Terrified (9 page)

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Authors: Kevin O'Brien

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Terrified
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That was exactly how she felt.
Stupid.
She’d told him how mad she was at him, and then she’d left him alone at that table. It had only been a few seconds, but long enough for him to run away—or for someone to take him.
If Josh were anywhere nearby, he might not have answered his mean mother. But he certainly would have answered one of those jugglers who had mesmerized him. Megan realized he wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity—and she might never see her little boy again.
 
 
She had lost track of how many times she’d ridden up and down the escalators at Westlake Center—from the basement level all the way up to the third floor, where she’d last been with Josh in the food court. Her voice was hoarse from crying—and yelling out his name every few moments. She wandered through the mobs of shoppers on each floor, searching for him, praying she’d hear him call back to her. She ducked into several stores, but didn’t see any sign of him.
On the third floor, on the other side of the food court, she asked people waiting in line for the Monorail if they’d seen a brown-haired, four-year-old boy in a green short-sleeved shirt and plaid shorts. They just shrugged or stared at her.
She knew she was acting like a crazy woman. She couldn’t stop crying and shaking.
She ventured to the bus tunnel, connected to the lower level. Could someone have taken him down there—and then dragged him onto a bus? Her voice echoed in the long tunnel as she screamed for him again and again.
She got back on the escalator again, and glanced at her wristwatch. It had been thirty minutes since she’d first reported Josh missing. The handsome cop she’d been avoiding earlier had immediately radioed it in. Now three patrol cars were parked in front of Westlake Center. Megan suddenly wasn’t frightened of the police—not anymore. The notion of losing Josh was far more horrible than anything the police could do to her.
Every few minutes—not frequently enough for Megan—they’d interrupt the Muzak piped through the shopping center to announce a little boy was missing:
“Josh Keeslar, meet your mother by the first-floor escalator,”
the woman would say—twice, for emphasis. Then she’d describe what Josh looked like.
“Josh was last seen wearing a green polo shirt, plaid shorts, and blue sneakers… .”
Megan had an awful feeling Josh was no longer around to hear that announcement. For every minute that passed, she felt sicker—and more terrified that she’d lost him forever.
On the third floor, she overheard one of the jugglers announcing between routines: “You’ve probably heard over the loudspeaker that a little boy is lost. Josh, if you’re anywhere around here, let us know! Your mom’s worried about you… .”
She thought about how kind it was of him to do that, and started to cry again. She glanced over toward Orange Julius and tried to spot the table where they’d been sitting. Someone must have cleaned it off, because all the tables in that area were occupied. It was as if Josh had never even been there.
The Muzak abruptly stopped, and Megan waited for the woman to announce that a little boy was missing. Instead, she heard a man’s voice come on the loudspeaker: “Mrs. Keeslar, please meet Officer Williams by the third-floor escalators… .” For a moment, Megan couldn’t move. She felt paralyzed. Had they found him?
As they started to make the announcement again, Megan turned and hurried toward the escalators. She hoped to see that handsome, bald cop with Josh at his side. She imagined the policeman’s smile in anticipation of the mother-son reunion.
But she only saw the cop, and he wasn’t smiling.
“What is it?” she asked, breathless. She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Did you find him? Did you find my little boy?”
“Not quite,” he said, wincing a little. “They want to talk to you, Mrs. Keeslar. Could you come with me?”
“What is it?” she asked again. She anxiously trailed after him as he headed toward the corridor for the restrooms. “Can’t you tell me what’s happened?
“I’m not sure what’s going on,” he replied, his back to her. He pushed at a door marked, DO NOT ENTER—EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Megan followed him down a white-walled corridor to what must have been the employee lunchroom. Four policemen milled around the small room that had cheap-looking round white plastic tables and folding chairs. Two of the cops were sitting down. Another was at the vending machine. The fourth cop wasn’t in uniform like the others, but in his gray suit with the ugly tie, the handsome, fiftyish silver-haired man looked like a police detective. He was at the sink, slurping water from the faucet when Megan stepped in with Officer Williams.
Wiping his mouth, the silver-haired man approached her. The two officers stood up. On the table behind them, there was a white plastic garbage bag laid out with something on top of it. Megan couldn’t see what it was.
“Mrs. Keeslar?” the plainclothesman said, frowning slightly.
Megan nodded. She couldn’t talk—or breathe.
“We found these items in the men’s room by the food court,” he said. “They were in the trash receptacle.”
One of the cops stepped aside, so Megan could see what was on the table behind him.
“Could you identify these for us?” she heard the plainclothesman ask.
Megan gasped. Laid out on the white plastic bag were a little green polo shirt and a pair of plaid shorts.
 
