The Last Time She Saw Him (7 page)

“That’s okay. You did great. Do me a favor. If you think of anything else, you tell your mom or dad right away. All right?”

“I will,” Logan promises. “Is Daddy going to be here soon?”

“He’s on his way,” I answer.

“Can I go in my room?”

“Just be careful what you touch. I’m going to talk to Detective Navarro out here for a minute. Let me know if you need anything,” I say and trail Logan’s retreat until he is safely out of earshot.

“Please tell me you have something,” I implore Navarro. Before I can pump him for information, Russell turns the corner from Will’s room holding another plastic evidence bag.

“We just found something under the little boy’s crib,” Russell says. “It looks like an Indian arrowhead.”

Russell holds the plastic bag up for Navarro and me to inspect from afar.

“I didn’t know what it was at first, but one of our patrol guys is half-Indian and he confirmed it. Does this belong to you, Julia?” Russell asks.

Ben’s last words swirl in my head like a mammoth black funnel cloud roaring in my ears. I no longer see the evidence bag, or Navarro or the cops canvassing every inch of my house for clues. I’m back in Sparrow in our room on the night Ben disappeared. The Indian arrowhead under Ben’s bed was one of the few pieces of evidence the police found in his abduction.

“
Jesus, this can’t be happening again. There was a call, a warning on my answering machine right before the break-in. The caller said someone was coming back for me this time. It’s all connected somehow.”

“Julia, what’s going on?” Navarro asks.

“It’s Labor Day, the anniversary,” I cry out.

“Take it easy,” Navarro answers and grabs my arm to try and calm me down.

“You don’t understand. There’s a thirty-year-old case of another missing boy that’s directly related to my son’s disappearance.”

“Who’s the kid?” Navarro asks.

“It’s my brother, Ben. Whoever took him just kidnapped Will.”

CHAPTER 5

T
he first fingers of daylight slowly break through the darkness of the previous night and cast a fuzzy glow behind two weeping willow trees that stand like bookends on either side of the front yard. David and I planted each tree right after the births of Logan and Will. Just two days ago, Will and I sat underneath his tree and I watched as my baby swatted at the high branches, and Will laughed in delight when he managed to catch one in his hand.

Navarro and I greet dawn in his unmarked police car, where I recounted the story about my brother and the day he was kidnapped. Navarro immediately briefed his team and left a message with Detective Leidy at the St. Clair Sheriff’s Department to gather information on Ben’s cold case and possibly pinpoint any threads that could connect to Will.

“Did the cops think the Indian arrowhead under your brother’s bed had some kind of meaning?” Navarro asks.

“No. They were never able to determine whether it was a symbol or just something accidentally dropped by the person who took Ben. I always thought it did though.”

“What about the guy in the green Caddy?” Navarro asks. “Was he ever found?”

“No. It was a dead end. Leidy figured the guy was an out-of-towner visiting Sparrow for the Labor Day weekend.”

“How about your dad?”

“What do you mean?”

“Gloves are off, Julia. Your dad had a record. He’d be a suspect even without one. Family always is. You know that.”

“My dad had an alibi that checked out. That’s what Leidy said. My dad got a temporary job installing flooring in a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was night work. The foreman vouched for him. I never saw my dad after that night, but I always wondered if he was trying to change. My dad could con the best of them, but he was doing honest work for once. I’d like to think he stayed that way.”

“If a man doesn’t come back for his own kid, I doubt he changed much.”

I ignore Navarro’s comment and instead stare at the dashboard clock. Six a.m., exactly eight hours since Will was snatched from his bed. I push down the unimaginable that could have happened in the past few hours and instead visualize my little boy as though I am seeing him for the first time. Will, with his white blond hair glistening like pure spun gold against the sun as he chases Logan up and down the banks of the lake. Will, my hundred-percent all-American boy, his arms overloaded with Matchbox cars as he climbs up the steps to bed, refusing to part with his precious bounty. Will, who already knows how to expertly work me as I easily cave to his whims and read
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
for the umpteenth time to him before bed. And Will, with a child’s unspoiled trust, who believed I would chase the monsters away and always protect him from harm.

Guilt and self-loathing course through me as I realize it’s my fault, all of it, my fault again. My heart begins to beat so hard in my chest, I am surprised Navarro can’t hear it.

Instead, Navarro picks up a paper cup from his dashboard and spits something inside.

“Sunflower seed casings,” he says. “I quit smoking two weeks ago, so I’ve got to put something in my mouth. I tried gum, but it’s like chewing on a piece of disgusting rubber you can’t spit out. I quit drinking after you left. So the cigarettes were my final vice.”

