STOLEN (15 page)

Now the little boy just stared at him and remained quiet.
The tears stopped, the movements of his head stopped. He laid his head back on Troy’s
shoulder and closed his eyes and seemed to go back to sleep.

Troy and Shane spent the next few days taking turns going
out and looking for M’leigh. They trolled the highways and streets and asked
storekeepers if they had seen her. It seemed that she disappeared into thin
air. No one had seen M’leigh, nor had any idea where she may be. The only one
with any sort of theory was his father, who claimed that M’leigh was suffering
from something called postpartum depression for a long time and she never
wanted to be tied down with a kid. That maybe she took advantage of Troy and
Shane being out of town and she ran away. “After all, she had done it before.
Hadn’t she?”

Even the cops agreed with his father, who offered his take
on the disappearance to any one that would listen. “The girl probably just ran
away . . . . New mothers do that a lot. Don’t realize how
much time and attention a kid takes . . . especially when
they get to be Tristan’s age. They can be a handful.”

Shane abruptly stopped his wandering thoughts, his memories
taking a backseat, when he realized he made it all the way to the employees’
exit. He dropped the pail and laid the mop up in the corner.

He pushed the large metal bar, opening the steel door and
stepped out into the hazy moonlit night. A flurry of moths made frantic
movements around the security light, and he hurriedly walked away from the building,
making his way towards the woods and back to the Harley he left hidden in the
woods.

He was about to go back to the cabin when he noticed the
three of them leaving the hospital. He recognized the lady doctor immediately.
She was walking with some big muscular guy and he was holding a sleeping
Tristan. He watched as the guy placed Tristan in the backseat of the lady’s car
and looked like he was trying to secure the sleeping boy with a seat belt.

Looking down at the gas gauge on the bike, he decided to make
one more run. He decided to follow them and see where they were headed. He
didn’t want them to take Tristan, but he had no other options. If he could
follow them without being seen, he would at least know where Tristan would be.

Tristan
was still asleep when they got back home and the kid never opened his eyes as Marty
and Jean made their way up the steps. Marty laid him down on the bed in the old
bedroom he once shared with his identical twin brother, Tommy. The little boy
barely moved when Marty slipped off his dirty canvas sneakers and socks and
covered him with the patterned quilt. He started to close the window blinds but
then realized the streetlight would produce enough light in the room in case the
boy woke up and became disoriented. Marty stood there for a second watching the
shadows the light and trees made and second guessed himself. The wind was
starting to pick up and the branches were waving, making it appear as if
someone was standing in the dark crevice of the large willow outside the house.
Marty wasn’t sure if the kid was afraid of the dark or not and he didn’t want
him to wake up in a strange house and be frightened. Sometimes those shadows
could look pretty damn spooky to a small boy with a vivid imagination. Instead,
he turned on the old brass lamp, which sat on his old wooden desk, and then
shut the blinds, consequently shutting out those bothersome night shadows.

Before Marty walked out, he gently touched the tip of the
little boy’s toes, something he realized his dad would do as a ritual every
night at bedtime. He flipped the light switch and started to shut the door and then
thought better of it. Instead, he left it halfway open and walked down the hall
and down the stairs. As he passed his father’s room on the lower level, he
realized someone had moved his father’s regular bed out and replaced it with
the old hospital bed that had been stored in the garage. Marty suddenly had a
flashback of his mother sitting up in that same bed, sipping water from a blue
plastic cup, her once waist-length auburn braided hair long gone from cancer
treatments. He could barely remember now the sound of her voice as she called him
into the room . . . he had made some sort of excuse of why he
couldn’t go in. He had told her he had a ball game or some other stupid reason,
when the truth of the matter was, he just didn’t want to. He may not have been
able to remember her voice, but he would never forget the look of hurt on her
face he had seen in the reflection of the mirror as he walked away. Marty
wondered, now, if he would ever forgive himself for the childish cruelty he subjected
her to.

His father has told Marty on more than one occasion that he was
just a child then and really didn’t understand the magnitude of what was
happening to his mother. He tried to convince him that he never really got the
chance to know his mother when she was healthy, because he was so young when
she took ill. He also tried to convince him that he really hadn’t acted the way
he was remembering it. He told him that he had treated his mother with love and
respect and had never outwardly showed her his distain, nor was he angry or
rude towards her. Marty wondered now if that was the truth or somehow his
father had false memories of what was actually truth in order to be able to
forgive him.

