Taken (11 page)

She’s right, in a way. But I can’t let her think that my old friend the sheriff deserved to be killed.

“Fred Corso was never abusive to me,” I tell her, “or to the kids, or to anyone that I know of, okay?”

“If you say so, ma’am.”

“The only man who ever abused me is still out there, and he’s got my son.”

“You gonna find him, though.”

“I’m gonna find him.”

Sherona smiles, relieved not to have offended me. “When you do find that sucker, the kidnap man, you want to pop him in the oven or something, you call on me.”

“I will, Sherona. Thank you.”

On the way to the rental car I’m thinking, pop the kidnap man in the oven. Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.

T
he boy comes awake very slowly. The first thing he’s aware of is the inescapable fact that he’s wet the bed. Again wet sheets, the stench of his own urine. Then the feel of the gag in his mouth—it tastes like throw-up. A moment later he becomes aware of the tight, tingly numbness of his wrists and ankles. White plastic straps securing him to the bed. He remembers the straps from the last time he woke up, and the sneering voice that threatened to put rubber pants on him. Rubber pants like a baby.

Bastards.

He remembers calling out for his mother, too. This time he won’t make that mistake. Obviously Mom isn’t here, or none of this would be happening. Still, he searches his mind for the most recent memory of his mom. Was it standing in the dugout, cheering him on? Maybe. No, no, after the game. Giving him money. Ice-cream money. But he never got the ice cream. Something happened. What was it exactly?

Choking. A hand covering his face. White van. No, the white van was first. Then a door sliding open. Shadow behind him. Then the hand on his face, a whiff of something powerful. Dizzy darkness. Next thing, his bladder hurting. Voice of a stranger, threatening him.

Kidnapped.

Tomas had heard scary stories about strangers who steal children, but the stories never had anything to do with him. Scary junk about sickos, or vampires, or slimy monsters from outer space, they were all the same really. Just stuff to make you shiver. Not real.

This is real.

Not fair, he’s thinking. A sense of unfairness so deeply felt it feels like heat spreading from his belly. The heat overwhelms the cold knot of fear, melts it away, and that makes him feel stronger. Not strong enough to break the thick plastic restraints, but strong enough to let him think.

First thing, what does he know? Tomas makes a list in his head. He knows he’s been kidnapped, taken away from everything that’s ever been familiar. He knows he was put to sleep somehow, and that it has happened more than once. He knows he’s facedown on a bed not his own, in a room not his own. He knows there are men nearby, because if he screams they come into the room, threaten him, and put him to sleep.

Tomas knows he doesn’t want to be put to sleep again, no matter how tempting that might be. He must stay awake. He must think. Mom is always telling him to use his brain. If she were here, he knows she’d want him to find a way to escape. Probably she wants him to do that anyway, no matter where she is.

He sure hopes his mom is okay, but he can’t let himself think about that too much or he’ll cry, and if he’s crying he’s not thinking.

First thing, he has to do something about the straps on his wrists and ankles. In the movies guys always fray the rope and get free. But this isn’t a movie and there’s nothing to fray the plastic against. Nothing but damp sheets. And when he tugs, the straps just get tighter. He tries willing his wrists smaller but that doesn’t work. And he can’t really see what’s going on with his ankles, tangled up as they are in the ruined bedclothes.

Think.
There’s always a way, if you use your brain, young man.

Tomas is thinking as hard as he can when a door opens behind him and footsteps come softly into the room.

“Dammit!”

The boy steels himself for a blow. Instead, a dark form appears in his peripheral vision. Can’t quite focus, but this man, like the others, conceals his face with a kind of mask.

“I told them not to let this happen,” the voice says. “My bad, Tomas. You deserve better than this.”

Something shiny near his face. A knife. The boy flinches, squeezing shut his eyes.

“Shh,” the voice says. “Easy now. Here’s what I’m going to do. First I’m going to cut away the gag. You must promise not to scream. No one to hear you anyhow. Then, I’ll free your hands and feet. You promise not to scream?”

Tomas nods.

The blade slices through the gag and he can breathe through his mouth. He takes great, gulping lungs full of air. Then coughs, because the stench of the ruined bed is so acrid.

Suddenly his hands and feet are free. Didn’t even feel the knife slicing through the plastic straps. Which makes him even more afraid of the blade, what it can do.

“Roll off the bed onto the floor,” the voice commands. “Sit there.”

Tomas slides off the bed, away from the blade. He’s dizzy, not sure if he could stand even if he wasn’t so afraid of the voice and the knife it wields.

“We’re going to treat you better, Tomas,” the man says. “There will be a new mattress, fresh clothes. No more drugs. I want you to be healthy. Do you want to be healthy, Tomas?”

Tomas hates that the voice knows his name. He’s afraid to look up at the man with the knife.

“Answer me, son.”

He hates that the man calls him “son.” But he’s afraid not to answer. “Yes,” he says.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I want to be healthy,” he says, speaking into his hands.

