The Murder Artist Read online

  The word beverage marks Prebble as a man who’s spent his life in a certain kind of job, a job where generic terms foreign to ordinary life hold sway: beverage, occupation, vehicle, firearm.

  When I arrived and told Prebble I couldn’t find my kids, he directed a heavyset woman in braids to read out a plea over the P.A. system. Then he methodically took down the details on what he called an “incident form.”

  “When kids go AWOL,” he told me, “which they do all the time, every single day, what we do is basically we put out the word, and then wait for ’em to turn up. They always turn up, sooner or later.” He advised me to “stay put.” “I been at this some time now.” He placed a consoling hand on my shoulder. “When folks get separated, it’s best if one party remains in a fixed location, you know what I mean?”

  That was ten minutes ago. Now Prebble joins me on the bench, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. I can’t say a word. My mouth is as dry as sand.

  Prebble’s a talker. “I do miss my weapon,” he says, patting the belt. “I was thirty years with the Prince William force – over in Virginia. Retired five years ago. Moved down here to be close to my grandkids.” He gives me a buck-up smile. “Don’t worry too hard about those boys. They’ll turn up. I guarantee it.”

  There’s warmth in his eyes, a demeanor of reassurance garnered from a long life of being a man people turn to in a time of trouble. I’m heartened by his anecdotal confidence, but it only goes so far.

  Where can the boys be?

  People wander in and out of the building. One couple leads a screaming toddler with a gash on his knee. A nervous pair of teenagers escort a hopping girl who’s been stung by a yellow-jacket. A weary man explains that he’s lost his car keys. A woman complains that she was shortchanged ten bucks at one of the food stalls.

  I do my best to believe that the boys getting lost is just another one of these pedestrian events, that any second, some helpful adult will come around the corner with Kev and Sean in tow. But after a while, there’s no way I can just sit there any longer.

  “Look,” I tell Prebble, “if they show up-”

  “They will, Mr. Callahan. You want to go looking for them? You go right ahead. When they show up, we’ll call you over the P.A. system and we’ll keep them here. I can promise you that.”

  It’s a relief to be in motion. Doing something, anything, is better than just waiting. First I head out to the Jeep figuring that maybe when we got separated, the boys thought of going to the car. Is this what they’d do? It seems logical to me, but I’ve spent so little time with them in the past half year, I’m not sure how they’d act. Anyway, I can get my cell phone. They know the number. Before the trip down from Maine, Liz made them memorize all my telephone numbers. Maybe they called.

  “Thou dost seem in a hurry,” a heavily made-up woman says in a flirtatious voice. She places a restraining hand on my arm. “Prithee, why not tarry-”

  I’m not quite rude enough to just brush by her. “I’m looking for my kids.”

  She drops the accent. “Let me stamp your hand,” she says. “Otherwise they’ll make you pay to come back in – even if it’s only for ten minutes.”

  Before I can answer, she’s stamped the back of my hand with a fluorescent pink rose.

  I lope through the acres of gleaming cars – noticing quite a few empty spaces close to the entrance now. The vast parking lot is surrounded by a dense and lush forest, and from it comes the fervid din of cicadas, a rising and falling crush of sound that for a moment almost makes me dizzy. A bright green John Deere Gator rumbles by, its small truck bed full of Day-Glo vests and the bright orange wands used to direct traffic. They’re getting ready for the mass exodus.

  It takes me a while to find the Jeep and when I finally locate it, the boys are not there. I didn’t expect them to be, not really, but I’m still disappointed. I hit the button on the key to open the door – and grab my cell phone – with a brief surge of hope that I’ll find a message.

  But there’s nothing. I shove the phone into my pocket, then pull it out again and call the machine at home. Nothing there either, only a message from Kathy at the station, “Is there a chyron for the opening shot?”

  I trot back toward the gate and reenter the fairgrounds – flashing the pink rose at the attendant, who clicks me through a turnstile. I grab a map of the fair, and with this in hand, begin my search.