“I’m glad you finally quit them both. The booze especially.”

“Ten years too late though, right?” Navarro answers and tosses the remains of his chew out the driver-side window. “Your brother’s abduction must have been a heavy thing to carry around for such a long time. And for a kid who could’ve been a potential witness not to remember anything, that’s got to make you feel a world of guilt.”

“Am I a suspect? You think I snapped and did something to my own child?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did. Family members are always the first people you look at. Remember who you’re talking to here.”

“That’s true. But it wasn’t what I meant.”

“I didn’t hurt my son.”

Navarro is quiet for a moment as if he’s weighing whether to ask me the next question.

“All the time we were together, you never mentioned your brother or what happened to him. Not once. You never told me anything about your family either, just your Aunt Carol. Why is that?”

I try to avoid Navarro’s question and recall the two years we spent living above a taqueria in a one-bedroom tiny apartment in Mexicantown on the southwestern side of Detroit. Navarro was always the protector, and I never had any doubt that he loved me more than anything during our relationship. But at the age of twenty-five, I had a laser focus on my career and felt too young to accept his marriage proposal. And Navarro couldn’t accept me saying no. He dealt with the rejection by getting a barbed-wire tattoo that wrapped around his bicep and hitting the vodka bottle hard. He wouldn’t go back to how things were between us without a firmer commitment, and his drinking was becoming a problem. As much as I loved Navarro at the time, I had to leave.

“Earth to Julia,” Navarro says and raps his fist lightly against the console between the seats. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about Ben?”

“It just never came up.”

“That’s bullshit, Julia.”

“I don’t like to talk about it. That’s all.”

“Did David know the story about your brother?”

“He did. It wasn’t a good story to know.”

“You could’ve told me anything when we were together. I didn’t think we kept secrets.”

“It was a bad story with a monster at the end. It wasn’t anything I wanted to share at the time.”

“I’m sorry about what happened to you and your brother. If you didn’t want to tell me back then, that’s one thing. But now you need to come clean about every detail of your past and what happened to your brother if you haven’t already,” Navarro answers. “Coincidences in crime are rare. Your kid being taken on the anniversary of your brother’s abduction and the Indian arrowhead found at both scenes make it pretty damn certain the cases are linked.”

“I told you everything there is to tell about Ben’s case.”

“All right then,” Navarro answers, temporarily satisfied with my response. “The one thing that doesn’t connect is the amount of time that passed. Thirty years is a long time to wait for payback. If the person who took your brother was worried about you IDing them, they would’ve come looking for you a lot sooner. But I’ve got the guys searching for every sex offender in a three-hundred-mile radius and for anyone who might fit the abductor’s profile.”

Navarro looks over at the snaking line of sheriff department and police vehicles parked along my driveway to the street and starts again. “You’re a prominent crime reporter in the city. Who would have it out for you?”

“Fifteen years covering crime in Detroit? Plenty.”

“What about one of those freaks who followed Reverend Casey Cahill after he went nuts? You broke the story, and those fanatical religious guys are always the worst. Corrupts their minds more than money or drugs, if you ask me. You won some awards for uncovering what a psycho fanatic that guy turned into, right?”

“Yes, something like that,” I answer as I recall my ex-posé on Cahill and his free fall from grace.

Five years ago, Cahill was one of the biggest players on the national megachurch circuit. While other nationally syndicated pastors were mostly middle-aged white guys who preached damnation from an angry God’s judging hand, Cahill had a shiny hardcore shell of cool that oozed rock and roll. Cahill was a tattooed preacher who drove a Harley-Davidson around the city with an easily recognizable helmet that read G
OD’S
S
OLDIER
on the back. With his hip vibe yet conservative values on the pulpit, Cahill had achieved something most religious icons could only dream of attaining: massive crossover appeal. His popularity exploded with a national television show and standing room only during multiple weekly services at his megachurch, which glittered like a Las Vegas five-star hotel along I-75. But Cahill’s glory days were about to end. On the way to a Sunday service, Cahill’s motorcycle skidded across a sheet of ice along the highway and he crashed headfirst into a guardrail. He survived after coming out of a two-week coma, but rumors began to circulate that his increasing paranoid behavior and sharp turn to the fanatical right were a result of a dependency on pain pills and a head injury from the crash.

