A Son's Tale

Nothing was happening.

Until the phone rang just after midnight. Morgan’s body suffused with weakness even while her heart pounded so hard she could feel its beat.

“Wait,” the detective on duty, Rick Warner, said, looking at her. The hand Morgan held suspended over the receiver, ready to pick up, was shaking. The call display flashed Unknown Caller.

“Remember what they told you, Morgan.” George Lowen stood over her, having come in from the business papers he had strewn all over the kitchen table as soon as the phone pealed. “Keep them talking. Stay calm. Be agreeable…”

She tuned out the voice. She couldn’t deal with her father and kidnappers at the same time.

“You’ll do fine.” Cal Whittier dropped quietly onto the couch next to her. Not touching her. Just there.

The detective nodded and Morgan picked up, the call broadcast to the room on a special speaker they’d hooked up. “Hello?”

“Your father killed my wife. I got your kid. Fair trade.” Click.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.

No one spoke at first, as the caller hung up far too soon for anyone to put a full trace on the call.

“What the hell?” George Lowen turned his back just as Grace came into the room. Morgan’s mother had been lying down on Morgan’s bed. Her usually immaculate, tastefully dyed brown hair was mussed. Her eyes were swollen, her lightweight navy slacks and white blouse wrinkled.

“Who was on the phone?”

Detective Warner spoke into a cell phone. And hung up. Caleb Whittier took the receiver out of Morgan’s grasp.

“The call came from a prepaid cell phone. No way to trace it,” the detective said. “But they got the tower the signal came from. First and Main.”

“Fifteen miles from here,” George bit out.

“He’s still in the area?” Hope shot through Morgan even while she was falling apart at the seams.

“We know the area the call came from,” Detective Warner said softly, his brown eyes warm but tired looking. He didn’t try to hide the graveness of the situation from her.

Morgan couldn’t move. “He said he has Sammie.”

“I know.”

“So what do we do now?”

Those dark eyes were so hard to take. “We wait.”

“We wait.” How could her voice sound so calm when she was screaming inside? Seething with panic and dread and anger and fear and… “For what?”

“For him to call again.” Detective Warner’s voice was as calm as hers. Did the man also have feelings underneath? Things she couldn’t see? Or was this all just another job to him? Did he know what his words were doing to her?

Did it matter?

“What about that tower?” George demanded, standing halfway across the room. “I want every inch of that area canvassed. I’ll provide the resources. If you people can’t man the search I’ll hire someone who can.”

Her father’s autocratic tone cut through her—and gave her hope at the same time.

“It’s a multiple base station site. The call likely came within a mile or two of the tower, but the range could extend as much as thirty miles or more, depending on the strength of the phone used. It’s late at night so there are fewer transmissions going out, which means that range is wider.”

Oh, God. Is there no hope?

“Calls connect through to the closest tower.”

So they could narrow the search dramatically?

“Not always. And that depends on the phone’s operator, as well. Cars and alerts are already out, Mr. Lowen. Believe me, we’ve got every resource possible on this one.”

“I want more.”

“We’re doing all we can.”

“Then I’ll do it myself.” Her father’s dismissive tone followed him out of the small living room.

Grace and Morgan exchanged looks but Morgan was no longer sure what they were saying to each other.

“You said we wait,” Grace addressed Detective Warner, who was working at a card table set up along the front wall of the duplex. Morgan’s mother was sitting in the armchair where earlier she’d gone through address files, making notes regarding run-ins her husband had had over the years.

George Lowen, when questioned by Detective Martin, had put his wife on that job.

And apparently Detective Martin had been right on cue, looking for people who had it in for Morgan’s father. Now they could narrow the search more. To a male who’d lost a wife—and blamed her father.

“Right now this guy is in control,” Detective Warner was saying. “Until we know more, we have to wait for the next call.”

Caleb Whittier sat beside Morgan throughout the exchange. It was as though he was her hard drive, taking in everything and storing it in meticulous order for her to call upon later.

