The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 12

A rap on the door jolts me out of a half-sleep. I don’t know how much time has passed, but it’s Shoffler, not Price, who steps into the room. “Let’s go,” he says.

I know right away that something’s happened. His attitude toward me has changed, but in a way I can’t read. He turns off the tape recorder, and I follow him out to his car. It’s a big white Ford, a Crown Victoria. It’s daytime – morning. I spent the night in the interrogation room.

It scares me when Shoffler holds open the door for me. Why is he suddenly solicitous of my feelings? Because: He feels sorry for me.

When he gets in and fastens his seat belt, I brace myself, rigid against the expected somber tone, the terrible news, the very worst news. It isn’t until we’ve gone a couple of blocks that I realize I’m holding my breath.

“The test came back,” Shoffler says, shaking his head.

“What?” This is not what I’m expecting, and my relief is immediate and profound. “You mean the polygraph test?”

“No,” Shoffler says. “No – the lab test. The test on the T-shirt.” He lets out a jet of air as he steers the car around a corner.

“And… what?”

“Chicken blood,” he says, with a quick look my way. “The shirt was soaked in chicken blood.”

“Chicken blood!” I repeat, elated. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s good news, I know that much. The blood was not human blood. It wasn’t my kid’s blood.

“UmmmHmmmm,” Shoffler says.

I realize now what Jason Price was getting at with his questions about religion and animal sacrifice. My elation fades.

“Look,” Shoffler says, “we pretty much, well, we also came up with some solid witnesses who saw you at the fair with the boys.”

“Huh.”

“Coupla fair employees,” Shoffler goes on. “The guy who runs the Jacob’s ladder – he remembered your boys real well. Told us one of the kids climbed the ladder like a monkey.”

“Sean.”

Shoffler nods. “Yeah, well for a while after your kid got to the top, there was a big line to try the ladder – older kids who figured if the little guy could do it, it must be a piece of cake. At a buck a try, the guy who ran the concession was grateful, so he had a good reason to remember.”

“He just sort of came out of the woodwork?”

“Had the Sunday and Monday off, so we didn’t get to him until this morning. He’s a local, doesn’t travel with the fair. And then after we questioned him, we wanted to check him out.” A sigh. “Make sure he doesn’t know you, doesn’t know Liz, doesn’t know the kids – that kind of thing. Actually, we got a number of fair employees who saw you and the kids. The guy who runs the archery concession – he remembers you and your boys real well. And there were others.”

“Hunh.”

“After we found that T-shirt, we had to check, you understand? Because if you went to the fair to set up an alibi – well…”

“I guess.”

“Look” – Shoffler is irritated and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand – “The chicken blood, all the people who saw you – none of that lets you off the hook.”

“No?”

“Think about it. Even if you’re at the fair with the boys, who’s to say you didn’t take them somewhere afterwards, you know? – then go back to Prebble yellin’ about how you can’t find your kids. The chicken blood? I don’t know. Maybe you got a secret life.” A blue Mercedes SUV cuts him off, and he reacts by hitting the horn. “Jesus, look at that guy. I should stick on the bubble. Anyway, what does get you off the hook is we got your afternoon pieced together now from stand-up witness to stand-up witness, got you covered from the time you dropped off the tape at the TV station with the kids in tow to the time you showed up at security saying the kids were missing.” He pauses. “So… looks like I owe you an apology, Alex.”

We’re sitting at a light. My euphoria lasts about as long as it takes for the light to turn. Yes, it feels good that I’m no longer a suspect. But the kids are still gone. It’s still the same nightmare.

I say nothing.

“I’m sorry about the polygraph test,” Shoffler continues, “and that whole routine with Price. I apologize. I really do.”

“You thought I did it.”

He shrugs.

We turn onto Klingle Road and head toward Connecticut. I look out the window, shake my head. “And in the meantime, whoever took my kids has all the time in the world…”

I think of the kidnapper with my kids, in my house, that creepy folded rabbit, the line of dimes, the shirt soaked in blood. And me in the interrogation room – and all the while the trail getting colder.

I rant on about this, and Shoffler just lets me go at it until finally, it seems pointless to continue. Out the window, a couple of little kids holding balloons from the zoo walk past with their mother. If only we’d gone to the zoo. I try to suppress these useless excursions into rearranging the past, but they pop up at least a hundred times a day. I press my eyes shut.

