Cruel Justice

46

FROM THE COURTHOUSE, BEN sprinted over to police headquarters, Central Division. After asking a few questions at the front desk, he learned that Mike was on the third floor. In the interrogation chambers. Still.

Since the witness was a friendly one, Ben wondered why Mike was using the formal interrogation room. He soon had his answer.

Abie’s parents were in the observation room, watching everything through an acrylic one-way mirror. Mike had undoubtedly insisted on isolating the boy from his parents during the questioning, and the Rutherfords undoubtedly insisted on not letting the boy out of their sight. And this was undoubtedly the compromise.

“How’s it going?” Ben asked Rutherford as he entered the observation room.

Rutherford nodded a polite greeting. Ben could tell he was torn. He didn’t like Ben, and he didn’t want him to be here, but it was difficult to be too rude to one of the men who had just rescued your son.

Rachel Rutherford was standing close to the mirror, her hands pressed against the acrylic. She was as close to her son as the room would permit.

“Any luck?” Ben asked her.

Rachel shook her head. “Very little. But I don’t think Abie’s holding anything back.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t intentionally prevaricate,” Ben said, “but after such a traumatic experience, witnesses typically have a hard time recalling details. That’s with adults. With a child, separated from his parents and scared to death, the psychological prohibitions multiply. Has Mike suggested hypnosis?”

“He did,” Rutherford said. “We forbade it.”

No great surprise there. According to Mike, Rutherford had been nothing but an obstacle since they recovered Abie. Rutherford was guilt-ridden, afraid that his own inattentiveness and insensitivity had driven his son into the arms of a child molester. Now he was overcompensating, becoming so protective that he interfered with the police’s efforts to track the maniac down.

Ben turned back toward Rachel. “Has the sketch artist been in?”

“Oh … yes …” She gestured unhappily toward a charcoal sketch on the conference table in the center of the room.

Ben picked up the sketch and scrutinized it. The only salient features that emerged were a full and flowing head of red hair, which was almost certainly a wig, and thick black glasses, which were also probably part of the disguise. The rest of the sketch was utterly undistinguished. It could be anyone. It was useless.

“What about the car?” Ben asked.

“Registered under a false name. Seems he renewed the driver’s license of a teenage boy who died six years ago. There’s nothing to trace.”

Another dead end. The pervert seemed to have thought of everything.

Ben watched as Mike asked a few more questions. Abie seemed distant, unfocused, tired. He wasn’t saying much.

Mike called a break. Abie tried to leave the room with him, but Mike ordered him to stay put. Abie reluctantly agreed.

Mike stepped outside. Ben entered the hallway and met him.

“How’s the kid holding up?” Ben asked.

“The kid is fine,” Mike said, rubbing his hands together. “I, on the other hand, am a nervous wreck.”

“Been with him all day?”

“Off and on. When the shrinks didn’t have him.”

“What’s their verdict?”

“They think he’s doing remarkably well. They want him to remain under observation and in therapy for a while, but he seems amazingly resilient. No incurable traumatization.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that Abie’s just a boy. Kids don’t really notice what grown-ups look like. After all, adult faces are two or three feet away, up in the sky. Add the fact that this creep was wearing a disguise, and you have a witness who will never give us a definitive ID. We’re going to have to find him on our own.”

“What about that hellhole we found with the mattress and the camera?”

“We’ve torn the place apart, examined everything. The mattress, the camera equipment, every scrap of paper, and every piece of lint. Nothing we can trace.”

“Did the creep take the kid anywhere else?”

“That’s where Abie’s testimony gets really hairy. I think he did, but I can’t get anything concrete out of the kid’s descriptions. He had already been drugged by the time they left Celebration Station. He was weaving in and out of a thick fog the rest of the day. And needless to say, the creep didn’t leave a trail of bread crumbs for us. We’re damn lucky Abie thought to drop that blue book bag.”

“Abie’s damn lucky you saw it. And came to his rescue.”

“And what a two-edged sword that’s turned out to be!” Mike suddenly exclaimed.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, the kid’s been hanging all over me. Keeps talking about how I’m his hero, and I’m such a great guy, and when he grows up he wants to be just like me!”

“You don’t like being promoted to local hero?”

“Not when it means I have a ten-year-old for a groupie! It’s embarrassing!”

“Doesn’t fit the tough-guy image, huh?”

“I can’t get away from him for five minutes! He says he doesn’t feel safe without me. He says he wants me with him all day long.”

“Surely he’ll get police protection until this sicko is caught.”

“Natch. But get this—Rutherford pulled a few strings with a country-club buddy. Chief of Police Blackwell, to be specific.”

Ben nodded. He’d had the pleasure of meeting Chief Blackwell. Except it was no pleasure.

“Blackwell has assigned me to be the kid’s bodyguard! Can you imagine? Me! An experienced professional homicide detective! Reduced to being some kid’s baby-sitter.”

“A fate worse than death,” Ben said sympathetically. “Sounds like you better catch this perp.”

“Believe me, I’m trying.”

“How are the kid’s parents?”

“A royal pain in the buttinsky, that’s how.”

“Care to be more specific?”