“What makes you think he’s going to call back?” she asked Warner.

“Because it fits the profile. This man is out for revenge. One phone call isn’t going to satisfy him.”

Okay. There’d be another call. Another chance. She had to make it count.

“The next time he calls, you need to ask to speak to your son the second you pick up. This guy’s playing with you. He’s letting you know he’s in charge. And now he’s going to bait you. He’s going to wait until he knows you’re on the line, give you another one-liner and hang up.”

“And then what?”

“Profiling suggests that he’ll get around to asking for a ransom. Eventually. When he’s satisfied that you’ve suffered enough. Or when the satisfaction of torturing you runs out. For now, the only chance for communication you’re probably going to get is when you first pick up the call.”

“So instead of saying hello, I ask to speak with Sammie.”

“Right.”

Foggy-headed from exhaustion and stress, Morgan studied the detective. “You think he’ll let me talk to my son?”

“I doubt it. Not at this stage, in any case. He’s not out to give you any comfort. Just the opposite, in fact. So we play on his need to make you and your family suffer by letting him hear how desperate you are to speak to your son.”

“Why would she give this guy what he wants?” Grace asked.

“So he’ll give us what we want, proof of Sammie’s existence. He has to get pleasure out of giving us the information or we aren’t going to get it.”

Morgan’s stomach threatened to give back what little she’d eaten. “What kind of proof?”

“He’ll call back with a tape recording, maybe. Or a description of Sammie’s clothing. The idea is to keep him calling back. Every time we get him on the line we have that much more chance of pinpointing where he’s calling from. And every bit of communication gives us more clues to go on in helping us figure out who this guy is.”

“You said he’d be calling back, anyway.”

“That’s right and we want to take control of his plan.”

She nodded. And would do exactly as she was told.

She wanted to ask what the chances were that Sammie was still alive. Wanted to ask Detective Warner his professional opinion regarding her chances of ever seeing her son again.

Not trusting her ability to handle the answer, she withheld the question.

They’d had the dreaded call. Sammie wasn’t just a runaway. He’d been kidnapped.

CHAPTER SIX

“DOYOUMIND IF I sit outside on the front step for a few minutes?” Morgan directed her question to the detective sitting at his makeshift desk. Cal watched her, taking in the whiteness around her too-tight lips, the glossiness in eyes that normally glinted with eagerness, the strands of hair surrounding skin that had been devoid of makeup since she’d first cried it off more than twelve hours before.

He recognized the signs of a woman at the end of her rope. He’d watched the same thing happen to Rose Sanderson when she’d transformed from his future mother to the stranger who’d thrown him and his father out of their home.

“If my phone rings, I’ll come back in.…”

“Stay close.” Detective Warner’s tone held warning more than acquiescence.

Morgan nodded and stood. Unlike the last couple of times she’d left the room for some fresh air, she didn’t glance at Cal. Didn’t invite him along.

On a hunch, he went anyway.

And was glad he had as soon as he stepped out the door and saw his star student bent over, one side of her propped against the corner of the building as she sobbed.

It was the first time he’d seen her lose control all day. There’d been tears, plenty of them, but they’d been slow, silent drips down her cheeks, not this full-out explosion of anguish.

Cal went to her, pulled her away from the building and against him, half carrying her over to the steps and settling her against his body as they sat. He didn’t say anything. There were no words that could help. Nothing anyone could do to ease the pain that was eating her alive, short of returning her son to her.

But he could share the pain with her. It helped not to suffer alone. That much he understood.

He didn’t take it personally when she turned her face into his chest. Or when her hands worked their way around his neck and clung to him. He held her. Stroked her hair.

And cried inside—a little boy manifested into a man who’d outgrown the ability to shed tears.

“They’re hurting him, aren’t they?” Her words, muffled against his chest, were completely clear to him.

Cal had no sense of how much time had passed. His arms didn’t loosen their grip on the body he held. “We don’t know that.”

