First Offense, page 12
Metzger looked at Tommy, who held out his hand to shake. “I’m Tom Noorland. Friend of the family.”
John began screaming. “He’s crazy! He broke my ankle. I need a doctor.”
Metzger’s expressionless face had the barest hint of a smile. He looked at notes he held in his hand. “It says here that you fell while you were being chased. I suspect that’s when you broke your ankle.”
John understood now. It wasn’t going to be business as usual. This whole dance had been choreographed. He had no doubt that if he wasn’t forthcoming, he’d be left alone once more with the lunatic. “I want a deal.”
“Lead us to Frankie Bishop, and then we’ll consider it.”
John moaned from the pain. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and he felt like he could pass out. But he still had cards to play. “You think I’m an idiot? No deal, no information. And I need a doctor!”
Metzger looked at his watch, then turned to Greco. “Didn’t we have a conference call we needed to take now?”
“Yeah, I think we better go.”
“Just a minute!” John screamed at them. “I know what they do inside to guys in for anything to do with kids. All I want is a promise that my sheet will say something different. Like embezzlement or something. And, look, if I wait ’til my attorney gets here, I’m sure he could get a knock-down on the charge. But you want the kid. And the longer it takes, the harder it’ll be to find him.”
“If we find Frankie Bishop based on what you tell us—and he’s alive—we’ll knock it down to criminal facilitation. Ten to fifteen.”
John nodded. “Put it in writing, then I’ll tell you what I know.”
CHAPTER
20
As soon as Dani returned to New York from the hearing, she placed a call to Joshua Cosgrove. The senior assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York had helped her once before. She hoped he would again.
“How’ve you been, Dani?” Josh asked when he picked up the phone.
They chatted first, getting the usual pleasantries out of the way, before Dani said, “I need another favor.”
“After what you landed us last year, you can have any favor you want.”
“I’m not even sure how much you can do. It’s outside your jurisdiction. And premature to boot.”
“Go ahead. I’m already intrigued.”
“There’s a young boy in Florida, just twelve, who was sent to a secure juvenile facility because he brought two joints into school.”
“Prior history?”
“None. Perfect grades, perfect behavior.”
“That seems pretty harsh, but we have no sway over state juvenile proceedings.”
“There’s more. He was badly beaten while there and sent to a hospital. Before his discharge, he ran away.”
“I gather they want to slap more time on his stay because of that.”
“No. Well, probably, but they haven’t found him yet. He was on his way to his brother, who’s stationed at Camp Lejeune, when he was abducted by a child predator.”
Dani heard a deep intake of breath on the other end. She knew Josh had worked child-pornography cases before and knew that he reviled those perpetrators above all others. More than murderers, more than drug dealers. They earned a special circle of hell, and he’d do anything he could to help them send them there.
“What can I do?”
“The FBI have a suspect they’re hoping will lead to Frankie. They’re questioning him right now. If they do get Frankie back, he’ll be returned to Eldridge Academy, where he was beaten senseless. His mother believes that’s why he ran away—because he’s afraid of more of that when he returns.”
“Have you gone into juvenile court to get him moved to another facility?”
“Yes. Yesterday. And the judge practically threw me out.”
“I’ll make a call to my counterpart in North Carolina. See if he’ll agree to keep Frankie in protective custody as a material witness when he’s found. Assuming he’s found.”
Dani felt a wave of relief wash over her. It was just what she’d hoped he would offer. It didn’t get Frankie his freedom, but it gave them time. Time to look into the judge who sentenced him, the judge who wouldn’t move him for his safety. Something was wrong there, and Dani needed time to find out what.
They drove for hours, the thin man silent the whole time. Frankie knew his name was Mark. At least, that’s what John had called him. He could tell from the highway signs they were heading south, but he didn’t know where. The sign where Mark exited the highway said “Atlanta,” and they drove on smaller roads for another half hour. By the time they pulled up to the small ranch home, it was already dark. Frankie hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and despite his fear, he was hungry.
“Out,” Mark barked at him after he’d pulled into the garage.
He exited the car and stood there until Mark grabbed his hands and pulled them behind his back. He slapped cuffs on them, then ordered Frankie to move toward the door that led into the house. Once inside, Mark grabbed Frankie’s collar, then marched him to the basement’s door.
Mark opened it, then pushed Frankie in front of him. “Move. Downstairs.”
Frankie did as he was told. There were three doors in the narrow hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Mark instructed him to open the door on the left. As soon as he opened the door, a nauseating odor filled his nostrils. He stepped inside and scanned the unfinished room, lit by a single bare bulb suspended from the low ceiling. Cement walls and floor, a dirty mattress in one corner, a bucket in another. He heard a whimpering sound and spun around. Shackled to the wall was a girl, maybe two or three years older than he was.
“Frankie, meet Daisy. But don’t get too friendly with her. She belongs to me.” Mark laughed, a sickening sound that turned Frankie’s stomach. He pushed Frankie down on the mattress. “Might as well get comfortable,” he said as he removed Frankie’s handcuffs. “Could be a few days before I find a buyer for you.”
