John Case - The Murder Artist

On the long walk to the car, the notion that Shoffler sent the officer with me out of some kind of compassion, because he didn’t want the bereft father to be alone in his distraught state, dissolves into a darker truth. I realize this as I fumble in my pocket for the keys and press the button on the remote. The door locks pop. The headlights tunnel out into the darkness. “That’s what they say, y’know,” Christiansen rambles on. “Nine times out of ten, it’s someone who knows the kid. Nine times outta ten, it’s a parent.”

Here’s the truth: Christiansen isn’t babysitting. I’m a suspect.

I stand with my hand on the door handle. I can’t bring myself to get into the car. Going home without the boys is… wrong . It feels like a signal of defeat and surrender, as if I’m giving up on them.

“Hey, you want I should drive?” Christiansen asks.

Then a sudden effervescence of hope bubbles up in my brain and I can’t get into the car fast enough.

“I guess that’s a no,” Christiansen says, sliding into the passenger’s seat. “Suit yourself.”

By the time I flip on the brights and make it from the grass parking lot to the gravel drive, an entire hopeful scenario has constructed itself in my head. Maybe the boys got disoriented, tried to come back to their hay bale and took a wrong turn. When the joust was over, everybody was leaving; it was chaotic.

I turn from the gravel drive onto a paved road. When they couldn’t find me, maybe the boys met someone – someone from the neighborhood, someone they hadn’t seen since Liz took them to Maine. And these people, they drove the boys home .

Or maybe Liz… Liz followed the boys down from Maine. She wanted to prove some point, so she waited until Alex and the boys were separated… Or not Liz herself, but she hired someone…

I’m filled with maybes, filled with fear and hope. On one level, I know these notions don’t hold up, not if I give them a minute’s hard thought.

Now that I’m on the road, I have an irrational need to get back to the house. As if that will make things right somehow. Tagging home base. I’ll be safe. The kids will be safe. Somehow it’s in my head that the kids will be there, waiting for me.

“You better slow it down,” Christiansen whines.

I glance at the speedometer. I’m doing eighty.

“Come on, man. This road-” The policeman’s voice sounds like a mosquito.

I slow to seventy-five, and then my cell phone rings and I hit the brakes, fishtailing onto the shoulder in a spray of gravel.

“Jesus Christ!” Christiansen squeaks, as I fumble for the phone.

Finally, I’ve got the thing pressed to my ear. “Hello? Hello!?”

“Who is it?” Christiansen asks, but I hardly hear him.

“Hello? Hello! ” I’m yelling. It isn’t that the connection is bad, it’s crystal clear, there’s no static at all. But no one’s there, just the silence.

“Sir? Who is it?” Christiansen bleats, but I shove my hand toward the cop to shut him up. I don’t hang up because I realize it’s not quite silence I’m hearing. It’s breathing. Someone breathing.

“Who is this?” I ask, trying to control my voice. “Who is it?”

Nothing.

And then a Roman candle of relief explodes in my chest as Kevin’s voice flutters into my ear, tremulous and tentative: “Daddy?”

Then a click, and the candle goes out as suddenly as it flared.

“Kevin? Kevin?! ”

I punch on the Jeep’s overhead light and stare at the tiny glowing rectangle of the phone’s LCD screen. Like most cell phones, mine displays the numbers of incoming calls. But only, I remember, until you press the key to answer. The screen tells me: CURRENT CALL: 18 SECONDS.

“Sir?” Christiansen says. “Who was that? Who called you?”

“Hang on just a minute.” I stay with the telephone, tapping through the menu selections until I get to RECEIVED CALLS. The list keys up. I tap RECEIVED 1, and read: 202-555-0199.

This can’t be right. It’s the number at the house, my own home phone number. Does this mean – my heart does a somersault in my chest – that the boys are at home?

I don’t see how it’s possible, how the boys could be home, and yet no one – not the boys or whoever took them there – ever bothered to call on my cell phone during the eleven hours they’ve been missing.

It makes no sense, but still, I go nova with happiness.

My cell phone must have cut out on Kevin’s call. I drove through a black zone; it happens all the time. The signal is strong now, though, so I press the 2 key, which automatically calls the house. I’m impatient for the sound of my son’s voice, and the explanation.

The phone rings four times, and then I hear my own voice. “Hi, you’ve reached Alex Callahan. I can’t come to the phone right now, but…”

I hang up. The phone has call waiting, so if you’re on the line and you don’t cut over to the new call, the machine picks up. The boys must be calling at the same time I’m calling the house. Our calls are blocking each other. I wait, try again, get the machine again. Repeat the process, in the meantime explaining to Christiansen what I’m doing – and that it was Kevin who called.

After the fourth try, I give up. Maybe I jumped the gun, maybe it took a minute or two for calls to post up. I click back to RECEIVED CALLS, but the number displayed for RECEIVED 1 is still the same, my home number. I press the tab for time of call . The time tag pops up: 4:42 A.M. A glance at the dashboard tells me it’s 4:48. So that means the call from Kevin did come from the house in Cleveland Park.

In which case – why doesn’t anyone answer?

“Mr. Callahan,” Christiansen says, “you sure that was one of your kids?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” I say, voice shaky with emotion. “It was Kevin.”

“How could you tell – them being twins and all?”

“Because it sounded like Kevin,” I snap. I don’t bother to explain that most of the time Kevin still calls me Daddy while Sean calls me Dad – and is quite militant about it.

“No kiddin’,” Christiansen says in a dubious voice.

Suddenly, I’m not so sure. Maybe it was Sean. The lack of certainty bothers me.

“So what did he say?” Christiansen asks. “What happened to them? Where are they?”

I’m pulling back onto the road, accelerating into the traffic. I don’t answer Christiansen, but what I’m thinking is: What did he say? He said, Daddy. I can’t get Kevin’s voice out of my head, the sweetest elixir, the hoped-for sound:

Daddy .

I flick on the phone’s light and try home again, impatiently waiting for the end of the message and the beep. “Whoever is there with the boys,” I beg, “please pick up the telephone. Please .”

Shortly after the kids were born, Liz and I got so busy, we developed the habit of letting the machine answer the phone most of the time – leaving the speakerphone on so we could hear whoever called and pick up if we could… or wanted to. Friends and family knew this, as did half a dozen people at the station. Messages often started, “Alex… if you’re there, pick up…” Or “Liz – it’s Mom. Don’t bother picking up, I just wanted to let you know…”

There are several telephones in the house, but I focus on the phone in the kitchen. It sits on the little red table Liz bought at a yard sale. The phone is an old one, beige, its black curly cord extra long and usually bunched into a messy tangle. Next to it is the square, white answering machine, red button flashing to indicate it holds messages. It is from the tiny grid of this machine’s microphone, that I imagine my amplified voice speaking into the kitchen.