Marty’s mother was diagnosed with cancer right after his
brother Danny was born; and his identical twin brother Tommy and he were still
in diapers. The last five years of her life, she was in and out of hospitals
and he never really got to know her as anything other than the very sick woman
that lived in the house with them. It was his sister Mary, still just a
teenager herself at the time, who had taken over the role of mother to the
eight boys. It was Mary who he looked to for comfort when he would come home
with a bloody nose, or black eye, because he had gotten into a fight with some
kid at school. It was Mary who taught him how to dance so he wouldn’t look so
lame at the school prom. It was Mary who slapped him across the face the day he
told her he wished his mother would just go ahead and die because he was sick
and tired of having to be quiet when the sick lady would come home from the
hospital.

Looking back now, Marty honestly believed that Mary should
have done more than slap him that day. He had deserved a real good ass kicking.

“Is he asleep?” Hope asked.

Marty’s phone began to vibrate, signaling a text message was
coming in, so he pulled it out of his pocket and quickly glanced at it.

The message was from Jean.

“Shit!” It slipped out and he was waiting to be scolded for
having a potty mouth.

“What is it, Marty?” Concern trumped her annoyance at the
cuss word. She already was showing signs of fatigue and Marty noticed the
crease in the center of her forehead had deepened. “Is it the Captain?”

“No, honey, it’s nothing. It’s just a message from Jean
about the case.” Marty pushed a lock of her chocolate brown hair behind her ear
and he could feel the tension escape from her muscles. It was as if he cut the
rubber band from the stem of a party balloon.

“Seriously, Marty.” She took his hand and prompted him to
sit down at the kitchen table. She pulled out a chair opposite him and sat
down. “Bringing him here was not a good idea. He needs a structured family
experienced in foster care, constant attention, and possibly extensive therapy.
We have no idea what kind of trauma or abuse he has been exposed to. You and I
have jobs that are very demanding and time consuming—”

Marty interrupted her. “Hope, there is no one better to care
for him than you.” She started to protest, but he hurried his words to block
hers out. “Nobody is more qualified. You and I were planning on taking some
time off and helping with the Captain when he came home from the hospital. How
much more trouble can it be to add one little boy to the equation? He’s
probably going to be a lot less demanding and a heck of a lot less trouble than
my father.”

“I got the feeling that you were needed at work,” she
argued.

“Look, we are both tired. It’s been a long day. How about we
just discuss this in the morning?”

Marty stood up and waited while she got up and then broke
into a broad smile. He could feel the deep indentation in his right cheek
making an appearance and he was gambling on it being a deal breaker, hoping it
would wipe away the look of reluctance on her face. Marty could tell she wasn’t
happy, but she was teetering on being persuaded to see it his way. What he
didn’t want to tell her was the thing which bothered him the most.

He had a strong feeling that Tristan may be in danger, and he
wanted him close and under his protection. He was pretty sure he had been in
the room when Blakey was murdered; and if Troy Blakey, or whoever he really was,
didn’t make it, then Tristan may very well be their only witness. Marty wasn’t
comfortable with the child being out of his sight, especially since he knew
someone else was out there; and he didn’t think he would just steal Dylan’s
motorcycle, take off, and leave his brother and nephew behind. Marty wasn’t
quite sure of the dynamics of this Blakey family, but he did know that brothers
usually stuck together, no matter what.

Lieutenant
Mike Sanders stood in the middle of the room staring at the computer. Now that they
received word verifying Archie Blakey was dead and one of his sons was in a
coma and the other son was missing, he finally convinced a judge to issue him a
search warrant of the wood-frame house the family had lived in. The place was a
virtual junkyard inside and out, with scrap metal, aluminum cans, and abandoned
cars scattered throughout the twenty-five-acre property. The front yard was
nothing but overgrown weeds, and more than one officer searching the place
managed to either tear his uniform or draw blood while walking through the
scattered debris.

A crime scene technician, a recent college graduate who majored
in computer engineering, was successful in opening a file he found on the early
model laptop computer hidden under one of the beds. He immediately called
Sanders over and the two men stood there, their eyes glued to the monitor. While
Sanders stood watching, his mind fought, unsuccessfully, to shut out the
visuals. A wave of nausea made him sick to his stomach. Thousands of
photographs of young children, in compromising positions, flashed across the
screen. Some of the images, of children, showed them smiling, but their eyes
told a different story. A few of them were so young their smiles showed gaps
where baby teeth had recently fallen out. He could tell by the clothing and
hairstyle some of the photographs were at least twenty-five years old or maybe
even older than that. As much as he wanted to turn away, he forced himself to
look: trying to see if any of the children’s faces looked familiar. Searching
deep and inventorying his memory for images of missing children whose cases
have passed through his office since his career began. They all looked familiar;
but he realized that it was generic and every one of their little faces looked
like the kids in the kindergarten class he recently visited on career day.

