and a four-legged animal with its tail swinging appeared on the screen in Air-1’s cockpit. The human figure waved at the chopper.
“That’ll be SPD’s K-9 team,” Bray said.
Nothing else appeared on the monitor. SPD and deputies had set up a perimeter around the woods. Would they find the girl or would they find a body? In the past two weeks, the flight crew had helped locate an escaped convict; then a suicidal woman; and then a ninety-five-year-old man who wandered from a seniors’ home.
Bray scoured the patchwork of rooftops, yards, alleys, parks and vacant lots as they turned above the west side and made more passes over the forest. Occasionally he would raise high-powered binoculars to his face to check an area. They’d nearly completed a pass over the east side of Lucifer’s Green and were banking for another when something streaked on the infrared camera’s monitor.
“Hold on there. We’ve got something. Roll back, Ken.”
Nulone flew them over the northeast corner of the forest and brought the helicopter to a crawl until two glowing figures materialized on the center of the screen.
“Air-One to dispatch, we’ve spotted two subjects on the northeast corner about one hundred yards due southwest of DeBerry. Request units move directly under our position now.”
Nulone moved the helicopter over the thick forest cover and hovered over the two figures concealed below, and stared at the screen that had captured them. One figure was clearly adult size. The other was much smaller.
Both were looking skyward.
* * *
“Fourteen-five, copy!”
Syracuse Officer Jimmy Holmes cranked up the volume and shouted over the chopper into his shoulder microphone while running through the thick woods toward the location.
“I’m coming from DeBerry from the north.”
Every few seconds he glanced up to the canopy of maple, oak, spruce and pine trees, some reaching upward of ninety feet. Through patches of blue he glimpsed Air-1 hovering in a holding position as his radio spurted transmissions.
“Sixteen-twenty, we’re closing in from the east, Jimmy.”
Branches slapped and tugged at Holmes as he got closer, almost directly under the helicopter.
Splotches of color, yellow then light khaki, flashed through the trees and Holmes’s pulse hummed. Maddison Lane was supposed to be wearing a yellow hoodie.
“Fourteen-five, I’ve got a visual on the subject.�
�� Holmes unholstered his gun.
“Sixteen-twenty, we see them too.”
“Sixteen-twenty and fourteen-five, check for cross fire.” A commander’s voice came over the air as Holmes stepped into a clearing, arms extended, his gun pointed at the two people standing before him.
“Police!” Holmes shouted. “Hands up! Get on your knees now!”
A man who appeared to be in his seventies, with a white beard and wearing a safari hat and a khaki vest, slowly lowered himself to his knees. His palms shook, his face a mask of alarm.
At the same time, the person with him, wearing a yellow hoodie, jeans and straw hat, appeared to be the same age, but petite, no more than five feet tall. Her face flushed with fear as she got to her knees and looked at the officer behind them who was also pointing a gun at them.
Holmes held them at gunpoint while the second officer handcuffed them, patted them down for concealed weapons while Air-1 thumped overhead.
Each of them had binoculars strapped around their necks, and had small knapsacks. The officer found identification, field manuals, guidebooks and logs as they explained their presence in the woods.
The officer took notes then reached for his shoulder microphone.
“Sixteen-twenty to dispatch. Our subjects are bird-watchers,” he said. “They say they haven’t seen or heard anything related to our search. We’ll run the names, get full statements from them.”
“Copy, Sixteen-twenty,” the dispatcher said.
Air-1 thundered away and resumed searching.
* * *
“Bird-watchers?”
Syracuse Officer DeDe Cook’s radio gave a static-filled squawk, and Hitch barked over the chopper’s roar.
“You heard that, Hitch. It wasn’t the girl, it was birders. We gotta keep going, buddy. You’re doing great.”
The dog was panting, enthused as he worked, making Cook confident they were tracking Maddison Lane. The conditions were good. The woods were dry, and the temperature was not too hot.
Tracking dogs like Hitch had phenomenal smell receptors at least twenty-five times more powerful than those of humans. He could smell one microscopic drop of blood in two gallons of water.