Medical Kidnap Files 1-6, page 65
They ate in comfortable silence, watching the traffic and pedestrians go by. Gabriel started to formulate a plan in his head. They needed to get to a different neighborhood. It was too dangerous staying so close to the hospital, where the doctors and now the police knew that they had been. They needed more money, as Renata had suggested. That would mean spending most of the day panhandling. It still wouldn’t yield a lot, but he’d have some emergency funds to fall back upon.
“I think I should ditch my phone,” he said. “Pick up a new burner.”
Renata raised one eyebrow.
“I don’t suspect Carmel,” Gabriel said uncomfortably. “Not really. I just think I’ve used it too much. I need to get rid of it before somebody does start tracking it.”
“But there might be a problem with Carmel?”
“Could be. I don’t think there is. But she was the one who suggested Seth’s case, and it turned out she was wrong. He was being abused.”
“But the information came from Judge Dee-Dee to start with.”
“So Carmel said.”
Renata considered that, sucking her cheeks in. She nodded.
“And then there was the car. It was probably just a random car, not surveillance. But it showed up right after I called her… Gotta be a coincidence, because they couldn’t have gotten someone to me that fast…”
“Unless they already had your general location and were waiting for you to make a call to pinpoint you.”
Gabriel’s skin crawled. “Yeah. So I need to get a new one.”
Renata nodded in agreement. “You got the money now, or is that what we’re raising funds for?”
“I have enough to start with.” Gabriel pulled out his phone and powered it on to wipe it. He glanced at the usage information. “This one was just about out of minutes anyway. Good timing.”
He did a system wipe, then popped out the SIM card and broke it in half, tossing one piece in the garbage and putting the other in his pocket to dispose of later in another location. He threw the phone down on the pavement and stomped on it, taking several tries to bust it up to his satisfaction. Gabriel picked it up and attempted to turn it back on, then nodded and threw it out.
Renata finished touching base with her contacts and hung up the phone.
“Leva’s being transferred back to face additional charges. And Social Services is going to send Seth back to the Children’s.”
“I guess there’s no reason for us to stay around here, then. Do you want to go home?”
Renata nodded. Her mouth quirked up. “Don’t you think it’s funny that we talk about home when we’re homeless?”
“Well… I guess. Even living on the street, I still think of the valley as home. It’s not that much different than being here or any other city… but I’m familiar with where everything is. That’s where most of our contacts are. It’s just… more familiar.”
“And you know your mom is there, even if you can’t see her.”
“Yeah, I guess there’s that too. I need to set something up to meet up with her again one day soon… I miss her. They’re probably not still surveilling her… do you think?”
“Every time the authorities figure out that you’re involved in a transfer, they’re going to show renewed interest in finding you. And she’s the best opportunity they have to do that.”
Gabriel grunted.
Sometime. He’d see her again sometime.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Their plan for ‘business as usual’ lasted only a few days. Gabriel started to feel like he was getting back on his feet. He wasn’t so tired. They fell into a comfortable routine. Renata seemed to be stable and happy. It was all he could have hoped for and more.
Renata gasped and stopped so fast that Gabriel just about tripped walking beside her.
“What? What’s wrong?”
Renata pointed to a newspaper box. They could see the big headline through the window. And a picture. One column of the story showed, the rest of it cut off.
Gabriel stared in blank disbelief.
“Is it an old paper?” he asked, not understanding.
“No!” Renata was bent over, reading what she could through the window. “Leva was out on bail. She wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near Seth.”
“Didn’t they have anyone at the hospital? A guard? Some kind of security?”
Renata shook her head, her eyes still on the words on the paper.
“She just walked in and took him. They didn’t have any idea. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform.”
Gabriel pressed his temples, feeling like his brain was going to explode.
“They knew that she already spirited him away once,” Gabriel omitted their part in the caper. “How could they not know that she was going to do it again?”
“Maybe they figured we wouldn’t help her, and she wouldn’t be able to do it alone.” Renata jerked on the handle of the newspaper box, but it didn’t open. “You’ve got change,” Renata snapped, “buy a paper.”
Gabriel slotted money into the machine and opened it up. Renata grabbed two copies and handed Gabriel one of them. He let the door shut and wondered if he dared put the fee for the second paper into the box while she stood there. He chickened out and didn’t. Renata was already holding her paper in front of her face, engrossed.
“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe they let her get in there and just walk out with him.”
Gabriel made a noise of agreement. He scoured the article for some suggestion of where the police or Social Services thought Leva would go. She didn’t have any family. Just Seth. She had plenty of friends in the mito community who would be sympathetic to her story that she was being persecuted by the authorities just for trying to care for her sick son. There were dozens of people who might be willing to flout the law and help her out.
“What are we going to do?” Renata asked.
“I don’t know. What can we do? She’s not with us this time.”
Renata flipped through the pages of the paper, looking for a continuation of the front page story or a shorter side piece.