“But…” A dry sob interrupted her. “If his goal is to torture us…”

Wanting to tell her not to let him win, not to torture herself with what-ifs, Cal said instead, “We don’t know his ultimate goal.” He’d read everything he’d ever found written about child abductions. He knew the profiling as well as any detective.

“And we don’t know who we’re dealing with. Some people just aren’t killers, no matter what life has done to them. They just don’t have it in them to hurt someone else physically. So they retaliate with mental and emotional abuse.” He wasn’t educating her. He was just talking in case hearing another voice made her situation better. He wasn’t even sure she could comprehend what he was saying at that point. Or that it mattered.

“If his ultimate goal is ransom, as is probable, chances are good that he won’t do anything to hurt Sammie. At least not until he’s made his deal.”

He had to be honest with her here.

“And chances are also good that the authorities will catch the guy before he gets to close his deal.

“Less than one hundred out of eight hundred thousand abducted children die each year,” he reminded her. “Sammie’s chances are very, very good. More than 99 percent.”

“But the girl you knew about—she had those same chances.”

“Which is why I’ve always believed that she’s still alive.”

Morgan’s breathing slowed. She pulled back slowly, dropping her arms, sitting up on her own. Hands wrapped around her stomach, she stared downward.

“Do you know how many kids are taken that aren’t found dead, but are never seen by their parents again?”

“The less than one hundred that are killed includes those that are assumed dead.”

Which, technically, included Claire Sanderson. She was one of the less than 1 percent who weren’t safely returned. But… “In the case I knew about, they never had contact from the kidnapper,” he told her. “There were no calls. Nothing for them to go on.”

Except a young boy’s testimony that he’d seen the little girl in his father’s car earlier that morning. And the child’s teddy bear, which had been with her the last time anyone had seen her, had turned up in Frank’s car later that day.

“They focused the investigation on one man. They weren’t ever able to find enough evidence against him to press charges. And in the meantime, whatever other clues might have been there had grown cold and whoever took the little girl got away with the crime.”

“Did the family have money?”

“Enough to be comfortable. Nothing comparable to your father.”

But he and Emma and Claire had had everything a kid could want. And then some. They’d had a close, loving, happy family. At least for a while.

“As I recall, there wasn’t ever much talk about ransom calls,” he added, for her sake—and because for the first time in his life he was talking about the incident that had sealed his fate in a world filled with inner darkness. “The girl was only two. She wasn’t like Sammie, able to fend for herself, or to understand that she’d been abducted. And sick people don’t take two-year-old girls from middle-class neighborhoods in hopes of ransom money.”

He couldn’t go any further than that. Couldn’t let his mind travel down the road that Claire Sanderson had probably had to travel. He couldn’t save her from a twenty-five-year-old fate.

Perusing child pornography photos was one job he’d left solely up to the authorities. But the fact that there was no evidence that Claire was taken for that sordid lifestyle didn’t ease his emotional burden any. There’d been no internet twenty-five years before. No global access to illegal practices. No way to find most of the scumbags who practiced or made money from underage sex.

“Dr. Whittier—”

“Cal,” he interrupted. “I’m not here as your college professor, and as we established last spring, there’s only three years’ difference between us… .” His voice faded off. What in the hell did names or ages matter?

“Cal, then,” Morgan said. “I just wanted to thank you.” She drew a deep breath. “For being here. It helps.”

He nodded, in spite of the darkness that probably prevented her from knowing that. “Julie offered to stay.” Her friend had left hours earlier to go home and put her twin five-year-olds to bed.

Morgan rubbed a hand down her face just as he’d seen her do countless times over the past hours. “I know,” she said. “But she’s like the rest of us here, shocked and hurting and…besides, I think she needed to be with her kids. To hang on to them.”

“I’m sure she did.” Like Rose had clung to Emma, frantic to keep the four-year-old in sight at all times. Cal hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to the girl he’d loved as his little sister.

He glanced around the dark and too-quiet neighborhood. “I’m pretty certain all the parents around here are keeping a close hold on their children tonight. Thanking the Lord that they’re home. And they’re probably also scared to death that whoever took Sammie could come for their kids next.”