After a while, Shoffler says: “This man with the dog, at the jousting ring. Got a couple of witnesses claim they saw him with your boys.”

My heart goes cold. “You think that’s the guy?”

“Well… we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. The tall man, the dog with the ruff – all that was in the news, so we take everything with a grain of salt. Still, we start asking if anyone saw the missing twins with this guy? And of course people did see this. Or at least they” – he makes quotation marks in the air – “think so.”

“They think so.”

“Lucky for us, somehow it never got into the news what kind of dog it was – so that gives us a kinda litmus test for the witnesses. We know it was a whippet, so if they saw a man with a German shepherd or a dachshund…”

“Right.”

“I was gonna ask you about what kinda look you got at the guy? You remember his face?”

I hesitate. I can bring the scene up in my memory, but what I was looking for was Kevin and Sean, to reassure myself they were still where they were supposed to be. As soon as I spotted them in the crowd of cheering kids, I relaxed. “I don’t know,” I tell Shoffler. “I didn’t really pay attention. I noticed his costume, and the dog. I thought he worked for the fair.”

“I’d like to put you with a sketch artist – see what you come up with. I’ll set it up.”

The light changes and we turn onto Connecticut. “I’ve got a press conference at five,” Shoffler says. “You want to join me? You and Liz? I mean it’s your vindication. You maybe ought to be there to take questions.”

There’s no maybe about it. I know what Claire Carosella would tell me. If it will maximize airtime, Liz and I will stand in front of the crowd of reporters all night.

I know from experience what it will be like. They’ll shout each other down for the right to lob questions at us. The questions will be either rhetorical (“Are you relieved that suspicion has been lifted from your shoulders?”) or impossible to answer (“Do you feel the police are getting closer to finding your boys?”).

“We’ll be there,” I tell him.

In the next two days, energetic friends and neighbors rally around. Now that I’m no longer a suspect, the floodgates are open again. The household is inundated with food – casseroles, cookies, salads, enormous baskets stuffed with every imaginable edible.

Ordway Street is aglow with yellow ribbons. Connecticut Avenue is decorated, too, for blocks in both directions.

A courier brings handmade cards from the boys’ fellow campers at St. Albans: Magic-Marker flowers, carefully printed words of support, cramped and juvenile signatures.

The accumulation of teddy bears and flowers left at the curb gets to me. They remind me of roadside displays at crash sites, the posthumous tributes in Oklahoma City, the heaps of flowers and stuffed animals that followed Princess Di’s accident, the mounds of commemorative tribute outside Ground Zero. Funerary offerings.

The police established a hotline and although they discourage the idea of a second one, a tag team of neighbors can’t be stopped. Jack organizes the volunteers who run this “totline,” coordinating their shifts. Unlike the official hotline, this one promises a reward plus confidentiality.

My old friend Ezra Sidran, a computer genius, sponsors the construction of a website: findkevinandsean.com. Liz’s friend Molly launches a drive to enroll volunteers to monitor the site. Within two days it’s pulling in almost four hundred hits an hour.

Since I’ve been exonerated, the station revives the reward fund, with Krista herself doing stand-ups to make appeals. Fox tops up its original seed money with another five grand. The station’s accounting firm contributes time to receive and tally contributed funds. Within a few days, the fund holds more than $90,000.

A trio of Liz’s old running buddies organizes the printing and distribution of thousands of flyers. For the most part, we’re captives in the house, but we’re told that the boys’ faces are on every conceivable storefront, bus shelter, telephone pole, each flyer with its little fringe of tear-offs imprinted with the hotline number and Web address.

I have a conference with Mary McCafferty, the private eye I hired to help search for the boys. She explains to me what she’s done, which is mostly to “troll for clues” by interviewing dozens of our friends and acquaintances – and new friends and acquaintances of Liz and the boys up in Maine. This has produced “nothing so far.” Recently, she’s been concentrating her efforts on household help: plumbers, babysitters, plaster repair guys, dishwasher installers, painters (I gave her the entire file of home-repair receipts). “It’s amazing how many times it turns out to be someone like that.”

“But not in this case.”

“Not so far.”

