STOLEN (20 page)

The
Captain started to cough, causing the intruder to have a sudden abrupt
outburst.

“Shut up! Just shut up.” He cupped his hands over his ears
and pressed down in an effort to stop the noise from invading his thoughts. He
was afraid not to look, though; he didn’t want to not pay attention. ‘Pay
attention!’ He heard his old man’s voice scream at him. He felt again the sting
of the old man’s fist against his cheek.

He caught a glimpse of Tristan, fear flashed across the
little boy’s face.

“I’m sorry, Tris, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He
took his hands away from his ears and knelt down in front of the boy. “You know
I wouldn’t hurt you, I’m not like him, Tristan. I wouldn’t hurt you.”

He was sweating. Beads of perspiration formed above his
brow, his hair, uncombed and messy from wearing the helmet, began falling in
front of his right eye. He pushed it back with a trembling hand.

Tristan stood frozen, except for the deliberate movement of
his eyes, which floated downwards, focusing on the hand that held the pistol.

“I can’t let them catch me, Tristan, they are going to put
me in prison. I had to shoot him. I had to. I had to stop him. That bastard
killed M’leigh!”

His voice took on a softer tone, “Your mama, Tristan. He
told us he did it. He stood right there and told Troy he broke M’leigh’s neck.
I loved her, and he took her away from me, he took her away from all of us.”

Hope took advantage of the apparent calmness to try and
communicate with the anxious man. “If the man was going to shoot you; if it
happened the way you say it happened, then it was self-defense. Nobody is going
to fault you for that, you did nothing wrong. The police will understand.” She
tried to reason with him, taking a great effort to keep herself calm.

“Your father . . . .”

“Stop!” he shouted at her. “Don’t call him that. I don’t
think that bastard was my real father. I think he stole me! That’s why Troy and
me came here in the first place, to find out the truth. I think he kidnapped us
both, just like he did that little girl we found in the cabin. But that son of
a bitch shot Troy, and I had no other choice. He stood there and laughed at me.
I had no other choice, I had to shoot him.”

A bead of sweat traveled down the side of his nose and the
hand holding the gun was shaking. The volume of his voice gained in intensity.
He started to pace back and forth.

“Please, you’re scaring him.” Hope blurted out, as she tried
to hide her own desperate fear. Feeling Tristan’s body tremble under her arm, she
gathered him closer to her body by tightening the grip of her arm around his
chest.

“No, no, Tristan, tell them, you’re not scared of me.” He
reached over and grabbed the boy’s arm, breaking the hold Hope had on him and
pulled him towards him. Now it was Shane who had his arm wrapped around the
child. He leaned down and put his nose up against the boy’s dark hair, as if he
was breathing in his scent. “He’s not afraid of me,” he repeated, “he knows I
would never do anything to hurt him. He’s just as much my son as Troy’s. I
could even be his daddy. He loves me. I love him.” He lowered his lips and brushed
them up against Tristan’s scalp.

Hope looked confused. “I thought that—”

“Yeah,” he interrupted. “Everyone thinks Troy is his daddy. We
don’t really know for sure. M’leigh, that’s Tristan’s mama,
she . . . we both loved her. We both loved her and she
loved us both. When we found out that M’ was pregnant, the old man tossed a
coin. He said whoever won the coin toss was going to marry her, make it legit.
He told us there would be trouble if she didn’t get married, her being so
young. The old man said it landed on heads. So Troy got to marry her. The old bastard,
he wanted Troy to win that toss, I really think he fixed it. I never got to see
how it landed. None of us did.” He hugged Tristan closer, as if he was afraid
to let him go.

“Besides, the old man was always telling me what a loser and
hothead I am. The bastard told me I didn’t have the brains to make a baby. So
he said we should put Troy’s name down on the birth certificate; and I went
along with it. I didn’t want my kid to think his daddy was a loser. Besides, if
Archie thought the kid was mine, he would have treated him bad. Troy was his
favorite. He would never hurt Tristan if he thought Troy was his real daddy.
The old man hated me. That’s why he killed her, to get back at me!”

He was talking, but he wasn’t focused on any of them
anymore. It was if he was in a different realm, another place and another time.