“Good. Excellent. You’re going to do me a big favor, Tomas,” the man says. “You know what the big favor is? Can you guess?”

“No,” the boy says.

“It’s very simple, really. You’re going to make things right.”

T
here’s something about the highway, about getting the show on the road, that makes me feel almost optimistic. Maybe because I’m finally doing something, making decisions, taking action.

Today is the day, I’m thinking. The day I find my son. The day Tommy comes home.

Have to think like that or I’ll fall apart.

Ted used to joke about potholes on 295 that were big enough to swallow Hummers. And that was long before military vehicles became the new station wagons. As I’m discovering, the pothole thing hasn’t exactly improved over the years. On the approach to the Throgs Neck they have the look and feel of bomb craters, and once or twice my passenger’s head comes close to smacking the underside of the car roof. Not that he’s complaining. Nothing less than an exploding land mine would break his concentration on the coffee he’s been sipping since we got on the thruway heading south.

Earlier, explaining his sleep disorder, he’d mentioned “zoning out.” Apparently that means staring at the dashboard with unfocused eyes as his right hand robotically feeds a steady dose of Starbucks caffeine into his system. Several times I’ve attempted to initiate a conversation, but his response is limited to noncommittal grunts.

I’ve owned dogs that were more responsive to my queries.

Shane snaps out of it as we begin our descent from the bridge. Suddenly his eyes brighten, his posture changes, he’s back in my world. “Little nap,” he says, yawning happily. “I feel much better.”

“That was a nap?”

He shrugs. “My version. Not refreshing, exactly, but it helps.”

Traffic opens, I find the right lane, slotting us into the flow for the Cross Island. After we successfully negotiate our way onto the parkway, Shane suddenly announces, “I’ve been thinking about motivation.”

“Motivation?” I’m at a loss. Is he about to bring up the so-far unmentioned subject of his fee?

“There’s the money extorted from you,” he says. “Half a million bucks is plenty of motivation. But if they have that kind of access into bank software, it’s a good guess they could have drained your accounts without having to risk a child abduction. Not to mention killing a cop.”

“You just said ‘they,’” I say, interrupting. “So you really think I’m right? There’s more than just, um, Bruce?”

“I do,” he says. “An abduction that involves ransom or extortion almost invariably requires teamwork. I’m assuming Bruce is team leader.”

“Okay,” I say, keeping my eyes on the fleet of battle-scared cabs that have suddenly surrounded us. “Sorry for interrupting, you said something about motivation.”

“Yes. There’s a strong possibility this wasn’t just about the money.”

“And that’s good?” I ask hopefully.

He shoots me a wary look. “Can I be blunt?”

“Go ahead.”

“Once Bruce had the money, why not kill you? From his point of view, you’ve served your purpose. Why leave you alive and go to the trouble of planting evidence implicating you in a murder?”

“How about this?” I say vehemently. “Because he’s a sadistic monster. Because he’s a sick, sick son of a bitch.”

“No doubt,” Shane agrees. “But he’s a sick monster with a very specific and well-planned agenda. I’m assuming the whole thing of setting you up for a murder, making it look like you’re in a custody dispute, all of that is an elaborate diversion from his actual purpose. He’s creating a lot of light and smoke, making sure the major law enforcement agencies aren’t treating this as a straight-ahead child abduction. He’s got something else planned.”

“And taking Tommy is part of his plan?”

“Yes. He’s buying time. Which means, whatever he wants to accomplish, it isn’t over yet.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Absolutely. Everything Bruce has done so far convinces me your son is still alive.”

A horrifying thought: Shane has been searching for a reason to believe that my son is alive.

“What about this woman who claims to be his birth mother?” I ask somewhat lamely. The air now definitely out of my optimistic balloon.

“We’ll know more by the end of the day,” Shane assures me. “But my experience is that birth mothers rarely kidnap children after so many years have elapsed without contact. Your son is what, eleven years old?”

“Eleven, yes.” I get a flash of his last birthday party—total chaos of screaming boy-monsters—and feel a lump forming in my throat.

“A distraught birth mother might change her mind and take drastic action after a few months. Possibly even a year or two,” Shane says, nodding to himself. “But after a decade? After that long, why not just go through the courts to establish shared custody, or visitation, or whatever? Why risk a felony conviction—a very serious felony conviction—when the child is going to be legally of age in two more years?”

“Legally of age? What are you talking about? In two years Tommy will only be thirteen.”

“Exactly,” Shane says. “And at age thirteen, most custodial judges will defer to the child. All things being equal, they’d let him make up his own mind regarding who has custody, or at least who he lives with. It’s actually a practical application of the law, because by the time they’re teenagers, unhappy kids run away, or find their way back to the parent of choice anyhow, no matter what the law or the social workers decree.”

