The case had gone unsolved.
Several years later, Walt had found himself embroiled in the disappearance of another child. This case had involved a seven-year-old girl by the name of Andrea Kennan. She had been abducted on the way to school by a man, who witnesses described as a white male in his early forties with long brown hair and eyes as black as obsidian.
Walt was one of three investigators on that case. Nearly a hundred interviews, some twenty suspects and five months later they had fished the pond dry and moved onto other waters. Andrea’s fate remained a mystery for better than two years, then suddenly her abductor resurfaced. He tried to pick up another little girl outside the Town & Country Mall. This time, though, the girl had managed to get away.
A witness jotted down the man’s license plate number.
Within a matter of hours, they had the guy in custody.
During the follow-up investigation, it came out that the man had been responsible for kidnapping and murdering at least eleven other little girls over a four-state area. Andrea Kennan, it was believed, had been his first victim.
It was that knowledge that preyed most on Walt’s psyche. For months afterward, the world felt like an ever-tightening noose around his neck. He found himself afraid to close his eyes at night, afraid of the nightmares that would take him to the cemeteries where the children roamed, lost and abandoned. No rest for the innocent. No sleep for the guilty.
Eventually, he had resigned from the department.
For a long time afterward, he had felt like one of the lost ghosts he so often dreamt about. No sense of time or place. No belonging. No sense of the world beyond his apartment walls. Then one day Teri had called. She said she had heard about his resignation, and she was wondering if he’d be interested in helping her follow up a lead in Gabriel’s case. He had already let her down once; he didn’t think he could do it again. Not if he ever wanted to sleep again. And so he agreed.
As it turned out, the lead was a case of mistaken identity. A Virginia woman thought she might have spotted Gabriel at a local swimming pool. The boy had been with a man in his late forties and a heavyset woman with a streak of gray in her hair. Walt called a friend back east, and in a couple of weeks they managed to locate the family. They were from Mexico. It had been their first trip to America. Their son, Roberto—who had been named after Roberto Clemente—was nine. Gabriel would have been nearly fifteen by then.
It was another in a long string of dead ends.
However, there had been an upside. The possibility of potentially solving the Knight case had rekindled a flame in Walt. For the first time in months, he found himself able to look past the ineffectiveness he had so often felt as a detective. It was a tiny flicker at best, but it was enough to steer him back into investigative work, specializing in missing children.
It was a flicker that he owed to Teri.
And now Gabriel Knight was home again.
The circle, at first glance, appeared complete.
[7]
Teri and the boy sat in the car outside Denny’s as Walt pulled into the parking lot. They had been waiting for a good fifteen minutes. In that time, she tried to explain to the boy that her son had disappeared a number of years ago and that because of that he couldn’t possible be Gabe.
“Then how come I’m not older?” the boy asked.
“Precisely,” she said. “You should be older, but you’re not. That doesn’t make any sense, now does it?”
“That’s because you’re lying.”
“I wish I were,” Teri said softly. She watched a blue Buick enter the parking lot and pull into a space across from them. A man in his sixties, thin and tall, wearing a long overcoat, climbed out and went around to the other side of the car and opened the door for his wife. Teri felt herself let out a breath that she hadn’t even realized she had taken in. “Why don’t you tell me about your bicycle accident?”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“Nothing at all?”
He shrugged. “Maybe some little things.”
“Like what?”
“I remember leaving the note on the table. And there were some junior high kids that got off the bus at Bascom. One of them threw a banana peel at me.” The boy grinned. “He missed by a mile.”
For a moment, she found herself thinking what a precious sight that smile was and how lucky she was to have it back in her life again. And then she caught herself, and a chill went through her. She glanced away. “Anything else?”
“I don’t know. Just little things, I guess.”
“What about after the accident? What do you remember after the accident?”
“I woke up in this room, and there were a lot of other beds in it, and the lights were down low, and I remember thinking that it must be night, because everything was so dark and everyone was asleep.”
“There were other people there?” she asked.
The high beams of another car cut across the windshield like a searchlight in the fog. Teri shaded her eyes and watched the car swing past them. It pulled into the space next to the Buick and Walt climbed out. He jiggled the door handle to make sure it was locked, walked around the other side and entered the restaurant.
“Is that him?” the boy asked.
“That’s him.”
“He doesn’t look like a cop.”
“Well, he isn’t. Not any more. He works alone now, in private practice.”
“Like Simon & Simon, right?”
She turned and stared at him, getting an eerie feeling that was hard to explain until she realized that Simon & Simon had been one of Gabe’s favorite shows. It had been off the air for years now, except for syndication, and she hadn’t given it a thought in longer than she cared to remember. But suddenly it was here at the fore again, a stark reminder of the huge gap in time that still separated her from her son.
“Are you all right?” the boy asked.
Teri nodded. “Sorry.”
Through the restaurant windows, they watched a waitress show Walt to a booth. He sat with his back to them, and said something to her that Teri assumed had to do with the fact that he was expecting two more people.
“So let’s go.”
“Not just yet.” She held him back with one hand, and watched as Walt thumbed indifferently through the menu. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was she was waiting for—paranoia wasn’t always that telling. But she thought it might be smart to wait a moment longer and make sure no one showed up behind him. She trusted Walt. Right now he was the only man she trusted. But… better safe than sorry.
After a few minutes with no one else turning up, Teri and the boy climbed out of the car. It had been raining on and off all day. Now, though, even as they were trying to walk around the puddles, she could see a patch or two in the clouds where the sky was blacker than black and Lucy was there with her diamonds, as Lennon had once sung. It was a beautiful night.
“You look silly,” he said as she tiptoed barefooted around a puddle. She had lost one shoe back at the house when the man with the scar had pulled it off. The other shoe was on the front seat of the car, stuffed into the crack between the seat and the back.
“Oh, I do, do I?”
“Yeah.” He giggled.