Tristan was now facing Hope and looking directly into her
eyes. His mouth was open and his bottom lip was trembling uncontrollably. She
noticed his little Adam’s apple moving, as if he was actually speaking out loud,
yet no sound was coming out. It was his eyes doing the actually communication. Up
until now, Hope didn’t have a problem reading his expressions, but this
particular facial expression was new. She was trying to decipher what was
happening when Tristan suddenly chomped down, sinking his teeth deep into Shane’s
forearm, momentarily startling him. In pain, the man let out a cry of anguish.
The unexpected action of the child caused him to release his grip on the gun,
causing it to slip from his grasp, letting it fall to the floor; causing the
gun to discharge accidently. The loud explosion caught them all off guard and silence
followed, as if every ounce of air was sucked up and everyone in the room tried
to follow the projectile of the bullet. When they realized they were all safe,
both Hope and Shane scrambled to reach down to recover the gun.

Hope was a fraction of a second too late. Shane recovered
his composure and swooped up the pistol just seconds before Hope was able to grab
it by the barrel. Their eyes met, and Hope thought she saw sadness behind the
façade, but Shane turned away, immediately breaking the visual contact.

Turning back to Tristan, a look of hurt flashed across Shane’s
face and then a look of concern, not for himself but the boy. “Don’t pop a tear!
Please, buddy, don’t pop a tear!” He got down on one knee and grabbed the boy’s
jaw with his free hand. When a sound that could only be described as the result
of being in pain came out of Tristan, Shane realized he was holding him too
tight and loosened his grip.

“I’m sorry, Tris, I don’t mean to hurt you. I don’t want to
hurt nobody. Honest, I don’t.”

He let him go and fell back against the wall behind him,
landing hard on his buttocks, but it was if his whole body was numb. He didn’t
feel any pain. “I got to think.” His right hand ran repeatedly through his
thick blond hair in frustration, his eyes shifting back and forth from Hope to
Tristan to the front window, his left hand now keeping a much tighter grip on
the weapon.

Sanders
and Marty were back at the station and Marty
was just about to answer his phone messages from Jean when it suddenly hit him,
the thing that was bothering him about Shane’s mug shot that Sanders had faxed
over. Marty visualized the scar on the man’s forehead. He turned to Sanders and
asked to see the mug shot he had folded in his pocket and made his way downstairs
to the Juvenile division where they had a corkboard filled with photos of
missing children. He could hear Sanders breathing heavily in pursuit.

Marty used to try and memorize those photographs every time he
passed by that corkboard; but mostly he did it hoping to never forget the face
of his neighbor’s little boy. But this time he passed over the one fading
poster of the three-year-old T.J. which had been taken a month before his
abduction, and he scanned the other photos and flyers. Marty’s eyes finally
rested on the photograph he was looking for. It was a picture of the little boy
that was abducted from Orange County; the one that disappeared within weeks of
T.J.’s abduction. That picture showed the boy, who was also three years old,
with a scar exactly the same shape and in the same spot on his forehead as the
one in Shane’s mug shot. It was just too much alike to be a coincidence. Marty
compared the eyes, both photos showed the left eye slightly drooping, the hairline,
the fullness of the lips, they were all the same. The blond hair was slightly
darker now, but the hairline was the same.

Marty turned to the computer monitor and tapped on the
keyboard to bring up another set of files. He was looking for the file that
contained the photograph with an aged enhanced comparison.

There it was. There was no denying it now. Sanders hit the
nail on the head. Shane Blakey’s intuition about being one of those kidnapped boys
was right on the mark. He was not the biological son of the man that raised
him. He was in no way related to the man who called himself Archie Blakey.
Shane Blakey was someone else’s child and he had been stolen. He wasn’t Shane
Blakey at all, but the son of Ben and Sue Ward of Orange County, New York, whose
little boy Charlie was abducted from an Orange County playground twenty-five
years earlier, less than two months after Marty’s neighbor, T.J., went missing.

Marty was actually shaking as he clicked on the next file. He
momentarily shut his eyes, almost afraid to find out the truth. He was
conflicted. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be right about Troy being T.J. He
was terrified either way it turned out. Could he be mistaken, and Troy Blakey
was not the little boy that lived next door and vanished that day twenty-five
years ago? He pulled up the flyer with the photo of T.J. It seemed to take
forever to download, but finally flashed across the computer screen. Next, he
pulled up the computerized age progression photograph, grateful this time it
seemed to download faster. When the progress bar was full, he printed them both
off. He took out the photograph of Troy Blakey that Sanders had faxed over. Marty
took all three of the photos and laid them down side by side. There it was, the
absolute proof. It was right in front of him, in black and white. There was no
question in his mind now that the man lying in the hospital bed was the little
boy who spent the first three years of his life living next door to him, Tim
Jr.