In his hand he held the mug shot of Shane Blakey and an old
high school photograph of Troy. Next to the computer monitor was a photo of a
young lady in a silver frame that Sanders immediately recognized as Donna
Barrie, holding a toddler on her lap.

“How did you get in? Did the guy have a password?” He
questioned the technician.

“Yeah, but he must have had a hard time remembering what it
was.” The tech held up the machine to show Sanders a white piece of paper taped
to the bottom with the word XESDNUORGYALP printed in block letters.

“What kind of gibberish is that?”

“Not gibberish, Mike, it’s . . . come here,”
the young technician motioned for him to follow.

Sanders looked up, confused, but followed the technician
into a small bathroom. Overwhelmed at first at the stench that almost had him
gagging, he glanced down at the toilet to see stale urine and feces that filled
the bowl, causing him to immediately slam the lid of the commode shut, hoping
to eliminate some of the sickening smell. Turning back around to face the
technician, Sanders watched as the tech held the back of the laptop and the
paper up to the mirror behind a stained and chipped porcelain sink.

Hardly able to see the image because the mirror was smeared
with soot, the man used the back of his jacket sleeve to wipe away the cloud of
dirt so that they can see the image, which was now reversed.

“PLAYGROUNDSEX.”

“Shit!” Sanders cried out in disgust.

He walked out of the bathroom and turned to one of the other
techs that was searching through a small, narrow closet.

Peter Putt, a veteran investigator, walked over to him. Putt,
at six-foot-nine, who was once destined to play professional basketball, but
blew out his right knee during a high school championship game, towered over
Sanders.

“Hey, Loo, look what I found.” He held up a cardboard box
with newspaper clippings.

“Do I really want to know, Peter?”

Putt didn’t say a word, just shrugged.

Sanders started to take one of the clippings out of the box,
but it was brown with age and the paper started to crumble at his touch. He
immediately let go and positioned himself so he could read the article on top,
holding the paper with the very tips of his fingers.

He was able to read the headline, but the smaller print was
faded and hard to make out. The article was cut out from a New York newspaper.

Sullivan County Child Abducted in Broad Daylight
 . . . it
was dated twenty-five years earlier, April 20th, 1988. He shifted the paper and
was able to make out the headline of the next article.
Orange County Toddler
Abducted From Daycare Center Playground
 . . . it was
dated June 16th, 1988.

He looked up at Putt, dumbfounded. He glanced down at the
photos in his hand and got a weird feeling. He did a few mathematical
calculations in his head, and then he turned, and made his way back into the
first room.

He turned to another young crime scene investigator who was now
inventorying the laptop into evidence.

“Do you geeks have some kind of facial recognition software
in that lab of yours? Can you put these pictures in and see if it matches any
of those?” He pointed to the laptop and handed them the photos he had of Troy
and Shane. “Damn it,” he looked up and scanned the room. “What the hell were
these guys into?” He wasn’t surprised when he received nothing but silence in
return.

Taking a deep breath, he started to walk out of the house.
He turned around before he got to the front door and rubbed his face with his
right hand. He pulled out his cellphone and called Rita at the station. He
started to talk as soon as she picked up her extension.

“Rita, do whatever you have to do and arrange for me to go
to New York State to follow up on the Donna Barrie case.” He didn’t wait for
her to tell him how she probably wouldn’t get approval or the funds to follow
up on a case that cold. “I don’t care if they won’t authorize the funds, I will
pay for the tickets myself, if I have to, just make me reservations to fly out
there as soon as possible and call that, what’s his name?”

“Detective Keal.” She answered him without hesitation.

“Yeah, him, give him a call and tell him I’m on my way
there. Tell him I want to interview Troy Blakey, coma or no coma; and if they
found his brother, you tell him to make sure they don’t let that guy out of their
sight.”

He didn’t bother to say goodbye, he just disconnected the
call and shoved the phone back into his pocket, kicking the door jam on his way
out.