A Son's Tale

“DOYOUMIND IF I sit outside on the front step for a few minutes?” Morgan directed her question to the detective sitting at his makeshift desk. Cal watched her, taking in the whiteness around her too-tight lips, the glossiness in eyes that normally glinted with eagerness, the strands of hair surrounding skin that had been devoid of makeup since she’d first cried it off more than twelve hours before.

He recognized the signs of a woman at the end of her rope. He’d watched the same thing happen to Rose Sanderson when she’d transformed from his future mother to the stranger who’d thrown him and his father out of their home.

“If my phone rings, I’ll come back in.…”

“Stay close.” Detective Warner’s tone held warning more than acquiescence.

Morgan nodded and stood. Unlike the last couple of times she’d left the room for some fresh air, she didn’t glance at Cal. Didn’t invite him along.

On a hunch, he went anyway.

And was glad he had as soon as he stepped out the door and saw his star student bent over, one side of her propped against the corner of the building as she sobbed.

It was the first time he’d seen her lose control all day. There’d been tears, plenty of them, but they’d been slow, silent drips down her cheeks, not this full-out explosion of anguish.

Cal went to her, pulled her away from the building and against him, half carrying her over to the steps and settling her against his body as they sat. He didn’t say anything. There were no words that could help. Nothing anyone could do to ease the pain that was eating her alive, short of returning her son to her.

But he could share the pain with her. It helped not to suffer alone. That much he understood.

He didn’t take it personally when she turned her face into his chest. Or when her hands worked their way around his neck and clung to him. He held her. Stroked her hair.

And cried inside—a little boy manifested into a man who’d outgrown the ability to shed tears.

“They’re hurting him, aren’t they?” Her words, muffled against his chest, were completely clear to him.

Cal had no sense of how much time had passed. His arms didn’t loosen their grip on the body he held. “We don’t know that.”

“But…” A dry sob interrupted her. “If his goal is to torture us…”

Wanting to tell her not to let him win, not to torture herself with what-ifs, Cal said instead, “We don’t know his ultimate goal.” He’d read everything he’d ever found written about child abductions. He knew the profiling as well as any detective.

“And we don’t know who we’re dealing with. Some people just aren’t killers, no matter what life has done to them. They just don’t have it in them to hurt someone else physically. So they retaliate with mental and emotional abuse.” He wasn’t educating her. He was just talking in case hearing another voice made her situation better. He wasn’t even sure she could comprehend what he was saying at that point. Or that it mattered.

“If his ultimate goal is ransom, as is probable, chances are good that he won’t do anything to hurt Sammie. At least not until he’s made his deal.”

He had to be honest with her here.

“And chances are also good that the authorities will catch the guy before he gets to close his deal.

“Less than one hundred out of eight hundred thousand abducted children die each year,” he reminded her. “Sammie’s chances are very, very good. More than 99 percent.”

“But the girl you knew about—she had those same chances.”

“Which is why I’ve always believed that she’s still alive.”

Morgan’s breathing slowed. She pulled back slowly, dropping her arms, sitting up on her own. Hands wrapped around her stomach, she stared downward.

“Do you know how many kids are taken that aren’t found dead, but are never seen by their parents again?”

“The less than one hundred that are killed includes those that are assumed dead.”

Which, technically, included Claire Sanderson. She was one of the less than 1 percent who weren’t safely returned. But… “In the case I knew about, they never had contact from the kidnapper,” he told her. “There were no calls. Nothing for them to go on.”

Except a young boy’s testimony that he’d seen the little girl in his father’s car earlier that morning. And the child’s teddy bear, which had been with her the last time anyone had seen her, had turned up in Frank’s car later that day.

“They focused the investigation on one man. They weren’t ever able to find enough evidence against him to press charges. And in the meantime, whatever other clues might have been there had grown cold and whoever took the little girl got away with the crime.”

“Did the family have money?”

“Enough to be comfortable. Nothing comparable to your father.”

But he and Emma and Claire had had everything a kid could want. And then some. They’d had a close, loving, happy family. At least for a while.

“As I recall, there wasn’t ever much talk about ransom calls,” he added, for her sake—and because for the first time in his life he was talking about the incident that had sealed his fate in a world filled with inner darkness. “The girl was only two. She wasn’t like Sammie, able to fend for herself, or to understand that she’d been abducted. And sick people don’t take two-year-old girls from middle-class neighborhoods in hopes of ransom money.”

He couldn’t go any further than that. Couldn’t let his mind travel down the road that Claire Sanderson had probably had to travel. He couldn’t save her from a twenty-five-year-old fate.

Perusing child pornography photos was one job he’d left solely up to the authorities. But the fact that there was no evidence that Claire was taken for that sordid lifestyle didn’t ease his emotional burden any. There’d been no internet twenty-five years before. No global access to illegal practices. No way to find most of the scumbags who practiced or made money from underage sex.

“Dr. Whittier—”

“Cal,” he interrupted. “I’m not here as your college professor, and as we established last spring, there’s only three years’ difference between us… .” His voice faded off. What in the hell did names or ages matter?

“Cal, then,” Morgan said. “I just wanted to thank you.” She drew a deep breath. “For being here. It helps.”

He nodded, in spite of the darkness that probably prevented her from knowing that. “Julie offered to stay.” Her friend had left hours earlier to go home and put her twin five-year-olds to bed.

Morgan rubbed a hand down her face just as he’d seen her do countless times over the past hours. “I know,” she said. “But she’s like the rest of us here, shocked and hurting and…besides, I think she needed to be with her kids. To hang on to them.”

“I’m sure she did.” Like Rose had clung to Emma, frantic to keep the four-year-old in sight at all times. Cal hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to the girl he’d loved as his little sister.

He glanced around the dark and too-quiet neighborhood. “I’m pretty certain all the parents around here are keeping a close hold on their children tonight. Thanking the Lord that they’re home. And they’re probably also scared to death that whoever took Sammie could come for their kids next.”

Up, down, up, down, up, down. He could feel the rhythm of her knee’s movement.

“They’ll be relieved to know that Sammie was scouted out specifically. That this is someone after my father, not some sicko after kids.” Shoulders hunched, she shuddered.

“Maybe. I figure the heads-up that children really are at risk of abduction will stick with most of them for a long time to come. You can’t witness something like this, even peripherally, and go back. You don’t ever become unaware again.”

“You really understand… .”

“Some things you don’t ever forget.”

“How long ago was that little girl taken?”

“Twenty-five years.”

“What?” She sat up, turned to him. “She’s been missing for twenty-five years? With no trace of her at all?”