“You want to come down and look?” was his opening greeting.
“Already?” she asked, surprised.
“I’ve seen enough. The man’s a brute, the kid’s in danger. Besides which, he was talking about taking the kid off somewhere for the summer. Vacation starts in a week and a half.”
“I’ll be down tomorrow. Let me just check when.”
He held on for a couple of minutes, then she came back on to tell him her flight number. “It gets in at eight-forty. Can you pick me up?”
“I’ll be there.”
He met her at the airport and drove her back through the Monday morning commute to his nondescript apartment. He had been up most of the night, first returning to the house to remove his devices, then editing the recordings on his laptop to delete all the hours of Mrs. Mendez vacuuming and O’Connell sleeping in front of the television, so he showed her where the fridge was and told her to wake him when she was finished. It took her five hours, three of the audio and a little over ninety minutes of images, before she stood outside the door to his bedroom and pronounced his name.
He came awake instantly. “Yeah,” he said into the pillow. “Be right with you.” He showered to shed his grogginess; when he came into the kitchen he found Alice fixing sandwiches.
He reached into the fridge and took out a beer and one of the flavored teas he’d bought for her, pouring hers into a glass with ice. “What did you think?”
“That last tape.”
“Ugly.” The faint tremble of the two shotgun shells on the smoky glass table as the boy braced himself against the weight of the gun. Allen twisted open the beer and poured half of it down his throat.
“I have seen a great deal over the years, but that . . .” She paused for a moment, and continued with great precision. “I do not know that I’ve ever seen anything quite so inherently evil as that performance with the gun. And yet it didn’t seem to surprise the boy.”
“I thought that, too. But he was still scared.”
The boy’s back rigid with terror, the man’s face alive with laughter as he rested the barrel of the heavy shotgun against his son’s chest. And that expression on deadboy’s face as he left the room, rich with self-loathing and yearning.
“The father’s a psychopath. The boy’s bright, but confused.”
“Who wouldn’t be confused, a father like that?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” she told him curtly. So she had picked it up, too, the boy’s expression, torn between his need for his father and his fear of him. Angry clients were far easier than the conflicted ones, particularly when there was no mother around to act as client and make the decisions. He thought about it while he was eating one of the sandwiches.
“Want to wait?” he asked her. “Only, that conversation last week between O’Connell and the housekeeper, it sounded like they’re leaving as soon as school lets out.”
“It looked and sounded to me as if things may be escalating,” she suggested.
He nodded. “The boy’s beginning to show signs of adolescence. Not much physically yet, but the attitude is there. Dad can’t handle being stood up to. It’s only going to get worse, and fast. I’ll go with your decision, but I have to say that the idea of letting it go for three months makes me nervous.”
“Is the boy old enough?”
Rarely—four times in the decade they’d worked together—had they performed a rescue on a young child, and then only if they had a member of the family waiting in the wings. Generally, it was better to take their illicit tapes and turn them over anonymously to Child Protective Services, and let bureaucracy do its thing. A young child lacked the self-awareness to assist in his or her own decisions. Twelve was borderline.
“Like you said, he’s bright, you can see that even in the emails. He can’t spell worth a damn, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
Alice retreated into thought, her eyes on the laptop’s screensaver pattern but her mind clearly far away. Allen left her, to go make coffee and wash the dishes. A few minutes later, she followed him into the narrow kitchen.
“I think you’re right. He needs to be away from that man before vacation starts.”
“Any family?”
“None so far. I’m afraid the boy’s story about having grandparents in Chicago was either a lie or a fantasy.”
“So where does he go?”
“What do you think of Rachel and Pete?”
“Aren’t they kind of stretched?”
“The girl we placed with them is in college now. Rachel herself contacted me to say she’d be willing to foster another.”
“They’d be ideal.”
“How do you want to contact the boy?”
“I think you should do it, at the library. If I’m remembered talking to him, all hell will break loose.” A woman talking to a boy, on the other hand, would be forgotten in a week.
“You can’t take him from his home?”
