Caleb is to his own brother, Mason, and I think that would have made Richard very proud. While I believe that the jury made the right decision, I…I am not happy about this. Nothing makes this a happy occasion. I understand completely why Caleb and his mother stood by Mason. Just as I had to stand up for Richard and for Jenny, who could not speak for themselves…”
He drew another breath.
“This family is my family. That’s all I have to say.”
More shouts followed, but he didn’t respond to them.
HE hardly remembered the drive home. He left another pack of reporters at the gates of the exclusive community where he lived. He pulled into his garage, turned the car off, hit the automatic garage-door control, and waited until the automatic light overhead clicked off.
He sat in the darkness and remembered.
RICHARD, the youngest of the boys, was crying. When Graydon Fletcher came into the bedroom, he was pleased to see that Nelson was trying to comfort the four-year-old.
“He had a bad dream, Daddy,” Nelson said.
“You’re a good boy to take care of him. I’ll sit with him now. You go on back to bed.”
“Mommy!” Richard cried. Nelson wished he could help him.
“Mommy’s asleep right now, Richard.”
“Not her! I want my real mommy.”
“She’s in heaven, Richard. You know that. But we love you and we’ll take care of you and keep you safe.”
The sobbing went on for a while, then subsided.
“Can you sleep now?”
Richard shook his head.
“Would you like to play with one of your puzzles for a little while? Would that help you feel sleepy again?”
The boy nodded.
“That’s a good boy. Put your slippers and robe on. Come on, let’s play the math game.”
“Yes, please!” Richard eagerly searched for his slippers and, with a little help, donned his robe. He glanced at Nelson. “Can Nelson play, too?”
“Oh, I suppose he can miss a little sleep tonight. Sure.”
While Nelson put on his own robe and slippers, Richard looked up at his adoptive father and raised his arms. The man lifted him and carried him easily. Nelson knew that Richard wouldn’t have wanted to be carried if he hadn’t still felt frightened.
“Ready?”
“Yes!”
“Such a bright little boy.” Their father smiled as he looked back at the sleeping figures in the other beds, then reached down and ruffled Nelson’s hair. “All my boys are bright little boys.”
N ELSON rubbed his hands over his face and then opened the car door. The dome light went on, and the motion detector in the garage quickly snapped the overhead on as well.
He thought of Elisa. Should he call her?
No, he decided. Be patient.
TWO
CHAPTER 8
Sunday, April 23
8:15 A.M.
LAS PIERNAS
THE rain was ruining someone’s weekend, no doubt, but I didn’t mind it at all. I was pleased to be where I was-in bed next to my husband, warm and cozy. We had been awakened by a thunderclap just after dawn, but apparently our houseguest, Ethan Shire, had slept through it, giving us a couple of unexpected hours of privacy.
I’m a reporter and my husband, Frank Harriman, is a homicide detective, so our plans are often overset by the demands of our work. Lately, our schedules had been further complicated by Ethan Shire’s recuperation. Ethan was a coworker of mine who was staying in our guest room. Since he had been shot trying to save my life, giving him a place to stay and a little of our time while he recovered wasn’t perceived as a burden, but it had changed how we walked around the house in nothing but our underwear.
At the moment, having read the sports section and comics and now feigning interest in the obituaries, I waited for my husband to finish reading page fifteen of the A section of the Las Piernas News Express. I work for the Express, and a story I had written on missing children was on pages one, fourteen, and made its final jump to fifteen.
He finished and gave me a wry smile. “The phones in Missing Persons will be ringing off the hook.”
I shrugged. “Probably in the newsroom, too.”
“Tough subject to write about.”
I couldn’t argue with that, but it was a story I couldn’t ignore.
A few weeks earlier, looking up some background for a story on an old kidnapping, I had learned that kidnapping is not one of the crimes included in the FBI’s national Uniform Crime Reporting system.
This struck me as odd. Not long after the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932, kidnapping became a federal offense if the abductor crossed state lines or sent a ransom note by mail. The FBI investigated all such kidnapping cases and was often called in to advise on others.
But kidnapping didn’t count in one of the leading reports on crime in the U.S. It was literally easier to get statistics on auto thefts than child abduction.
I got curious.
I found a Department of Justice study on missing children for the year 1999. That study estimated that in the U.S., an astounding number of children had been reported missing-797,500-which meant that on the average, Americans lost track of more than 2,100 children every day-91 kids an hour.
If they had just been numbers, I suppose I would have gone on to something else. But they were children.
The reasons for their disappearances were complex. The largest number were reported to be runaways, a sad commentary in itself, and again not a problem with a single cause or solution. It wasn’t always a certainty that children labeled runaways had voluntarily disappeared. In some jurisdictions, it was a fact of life that the police would rather not spend time hunting down a teenager who probably didn’t want to be returned home. Runaway was an easy thing to write on a report if you didn’t want to trouble yourself much.
One woman told me that when she sought the help of police in the disappearance of her seventeen-year-old son, she spoke to a detective who did nothing more than take down her son’s name, age, and general description. At the end of which he cruelly remarked, “Lady, he probably just wanted to get away from you.” That was just about the sum total of the police investigation thirty years ago, and despite continued effort on her part, she never learned what became of her son.
