The Murder Artist Read online

  I blink my eyes, sharpen my focus, close my mind to the thought: covered with leaves. But I can’t keep from my mind the terrible notions that float into it. I can’t stop thinking of that shoe, for instance, Kevin’s shoe, derelict against the metal of that chute. The way it sat, inside its barrier of police tape, waiting for the evidence technician.

  These are words I don’t want in my vocabulary: evidence technician, K-9 team, search grid.

  When Shoffler orders the team to return “to base,” not a single member of the unit wants to do it. Everyone grumbles, pleads for more time. “We don’t want to give up,” a man named Rusty, who is the leader, barks into his handset, “we’re rollin’, Shoff.”

  But Rusty surrenders grudgingly to Shoffler’s insistence. Replacements are standing by. Exhaustion causes mistakes. Fresh eyes are better. “And besides,” Shoffler says, his voice ragged with static, “I need to discuss something with Mr. Callahan.”

  The room is a mess, the area devoted to a kind of makeshift canteen already overflowing with foam cups, doughnut and pizza boxes, water bottles. Untidy mounds of clothing and shoes obscure the counter of the Lost and Found desk. Heaped on the floor are piles of communication equipment, stacks of orange traffic cones, vests shiny with reflective tape, a small mountain of olive-green fleece blankets still encased in plastic bags.

  I wait for the promised discussion, so tapped out that for the moment I lack the energy to imagine its subject or purpose. It’s not about the boys being found (or a replacement team would not be heading out into the dark), and that’s the only item of interest to me.

  Shoffler slings a big arm around my shoulder and tells me it’s time to go home. I sputter my objection, but Shoffler gently reminds me of two matters.

  “We’ve got no evidence of abduction,” he starts. “There’s the shoe, but” – he shrugs – “you couldn’t positively identify it.”

  “I’m sure it’s Kevin’s shoe.”

  “You’re sure it’s his shoe because he’s got a shoe kinda like it and he’s missing.”

  “And he was there, at that jousting ring.”

  Shoffler shakes his head. “You know how many kids come through this place every weekend? Who knows how long that shoe’s been there? It’s a pretty common type of shoe.” He shifts from foot to foot. “If this is an abduction, and there’s a call, they’re not going to leave a message on your voice mail. They’re gonna want to talk to you.”

  I nod.

  “We’d like to install a trap and trace on your phone, and that’s gonna go much faster if you’re there – otherwise, we got to get a form signed, get it to these guys, get ’em some keys, it’s a whole rigmarole. If you’re there, it’s done inside a coupla hours.”

  “Okay.”

  He purses his lips for a moment, cocks his head. “Second thing is,” Shoffler goes on, “you can’t have all these people, helicopters” – he makes a sweeping gesture with his arm – “and keep it secret. Point is, this is gonna make the early news in some bulletin kind of form, and then, by the regular morning news…” He shakes his head. “Well, you would know…”

  “Right,” I say. And of course Shoffler is right. I should have thought about this, but didn’t. Not until this moment.

  Parents all over the country are already on edge, thanks to a recent series of highly publicized child abductions and disappearances. There’s a trial going on right now in California, in the abduction-murder of a five-year-old girl. It’s an atmosphere in which any new missing child is instantly big news, a national story.

  And from the media’s standpoint, the disappearance of Kevin and Sean will be pure gold: photogenic twins vanish in the midst of jousting knights, Elizabethan ladies, men in waistcoats and doublets. It’s not just going to be a news story; it’s going to be a monster.

  “And that’s good, that’s all to the good,” Shoffler is saying. “It’s time to enlist the public’s help. And the media, they will do that for you, they will get the word out.”

  He stops talking and waits for me to say something. I can tell I’m supposed to be connecting some dots here, but I don’t see what the detective is after. “You probably got people,” the detective finally says in a patient voice, “shouldn’t hear about this on the TV, or because they get a phone call from a reporter.”

  Christ! Liz! I’m going to have to tell Liz.

  “I think you should go home.”

  I stare at my feet. Liz.

