Taken (9 page)

“Why is that?” I ask plaintively. “I just don’t get it. Terry Crebbin already told me they weren’t interested in helping me, but it doesn’t make sense. Isn’t that what the FBI does, handle abduction cases? Even if they think the police are right, and that I abducted my own son, wouldn’t they want to investigate?”

Ms. Savalo sighs. “Time was when they’d have been all over it. Pushing the locals out of the way, taking over. But they have other fish to fry now. Homeland security and all that. I’m not saying they won’t assign an agent or two, check it out, but like I say, don’t expect what you see on TV. This isn’t
Without a Trace,
or even
Law & Order
. Especially if the local cops are dumping on the idea, telling them it’s a custody case. Feds hate to waste manpower on custody abductions.”

I want to weep in frustration, but manage to contain my tears. Determined not to break down or show weakness in front of this implacable woman. The thing is, I’m not sure if I actually like her or not—would we lunch together, in other circumstances? But one thing is abundantly clear: I need her help. Desperately.

“What can I do?” I plead. “If the FBI won’t help, what do I do next? How do I go about finding my son?”

From out of the briefcase Ms. Savalo produces a business card. “This is your man,” she says, handing me the card. “He’s a bit eccentric—hell, he’s a
lot
eccentric. But he’s the best in the business.”

“What business is that?” I ask, studying the card. All it shows is a name and a telephone number. No office indicated, not even an e-mail address.

“He finds lost children,” she explains. “Abducted children. That’s his specialty. That’s what he lives for. Sometimes I think that’s
all
he lives for.”

S
hane. That’s the name on the card. Randall Shane. Sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t think why.

Soon after giving me the card, Ms. Savalo locks her briefcase and prepares to leave, eager to return the borrowed Honda and, no doubt, to get on with her regular life, whatever that might be. I’ve no idea if she’s married (no ring, but that’s hardly conclusive) or if she has children of her own. She’s given no indication of any desire to share personal information, and I’m not inclined to pry. For all I know, she lives in a file cabinet and pops out when innocent clients are framed for horrible crimes. Which is fine by me, so long as she continues to pop up whenever I need her.

Last thing she does before leaving is promise to arrange a car rental for me. It seems my minivan has been impounded, and will not be released for several days, assuming they don’t find any evidence linking it to Fred Corso’s murder.

“You don’t want to be driving a vehicle with known plates anyhow, not for a few days,” she says. “The media folks aren’t geniuses, but they know how to run plate numbers.”

“I thought there was a law against that.”

“You’re joking, right? That’s good. When bad things happen to good people, you need a sense of humor.”

“So you think I’m a good person?” I ask, really wanting to know. “You believe I’m innocent?”

Ms. Savalo pauses at the door, looking up at me, considering my question. Even with her high heels, our height difference is a crucial inch or two. “It’s not important what I believe about a client’s guilt or innocence,” she says. “But in your case, actually, yes, I do believe you.”

I fumble in the purse that has been returned with my personal effects. “You’ll want a credit card,” I tell her. “For the car.”

She shakes her head. “We’ll take care of it and bill you later. The vehicle will be in someone else’s name, but will be valid for your driver’s license.”

“Oh.” I shut the purse.

“I always use Enterprise,” she says with a wry smile. “Because they deliver.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“Standard procedure for keeping a low profile. Look, Mrs. Bickford, you’ve been through a lot in the last few days. Try to get some sleep and call Randall in the morning.”

I’m at the point of asking her to stay—the prospect of being left alone in this dreary motel is suddenly daunting—but realize that’s silly, not to mention inconsiderate. So I thank her yet again and then lock and chain the door when she’s gone.

I can always call a friend. It’s not as if I don’t have girlfriends galore, right? Okay, maybe not a go-to, call-in-the-middle-of-the-night best friend. But I’m on friendly terms with all the Little League moms—well, most of them—and there’s Connie, who runs the day-to-day operations for the catering business, and who must be totally flipped out by what she’s no doubt heard on the news. At the very least I should give Connie a call, tell her what has happened, my version. But I can’t bring myself to call her for the same reason I can’t call closer friends: because I’m ashamed to tell them what has happened. As if I’ve somehow brought this upon myself. As if part of me wants to take the blame.

Totally absurd. But that’s how it feels. Deeply shameful and humiliating. What it boils right down to is, the only person I really want to talk to is Ted, and he’s no longer available, at least not for a normal two-way conversation. I still tell him things in my head—surely everyone who has lost a loved one does that—but if anything, it only makes me feel more alone. And I’ve never felt so alone in all my life, not even in the empty-bed days that followed Ted’s passing. Of course, I had Tommy to hold and comfort, and that helped. My son who may have a birth mother out there after all, one who wants him back. What would he think of such a thing? Would he want to see her? Or, and here’s a terrifying thought, has he already met her and decided to abandon life in the suburbs with boring old Mom?

