She nodded silently and watched him.
"What do you know about the child’s situation?"
"Who are you? Why are you the one who has questions?"
His eyes widened involuntarily, as though someone had thrown a glass of water in his face. "I’m sorry," he said. "When you’ve been a judge for a few years, you’re used to being the only one in the room everyone takes at face value. My name is John Kramer. I’m the judge who was presiding in Courtroom 22. We hadn’t gotten to the petition to declare Timothy Phillips legally dead when he ran in and disrupted my court. For the moment, the matter is still undecided, and I’ve left it that way."
"Why?"
"First I had to recess while the officers took you away. Then I had to adjourn for a few days to give time to the authorities who can verify Timothy’s claim. In a day or so, oddly enough, I have to set a date to give the petitioners the opportunity to refute the claim— fingerprints, blood tests, and all. Then I have to rule on it."
"Will you be the one who decides what happens to him after that?"
He shook his head. "Not directly. At the moment he’s in the care of a very protective woman from Children’s Services named Nina Coffey. After a time there will be criminal cases—probably several of them. There will be a family court case to decide who is granted guardianship of Timmy. There will be some sort of civil action to settle the disposition of the trust. I can influence the direction some of those cases take if I find out the truth and get it on the record so it can’t be ignored. I’m asking what you know because I don’t have much time and I need to know where to begin. Once I rule on the petition that’s before me, it’s out of my hands."
"Is any of this legal?"
"What I’m doing is so contrary to legal procedure that it has no name."
She sat erect in the chair and met his gaze steadily while she decided. "He was a ward of his grandmother because his parents were killed in a car crash. She was old at the time—about eighty. Whoever she hired to watch him didn’t. Along came Raymond and Emily Decker, and he disappeared. I have no way of knowing what was going on in their minds at the time. They may have been kidnappers who stalked him from birth, or they may have been one of those half-crazy couples who create their own little world that doesn’t need to incorporate all of the facts in front of their eyes. If you read the old newspaper reports, it sounds as though maybe they just found him wandering around alone in a remote area of a county park, picked him up, and then convinced themselves that he was better off with them than with anybody who let a two-year-old get that lost. I’ve tried to find out, and so did Mona and Dennis, but what we learned was full of contradictions."
"What sorts of contradictions?"
"Timmy says they sent pictures of him to his grandmother, sometimes holding a newspaper, sometimes with his fingerprints. He doesn’t know what the letters said. If the Deckers knew where to send the letters, then they knew who he was. But I can’t tell whether it was a straight ransom demand or they were trying to keep him officially alive so he could claim his inheritance when he grew up, or whether they were just being kind to an old lady by letting her know her grandson was okay."
"What do you know about the grandmother?"
"From what Dennis Morgan said, the police stopped looking. That means they never saw the letters. Grandma kept looking, so maybe she got them. She must have believed he would turn up eventually, because she tied up all the family money in a living trust for him and made a business-management firm named Hoffen-Bayne the trustee. She died a few years ago."
"Before or after Raymond and Emily Decker?"
"Before. But I’m not the best source for dates and addresses. I’m sure if you don’t have it in the papers on your desk yet, it’ll be in the next batch. Anyway, I don’t think she hired somebody to kill them for kidnapping her grandson."
"You’re the only source of information I have right now. Who did kill them?’’
"I don’t know."
"Who do you think did it?"
"When someone killed the Deckers, they also stole all of Timmy’s belongings, every picture of him, and a lot of paper. If you’re looking for somebody, you would want the photographs. But they took his toys, clothes, everything. That’s a lot of work. The only reason I can think of for doing that is to hide the fact that he was alive—that a little boy lived there. Maybe they did such a good job of wiping off their own prints that they got all of his too, as a matter of course. I doubt it."
"Who would want to accomplish that?"
She hesitated, and he could tell she was preparing to be disbelieved. "What I’m telling you is not from personal knowledge. It’s what Dennis Morgan told me. This company, Hoffen-Bayne, got to administer a fortune of something like a hundred million dollars. They would get a commission of at least two percent a year, or two million, for that. They also got to invest the money any way they pleased, and that gave them power. There are some fair-sized companies you can control for that kind of investment. As long as Timmy was lost, the trust would continue. You’re a judge. You tell me what would happen if Timmy turned up in California."
"The court would—will—appoint a guardian, and probably in this case, a conservator, if you’re right about the size of the inheritance."
"That wouldn’t be Hoffen-Bayne?"
"We don’t appoint business-management companies to raise children, or to audit themselves."
"Then the power and money would be in jeopardy."
"Certainly they would have to at least share the control."
"And they did try to have him declared dead."
"That’s a legal convenience. It relieves them of responsibility to search for him, and also protects them if someone were to ask later why they’re administering a trust for a client who hasn’t been seen for seven years."
"Then it would have been even more convenient if he were really dead. They wouldn’t have had to go to court at all."
"Filing a motion is a little different from hiring assassins to hunt down a six-year-old and kill him."
"Maybe. I think filing the motion was a trap. I think Dennis Morgan was poking around, and somebody noticed it. It’s not all that hard to find out what you want about people; the trick is to keep them from knowing you’re doing it. Dennis was a respected lawyer, but investigating wasn’t his field; lawyers hire people to do that. I think they sensed that if a Washington attorney was interested, then Timmy was going to turn up sometime soon."
"And you—all of you—got caught in the trap?"
"Yes." She stood up. "You asked me what I think, so you would know where to begin. I’ve told you. Dennis couldn’t find anybody but Hoffen-Bayne who would benefit from Timmy’s death—no competing claims to the money or angry relatives, for instance. Nobody tried to break the will during all the years while Timmy was missing. But I don’t know what Dennis got right and what he got wrong, and I can’t prove any of it. I only saw the police putting handcuffs on four of the men in the courthouse, and there won’t be anything on paper that connects them with Hoffen-Bayne or anybody else. I know I never saw them before, so I can’t have been the one they recognized. They saw Timmy." She took a step toward the door. "Keep him safe."
The judge said, "Then there’s you." He watched her stop and face him. "Who are you?"
"Jane Whitefield."
"I mean what’s your interest in this?"
"Dennis Morgan asked me to keep Timmy alive. I did that. We all did that."
"What are you? A private detective, a bodyguard?"
"I’m a guide."
"What kind of guide?"