“No way, there’s a housekeeper and a man, I don’t know what his job is but he always seems to be there whenever the father’s home. Plus alarms, and the entrance gate. Far better when the boy’s out in public.”
She nodded, and went to fetch the wig and costume she’d brought from Seattle.
Two hours later, when Jamie got to the library’s computer room, he found an older lady at the next terminal, looking a little confused. After a minute, she asked him a question about doing a search, and while he was showing her what to do, she said quietly in his ear, “Try not to show any reaction, Jamie, but my name is Alice. I’m your friend ‘A’ from the Internet.”
When their hour was up, Jamie climbed on his bike and Alice went back to her car. They met again the next day, and the day following that. On the fifth day, the last Friday afternoon in May, Jameson Patrick O’Connell disappeared. He was last seen in the library, conversing with the same white-haired woman he’d been talking to every day that week. He was wearing a red T-shirt, jeans, and scuffed white sneakers, and carried a green backpack. Both the boy and the woman had left the library around the same time, separately. No one saw the boy, wearing his helmet, steer his bike into a side road half a mile from the library and stop next to a parked car. A woman got out and lifted the bike into the trunk while he climbed into the backseat. Once the car was under way, the boy sank down beneath a blanket. Half an hour later and fifteen miles away, in a parking lot between a busy pizza parlor and a nine-screen movie house, a woman with brown curls and a blond kid with a bright orange backpack and black T-shirt got out of a car and went to talk with the driver of a dented but clean tan Ford pickup truck fitted with a well-used camper shell that wrapped over the cabin. The driver, who greeted the woman with a hug and the boy with a handshake, was a tall, stooped grandfather of a man with longish gray hair gathered into a stubby ponytail, a full moustache, and a faded Marine Corps tattoo showing on his left forearm beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his chambray work shirt. After a few minutes, the boy got into the truck and waved a small good-bye to the woman. The camper drove onto the freeway and joined the surge of traffic pouring out of the Bay Area for the long Memorial Day weekend.
Smooth as can be. They had a piece of luck that Allen had not counted on, when Jamie told him that his father had left that morning for a few days, and he thought it extremely unlikely that the housekeeper would call the police on her own initiative. By the time the woman located O’Connell and he had called the police, the trail would be cold. Near Tahoe, Allen had Jamie crawl up into the camper space overhead, and pulled the truck into a campground that was wall-to-wall with vehicles. During the night, the boy’s blond hair and orange backpack found their way into the campground trash cans; the tattoo on Allen’s arm had been scrubbed away, the moustache vanished, his hair gone short and white; and a thicket of fishing stickers had sprouted on the camper shell.
The truck left the campground before the sun was up, and crossed the Nevada border. Half the country was on the road this weekend, and unless Allen began d
riving up the wrong side of the road or otherwise behaving erratically, there was little danger that any cop would have enough time on his hands to pull over a camper driven by a white-haired man with his grandson. They took a fairly direct route, a luxury Allen didn’t always have, and he spent the time educating the boy to the new rules of his life, getting him used to being called a nice anonymous “Jim” instead of the more ear-catching “Jamie,” all the while making small, surreptitious probes into the boy’s history, problems, and sensitivities.
They stopped Saturday night just south of Twin Falls, at a motel located at a confluence of roads. The tall man who booked a pair of adjoining rooms shook his head as he told the desk man about his daughter who’d been so eager to shop, he had to go back and pick her up when the discount mall shut, can you believe it? No one noticed that when the camper drove back into the parking lot that night, there was no daughter with the old man and the boy.
Sunday morning, they circled west around Twin Falls to a small town on the main road. One of Alice’s clients lived here, now happy and safe in her second marriage, this one to the town doctor. The camper drove around past the clinic’s front door with its CLOSED sign and pulled up at the back entry. The door opened, and Allen ushered Jamie in.
He and Alice had both discussed with the boy the necessity of a physical exam. Jamie hadn’t liked it, but he was resigned. Once inside, Allen asked him if he’d rather be alone with the doctor and nurse.
Jamie hesitated. “I guess you can stay here.”