Once Mark left, Frankie turned to the girl. She was painfully thin, with stringy blonde hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. Her pale-blue eyes had dark circles under them. “How long have you been here?” he said.
She shrugged, then with a hoarse voice said, “I don’t know. Months, I think.”
“Does he keep you like that? Chained up?”
“Not at first. But I tried to run away. Since then. Unless he’s . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“What?”
She stared at Frankie. It seemed as though her eyes were hollow, devoid of all feeling. “Unless he’s raping me. Then he unchains me and takes me into the other room. When he’s finished, he brings me back in here and locks me up.”
Frankie knew about rape. Bobby had showed him pictures of naked girls and told him about sex. And he’d cautioned him that anytime a girl said no, he had to back off. Not that any girl ever said yes to him. He’d never had a girlfriend, although there was a girl he liked at his last school. He couldn’t imagine anyone doing to her what Mark must be doing to Daisy.
“How did . . . how did you get here? Did he grab you from the street?”
Daisy laughed, a hollow, bitter sound. “Grab me? No, I walked right into this. I caused this fucking nightmare.”
Frankie didn’t know what to say, so he remained silent. After a while, Daisy spoke again.
“I hated my home. My parents screamed at each other all the time, and treated me like I didn’t exist. Just some stranger they were supposed to feed. Mark friended me on Facebook. At first, he said he was fifteen. We’d e-mail back and forth, and it was like he got me. Finally, someone understood what I was feeling.” She gave an empty laugh. “After a few months, he admitted he was older, but by then, I didn’t care. He promised to take me away from my family, give me gifts, whatever I wanted. So I said, hell, yeah, I’d meet him. I got in his car willingly, drove here willingly, happy to be with someone who cared about me. And then, we got to this house.”
She grew silent again.
“Did he take you down here right away?”
Daisy nodded. “He told me he had something special to show me downstairs. As soon as he opened this door, he shoved me inside, then started punching me. When he finally stopped, he told me he wouldn’t do that again as long as I did what I was told. He started raping me that night.”
Listening to Daisy, the realization hit him hard: this is what he faced. He began to shake, his whole body in the grip of a terrifying fear. My mom will find me, he kept saying over and over to himself. She’ll rescue me. Only he wasn’t sure he really believed that.
CHAPTER
21
“How did they get Felder to talk?” Dani asked Tommy when he called in.
“I had a little help in that.”
Dani didn’t want to ask what he meant. She loved working with Tommy, but she knew that sometimes he acted outside accepted rules, sometimes even outside the law. “What now?” Dani felt helpless back in New York, but she knew this was Tommy’s bailiwick.
“He only had the first name of his contact. A man named Mark. He’s part of an organized ring, all operated over the Internet. Mark gets a request for a child, giving the desired age, gender, anything else of importance to the requester, and Mark has a network of procurers—men who snatch a child fitting the desired description. Felder is one of them. A place and time is set up for the transfer to Mark, and the procurer gets paid $5,000. Felder doesn’t know where he takes them, or if Mark works with anyone else.”
Dani felt nauseated. It was repulsive. She wasn’t naive. She knew such things occurred, but still—it broke her heart to think of a helpless child caught in such a sick web. “So, that’s it? A dead end?”
“Not yet. Felder gets the request through a website. The feds turned over his laptop to their computer specialists, along with Felder’s password. They’re hoping to track down Mark’s full name and location through the IP address.”
Dani became aware that her hand had dropped protectively to her stomach. At times, she wondered if it was selfish to bring children into a world where such depravity existed.
Dani finished up her work in the office, then headed home, arriving in time to greet Jonah as he got off the school bus. They went into the kitchen, where Katie had left chocolate-chip muffins for Jonah.
After Jonah finished one, he pulled a single sheet of paper from his backpack. “Mommy, there was a man in school today. He wants to do a story about my musical endowment.”
Dani had learned to hold back her smile when Jonah, like other Williams syndrome children, missed the mark on the words he chose, often substituting a synonym that didn’t quite fit. “Really? Where’s he from?”
“Mrs. Radler wants you to sign this paper so he can talk to me.”
Dani took a look at the paper that Jonah handed her. A reporter from the New York Times was doing a story about the musical talent of some children with Williams syndrome. “Will he be talking to other students in your school?”
Jonah nodded. “Lucy and Eddie.”
Dani knew that Lucy was a gifted singer and Eddie a piano prodigy. “How do you feel about it, Jonah? Do you want your story to be in the newspaper?”
“I think it would be superlative.”
“Well, then, I’ll talk to Dad, and if he’s okay with it, I’ll sign my permission.”
Jonah beamed.
Dani had been so frightened when she and Doug first received Jonah’s diagnosis. Afraid of what his future would hold. Afraid that they’d fail as his parents. Afraid to have another child. Time had allayed those fears. Jonah was doing well. They’d made mistakes, as all parents do, but Jonah had survived them, and they’d learned along the way how to do things better. Yes, horrible things happened in the world; evil people existed. But they would love this new child in spite of it. And, with luck, this child would never come face-to-face with those horrors, as Frankie Bishop had, wherever he was.