Up, down, up, down, up, down. He could feel the rhythm of her knee’s movement.

“They’ll be relieved to know that Sammie was scouted out specifically. That this is someone after my father, not some sicko after kids.” Shoulders hunched, she shuddered.

“Maybe. I figure the heads-up that children really are at risk of abduction will stick with most of them for a long time to come. You can’t witness something like this, even peripherally, and go back. You don’t ever become unaware again.”

“You really understand… .”

“Some things you don’t ever forget.”

“How long ago was that little girl taken?”

“Twenty-five years.”

“What?” She sat up, turned to him. “She’s been missing for twenty-five years? With no trace of her at all?”

“That’s right.”

“You had to have been just a kid then!”

“I was seven.”

“And yet you remember…”

“Like it was yesterday. I…knew the little girl. Her mother worked with my father.” He spoke slowly, choosing his way carefully. Like each word landed on a minefield and risked imminent explosion.

Rose and Frank had met at an educators’ conference. She’d been an elementary schoolteacher, while Frank was a high school principal and basketball coach. A match made in heaven.

Or could have been.

“Where did this happen? Here in Tyler?”

“No.” She seemed to be waiting for more. “It was in Massachusetts.” He was saying too much.

“What happened to the parents? Are they still there?”

“I have no idea where they are.” Claire’s father was dead. A shady man from the docks who’d run off when he’d found out that Rose was pregnant with Claire. Sanderson, Sr., had died in a bar brawl less than a year later, killed by the husband of the woman he’d just bedded.

And Rose? He didn’t want to know. “We moved away shortly after that and all we knew was what was on the news, which wasn’t much.”

“But you know she wasn’t found.”

“I was an impressionable kid. The incident stuck with me. I still periodically check the missing-persons database.”

“You don’t ever go back to a state of unawareness.”

She understood. And in a strange way, on a night when his only purpose was to give a measure of support, he’d found a moment of peace.

“When I get Sammie back…he won’t… I… Neither of us will ever be able to go back. We’ll be different.”

“Yes, but different might be better, too.” He knew with all of his being that she had to think that. Had to believe. To hope.

“Julie said something this morning shortly after I got to school. She apologized for not watching over Sammie more closely. She felt so guilty. And so do I. It’s my job to protect my son. And I didn’t. How can he ever forgive me?”

“Hey.” He nudged her arm, wanting to take her hand, but not doing so. “You have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about.” Guilt ate a body alive with insidious tenacity. “Your son was at school right where he belonged. You aren’t allowed to be there babysitting him even if you wanted to.”

“My son left class.” Her voice had dropped an octave. “He misbehaved and put himself in harm’s way and that is my fault. I’m the only one in charge of teaching him. Training him. I try so hard but he butts heads with me on a constant basis. Probably because he doesn’t have a father around and that’s my fault, too.”

Cal debated his response in terms of being kind to her. And then spoke. “He left class, with permission, to use the restroom. That’s all you know. The kidnapper has it in for your father. He obviously planned this whole thing. He didn’t just happen to be in the right place at the exact time that Sammie misbehaved. And while Sammie doesn’t have a father, you’ve been discussing things with me, getting male perspective and allowing Sammie some freedoms based on our conversations.”

Her silence gave him pause. He sure as hell hoped he hadn’t made things more difficult for her.

“You think this…this monster was watching Sammie? That he’d have taken him, anyway, the first chance he saw?” Her leg bounced up and down. Continuously. Getting faster.

“Probably.”

“I keep a close eye on him. As you know, that’s part of what he complains about.”

“You obviously do a great job if this guy thought his best chance of getting to your son was while Sammie was in a secure school situation being watched over by trained professionals.”

The bouncing stopped. She rocked forward. And back. And then forward again.

“Sammie says I don’t let him grow up and be a man, but this is why…” Her voice broke with the threat of more tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said on a sigh. “I’m losing it here.”

