Her Silent Cry

Sixty-Seven

“Who the hell is this kid?” Chitwood asked no one in particular.

Josie, Noah, Mettner, Gretchen, Oaks and Chitwood all crowded into one the Denton PD viewing rooms, watching the man they’d apprehended at the Ross home on CCTV while he sat alone in an interrogation room down the hallway. They’d left him cuffed and he sat slumped in one of the metal chairs, his bound wrists in his lap. He hadn’t said a word to any of them since they’d brought him in.

“He’s Amy Ross and Martin Lendhardt’s son,” Josie said. “I’m sure of it.”

Gretchen said, “You think she gave him all those scars?”

“I never liked her all that much,” Noah admitted. “But I’m not sure I could see her torturing a little boy.”

“No,” Josie said. “It wasn’t her. Martin was the one convicted of child endangerment. It had to be him.”

“Child endangerment wouldn’t account for the kind of abuse this kid endured, based on those scars,” Noah said. “Child endangerment is when you neglect your kid or put them in a dangerous situation. This kid was abused.”

“Well,” Josie said. “I’m not sure what happened, but he blames Amy for whatever happened to him.”

“Well, what the hell is his name?” Chitwood asked.

Oaks’s phone chirped. He answered it with a brusque hello, listened for a few minutes and said, “Thank you.” He turned to Josie and said, “That was one of my agents in Buffalo. They got in touch with the district attorney’s office there. They were able to view Martin Lendhardt’s file. He had a son—not a daughter. His name was Gideon. Gideon Lendhardt.”

“How old?” Josie asked.

“He’s twenty-six. I should have a driver’s license photo in a few minutes. We’ll see if it matches our suspect. He was found escaping Martin Lendhardt’s home at age nine, malnourished and scarred. Hadn’t been to school. Martin was arrested. Gideon was terrified of him and would never talk about him or anything that happened in the house. Martin’s defense was that Gideon’s mother was the one who beat and starved him. But she couldn’t be located.”

“How convenient for him,” Josie said.

Oaks continued, “They couldn’t prove it wasn’t her. The best they could do was charge him with child endangerment. One year in prison. Gideon was put into foster care—bounced around to a bunch of different homes—which is where he stayed until he aged out at eighteen.”

Gretchen said, “Natalie Oliver was a foster kid, too.”

“So now we know where they met,” Noah said.

“And we know that Amy-or-Tessa abandoned him. But we still don’t know where Lucy is. I’m going to talk to him.”