  “Chris here,” Shoffler continues, with a nod toward Officer Christiansen, “he’ll go with you.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I say. Shoffler obviously thinks I shouldn’t be alone, but the last thing I want is Officer Christiansen for company.

  Shoffler ignores me and nods at Christiansen, then walks us toward the entrance gate. “You got juice in your cell phone?” he asks Christiansen, who lifts the phone from its holster and flips the top open.

  “I’m all set.”

  Outside, it’s quiet. A faint murmur of traffic. The rhythmic rise and fall of chatter from cicadas. The helicopter is gone for now, having returned to refuel. For a moment, I think I can hear the faint cries of the search team, but then a breeze rustles through the trees and swallows the sound.

  We walk through the small cluster of cars and squad cars parked near the entrance gate. “Well,” Shoffler says, stifling a yawn. “We’ll do our best here.” He offers his hand and I shake it. Then he gives Christiansen a little tap on the shoulder and heads back into the fairgrounds.

  In front of us looms the vast empty space of the parking lot. Near its far perimeter sits the small squarish shape of the Jeep, alone in the huge field. Christiansen walks beside me, talking in nervous little bursts about “a kidnap case I worked on couple of years back.” “They found the kid in Florida,” Christiansen says. “Boyfriend’s backyard.”

  On the long walk to the car, the notion that Shoffler sent the officer with me out of some kind of compassion, because he didn’t want the bereft father to be alone in his distraught state, dissolves into a darker truth. I realize this as I fumble in my pocket for the keys and press the button on the remote. The door locks pop. The headlights tunnel out into the darkness. “That’s what they say, y’know,” Christiansen rambles on. “Nine times out of ten, it’s someone who knows the kid. Nine times outta ten, it’s a parent.”

  Here’s the truth: Christiansen isn’t babysitting. I’m a suspect.

  I stand with my hand on the door handle. I can’t bring myself to get into the car. Going home without the boys is… wrong. It feels like a signal of defeat and surrender, as if I’m giving up on them.

  “Hey, you want I should drive?” Christiansen asks.

  Then a sudden effervescence of hope bubbles up in my brain and I can’t get into the car fast enough.

  “I guess that’s a no,” Christiansen says, sliding into the passenger’s seat. “Suit yourself.”

  By the time I flip on the brights and make it from the grass parking lot to the gravel drive, an entire hopeful scenario has constructed itself in my head. Maybe the boys got disoriented, tried to come back to their hay bale and took a wrong turn. When the joust was over, everybody was leaving; it was chaotic.

  I turn from the gravel drive onto a paved road. When they couldn’t find me, maybe the boys met someone – someone from the neighborhood, someone they hadn’t seen since Liz took them to Maine. And these people, they drove the boys home.

  Or maybe Liz… Liz followed the boys down from Maine. She wanted to prove some point, so she waited until Alex and the boys were separated… Or not Liz herself, but she hired someone…

  I’m filled with maybes, filled with fear and hope. On one level, I know these notions don’t hold up, not if I give them a minute’s hard thought.

  Now that I’m on the road, I have an irrational need to get back to the house. As if that will make things right somehow. Tagging home base. I’ll be safe. The kids will be safe. Somehow it’s in my head that the kids will be there, wa
iting for me.

  “You better slow it down,” Christiansen whines.

  I glance at the speedometer. I’m doing eighty.

  “Come on, man. This road-” The policeman’s voice sounds like a mosquito.

  I slow to seventy-five, and then my cell phone rings and I hit the brakes, fishtailing onto the shoulder in a spray of gravel.

  “Jesus Christ!” Christiansen squeaks, as I fumble for the phone.

  Finally, I’ve got the thing pressed to my ear. “Hello? Hello!?”

  “Who is it?” Christiansen asks, but I hardly hear him.

  “Hello? Hello!” I’m yelling. It isn’t that the connection is bad, it’s crystal clear, there’s no static at all. But no one’s there, just the silence.

  “Sir? Who is it?” Christiansen bleats, but I shove my hand toward the cop to shut him up. I don’t hang up because I realize it’s not quite silence I’m hearing. It’s breathing. Someone breathing.