I work with a police artist named Marijke Wilcke, trying to dredge up the image of the man with the dog. Since I just caught a glimpse of the guy, I’m not optimistic. Shoffler insists “Dutchie,” as he calls Marijke, is “real good at coaxing details outta eyewitnesses. She’s just about a genius.”

We have trouble right away, trying to establish the shape of the man’s face. The fact that he was wearing a ruff, too, creates problems, not only because it makes it hard for me to determine the length of his face, but also because it obscures the conjunction of neck and shoulder, his jawline, even his ears. The neatly trimmed goatee and mustache don’t help, either. Despite Marijke’s skill at translating my vague impressions onto the page, the result is vague and generic. The man stares blankly back from the final image, neatly groomed hair and trimmed goatee and mustache, just as I remember it, but the rest is just a guess.

Shoffler stops by to take a look.

“What do you think?” Marijke asks.

“Looks like they’re all on the same bus.”

“What?”

“Marijke and Larry – he’s another sketch artist – they been through this with three other eyewitnesses who saw this guy with your kids.” To Marijke he says: “Go on. Give him the tour.”

She brings up in sequence five versions of the man with the dog, all of which prominently feature the goatee and sharply trimmed mustache. Apart from that, the sketches vary in head shape and other features. “Facial hair,” Marijke sighs, “especially when it is trimmed into geometric shapes and clean lines – it’s just so dramatic it makes the other features fade. What you remember is the facial hair. Maybe,” she says in her slightly accented English, “it’s even pasted on.”

Shoffler shakes his head.

“And that ruff around his neck – that’s another problem.”

Marijke flicks back to my sketch. “You are happy with this one?” she asks me.

I shrug. “I guess.”

When she taps her mouse a few times, the hair and the beard and mustache disappear. Clean-shaven, the man could be anybody.

“I make a composite from all of them,” Marijke says, “then I do one with the facial hair, one clean-shaven, okay?”

The official position shifts. With the boys stipulated as the victims of a kidnapping, an FBI agent is assigned to the case. Shoffler tells me ahead of time that Judy Jones is very young but very smart. “A rookie, but a real firecracker.”

We gather in the family room. Shoffler introduces her and she explains to us that the Bureau’s involvement in kidnapping cases has been routine since the Lindbergh case.

Liz sits next to me and holds my hand, although there’s nothing intimate about this. We’re like two strangers at the site of a disaster, our touch the instinctual clutch for human contact. Liz and I present a united front in public – and that includes sessions like this one. But except for moments when she breaks down and needs – literally – a shoulder to cry on, she’s formal and distant, clearly uncomfortable with our forced reunion. I’ve yet to catch sight of her, for instance, in her bathrobe.

“The depth of the Bureau’s involvement varies,” Judy Jones says, carefully making eye contact with each of us. “Since we are satisfied with police conduct in the investigation, our role will be limited to support.”

Jack immediately protests. “What – the FBI’s so hung up on terrorists a couple of kids don’t matter? Don’t my grandsons deserve your full attention?”

I think the limited role for the Bureau is a plus, but Jack doesn’t see it that way. From the way he goes on about how the boys deserve the best, it’s clear that despite the memorable series of FBI screwups over the past decade (Ruby Ridge, Waco, the spy Robert Hanssen, the embarrassing repression of leads in the 9/11 attack, the shocking errors at Bureau labs), Jack harbors fantasies of Bureau efficiency and excellence that go back to Eliot Ness.

Jones assures us that the Bureau’s limited role is not because the FBI is “preoccupied with homeland security. We’re prepared to lend whatever support Detective Shoffler requires and requests.”

“How can you be satisfied with the police conduct?” Jack persists. “They thought Alex was the guy and while they’re putting him through the wringer, the real guy’s making tracks.” He throws up his hands.

“I understand your feelings. With hindsight, we’re all geniuses. But you have to understand that there’s nothing in the conduct of the case that warrants criticism. As soon as he was summoned, Detective Shoffler took steps to secure the scene – a very difficult scene to secure, by the way. He immediately launched a vigorous search and inquiry. In the time since the boys disappeared, he and his team have questioned a large number of witnesses, some of them more than once. He’s made a good liaison with the District police. He’s pursued the case by the book, and that includes” – she glances my way and offers a tiny sympathetic grimace – “suspecting and questioning Mr. Callahan.”

