John Case - The Murder Artist

“Come again?” Jack says. “Could you speak up, young lady?”

Her eyes drift over to her partner and he takes over. “Duchess here is a tracking dog, pure and simple,” he explains. “Goes by scent. I imagine you’ve seen bloodhounds in the movies?”

Jack nods.

“But there’s another type of canine, sir, that’s deployed in these situations, specially trained to detect… well, their expertise is to detect… remains, sir. They can even locate remains in ponds and streams – you know, underwater. It’s amazing.” He looks at the floor.

Jack’s eyes snap shut, and for a moment, I’m afraid he’s going to break down. “My God,” he says, and looks at me. “Not a word to Lizzie about this.”

“Cadaver dogs,” the policewoman whispers. “That’s what they call them.”

Somehow we get through the day, a maelstrom of emotion, interrupted by what seems like hundreds of telephone calls.

I speak to Shoffler half a dozen times, but there’s nothing new except his change of schedule; instead of “sometime today,” he’ll come by “sometime tonight.”

On the advice of several friends, I call an investigative agency and talk to a guy I interviewed once for a story about the Russian mob in Brighton Beach. Before I get to why I’m calling, he puts two and two together: “Oh, my god, the missing twins. Jesus, that’s you, I didn’t think…”

He gives me the name of the firm’s best missing-person investigator – a woman named Mary McCafferty. We set up a meeting for the following day. She gives me a list of information she’d like. “We’re going to cut you a break,” she tells me, “and do the work for half the normal rate.”

But it’s still not going to be cheap. Seventy-five dollars an hour instead of one hundred fifty dollars. Plus expenses.

I speak several times to Krista at the station – which, she tells me breathlessly, has pledged ten grand to a reward fund. The boys’ pictures, an announcement of the reward, and the hotline number will be shown at the top of every hour.

I talk to a woman at the missing children’s center. They’ve set into motion an e-mail “locater” search, which, through an elaborate network of electronic address books, might reach – with its attachment containing a picture of the boys, physical description, and hotline information – as many as three million people.

Friends and acquaintances call by the dozen.

At five o’clock, I realize that the boys have been missing for twenty-four hours. I don’t mention this to anyone.

At six thirty, a bewildered Hispanic kid delivers the food Liz ordered from Sala Thai. My father regards the food with suspicion. Jack eats with gusto, encouraging his daughter to do the same: “Important to keep your strength up, sweetheart.” My mother takes a bite of the Pad Thai and says to my father, “Really, Bob, it’s just linguini.”

It’s seven, it’s eight, it’s nine.

Sleeping arrangements. I’ve been awake for so long, I’m approaching an altered state of consciousness, although I can’t imagine actually falling asleep. Liz bustles around, making up the sleep-sofa in the study for her father, changing the sheets in the master bedroom, which she has assigned to my folks. I trail her, carrying towels and sheets. It’s her intention to sleep in the boys’ room, but she stops in the doorway, frozen. “I can’t… I can’t sleep in here,” she says. “Oh, God… Alex…” She begins to sob and I put my arm around her shoulder, but she stiffens under my touch, pulls away, composes herself. “I’ll take the futon in the family room,” she announces. “You get the living room couch.”

She heads into the bathroom. I follow, with my stack of towels. She stands in front of the vanity and looks into the mirror; then her eyes slide down toward the sink. I see the expression on her face in reflection for a moment before she turns and I see the puzzled frown straight on.

“What’s the deal with these dimes?” she asks.

The vanity has a faux-marble top with a backsplash. On the upper edge of that backsplash and perfectly centered between the faucets rests a row of Liberty head dimes. Seven of them, precisely aligned.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Do these belong to the boys? Did they start a collection?”

“I don’t think so.”

But the ambiguity is only notional. I’ve never seen the dimes before – and I would have seen them. It’s my habit to stand and watch Kev and Sean brush their teeth, to make sure they stay at it for more than two seconds, to see that they rinse their toothbrushes and sluice down the spit and toothpaste. It’s not that dental hygiene is such a big thing with me. My vigilance is due to Liz. I knew I’d be called to account for any evidence of a lapse. No way I would not have noticed a line of coins on the sink. And the sight of them spooks me. They seem like some kind of crazy sign or message.

“Someone put them there,” I tell Liz.

“Who? What?”

“The kidnapper.”

“Oh, God. Alex…?”

“Come here for a sec,” I say, pulling her toward the boys’ bedroom. “I want you to take a look at something.” I point out the little origami rabbit on the dresser. “Does this belong to Kevin or Sean? Because I never noticed it before…”

“No,” Liz says, “I never saw it before.” She looks at me with a little worried frown. “ Alex … that rabbit. The dimes. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Tears well up in her eyes, but she shakes me off when I try to comfort her. I follow her back to the bathroom, where she blows her nose, splashes cold water on her face, buries her face in a towel.

When I hear the loud rap at the door, I’m in the family room down on my hands and knees, still trying to get the rickety futon frame to fold down. Jack and my father have been taking turns on door duty, and I hear my father’s husky voice, and another voice, in counterpoint. I’m still extricating myself from behind the futon when my father and the detective arrive at the door.

“How you holding up?” Shoffler asks me.

I manage a sort of shrug. Shoffler himself looks terrible. He wears a crumpled linen sports jacket, one button dangling by a thread. A battered pair of khakis rides low on his hips, forced there by his belly. His weary eyes make it clear he needs sleep. A nap in the car on the way to Ordway Street, in fact, would explain the spiky explosion of hair on the right side of his head. “The press gives you too much trouble,” he says, “I can get D.C. to post an officer.”

I shrug. “I’ll let you know.”

“That the kind of thing you do?” he asks, nodding toward the front of the house.

“I’ve done it,” I say. “It’s just their job.”

“Bob – do I have that right?” Shoffler says, looking at my father. He hooks a finger in his belt and hitches up his pants.

“Yes, you do. Robert J. Callahan.” My father gives a little whinny of high-pitched laughter, a sign of nerves to those of us who know him well.

“You mind calling the others to come in here?”

A gush of fear blooms in my chest. “You have something? You have… news?”

Shoffler shakes his head, and bends to help me, yanking on one of the futon frame’s recalcitrant legs. The whole thing unfolds with a crash. “There you go,” he says.

Between us, we manage to maneuver the awkward futon into position. “My son had one of these doohickeys when he was at Bowie State,” the detective says. “Slept on it once. Pretty comfortable.”

Once Liz and the others are in the room and seated, Shoffler tells us he’s going to give us an update on what’s been happening. The search in the woods outside the fairgrounds proceeds, he tells us, with more volunteers than they can “shake a stick at.” The hotline is swamped with calls, but it’s going “to take time to sort things out.” The questioning of fair employees, he says, “is slow, but it’s coming along. As I told Alex earlier, we’re having some trouble finding reliable witnesses who remember seeing the boys, but we’re making progress.”