Lost Innocents (8 page)

Mary Beth pushed her chair back from the table and examined her daughter critically. “Heather,” she said, “what in the world inspired you to wear those two items of clothing together?”

Heather looked down at her dull green shirt and her lavender overalls and gazed wearily at her mother. “They look okay,” she said.

Mary Beth shook her head. “They look completely ridiculous, Heather. You wonder why you have no friends.”

Frank sipped his coffee and closed his eyes. He had a sudden image of Sandi Starnes in that ketchup-stained blouse, clutching a photo of her daughter. Promising God any extravagant thing, if only she could just set eyes on Rebecca again. “She looks fine,” he said through clenched teeth.

Mary Beth stood up and walked over to the coffeepot, high heels clicking against the linoleum. “What do you know about it, Frank?” she said.

A knock on the back door precluded his reply. Mary Beth opened the door, prepared to excoriate the person who dared intrude on her family breakfast. But her stiffness vanished at the sight of the two young people in the doorway.

“Karla,” she exclaimed with a broad smile. “What a nice surprise. Come on in.”

Heather blanched when she saw the visitors. Karla Need-ham lived two streets over and was one of the most popular girls at school. She was a cheerleader, had perfect looks, perfect clothes, and a boyfriend. A boyfriend who made Heather swoon every time she thought of him. A boyfriend who was standing in her doorway.

“Who’s your friend?” Mary Beth asked.

“This is Richie Talbot. Hi, Heather.”

Heather gulped down the corner of a Pop-Tart. As she mumbled, “Hi,” some crumbs escaped and sprayed out on the table. Heather had known Karla Needham all her life. As little girls, they had played together. But once they hit fifth grade, Karla had moved on to other things. Not that she wasn’t nice. She always said hi and asked how Heather’s parents were. But that was all. Until now. This morning. This moment. Heather suddenly felt sick to her stomach.

“We were passing by and we thought you might want to walk to school with us,” Karla said pleasantly.

“Why?” asked Heather.

“Heather,” Mary Beth scolded, sensing a golden opportunity for her daughter to be seen, for once, in the right company. “Can’t you be friendly?” Mary Beth turned back to the couple crowded in the doorway. “Heather was just about to leave for school, weren’t you, honey? I’m sure she’d love to walk with you.”

The phone rang. Frank reached over and picked it up, glad for any distraction from his daughter’s discomfiture and his wife’s transparent machinations. He listened for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

He reached for his keys and wallet on the counter. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

“Did you find that girl and the baby, Chief Cameron?” Karla asked politely.

“Not yet.” Frank sighed. “Maybe this will be the break we need. Excuse me, everyone.” As the door shut behind him, he heard Mary Beth oozing charm to the visitors and ordering Heather to ready herself for the march to school.

“What’s up, Pete?” Frank asked as he banged back the door of the station house.

Pete Millard’s tie hung loose around his open collar, his normally well-groomed hair was disheveled, raked through by nervous fingers. He jerked his head in the direction of the sergeant’s desk. A pudgy woman with steel-rimmed glasses and strawberry blond hair in a messy ponytail, wearing a SUNY warm-up jacket and Reebok running shoes, was looking around the station house disdainfully.

“A witness,” Pete explained.

Frank raised his eyebrows and regarded the woman with interest.

“She says she read about it in the paper this morning,” said Pete.

“What? She doesn’t watch television? It was on the tube all night.”

“She doesn’t own a television,” Pete said. “She made a point of telling me.”

“An intellectual,” Frank snorted.

“Anyway, she’s here now,” said Pete.

“Fine. Let’s talk to her. Bring her down to room one.”

Frank headed down the corridor to one of the interview rooms and turned on the overhead lights. They illuminated every corner of the sickly green room. Frank sat down heavily on one of the molded plastic seats and looked at his watch. Fifteen hours had elapsed since the girl and the baby had been reported missing, and with each passing hour, their prospects grew more ominous.

The door opened, and Pete Millard led the woman into the room. “Chief Cameron, this is Miss Julia Sewell.”

“Miz,” she corrected him.