“How’s that?” Jack says, his face red with belligerence. “They waste their time with Alex here, and boom – no one’s even looking for my grandsons. Everyone thinks they’re dead.”

Jones looks down at her fingers – the nails are bitten raw. “In the field of criminal justice,” she says, “we are all to a certain extent students of history. We have to rely on known precedent. In suspecting Mr. Callahan, Detective Shoffler was going with history. The truth is that most child abductions and murders are committed by parents – especially when those parents are separated.” She hefts the police file. “This kidnapper didn’t go by the book. You just don’t come across many cases – I couldn’t find a single one – where a kidnapping occurs many miles from a victim’s home and yet the kidnapper returns to that home, where he has one of the victims place a phone call to a parent, a phone call that is not a ransom plea.” She shakes her head. “It’s all very risky behavior.”

“What about the T-shirt?” I ask. “Do you have any theories about that?”

She sighs and glances at Detective Shoffler. “There’s nothing in the database, really nothing. Maybe some kind of animal sacrifice. We’re looking into that.”

Shoffler grimaces. “What I think is maybe the T-shirt was just to throw off pursuit. Not that we let up on other suspects or possibilities. You got two kids missing, the search is really relentless. But until that lab test came back, it was natural to focus certain resources on Alex.” He wags his head sadly. “I think the T-shirt was deliberate and it worked like a charm.”

“A red herring,” Jones says, “almost literally. Except the fish on the T-shirt was a whale instead of a herring.”

Liz groans and her head droops.

“This guy is too fucking cute,” my father says.

“Detective Shoffler has asked me to pick up a couple of threads in the investigation,” Jones tells us. “First, that folded rabbit – I’ve already checked into that.”

“Really – what did you find out?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Not much. We ran it by an origami expert. He said it was cleverly constructed and of high intermediate level, but that’s about all he could tell us. It’s now with a second expert, but I’m not very confident this lead’s going anywhere. Like any other subculture you get into, from skydiving to candlepins – origami has more devotees than you’d think possible.”

“What about the material?” Liz asks. “That skin or whatever it is.”

“Apparently it does feel like skin. It’s called elephant hide. But in fact it’s a special kind of paper used in origami.”

“Really.”

“It stands up to being folded wet, the expert explained. Very commonly available and pretty much the paper of choice at a certain level, especially for animal forms. I’m afraid tracking the source of the paper does not look promising. The Internet alone has dozens of sources.”

Liz looks as if she’s going to start crying.

“The other area Detective Shoffler has asked me to pursue,” Jones says, “is the question of Mr. Callahan’s possible enemies. I’ve got a copy of the list Mr. Callahan supplied, and when we’re done here” – she shifts her gaze to me – “I’d like to go over it.”

My mother sticks up her hand, as if she’s in a classroom. Her face is bright red. “What if it’s because they’re twins,” she blurts out. “I keep thinking about that Nazi doctor… his experiments.” She presses her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at Liz and me.

My father puts his arm around her shoulder. “I thought of that, too,” he says.

This is a possibility I try to keep out of my head. I can’t handle it, can’t stand the idea of some modern-day Mengele doing things to the boys. They’d be better off dead. And so would I.

“I checked on twins,” Judy Jones tells us, with a negative shake of the head, “and I can tell you that in the past twenty years, there are very few cases of twins being kidnapped. Or twins going missing. None at all that seem relevant to this case.”

“What about those boys out in L.A.? Lopez? Some kind of Hispanic name.” This from Jack.

“The Ramirez twins,” I say.

“It sounds like Alex knows why that case isn’t relevant,” Jones says, with a nod my way.

“Police caught the kidnapper with the bodies of the boys,” I tell them. “Then he committed suicide.”

“That’s about as closed as a case can get,” Jones says. “So…”

Liz’s mother, Marguerite, flies in from Maine, and nearly requires hospitalization again after fighting in through the press crowd.

Although, already – just one week after the abduction – that is beginning to diminish.

Compassionate strangers keep on volunteering for the search teams – which continue, weather permitting, to comb the area around the fairgrounds. When we can, we join them – Liz, Jack, Liz’s mother, my father, and me. Outfitted in cutting-edge gear donated by Tenleytown Outdoor Sports (a friend of a friend of mine owns it), we drive the hour and a half to Cromwell and then separate, according to police direction, each of us joining a different search team.

