Taken (22 page)

C
utter pulls the stolen Cadillac into a slot behind the boat shed, where it can’t be seen from the access road. Not much traffic in this part of the waterfront, but with his ID out there in the wind, he needs to be ultracautious for the next twelve hours. After that it won’t matter.

Not that he intends to let himself be arrested. When the moment comes, he’ll do a Houdini, or maybe check out permanently, he hasn’t decided. No rush, he’s good at making instant life-or-death decisions under pressure, and right now he has to concentrate on getting the job done. Not for the first time he regrets having to terminate Hinks and Wald, not only because he rather enjoyed their moronic banter, but because it makes the execution of his plan more complicated.

No use crying over split blood, he tells himself. Have to play the hand that’s dealt. Living happily ever after had been, he now realizes, a fantasy, a way to keep focused. The odds of getting away undetected had always been low, on the order of drawing to an inside straight flush.
Let it go, Cap, get on with the show.

Next move, prepare the boy
.

Inside the shed, Cutter carefully snugs the padlock to the inner hasp. Insuring there will be no surprises from an inquisitive landlord, not that the old man was likely to drop by unannounced. Still, you can’t be too careful.

Turning from the padlocked entrance, he senses that something is wrong. Can’t put his finger on what exactly. A noise or sound? Possibly.

Cutter stops breathing, listens. Notes the transformer hum of the idling air compressor. A barely audible metallic ticking that could be steel drums expanding in the heat—the interior of the shed has gotten quite warm—and from outside the faint cry of a wheeling gull. Nothing out of the ordinary.

He wonders if the contents of the fifty-five-gallon drums are spooking him. Yesterday it seemed vitally important to dispose of the drums and the bodies they contained. Today, much less crucial. It’s just dead meat. Nothing human about it, not anymore. But he’s keenly aware of Hinks and Wald, their telltale hearts beating in the back of his mind. The look in their eyes as they died.

Stop it
.

Cutter smacks his palm against his forehead, hard. Grunts and grimaces and forces the kinks out of his mind. The kinks and the hinks and the hinks and the kinks.
Stop it. Take a deep breath, hold until your mind clears. Focus on the mission. Focus on saving Jesse, on returning your son to his grieving mother, on making things right in her world, if not your own. You have no life to lose. You’re a dead man, and dead men feel no pain. Dead men do not suffer from guilt or regret. Dead men do as they please.

The boy. Concentrate on the boy in the white room. He’s waiting. He knows what must be done because he saw it in your lying eyes. You think Hinks can haunt you? You ain’t seen nothing yet, amigo. The boy will send your soul to hell like a rocket-propelled grenade, exploding into eternity
.

Stop, stop, stop.

Cutter shudders, a full-body writhing, like a snake speed-shedding it’s vile skin. He vomits hot, foul-smelling air. And then he’s clean again and ready for what he must do. Quick-marching to the enclosure, he keys the outer padlock, remembers to lock it behind him. Clever boy, he’ll be plotting an escape. Four strides and he’s at the inner door of the enclosure, noting the blood spatter left by the late Walter Hinks, furious because the clever boy had broken his nose. Hinks complaining,
I’m breeving froo my mouf,
totally unaware of the comic implications, or that he’d made himself redundant, expendable.

In the white room, chaos.

Cutter instantly notes the missing plywood wall panel, the stink of the upended potty-chair. Sees the ragged hole clawed through the Sheetrock of the outer wall. A hole just big enough for a boy to pass through.

Gone.

The loss brings a banshee howl from his throat. A broken scream of grief, because if the boy is gone, if he’s found a way out of the boat shed, then all the killing was for nothing.

Cutter lets instinct take over. Instinct shaped by years of training. Without even thinking about it, he crashes through the damaged Sheetrock, finds himself standing in the back of the boat shed, with the dilapidated stern of the ancient Chris Craft rising above him.

He searches for a breach in the outer walls. Walls and roof constructed of galvanized steel, fastened from the outside. One of the features that had attracted him to the building in the first place. The boy unscrewed the plywood inner wall somehow—how did he manage that without tools?—but galvanized sheathing is another matter. Needs a drill and a hacksaw, at the very least, or better yet a cutting torch. No torch on the premises, but there’s got to be a hacksaw lying around somewhere. Did he find it? Did clever Tomas cut his way to freedom?

