“What did you do?” I ask.
“I waited. I thought it was best if I waited for the police to come and we did a controlled, managed, takedown. I figured it was so crowded down there and it was going to be a little bit before the train got there, so he wasn’t going to be moving. I just kept my eye on him, following to make sure he didn’t do anything to the children. I assumed when the police arrived, they would be able to recover both of them and arrest him. I stood there, not two feet away from him. He didn’t know who I was, so he had no reason to run away from me. I was close enough that I could have reached out and taken the children out of his arms.”
“But you didn’t,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t. I stood there, and I waited. It hurt like hell to do, but I did. I just wanted to rescue them, but I knew I’d jeopardize the whole thing if I made a move. Finally, the police arrived, and one of them made a move toward the guy. It spooked him, and he started running through the crowd. I chased after him, but before I could reach out and get the children, the train started coming into the station, and he tossed one of them down onto the tracks. She made it but lost a leg and got severely injured and traumatized. For a long time, I destroyed myself over that. I felt like it was my fault. It was enough that I almost quit.”
“Why didn’t you?” I ask.
“A few weeks later, I found a girl who had disappeared when an internet predator lured her out of her house. She was alive, and I got her back to her parents. Then at the hearing for the man who threw his daughter, he said he would have done it no matter what. If I had tried to grab one of them, he just would have tossed the other one. I had to realize it wasn’t my fault. As much as I desperately wanted to protect those children and stop anything from happening to them, I couldn’t control their father. I couldn’t stop him from doing exactly what he was going to do. So, I do understand.”
He looks at me with tears brimming in his eyes, but his jaw set and serious. “Emma, I want you to know, this isn’t you. You might have to be the one to bring him down, but you aren’t making him do what he’s doing.”
Chapter Fourteen
“When was the last time you looked through these?” Sam asks as I pull stacks of folders out of the filing cabinet in what I still think of as my father’s office.
“Years ago,” I tell him. I hand him a stack and turn around to get more. “When he first disappeared, I spent a lot of time going through them. I thought maybe if I understood what he was doing and the cases that were taking up the most of his time and energy, maybe I’d be able to figure out what happened to him. I know he didn’t leave me any information about where he was going or why, but something told me I could figure it out just by digging through what he was doing in the days leading up to when he left. Of course, I never figured that out. I must have gone through these files a dozen times each, but it wasn’t enough to help me trace him.”
I hand off another stack of files to Dean and get a stack for myself. We go back into the living room, and they move the coffee table out of the way so we can sit on the floor and spread the files out around us. Once we’re settled into place, each of us pick an arbitrary folder out of our stacks and start reading through them. It’s been so long since I’ve read the files, but as I go through them, details start coming back to me. I remember reading about the cases, trying to piece together what they could mean and which one of them had claimed my father’s attention so much he needed to leave me in order to pursue it.
The first file I go through contains nothing that points to Leviathan or Lotan. I set it aside and pick up another. Sam and Dean do the same. For the next two hours, we read through the files, separating them out into two stacks: one of cases that clearly have no link, almost overwhelmingly tall, and a much smaller stack of cases that could possibly have the slightest something to do with Catch Me or Lotan or Leviathan or whatever we’re looking for. Finally, we’ve gone through all the files, and I look at the stacks.
“Alright. I guess now we go through the ones that might have information in them,” I say.
Each of us picks up a file, and we start reading out the details to each other. Sam has one that involves a smuggler who managed to avoid any type of detection for years because they stayed in international waters.
“The boat they used was named Sea