  “Who is this?” I ask, trying to control my voice. “Who is it?”

  Nothing.

  And then a Roman candle of relief explodes in my chest as Kevin’s voice flutters into my ear, tremulous and tentative: “Daddy?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Then a click, and the candle goes out as suddenly as it flared.

  “Kevin? Kevin?!”

  I punch on the Jeep’s overhead light and stare at the tiny glowing rectangle of the phone’s LCD screen. Like most cell phones, mine displays the numbers of incoming calls. But only, I remember, until you press the key to answer. The screen tells me: CURRENT CALL: 18 SECONDS.

  “Sir?” Christiansen says. “Who was that? Who called you?”

  “Hang on just a minute.” I stay with the telephone, tapping through the menu selections until I get to RECEIVED CALLS. The list keys up. I tap RECEIVED 1, and read: 202-555-0199.

  This can’t be right. It’s the number at the house, my own home phone number. Does this mean – my heart does a somersault in my chest – that the boys are at home?

  I don’t see how it’s possible, how the boys could be home, and yet no one – not the boys or whoever took them there – ever bothered to call on my cell phone during the eleven hours they’ve been missing.

  It makes no sense, but still, I go nova with happiness.

  My cell phone must have cut out on Kevin’s call. I drove through a black zone; it happens all the time. The signal is strong now, though, so I press the 2 key, which automatically calls the house. I’m impatient for the sound of my son’s voice, and the explanation.

  The phone rings four times, and then I hear my own voice. “Hi, you’ve reached Alex Callahan. I can’t come to the phone right now, but…”

  I hang up. The phone has call waiting, so if you’re on the line and you don’t cut over to the new call, the machine picks up. The boys must be calling at the same time I’m calling the house. Our calls are blocking each other. I wait, try again, get the machine again. Repeat the process, in the meantime explaining to Christiansen what I’m doing – and that it was Kevin who called.

  After the fourth try, I give up. Maybe I jumped the gun, maybe it took a minute or two for calls to post up. I click back to RECEIVED CALLS, but the number displayed for RECEIVED 1 is still the same, my home number. I press the tab for time of call. The time tag pops up: 4:42 A.M. A glance at the dashboard tells me it’s 4:48. So that means the call from Kevin did come from the house in Cleveland Park.

  In which case – why doesn’t anyone answer?

  “Mr. Callahan,” Christiansen says, “you sure that was one of your kids?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I say, voice shaky with emotion. “It was Kevin.”

  “How could you tell – them being twins and all?”

  “Because it sounded like Kevin,” I snap. I don’t bother to explain that most of the time Kevin still calls me Daddy while Sean calls me Dad – and is quite militant about it.

  “No kiddin’,” Christiansen says in a dubious voice.

  Suddenly, I’m not so sure. Maybe it was Sean. The lack of certainty bothers me.

  “So what did he say?” Christiansen asks. “What happened to them? Where are they?”

  I’m pulling back onto the road, accelerating into the traffic. I don’t answer Christiansen, but what I’m thinking is: What did he say? He said, Daddy. I can’t get Kevin’s voice out of my head, the sweetest elixir, the hoped-for sound:

  Daddy.

  I flick on the phone’s light and try home again, impatiently waiting for the end of the message and the beep. “Whoever is there with the boys,” I beg, “please pick up the telephone. Please.”

  Shortly after the kids were born, Liz and I got so busy, we developed the habit of letting the machine answer the phone most of the time – leaving the speakerphone on so we could hear whoever called and pick up if we could… or wanted to. Friends and family knew this, as did half a dozen people at the station. Messages often started, “Alex… if you’re there, pick up…” Or “Liz – it’s Mom. Don’t bother picking up, I just wanted to let you know…”

  There are several telephones in the house, but I focus on the phone in the kitchen. It sits on the little red table Liz bought at a yard sale. The phone is an old one, beige, its black curly cord extra long and usually bunched into a messy tangle. Next to it is the square, white answering machine, red button flashing to indicate it holds messages. It is from the tiny grid of this machine’s microphone, that I imagine my amplified voice speaking into the kitchen.