“So what? If we can hide people, we should be able to find them too. How many people in our network know Leva? If we put the word out that we’re looking for her, someone is bound to know something. She can’t just disappear into thin air. We know all the exit routes. We know she has to establish a new identity. We’ve been through this before. There are only so many people she can go to for help.”
“She has a car. She can leave town and then look for someone to help her with the identification.”
“There’s an APB out on the car. She’ll have to dump it and get a new one. And that means she’s stuck in town a little longer. She won’t leave town before she has an identity. It will be too hard to find someone who will trust her. She knows people here. She knows what has to be done.”
Gabriel wanted to argue with her. He couldn’t see what would stop Leva from fleeing town. And the state. Get as far away as possible, and then find a way to get herself established.
But if Renata were right, they had a much smaller footprint to search. There were only so many sources of good identification papers in town, and his contacts knew them.
“Seth is still sick,” Gabriel said, looking at the newspaper. “She won’t be able to take him far. Traveling makes him worse.”
“Being alone with her makes him worse,” Renata snapped. “What are we waiting for? Time to make some phone calls.”
Gabriel ignored her impatient tone. She wasn’t mad at him. She was just eager to find Seth again and to rescue him. Again. From his mother. Again. How many times were they going to repeat the same scenario?
He caught Renata looking at him, her face slack, mouth slightly open.
“What?”
“How many times…” she repeated. Gabriel hadn’t even realized that he’d said the words out loud. She put her hand on his arm as if to stop him from some action. “What if she decides that it’s not worth it? What if she decides that it’s too dangerous? She knows that if she gets caught again, she’s not going to get out on bail. I don’t know how she managed to make bail this time. If she gets caught again, there’s no way she’ll ever get another chance.”
Gabriel wasn’t sure where Renata was going with it. Or maybe he just didn’t want to admit that he did.
“What if she decides to kill him this time, Gabriel? It happens sometimes, doesn’t it? I know Munchausen by Proxy parents rarely kill, but it still happens. She’s desperate. She’s going to lose him. If she decides the authorities are getting too close…”
“You think she’ll kill both of them? Him and herself?”
Renata nodded. She gripped Gabriel’s arm tighter. “We’ve got to find them, Gabe.”
Gabriel didn’t answer. He just pulled out his latest phone and started dialing.
He reconnoitered first, taking a walk up and down the block looking for any suspicious vehicles or watchers. He did a turn around the block, walking through the alley behind the building. Everything seemed to be as usual. Gabriel went back to the front of the pawn shop.
The owner was behind the counter. No assistants or additional staff in sight. Merrick was a big man, overweight; even his stubby fingers were fat. And yellow from chain-smoking, which he did in the store despite the by-laws. But Gabriel had seen him at work. His fingers were as deft and nimble as a child’s. Merrick glanced up when the chimes rang, then went back to whatever he was writing in the log book. Gabriel approached the counter, pretending that he was looking at the watches under the glass top.
“Something must be going on for you to come visit me in person,” Merrick remarked.
Gabriel looked up from the watches. He shifted his weight from one foot to another. He might just be a teenager, but Merrick knew who he was, knew that Gabriel had sent business his way. So he showed him the respect that he would show any adult business associate.
“I’m wondering if you’ve done any paper recently,” he said. “Probably a rush job, for a mother and teenage son.”
“I can’t share confidential information,” Merrick said. “You understand that. You wouldn’t want me sharing any of your clients’ information.”
“Well, she actually is one of ours. We’ve just sort of… lost her…”
“That was careless, wasn’t it?”
“It’s important that we get in contact with her. The boy could be in danger.”
Merrick studied him.
“What kind of danger would he be in? Mothers with children that are in need of my services are usually running from something. They already know where the danger lies.”
Gabriel hesitated over what to say. He didn’t want to take the chance of spooking Leva if word got back to her that someone was looking for her. But Merrick and those like him wouldn’t help Gabriel if they thought that Leva and Seth were safe where they were.
“Actually… we think that she is a danger to him.”
Merrick’s eyes widened in surprise. “I thought you said that you had sent them.”
“Initially, we did. But then we became aware of… other facts.”
Merrick drummed his fingers on the countertop. “This is all very… unusual. You know the way I operate. Discretion is paramount.”
“I know. And I normally wouldn’t expect you to say anything. It’s just that… I know he could be in danger. Serious danger. From her.”
Merrick stared off into space for a long time, then shook his head. “I don’t think I can help you. You’ll have to look elsewhere.”
Gabriel sighed. “Should I be asking other artists?” he asked. “Or did you handle this job?”
Merrick’s eyes were inscrutable. “I can’t help you.”
Gabriel expected he was going to get a similar response from everyone he asked. He could only hope that whoever had forged papers for Leva and Seth would have a conscience and let him know somehow where they were headed.
He wasn’t holding his breath.
