Long Lost (9 page)
When the lab crew finally left, Webber, Pendleton, and everybody else going with them, the house had never felt so empty. My footsteps echoed off the hardwood floors as I went upstairs. Fingerprint powder smudged furniture, and clothes remained on the bedroom floors. I sat on Jason’s bed, inhaling his boy smell. I went into the master bedroom, picked up one of Kate’s blouses, and pressed it to my face.
I have no idea how long I remained there. The phone rang again. Ignoring it, I went into the bathroom, took off my borrowed clothes, and tried to take a bath without getting my bandaged hands and my stitched left forearm wet. Dirt and dried blood floated from me. Steam rose, but instead of the water’s heat, what I felt was spreading pain as the effect of the pills the doctor had given me began to wear off. The extent of my bruises was appalling. I did my best to shave, then put on fresh clothes, but I begrudged their comfort, telling myself that I didn’t deserve it, given the hell that Kate and Jason would be going through.
The doorbell rang. Limping, I needed extra time to get downstairs. Meanwhile, the bell rang again and then again. If this is a reporter … , I thought. When I opened the door, I saw a straight—backed man in a dark suit, with polished shoes and short, neat, slightly graying hair. His lean face was all business.
“Mr. Denning?”
Behind him, out on the street, a camera crew started forward.
“I’m not giving interviews.” I stepped back to close the door.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m FBI Special Agent John Gader.” The man showed his ID. “I kept phoning, but no one answered, so I took a chance and drove over.”
“I was … I didn’t … Please, come in.”
As the reporters neared the house, I shut the door and locked it.
Gader opened his briefcase and took out several small electronic devices. “These are voice—activated tape recorders.” He linked one to the living room phone. “Is there a phone in the kitchen?”
He installed a recorder there also. “We’ll deal with the rest of the house later. I’ve already obtained a court order to have your phone tapped and all calls traced, but it never hurts to have a backup system. If the man who took your wife and son phones to demand a ransom, we’ll have a recording of it here, as well as through our intercept at the phone company.”
“There won’t be a ransom demand.”
“You never know.”
“I
do
know. My brother doesn’t want money. He wants my wife and my son.”
“Your brother?” Gader sounded as if he knew only the general parameters of the case.
So, yet again, I explained what had happened. Gader pulled out a pocket—size tape recorder and took notes as a backup. He assured me that the Bureau would give my case its full attention. After he left, it was as if he’d never been present.
Emptiness again enveloped me.
This can’t have happened, I thought, straining to convince myself. I’m having a nightmare. I’ll wake up soon. Kate and Jason will be back. Everything’ll be perfect, the way it was.
But when I woke in the night, pain racking my body, I reached next to me and was confronted by the emptiness on Kate’s side of the bed.
Nothing had changed.
As the days stretched on, the Butte police failed to catch Petey or find any sign of Kate and Jason. The Montana state troopers finally stopped watching the interstate.
“He isn’t your brother.”
“
What?
”
“The man who took your wife and son isn’t Peter Denning,” Gader said as he stood at my front door. “His name’s Lester Dant.”
I felt as if I’d been shoved. “You mean Petey used the name Lester Dant as an alias?”
“No. The other way around.”
“For God’s sake, what are you talking about?”
“The prints the crime—scene crew found in your house belong to a man named Lester Dant.” Gader stepped inside. “Here’s the file we have on him. Background. Social Security number. Criminal record.”
Bewildered, I sat in the living room and stared at the photograph that came with the documents. Complete with chipped tooth and scarred chin, Petey’s face confronted me from a mug shot that had been taken in Butte.
But the file identified the man as Lester Dant. He’d been born in Brockton, Indiana, a year before Petey was born. Over the years, he’d been arrested for, but never convicted of, auto theft, armed robbery, and manslaughter.
“Dant did time for extortion, drug dealing, and rape,” Gader said. “It’s a miracle he didn’t kill you all in your sleep. See where the Butte police have a record on him? Lester Dant got in a bar fight and put a man in the emergency ward. He was released from jail a week before the
CBS Sunday Morning
broadcast you were on.”
