Mariah Stewart - Cry Mercy

Beth Magellan's remains lay across the front seat at an angle to the steering wheel. Ian's car seat was, as always, directly behind his mother's, but incredibly, Robert's son was nowhere to be seen.

A white-faced Robert sat on the hood of the car parked at the side of the road, numb with disbelief. After he'd gotten Susanna's call and her words actually sank in, he'd hired a helicopter to bring him and Kevin as close as possible. Once they landed, Susanna picked them up and drove them to the mountain where the Jeep had been found. He'd had trouble putting words together in a sentence since they arrived.

“What kind of person would take a child from a wreck and leave its mother there to die?” he asked the trooper who met them at the accident scene.

“Sir, we don't know what happened here. We're trying to find out.” The trooper, Captain K. Carlson, had tried to calm Robert. “If you'd just wait over here-”

“I want to see my wife,” Robert had protested.

“Sir, your wife has been removed from the vehicle and is no longer on the scene.” Carlson had blocked his way.

“Where is she? Where did you take her?”

“To the medical examiner's, sir. He'll need to determine the cause.” It wasn't necessary for him to add, “of death.” It was understood.

“What are you doing to find my son?” Robert demanded.

“We're almost finished processing the car, then we'll-”

“I don't give a damn about the fucking car,” Robert shouted. “I want to know what you're going to do to find my son.”

“Sir, someone removed your son from the car,” Carlson replied calmly. “The only way we have to figure out who that was is by processing every bit of trace evidence from that vehicle. We need to develop the fingerprints we've lifted so we can run a search through every database we have access to. I promise you that we'll do this as quickly as possible, but right now you're going to have to let my people do their jobs.”

“Robert,” Kevin touched his arm. “Let them work. Go sit with Susanna for a while.”

“Standing around… sitting around… while Ian is…” Robert waved an arm to take in the scope of the entire mountain. “I feel like I should be doing something.”

“What you should be doing is thanking God that there is a damned good chance that your son is alive somewhere,” Kevin told him calmly. “What you should be doing is thanking Susanna for doing what no one else has been able to do.”

“Didn't I thank her?” Robert frowned. “I thought I said thank you.”

“Not sufficiently, no.”

Robert walked to the car where Susanna sat on the hood watching the buzz of activity.

“I owe you an apology,” he said when he reached the car. “Kevin has pointed out that I haven't thanked you enough.”

She put a finger to his mouth and said, “You did thank me, and once was enough.”

“But Kevin is right, Suse. I can't thank you enough.” He sat next to her on the hood of her car. “I owe you an enormous debt. I still can't believe you spent every weekend searching for them.”

“It wasn't quite every weekend.” She smiled weakly. “But it was many.”

He took her hands and held them between both of his. “You know, in my heart, I think I've known all along that Beth was no longer with us. I was surprised, but not shocked that she's been found. But Ian… I've never felt that Ian was gone. I kept telling myself it was just because I didn't want to believe that my son's life had been cut so short. But honestly, deep inside, I felt he was still here, in this world. Now I don't know what to think.”

“Want to know what I think?”

“Of course.”

“I think that someone stumbled across the car. Either they saw the accident, or heard it, or were walking through those woods and found it. They looked inside and saw that Beth was most likely already gone. The car was old, Rob. There were no airbags that could have cushioned that fall. I don't know if the medical examiner can determine how she died at this point, but I think she probably did not survive the crash.” She watched the crime-scene techs load their black bags into the back of a car. “But Ian… you know, there was no blood on the car seat. No blood on the backseat.”

His head snapped up to look at her.

“I opened the door when I first found the car. I probably should not have done that. Now my fingerprints are on the door handle and the car seat. And yes, I did tell Captain Carlson, and he did take my prints for comparison, so I didn't really compromise things too much. I hope. And I hadn't meant to open the door. But when I looked through the window and I didn't see Ian in the car seat, I thought how strange that was. Trula and I bought that car seat, remember? We went online and found the one that had the highest safety rating, the one that was supposed to be able to survive a nuclear blast.”

When he raised an eyebrow, she added, “Okay, that was an exaggeration. But the point is, it's supposed to be the best on the market. So why didn't the straps hold him in the seat? That's what I was thinking when I opened the door. But then he wasn't there at all. His diaper bag was gone. Beth's sister said she strapped Ian in herself, and that she put the diaper bag on the floor behind Beth's seat.”

She paused. “There's only one logical conclusion, Rob. Someone took him, and he was alive.”

He stared at her for a long minute. “Because a dead child won't need a diaper change.”

She moved closer and put her arms around him. “So the next order of business is to find him.”

“Someone's had my boy all this time,” he said, his voice choked with emotion. “At least one person has known all this time where he was, and didn't tell. What kind of a person does that, Suse?”

“I don't know, Rob.”

“All this time, he's been growing. Learned to walk, probably. Learned to talk, too. Someone else got to be with him for all those important things.”

She rocked him gently, side to side.

“He doesn't even know me,” he said. “If we found him tomorrow, he wouldn't know me.”

She stroked the back of his head, too choked up to speak.

“I want my son, Suse.”

“We're going to find him, Robert.”

They sat together quietly for a while, Susanna still holding him.

“You're the best friend I ever had, Suse,” he told her, breaking the silence.

“I know, Robert,” she whispered. “I know…”

Maria Clemente stood at the gate and waited for the children to come out of Our Lady of Angels for morning recess. She was glad Father Kevin had installed the new fence around the entire playground. The old one really hadn't been very secure. Anyone could get through at the far corner if they'd wanted to badly enough.

This new fence was just fine, with only one gate, facing the church office. Well, that was just fine, too. You never knew who might be about these days. When it came to the children, you could never be too careful. Besides, Maria liked to wave to Mary Corcoran, whose desk faced the playground, when she finished fixing the altar flowers. This morning she'd picked red dahlias the size of dinner plates, white gladiolas, and blue delphinium from her garden and arranged them in tall white vases in honor of the upcoming holiday. Father Kevin always got such a kick when she tied the altar flowers to some special day.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a woman approach, and she tilted her head to watch. Not that she was by nature a nosy person-God forbid-but she was very observant. Very little got past her, even now, when the arthritis made cutting the flowers so much harder than it used to be, and that cataract was starting to cloud the vision of her right eye.