Here After

chapter fifteen

VICKIE TAYLOR STOOD AT THE counter in the Tim Horton’s across the street from headquarters, watching a teenage girl in a two-tone brown uniform put a lid on her large double-double. The clock on the wall above the coffee machine said ten minutes to two and when the teenager said, “A dollar-sixty,” Vickie was thinking, Thirteen hours, knowing that the majority of child abductees who didn’t turn up within the first three were usually found dead or not at all. She was thinking of the boy’s mother screaming blame at her when the teenager planted a ring-laden fist on one cocked hip, gave her that Duh look her niece sometimes gave her and said it again: “A dollar-sixty?” Returning the kid’s dull stare, Vickie handed over the exact change, resisting the urge to reach across the counter and bust the little creep in the chops.

She took the coffee to a table for two in the sunny front window and sat alone, sipping the soothing brew and staring out at headquarters, thinking of the reasons she had wanted to become a police officer in the first place, the gloss worn off most of them now. She’d come on board at a time when the resistance to the notion of women on the force in any capacity other than secretarial was at its peak, and had put up with immeasurable quantities of bullshit because she had believed it was worth it, had believed she could make a difference. Now, with Graham Cade already a grim statistic and his parents seriously injured, one of them critically, Vickie was left to wonder if they’d been right about her all along. Maybe she should have gone into nursing like her sisters or become the happy little homemaker her mother had worked so hard to shape her into.

When her cell phone rang she was sipping her coffee, silently rehearsing her resignation speech to Rob Laking. She flipped the phone open, saw Laking’s number on caller ID and said, “I was just thinking about you.”

Laking said, “The Cade boy, we got him,” and Vickie was sprinting for the exit, any thought of tendering her resignation dripping to the restaurant floor with her spilled coffee. She said, “Alive?” and Laking said, “Alive.”

Crossing the busy street, Vickie said, “Where?”

“About three hundred miles northeast, a farm near a village called Fitzroy.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Me neither.”

“What’s the plan?”

Laking said, “Look to your right.”

Vickie stopped on the sidewalk in front of headquarters and saw Laking in his car on the parking ramp, wearing his amber aviator shades, the blue dash light already strobing. “Get in,” he said. “We’re going for a helicopter ride.”

                                                                     * * *

Roger knew he should check on Peter, but once he’d uttered Jason’s name he could contain himself no longer. His son had been in this house, and the possibility, however slight, that he might still be here was too compelling to ignore. He had to act on it.

He started with the upstairs, sprinting from room to room calling Jason’s name, looking under beds, in closets, clothes hampers, a big cedar chest in the master bedroom, anything that might conceal a small boy. In the child’s room at the front of the house he found something that simultaneously set his heart soaring and tipped it into a tailspin, something he might have missed had he not dragged the bed away from the wall.

There, behind the headboard, carved through the Batman wallpaper into the plaster underneath, were the initials JM, Jason Mullen, the J flipped around backwards in a reflection of the mild dyslexia that had revealed itself in Jason in the first grade.