Cutter forces himself to complete a circumnavigation of the outer walls. Smacking on the sheathing as he goes, looking for weak points. With great relief, he ascertains that the outer barrier remains intact, securely fastened to the steel frames of the building.

The boy is inside the shed. Inside and hiding.

“Tomas?” Cutter hardly recognizes his own voice. “It’s Steve. Guess what, you passed the test.”

Making it up as he goes along, as he so often did while interrogating prisoners and suspects and civilian troublemakers. Breaking them with his mind, molding them to his will. Creating stories and scenarios that seemed so plausible that they were soon dying to cooperate.

“This whole thing was a test, Tomas! An elaborate test! We had to know if you were strong enough, clever enough to find a way out of the white room. You passed the test with flying colors. Congratulations!”

Cutter prowls the boat shed, eyes scanning every dark corner, searching for movement, for the quivering of a frightened boy.

“This is part of a top-secret government project, Tomas,” he says, riffing. “You’ve been chosen. We need a boy of your size and your cunning to complete a very important mission. Your mom knows all about it. She gave us her permission.”

Cutter finds the ladder on the floor, under the boat. That’s what his brain noted when he first came into the shed. Not a noise, but a visual clue: the old wooden ladder was missing from the side of the Chris Craft.

He sets the ladder against the hull, climbs up into the cockpit. The engine hatch is open, tools strewn about. All staged, part of making it look good as if the landlord came by to check on progress.
Yup, we’re tearing apart that old Chrysler engine, make it purr like an eight-cylinder pussycat.

He crouches. Gets a visual line from the back of the engine compartment into the ruined cabin. Interior panel laminations peeling away, the floor all funky with dry rot. There’s a V-berth forward, a small galley, lazarette lockers under the seats, cupboards and a small enclosed toilet. Plenty of places for a determined eleven-year-old to hide.

Inside the cabin, Cutter sniffs. Amazing how strong and detectable the stink of fear, if you let your brain sort out the various odors. He detects motor oil, rust, mildew, rotting carpet, his own rank odor. Can’t detect the boy, but he must be here. Hiding in a locker, under the V-berth, somewhere very close.

Time to reach out and touch someone.

“Tomas? I’ve got a cell phone in my pocket. Your mother really wants to talk to you. She wants to explain what’s been going on these last few days. I know you won’t believe me—why should you?—but you’ll listen to your mother.”

Using the toe of his boot, Cutter lifts the lid on the lazarette, exposing bundles of rotted rope, rusted anchor chains.

“Come on out, Tomas. You passed the test.”

Cutter moves to the V-berth, all the way forward. He’s about to lift up the ruined cushions and look under the berth when the door to the enclosed toilet creaks open and the boy streaks out.

Clever kid waited until he had a clear shot at the cabin hatchway, must have been clocking him through the keyhole. Doesn’t matter because Cutter is fast and ready and his arms are long. His right hand locks on the boy’s ankle as he tries to scamper up the hatchway.

The boy kicking to no avail.

As Cutter yanks him back inside the cabin, the boy turns, wielding a hacksaw blade in his fist. Cutter doesn’t dare let go of the flailing boy, who is able to rake the saw blade across Cutter’s cheek, laying him open to the bone.

Blood everywhere. Amazing how much flows from a facial wound. Makes things slippery and difficult, but Cutter is a pro and he manages to subdue the struggling boy. Holding him tight, jabbing him with a loaded syringe, hanging on until the powerful anesthetic takes effect and the boy goes limp in his arms.

“Good night, son,” Cutter whispers, and then he allows himself to weep. Weeping for lost boys and sick boys and mothers who yearn for their missing children. Weeping for the already dead and the soon-to-be dead and for a man he used to know.

When the tear ducts finally empty, the dead man gently puts the unconscious boy on the deck and prepares to attend to the wound on his own face. Nothing fancy, just a rudimentary repair that will get him through the next few hours. He sets a shaving mirror on the galley table and lights a wax candle for illumination. Using a sailmaker’s needle and waxed-cotton thread, he stitches himself together. He has in his possession an extensive kit of pharmaceutical drugs, including various anesthetics, but chooses not to numb the wound or dull the pain.

