“Thank you for telling me what your uncle said.” My gratitude is heartfelt; it’s amazing how this unsolicited bit of encouragement lifts my heart.
The Madonna of the cash register rewards me with a beatific smile.
CHAPTER 16
“Hang on,” Shoffler says, “we’re just breaking up the huddle here.” I hear voices, the chime of elevators, Shoffler exchanging parting comments with someone. Then he’s back. “So what’s up?”
“The Sandling twins.”
If I didn’t know the detective so well, maybe I wouldn’t notice, but I catch the hesitation and the sudden holdback in his voice. “So – what about them?”
“The more I read the more it sounds like Kevin and Sean. The parallels are compelling. And I can’t understand why you and Judy Jones dismissed the case as irrelevant. Pretty much blew it off.”
Once again, there’s that hitch in his voice, a guarded quality. “We checked into it, Alex. We did. Look – that kidnapping took place a whole continent away. You got the ages of the boys and the fact they’re twins. That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“Apart from that, there didn’t seem to be a connection.” Shoffler clears his throat. “The mother, you know – she wasn’t exactly a pillar of the community.”
“Look, Ray – I’ve read everything I can find about the case. And far as I can tell, Emma Sandling may not have been Mother Teresa but there’s no evidence she had anything to do with kidnapping her children.”
“That’s your opinion. Maybe there’s stuff you don’t know about.”
“Must be. Because as far as I can tell there wasn’t exactly a full court press to hunt down the kidnapper once the kids popped up in Eureka.”
“You’re wrong,” Shoffler says. “There was an investigation. A thorough one, too. But the mother wasn’t exactly helpful.”
“You mean-”
“I mean Emma Sandling was not cooperative. She said it was to protect the boys, but not everybody bought that. Look – the kids are safe and sound; it’s a happy ending. For a few days, that was big news, a miracle. But after? There’s no perpetrator, no charges, no story, no trial. All you got is the boys themselves and a police investigation that goes nowhere. Why? Because for whatever reason – whether she’s involved somehow or she genuinely wants to protect her kids – Mommy won’t talk and she won’t let her kids talk.”
“She could have made a buck or two out of the media, that’s for sure.”
“True, and that could mean she’s on the level. Or maybe it’s just damage control. The more the thing gets looked at, the more her part in it is exposed to the light of day.”
“If there was a part.”
“Okay, if there was a part. But the consensus out there was that she had a hand in it, that it was some kind of shakedown that got screwed up. After which, Mother Sandling made herself scarce.”
“I don’t think so.”
Shoffler says nothing for a moment. Then he says: “Why not?”
“Because the more I look at it, the more I get this creepy feeling that whoever took the Sandling kids is the same guy who took mine. They got away, so he took my kids to replace them.”
“Hunh.” A pause. “A ‘creepy feeling’?”
“It’s the same pattern. Come on, Shoff.”
“There’s gotta be a boatload of twins on the West Coast. Why would this guy come all the way across the country?”
“I don’t know, but the point is I’m looking at this Sandling thing and it sounds so much like my boys. I figure I’ll take a closer look. But I can’t, because for one thing, Emma Sandling? She’s gone; she might as well have fallen off the face of the earth.”
“You tried to find her, hunh?”
“I did. And finding people is one of my job skills. If you’re a reporter, you’ve gotta have sources and you have to find them whether they want to be found or not. But I can’t find Emma Sandling.”
“Hunh.”
“And while I’m trying to track her down, I’m also talking to the cops out there in Oregon. Well, no, that’s not accurate. I’m talking at the cops out there in Oregon.”
“I don’t-”
“I call both jurisdictions – Corvallis, where the boys went missing, and Eureka, where they stumbled out of that trailer. Eureka – they tell what they can, which is not much. But Corvallis? I get nothing, Ray. A stone wall. The cops flat out won’t talk to me. They give me some bullshit about ‘privacy issues.’”
“So this is why you called me.” He lets out a sigh.
“Yeah. I thought you might be able to talk to them out there. Let them know I’m not gonna be a problem.”
There’s a long moment before he answers. “I’m sorry, Alex. I can’t help you. I wish I could, but my hands are tied.”
“Your hands are tied? We’re talking about my sons. Ray, you can’t-”
But the detective is no longer on the line.
Two hours later, I’m outside Shoffler’s place in Greenbelt, Maryland, waiting for him to show up. The house isn’t what I expected – although I’m not sure what that was. I knew Shoffler worked seventy-hour weeks, that he’d burned through two marriages. I guess I expected a crash pad but the tidy rancher in front of me is neat and homey, with a picket fence and well-kept flowerbeds. There’s even a grapevine wreath on the door.
At first, I sit on the porch, but at dusk a cloud of biting gnats drives me back to my car. I wait, listening to the O’s game on the radio and periodically cranking up the air when it gets too hot.
I’m jolted out of my doze by a deep metallic concussion that seems to take place inside my skull. The sound is actually a rap on my car door, a fact that I realize when I open my eyes to see Shoffler looming next to my window.
He’s not happy to see me. He stands in a predatory, almost threatening stance, half in shadow, illuminated by the sickly green of the streetlight. He looks terrible, irritated but so exhausted that my eyes flick to the dashboard clock to see what time it is: 3:32 A.M.
A film of moisture coats my skin. My mouth is cotton, my lips dry and cracked. My shirt is glued to the leather seat and makes a little sucking noise as I sit up and reach for the door handle. But Shoffler pushes his big hand against the Jeep’s door and scowls at me.
“Go home, Alex.”
“No.”
“Just go home.”
“I need to talk to you.”
He pivots on his heel and moves toward the front door; he’s inside before I can get out of the car. I ring his doorbell, which actually goes ding-dong, at least a dozen times. I can’t believe it. I’ve been sitting in the driveway for six hours. Back in the car, my impulse is to lean on the horn, cause a ruckus, force Shoffler to deal with me. But remembering the look on his face, I decide against it.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Shoffler in the past few weeks, and every minute of it I’ve been attuned to him with the rapt attention of a lover, always on the lookout for telltale signs: Has he heard something? Does he have news? I’ve become adept at reading the clues of body language – vocal inflection, gestures, and facial expressions.
I also know that cops and military types put a lot of stock in respect. If I lean on the horn and get in Shoffler’s face in that public way, I won’t get anywhere. He might even have me arrested. I move my car two blocks away and set the alarm on my cell phone to wake me at six. The detective won’t catch me dozing again.
When he comes out the door at 7:44, he looks surprisingly jaunty for a man who got – at most – four hours of sleep. And then he sees me, as I step out from behind his Crown Vic.