A dark thought plagued me, something I didn’t want to admit could possibly be true.
But then I had to admit it very well might be.
He’d told me that his son was home, that he was “safe,” not that he was “okay.”
That was easy enough to check on.
Back at my desk, I called Radar’s house. No one picked up. I tried radioing him again, but he didn’t answer.
The principal answered and told me the secretary had gone to the central office. “Before she left she mentioned that a man had come to speak with the Walker children regarding a car accident their father had been in.”
“Who was he? The man who came by?”
“If he was the fellow I saw at the reception desk, I’ve never seen him before. Hang on.” A moment passed, then she said, “Mrs. Unger didn’t write down his name.”
“So, he left through the front doors again?”
“I haven’t seen anyone walk past my office.”
“When? When did he come in?”
“About one thirty, I think.”
That was too long ago, way too long. “Page Tod Walker and have someone check his classroom for him. Also, see if you can reach Mrs. Unger. We need to know who that man was.”
I handed the phone to Ralph. “Find out what you can. See if you can get a description of the guy. Something’s happened to Radar’s son. I think someone took him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find Radar.”
Joshua wanted to see if his wife could record the news for him this afternoon. He tried the home number, but she wasn’t there. He gave her a ring at the real estate office. They told him she’d stepped out earlier, but that they were expecting her back any time and would give her the message.
Okay, if she didn’t get back to him, watching it live would have to be enough.
He drove the boy, who was safely tucked in the back of the moving truck, toward the bank in Wales.
87
3:25 p.m.
1 hour until the gloaming
I went to grab my things. Ralph called over to me and told me that neither Tod’s teacher nor the principal could give us anything on the man except that he was “big and white.” No one had been able to locate Mrs. Unger.
I tried Radar on the radio one last time.
Still nothing.
Tod was missing and all I could think of was that box Radar had been holding, and of the finger the kidnapper had left behind in Carl Kowalski’s refrigerator and what he’d done to Colleen and Adele.
He abducts. He makes demands. He mutilates his captives. And he’s escalating.
Honestly, I had no clue.
When Radar left, he’d implied that he was going to his house, so I decided to try there first. From here I could get there just as quickly as if we dispatched a car. And he was my partner. I wanted to be the one there if something bad really was going down. I asked Ralph to stay on top of things here and to call me if we heard from Radar.
Calvin saw me getting ready to go and when I mentioned vaguely that I was following up on a lead, he surprised me and offered to come with me.
“I can’t do that.”
“Actually, my boy, you can, as long as I’m not in the front seat.”
I wished he didn’t know so much about law enforcement.
“I’m sorry, I-”
“You drive,” he said, as if that were a choice. “I’ll bring my computer. With the information your team pulled up on Basque’s activity nodes, I’m close to formulating a crude model of his cognitive map.”
“You can work on that here.”
“But you can’t get my results in real time.”
“Can you find him? Can you predict where he might’ve gone?”
“No. But I might be able to find his anchor point.”
I rubbed my head and tried to think things through.
It was possible that Basque had something to do with what was going on with Radar and Tod. I wasn’t sure how, but I was willing to do whatever it took to find them, especially if, as I feared, something bad had happened to Tod.
This was way unorthodox, but Calvin would be safe in the back of the car and I could pick his brain as we drove.
“Don’t tell anyone I’m doing this.”
He closed up his laptop and headed with me for the elevators. “Mum’s the word.”
88
No one was at Radar’s house.
Ralph radioed me that he’d spoken with the principal again and, providentially, she’d been able to stop Gayle Walker and Angie just as they were leaving car line. “A squad’s on the way to pick them up.”
“But Tod’s not with them?”
“No.”
I was parked beside the curb in front of Radar’s home, trying to figure out what the next step should be. Calvin had been quietly working through Euclidean distance and linear decay models, and now he said, “I might have something, my boy. The west side of the city. Industrial district.”
“His anchor point?”
“It’s the best I can do with the data we have.”
“You sure about this?”
“Not at all.”
If Radar and Tod weren’t here and Gayle and Angie were safe, then sitting around waiting for something to happen wasn’t doing anyone any good.
If anything came up here with Radar, I could always come back, but if Basque was our guy and he’d gone to the anchor point for his crimes, we might have a chance at tracking him down. And even if he wasn’t there, if we could somehow locate it, there might be something there that could lead us to him.
I radioed Ralph, who said he’d station another car at the house, then I pulled onto the street.
The industrial district Calvin was speaking of wasn’t far.
“Alright,” I said to Calvin. “Which street?”
“Head toward Bracken Street. We’ll see what we can find out from there.”
I called in to have squads focus the APB search for Basque’s car in that area of the city.