“If you change your mind, just say so, I’ll step out in the hall and wait for you.”
The checkup was as thorough as it could be without making the boy feel too invaded. Which meant they could draw blood and take X rays, but evidence of sexual trauma was limited to questions alone. The exam brought to light two broken fingers on the boy’s left hand, an old greenstick fracture of the left radius, a slight hearing loss in the right ear, and the suggestion of trauma to the skull, bad enough that the boy had probably been knocked unconscious. At least the blood work showed no signs of infection, drug abuse, or sexually transmitted disease.
Then the nurse handed Jamie his T-shirt and asked him to remove his trousers. “You can leave your underwear on,” she added.
As soon as the jeans were off, all three adults stared at the enormous black bruise on the pale thigh. The doctor cleared his throat and explored the area gingerly with his gloved hands. “Was this a kick?”
Jamie looked down at his leg. “I think so.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not really.”
“Son, this must have been very painful.”
“I don’t remember it hurting,” Jamie told him.
The doctor looked skeptical, but his wife and Allen exchanged a knowing glance: It was not bravado speaking, but the simple truth: Jamie had excised the pain from his awareness. It took a lot of experience with pain to be able to do that.
“Any headaches, stomachaches, problems with urination?” the doctor rattled off in a disapproving voice. He clearly thought the boy was lying about the pain, and Jamie did not like that. He sat on the examining table, increasingly stony-faced, answering with grunts and monosyllables.
At last it was over. The X rays and blood work would be sent to Alice, to join the boy’s evidence file of tapes and email and Allen’s anonymous statement, bulwark against the ever-present possibility that the case would go bad on them and they would need to piece together a legal defense for kidnapping.
The adults looked at each other, relieved that it hadn’t been any worse than it was, and plied the indignant, embarrassed youngster with the picnic meal the woman had brought to the clinic. No twelve-year-old kid likes strangers asking intrusive questions and poking his unclothed body, no matter how professional they are; the meal was not a comfortable one. When they left, with most of the food crammed into the camper’s small fridge, Allen listened without comment as his passenger concocted an elaborate explanation of the broken bones, looping through an ever-more-detailed story of an accident when he was learning to ride a bicycle. Who knew? It might even be the truth, and it was not Allen’s business to question him. He was just relieved that he could hand over to Rachel Johnson a boy with no severe physical problems.
He was also relieved that the trip was nearly at an end. This part of a rescue was always tricky, the time when a client fell in love with the rescuer. Woman with kids, woman alone, kids alone, it didn’t matter—Allen took care to stay as remote as he humanely could. His job was to get them out and get them safe, not to lay the groundwork for a long-term relationship. Fortunately, Jamie slept a lot, and he seemed easily entertained by the handheld electronic games Allen had brought along. Theirs was a temporary relationship, and allowing bonds to form between them would only cause more of a wrench when they reached the boy’s foster home in Montana and Allen drove away.
Jamie showed little inclination to talk, anyway. Their conversations were concerned mostly with the mechanics of the escape, getting the boy used to his new name and history, telling him all about the town in Texas he was supposed to have come from, the specifics of his fictional family. When they stopped on Sunday night, Allen asked Jamie to empty out the green backpack, so he could check that there were no pieces of incriminating evidence that he’d overlooked. He removed a printed receipt and a scribbled phone number, and with apologies cut out the front page from a paperback novel with Jamie’s name on it, but he stopped at the picture of a young woman smiling down at the baby on her lap, both of them with dark eyes and pale skin. He could have guessed who the woman was, but he asked Jamie anyway.
“That’s my mother. She’s dead.”
Committed suicide when the boy was seven—and no doubt the kid blamed himself. Abused kids always blamed themselves, for everything. “Do you remember her?”
“Not really,” the boy said with a studied indifference, and took up his electronic game.
“Not at all?”
“She was stupid, and weak.”
“That doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.”
“She didn’t. And I didn’t care when she died. She was stupid.”
