“She’s gone,” Ben said.
“Can I have her stuff?”
“What?”
“You know, like when she goes to college, I’m gonna get her room and all her stuff.”
“No, it’s not like that, Sam. She didn’t want to go.”
“So why did she?”
“A man took her.”
An innocent face. “The mailman?”
“No, not a nice man.”
“A cretin?”
“A what?”
“A bad man.”
“Yes, Sam, a bad man.”
“Where did she sleep last night?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did the cretin feed her dinner?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s ransom?”
“Money.”
“The cretin wants money to let Gracie go?”
“Maybe.”
Sam’s face brightened. “Well, that’s okay.”
“Why?”
“Because after the IPO, we’ll be a billionaire.”
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux had no doubt the furnishings in this one room cost more than his entire homestead. He had followed the victim’s mother into the elegant formal living room in the east wing of the residence; Devereaux didn’t know furnishings from fiddlesticks, but he knew this stuff didn’t come cheap. He instinctively pushed his hands into his pockets, like he did when visiting those antique shops the wife loved, so as not to inadvertently break something he couldn’t afford.
“Set up in here,” the mother said. She dismissed the entire room with a wave of her hand. “Use the furniture, move it to the garage, burn it for firewood. I don’t give a damn.”
“Mrs. Brice, we normally don’t establish the command post in the victim’s home, but-”
She pointed a finger his way. “I want it here! I want to know what’s being done to find my daughter at all times! I’ll call Larry McCoy himself if I have to! He owes me!”
Not that it would affect his decision, but Devereaux couldn’t help but wonder if the mother really knew the president personally or was merely a “Friend of Larry,” a status earned through a $100,000 contribution to his last campaign.
– “ but, your home is already wired for twenty phone and fax lines and broadband for computers and it would take us the entire morning to wire another location. So we will set up the command post here. We’ll be operational in one hour.”
Devereaux hoped he would not regret his decision. Because there was a good reason not to establish a command post in the victim’s home: if the victim was not recovered quickly, personnel couldn’t be maintained at a remote location indefinitely; the command post would have to be moved to the local FBI field office in downtown Dallas forty miles away. And when it was, the parents would worry that the FBI was quitting on their child. But Eugene Devereaux had never quit on an abducted child.
“Good. Now, what’s being done to find my daughter?”
A fair enough question. Devereaux removed his hands from his pockets and ticked the items off on his fingers.
“I’ve got twenty agents full time on the case, plus ten local police. Chief Ryan issued an Amber Alert immediately upon Gracie’s disappearance and broadcast an alert on NLETS, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. Every law enforcement agency in the country knows about Gracie now.
“We’ve input Gracie into the National Crime Information Center Missing Person File. As soon as we get her photo, we’ll input her into the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They’ll put her on their website, and she’ll go on the FBI website.
“We’ll print up fliers with Gracie’s photo and a composite sketch of the suspect for distribution throughout the area and to the media. Chief Ryan is coordinating the search at the park. An FBI Evidence Response Team is also at the crime scene. They’ll collect and preserve any evidence and conduct a forensic analysis of the abduction site.
“We’ve installed communications equipment to record and trap and trace all incoming calls. Our Rapid Start Team will set up the command post, the phone bank, computers, and faxes, and coordinate and track all leads on a computerized system- there’ll be thousands. We’re interviewing witnesses who were at the park last night, and we’re canvassing the neighborhood.”
Devereaux decided not to mention that they were compiling a list of known sex offenders residing in the locality.
“Mrs. Brice, we can get a psychologist in here.”
“For what purpose?”
“For you, your husband, your son. To help you through this.”
“I don’t want help. I want my daughter found.”
The mother turned away, paced off four steps, and whirled to face him; her arms were crossed, and her eyes were sizing him up.
“And what are your qualifications, Agent Devereaux, to find my daughter?”
Bluntness did not offend Eugene Devereaux.
“Well, ma’am, this ain’t my first rodeo.” He was met with a blank expression. “One hundred twenty-seven abductions, Mrs. Brice. Those are my qualifications.”
Her face deflated as she absorbed his words; her eyes fell.
“One hundred twenty-seven,” she whispered. “My God.” She lifted her eyes. “Children?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How many were ransom?”
He hesitated. “None.”
“Ben, what if this isn’t about money?” Kate asked.
She had taken Ben out to the pool house. She thought it would be better that way, Ben staying out here alone. Just in case he drank. And the nightmares returned. And he screamed, that tortured cry that had punctured her sleep so many nights.
“Take me to the park.”
Kate shook her head. “It’s a crime scene. No one can go out there until they search it.”
Bobby Joe Fannin spat a stream of brown tobacco juice.
“Settle down, boys.”
The dogs were straining at their leashes, ready to get it on, the girl’s scent fresh in their nostrils. Bobby Joe headed up the county’s canine search unit, a team of six bloodhounds he had raised from pups. Good job, good benefits, outside most of the time. Not as good as farming this land thirty years ago when his granddaddy still owned this land, but not bad. Except for finding dead people. Bobby Joe never liked that part of the job. Why did killers from the city always dump the bodies in the country?
On the radio: “Bobby Joe, come in.”
Bobby Joe pulled the radio off his belt and pushed the transmit button. “Yeah, Chief?”
He could barely make out Police Chief Ryan at the other end of the park; the search party was stretched out single file across the playing fields. Bobby Joe worked alone, just him and the dogs, which was another thing he
