James Swain: The Night Stalker

“It’s just you and me, pal,” I told him.

Buster pawed his seat. He was ready to go. I liked that in a partner. I grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and opened my door. My dog climbed over me, and ran to the bushes surrounding Jed Grimes’s house.

I got out of my car and stood on the sidewalk. Jed’s place was dark, and I shined my flashlight at it. Shingles were missing from the roof, the paint peeling like a bad sunburn. The carport was empty, and no one appeared to be at home.

I started to climb over the police tape. The articles I’d read on the Internet had said that Sampson had been abducted from his bedroom in the rear of the house. Stealing kids from their bedrooms was tricky, and I wanted to see how the kidnapper had pulled it off.

Hearing a woman’s voice, I stopped what I was doing. Trespassing on a crime scene was a crime, and I didn’t want to get caught in the act.

I looked up and down RichJo Lane, then heard the voice again. It had come from a white trailer parked on the street. I hadn’t paid much attention to the trailer, thinking it belonged to a neighbor. Now I took a closer look.

It was the Broward County Sheriff’s Department’s Operations Center trailer, or what cops called the OC. When kids were abducted, the police parked the OC near the home, and conducted their investigation from it. This allowed the police to be near the crime scene, while giving the child’s family some privacy.

A door on the trailer opened, and a young woman came outside and shut the door behind her. She was no more than twenty feet away from me, and stood beneath a streetlight. She started to cross the street, then halted, and looked directly at me.

“Mr. Carpenter? Is that you?”

She was a long-stemmed beauty with slender features and deeply troubled eyes. I couldn’t place her, and I stepped forward to get a better look at her.

“Excuse me, but who are you?” I asked.

“Heather Rinker. I played basketball with your daughter in junior high school. You used to drive us to games.”

Shock was the best word to describe my reaction. The last time I’d seen Heather, she’d been a skinny little girl in pigtails, and hardly resembled the stunning woman standing before me. I said, “It’s been a long time. What are you doing here?”

“I was talking to the detective inside the trailer.”

“About what?”

“You don’t know?”

I shook my head.

“Sampson Grimes is my son.”

I didn’t know what to say. I put my hand on her shoulder. As a cop, I couldn’t do that, but I wasn’t a cop anymore.

“I’m sorry, Heather,” I said.

Her eyes welled with tears, and she wiped them away. “I spoke to Jed earlier. He told me that his father’s attorney hired you to find Sampson.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“That’s what you do, isn’t it? You find missing kids.”

I nodded. I sensed that Heather was dying inside, but I had to press her. “I need for you to tell me what happened to your son.”

“Right now?”

“Now’s a good time.”

She took a deep breath. “Jed and I got divorced after Sampson was born, and I’ve been raising him myself. Last year Jed decided he wanted to help raise Sampson, and he sued me for custody rights. The judge said okay, and Sampson’s been staying with Jed on weekends.

“It was going okay until this past Saturday. I was working, and Jed called me, and said that someone had come into his house through a window, and taken Sampson from his bedroom. Jed was freaking out, and didn’t know what to do.”

“Was anyone home when this happened?” I asked.

“Jed was, and his friend Ronnie.”

“They didn’t hear anything?”

Heather shook her head.

“What happened then?” I asked.

“I left work and raced over here. Jed and Ronnie were running around the neighborhood, looking for Sampson, and I joined in. We talked to all the neighbors. Nobody heard my son cry, or saw a car pull away. It was like…”

Her voice trailed off, and I touched her sleeve.

“Like what?” I asked.

“It was like Sampson disappeared off the face of the earth.”

The memory was tearing her apart, and she covered her face with her hands. If I’d learned anything looking for missing kids, it was that children stolen from their bedrooms did not go quietly. They screamed and kicked and sometimes even bit their abductors. Something was not right with her story.

“I need to ask you a question,” I said.

Heather lowered her hands.

“The detective handling the investigation thinks Jed did this,” I said.

“He’s wrong,” Heather said.

“You’re sure about that.”

Heather nodded. “Jed had a rough time growing up. But he’s changed. He was trying to do right by Sampson. He wouldn’t do this to him. Or to me.”

“Where is he?”

“Jed’s staying at his mom’s place. So am I. The police wanted us nearby, and I just couldn’t stay here.”

“Are you two back together?”

Heather smiled faintly. “We’re trying.”

I walked Heather to her car. She drove an aging Toyota Camry with a baby seat strapped in the backseat, and bumper stickers with Sampson’s photograph and the word MISSING! plastered to the front and back bumpers of her car.

“I’d like a bumper sticker for my car,” I said.

Heather opened the trunk. It contained a cardboard box filled with bumper stickers, and signs with Sampson’s photo and a number to call that could be stuck in people’s yards. She pulled a bumper sticker and a DVD from the box, and stuck them into my hands.

“I recorded this DVD at Sampson’s third birthday party,” she said. “I took it around to the TV stations, and asked them to show it on the news.”

“That was very smart of you,” I said.

I opened the driver’s door for her. Heather started to climb in, then paused to look at me with her sad eyes. “Please find my baby, Mr. Carpenter. I can’t live without him.”

I never made promises when I was looking for missing kids. They only filled people with false hope, and that was not the business I was in.

“I’ll try, Heather.”

She nodded woodenly, and left without saying good-bye.

H eather’s taillights hung like an afterimage in the darkness. I stuck the bumper sticker to the trunk of my car, and tossed the DVD onto the passenger seat. Then I clapped my hands for my dog. Buster exploded out of the bushes around Jed’s house.

“Time to go to work,” I said.

I started to climb over the police tape, and glanced at the OC trailer. Normally, I would have told the detectives inside the trailer that I was here. But Cheek’s threat had changed my mind. I wasn’t going to talk to anyone with the sheriff’s department unless it was absolutely necessary.

I walked around the side of Jed’s house to the backyard. The backyard was like most in Broward County, and the size of a postage stamp. Kids’ toys were scattered around, including an expensive-looking tricycle and a plastic swimming pool. Jed had obviously indulged his son.

I shined my flashlight at the house. Three windows on the house faced the backyard, all of them screened. The screen on the corner window looked damaged, and was flapping in the breeze. I approached for a closer look.

The screen had been sliced horizontally, the cut about three feet wide. I shined my flashlight through the window, and found myself looking at Sampson’s bedroom. A Spiderman mobile hung from the ceiling, and the walls were papered in cartoon characters. Like the backyard, there were toys everywhere. Throughout the room I could see traces of white powder from where a police technician had dusted for fingerprints.