David Putnam - The Replacements

My hand instinctively went to the sheriff’s badge on the chain around my neck. Before I could speak, Mack jumped in. “Sheriff’s Department, ma’am, you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

She stepped out and closed the door behind her. Mack and I looked at each other. Her maneuver was common among crooks who didn’t want their contraband discovered. Or wanted to hide kidnapped children inside. My heart rate increased. Not this easy, it couldn’t be this easy.

“Are you talking about Micah Mabry?” I asked.

“Who else would I be talking about?”

Mack said, “We’re looking for Jonas.”

“What’s he done?” she replied.

“Have you seen him recently?” I asked.

She looked from Mack back to me. “No, not for ages.”

Mack started to say something. I held my hand up, stopped him, and asked, “What is your relationship to the Mabrys?”

“None of your damn business. Get off my property. There’s nothing here for you. I told you he’s not here.”

I said, “Micah Mabry is dead.”

She swayed a bit and put a hand out and grabbed the door frame for support. Her voice lost its force, “When…how?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You didn’t know. He died of natural causes two years ago.”

“Come in, come in. I need to sit.” She opened the door to a musty dimness the sunlight tried to penetrate. We followed her inside.

No children watched television or hung out waiting to be rescued. The square room’s naked concrete floor contained a ratty couch, an easy chair, and a swayed, rope-slat bed. The place smelled of cinnamon and sweat. In one corner sat a dorm refrigerator with a hot plate on top. Tidy and organized, the shack held the bare minimum for survival, with nothing left for comfort or luxury. She went over to the easy chair, sat, and rocked and looked off into the distance.

“Ma’am?” Mack said. His cell rang. He stepped outside to answer it.

I got down on complaining knees and put my hand on hers. “How long have you and Micah lived here?”

“Twenty-odd years. Met him walking along the highway with a summer monsoon coming. I stopped for him.” She brought her eyes down to mine. “He wouldn’t take the ride, said he needed the time to walk, said he’d already walked a hundred miles. He looked like he’d come a hundred miles. I told him I lived down the road right here, another ten miles or so, and if he wanted to he could stop to rest and have some water. He looked real bad, about to collapse. Didn’t think he’d make the ten miles. To tell you the truth, I thought he’d walk right off into oblivion.”

I nodded. “What happened two years ago? Where did he go?”

“I thought he’d come back. I did. Still did, until just now, when you sauntered in fat and happy to ruin my life.”

She rocked some more and I waited.

“Two years back, his son, the spittin’ image of Micah, he come drivin’ up in a fire-engine-red car without any warnin’, nothing, not so much as a letter. Old Micah, he never talked about any family. Didn’t know he had any. Said, ‘May, this is my son.’ The boy said something like, ‘Yeah, nice to meet ya,’ or something, and turned back to Micah, and said, ‘Can I talk to you outside?’ Rude little bastard. Maybe twenty, twenty-three, too old to be rude like that.

“Micah, he came back in and said he had ta go, said he’d be back in a couple days. That’s goin’ on two years. Now you tell me he’s not comin’ back. I had a thing for that crotchety old man.”

The weathered skin sagged under her eyes, giving her a hound dog appearance. “I’m real sorry for your loss, May. We’re trying to find his son, and we could use your help.”

“Nothin’ I can do. I’ve had enough jabbering for one day. Now it’s time for you to leave.”

“Are there any of Micah’s things here? Anything with an address on it?”

“He had nothin’ when he got here, and he left with nothin’.”

“We’re looking for you to tell us anything, anything at all that might help us.”

She stopped rocking and looked right at me. “I can tell you that son of his was crazy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Saw it in his eyes. When you’ve lived as many years as I have, you can tell by the eyes.”

“What did he look like? How did he wear his hair? Did he have any tattoos?”

“He had on a pair of nice trousers, the kind you wear with a suit, but he didn’t have on the suit. He wore his white button-down shirt open, no t-shirt underneath, kind of uncouth. He had two tattoos, like you said. One was very odd, that’s why I remember it. A heart with a lot of detail.” She pointed to her chest over her own heart. “Only in the center, colored real bright, he had a little yellow light, and inside that was a lump of scar tissue. Right below, scrolled in nice letters, was the name ‘Bella.’”

The wound in his chest, the place his mother had shot him. “And the second tattoo?”

“Big bold black letters across his stomach.”

“What did it say?”

“Couldn’t tell, his shirt flapped this way and that. And, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really care. The look on my Micah’s face…my Micah was hurting inside just looking at the boy. And that’s not right. That’s not right, I tell you. Not for a father to act that way toward his son.”

Back outside of the dark interior, sunlight blinded me for a moment. Mack leaned on the T-Bird’s fender, his arms crossed. “The old bag give up anything useful?”

“Not a thing.”

“That phone call was from Chief Wicks. She wants us back ASAP. They just got a ransom call.”

Headed toward Montclair, I put the car seat all the way back and closed my eyes. “The ransom call come from Jonas?”

“Don’t know. No way to tell for sure.”

“So we don’t know if Jonas has help?”

“The call came in on the hotline. Wicks played it for me.”

“And?”

“The person was all over the place, started off low and concise and worked up to manic and screaming at the end. Said, among other things, that he wants an even million. He said, ‘Three hundred thousand a piece will do it, just make it an even million.’”

I sat up.

Mack said, “Yep, sounds like he’s grabbed another kid, one we don’t know about. A kid some parent hasn’t reported yet.”

“Three of them-those poor children,” I said.

“Bruno?”

I looked at him. “Yeah.”

“The FBI just came into it. They’re taking over the investigation. We’re on our way to talk to Wicks. She can’t run cover for you with the Feds crawling all over the place. She’s scared for you. She thinks you should head south where you belong. She thinks this was a mistake.”

“What do you think?”

He shrugged, didn’t take his eyes off the road. “You do have more skin in the game than anyone else, and for no real reason.”

If he didn’t understand, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to him. “She get anything on the rental car?”

“Did you hear what I just said? The Feds are in this now. It’s a different set of rules, all of them going against you.”

“Yeah, yeah, did they get anything on the car?”

“I didn’t ask her.”

I nodded and went back to mulling over the new information. Something niggled in the back of my mind. I’d read everything in the file on Micah and Jonas, read the crime reports, the forensic reports on the kidnappings, but I had purposely been avoiding the children’s profiles. I didn’t want to put a face to them. I didn’t want to make their lives any more real than they already were. I put my fingers on the tab marked “Elena Cortez” and knew what I would find before I flipped to her section. “What about Jonas’ mother Bella?”