  “Kev? Sean? If you’re somehow there by yourselves, pick up the phone, okay, guys. It’s Dad. Just pick up the phone.”

  Nothing.

  Above the telephone table is the bulletin board, its wooden frame stained with green ink in one corner, where Sean colored it as a toddler. In Liz’s absence the cork rectangle has become the permanent home of a haphazard collection of cleaning tickets, news clips, take-out menus, Post-its with scribbled names and numbers, the car-pool schedule, photographs, kid art, old lottery tickets.

  “Pick up,” I plead, “come on.”

  The machine picks up and I hear my own robot voice again: “Hi, you’ve reached…” I try to imagine Kevin or Sean with the same detail in which I saw the bulletin board, but for some reason I can’t do it.

  “What are you doing?” Christiansen asks.

  I ignore him, punch 411. I ask for Yasmin Siegel’s number but then change my mind and instead call my next-door neighbor, Fred Billingsley. Yasmin is in her eighties. It will take her too long to get out the door. Fred, whose wife Nancy died two years ago, lives with his adult daughter. He’s efficient and reliable if not friendly.

  “Sir,” Christiansen says, “I need to report to Detective Shoffler. Can you tell me-”

  Fred is more than surprised to hear from me at this hour. “Alex? What time is it?” His voice is alarmed. “Is there a problem?”

  “Can you do me a huge favor?” I ask him.

  I explain the situation, tell Fred where to find the key for the front door. Fred promises to go right over; he’ll call me back on my cell phone in a few minutes.

  Christiansen leans over, peering past his shoulder toward the dashboard. “Whoa!” he squeals. “Sir! Sir! Slow down! You’ve got to slow down.”

  I’m on the Beltway by the time Fred gets back to me. “No one here,” he tells me. “I don’t see anything unusual or peculiar or out of place. You sure they called from here?”

  I tell him my cell phone listed the call as originating from home, but maybe there’s some mistake. I thank him profusely.

  “Your boys are really… missing?” Fred says. “Good Lord, is there anything else I can do?”

  I have it in my mind that the kids are in the house, hiding from Fred. For no particular reason besides the man’s stiff formality, they’ve always been afraid of “Mr. B.”

  “Thanks for checking, Fred. I owe you one,” I say. “I don’t think there’s anything else you can do. I’ll be there in half an hour. You should just go back to bed
. I’m really sorry I woke you up.”

  “Not at all,” Fred says, in a remote voice. “Glad to be of assistance.”

  Christiansen finally gets through to Shoffler just before I turn off Connecticut onto Ordway. They’re still talking when I pull into the driveway. And then I’m out of the car, running toward the house.

  I yank open the screen door, turn the dead bolt, and then I’m inside, charging from room to room at warp speed, yelling the boys’ names, throwing open doors, flipping on lights, my eyes practically strip-searching the rooms. I check their bedroom last. Some demented optimist inside me continues to hold out hope that somehow I’ll find them here, asleep in their beds.

  But their room is deserted. A void.

  With Christiansen trailing behind, I check the attic, then the basement, then make another round of the rooms, this time opening closet doors, looking under the beds, behind furniture, anywhere, everywhere that might conceal a little boy. Again I finish in their bedroom, drifting toward the front window.

  Yasmin Siegel is not just a night owl; she claims to sleep only two or three hours a night. She’s also one of those women who seems to know everything that happens in a neighborhood. Maybe she saw something – a car, the boys, whoever brought them to the house – something. She’s awake, too. I can see the bluish glow of the television through the windows of the Siegels’ family room.

  I’m on my way out of the bedroom, heading for the phone in my study to call Yasmin, when my eyes catch on something I never noticed before.

  It’s some kind of little rabbit, perched on the double dresser, a low-slung many-drawered thing Liz got from Ikea. It’s on Sean’s side, which, unlike Kevin’s half, is almost free of clutter – or I never would have noticed it. Up close, I see that it’s origami, the little figure maybe four inches tall, folded out of brown paper. I don’t know anything about origami, but this is not some simple cartoonlike rendition of an animal. It’s sleek and sophisticated, more like a piece of miniature sculpture.