So now it was conclusive. Now part of the puzzle had been
solved. It wasn’t Tristan who was a missing child at all. It was his father and
his uncle Shane who were the stolen children. Both abducted by Archie Blakey
from their families at the tender age of three. The man who was lying in the
morgue, the one they identified as Archie Blakey, had kidnapped two little boys
and ripped them from their families and kept them for twenty-five years, and
they never even knew it. The two boys grew up thinking that this man who
tortured them, who abused them mentally and physically, was their own flesh and
blood; and only by chance, and the suspicious instinct of one of the boys, did they
learn any different.

Marty called Jean and learned they were both on the same
page. Jean and Frank had done some of their own investigating and had
discovered the same information. She told Marty she was heading out to see if
she could find a relative of Shane/Charlie’s Ward’s. She thought there might be
a chance that Shane had found out the same information and was headed in that
same direction. Marty told her he was going to track down his neighbor, Mrs. Kolakowski,
and give her the news. He was going to inform her that her nephew, T.J., was not
only alive and well, but close enough for her to touch.

In order to keep the officers and the public safer, OSHA had
set new guidelines which required all newly issued vehicles to be equipped with
hands-free cellphones. When the budget allowed, OSHA guidelines were followed
and the department was beginning to issue their officers the newer vehicles. As
the older vehicles were phased out, new ones were issued, equipped with the
newest technical equipment and hands-free devices. Jean, having seniority, was
one of the first in her department to get one of these high-tech rides, much to
her dismay. Her husband may be an engineer, but she found herself to be technologically
challenged. When her cellphone rang, Jean’s fingers fumbled around the
dashboard monitor, trying to figure out how to answer the call.

It was Kathy that touched the
Answer
icon on the
dashboard’s screen and connected the call.

“Hello. Whitley here.” Jean leaned into the dashboard
awkwardly.

They were both surprised to hear whose voice came out of the
speaker. It was Jean’s daughter, Bethany.

“Mom, something’s wrong at Marty and Hope’s house.” Her
daughter spoke as if she was having trouble trying to catch her breath.

“What do you mean, honey?” Jean asked, as she tried to
concentrate on her driving and the busy traffic on the road before her.

“Dylan was driving me home and he thought he saw his bike
and the guy that stole it. We saw him turn down the path in the woods, behind
Marty’s house, so we went to check it out. It’s his bike, Mom. We knocked on
the door so we could use the phone and we heard someone talking inside. Dylan
says he thought he saw someone move the curtains and look out, but they
wouldn’t come to the door. We knocked a few times and Dylan walked around the
back. Mom, Hope’s car is in the driveway,” the girl said, without so much as
taking a breath.

Knowing that her daughter was not normally a drama queen and
the apparent tension she heard in the teenage girl’s speech gave Jean cause for
concern. A wave of anxiety rushed through her body. Something felt wrong and
she wasn’t going to take any chances.

“Bethany, tell Dylan to drive you home and wait there. I
want you to call nine-one-one as soon as you hang up. I’m on my way there now.”
She waited for her daughter to respond, but got silence.

“Bethany, did you hear me?”

“Mom, Dylan went to check things out. He went around the
back of the house, he hasn’t come back yet.”

Bethany had the phone pressed tight against her ear as she
started to make her way in the direction Dylan had gone only moments before. She
started to make her way through the newly budding shrubbery that lined the side
of the brick ranch home.

“Bethany, I want you to leave there this minute!” She leaned
in even closer to the dashboard as if it would help relay her message.

“But Mom, Dylan, I can’t see him! He must have gotten
inside.”

Now it was more than concern she heard in Bethany’s words,
it was panic.

“Bethany, listen to me closely.” Silence. “Bethany, dammit, answer
me!”

“I’m here, Mom.”

Jean let out the air from her lungs. “I need you to call nine-one-one,
and I want you to go down to Marty’s neighbor’s house and knock on the door. If
they don’t answer, go to the first house that does. I want you to get away from
that house and go to the neighbors. Now!”

“But Mom, Dylan . . . .”

“Bethany, just do what I say. Please!” Her heart was
pounding. She didn’t want to debate this with her teenage daughter. The girl
might be in danger and she was not in a position at the moment to help.

“Okay, okay. I’m calling now, I added it as a third party.”

“Honey, I’m hanging up. Please go to the neighbors, do it
now. I’m on my way!”

She stepped on the gas pedal and she said a silent prayer
that her daughter would do what she told her to.

She signaled to Kathy by waving her right arm. She couldn’t
speak. So she told Kathy to call Marty by mouthing it out. She knew she got
through to her friend when saw Kathy take her cellphone out of her purse and
tap the contact screen on the phone. Jean abruptly pulled the steering wheel to
the left and made a sharp U-turn, causing the driver of the vehicle directly
behind her to come to a sudden stop and yell out a greeting with a very
sexually descriptive narrative.