He spun back around. “So of course the mother is of special interest here. Stealing your own kid is an excellent way to avoid a custody battle.”
I looked down at my notes. Mother, with the t crossed distractedly. Wasn’t it not yet time for blame?
“There’s a snag, though,” he continued. “Couple of them, actually, but one is an anonymous note threatening to take the kid.”
Finally I saw the door through which I’d entered. Kent hadn’t given me the details. That was his style, to let me make all my own discoveries. All my own mistakes.
“They’re trying to pull prints off the note now,” he said. “So all I can get you is a copy of—”
“A copy isn’t good enough.”
A flat stare from Keller. “Sorry?”
“A copy isn’t good enough,” I said. “I’ll need to see the real thing.”
“Well, I’m not likely to get my fingerprints on the real McCoy until tomorrow sometime,” he said, slapping the desk. Annoyed with either the question or the answer he’d had to give. “Don’t even have a copy yet, to tell you the truth.”
“I’m surprised Kent didn’t tell you I would need the original.”
“No, he did,” he said. “I just—”
I sensed some piece of his pride was at stake here. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to admit that the only real crime likely to pass over his desk this year—maybe in his entire tenure—had been taken away from him, that he couldn’t lay his hands on his own evidence. “You just?”
“I just wanted to get a look at you first.”
I froze, but inside I was taking flight, my heart pattering. I glanced at the door. “Excuse me?”
The sheriff closed his notes with a snap. “Wanted to make sure I didn’t let any . . . woo-woo in the door.”
“And how do I stack up?” I said, willing myself to calm down. “Right amount of woo for you?”
“Now, don’t take it personal—”
“To take it personally,” I said, “I would have to care significantly more than I do about your opinion. As it is, I only care professionally—but if you don’t trust that my profession exists outside the realm of voodoo, I’m not sure what I can do for you.”
“You can prove me wrong,” he said.
“Seems like you’re pretty sure about most things,” I said. I glanced up at the wall of accolades and adoration. “What don’t you already know?”
He didn’t like me shopping his wall. “Where that boy is, first off.”
“What do you think the note might tell us about Aidan’s whereabouts?”
“This is your area. They say. But the whole thing tells me to get nervous.” He nudged his cap crooked on his head to draw his hand over his face. He needed a shave. “Not a lot of kids go missing and almost every one of them turns up somewhere on a play-date everyone forgot about or, if they’re actually gone, with the noncustodial parent, simply being withheld. It doesn’t make a lot of sense—to me.”
I looked back at my notebook.
He said, “I do worry that the note seems to be . . . vague on details. And demands, actually. There was no ransom mentioned.”
I nodded. Without comparing it to a sample of someone’s handwriting, the note was a big unknown in the center of a lot of unknowns. Anyone could have written that note. If the father wrote it, he could be covering his own tracks. The kid could be in danger or hurt. Or dead. And the mother. Was she just not answering the phone or was she in a quick grave somewhere?
I turned my head. From where I sat, Keller’s office window was filled with a span of perfect blue sky. Just the other day I’d been thinking: maybe. Maybe it didn’t have to be so hard. I remembered hot dock slats under my legs, a warm arm thrown around me as the sun dipped into the lake.
“So I’m nervous, all right,” the sheriff said. “I’m nervous that kid is really gone. Pedophile gone, or—but forgive me if I hope it’s the mother who’s got him. You know why, Ms. Winger? Not because it’s easier to solve, but because it’s so much more likely we’ll bring Aidan back home, soon and safe.”
I kept my face passive. Sometimes when I needed to keep my mouth shut, I ran my tongue over the backs of my teeth and counted off the states. Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio. One of my teeth had cracked at some point, inviting rot, and I’d finally had it rooted and capped in Cincinnati. I always tried to land on that tooth when Ohio’s turn came along. Then Illinois, now Indiana. I looked up. “What was the other snag?” I said.
“What’s that?” he said.
“You said there were a couple of snags.”
I didn’t think he was going to tell me. No sample, not enough info. And now a stonewalling look instead of letting me in on what I was up against. There was no reason for him to treat me as a peer, but I didn’t have to put up with being treated like a circus freak. I stood and reached into my purse.
“The other snag is the babysitter,” he said. “She was missing, too.” I waited, a business card in my hand. It was a quality card, simple, with only my name and number pressed into smooth, white paper.
Was. Was missing. I sat back down.
“Until this morning,” he said, “when her body was discovered in an out-of-service latrine at Sugar Creek Park.”
ON THE WAY home, I took a detour. There was absolutely no reason for my going there, but when I saw the sign for the park, I turned in. Under the canopy of trees, I took a deep breath. I drove slowly but no children darted into the lane.
The road abruptly ended in a parking lot with empty playground equipment on the far side. Beyond that, a concrete block structure sat surrounded by more trees and, this morning, several cruisers, local and state, with their lights turned off. A couple of unmarked vehicles—a dark SUV and a panel van, black, maybe a crime scene unit—sat nearby. I parked just in view of the taillights and got out, wandering over to a park bench in the grass and sitting at an angle to the activity.
Why this place? Of all the parks to bring a kid for a day out, this one seemed the least likely. Fall was thinning out the leaves overhead as well as the nice-weather days left in the season. This particular park also seemed out of the way and abandoned, given the better-kept Memorial Park right downtown, mere blocks from where the Ranseys lived.
A hundred feet away or so, an older man in a rumpled sweater stood in the grass with a small white dog on a leash. “Come on, Trix,” he was saying. “Come on.”
He startled at seeing me and then recovered with a gesture toward the goings-on at the facilities. “Bad business in that latrine,” he said. “Safe as houses, this place is supposed to be.”
“The park?”
“The whole town. And the park.”