Here After

chapter eleven

PETER REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS AS THEY lifted him onto a stretcher. Ironically, it was Lisa Black’s voice he heard trying to reassure him, her cool hand tight around his forearm. “It’s okay, Peter,” she was saying. “You fainted and bumped your head. It doesn’t look like you broke the skin but I think we should do a CAT scan and get some blood work done, look at your sugar and maybe your hemoglobin. You’re white as a sheet.”

Now he heard her say, “Take him down to the ER,” and felt the stretcher move, angling out of the waiting area toward the orange exit doors. He waited until they were in the main hall and sat up, shaking his head against a swirl of dizziness. The porter said, “Maybe you should lie down,” and Peter slid himself off the end of the stretcher, telling the porter he was fine.

He made his way down the hall without looking back, using a patient handrail for support. By the time he reached the locker room he felt better and changed quickly into his street clothes. Lisa intercepted him on his way out and followed him down to the lobby, doing her best to talk him into staying. Peter said he was fine, assured her that if he dropped dead in the parking lot he’d accept full responsibility, then hurried out the door. He called Roger on his way to the car, asking him if he’d gotten the entire newscast on tape.

“You bet I did,” Roger said. “The son of a bitch is at it again. I can’t believe they let him get away. Are you coming over?”

Peter said, “I’m on my way.” The sun was bothering his eyes, the goose egg on his head beginning to throb. He wanted to ask Roger if he’d seen David on the monkey bars, but he knew how crazy that would sound and decided to wait, show it to him on the tape. He said, “See you soon.”

“Make it quick. I’m going down there.”

Peter said, “I’m coming with you,” and signed off, climbing into the car. For a moment the muggy heat inside threatened to turn his stomach, but the feeling quickly passed. He sped out of the lot onto Paris Street, cranking the air conditioner to its highest setting, the image of his son’s eyes, black in the sunlight, indelibly etched in his mind.

                                                                                * * *

Sergeant Vickie Taylor, the lead investigator in the attempted kidnapping case, leaned against a picnic table in Warner Park with her cell phone pressed to her ear, waiting for the boy’s father to come on the line. A curt sounding woman had told her Mr. Cade was out on a job site today and that it might take her a while to track him down. The woman offered to have Mr. Cade call Vickie back once she’d located him, but Vickie said thanks, she’d wait. That had been ten minutes ago. She was hoping to catch the man before he saw it all on TV.

According to Cade’s daughter, Risa, Christopher Cade was a foreman for a Toronto-based construction company. Risa had given Vickie the mother’s number, too—Angela Cade worked as a teller in a Mississauga branch of the Royal Bank—but from experience Vickie knew that if there was a dad in the picture, it was generally better to start with him. It lessened the hysteria factor. Where their children were concerned, even if the kid was fine, mothers tended to go off the deep end early, becoming liabilities to themselves and to the investigation. And in spite of what Vickie did for a living, she knew that if something like this ever happened to her daughter, Samantha—the world’s most precocious three year old—she’d react in exactly the same way.

Cade came on the line now, his voice shaky with apprehension, saying, “This is Christopher Cade. What’s this about?”

In calm, measured tones Vickie introduced herself and said, “I don’t mean to alarm you, Mr. Cade, but there’s been an incident involving your son. He’s fine, he hasn’t been injured, but he was the victim of an attempted kidnapping in the park near your home today.”