“You have absolutely nothing to be sorry about and you are not losing it. As a matter of fact you’ve held up astonishingly well, considering. This is the first time I’ve seen you really cry.”

“It’s not something I do in front of my father.” She sounded stronger again.

“In front of your father? You’re kidding.” He said the words, and yet, thinking of the man inside the door behind them, what she’d told him made sense.

“From the time I was little I learned to hold back my tears around him,” she said softly. “Crying pisses him off. He says it’s a tactic females use to try to control men. It’s a sign of weakness. Of victimization rather than accountability.”

The guy was a first-class bastard.

But he was there. Insisting that mountains would move and his grandson would be brought home to them. From what Cal had seen, George Lowen was willing to get out there and move the mountains himself if need be.

“I must respectfully disagree. Crying is normal. Healthy. And part of being human.”

“When’s the last time you cried?”

He didn’t answer, knowing that his silence was an answer in itself.

“You just said it’s part of being human.”

He wasn’t surprised that she’d called him on the inconsistency.

“Which is why I’ve always envied people who could cry,” Cal said, the night, the circumstance, putting him in strange territory, making him a stranger to himself.

This night, these circumstances—it wasn’t real life.

It was a snippet of time outside of ordinary living. An anomaly that would seem surreal once Morgan’s son was home safe and sound.

“So why don’t you cry?”

“I’m not sure. It’s not like I sit around and try,” he said, giving her a sideways glance, glad he seemed to be distracting her. She was listening so he continued. “Might have something to do with the fact that I never knew my mother. She died when I was six months old.”

“That’s horrible! What happened?”

“She taught a program for accelerated students and was on an oceanography field trip. She went into the water at night with a couple of other teachers, on an ocean life study, and she and another teacher got tangled in the reef and drowned.”

“I’m so sorry! That’s awful.”

For his father it had been. Cal didn’t have any memories of her at all. But he missed knowing a mother—her absence had made him particularly eager to accept and return Rose Sanderson’s motherly care.

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Nope. It’s just me and Dad.”

“He never remarried?”

“No.”

“So you went into teaching because of her? Because of your mother?”

It wasn’t that simple. “I teach because I enjoy it.” And because his father—who’d lost his prestigious career in education because of something Cal had told the police that had incriminated an innocent man—lived vicariously through him.

“You’re sure good at it.”

Before he could say more and risk crossing the boundaries between teacher and student and professionalism, the receiver in her hand pealed, splintering the quiet of the night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“PLEASE…LETME SPEAK to my son… .” Morgan’s voice broke as she started to cry, something she couldn’t help in spite of her father standing over her as she answered the phone.

Cal was there, too, somewhere behind her in the living room. Her knees were weak and wobbly as she stood at the card table, watching Detective Warner’s face.

He nodded, mouthed that she was doing fine, and then the voice that she recognized from earlier that night—a voice she somehow knew was going to live within her forever—spoke again.

“Good, you’re begging for the life of your loved one. Just like I did.”

Click.

Morgan’s stomach felt like lead as Detective Warner listened to the earbud that connected him to his people and then shook his head.

“They got the tower,” he announced. “A different one. It’s forty miles away.”

“He’s moving,” George Lowen said.

“Or his cell phone provider has good range and other towers had conflicting signals,” Grace said from the doorway leading into the bedrooms. “You heard what he said earlier, George, depending on cell providers—”

“It’s the middle of the night,” George interrupted, his impatience evident in spite of the soft tone he used to address his wife. “There can’t be that much business out there. He’s moving south.” George left the room, cell phone to his ear, barking orders to someone to get cars on every road going south out of Tyler.

Cal Whittier was behind her, a steady presence, and still Morgan struggled to maintain composure as panic surged through her. She looked at Detective Warner.

“We’ve got officers combing south, as well, Ms. Lowen. And we’ve notified law enforcement within a six-state radius. The Amber Alert has gone out nationally. We’ll find him.”

She nodded. “You have to bring him home to me. You have to.”

“We will, ma’am.”