“But …” My sense of unreality intensified so much that the living room seemed to tilt. “How did he know so much about Petey?”
“They must have crossed paths,” Gader said. “Maybe your brother saw the
CBS Sunday Morning
show and talked about it with some people he knew, including Dant. Later, in private, Dant got more specifics from him and decided to pay you a visit.”
I raised my voice in dismay. “My brother hung around with people like
Dant
?”
“Maybe your brother had as rough a life as Dant claimed.”
“But why in God’s name didn’t Petey come to see me himself?”
Gader stared at me, and I tensed with the realization that Dant might have killed Petey to prevent him from interfering.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I told Gader. “If Dant’s this vicious, why would he have packed clothes for my son? Why would he have taken Jason along instead of …” The words caught in my throat.
“Killing him?” Gader looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure that’s a topic you want to get into.”
“Let
me
decide that.
Answer me.
”
Gader exhaled slowly. “It’s probable that Dant took your son to put pressure on your wife. By threatening to hurt Jason, he could force your wife to submit to him.”
I felt as if I’d been struck in the face. “No.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Denning. You asked me to be candid.”
“Petey … Lester Dant …”
“Fingerprints don’t lie.”
“There’s got to be a mistake. What Petey told me about when we were kids and how he was abducted—”
“What
Dant
told you. He probably kept buying your brother drinks to keep him talking, supplying details.”
“But it all felt so
real
. I’m sure he was telling the truth.”
“Listen, some of these con men are good—enough actors, they could have won Academy Awards if they’d gone straight.”
“It’s just that …”
“Everything was a lie. The name of the town in West Virginia where he told you he was held prisoner.”
“Redemption.”
“There’s no such place.”
“What?”
“Other parts of his story don’t hold together, either. He told you he got the scar on his chin last summer when he fell off a ladder on a roofing project in Colorado Springs.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, our agents showed Dant’s photograph to all the roofing contractors in that area. Nobody recognized him. The same with the construction contractors. If somebody had gotten a two—inch gash on his face, they’d remember it, they say. It would have required stitches, but the hospitals in the area don’t have any record of a construction worker coming in last summer with that kind of injury. However, the Colorado Springs police have a security—camera tape of a man who looks like Dant beating a clerk in a liquor store robbery. A police car chased his vehicle into the mountains. He may have gotten the injury to his face when his car skidded off a curve and tumbled into a draw. There was blood but no driver when officers climbed down to examine the wreckage.”
Bitterness twisted my voice. “Yeah, Petey has a habit of vanishing.”
“You mean Dant.”
“Sure… . Dant.”
“We’ll get him,” Gader said. “The money he took from you won’t last long. Eventually he’ll have to steal again. One mistake. That’s all he has to make, and we’ll get him.”
“Eventually.” The word that Gader had used stuck in my throat. I tried not to think about what was happening to Kate and Jason.
So a man who was my brother or who
wasn’t
my brother but who was pretending to be him had abducted my family and torn my world apart. He’d covered his trail by fooling me and the police into thinking he was going to Butte, Montana. Then he’d vanished off the face of the earth. No other motorists were reported missing for that time period, which meant that the police didn’t have a license number and a description of a carjacked vehicle to focus their search. There were numerous reports of stolen cars. Hundreds in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Thousands nationwide. But when any of these were located, Petey (I still couldn’t bring myself to call him Dant) was never linked to them. Perhaps he’d switched license plates with another vehicle. The owner of the other vehicle might have taken quite a while to notice that the plates had been switched, by which time Petey might have stolen another car or switched plates again. Or perhaps Petey had taken the money he got for the things he stole from my house to buy an old car and then showed a fake ID to register the car under an alias that the police didn’t know he had. Perhaps. Could have. Might have.
