Tracks (4 page)

His mother, Diane, suffered
for him more than anyone did.  Trauma from the ghastly affair, losing a
daughter-in-law and a grandson, along with such drastic change in her son,
proved too much even for her.  Her son’s reaction was, at first, reasoned
to be a mourning period, a period of adjustment, but it went far beyond.  She
knew the change in him went much deeper and was much more significant than what
would ordinarily be considered grief.  She knew that, together with his
wife, his natural optimism had
died,
his naive trust
in people, his kindness.  The light that had always flickered in him had
been extinguished and she felt it her responsibility, her burden, to bring him
back from the dead. 
When he did not react to her
efforts, her world collapsed.
  She suffered a nervous breakdown and
was hospitalized for a month. She returned, not the same person, in need of
constant medication
.

It was three months before Sam
set foot in his home.  Black Jack had accompanied him.  He walked
around feeling his wife and son’s presence everywhere.  The place had not
been altered.  The police had left it as he had last seen it except for
the bloodied covers and sheets, which had been checked for traces of semen and
prints and discarded.  His brother Robert had offered to have the house
cleaned but Sam wanted it left alone.  When he reached the bedroom, he had
a momentary lapse, feeling faint again, but regained his poise, walked in and
sat on the bed, Black Jack watching from the doorway.  Sam surveyed the
room, chilled to the bone.  He looked up at Black Jack and began to sob,
silently at first, then in short gasps, cupping his face with his hands. 
Later, sitting opposite Black Jack at a nearby coffee shop, he heard the
horrifying details for the first time as Black Jack disclosed the gruesome
findings of his investigation.  Sam sat through it, feeling numb, as he
found out his wife, cuffed to the bed frame, had not only been raped but
sodomized as well before being shot from point blank range by a 9mm
Beretta.  Evidence found in the house clearly identified two men from
semen samples found on Michelle’s body and fingerprints in the bedroom. 
He thought of her there, helpless, being butchered by animals.  Feeling
totally impotent he began to sob once again.  Black Jack had paused,
then
offered to stop, but Sam, through his tears, urged him
on.

Prints were found all over the
place, but had not been matched with any local or federal offenders.  The
two had obviously been careless covering their tracks, leading investigators to
believe they were foreigners but Interpol and other foreign agencies had come up
empty as well
.

There were no witnesses who
could point to a strange car or prowlers in the neighborhood at the time. 
None of the neighbors saw or heard anything out of the ordinary that night and
no random passerby had come forth with any useful information. The two men had
come in, performed their terrible deed, and were gone - presumably with little
Sammy - like ghosts in the night
.
The search for little Sammy had also proved fruitless. 
Local and state police, federal and border authorities had been alerted a mere
seven hours after Sammy had presumably been kidnapped but three months into the
investigation no solid identification of him had been established.  Black
Jack had gotten a few reports of toddlers fitting the description and had
pursued several of those leads with a vengeance, but came up empty each time
.

Sam managed only a few months
back at the office, getting nowhere with work.  Files piled high on his
desk, memos and phone messages were ignored as he sat in his chair unable to
allot any attention to everyday chores.  The first few days were spent
staring into space waiting for word on his missing son.  Devastated by his
predicament and the barren investigation, as the weeks dragged on, it became
apparent that he could not perform his duties.  The firm’s seven partners,
Sam’s colleagues, secretaries and clients alike, had all tried in vain to lull
him back to existence but his torment was just too great to overcome. 
Eventually any pending cases were assigned to other attorneys and Sam’s contribution
was reduced to meager assistance of the attorneys assigned his cases. 
Finally, almost a year after the tragedy, when Detective Black Jack had formed
his federal task force for locating missing children, Sam took all vacation
days owed him, then resigned from the firm and dedicated his life to locating
his son and other children with similar fates
.
 

By the time Sam had offered to
join Black Jack’s task force, the investigation into Sammy’s disappearance had
taken a slight turn for the better.  Agents got a break when Interpol
discovered an Algerian ring assisting divorced Muslim fathers snatch children
away to Northern Africa from their estranged Western European wives, mostly
from France and Belgium where mixed marriages were quite common.  The most
prevalent way of abducting these children away from their mothers was a
seemingly innocent vacation to the father’s homeland from which child and
father would never return.  The more suspicious mothers would not allow
such a vacation and end up getting a divorce and custody of the kids before
letting the child out of their sight.  It was these divorced fathers who
used the Algerian ring’s services.  They would trap the child at school or
at a playground then smuggle him or her out of the country by cargo boat
.

A French newspaper reporter
investigating complaints on behalf of a group of victimized mothers whose
children had been kidnapped, but whose resident Governments were too
constrained by international treaties and political considerations to deal with
the matter, stumbled upon the ring and alerted Interpol and the French
police.  After further investigation and verification of corroborating
evidence, a suspicious merchant ship hauling grain for Algiers was put under
surveillance in Marseilles and the offense was eventually observed. The
conspirators were caught red-handed with twin boys they had snatched from a
playground in Paris
.

A photo of a child resembling
Sammy Jr. was found in possession of the ring after the French police raided
their hideout in Nice, confiscating incriminating materials which included
lists of names, addresses and photographs of children.

Sam and Black Jack flew to
France to look at the photos and list of names.  The resemblance to Sammy
was not conclusive and his name was not found in any of the lists.  Still,
it was more to go on than they had ever had. It turned out the names on the
list were all aliases, not the children’s real names.  The mother of the
kidnapped twins and another, who clearly identified her daughter from the
photos, soon discovered their marked children were cataloged with false
names.  The captured kidnappers, working on orders from a larger
organization assumed to be based in Libya, were not aware the children’s names
were false
.

