Whoever it was, he or she would have to be a total recluse, living outside of society – because there’s been no credible sighting of the boys since the day they were abducted. And what about the dimes? The T-shirt? The phone call? How would any of that fit into the would-be parent scenario?
A recluse. An obvious thought occurs to me, but one that never occurred to me before. Unlike Elizabeth Smart, there’s no way someone could wander around with identical twins in tow, not without arousing suspicion. So wherever they are, whoever’s got them, if the boys are alive, Kevin and Sean are hidden from view, isolated.
I glance over my list of possible motives: profit, retaliation, sexual predator, kiddie porn, religious whack-job, Dr. Mengele, wannabe parent. Stripped down like this, the bare list gives me a chill. The least terrifying motives suggest reckless lunacy; the most alarming are truly evil.
I take a deep breath. Beneath the list of motives, I write a second word: CLUES.
Origami rabbit.
Chicken blood.
Row of dimes.
The abductor’s mementos. Judy Jones established that the rabbit was folded of standard material, bore no fingerprints, was of high-intermediate difficulty. And that was about it.
Still, The Piper left the thing on Sean’s side of the dresser. Why?
The chicken blood. It was possible that the blood-soaked T-shirt was a ruse to focus suspicion on me, but that was only an assumption. The chicken blood might have some other meaning. The police lab did establish that the blood came from a breed of chicken common in the commercial poultry business.
The dimes. The lab checked them for prints and struck out. There was also an attempt to source them – but it turned out that although you don’t see many “Mercury” dimes in circulation, there are millions of them out there. They were minted for almost thirty years, from 1916 to 1945, at which point the FDR dime replaced the Liberty head design. The police and the FBI had also looked into mint marks, and the dates of the coins left by the abductor, but there was no discernible pattern.
Still, the coins were placed deliberately; the Piper took the trouble to line them up. They must have some meaning.
There are other clues. For instance, the dog. The Piper used the cute little dog as a kid magnet. Shoffler checked into whippets and told us that the breed was rising in popularity. Lots of whippets out there. But how many can there really be? I never see whippets out for a walk.
And then there’s The Piper himself – his costume. Was that just a disguise, or did it, too, have meaning? I needed to check into the fairy tale of the Pied Piper. And what about the costume – where do you go for Piper gear? I got just a glance, but it seemed pretty elaborate. And what about the ruffs? One for him, one for the dog. Where do you buy a ruff? Did Shoffler check that out? And if so, what did he find out?
Under CLUES, I add:
whippet
Piper: fairy tale
costume
ruff
I’m going to need a look at Shoffler’s files. Only I guess they’d be Muriel Petrich’s files now.
I pick up the phone and call Petrich. She’s not in. I leave a message and try her home number. Instead of a crisp message or the voice-mail robot, I hear a young child’s voice, a child who has trouble pronouncing the letter R. “Hi, you’ve weached the home of Petew, Muwiel, and Bwittany. If…”
The sound of the little girl’s voice, so sweet and vulnerable and proud of herself, is more than I can handle. It’s like stepping off a cliff. What I’ve lost. I hang up.
I have an impulse to call Petrich back. I want to tell her to get the kid’s voice off the voice mail. As she would know, anyone can get the address from a criss-cross directory. Is she crazy? Advertising to random callers that there’s a child in the house?
I take a deep breath, retreat from my impulse and my proxy vigilance. Despite her job, Petrich still lives in a world that seems like a friendly place. She knows – but she doesn’t know, not really – that it can all evaporate in an instant.
CHAPTER 15
It doesn’t make sense to get into the dimes or origami without at least looking at the police files first to see what they’ve got. So until Petrich gets back to me, I hit the Internet.
And once again, I descend into the world of missing children. I’ve been to a lot of the sites dealing with abducted children before; maybe there’s something I’ve missed, some angle I’ve overlooked.
I’m back in Milk Carton Land, accompanied by sidebar ads for private eyes who suggest they can find the missing children. I’m engulfed by the faces of the vanished – including the smiling faces of Kevin and Sean.
I correct myself. No one “vanishes.” It’s not a magic act. These kids were abducted. The man who went to the Renaissance Faire dressed up as the Pied Piper is the one who ripped my sons out of my life… and into his world. And I’m going to find out who he is and why he did it.
I visit a website maintained by the IRE – an organization of investigative reporters and editors. At first, it doesn’t seem relevant. Most of the database on kidnappings concerns the online world – as in “Dangers of the Internet.” There are dozens of stories about intrepid cops and FBI agents working stings in chat rooms.
But this can’t have anything to do with my kids. Some six-year-olds have amazing computer skills, but not Kevin and Sean, whose access to computers is strictly controlled by Liz. Anyway, they’re just learning how to read; they don’t know how to spell or type. There’s no way they could get into a chat room, let alone make some kind of arrangement to meet a stranger.
But some of the articles in the IRE’s archives scare the hell out of me. One concerns a churchgoing couple who ran a “foster home” in rural Illinois – from which they sold children to pedophiles. Another is about some killer nerds in Idaho who abducted a ten-year-old with the intention of making a snuff flick. It’s one nightmare after another, each one darker than the one before.
A second site reminds me that there are fewer than one hundred kidnappings by strangers each year and that small children are not the usual targets. Teenagers are. Girls older than twelve make up more than half the cases. I scan through the dozens of websites that one of my search requests prompts, each representing a missing child. It’s depressing, clicking through this forlorn catalog of faces. And the websites themselves seem remote outposts in the vastness of the world, like the photos on milk cartons: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
Shots in the dark.
The sites for certain children – findkevinandsean.com is one of them, I’m glad to see – surface over and over again while I browse. There are also paid ads for missing children that show up on the right of my screen. I make a note to check with Ezra, my computer-genius friend. How much does that kind of thing cost? Now that the boys are relegated to the occasional news update, maybe a paid ad connected to search terms such as “abducted child” would be worthwhile.
And maybe it’s time, after all, to get a PR person. Someone who might line up a special on 20/20 or Dateline, keep the boys in the news. The Smart family managed this after their daughter had been missing for several months, an hour-long special flooded with images of their missing child. The special, which I watched at the behest of Claire Carosella from the Center, made it clear that the police had fastened their attention on a handyman, an ex-con who died several months after the kidnapping. It was a believable theory, bolstered by some suggestive evidence about a car – although the dead man’s wife insisted on his innocence.