It hurts, and he deserves it.

B
ack in the day, this was the American dream house. A tidy clapboard Cape-style home with a green patch of lawn and a white picket fence. Friendly neighbors leaning over the fence, trading recipes, resuming conversations that lasted a lifetime. Now the dream is more likely to be a gated community and a million-dollar ski retreat in Vail, and a waterfront condo in South Beach, and enough luxury cars to fill all three garages.

Expectations have changed, but the Cutter family home still looks like a Norman Rockwell postcard. Driving to New London, to an address scrawled in Shane’s hurried hand, I’d been terrified of what I might find. Imagining a dark dungeon where children are tortured, or a crime boss’s fortress, all razor wire and seething menace. The last thing I expected was a cheerful, if somewhat smaller, version of my own home.

Back in our walk-up-apartment days, Ted and I would have killed for a perfect little house like this. Bad choice of words, but my every thought is shaped by morbid anxiety. The rational, analytical part of me knows that my son might well be dead—that’s what kidnappers do, all too often—but if I’m to get through this day, I have to believe that Tommy is alive. That’s the only way I can function, and what gives me the courage to proceed on my own. That, and the feeling, odd as it may seem, that Randall Shane still guides me.

Shane with his head smashed. Shane unconscious, fighting for his own life. And yet somehow he’s along for the ride, long legs folded into the passenger seat, making his little self-deprecating jokes, quietly urging me not to give up hope. What would he think of the white picket fence? Probably remind me that criminals sometimes live in houses just like this. Scratch that rare suburban dad and find a monster. God knows the cable channels are full of them. Moms who drown their children and blame it on a black bogeyman. Dads who set fire to their families to collect enough insurance to buy jewelry for a trophy mistress. We’ve all heard the stories, watched them play out on TV. Getting some sort of vicarious thrill, I suppose, in the certainty that our own lives will never be touched by evil, no matter how familiar the shape it assumes.

But for all that, first impressions count, and I’m almost certain the owner of this house will be another dead end. Stephen Cutter will turn out to be a regular guy, want to know about his old army buddy Big Mike Vernon. He’ll introduce me to his wife and his adopted son and we can commiserate about the sleazy way Family Finders took advantage. But maybe, just maybe, he’ll know something useful, point me in the right direction.

I promise myself that I won’t waste time, that as soon as the Cutters are eliminated as suspects, I’ll move on to the next name on Shane’s list.

The thunderstorm has swept on by for the moment, leaving the black street glistening in the moonlight. Amazing how night rain makes everything look shiny and new. There’s no car in the driveway. Maybe the Cutter family keeps their minivan in the garage, out of the weather. I’ve already decided they drive a car a lot like mine. In any case there are lights on inside, glowing like yellow cat eyes, so I know someone is home. Probably watching TV and munching popcorn. It’s ten o’clock, will their son be in bed by now? Not if he’s anything like Tommy, who has to be herded to his room, no matter how exhausted.

The civilized thing would be to locate their phone number and give them a call, rather than ring the bell at this hour. No time for the social niceties, however. I’m on a mission that won’t end until I’ve cleared every name on Shane’s list.

The gate creaks shut behind me as I move up the walk to the breezeway. Making no effort to be stealthy. Look out, folks, crazy woman on the warpath, come to disturb your peaceful evening.

It occurs to me, approaching the door, that despite the benign look of the place, the Cutters may be paranoid types. New London is not without crime, and home invaders sometimes ring the bell. So there’s always the possibility that Mr. Cutter, a military man, don’t forget, will come to the door armed. Who will he see through the peephole, a desperate woman or a killer mom? A lot depends on whether or not they watch the local news and have an eye for faces.

In this case, I’m hoping that darkness will be my friend.

I’m unable to locate a doorbell button, so I raise my fist and knock. At first there is no responding sound from within. If they’re watching TV, the sound is too low to be detected from the breezeway, so my knock should be audible.

Footsteps. Light footsteps approaching, those of a woman or perhaps a child. I step back and wait for the door to open.

Nothing. I can feel a presence on the other side of the door, but nothing happens, so I knock again, louder.

“Mr. Cutter? Mrs. Cutter? Can I have a word, it’s very important.”