 
“Will they give her a noperation and make her better?” the little boy asked.
“Yeah, but we need to get to the hospital soon if you want to see her,” the man answered, pulling him by the hand. “C’mon, hurry up… .”
They headed down the stairwell of the Bon-Macy’s garage toward where he’d parked his car. He’d been on the hunt at Westlake Center this afternoon, so he’d parked across the street at the Bon-Macy’s garage. He didn’t park in a garage connected to a place where he took a kid, not anymore. Even with his prey chloroformed and well-hidden under a blanket on the floor of the backseat, he could still get stopped by a cop at the garage exit—especially if it was the store where the kid had gone missing. He’d learned that the hard way a while back. He’d been arrested in a Spokane shopping center’s garage, where they’d found an unconscious six-year-old girl in the backseat of his car. After his arrest, they’d tried to pin three missing-child cases on him, too, but couldn’t make the charges stick. If they’d only combed some woods near Post Falls, Idaho, they might have gotten even more than they’d been looking for. Still, he’d spent two years in prison for making that mistake in the Spokane shopping center garage.
The clothes he’d put on the kid were a size too big. So he’d rolled up the cuffs of his little jeans, and pushed up the sleeves of his red checkered shirt. The blue baseball cap had kept people from noticing the hair color right away. The kid wouldn’t stop whimpering, but that had been expected since he’d been told his mother had an accident and was on the way to the hospital. It was funny how kids didn’t question certain things like, “You need to change your clothes before I take you to see her.”
The mother must not have wasted much time getting ahold of a cop or mall security, because they’d made the first announcement over the public address system as he’d been pulling the kid toward the Fourth Street exit in back. He’d started talking to the boy—so the kid hadn’t heard his name announced.
They’d walked around the back of Westlake Center, and across the street into the Bon-Macy’s, where he’d waited for an empty elevator to take them up to the sky bridge. No sense taking a chance someone else on the elevator could identify him later. The kid had stopped crying for a few moments, apparently fascinated by the sky bridge leading to the Bon-Macy’s parking garage—five stories over the crowded street.
But now, he was sobbing again—and having trouble holding on to his loose jeans and maneuvering the steps in the gray, gloomy stairwell.
“C’mon, move it,” he hissed. “Do you want your mother to die before we even get to the hospital?”
This only made the little boy cry harder.
“Shut up!” he growled. He stopped at the landing to the third level, where he’d parked his car. Hearing footsteps above them, he put his hand over the kid’s mouth. He’d taken the stairs, figuring most people would use the elevator. Despite pulling off the abduction without a hitch, he couldn’t shake the feeling someone had seen it and was following him. It wasn’t the first time he’d spooked himself out that way. The footsteps above them seemed to be getting closer.
With his hand still over the little boy’s mouth, he managed to push open the door to the parking area. He stopped dead at the sound of tires screeching. Then he heard rap music, and then a car’s motor idling for a moment before it died. He cautiously moved ahead, dragging the kid with him. “You gonna shut up?” he whispered.
The little boy nodded timidly. His tears were wetting the man’s hand.
The footsteps in the stairwell behind them had stopped.
Glancing over his shoulder, the man saw no one. He slowly took his hand away from the boy’s mouth. The kid sniffled, but didn’t make another sound. He was trembling. They stayed in a shadowy alcove while two women got out of a beat-up Monte Carlo, parked only a few spaces away from his green Buick LeSabre. The women were laughing about something. Their cackling competed with the not-too-distant sound of tires turning on concrete and car doors slamming on other parking levels.
He waited behind a thick post. He didn’t want anyone to see him putting the kid in his car. He watched the women step inside the elevator, and then the door shut.
Pulling the little boy by the arm, he finally started toward his car, where he kept a small vial of chloroform, a washcloth, and a roll of duct tape in the glove compartment. A blanket was in the backseat. In the trunk was a big trash bag stuffed with children’s clothes of various sizes. Some were bought at secondhand shops, and some were recycled from children who had taken their last rides in that same car. He’d forgotten where he’d originally gotten the jeans, checkered shirt, and baseball cap the boy now wore.
The kid started to resist as they got closer to the LeSabre. He began to whimper again.
Behind them, a door squeaked.
“Josh?”
The man halted in his tracks, and swiveled around. He suddenly felt the boy tugging to get away from him. He couldn’t quite see the other man, standing in the dark alcove by the stairwell door. His face was cloaked in the shadows. The guy didn’t look like a cop. He didn’t look like anybody.
“Hey, Josh,” the faceless stranger said. “Your mother’s looking for you… .”
 
 
Megan didn’t remember fainting, and yet strangely, she recalled a clattering sound as she toppled into a plastic chair and collapsed on the floor of the employee cafeteria. She wasn’t sure how much time had gone by when she’d come to. It seemed like she’d been out for only a moment.
As she stared at Josh’s discarded clothes, she couldn’t stop crying. The cops had probably laid them out on the unused plastic garbage bag to keep the evidence clean. But all Megan could think about were those murders in which the victims’ severed body parts were found in bags just like that.
At one point, she heard the silver-haired cop say they should call a doctor for her. She barely heard him. And she barely noticed Officer Williams, standing in the doorway of the employee break room. But then all at once, Megan noticed him smiling at her. It was the smile she’d hoped to see on his face earlier, the one anticipating a mother-son reunion. He stepped into the lunchroom.
Josh shuffled in just behind him, holding the cop’s hand.
“Mommy!” he cried. Breaking away from the policeman, he ran into her open arms. The baseball hat flew off his head as they embraced. They were both crying.
After a few minutes, Megan’s elation waned at the moldy smell of the strange, ill-fitting clothes he wore. The notion that someone had undressed her son repulsed her. The jeans rode low on him, and she was grateful to see he still had on the same underwear from this morning.
Her hands shaking, she started to unbutton the checkered shirt. She stripped him down to his underwear, and then dug into the Bon-Macy’s bag the police had held on to for her. Megan quickly dressed him in the clothes she’d just bought on sale. Josh fidgeted a bit, but he was so in awe of the policemen that he was cooperative and docile.
More than anything, she just wanted to take him home and give him a good bath—wash away whatever had happened to him, wash away this whole afternoon.
At the same time, she wanted the police to find the monster who had tried to steal her little boy. The police questioned Josh while he sat in her lap, and from what they could tell, a man had come to him just moments after Megan had left their table in the food court. All they had to go on regarding his appearance was dark hair, glasses, and “a beard—here and here,
”
Josh said, pointing above his lip and on his chin. This man with glasses and a goatee—perhaps a disguise—had told Josh that his mother had fallen and hit her head, and they were taking her to the hospital. He’d led Josh into the men’s restroom, just down the hall from where they were now. He’d given him the other clothes to wear for their “trip to the hospital.”

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