The whole subject of a possible birth mother makes me feel very unsettled. Not quite skin crawling, but close. Reminds me of how relieved I’d been when Ted told me the parents were deceased, that we were adopting an orphaned child. Which also made me feel guilty, for benefiting from a tragedy. Guilt that was swept away by the flood of joy when I took the baby in my arms and felt his little heart beating.
He’s afraid, too,
I thought, and then,
but I can fix that.
And I did fix it, by a simple act of love. Proving to myself that I could mother a child not my own, and in that way make him as much a part of me as if he had been conceived with my own DNA.

Or so I thought at the time. The idea that his birth mother might be alive changes everything, throwing me back into a deep unease about my place in Tommy’s world. Unease somehow separate from my anxiety about his current well-being.

Every minute, every hour without my son makes me more uneasy, motherwise. Anxious not that my love for him will ever abate—no chance—but that he will no longer feel the same way about me. Knowing there may be another Tommy-mom in the world changes everything, doesn’t it?

“So how did you get into this crazy business?” I ask my passenger, if only to distract myself.

Shane studies me, as if unsure how much information should be shared with a client. “I was with the bureau,” he finally admits. “The FBI. After I took early retirement, I needed something to do.”

His hesitant tone makes it sound like he’s far from certain about his own motivation. Or at the very least unwilling to discuss it with me. But I’m not ready to let him off the hook. I glance over—one eye for the traffic, one for the passenger—and ask, “So this is what you did in the FBI? Located missing children?”

Shane rubs his chin, stroking his trim little beard and grimacing slightly. “No, no. At least not like what you see on TV,” he explains. “I was a special agent with an expertise in fingerprint identification. Really not so much the prints themselves, as our system for accessing prints and connecting them with perpetrators. Which means linking up with other systems, worldwide. Software stuff.”

“You were a computer geek?”

“Sort of. It’s not that simple. Because in addition to the prints, I also worked cases like the other agents. Mostly interviews, surveillance, wiretaps. Sometimes pure abduction cases. But I was never part of an official child recovery team.”

Clearly he wants to take the conversation elsewhere, but I decide to bear down. “So you take early retirement,” I say. “And then what, out of the blue you decide to set yourself up as a child recovery expert?”

A glance reveals that he’s wearing a slightly bemused expression. As if letting me know that an intrusion into his personal space will be tolerated just this one time. “Not exactly,” he says. “I just retired, period. Never to work a full-time job again, or so I thought. Fooled around going to sleep disorder clinics for a while, to make myself useful, you know? For research? That’s where it happened.”

“Where what happened?”

“Kid got snatched from the clinic day care. This technician, Darla, she brought her two-year-old to work, left her at the day care. And Darla’s sicko boyfriend, who was not the little girl’s father, took her. Had a pass, so he just picked the kid up and walked out with her.”

“And you helped Darla get her little girl back?”

Shane nods, studying the traffic, his hands, anything but make eye contact with me. “That’s what I did. The boyfriend was trying to ‘loan’ the little girl to another pedophile he met on the Internet. I found out where the handoff was going to take place and recovered the child.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

“He’s doing thirty years in Leavenworth.”

“Nice work, Mr. Shane.”

“Thank you.”

“So you recover the little girl, then you decide to make a habit of it?”

“More or less. Darla, she’s very religious, she said I’d found my true calling.”

“Is she still a girlfriend, Darla?”

The very idea makes Shane chuckle. “Darla? Hardly. Never was. Darla likes her men short, round and brown. I lose out in all three categories.”

“Guess you would at that. Mind answering one more question?”

“Won’t know until you ask it.”

“What are you charging me?”

His looks surprised or bemused, or possibly both. “Haven’t thought about setting a price,” he says. “We’ll see how it plays out.”

“You don’t have an hourly rate like lawyers?”

“Nope. My fee depends on what happens.”

I let that soak in, absorbing the implications. “You mean your fee depends on if you get the child back alive?”

“Among other things, yes,” he admits. “Is this our exit?”

He doesn’t even flinch when I lay into the horn and cut over to the lane for Grand Central. This much closer to the city, the parkway is jammed with honking, flatulent vehicles. We find ourselves trapped behind a smoke-belching freight truck, visibility pretty much zero. I’m worried about missing the exit onto Queens Boulevard, but Shane spots it before I do.

Twenty minutes later we’re in a day-rate parking garage a block from our destination. Haven’t been to this part of Queens in years, but it looks like business is booming, with folks hurrying along sidewalks that are as crowded, if not quite so wide, as Fifth Avenue.

After shutting off the rental car, I turn to Shane and say, “Ready?”

Shane clears his throat awkwardly. “I’ve been thinking maybe you should stay in the car, let me handle the lawyer.”

“No way,” I say, opening the door. “If this guy won’t tell us what we want to know, I’m going to get all medieval on him.”

“Excuse me?”

“Tommy likes that expression. Now I know why.”

Shane grins. “It would probably be better if you don’t actually threaten his life.”

Somewhere deep in the garage, wheels are screeching. The sound is like a jagged fingernail inside my brain.

“We’ll see,” I tell him. “I’m not leaving his office without Teresa Alonzo’s number and address.”

The woman who claims to be Tommy’s birth mother. Oh yes, I do remember her name.