My voice sounds strange and threatening even to me. The footsteps retreat. I pound my fist on the door, rattling the frame. “Please! I just want a word!”

The shadows shift, as if a light somewhere in the house has been switched off. Time to go for broke, let it all out and hope for a connection.

“Mr. Cutter! My name is Kate Bickford, I need your help! Please give me a minute of your time! It’s about my son, my missing son!”

Silence.

Cold anger rises. The Cutters must know by now that I’m not a home invader, not a gang of drug addicts come to rip them off. Probably in there dialing 911, reporting an intruder. And although I’m legally released on bond, I’ve no doubt the cops will want to hold me for questioning in the assault on Randall Shane. I can’t let that happen.

Out of the breezeway I go, around the corner into the backyard. Bang my knee on the leg of a swing set obscured by the shadows. Parts of the backyard bright in the moonlight. Ignoring the thump of pain in my knee, I head for the back windows. Note the curtains tightly drawn, but not so tight as to completely obscure light from what I assume to be the kitchen.

I’m banging my fists against the kitchen window and crying, “Help me! Help me, please! It’s about my son! It’s about my boy!” when a white figure emerges from the ground, a white lady in the moonlight, floating toward me.

A thin, terrified voice asks, “Is this about Jesse? Have you come about Jesse?”

“Mrs. Cutter?”

“You said a boy. A missing boy.”

As the shock of her sudden appearance subsides, I realize that she’s come up out of a basement bulkhead, and that of the two of us, she’s by far the most frightened.

“Can we go inside?” I suggest. “It’s kind of spooky out here.”

Really I’m more concerned about alerting the neighbors, getting called in for disturbing the peace or whatever. And I’m worried that this thin, ethereal wisp of a woman could vanish into the night. A woman who approaches me with great caution, reaching out a slender hand to tentatively touch me, as if to make certain I’m real. Dressed in a thin white robe and fluffy house slippers, she has the glistening brown eyes of a frightened doe.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asks with little-girl shyness.

“I can try.”

“Stephen locks the doors,” she confides in a husky voice that barely carries above a whisper. “He thinks I can’t get out. Promise not to tell?”

“I promise.”

She takes my hand and leads me into the dark basement.

I’m no psychiatrist, but I’ve always assumed there’s a fine line between mental disturbance and full-blown insanity. Equating the former with neurotic behavior or compulsive disorders, and the latter with a disconnection from reality. My impression is that Lyla Cutter lives somewhere in between, in a netherworld where reality comes and goes. The way she keeps studying me, as if waiting for my image to dissolve into hallucination. The nervous things she does with her elegant hands, and a peculiar, affected way she has of clearing her throat. Some of the physical manifestations could be from medication, I suppose, but the important thing is that she’s taken me into her home, into her world—and she wants to talk.

“You came about Jesse,” she says in her whispery voice.

“Not exactly.”

We’re sitting in her living room. Lyla perched on the very edge of a beige divan, so frail she looks like she could be shattered by a loud noise. Her big, nervous eyes imploring me—for what exactly, I can’t quite fathom. She has lovely, waist-length hair. Dark blond streaked with silver, carefully combed—a hundred loving strokes before bed, no doubt. The premature graying is incongruous, because her elfin face is that of a child, unlined and porcelain pale. A woman-child from a nineteenth century melodrama, waiting for Heathcliff to return from the barren moors.

“I’m searching for my son,” I tell her. “Tommy Bickford. He’s been abducted.”

She nods knowingly. “You turn around and they’re gone.”

“Is that what happened to your Jesse?”

She shrugs and makes a vague gesture, as if wafting away invisible smoke. “My beautiful son.”

“I believe your son and mine were both adopted from the same agency,” I tell her. “Family Finders.”

“Stephen would know.”

“Is your husband here, Mrs. Cutter?”

Rather than answer, she leads me to the mantel of a small brick fireplace. “There he is,” she says, indicating a framed photograph of a solidly built but otherwise nondescript man in a military uniform. On closer examination he’s almost but not quite handsome. Could be Bruce, or not, it’s impossible to say. “Stephen was an English teacher, did you know that?” she asks.

“I thought he was a soldier.”

“Before the army he taught at the University of Rhode Island for a year. They let him go, that’s when he decided on an army career like his father. He’d done so well in ROTC, scored off the charts. He’s very, very smart, Stephen. Too smart.”