“Thank you for coming in, Ms. Sewell,” Frank said politely. He knew better than to alienate this alien creature. She appeared to be in her thirties, not a college student, as her jacket might indicate. “Detective Millard says you saw the news of the disappearance of Rebecca Starnes and Justin Wallace in the paper.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“And you recognized them from the pictures?”

“The girl. I saw her yesterday.”

“You saw her by herself?”

“No. She had a baby with her. I couldn’t swear it was the same baby. They all look alike to me.”

“Where did you see them?”

“I was in the park, reading.”

Frank’s heart began to race. “What park was that, Ms. Sewell?”

“Binney Park,” she said. “I was sitting on a bench, near the duck pond. Across from the parking lot. I was reading.”

Something was familiar about her, but Frank could not quite put his finger on it. He was just too tired. “What time was this?” he asked, making a note.

“About two o’clock.”

“What were they doing?”

“They were just sitting there. The kid was in a stroller. She was sitting on a bench.”

“Any…anything unusual? Any reason why you noticed them?”

“A man came up to them and started talking to her.” The woman disclosed this news with grim satisfaction.

Frank felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. Perverts. I knew it, he thought. What is it with these bastards that makes them need to mess with children? His thoughts strayed to his own daughter and her recent experience with her schoolteacher. Kids weren’t safe anywhere these days. Even in school. “Did you think it was someone she knew?”

The woman squinted and shook her head. “No,” she said. “A stranger.”

“Do you mind my asking how you know that?” Frank asked mildly. He was always wary of witnesses who noticed too much.

“Body language,” she said flatly.

Frank nodded and made a note on the paper in front of him, not satisfied with her answer. Something about her was setting off warning bells in him. Most witnesses who came forward voluntarily were eager, not hostile. They were filled with the pure zeal of the innocent bystander, and they were definitely on the side of the police. “Can you describe the man?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“Height, weight, age?”

The woman exhaled noisily. “I couldn’t tell his exact age. I wasn’t that close to him. I would say in his thirties. Blondish brown hair, medium build.”

An image came to Frank Cameron’s mind of a man who perfectly fit that description. The man who had sat in the courtroom and denied coercing Frank’s teenage daughter into having sex with him. Thirties, sandy hair, medium build. Douglas Blake. Frank’s curiosity suddenly became personal.

“Wearing?”

“Those chino-type pants. And a dark jacket.”

“Color?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. Might have been blue.”

Frank studied her through narrowed eyes, and suddenly it came back to him—how he knew her. Now he remembered. It was a while ago. She had reported that a guy had grabbed her, tried and failed to rape her. She’d scared him off by screaming. They never found the guy. “Miss Sewell,” he said.

“Miz,” she corrected him.

“I’ve been thinking that you looked familiar to me. Didn’t you report an assault a while back?…”

Julia Sewell blushed but didn’t flinch. “Yeah,” she said. “Two years ago. And a fat lot you guys did about it. Anyway, what difference does that make?”

Frank looked over his notes and shrugged. “No real difference,” he said slowly. “I’m a little concerned that you may not have perceived the situation clearly because of your own experience. We aren’t interested in wasting precious hours trying to hunt down some fellow who stopped to ask Rebecca Starnes for the time.”

Julia Sewell regarded him with a combination of scorn and outrage. She started to retort, then stopped herself. Her first reaction was to lash out at him. But something more important was at stake here, and even these cops, she reminded herself, were trying, in their own blundering, overbearing way, to do something about it. Besides, she felt guilty. Definitely guilty. She should have intervened. She should have walked up and confronted the man, told him to leave the girl alone.

Julia thought carefully and composed herself before she replied. “He spoke to her, then he sat down next to her on the bench. Then he offered her something. I don’t know what. After a minute she seemed to take whatever it was. Then he began to get closer to her. You’re right. I was suspicious of him, although my own experience was a little bit different. In my experience, I was walking along and a guy grabbed me from behind and pulled me down into the bushes.”

There was a brief silence in the interview room. After a moment she continued. “She had a funny look on her face. Like she was uncomfortable. Then she got up and walked away.”

“She got up and walked away?” Frank asked.

“Yes.”