  I plan to be methodical, to check every stall and concession, every amphitheater, large and small, the phalanx of Porta-Johns, every single shop. As I go around, I call out the boys’ names. I’m doing my best not to panic, but every once in a while my voice gets away from me, and the tone of desperation startles those around me. I can see it in their eyes; they look wary and alarmed.

  “Kevin! Sean!”

  After a while, I start to stop people at random: “I’m looking for twins?!”… “Twin boys, have you seen them? Six-year-old boys, blond hair.”… “Have you seen two boys? Twins.”

  The layout of the fairgrounds is complex, set up in the manner of big retail stores to encourage meandering. Searching for someone in the chaotic, people-jammed sprawl is not easy. Several times I realize I’m in familiar territory, that I’ve doubled back over an area already visited. Every few minutes I run over to the jousting arena, just in case the boys returned there. Then I check in with Gary Prebble in case someone’s brought the boys to Faire Headquarters.

  After about forty-five minutes, I’ve covered most of the fairgrounds. Some people remember seeing the boys, but when pressed, many of these recollections are from much earlier in the day and others are so vague as to be useless. Some people seem to produce memories of the boys for my benefit. My impression is that I look so distraught they want to help. (“I think I saw a pair of twins during the falconry exhibition.”)

  Then comes the P.A. announcement informing the crowd that the fair is scheduled to close in thirty minutes, that visitors should make their purchases and leave enough time to return any rented costumes. Almost immediately, people begin streaming toward the exits. I head for the fair’s headquarters.

  What I want is for Gary Prebble to throw a wall around the place.

  “We can’t do that,” Prebble says.

  “Why not?”

  “Can you imagine the panic if we try to pen all these people in? I can’t do that! Besides, the fair is enclosed, except to staff. Everybody has to go in and out through the one entrance – that’s how we make sure everybody pays on the way in, you understand? In fact, why don’t you and I go on over to the exit? Maybe the boys will head for your car.”

  “I already checked.”

  “Still, now the fair is closing. They will have heard the announcement. Everybody heads for their cars.” Prebble disappears into his office for a moment, and I hear him call out to his assistant: “Jackie, you touch base with the crew. Tell them don’t anybody go home, a’right?”

  The two of us stand on the bridge that crosses the moat, scanning the exiting crowd. “One way in, one way out,” Prebble tells me. “On the way in everybody pays, and on the way out, visitors are funneled straight to the parking lot so they can’t intrude on the privacy of the performers and artisans who live on the premises.”

  “They live here?”

  “Oh, some of ’em, sure. Out back, behind the mud-wrestlin’ pit. They got Winnies and campers and the like. There’s fairs like this all around the country, all round the world, matter of fact. Some of these folk, they just travel from one to the other. And that’s their life, you know, just like the circus.”

  I focus on the approaching crowd, my heart picking up a hopeful beat every time my eyes catch on a couple of blond kids – or even one. But each time, the hope lasts only a few seconds, fading as the fair-haired children approach, their features clarified by proximity.

  Not Kevin. Not Sean.

  Some fairgoers stop at the costume shop before exiting, exchanging their Elizabethan finery for blue jeans and T-shirts, tank tops and shorts. W
eary parents shepherd tired children with rainbows painted on their cheeks. Toddlers scream to be picked up and carried. Two giggling teenagers in Goth makeup walk past, leading a little girl with a garland of flowers in her hair.

  The crowd is noticeably thinner when Prebble’s walkie-talkie crackles. As the gray-haired man steps a few paces aside, a torrent of hope floods through me. It doesn’t last. I can see from Prebble’s face that it isn’t news about the boys. “Before we left headquarters,” he tells me with a somewhat pained look, “I had Mike call Anne Arundel County to alert them we might have a situation here. They’ll be here any time now.”

  Five minutes later, the exodus is down to just a few stragglers. Inside the fairgrounds, cleanup crews begin to collect trash and litter, lifting off the crenelated trash can covers and extracting big clear plastic bags of junk. A gangly youth in a jester’s hat drives by in a fat-wheeled John Deere Gator and tosses the bags into its small bed. People in shops near the entrance stow wares for the night – pewter mugs, hammock chairs, candles, framed woodcuts of knights. At the costume shop, a woman totes up earnings on a calculator. Behind me, at a shop selling candles, a man slides a painted plywood panel into place over his storefront.