The line of thought is so painful I attempt to banish it from my mind. And fail, of course. Thinking that a distraction might help, I turn on the television but find I can’t focus on the images. I see them clearly enough, heads yakking, cars crashing, more heads yakking, but can’t make sense of the story, if there is one.

Switching off the TV, I take a quick shower in the mildewed stall. After toweling my hair more or less dry—I look like a water rat, no doubt, but lack the courage to check the steamy mirror—I lay back on the ruptured bed and close my eyes. And keep seeing my son in his uniform, and the frost-burned face of poor Fred Corso, the two blurring together until I want to scream myself unconscious.

Sleep is out of the question. I have to do something.

Randall Shane. What is it about that name?

One way to find out. These are hardly normal business hours, but recovering abducted children isn’t a normal business, is it? Anyhow, that’s my excuse for dialing the number on the card.

Rings three times. Answering machine with three words,
Leave a message.
I hang up and then decide to try again, having formulated a message to leave on the machine.

This time, much to my surprise, an actual voice responds.

“Randall Shane. State your business.”

Now I’m really flustered, and therefore speaking too fast, rushing the words. “Um, Mr. Shane? My name is Kate Bickford. My son, Tommy, has been kidnapped. Tomas, really, that’s what he prefers, but I can’t seem to stop calling him Tommy.”

“Who gave you my number?” he responds, making it sound like an accusation.

“My lawyer, Ms. Savalo. Maria Savalo. She, um, said you could help me.”

“Address,” he says abruptly.

“Excuse me?”

“Where are you, Mrs. Bickford?”

Lions have kinder growls. He sounds like he wants to come right over and rip the phone out of my hands. I’m trying to make my hand hang up the receiver when he snarls, “Tell me where you are, lady! How am I supposed to help you if I don’t know where you are?”

I search around for something that will give me the motel address, can’t seem to find anything relevant. No pens, notepaper, or matchbooks. Feeling helpless and intimidated by the rudeness in his voice, I manage to describe the motel, its location near the traffic circle.

“I’ll find it,” he says. “What room?”

That much I do know.

“Ninety minutes,” he snaps, and hangs up.

For the next hour or so I contemplate going down to the front desk and asking to change my room. At about the same time, my brain solves the riddle of the familiar name.
Shane
happened to be one of Ted’s favorite movies. You know, mysterious gunslinger protects a boy and his homesteader family from a hired killer, mostly seen from the boy’s point of view. Alan Ladd and Jack Palance. In the end, having gunned down the really creepy bad guy, Shane rides off into the sunset, mortally wounded perhaps, but not wanting to let the boy see him hurting.

I never connected with the story quite the way Ted did, but I loved to watch him watch it, if only to glimpse the ten-year-old boy inside the man I loved.

I’m not sure what to expect of Randall Shane, but after being a victim of his rude and abrupt phone manner, I’m not expecting a hero in a white hat, that’s for sure.

An hour crawls by. Sixty seconds to the minute, sixty minutes to the hour. No wonder it takes so long to get through an hour. We pass ninety minutes and head toward two hours. The son of a bitch has stood me up. How dare he?

One hundred and four very long minutes after the abrupt hang-up, a fist rat-a-tats the motel-room door, causing me to jump about a foot in the air, my heart slamming. Scared and angry, I undo the chain and yank the door open. Ready to give him hell if he so much as raises his voice.

Standing in the doorway, looking more sheepish than intimidating, is a tall, rangy, slope-shouldered man in his midforties. Before I can speak—not that I know what to say—he removes a Red Sox baseball cap, revealing close-cropped gray hair, and apologizes profusely.

“Mrs. Bickford? Randall Shane. Really sorry to keep you waiting at a time like this. I had trouble finding a cab. Said they’d be over in ten minutes, it was more like thirty.”

“Cab?” Seeing the deep sadness that emanates from his faded blue eyes, I feel my anger drain away.

“Maria didn’t tell you? I don’t drive. May I come in?”

I’m thinking that if Clint Eastwood had a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee, he’d bear a passing resemblance to Randall Shane. That is, if Mr. Shane could be persuaded to stand up straight. Dressed not in faded denim but slightly wrinkled khaki pants, long in the leg, moccasin boat shoes, and the kind of loose, buttoned shirt that fishermen favor, with multiple pockets. His hands, I can’t help noticing, are large, blue-veined and strong. The kind of hands that can palm a basketball or make a powerful fist.

Having been ready to dismiss him out of hand, after a bad first impression, my inner compass instantly swings one hundred and eighty degrees. My Shane is not the hero from the movie, perhaps, but he’s half again as tall as Alan Ladd, and looks plenty capable of handling himself in a difficult situation. Looks, indeed, as if he’s been handling difficult situations all his life.