Allen knew he should confiscate the photograph, but he didn’t have the heart to. He merely checked to be sure that there were no identifying marks on the back, and laid it on the table in front of the boy with a warning to keep it to himself. Jamie continued with his game for a few minutes, then shut it off impatiently and turned to shove his clothes, CDs, and comics back into the green pack. He snatched the photograph up and stuffed it inside the outer pocket, but Allen noticed the fingers smooth its corners out carefully before pulling the zipper shut.
Monday morning, working their way through Idaho and southern Montana, Jamie grew talkative, almost in spite of himself, the words pushed out by the growing tension of journey’s end. He put aside the game unit, and began to comment on things they drove past. Most of his remarks were negative, even sullen, and when Allen tried to extend them, the boy would draw back into himself for a while, then venture another remark. Their conversations went something like this:
“The kids here sure dress stupid,” Jamie said, staring at a group of half a dozen boys in ordinary jeans and T-shirts coming out of a drugstore. “They look like hicks. I bet they don’t even play computer games.”
“Probably a lot of them do. Not in the library, though.”
Allen felt a glance hit the side of his face. “I used to play at home. I had a great system.”
“What happened to it?”
“My father broke it.” The answer came just a bit too quickly. Allen raised a mental eyebrow.
“By accident?”
“No. Yeah. No. I mean, yeah, he meant to break it, but he could just as well have broken it by accident. He’s not really very good with computers.”
“So you used one in the library.”
“Yeah.”
“When did your computer break?”
“Month ago maybe. Not long. H
e was going to buy me a new one, a lot better, only I couldn’t decide what I wanted.”
This was such a blatant lie, Allen took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at the boy’s face. The delicate features were taut, jaws clenched and eyes focused on something at once far away and deeply internal. For an instant, Allen was seeing a soldier riding a Huey out toward a hot zone, the ghost of an M16 barrel rising up alongside the boy’s face . . .
The boy picked up the handheld game, and retreated into silence.
At midday on Monday, Allen pulled into a dirt road leading toward the rambling farmhouse in which lived a family of what Alice called “easygoing Mormons” (which Allen had considered an oxymoron until he met the Johnsons), the mother of whom owed a large debt to Alice’s organization.
Smooth, the whole operation.
It was only later that things began to get interesting.
Chapter 20
Montana was everything Allen remembered; Rachel Johnson was even more. Rachel and he were sitting on the wide porch of the house she and her husband had built when they moved here two dozen years before. It was in a marginally fertile valley surrounded by high hills, more farm than ranch, halfway between Bozeman and Billings. At first glance it appeared an ideal setup for a survivalist militia, but Pete and Rachel Johnson were only farmers. At least, they were farmers on the surface.
Pete had a degree in history, but after teaching high school for several years, he had grown dissatisfied with a life away from the earth. Rachel had gone on to a Ph.D. in child psychology, and worked for five years in a Chicago mental health clinic before deciding that the inner city was not where she wanted to raise her own children. They had left the city and come here, to farm, and to raise a family, and to help those who needed it.
When Allen had first met them, six years before, they had struck him as somehow Quaker, but both had actually been raised Mormons, moving away from that tight-knit community during their college years. Although the habits of the Latter-day Saints were in their blood, they now simply worshiped at the nearest church, which happened to be Presbyterian. They even drank coffee, enjoying, Allen thought, the secret sin of it. At the moment, Rachel was pouring out two glasses of homemade lemonade and offering Allen a plate of spiced applesauce cookies. The youngest Johnson child, four-year-old Sally, had been overjoyed at having a newfound cousin all to herself, since her siblings wouldn’t be home from their long-weekend church outing until evening, and had dragged “Jim” away immediately to admire her chief responsibility, the chickens. The child had allowed her cousin to hold the egg basket, and “Jim” was trying not to look too apprehensive about the flock of dirty, noisy, weirdly aggressive hens that squawked and pecked at their feet. With the two children out of earshot, Allen was taking the opportunity to fill Rachel in, giving her the information he’d dug out, a synopsis of his surveillance, and his impressions gathered from the drive up. Knowing what she would be dealing with in the years ahead was every bit as essential as the forged documents that Alice had provided for the boy.