Guilty as Sin (15 page)

"Hello? Who's there?"

The truck engine grumbled to itself. Outside, the shabby little neighborhood that backed onto the interstate was quiet in the twilight. People were in their homes having supper and watching the news as night began to settle down around them. It was the time of night Josh had disappeared.

As the thought shot a chill through him, the voice came over the phone. A whisper.

"Ignorance is not innocence but sin. Ignorance is not innocence but sin. Ignorance is not innocence but sin."

The line went dead.

Mitch sat perfectly still, his heart banging like a fist against his ribs. Ignorance is not innocence but sin. The message in the note that had been left behind at the scene of Josh's abduction. Common knowledge, he told himself. The press had splashed it all over. And yet he couldn't shake the sick sensation of dread. His muscles quivered with it. It steamed from his pores even though the temperature in the cab of the truck was below freezing. The number of his cellular phone was not common knowledge.

A minute passed. Then five. The phone rang again and the uneasiness pressed down on him like an anvil.

"Mitch Holt."

"Chief, it's Natalie. We just got a call from the sheriff. He's in Campion. They've got a child missing . . . and a note."

Josh sat on the family-room floor, cross-legged, staring at the flames in the fireplace. A giant sketch pad and a new box of markers lay on the floor beside him, untouched. Aladdin was running in the VCR, but the cartoon didn't interest him. His baby sister, Lily, however, was delighted and toddled around the room, singing along, dancing with a stuffed Barney the Dinosaur.

Josh didn't care about cartoons anymore. He didn't want to play. He didn't want to talk. He stared at the fire and imagined he was a fireman on Mars, where it was hot all the time and there were no kids.

Hannah stepped down into the family room from the kitchen, rubbing lotion into her hands. The supper dishes were done, such as they were—glasses for soda and plates for pizza from the Leaning Tower of Pizza. Josh's favorite. Nutrition be damned tonight. She had called out for a medium pepperoni and mushroom and offered brownies for dessert. She hadn't made them, either, selecting instead the best from the pans friends and neighbors and absolute strangers had sent over during the course of Josh's absence.

She had brought her son home today. Against Bob Ulrich's wishes. Against the advice of the advocate from Park County Social Services. They had wanted to continue observation, as if Josh were a freak in a sideshow. But he had checked out all right physically, and Hannah had argued that his unwillingness to talk to anyone was no reason to keep him in a hospital bed. It was time to go home, where things were familiar and safe. She was a doctor herself; if Josh exhibited signs of physical problems, she would be the first to notice.

And so they had come home, where reporters blocked the driveway and well-meaning friends crowded the house. Home, where everything looked familiar but nothing would ever be the same again.

Hannah put the thought out of her head. She had sent the friends home, and the police had chased the reporters off the lawn. She had ordered pizza and built a fire and put one of Josh's favorite movies in the VCR. She had made things as normal as she could, considering the circumstances.

Lily danced up to her, all smiles and rosy cheeks, and offered her Barney. Hannah scooped up her daughter instead and hugged her close.

"Mama, Josh!" Lily announced, pointing at her brother.

"Yep, Josh is home. We missed him, didn't we, Lily-bug?"

"Josh! Josh! Josh!" Lily sang, euphoric over her brother's return. At eighteen months, she worshiped Josh. He had always been wonderful with her, sweet, gentle, loving. He read her bedtime stories and played with her.

He hadn't spoken a word to her since coming home. He ignored her efforts to engage him in play. He looked through her as if she weren't there. Fortunately, Lily was too excited to notice her brother wasn't returning her affections. It would have broken Hannah's heart if there had been any pieces left intact.

She settled on the couch with the baby in her lap as the movie rolled to a close. Lily twisted around, blond curls bouncing. "More!"

"Let's ask Josh," Hannah said, her eyes on her son. "Josh, honey, do you want to run the movie again?"

He didn't answer, didn't look at her. He sat as he had for the last hour, staring into the fire. He hadn't touched the sketch pad or markers.

The advocate had said to keep them handy, to encourage Josh to draw in the hopes that he would vent his experiences with his kidnappers through his artwork. So far, the only mark on the pad was the one the advocate herself had made, trying to draw Josh into a game of tic-tac-toe. Josh was keeping his experiences locked up tight, and his emotions along with them. Aside from his violent reaction to his father, he had reacted to nothing and no one.

"More, more, Mama!" Lily insisted.

"Not tonight, sweetheart," Hannah murmured. "It's time to watch something quiet so we can all settle down for bedtime."

Lily protested by taking Barney and moving to the love seat. "Where Daddy?"

"Daddy's staying somewhere else tonight," Hannah answered, watching Josh for a reaction at mention of his father. There was none.

She was angry with Paul for not being there, even though she really didn't want him. He had upset Josh before; she didn't want a repeat performance. Nor did she want the tensions between her and Paul to be telegraphed to the children.

Still, a foolish part of her wanted Paul to assert his rights as a father, to make some kind of stand to keep their marriage from disintegrating. She wanted to see the man she had married, the man she had loved, but he was lost. It seemed he had been an aberration, that for the first part of their marriage Paul had been at his peak and for reasons she couldn't understand had slowly fallen backward until she could no longer reach him, could hardly recognize who he was. It frightened her that she had thought she had known him so well, but now she didn't seem to know him at all.

Sighing, she flipped through the television channels, looking for something without sex, violence, or reality involved, settling on an independent station out of Minneapolis that was running The Parent Trap for the millionth time. Hayley Mills in a madcap adventure as twin sisters. Classic fluff from the sixties, when the world had still clung to its last shreds of innocence.