The door to the room opened, and Frankie saw Mark enter with two trays of food. The room’s single overhead light gave Mark’s face an eerie pallor.
“Here’s the rules, boy. I feed you twice a day. An hour later, I’ll take you out to the bathroom. If you need to relieve yourself in between, use the bucket. Light gets turned out at nine p.m. and turned on at nine a.m. Behave, and we’ll get along fine. Give me any problems, and you’ll end up like Daisy. Understand?”
Frankie nodded.
Mark placed a tray in front of him, and then released Daisy’s right hand from the restraint, keeping the left one shackled. “Be back for you later, sweetie pie,” he said to the girl, a leering grin on his face.
When he’d gone, Frankie looked at the food. It was a heated-up frozen dinner—some sort of pasta dish, maybe lasagna. He took a bite, and if he weren’t so hungry would have spit it out. It was barely warm and tasted rancid. He ate it anyway.
He didn’t understand how everything in his life had fallen apart. Sure, he didn’t like moving around so much, but he’d gotten by. Eventually, he always made friends in his new school. His teachers always liked him. His mother and father loved him. His brother looked out for him. And then they got the news that his father had gone missing. What did that even mean? How could the army not find him? Would he ever come home? It was the stupid war. Not even a real war. That was the start of everything. They wouldn’t have moved from the army base if his father hadn’t been deployed. He missed his mother, but he missed his father more. It wasn’t fair what happened to him. It wasn’t fair that he might never come home. Home. That’s where he wanted to be. Home with his mother and father.
He began crying, just silent tears at first, but then it caught in his throat, and he was sobbing and he couldn’t stop. He hugged himself tightly and rocked back and forth, and Daisy didn’t say anything until he’d cried himself out.
“I cried, too, at first. Every day. But it didn’t change anything.”
Later, Mark came back. He grabbed Frankie by his collar and pulled him to his feet. “Bathroom time,” he said, and pushed Frankie toward the door. Mark waited outside the bathroom while Frankie peed, then shoved him back into the room. He turned to Daisy, unlocked her other hand. As she rubbed her wrists, he said, “Time for fun, my little darlin’.” She turned back once to glance at Frankie, then walked out with Mark.
She was gone for more than an hour. When she returned, Mark snapped the handcuffs, attached to a chain on the wall, on her wrists, then shut out the one light in the room and left. It was pitch-black.
“Are you all right?” Frankie asked.
The only thing he heard in return were soft cries.
For two days, the pattern was the same. At nine the following morning, Mark returned with breakfast, another frozen-food meal of runny eggs and limp bacon. An hour later, he brought them to the bathroom. When it was Daisy’s turn, she didn’t come back for an hour, sometimes longer. Mark barely spoke to Frankie, barely took notice of his existence. Food and bathroom, food and bathroom. He didn’t tell Frankie any more of what was in store for him, and Frankie was too frightened to ask.
The first night, after Daisy returned, Frankie pulled the mattress nearer to her so she’d at least have something soft to rest on. He remained upright on the end of it, giving Daisy most of the space so she could lie down.
“What did your parents do to you?” Frankie asked her that first night.
“What do you mean?”
“Did they hit you?”
“Hah. You think that’s the worst thing parents can do?”
“No. I guess not. But it was bad enough that you wanted to run away from them. I just wondered if they’d hurt you.” Frankie couldn’t imagine parents so bad that you’d want to leave them. His mother always did nice things for him, like cook the foods he liked to eat, and drive him to places he wanted to go. Every night she still tucked him into bed, even though he wasn’t a baby anymore, and told him she loved him. His father wasn’t around as much, but when he was, he always played games with him and Bobby, like football or soccer or tennis. He always bragged about Frankie to his friends, even in front of Frankie, although that embarrassed him. He kept wishing over and over that his father was alive and able to find his way back. After all, his father was the strongest person he knew.
“From the time I was little, my parents told me how worthless I was,” Daisy said. “Too stupid. Too ugly. Too skinny. Nothing I did was good enough for them. They never hit me, but they never loved me either. Sometimes, they’d disappear for a few days and leave me home alone, without any food in the house or money to buy some. I bet they’re relieved that I’m gone.”
Frankie felt sad for Daisy. She’d left one nightmare and marched right into a worse one. Whatever happened to him, Frankie was certain his mother would never stop looking for him.
CHAPTER
22
“How much longer?” Tommy asked. He and Jessica had been sitting idly by with Metzger at the Raleigh police station, where the FBI task force had borrowed a room and set up a temporary command center.
“They’re working on it,” Metzger answered. “Whoever set up the site did a good job of hiding himself.”
Tommy had been trying to keep Jessica calm, but it hadn’t been easy. He could understand her agitation. If one of his kids had been abducted, he doubted that he’d be able to sit by and wait for something to break. He’d want to bust down some walls, or go to a bar and pick a fight, or ram his car into a tree. Anything to provide some physical pain, so as to wipe away the psychic pain he’d be experiencing.
“Want a cup of coffee?” Tommy asked Jessica.
She shook her head.
“Candy from the machine?”
“I can’t eat anything.”
He wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “They’re going to find Frankie. Their cyber experts are ace at cracking through encryptions.”