  Prebble checks in with the security crew by walkie-talkie, but no one has seen the boys. “Well,” he says, “maybe they fell asleep somewhere. The fairground is full of nooks and crannies.” His voice isn’t so reassuring anymore.

  In the vast parking lot, hundreds of engines rumble and rev, drowning out the occasional wails of tired children. Handlers in Day-Glo orange vests, wielding orange flags, direct the streams of departing traffic.

  A brown-and-beige squad car, blue and red lights flashing, threads its way through the streams of exiting cars and pulls up outside the entrance gate.

  Detective Shoffler is a big guy, ruddy-faced, with dirty blond hair. He’s fifty or maybe a little older and forty pounds overweight. Despite his rumpled khakis and a blue blazer that’s seen better days, he gives the immediate impression of authority. And heavy or not, he carries himself like an athlete.

  Officer Christiansen is a skinny guy with a buzz-cut, buckteeth, and a high-pitched voice. He wears a brown uniform that’s more or less the same color as the squad car.

  Shoffler’s hand is big, the skin rough, and he does not release my hand immediately, covering it instead with his other one. “Mr. Callahan,” he says, and fixes me with a gaze so piercing that it feels to me as if I’m being scanned by a biometric device.

  Then Shoffler releases the hand, and points an accusing finger at Prebble. “Gary, you shoulda called me sooner. Damn it, you know better.” He shakes his head in a disapproving way.

  Prebble shrugs. “I figured-”

  “How long these boys been missing? More than two hours now?” Shoffler heaves a sigh. “All right. What you got in the way of a crew today?”

  “Me plus four,” Prebble says, and then, when it seems clear Shoffler is waiting for more, lists them by name. “Apart from Jack here” – he nods toward the pale man seated at the desk – “there’s Gomez, Arrington, and, oh yeah, Abigail Dixon.”

  Shoffler makes a face. “Get ’em down here.”

  Prebble nods, then lifts the phone away from his ear as if he’s going to say something, but Shoffler stops him, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “I’m gonna get K- 9,” he says, snapping a cell phone off his belt. He turns to Christiansen. “In the meantime,” he says, “we’re gonna seal this place up.”

  CHAPTER 4

  You’d think this burst of purposeful activity would make me feel better, but instead I’m paralyzed by fear. If I wasn’t quite buying Gary Prebble’s schmoozy air of reassurance, Shoffler’s serious and industrious manner is infinitely worse. I think of the Ramirez boys, California twins murdered a few years back. I think of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh, of Polly Klaas, Samantha Runnion, of all the less famous missing children whose faces haunt the world from milk cartons and post office walls.

  The fear must show on my face because Shoffler reaches out and grips my upper arm with one of his big hands. “Kids hide,” he says, and now he is reassuring. “That’s the thing. They get lost, they get scared, and usually, what they do is they hide. They might even think you’re gonna be mad at them, you know? Because you couldn’t find them? So we’re going to look for them, we’re going to take a long hard look at the fairgrounds. The dogs might help, that’s why I summoned K-9. Okay?”

  “Right,” I say. “I understand.”

  He frowns. “You look familiar. You a lawyer or something?”

  “Reporter. Fox.”

  “Right,” Shoffler says in an automatic way, but then he actually remembers. “Right. Okay.” He pulls a small spiral-bound notebook out of his blazer pocket and opens it. “Now,” he says. “Your boys. They’re what? – six years old, Gary tells me.”

  “Kevin and Sean Callahan,” I tell him.

  “Birth date?”

  “January 4, 1997.”

  “Describe them.”

  “They’re, I don’t know, up to here.” I hold my hand out at their approximate height. “Blue eyes, blond hair-”

  “What kinda blond?” the detective wants to know. “Dirty blond like yours or more like platinum?”

  “Almost white.”

  “Any distinguishing characteristics, scars, anything like that?”

  “Well, their front teeth are only halfway in.”

