Lisa Scottoline - Look Again

She froze. The composite drawing of the carjacker looked like Beach Man. She double-checked, and there was no doubt that they looked alike.

"Oh my God," she said aloud, and Oreo Figaro raised his chin, his eyes angled slits disappearing into the blackness of his fur.

Ellen looked back at the screen, getting a grip. It was impossible to compare a black-and-white pencil drawing with a color photo of a flesh-and-blood man. She flashed on Will's tracing of a horse from the other day, and it gave her an idea. She clicked Print, and her cheap plastic printer chugged to life. Then she got up and hurried downstairs, rummaged through the toy box, and ran back up with a roll of tracing paper.

The printer had spit out a copy of the composite drawing, and she took a black Sharpie and went over the lines of the carjacker's features, blackening them so they'd be darker and thicker. Then she took the piece of tracing paper and placed it on top of the composite drawing, tracing the image onto the crinkly transparent paper, ignoring the thumping in her chest. She set the traced composite aside, slid the copy of the Beach Man photo from the printer tray, then moved her computer keyboard to the side and set the printed photo on the desk.

Then she stopped.

She wanted to know and she didn't want to know, both at once.

"Get over it," she said under her breath, and she took the traced composite of the carjacker and placed it over Beach Man's face.

It was an exact match.

Ellen felt her gorge rising, and she jumped up and bolted for the bathroom.

Ellen lingered on the threshold to Will's room, lost in her thoughts. She couldn't work any longer, not after what she'd learned, or what she thought she'd learned. She could barely give it voice inside her own head, but she couldn't ignore it, either.

Is Will really Timothy?

She tasted bile and Colgate on her teeth and sagged against the doorjamb, willing her brain to function. Tried to reason it out and spot any failures of logic.

Begin at the beginning. Remain calm.

Ellen thought a minute, trying to articulate the scenario she feared. If the composite matched the photo of the man on the beach, then Beach Man was the carjacker. He had shot Carol Braverman's nanny. Kidnapped W. Taken the ransom money but kept the child. He had a girlfriend who pretended to be the baby's mother. Amy Martin.

Why not kill the baby right after the kidnapping?

Ellen shuddered, but she could guess at some answers. Amy wanted a baby and couldn't have one. Or they thought they could sell the baby on the black market. She folded her arms against her chest, hugging herself, and picked up the narrative in her mind, detecting another fallacy.

Why give him up for adoption?

That answer, Ellen knew for sure. Because he got sick. Will had a heart problem no one knew about. At least she assumed as much, because the Braverman site didn't mention that Timothy had any heart problems. The doctors at Dupont Hospital had told her that his murmur had gone undetected, which wasn't unusual. Will would have failed to thrive. He wouldn't eat well and he'd have been sickly. That would have overwhelmed Amy, even her mother said so, and it would have made it too risky to keep him. Too many blood tests, forms, and questions that could show Amy wasn't the mother and the boyfriend the father.

So what do they do next?

Ellen composed it like a nightmare news story. They'd take the baby to a hospital far from Miami, back to where Amy had grown up. They'd essentially abandon the baby in the hospital, and then a solution would come, in the form of a nice lady reporter, who falls in love with the baby. She adopts the baby and takes him home, where he sleeps under a sky of ersatz stars.

My God.

Ellen let her gaze wander around Will's bedroom, over the shadows of Tonka trucks and Legos, over shelves of skinny books and Candy Land and plush bears and bunnies, their soft pastels reduced to shades of gray. The window shade was up, and outside the sky was oddly bright, the world aglow with a new snowfall that insulated the house like a sheet of practical cotton, keeping her and Will safe inside.

"Mommy?" he asked sleepily, from the bed.

Ellen wiped her eyes, padded over to the bed, and leaned over Will, brushing his bangs from his forehead in the light from the doorway. "Sorry I woke you."

"Are you home?"

"Yes, it's night and I'm home."

"Connie says you have to work hard."

"I do, but I'm home now." Ellen swallowed the knot in her throat, but she had a feeling it would only travel down to her chest and cause a heart attack, or maybe she'd just spontaneously combust. She eased onto the guardrail and tried to regain her composure. "Sorry I forgot your crazy shirt."

"It's okay, Mommy."

Ellen's eyes welled up. She reached down and stroked his cheek. "You're the best kid in the world, do you know that?"

"You brushed your teeth."

"I did." Ellen was uncomfortable, sitting on the guardrail. "I hate this guardrail. I'm taking it off." She stood up and began to slide the wooden rail from the bed, jiggling the frame.

"I won't fall out, Mommy."

"I know that. You're too smart to fall out of your own bed." Ellen jiggled one last time and finally wrenched the guardrail from the bed. "Sorry."

Will giggled.

"Stupid guardrail."

"Stupid guardrail!"

"See ya, guardrail." Ellen took the guardrail to the other side of the room and set it on the floor. "Wouldn't wanna be ya."

Will giggled again.

Ellen came back to the bed, where she could see Will wriggling in his bed. "Are you being a wiggle worm?"

"lam!"

"I'm coming in. We're having a slumber party."

"What's that?" Will scissored his legs.

"It's people having a party when they should be sleeping." Ellen eased onto the skinny bed, on her side. "Scoot over, wigglehead."

"Okay." Will edged backwards, and Ellen reached for him and wrapped him up in her arms. She didn't want to think about Amy Martin and the Bravermans anymore. She wanted to be where she was, right this moment, holding her son close.

"How's that feel? Good?"

Will hugged her back. "I made a snowball."

"You did? Cool."

"It's on the porch, did you see?"

"No." Ellen gave him a squeeze. "It'll be there tomorrow. I'll look at it in the morning, first thing."

"Do you have to go to work tomorrow?"

"Yes." Ellen didn't know what would happen at work tomorrow, with her story unfinished. Right now, she didn't care.

"I hate work."

"I know, sweetie. I'm sorry I have to work."

"Why do you?"

Ellen had answered this more times than she could count, but she knew it wasn't a real question. "I work so we have all the things we need."

Will yawned.

"Maybe we should settle down and go to sleep. Party's over, and slumber is beginning."

"I won't fall out," Will said again, and Ellen hugged him close.

"Don't worry. You won't fall out. I'm here to catch you."

"Good night."

"I love you, sweetie. Good night." Ellen cuddled him, and in the next minute, she could feel his body drifting back to sleep. She caught herself beginning to cry and willed herself to stop. If she went that way, she'd never come back, and this wasn't the time or the place anyway.

Flip it.

She really couldn't be sure that Beach Man was the carjacker. A tracing couldn't tell anything with accuracy, and composites were based only on a verbal description. Lots of men had narrow eyes and long noses. If the composite was too unreliable to prove that the carjacker was Beach Man, then there was no link between Will and Timothy.

Ellen smiled in the dark, feeling a tiny bit better. Maybe Amy would email her, tell her the story of Will's birth, and explain why she'd put him up for adoption.