David Silva: The Disappeared

She finished dialing as two young men walked past the phone booth and filed through the front door of the 7-Eleven. The boy, whom she was almost beginning to think of as her son now, waved at her from behind the foggy windshield of the car. Teri forced a smile and waved back.

They had been lucky to escape at all, and even luckier to have escaped with the car. If she hadn’t been bothered by the headache when she had arrived home, she would have taken the time to park inside the garage. That would have put the car out of reach. And if Michael, her ex, hadn’t always insisted on keeping a spare set of keys in a magnetic box in the wheel well, it wouldn’t have mattered where she had parked.

The boy had been the one who had found the spare keys, and that had been the moment when she had begun to look at him a little differently. It didn’t make any sense, of course, because Gabe had disappeared nearly ten years ago and he would be almost twenty-one now. But what about the man back at the house – Mitch? He had said that he only wanted her son. And then there were the keys. How had the boy known about the keys?

It had all been an adventure for him once they had made it to the car and they were safely out of the neighborhood. He had turned to her, his face bright, his smile alive and asked almost enthusiastically, “What now?”

“I don’t know,” Teri had said, still shaking.

“Did you see that guy when he caught his fingers in the back door? I thought his eyes were gonna pop. Jeeze, that must have hurt.” The boy climbed up on his knees and stared out the back window as if they had just finished a roller coaster ride and he wished he could go back and do it all over again. “Who do you think those guys were, anyway?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“What do you think they wanted?”

You, Teri had thought at that moment. They wanted you.

She dropped her smile now and listened as the phone on the other end rang a fourth time. The ring was followed by a click and then the message:

Hi, this is Walt. Sometimes I’m here, sometimes I’m not. Looks like this time you’re outta luck. Leave a message at the beep.

The tape rolled another second or two, and beeped.

“Walt, it’s Teri Knight. I need to talk to you. It’s important. Unbelievably important. Um… it’s a little after midnight now, if you happen to come in before—”

“Teri, good to hear from you.”

“You’re there.”

“Yeah. Bad habit, hiding behind the machine. Sorry.”

“No, that’s okay. I’m just grateful you’re there. I’ve been driving around in circles, trying to figure out what I should do next, who I might be able to call. I’m scared, Walt. I’ve never been so scared in my life.” She gulped down the last word, her mouth dry, her throat raspy. “I need to see you.”

“Name your time.”

“Tonight.”

“How about Denny’s in forty-five minutes?”

“That would be wonderful,” she said, taking in a deep breath. She stole a quick glance at the car, where the boy was hunched over the dashboard, a Big Gulp in one hand, the other hand apparently flipping through the stations on the radio. “There’s something I should prepare you for, though. I’ve got someone with me who claims to be Gabe.”

“Jesus, Teri, you found him?”

“I don’t know. It’s more like he found me.”

There was a short pause on the other end, and she did her best not to analyze it. If she thought about it at all, she’d probably conclude that Walt was trying to decide if he wanted to believe her or not. A mother’s sorrow was like a dream. It could take you places that never really existed. Teri had been trapped in her own sorrow for a long, long time now.

“Gabe’s really back?” he finally said.

“Yeah, well, wait ’till you see him.”

Walt hung up the phone, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. In front of him, on the kitchen counter, the Chicago Tribune was open to the Tempo section. It was the top newspaper on a stack of papers from across the country: the San Francisco Chronicle , the L.A. Times , the New York Times , the Washington Post , and the San Jose Mercury News . Walt folded the Tribune into fourths and tossed it aside.

Gabriel Knight had come home.

Walt had been a lieutenant in the Juvenile Investigations Bureau when he had first been drawn into the Knight case. It had been his first day back after the death of his son, Brandon, who had battled leukemia for nearly eighteen months before finally succumbing. Walt had watched his son waste away to almost nothing in the end and then he had been handed the Knight case. Gabriel, it seemed, had done a disappearing act of his own. Maybe not as graphic, but certainly just as devastating for his parents as Brandon’s death had been for Walt.

Gabriel Knight had simply vanished. He had attended school that day, where his behavior had been nothing out of the ordinary according to teachers and classmates; and afterwards he had taken the bus home, where he left his backpack and books on the kitchen table, along with a short note that said he was going to the park. Mrs. O’Brien, a neighbor from down the block, saw him ride past her place a little after three o’clock. She made a mental note to speak to his parents after he cut the corner and left a tire track across the edge of her lawn. Jonathan Chambers, who was in Gabe’s fifth grade class, passed him on Sycamore Street a short time later. It was another two blocks from there to Kaplan Park. No one had reported seeing him at the park.

Gabriel Knight had simply disappeared.

As with most cases of this nature, Walt’s focus had first turned to the boy’s parents. Michael and Teri had been married thirteen years. From all outward appearances, it had been a good marriage. No financial troubles. No affairs. No history of child abuse. In addition, both parents had been working that afternoon, with a handful of coworkers on each side willing to substantiate that fact. There was little reason to believe either of them had been involved.

In fact, Walt had found it interesting a short time later when Teri Knight had all her accumulated vacation time to focus on keeping her son’s disappearance in front of the public eye. Besides distributing flyers, she began doing interviews, and sending out regular press releases. And when public interest began to wane as it always did in these kinds of cases, she took on the task of tracking down whatever leads the department was willing to make available to her.

Michael Knight, though still not a suspect, had been quite a different study. He had quietly done his own vanishing act, preferring to deal with the loss of his son by burying himself so deep in his work that he was rarely seen outside the office. Walt remembered thinking that the marriage was probably doomed at that point. And he remembered thinking that the chances of the Knight boy ever showing up alive again were probably doomed as well.

The case had gone unsolved.

Several years later, Walt had found himself embroiled in the disappearance of another child. This case had involved a seven-year-old girl by the name of Andrea Kennan. She had been abducted on the way to school by a man, who witnesses described as a white male in his early forties with long brown hair and eyes as black as obsidian.

Walt was one of three investigators on that case. Nearly a hundred interviews, some twenty suspects and five months later they had fished the pond dry and moved onto other waters. Andrea’s fate remained a mystery for better than two years, then suddenly her abductor resurfaced. He tried to pick up another little girl outside the Town & Country Mall. This time, though, the girl had managed to get away.