The nineties intruded immediately in the form of a news bulletin. A grim-faced anchorwoman with a helmet of spray-starched red hair filled half the screen while the photograph of a little boy popped up in one corner under a red banner that proclaimed him missing.

"Oh, my God," Hannah murmured.

"Authorities in the small Park County town of Campion tonight are launching a massive search for eight-year-old Dustin Holloman, abducted from a city park where he was playing with friends after school this afternoon. The abduction bears marked similarities to the case of Josh Kirkwood of Deer Lake, also in Park County. Josh, abducted January twelfth, was returned to his family unharmed late last night. The family of Dustin Holloman can only hope for a similar outcome.

"Dustin is eight years old with blond hair and blue eyes. He was last seen wearing blue jeans and a black-and-yellow ski jacket with an orange stocking cap. Anyone who thinks they may have information about Dustin is asked to immediately call the Park County sheriff's office."

Josh turned slowly and looked at the television screen as it filled with the smiling, slightly blurry image of Dustin Holloman and the hot-line phone numbers. He rose and moved to stand directly in front of the set in the cherry entertainment center, staring without expression at the boy who had been proclaimed missing.

"Josh," Hannah murmured, coming out of her seat, reaching for him. She dropped to her knees on the floor beside him.

He stared at the little boy's photograph and lifted a finger to point at him.

"Uh-oh," he said softly. "He's a Goner."

CHAPTER
 
9

"Will you disclose the contents of the note?"

"How does this affect the case against Dr. Wright?"

"Do you believe this is the work of the same kidnapper?"

"Do you still believe Wright had an accomplice, or do you think you've got the wrong man sitting in jail?"

"When will you release the contents of the note?"

"How does this change your strategy?"

The questions echoed through Ellen's head, swam through it, whirled around it. The faces of the reporters did the same. Some were familiar, some famous, many obscure. All of them wanted the same thing. The scoop, the hot quote, the exclusive tidbit. After two weeks of covering Josh Kirkwood's abduction, they came to Dustin Holloman's as ravenous as ever, driven by ambition to grab whatever details they could.

"I'm ambitious," Adam Slater had proclaimed yesterday outside the hospital. She had spotted him in the sea of faces, out on the edge, on the fringe of the mob, his young eyes bright as he soaked it all in.

Ambitious. Or maybe "desperate" was the word. Desperate for answers. Desperate for some clue as to why the fabric of this quiet rural county was unraveling. That was what Ellen felt—a sharp, choking sense of desperation, the kind of panic that threatened to swell up and swallow her whole. It was just as strong now, as she pulled into her driveway, as it had been when she had driven away from the reporters in Campion.

Campion was a farming community of two thousand. A simple, quiet place that made Deer Lake, a half-hour drive away, seem like a teeming metropolis. A town too small and too dull to need its own police department, it contracted with the county for the use of deputies to keep things

in order. The people of Campion had watched the evening news when Josh Kirkwood had been taken and reflected that the world beyond them was an increasingly dangerous place. Thank God they lived in Campion, where everyone was safe. Until tonight.

News that a child had been taken had the town reeling, stunned and confused. It was deja vu for the volunteers who flocked over from Deer Lake. Having been through it all before, they organized search teams quickly and set up a command post in the Sons of Norway hall because it was the only place in town big enough. But, as had been the case two weeks before, there was little for the investigation to go on.

"Witnesses?" Ellen hurried toward Mitch, turning her coat collar up against the bite of the wind.

"None," he answered, half shouting to be heard above the pounding of helicopter blades.

State patrol choppers had already begun their search, sweeping back and forth over the town in an ever-widening grid while helicopters from the Twin Cities television stations hovered over the crime scene like vultures. Campion Civic Park had been turned into a surrealistic circus ground, the barren trees and deep snow cover illuminated by portable floodlights and the colored beacons of police vehicles. Yellow crime-scene tape had been wound around saplings and fluttered in the sharp wind like banners around a used-car lot.

"The boy's older brother was supposed to be watching him," Mitch said as Ellen fell in step beside him. "They were all skating on the outdoor rink over there. The older boys got a hockey game going and the younger kids got pushed out. Apparently Dustin wandered away."

He pulled a gloved hand out of his parka pocket and pushed back a lacework of small branches for Ellen to pass. "Don't worry about where you're stepping," he said bitterly. "The trail the boy took has already been tramped over by sixty or seventy sets of boots."

They skidded down a short slope Ellen could easily envision as a favorite sledding spot for smaller kids. At the bottom, the woods of the park thinned out to brush. Beyond the brush, cop cars sat, strobes twirling, tossing disks of colored light across a winding back street where the nearest house was three hundred yards away. Directly across the street from the park, the tumbledown remnants of what had once been farm buildings crouched, gray and bleak, open doorways and empty windows gaping like wounds black with rot.

Ellen's stomach clenched at the thought of being eight years old, standing in this forlorn spot, knowing you were about to be taken by a stranger.

If the kidnapper had been a stranger. They would have to question the Hollomans and the Kirkwoods, looking for any mutual acquaintances. Josh had not been taken by a stranger. Provided Garrett Wright was the man who had taken him.

She blew out a steamy breath as the doubts surfaced. She believed Wright was guilty, and even she was having second thoughts now. The press would have a field day casting doubt and muddying the waters of the potential jury pool.