Mom’s eyesight won’t allow her to stumble around in brambles and ravines. She stays behind to help with the Power-of-Prayer outreach group launched by one of her friends, working a vast network of e-mail circles.

The single telephone in my study has been joined by half a dozen other receivers, spillover lines installed by the authorities. “If the kidnapper does call,” my mother explains to one of her group, “we don’t want him to have any trouble getting through.”

The phone never stops ringing. When we’re at home, we all pitch in to answer calls, logging name, number, and purpose of call on printed information sheets.

Shoffler stops by one afternoon, now ten days after the disappearance. Everyone else is busy so we talk alone.

First he tells me he’s getting a lot more information about the man with the dog. “What we’re getting is that this guy had kids around him all the time. It’s the dog, right? It’s a very cute dog. It works like a magnet for this guy. A kid magnet.”

“That’s what I saw – a bunch of kids petting this dog.”

“We got some confirmation from one of the ticket sellers at the gate. He remembers the boys leaving with a man and a dog.”

“Remembers them leaving? Really? Where’s this ticket seller been?”

“He’s kind of a reluctant witness. Has a rap sheet. He wasn’t coming forward to volunteer, that’s for damn sure. We got to him the second time around. We’re going through the whole employee roster again, see – and this time we ask did he see a tall man with a dog and two kids leaving the park. Well, this kid, basically a kind of nervous Nellie, a law-abiding citizen except he likes to smoke pot, you know – he worries about it. What if he keeps his mouth shut? Would that be lying? Would that be obstruction? Would that be a parole violation? So, he comes forward.”

“Huh.”

“I was skeptical, too. How can he remember this? Thousands of people coming and going every single day – half of ’em dressed like Friar Tuck or King Arthur. And we’re talking about more than a week ago now.”

“Ten days.”

“Right. So anyway, here’s what the guy tells me. He doesn’t really remember the twins, just two kids about the same size; he didn’t really look at ’em. What he remembers is that the group struck him as weird.”

“The group?”

“The two kids, the man, the dog. I ask what does he mean. He’s got knights and princesses up the kazoo, he’s got boatloads of Goths and… this little group strikes him as weird? Weird how? Weird why? And what he tells me is he noticed that the man was in costume, the dog was in costume – but the kids were not. That didn’t make sense to him. Usually, he said, it’s the other way around.”

“Hunh.”

“When he said that, it rang true, you know? It’s not the kind of thing you’d make up. Plus, he nailed the dog.”

“Said it was a whippet?”

Shoffler pulls out his notebook, puts on his glasses. He’s very attached to his notebooks, and he writes everything down. Sometimes he’ll refer to notes several times in the course of a conversation. He’s got hundreds of notebooks. He jokes that one day he’ll write his memoirs.

Now he finds what he’s looking for. “Yeah, so here it is. I ask him what kind of dog the tall guy has, and he tells me it’s ‘one of those fast dogs. Like a greyhound, but not as big.’”

“There you go.”

“So then I ask him what the owner was wearing. And he says: ‘I told you – a costume.’ I keep at it: what kind of costume? He tells me his sister got him the job, he’s not into this Renaissance shit. Then he points out the obvious – people don’t come to Renaissance fairs dressed up like cowboys or superheroes.”

“Right.” I can tell Shoffler is excited about this, but I can’t see where he’s going.

“The guy’s getting real tired of me,” the detective says, “but I press him. Can he be more specific? Well, the tall man wasn’t a king. He wasn’t a knight. The guy didn’t know what he was. His costume – it had this ruff, same crazy neckware as the skinny dog. And then he tells me the guy wore some kind of tights and he had a flute.’” Shoffler looks up at me, peering over his reading glasses. “I say hold it, he had a flute? Cause I got that from one other source, but I didn’t make much of it. The kid brightens, you know, like he’s just had a realization. ‘I think that’s it,’ he tells me. ‘The guy wore this jacket, you know, four different colors. And the flute. That’s what he was supposed to be: the Pied Piper.’”

Shoffler closes his notebook. He looks pleased with himself, but I feel a skitter of dread down the back of my neck. How did the fairy tale go? The way I remember, the Piper got rid of the village’s rats, but the town wouldn’t pay up. He piped a tune and all the children followed him. And then – didn’t the children disappear?