kissed Lucy's cheek.
'Hey. How you guys doing?'
'Not so good.'
Two Juvenile Section detectives got out of a car behind him. The lead detective was an older man with loose skin and freckles. His driver was a younger woman with a long face and smart eyes. Poitras introduced them as they came into the house.
'This is Dave Gittamon. He's been a sergeant on the Juvie desk longer than anyone I know. This is Detective,
ah, sorry, I forgot your name.'
'Carol Starkey.'
Starkey's name sounded familiar but I couldn't place it. She smelled like cigarettes.
Poitras said, 'Have you gotten another call sine we spoke ?'
'No. We had the one call, and that was it. I tried reverse dialing with Star sixty-nine, but they must've called from a blocked cell number. All I got was the phone company computer.'
'I'm on it. I'll have a backtrace done through the phone company.'
Poitras brought his cell phone into the kitchen.
We took Gittamon and Starkey into the living room. I described the call that we received and how I had searched for Ben. I showed them the Game Freak, telling them that I now believed Ben had dropped it when he was taken. If Ben had been abducted from the slope beneath my house, then the spot where I found the Game Freak was a crime scene. Gittamon glanced at the canyon through the glass doors as he listened. Lights glittered on the ridges and down through the bowl, but it was too dark to see anything.
Starkey said, 'If he's still missing in the morning, I'll take a look where you found it.'
I was anxious and scared, and didn't want to wait. 'Why don't we go now? We can use flashlights.'
38
Starkey said, 'If we were talking about a parking lot, I'd say fine, let's light it up, but we can't light this type of environment well enough at night, what with all the brush and the uneven terrain. We'd as likely destroy any
evidence as find it. Better if I look in the morning.' Gittamon nodded agreeably.
'Carol has a lot of experience with that type of thing, Mr. Cole. Besides, let's hold a good thought that Ben's home by then.'
Lucy joined us at the glass doors.
'Shouldn't we call the FBI? Doesn't the FBI handle kidnappings ?'
Gittamon answered with the gentle voice of a man who had spent years dealing with frightened parents and children.
'We'll call the FBI if it's necessary, but first we need to establish what happened.'
'We know what happened: Someone stole my son.' Gittamon turned from the doors and went to the couch. Starkey sat with him, taking out a small spiral notebook.
'I know that you're frightened, Ms. Chenier, I would be frightened, too. But it's important for us to understand Ben and whatever led up to this.'
I said, 'Nothing led up to this, Gittamon. Some asshole just grabbed him.'
Lucy was good in court and was used to thinking about difficult things during stressful situations. This was infinitely worse, but she did well at keeping herself focused. Probably better than me.
She said, 'I understand, Sergeant, but this is my child.'
'I know, so the sooner we do this, the sooner you'll have him back.'
39
Gittamon asked Lucy a few general questions that didn't have anything to do with being grabbed off a hill. While they spoke, I wrote down everything the caller had said to me, then went upstairs for a picture of Ben and one of the snapshots Ben had found of me in my Army days. I had not looked at that picture or any of the others for years until Ben found them. I hadn't wanted to see them.
Poitras was sitting on the Eames chair in the corner when I got back.
He said, 'PacBell's working on the trace. We'll have
the source number in a couple of hours.'
I gave the pictures to Gittamon.
'This is Ben. The other picture is me. I wrote down what the man said, and I'm pretty sure I didn't leave anything out.'
Gittamon glanced at the pictures, then passed them to Starkey.
'Why the picture of you?'
'The man who called said 'five-two.' You see the man next to me holding the sign with the number? Five-two was our patrol number. I don't know what else this guy could have meant.'
Starkey glanced up from the pictures. 'You don't look old enough for Vietnam.' 'I wasn't.'