  “Good,” the detective says, nodding as he writes this down, as if the state of the boys’ dentition is a really useful bit of information. This strikes me as nuts, given the one truly unusual fact about Kevin and Sean.

  “They’re twins, you know,” I say. My nerves have notched up the volume and this comes out much too loud. I’m shouting. I take a breath. “You know that, right? They’re identical twins.”

  “Right,” Shoffler says, “but see – they might get separated. So…” He shrugs.

  “No,” I insist. “They’d stay together.” I hate the idea of Kevin and Sean not being together.

  “They dress alike?”

  “No.”

  “So tell me what they were wearing. Kevin first.”

  “Yellow T-shirt with a whale on it, jeans, white Nikes.”

  “And Sean?”

  “Cargo pants, blue T-shirt, black shoes with white stripes.”

  Shoffler takes it down then turns to Gary Prebble. “Gar – I’m assuming you got a list of fair employees, who’s working where and what hours? I’m going to need that. Now let’s talk about how best to search the grounds.”

  The two men walk over toward the large wall map mounted behind the Lost and Found, discussing how to deploy the available manpower. “When you search the residential area,” Shoffler says, “which I would like you to do personally, Gary, ask permission to look inside campers and Winnies. But don’t push it. Just keep track of the hesitant ones because that might mean coming back with a warrant.”

  “Do you think?” I blurt out, “I mean-”

  Shoffler gives me a look. “I don’t think anything, Mr. Callahan. I really don’t. It’s just – we have procedures, you understand?”

  I nod, but I’m losing my mind. Warrants.

  Shoffler turns back to Prebble. “Take down everybody’s name, note whether you took a look inside or not. Ask about folks who work for them, who might not be on the fair’s official list of employees. If this turns out to be an abduction, we need to ID potential witnesses.”

  Although I’ve thought of this – of course I’ve thought of it – I’m still hanging on to the idea that the boys are lost. The word abduction crashes through my head like a dum-dum bullet.

  Once Shoffler dispatches the search crew – the security personnel, Christiansen, and the newly arrived K-9 team, with their jumpy German shepherd Duchess – the detective lowers himself onto the bench outside fair headquarters. He pats the seat next to him. “Now you tell me about it,” he says to me, “your whole time here at the fair. Where you
went with your boys, everything you can remember.” He pulls a small tape recorder out of his pocket. “Myself, I’m partial to handwritten notes,” the detective says, “but if you don’t mind, I’ll record what you say, too.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  Shoffler shrugs, turns on the machine, then speaks into it. “Saturday evening, May thirty-one, two thousand three.” A glance at his watch. “The time is seven-thirty-two P.M. I am detective Ray Shoffler, responding to a two-four-two called in by Mr. Gary Prebble, who runs security at the Renaissance Faire in Cromwell, Maryland. I am speaking to Alexander Callahan, the father of the missing boys, Sean and Kevin Callahan, who are six-year-old identical twins.”

  He holds the small silver recorder between us. Its red diode glows.

  “By the way, Mr. Callahan, where’s your wife? She at home? She know about this yet?”

  Jesus. Liz. “She’s in Maine,” I tell him. “We’re separated.”

  The detective hitches his head to the side with a little frown, as if this is not what he wanted to hear. “Uh,” he says.

  “The boys are with me for their summer visit.”

  “And where do you live? You local?”

  “D.C.”

  “Address?”

  I give it to him.

  “So you came to fair headquarters at, let’s see, five thirty-six. How long would you say the boys were miss-”

  “What about an Amber Alert?” I ask him. “Isn’t that something you should be doing?”

  Someone at the station did a segment about this a few months back. I don’t remember all the details, but the system, named for a murdered child, raises the alarm about missing children, triggering an elaborate network to inform the public – bulletins on TV and radio stations, crawls at the base of the screen on all the major channels. It even flashes information on those big electronic highway signs that usually warn of fog or accidents.

  I feel a rush of guilt, remembering an argument at the station. I was opposed to screen clutter, the weather, the breaking-news crawls, which, in my opinion, distracted the viewer. The Amber Alert seemed like more of the same.