“And what did the man do?”

“He sat on the bench for a while. Just long enough to pretend that he had some reason for being there. Then he got up and walked away, too.”

“In the same direction?”

“Yes.”

Frank and Pete Millard exchanged a solemn, apprehensive glance.

“Did you see what happened after that?”

“No,” she said in a low voice, lowering her eyes. “I should have followed them. I wish I had.”

“You had no way of knowing, Ms. Sewell. All right,” he said briskly. “We’d like to try and get a composite sketch from your description. It may give us a picture of the suspect. You may remember this procedure from your own experience. Do you think you could work with our artist on this?”

“Yes, sure,” she said.

“Now,” said Frank, peering down at his notes. “What about other people that might have seen this man? Did you notice anyone else in the park? Anyone who might be able to ID him for us?

Julia sighed and looked at the imitation stuccoed surface of the dropped ceiling. “There were a couple of women with kids. One woman walking her baby in a carriage. A couple of joggers, I think….” She shook her head. “Wait, a guy doing tai chi…that’s a series of exercises…a martial art, I believe.”

“I know what it is,” Frank said irritably. “What did he look like?”

“He was Asian. Young—late twenties, probably. He was wearing warm-up clothes.”

“That’s a good place for us to start,” said Frank, standing up. “Thank you for coming forward. If you remember anything else…”

“I’ll call you,” she promised.

He hesitated, then added, “I only wish someone had done the same for you.”

Julia stopped at the door. “I hope it’s not too late,” she said sincerely.

“So do I,” said Frank in an edgy voice. “So do I.”

T
he banner headline on the
Taylorsville Tribune
proclaimed MISSING over the photos of a pretty high school girl and a laughing, curly-haired baby. Ellen Henson stared at the photos and read the caption: “
Six-month-old Justin Wallace and fifteen-year-old Rebecca Starnes…
”

“What’ll it be, lady?” the man in the kiosk asked.

Ellen looked up at him, startled by his abruptness, then held up pack of mints. “These…and the paper,” she said.

The man toted up the price indifferently, and Ellen stuffed both the paper and the mints into her purse. She walked down the block, gazing into windows as she passed by. She was so preoccupied that she scarcely registered what she saw. Finally she found herself standing still, staring into one window for a long time. She read the name of the shop on the window and felt disoriented. How long had this store been here, she wondered. She rarely came to town, but still…It was not there when she…when Ken was a baby. She was sure of it. She pushed the door to the Precious Littles Shop open and took a cautious step inside. The walls were painted a creamy yellow, and wallpaper bordered with ducks and dancing letters of the alphabet substituted for a molding around the ceiling. Ellen looked around, wide-eyed, at the racks of frilly dresses, footed sleepers, and tiny pastel sweaters. She was reluctant to touch anything. She walked around the store, gripping her purse as if it were likely to be stolen, although there was no one else in the store except for the young salesgirl, who was sitting behind a glass case, full of baby bonnets and silver rattles.

The salesgirl was folding hooded terrycloth bath towels into neat piles. She smiled at the gaunt, graying woman who stood helplessly in the middle of the shop.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked.

“I’ve just come to get a few things,” Ellen said.

“Grandchild?” the girl asked pleasantly.

Ellen stared at her as if the question were somehow confusing. “No,” she finally said. “No…just a baby.”

If the salesgirl was surprised by Ellen’s response, she didn’t show it. “How old is the baby?” she asked smoothly.

Ellen looked at her blankly for a moment. Then she unconsciously glanced at the newspaper sticking out of her purse and said, “Uh…around six months.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy,” said Ellen.

The salesgirl came out from behind the counter and led Ellen over to the rack of crayon-bright outfits appliqued with fire trucks or puppies or baseballs. The assortment was both dazzling and daunting. Gently Ellen parted the hangers, her eyes alight at the various cunning outfits.

“Does he like giraffes?” the girl asked, pulling out a pale green sweatsuit adorned with jungle animals.

Ellen gazed at the little suit. “He loves all animals,” she said.

“What about cars? Is he into cars yet?” the girl queried, liberating a royal blue and canary yellow combination with a race car motif.