That, I’m thinking, may be exactly what my situation requires. What I require. Because the man in the mask continues to scare me stupid, and I can’t seem to shake the fear.

“I see you’ve got a coffeemaker,” Shane says. “Mind if I make myself a cup?”

I offer to do it for him. I am, after all, a professional caterer, and ought to be able to play gracious host, even in a dump like this. But the big man shrugs me away. “Always make my own coffee,” he says. “One of my quirks.”

I think it a trifle odd that he doesn’t offer to make me a cup, too, (not that I want one of the tasteless things) but then recall that Ms. Savalo said he was eccentric. Maybe his eccentricities extend from not driving to not sharing beverages.

Right away he sets me straight on the latter point. “Thing is, you look shaky as hell,” he says, bring his cup over to the little laminated table. “I’m guessing you haven’t slept in at least twenty-four hours. No caffeine for you.”

I open my mouth to tell him I’m perfectly capable of monitoring my own caffeine intake, and then think better of it. What do I care? All that matters is that he’s capable of finding my son. If he can do that, and wants me to walk ten paces behind him, eyes averted, I’ll gladly comply.

“How do you do it?” I ask him. “How do you find kids who’ve been abducted?”

He shrugs, sips quietly at his coffee. “Depends on the situation. Tell me all about it, then I’ll have some idea of how to proceed.”

Once I get rolling, Shane doesn’t interrupt and he doesn’t take notes, he just sips his coffee, his eyes directed at the floor, as if fascinated by the variety of stains in the carpet. I tell him what I told Ms. Savalo, trying my best to include all the details she had to pry out of me. When I get at last to the body in the freezer, he puts his empty cup down and levels his sad blue eyes at me.

“The bastard,” he says, sounding appalled but not terribly surprised. “Had you thinking it was your boy in the freezer, didn’t he?”

I nod, a lump in my throat. Exactly right. Exactly what I’d been dreading when I lifted the lid. And no doubt why my hands are shaking now. Because even thinking about it still scares me. No, not “it,” my fear is not centered on dead bodies, but upon the man in the mask. Because an essential part of me is convinced he’s still out there in the shadows. Maybe right there in the parking lot, waiting to pounce, waiting to put me under his control.

Randall Shane picks up on my anxiety—anybody would, I suppose—and probes me for the specific symptoms.

“Just thinking of this man gets your heart racing, right?” he asks. “Brings on a cold sweat? Weakness in the belly and knees. Trembling?”

I nod, feeling deeply ashamed.

“Got an idea,” Shane announces, sounding utterly confident. He folds his large hands and places them under his chin, as if posing for Rodin’s
Thinker,
the khaki-clad version. “Just go with me here, okay?” he says. “I want to try something.”

I’ve no idea what he has in mind, but nod my assent.

The big hands have folded themselves together, as if in prayer. Indeed, Shane is staring up at the ceiling, as if in prayer. But he does not, as I’m half expecting, invoke the name of God. Not even close.

After a pause, he says, “What’s the most harmless name you can think of? A man’s name. First harmless name that comes to mind, Mrs. Bickford. Give me a harmless name.”

I shrug. “Bruce?”

Shane grins, exposing teeth that have not been laser-whitened or capped, which is oddly reassuring. “I know a couple of macho Scots would take mortal offense at that choice, but Bruce it is. From now on, until we establish his identity, that’s what we’ll call the man in the mask. Bruce.”

“Bruce?”

“Bruce is a bastard, but he’s not all-powerful, okay? He’s just a man. One who probably had military training in how to intimidate a victim. Wants you to fear him because his training teaches him that fear makes victims weak, makes them not pay attention to what he’s really doing. Does what I’m saying make sense?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Are you offended by vulgar language, Mrs. Bickford.”

“My son listens to Eminem and 50 Cent. I’ve gotten used to it.”

“Good,” he says, as if I’ve helped him arrive at a decision. “Now repeat after me—Fuck Bruce.”

“Excuse me?”

“Humor me, Mrs. Bickford. I’m sure Maria told you I was eccentric. Probably told you worse than that. So repeat after me—Fuck Bruce.”

The thing is, and this may sound silly or even prissy, but
fuck
is not a word I use. Lots of women in my age group and social class swear like sailors, but since I’m always meeting and greeting potential customers, I’m careful to avoid language that might be offensive.

“Come on, Mrs. Bickford. Give it a try. Fuck Bruce.”

I take a deep breath and go for it. “Fuck Bruce.”

“Good. Now say it like you mean it.”

“Fuck Bruce!”

He grins again. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Bruce is not a monster, he’s a man. Therefore he makes mistakes. We don’t know exactly what mistakes yet, but I’ll find out, starting first thing tomorrow morning. The mistakes will lead us to Bruce, and from Bruce to your son.”