The Disappeared Page 7

  Teri nodded, fully aware of the subtle game of semantics they were playing.

  “This Churchill woman? She say anything at all?”

  “Not much.”

  “Anything about where the boy's been the last ten years or why she was bringing him home at this particular time?” He sat down at the table again, immersed in making notes. “By the way, I want you to know that I'm going to have you check Gabe's dental records tomorrow. We'll see how they match up.”

  “You still don't believe it's him, do you?”

  Walt glanced up from his notepad, stared at her a moment in silence, then sighed and leaned back. “Neither do you, Teri.”

  “Well you tell me then, if he's not Gabe, then who is he?”

  “I don't know who he is.”

  “And why would anyone do such a thing? I mean... what's the point? I haven't got any money. I'm not connected. What in the world would anyone want with me?”

  “I don't know that, either. But I want you to keep in mind that that kid, whoever he is, isn't capable doing this all on his own. Someone's behind the scenes, pulling the strings, Teri. I don't want you to forget that.”

  The mood between them had shifted, and they both seemed to realize it at the same moment. Teri sat back in her chair. Walt tapped out a handful of beats against his notepad, and blew out a breath of air.

  “We'll get a handle on it,” he said finally. “One way or another, I promise you, we'll get a handle on it.”

  She nodded and stared down at her hands, which were nervously picking at the hem of her shirt. She hadn't had a handle on anything in longer than she could remember. Not her family. Not her marriage. Not her job. After Gabe had disappeared everything had seemed to fall apart all at once, right before her eyes. She didn't want to let that happen again.

  “She said he didn't know how long he'd been away.”

  Walt raised his eyebrows.

  “Miss Churchill. She said the boy thought he had been in an accident a couple of weeks ago, that he didn't know he'd been missing for ten years.”

  “Did you ask him about it?”

  Teri nodded. “He doesn't remember anything about any accident. I keep thinking it was something she must have told him as a way of explaining where he was and what had happened.”

  “Does he remember anything before the accident?”

  “He remembers being Gabe.”

  Walt shook his head, a smirk on his face. “And after?”

  “Apparently, he woke up in some sort of medical facility.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Walt said absently. He jotted down a note, and she could see he was burning with raw curiosity now, the investigator poking at the edges of the facts to see if anything protruded from the other side. “Tell me about these other guys.”

  “There were three of them.”

  “Were they carrying weapons?”

  “Yes. The one named Mitch—he seemed to be the one in charge—he was carrying a gun. He showed it to me when we were standing at the front door. I think he thought it would help persuade me.”

  “How about the others?”

  “I don't know about them.” She flashed back to the man, his suit coat pulled back, exposing the gun. There was something odd about that. Something that had been quietly gnawing at her. “It was strange; because that was the only time I saw the gun, when we were there at the front door. He never took it out of the holster.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “No.” She shook her head, thinking how odd that seemed now that she looked back on it. “Why didn't he take a shot at me?”

  “Probably because he wasn't supposed to hurt you.”

  “You make it sound like you don't think he was really in charge.”

  “Oh, there's no question he wasn't in charge. This whole thing was orchestrated from behind the scenes, Teri.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “The cleanup,” Walt said matter-of-factly. He tapped another solo out on the notepad, the look in his eyes clear and focused. “This kid wasn't supposed to be wandering off from wherever it was they were keeping him. And that's why they showed up at your place right behind him.”

  “Because they knew that's where she would take him.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Home.”

  “Or someplace he was supposed to think of as home.”

  “Who are we talking about? Why would anyone want me to believe my son had come back after all this time?”

  “I don't know,” Walt said. “What about Michael?”

  Teri shook her head. “No, I can't imagine him doing something like this.”

  “He didn't hold you responsible?”

  “For what?”

  “For everything. For what happened to his son, for the disintegration of his marriage, for all of it.”

  She shrugged, almost unnoticeably, and hoped Walt hadn't caught it. She was about to tell him a lie. Michael had held her very much responsible for the breakup of their marriage. She had become obsessed with finding Gabe again, and everything else, including their marriage had been put on the back burner. What had Michael told her just before he moved out? First I lost my son, then I lost my wife.

  “No, it's got nothing to do with Michael. I'm sure of that.”

  The mood had shifted again.

  Walt got up and headed for the kitchen. “You sure you don't want anything to drink?”

  “No thanks.” Teri stared across the table at the notes he had been scribbling. It was impossible to make them out upside down. “Oh, I almost forgot. The guy that seemed in charge—Mitch? He had a scar over his left eye.”

  “That helps.” The refrigerator door closed and Walt came around the corner with a Diet Coke in his hand. “How about the other two?”

  “One guy, I think his name was Jimmy, was a nervous little weasel. Always fidgeting, rocking back and forth on his heels, that kind of thing. The other one... all I can tell you about him is that his fingers were a mess after we slammed the door on them.”

  “So he'd probably need medical attention?”

  “If he ever wanted to zip up his pants again.”