It gave Sam and Black Jack
some more hope.  The name assigned to the child resembling Sammy was
Jacques Piccard, his address in an apartment building in La Defense, Paris. Sam
and Black Jack joined the French police inspecting the apartment but found it
had been vacated by a family with two children, a boy and a girl, only a few
months before.  The current male resident had never met the family but
neighbors and the building’s superintendent recalled the boy was about Sammy’s
age. A copy of the lease and information from the landlord’s office revealed
the family name was Trevor, not Piccard, and the boy’s name was Jon. 
Further investigation revealed the family had moved to a small village in the
French Alps
.

With help from the French
reporter who had discovered the ring, Christine Patrese by name, Sam and Black
Jack located the family in Chamonix, a picturesque ski resort in a hidden
valley not far from the French-Swiss border, altitude three thousand meters.
The parents, Serge and Jeanne Trevor, had found jobs at the resort, he as the
resort’s accountant,
she
as a ski instructor. 
Their two children were receiving ski lessons when Sam first saw them. 
The boy was Sammy’s age and could be said to resemble him
.

The mother, Jeanne Trevor, was
caught totally unprepared when Sam first approached her with the tale. 
They had discreetly inquired about her when they first arrived at Chamonix
intending to approach her alone, not knowing how aware she was of the danger,
if at all, assuming her husband was the reason little Jon Trevor had appeared
on the list.  A fellow ski instructor at the resort cafeteria pointed her
out to Sam who cornered her alone at her table.  At first she refused to
acknowledge there was any threat to her children but eventually revealed that
Serge Trevor was not the children’s biological father but her second
husband.  Her first, a carpenter by trade, named Abdul Rahimi, the
children’s biological father, had decided to return to his home country of
Morocco,
shortly after little Jon was born.  Jeanne had
no intentions of following her husband to his homeland, so he filed for a
divorce, intending to take his son with him; for their four-year-old daughter,
Maya, he had no use
.

After failing to win custody
in court, he tried to kidnap little Jon himself from their home, but the
babysitter had alerted Jeanne in time to thwart the attempt.  Before he
left for Morocco, Rahimi swore he would return for his son. Jeanne and her
family had been on the move ever since. She married Serge Trevor, a high school
sweetheart, as soon as she could, adopting his family name, then moved twice
within Paris before landing the job in Chamonix.  Obviously, she mused,
they had done a poor job covering their tracks, if Sam and his crew were able
to find them so effortlessly
.

She was quite shaken by the
news that her son was on a list of children to be kidnapped but was grateful
for the advance warning. She opted not to involve her husband at that stage and
took Sam to see two-year-old Jon taking his first ski lesson at the resort’s
daycare center.  As he watched him, tears welling up in his eyes, the now
familiar feeling of despair engulfed him, and once again he wondered if he
would ever get to see his own son taking ski lessons or any lessons
.

The failed endeavor in France
was a blow, but out of it sprang reinforced ties to various European agencies
working to similar objectives. The Federal Task Force for the Location of
Missing Children, commonly referred to as LMC, was a country wide organization
assembled from cross disciplines such as law enforcement, both federal and
local agencies, private investigators, psychologists, social workers, civil
servants and a few attorneys who handled legal matters and international
disputes. Sam was originally accepted to perform legal duties but was given a
more active role when it became apparent he would not remain behind his
desk.  He soon became an expert on worldwide matters having to do with
child abduction and kidnapping.  It became his life.  He shunned any
and all activities not strictly related to the pursuit of locating missing
children.  He knew names, locations, size and make of any illegal
indulgence in child abuse of organizations and people under LMC
investigation.  One had only to ask Sam rather than look for a file to get
an answer to whatever it was he or she was looking for.  He memorized
entire files of child abduction incidents to the smallest detail and would
eventually help the team piece cases together.  He became so proficient at
what he did that he was eventually put in charge of the western United States
section, compensating for his lack of investigative experience with ambition,
fervor and a sense of purpose unmatched by anyone on the force.  Finding
Sammy Jr. was what drove
him
but he was passionate and
involved with all cases under his responsibility and soon every missing child
became his Sammy
.

He was sometimes accused of
making irrational decisions, becoming too emotionally involved with his
cases.  In one such case, a seven-year-old boy had to be liberated from a
cult his mother had joined, tearing
herself
and the
boy from the father and two older sisters.  The father had tried for years
to win custody, claiming the cult was depriving his son of a normal upbringing
and education, instilling in him traits that would, eventually,
deprive
him of properly functioning in society.  The
mother, represented by the cult’s leader, a high school drop-out, unemployed
Guru-turned-lawyer, argued the definition of “normal upbringing” proclaiming
the cult’s way superior to any “Western” type upbringing.  After three
appeals, Utah’s Supreme Court finally ruled in the father’s favor.  The
father had managed to sneak into the cult’s encampment and videotape ongoing
activities such as his wife indulging in sexual intercourse with two men out in
the open, her son and several other children splashing themselves silly in a
neighboring stream, meters away. He had also managed to shoot her sniffing a
white substance, through her bunk window, though it was never proven she was
doing drugs.  A panel of three judges ruled the cult an inappropriate
environment for bringing up children, claiming no facilities, tools, and/or
educated personnel to provide for children so young.  The panel judged the
mother unfit to provide for her boy based on the videotape, which was admitted
as evidence though taken
illegally,
and testimony from
two former cult members who were dug up by a private investigator employed by
the father
.