The local TV stations repeated the story. The networks picked it up, especially CBS, which included excerpts from the
Sunday Morning
segment that Kate, Jason, and I had been in. They emphasized the sick twist that a man who claimed to be my long—lost brother had vanished again, this time with my family. I got calls from men who claimed to have taken Kate and Jason. In graphic detail, they described the torture they inflicted. The police traced the calls, but nothing was learned, except that some people love to aggravate the suffering of others. Several of the callers were charged with obstructing the investigation, but none ever went to jail.
Despair and lack of sleep gave me headaches. I went through the motions of working, but my staff ran the business. I spent most of my time in a trance. As the search lost momentum, it became obvious that unless Petey—again I tried to substitute Dant’s name, but I couldn’t manage to do so—unless Petey stumbled into a policeman, he was never going to be found, especially if he grew a beard to cover the scar on his chin so his mug shot would no longer resemble him.
Blurred photos of Kate and Jason appeared on milk cartons and in mailers.
Have you seen this woman and this boy?
the caption read. But if
I
couldn’t recognize the indistinct faces, I couldn’t imagine anyone else being able to. I’d never paid attention to the faces on those milk cartons and those mailers when it was someone else’s wife or child who was missing. How could I hope that anyone would pay attention when it was
my
wife and child who were missing?
Friends were supportive initially: phone calls of encouragement, invitations to dinner. But after a while, many wearied of my despair. Unable to come up with fresh expressions of sympathy, they kept their distance.
A few remained loyal, though, and it was from my next—door neighbor, Phil Barrow, that I learned how things could get worse. I was listlessly raking dead leaves in my front yard, vaguely aware that autumn had once been my favorite time of year, frost in the air, wood smoke, the rattle of dead leaves, and now it meant nothing, when I happened to look up and see Phil hug his sweater tighter to his chest, then step off the sidewalk and approach me.
“How are you doing, Brad?”
Kate had once told me that no matter how shitty either of us felt, we should always answer “Never better.”
Phil’s shoulders moved up and down as if from a bitter chuckle. “Yeah, I can see that. You’ve been raking that same pile of leaves for about an hour.”
“Neatness counts.”
Phil looked down at his hands. “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”
“Oh?” I felt a cold breeze.
“Marge says I shouldn’t upset you, but I figure you’ve got enough trouble without getting
more
trouble from the people who are supposed to be helping you.”
The breeze got colder. “What are you talking about?”
“An FBI agent came to see me at work yesterday.”
“John Gader?”
“Yeah, that was his name. He asked me if you and Kate got along. If there were a lot of family arguments. If you ever hit your son.”
“
What?
”
“He wanted to know if you lost your temper when you drank. If you had a girlfriend.”
“The FBI suspects
me
?”
“You son of a bitch.”
Gader faltered when I stepped in front of his car in the parking garage of Denver’s Federal Building. “Calm down.”
“You think I killed my wife and son!”
“I gather that some of your friends told you I’d been asking them questions about you.”
“Destroying my reputation is more like it!” Fists clenched, I stepped toward him.
“Take it easy,” Gader said.
Its engine echoing, a car drove past in the garage, the driver frowning at us.
“This area has security cameras. It’s patrolled,” Gader said. “You don’t even want to
think
about assaulting a federal agent on federal property.”
“It’d be worth it!”
Gader held up his hands in surrender. “I’m not going to fight you. If you’ll calm down and listen …”
Behind him, a door banged open. A guard stepped into the garage’s harsh lights. His hand was on his holstered gun. “Is everything all right, Mr. Gader?”
“I’m not sure.” Gader’s lean face was stern. “
Is
everything all right, Mr. Denning?”
I squeezed my fists so tightly that my knuckles ached.
“If you go to prison, how’s that going to help your wife and son?” Gader asked.
I trembled, feeling anger burn my face.
“Think about what your family needs,” Gader said.
I relaxed my fists.
“It’s going to be fine, Joe,” Gader told the guard. “You can leave us now.”
“I’ll watch the monitor,” the guard said.
“Good idea.” Gader waited until the door rumbled shut.