  “That's good.” Walt made another note, nodding absently as he did so. When he was done, he paused, then said: “Okay, here's what I think we ought to do tomorrow. I've got some friends in the department. I'm going to run these prints by them and see if we come up with anything. We'll also run Mitch and Jimmy through the department's database and, who knows, maybe we'll luck out and something'll click.”

  “Okay,” Teri said.

  “What I want you to do is to take the boy in to see your family dentist and have x-rays taken. Have the dentist check them against his records and see what he has to say. If he comes back with a match, then we've got ourselves a whole new set of problems. And if it isn't a match...”

  “At least we'll be over that hurdle,” Teri said reluctantly.

  “Yeah, I guess we will.”

  “You know, I'm not even sure if Gabe's dentist is still in business.” She hadn't seen Dr. Harding in four or five years and the last time she had been in for a visit, he had been talking about retirement.

  “His records should still be around,” Walt said.

  “I can't even remember if he ever had a filling.”

  “Well, why don't we see what the dentist has to say. All right?”

  “Sure.”

  [14]

  It was done.

  Not much had gone right tonight. When things went to hell, they went to hell in full glory. But at least Mitch could go to bed knowing he hadn't let it all blow up in his face.

  He stopped outside his hotel room, feeling worst for the wear, and dug his card key out of his wallet. Earlier, he had tucked it behind the fake driver's license and for a moment he thought he might have misplaced it. But it was there, and even though it was a struggle getting it into the slot, the card key fit.

  The lock cli
cked.

  The door opened automatically.

  Mitch went in.

  He took off his suit coat, hung it properly in the closet, and loosened his tie. He slipped out of the black dress shoes he had been wearing (spit shined the way he had learned in the military) and placed them side-by-side at the bottom of the closet. People didn't wear black dress shoes anymore. Maybe occasionally to church on Sundays, though even then it was the exception and not the rule. A long time ago, the country had lost all sense of propriety. But not Mitch. When he did things in this world, he did them properly, with respect to his past and his family and his superiors. And he always respected his uniform and his equipment. That was the way it was supposed to be. Anything less might get him killed.

  Just ask Amanda Tarkett.

  Oh yes, just try to ask her.

  She had done a very stupid thing tonight. After she had dropped off the boy, she had gone to her mother's house. That had been her first mistake. Her second mistake had been fatal... she had taken her mother's dog for a walk.

  Mitch finished removing his tie, which he hung over the shoulder of his suit jacket, and dragged himself into the bathroom. He splashed water over his face, dried off, then stared into the mirror, into his own eyes, and wondered (almost so absently that it slipped by unnoticed) how he had found himself in this place, at this time, doing something that didn't set well with him at all. He wasn't thinking about Amanda Tarkett now. He was thinking about the boy. There was something about involving children...

  He had never imagined that things would someday lead him so far astray.

  Out in the hall, footsteps passed by.

  Mitch glanced over his shoulder at the reflection of the doorway in the mirror, listened, and heard the steps gradually fade into the distance. All he wanted now was a good night's sleep. He folded the towel, then brushed his teeth and used the toilet before pulling back the covers and finally climbing into bed.

  He would sleep uninterrupted for five blessed hours, and when he would awaken again, Mitch would awaken with only one thought on his mind: to find the boy and return him.

  That was the way it had to be.

  [15]

  It wasn't until nearly four o'clock in the morning, with the cold night painting the windows with frost, when they finally headed off to bed. Teri slept in the bedroom, with the boy on the floor in a sleeping bag beside the bed. Walt slept on the couch in the living room.

  Through the window, he could see the tiny puff of a cloud kissing good-bye to the moon, two bodies drifting apart. It had stopped raining. The moon was a huge crystal ball in the sky. If only it could tell him where this thing was going.

  A chill passed through him.

  He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

  [16]

  The boy was sitting on the couch, watching an old rerun of Roseanne, when Teri came out of the bedroom the next morning. It was a little after ten. The sun was already slanting above the building across the way and there were tendrils of steam rising off the asphalt in the courtyard below.

  “About time,” he said, his eyes riveted to the television.

  “Where's Walt?”

  “Out. He left a note on the counter.”

  Teri yawned, feeling very nearly as tired this morning as she had last night before she had gone to bed. She didn't get many opportunities to sleep in late. Then again, there weren't many occasions when she found herself up after ten the night before. Strange events made for strange hours, she supposed.

  The note, which had been written in precise, draftsman's letters, was short and to the point: TERI, THOUGHT I'D CHECK OUT THE PRINTS. CAN YOU GET THE KID IN TO SEE HIS DENTIST? HOPE YOU SLEPT WELL. MEET YOU HERE THIS AFTERNOON. AFTER TWO? WALT. P.S. MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME.

  “Did he say anything?” she asked.

  “He was already gone when I got up.”

  “When was that?”

  “'bout half-an-hour ago,” the boy said, without much interest. Teri had to remind herself that whether he was Gabe or not, he was still an eleven-year-old, and like most eleven-year-olds he apparently had a habit of tuning in the television while he tuned out the rest of the world.