Despite his gutted popularity, Cahill thought he still had God, power, and all-encompassing celebrity on his side. And he blamed me for taking it all away. Based on an anonymous tip from a UAW employee’s girlfriend who worked part-time as a church secretary, I discovered Cahill had skimmed millions from his church and was having sex with several underage girls in his congregation. Cahill told his hundred or so “true believers” that they were handpicked to become part of his true Christian family. Cahill’s youngest conquest was nine, a tiny strawberry-blond child whose high-pitched voice quavered and broke during testimony after the prosecution played an audiotape taken from a video they discovered in Cahill’s safe that had shown the girl dressed in nothing but a cross necklace, screaming for her mother as Cahill raped her. I covered every detail of Cahill’s explosive trial, and his congregation hated me for it. After the guilty verdict was read, Cahill was stoic for a moment and then slowly turned his head toward the back of the courtroom, the tendons in his neck sticking out like angry cords. As soon as he saw me, Cahill leapt to his feet, raised his handcuffed wrists in my direction, and screamed, “Satan is among us!” before his defense attorney and the court bailiff wrestled the madman down.

Cahill was ultimately charged with tax evasion and sexual assault of three underage girls. And memories of the Rock ’n’ Roll Jesus of Motor City quickly disappeared when Cahill began his ten-year sentence.

Navarro checks the rearview mirror and inspects his teeth for any stray sunflower seeds. “There were a bunch of zealots in that church. Did you ever have run-ins with any of them? I’d go looking at Cahill as a suspect if he weren’t locked up already. Cahill and his lawyer said it was your fault he didn’t get a fair trial.”

“Members of Cahill’s congregation picketed the courthouse and swarmed me after the trial like a pack of jackals and condemned me to hell. But there were no more threats after Cahill went to prison,” I answer.

“Do me a favor. Come up with a list of anyone who may have thought you burned them with your coverage.”

“Linderman asked me about that too, but they have no connection to Ben and most of the people who really hate me are still serving time. But I gave him a few names to check. There’s Alejandro Rojas. He’s a local hood who I wrote an expose on that vindicated Salvatore Gallo. Gallo is the uncle of Nick Rossi, the big Detroit criminal I know you’ve been trying to bust for years. Rojas was trying to frame Rossi for a killing over a territory dispute, but the cops saw it differently and liked Gallo for the murder, since Rojas planted the body inside a car in front of Gallo’s house. My stories pinned Rojas for the murder. He got convicted, but I think he got out early. The only other person I can think of is that woman who killed her kids over in Elmwood Park. Kate Bramwood was her name. Her sister gave her up, but Bramwood got off on a technicality. She was a nut and swore she’d come after me. Please check them out, but there’s no way anyone I wrote about would’ve been able to find me here. I’m too careful.”

Being a female crime reporter, I always take precautions. In addition to my reporter’s notebook and tape recorder, I also keep pepper spray and a six-inch folding knife in my purse. After a local female TV anchor was raped and murdered, I made it a point to protect myself, and my family, from the dark side I often encountered on my job, including keeping my maiden name, Gooden, as my byline.

“Do you know who that is?” Navarro asks as Kim’s silver Volvo pulls into the driveway.

“It’s my best friend. David must have called her. Are we done?”

“Yeah, for now. Go take care of your business.”

Kim somehow still looks flawless at the crack of dawn in a pair of pressed khakis and a soft pink linen shirt. She gives me a big bear hug that lasts for a good thirty seconds until I finally pull away.

“Oh, Julia, I’ve just been sick since David called. I told Alice and Leslie what happened, and they are just devastated. We’ve all been praying nonstop for Will’s safe return,” Kim rambles as she twists her hands together in nervous knots. “Do the police have any leads yet? Please tell me they do.”

“Nothing solid. The suspects left behind a package of cigarettes, and the police found a hair in Will’s crib. It looks like they got a good latent print on Will’s bedroom door.”

“Well, that’s something,” Kim says.

“It’s not enough. The chief is trying to expedite the hair sample. We don’t have the luxury of time right now.”

“Did they leave a ransom note? If you need money, just tell me.”

“No ransom note.”

“What does that mean?”

“They don’t want money. Whoever took Will has no plan to return him.”

“Oh, Julia,” Kim cries. Her usually pretty face contorts into a pained, twisted expression as though she is about to break down, but I don’t have the reserve to comfort anyone else but my own family right now.

“Kim, I need you to keep it together.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Come on, let’s go inside.”

Kim rallies and puts a protective arm around my shoulder, and we walk into my house, whose every surface is now coated with black fingerprint dust. I search for familiarity amidst the chaos and spot David and Logan, who are huddled together on the living room couch. David, all six feet and hundred and eighty pounds of him, somehow looks small and deflated as he stares with rapt intensity at an invisible point on the wall. I start toward my family when the screen door bangs open.