Mike shrugged. “It’s always this way with these rich types. They don’t want anything to do with the police. Our work is dirty. It’s beneath them. They treat us like servants, like the people they pay to take out the trash. And they’re scared to death of bad publicity. They’d rather let a pervert roam the streets indefinitely than risk getting their name in the paper.” Mike glanced at his watch. “I’d better go back in. If I’m separated from the kid much longer, he’ll come out and attach himself to my sleeve.”

Ben returned to the observation room. He saw Mike reenter the interrogation room where Abie was waiting patiently.

“Lieutenant Morelli!” Abie cried, in his high-pitched chirp. He threw his arms around Mike and hugged him like a long-lost brother. Mike looked as if he were going to die.

“Looks like Abie has really taken a shine to Lieutenant Morelli,” Ben commented.

“Yes, hasn’t he?” Rutherford said dryly. “He never greets me like that.”

“Perhaps that’s because Lieutenant Morelli didn’t wait until he’d completed another nine holes before coming to his rescue,” Rachel said icily.

Rutherford glared at her, fuming.

Ben turned toward the mirror and pretended he hadn’t heard.

“All right,” Mike said to Abie. “Tell me again about the walk from Sam’s apartment to the mattress room.”

“I don’t ’member much,” Abie said unhappily. It was apparent that he wanted nothing more than to please his hero by providing useful answers. He simply had none to give.

“Can you describe the building the apartment was in?”

“I think it was white. Or sort of grayish.”

“Made of?”

“Brick. Oh, wait. Maybe wood.”

“Was it an apartment complex or a boardinghouse?”

“I think it was—oh—jeez, Lieutenant. I dunno.”

Mike cast his eyes heavenward. This was getting them nowhere. “Can you tell me anything about the building?”

Abie thought hard. “There were some little men outside.”

Mike blinked. “Little men?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You mean, children?”

“No, little men.”

“Midgets?”

Abie squirmed. “More like trolls.”

“Trolls?”

“Yeah.” Abie leaned forward. “I got this book at home by Maurice Sendak, and it has the coolest-looking trolls.”

“And these … trolls … they were outside the building?”

“Right. In the garden, I think.”

“The garden? What kind of garden?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just saw the trolls.”

Right. Trolls. Mike made a notation in his notebook. “Describe the route you took when you left the apartment.”

Abie shrugged. “It’s real hard to remember. He was like dragging me the whole time, and I couldn’t see much. Everything was kinda fuzzy, you know?”

“Do the best you can.”

“Well, first he dragged me past the trolls. …”

Mike gritted his teeth. “Yes, yes. Something other than the trolls, please.”

“Well, I remember I looked at the ground for a long time, ’cause I was afraid if he saw my face he might—I don’t know—he might do something to me. Then we walked into this real dark narrow place. And then I saw all the yellow numbers.”

“Yellow numbers?”

“Yeah. Well, doors with numbers on yellow …”

Mike’s mouth hung open for several moments. “Yellow—what?”

The strain showed in Abie’s face. “I don’t know. I was so afraid, and I was trying not to look up—”

“It’s okay, Abie. It’s okay.” Mike patted the boy on the back. “Tell me what else you recall.”

“Well, we walked by all the numbers and then we walked through a wall.”

“Wait a minute. Walked through a wall?”

Abie looked as if he might burst out crying at any moment. “Uh-huh,” he whispered.

“Okay, okay. And what did you see when you walked through the wall?”

“Airplanes.”

“Airplanes? Toy airplanes? Radio-controlled airplanes?”

“No. Real airplanes.”

“What were they doing?”

Abie looked at Mike as if he had suddenly dropped about five hundred IQ points in the boy’s estimation. “They were flying, of course.”

Mike pressed his hand against his forehead and paced around the perimeter of the small room. Ben knew what he must be thinking. The drug in Abie’s system had had a more profound effect than they realized. His descriptions just didn’t make sense.

“Do you remember anything else?” Mike asked.

“We walked for a long time after that.”

“What direction?”

“Uh … I’m not sure.”

“Was the sun in front of you or behind you?”

Abie thought for a moment. “I don’t remember.”

“Okay. How long did you walk?”

“Gosh, I dunno. A long time.”

“Half an hour?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“More? Less?”

Abie bit down on his lower lip. “About half an hour, I think.”

Well, that’s something useful, Ben thought. Maybe. He knew that the time estimates of adults separated from their wristwatches were often wildly inaccurate. An estimate made by a kid in a high-stress situation after being drugged was even more suspect.

“What’s the next thing you remember seeing, Abie?”

“We went inside another building and walked up those rickety stairs. Then we came to the room where he kept the mattress and the camera.” Abie smiled proudly. “Boy, I really smashed up one of his cameras but good, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, kid. You did a real number on it.” Mike put on a brave smile, but Ben found it patently unconvincing. Truth was, it would be virtually impossible to find the apartment where the creep first took Abie based on this information.

And there was another truth, one even more unsettling and inescapable. In this pervert’s long and checkered history, none of his victims had ever gotten away before. Abie was the only person alive who could possibly identify him. He hadn’t—but the creep didn’t know that.

They could hope that he would forget about Abie, would consider him too high a risk to approach now. But no one really believed that. It didn’t fit the profile. Child molesters were obsessive to the extreme. Once they fixed on a particular child, they stayed fixed.

As long as Sam was a free man, Abie wasn’t safe. Sam would be doing everything he could to find Abie.

And kill him.