  “Did you get yourself something to eat?”

  A mumble.

  “Gabe?”

  He glanced up, a semi-vacant expression on his face, and while Teri thought it was probably a trick of the light at first, suddenly she thought she could see a thin streak of gray in his hair. It swept back from his temple, over his right ear, and disappeared into his natural coloring.

  She grinned. “What did you do to yourself?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what's that in your hair?”

  “What?”

  “Come here a minute.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just come over here.”

  He stood next to her, and she angled his head so that the right side of his face was under the light. There was a gray streak, all right. It was faint, but clearly visible. It looked almost as if he had taken some ash in his fingers and run them through his hair as a joke.

  “Hold still,” Teri said. She plucked one of the hairs.

  “Ow! What did you do that for?”

  “Look at this.” She showed it to him. “You're turning gray.”

  [17]

  His name was Aaron Thomas Jefferson. He was thirty-five, black, and by far the best damn identification technician Walt had ever worked with. His training had come through the FBI, his first on-the-job experience through the Criminal Identification Section of the department. Walt had only a cursory understanding of the deltas and dots and trifurcations that defined identification points. Aaron was the expert.

  “I've got a full load,” Aaron said without looking up. He was using black ink to trace a photographically-enlarged print onto a sheet of thin tracing paper.

  “Something for the FBI?” Walt asked, making reference to the tracing.

  “It's from that double homicide last week, on the west side.”

  “I think I read something about that.”

  “Yeah, well, I've had three men working on a non-suspect match and it looks like the guy might not be a local.” Aaron raised the pen off the paper, let out a breath, and sat back. “So what have you got?”

  “I'm not sure.” Walt pulled the 3x5 cards out of his pocket and dropped them on the counter next to the light box. Each card was labeled. One: Teri Knight. Two: Gabriel Knight. Three: Suspect. 5/13/95. Instep of right shoe belonging to Mrs. Knight. Four: Suspect. 5/13/95. Back side of right shoe belonging to Teri Knight.

  “I see you haven't lost your training.”

  “Like riding a bike.”

  Aaron glanced at the cards. “Isn't she--?”

  “Yeah,” he said quickly.

  “Okay. So, what am I looking at?”

  “An attempted abduction.”

  “Is the department involved?”

  “No,” Walt said.

  Aaron shook his head. “Best I can do is probably four or five days. I'll have to handle it myself. After hours.”

  “I appreciate it, Aaron.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He dropped the cards back on the counter. “So when you coming over for dinner again? Tina's been asking about you.”

  “Soon,” Walt said. It had actually been several years since they had last gotten together. At the time, Walt had been going with a law clerk, who worked for the county. Her name was Rachel Burack. They had met by accident one day, when Walt was searching records for a case he was working on, and Rachel sat down next to him in search of some records of her own. The relationship hadn't lasted. She had become impatient with the sometimes relenting way he went about his business, the way he let himself become consumed by it. And when he couldn't—or wouldn't—change, she had moved on. It had no longer been Walt and Rachel after that. It had simply been Walt. Walt and his clients. Everything else had fallen away.

  “I'm gonna hold you to it,” Aaron said.

  Walt grinne
d.

  “I am.”

  “All right. All right. I'll give you a call, I promise.”

  “Good,” Aaron said, picking up the fingerprint cards again. He tapped them against the counter. “I'll do my best on these.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Now let me get back to work.”

  [18]

  Teri had outsmarted herself.

  She was standing at the front door of the Evergreen Dental Clinic, a small business space located at the back corner of the West Valley Shopping Center. This was where Dr. Harding had maintained his practice for as long as she could remember knowing him. But he wasn't here now.

  Taped to the inside of the glass door was a sign that read:

  Closed.

  May 10th - May 24th

  For Emergencies Contact:

  Dr. Chittenden 555-4732

  Teri's hand fell away from the door handle. She had thought about calling first, but had decided against it, believing the doctor would be more likely to see them at the last minute if they were already in his office. Not the smartest thing she had ever done.

  “What now?” the boy asked.

  “Guess I better call Dr. Chittenden.”

  [19]

  Aaron Jefferson finished the tracing, re-photographed the print and scanned it into the computer. He set the cross hair references on the core and the axis and the computer began to run through its routine. It was as much of an opportunity to grab a bite as he was going to get today.

  He fished his lunch bag out of the bottom drawer of his desk. Tuna fish. Not his favorite. His mother had turned him against tuna when he was a boy. She had always added egg and the combination had never sat right with Aaron. While there was no egg in this particular tuna fish, it didn't matter. The taste of egg had long ago become part of his permanent association.

  He dropped the sandwich back into the bag, took out a couple of oat meal cookies, and poured himself a cup of hot coffee. The photographic blowups of the prints Walt had brought in were sitting on the corner of the desk. They had come back nearly half-an-hour ago. Aaron had put them aside until he'd had a chance to look at them.