Gabriel made the decision to reunite their extraction team. All of them had talked to Leva or Seth at some point along the way. If they pooled their information, maybe they could figure out where to start looking.
So far Gabriel’s investigation into new identification had not panned out. No one would admit to having heard anything from Leva. Which either meant that she was lying low, or that she had persuaded them to keep her secret. Gabriel didn’t have the money to pay for bribes. If Leva had paid them enough money to keep their mouths shut, Gabriel didn’t have anywhere near enough to open them again.
“She probably isn’t trying to get identity papers yet,” Nelson argued. “If Seth was still sick when she took him from the hospital, she wouldn’t want to leave him alone or in someone else’s care while she chased around after paperwork, would she? She’d just hunker down somewhere and take care of him until he was stable.”
“Maybe,” Gabriel agreed. He had no evidence to counter the theory.
“He complained at the hospital about getting sicker traveling,” Carmel said. “He doesn’t like to travel at all when he’s sick. And it sounds like he was still pretty bad.”
“Where did you get that?” Renata demanded. “The paper said he was sick, but it didn’t say how sick.”
Carmel hesitated. She looked at Gabriel, then back at Renata.
“Come on, spill!” Renata insisted. “You need to let us know what you’ve heard, and from whom. We need to pool everything.”
“Well… it’s not official.”
“We don’t need official,” Gabriel assured her. “If you’re hearing rumors through the grapevine, that’s just as important as what we’re getting through public media. Maybe more so.”
“It wasn’t through our network. I was… talking to Judge Dee-Dee.”
There was silence as they all considered this and looked back and forth at one another. Gabriel tried to compose a question in his mind. He needed to get as many details from Carmel as he could. But Judge Dee-Dee was not on their side. Not completely. And if Carmel were in cahoots with her…
“She called me,” Carmel confessed, without anyone posing the question. “She thinks that the underground Railroad is helping Leva again.”
“Why would she think that? We turned her in!” Gabriel’s voice was loud in his shock and anger. “We found out that Judge Dee-Dee was wrong and we went back in and called the ambulance and made sure that the doctors knew it was Leva. We made sure they called the cops. Doesn’t she know that?”
“I told her,” Carmel said in a small voice. “But I guess the official report said that it was Leva who called the ambulance and the doctor who reported her. Judge Dee-Dee thought that we were helping her. I told her we weren’t.” Carmel looked down at her hands in her lap, not meeting their eyes.
“There must be a recording of my call,” Gabriel said. “All she has to do is listen to it to hear that I was the one who called.”
“She didn’t know until I told her. I don’t know if she’s verified it since. She probably has.”
“How sick did she say Seth was?” Nelson asked, trying to circle back around to the original question.
Gabriel stopped arguing and closed his mouth, waiting for the answer. Carmel looked reluctant to say anything else. She looked at each of them before going on.
“They’re pretty worried about him. He was still being treated for magnesium poisoning. He was still on oxygen and IV.”
“Let’s assume she’s still here,” Gabriel said finally. “I’ve been assuming she would go out of state, as far away as she could, but that’s all the more reason for her to stay here. If everybody is looking for her elsewhere, she’d be safest sticking close to home. Just like what we usually do… stay in the city for a few days until they assume that we already slipped through their fingers and then leave once security is relaxed.”
“How does that help us?” Nelson asked.
Gabriel closed his eyes and thought.
“She needs medical supplies. Even if they’re staying with a friend. She needs money. Probably a lot of it. She can’t live on the street and be invisible like us. Not with him needing that kind of care.”
“Maybe if Judge Dee-Dee thinks we’re helping her, other people do too,” Carmel said. “Can’t we use that to our advantage?”
Everyone looked at Carmel with suspicion.
“Other people will think that we’re still on Leva’s side. So if they know where she is, they might not have a problem telling us, like they would the police.”
“But Leva knows,” Gabriel pointed out. “She’d set people straight pretty quickly.”
“Does she know?”
“How could she not know?” Renata snapped. “She was right there when Gabriel turned her in.”
“When Gabriel called the ambulance,” Carmel corrected. She raised her eyes to Gabriel. “What did you say in front of her? That you knew she did it? Did you tell the dispatcher that she was the one who made him sick?”
“No… I told her that they wouldn’t get caught if I called the ambulance. I just told the dispatcher that I thought his electrolytes were off, like at Disneyland, not that I thought she did anything. I didn’t tell anyone it might be her until we talked to the doctor.”
“So maybe she thinks we’re still on her side. We could reach out to her. Say that we would help her to get out of town again.”
“We’d have to know where she was to reach out to her.”
“We can put the word out to her friends and our volunteers. If we can get word to her that we want to help…” Nelson suggested.
“Do you think she’ll believe it?”
“Psychopaths like her always think they’ve got people snowed,” Renata said. “They think they’re smarter than anybody else.”
“Psychopaths?” Gabriel repeated skeptically.