“Why do you say that?”

“What good does it do, being smart? Thinking he’s oh so clever. He must think I’m stupid, locking all the doors but forgetting about the basement.”

“Yes,” I say, just to be agreeable.

“Thinks I’m stupid about Jesse, too. Telling me lies. That’s what put holes in my brain. Dirty lies. Lies turn into little worms, once they get inside your head. They eat your thoughts.”

“What does your husband lie about, Mrs. Cutter?”

“Oh, just everything,” she responds airily.

“What happened to your son?” I ask. “What happened to Jesse?”

“Shh,” she cautions, holding a pale finger to her lips. “You’ll wake him.”

With that she links her hand in mine and guides me to the stairway. A braided rug on each tread, warm light spilling from the upstairs.

“Your son is here?” I whisper. “Asleep in his room?”

Lyla smiles but does not answer. Her eyes shine with an unbearable, incandescent joy, or madness, or both. Clutching my hand, as if we are little girls about to visit the best dollhouse in the world, she leads me up the stairs and down the hall to her son’s room.

A boy’s room, no question. The posters, toys and carelessly stacked video games could have belonged to my own son. More than that I can’t quite make out, because Lyla doesn’t switch on the light, and the only illumination comes from a wall-socket night-light. A plastic Goofy, glowing in the dark.

Tommy’s night-light is Mickey Mouse.

“Where is he?” I ask, keeping my voice low. “Where’s Jesse?”

Lyla points at the bed. If her eyes get any bigger they’re going to fall out of her head.

“There’s nobody in the bed, Mrs. Cutter.”

I reach out, flip on the light.

Lyla covers her eyes with her pale hands and moans. In other circumstances, my instinct would be to comfort the poor woman, maybe even play along with her delusions. But my cold heart has only one concern and it is not, for the moment, the state of Lyla Cutter’s mental health. I need answers and the empty bedroom makes me think that I will find them here, if only I can get this frail creature to tell me what really happened to her son.

She does not resist as I gently pry her hands away from her eyes and turn her to face the empty bed.

“I’m begging you,” I say. “Please help me. My son was taken from me. I think your son was taken from you. What happened, Mrs. Cutter? What happened to the boys?”

Tears well in her eyes, but she seems to be focusing on me, which is encouraging. “Jesse wasn’t taken,” she explains. “He wasn’t kidnapped. Jesse got sick, is what happened.”

“Sick?” I ask, taken aback.

“It was just a cold, like kids get, you know? That’s what we thought. His head hurt, so I gave him a children’s aspirin. Just one. You know how dangerous aspirin can be with children. But the headache wouldn’t go away, so Stephen took him to the E.R.”

Lyla’s eyes flutter and her focus dissolves. She begins to hum a little tune I can’t quite recognize. Could be the theme to a kids’ show, maybe
Sesame Street
. Wherever she’s going, I can’t follow.

In the movies a slap to the face always returns the mad to sanity, if only for a moment. But I’m convinced that any violence or threat will send her further into whatever place she presently occupies. So all I can do is implore her to continue.

“Your husband took your son to the hospital. What happened then? What happened to Jesse? Did your son die, Mrs. Cutter, is that what happened?”

She shakes her head forcefully. “A virus,” she mutters. “It was a virus. Like a cold but worse, much worse. It made him sick, very sick, but he didn’t die. They wouldn’t let him die, not my Jesse. Not my beautiful boy.”

She’s drifting away again, head moving to music only she can hear, and I decide desperate measures are in order. I open my purse, take out the photograph I’ve been carrying like a talisman. And then, God forgive me, I force her to look at the photograph. Shove it in her face like an accusation. “You see this, Lyla? I’m searching for this boy. He means everything to me. He’s my life. Have you seen him? Did your husband steal my son?”

She grows utterly still, staring at the picture. Tommy in his Little League uniform.

“You’re trying to trick me,” she says, looking away. “You’re a liar. A liar just like Stephen.”

“Look at the picture, Lyla.”

She folds her slim arms across her chest, as stubborn and unrelenting as a child. “You want me to think that’s a picture of Jesse, but I know it’s not. A mother knows. Besides, that’s not even the right uniform.”