John Case - The Murder Artist

You’d think this burst of purposeful activity would make me feel better, but instead I’m paralyzed by fear. If I wasn’t quite buying Gary Prebble’s schmoozy air of reassurance, Shoffler’s serious and industrious manner is infinitely worse. I think of the Ramirez boys, California twins murdered a few years back. I think of Etan Patz and Adam Walsh, of Polly Klaas, Samantha Runnion, of all the less famous missing children whose faces haunt the world from milk cartons and post office walls.

The fear must show on my face because Shoffler reaches out and grips my upper arm with one of his big hands. “Kids hide,” he says, and now he is reassuring. “That’s the thing. They get lost, they get scared, and usually, what they do is they hide. They might even think you’re gonna be mad at them, you know? Because you couldn’t find them? So we’re going to look for them, we’re going to take a long hard look at the fairgrounds. The dogs might help, that’s why I summoned K-9. Okay?”

“Right,” I say. “I understand.”

He frowns. “You look familiar. You a lawyer or something?”

“Reporter. Fox.”

“Right,” Shoffler says in an automatic way, but then he actually remembers. “ Right . Okay.” He pulls a small spiral-bound notebook out of his blazer pocket and opens it. “Now,” he says. “Your boys. They’re what? – six years old, Gary tells me.”

“Kevin and Sean Callahan,” I tell him.

“Birth date?”

“January 4, 1997.”

“Describe them.”

“They’re, I don’t know, up to here.” I hold my hand out at their approximate height. “Blue eyes, blond hair-”

“What kinda blond?” the detective wants to know. “Dirty blond like yours or more like platinum?”

“Almost white.”

“Any distinguishing characteristics, scars, anything like that?”

“Well, their front teeth are only halfway in.”

“Good,” the detective says, nodding as he writes this down, as if the state of the boys’ dentition is a really useful bit of information. This strikes me as nuts, given the one truly unusual fact about Kevin and Sean.

“They’re twins, you know,” I say. My nerves have notched up the volume and this comes out much too loud. I’m shouting. I take a breath. “You know that, right? They’re identical twins.”

“Right,” Shoffler says, “but see – they might get separated. So…” He shrugs.

“No,” I insist. “They’d stay together.” I hate the idea of Kevin and Sean not being together.

“They dress alike?”

“No.”

“So tell me what they were wearing. Kevin first.”

“Yellow T-shirt with a whale on it, jeans, white Nikes.”

“And Sean?”

“Cargo pants, blue T-shirt, black shoes with white stripes.”

Shoffler takes it down then turns to Gary Prebble. “Gar – I’m assuming you got a list of fair employees, who’s working where and what hours? I’m going to need that. Now let’s talk about how best to search the grounds.”

The two men walk over toward the large wall map mounted behind the Lost and Found, discussing how to deploy the available manpower. “When you search the residential area,” Shoffler says, “which I would like you to do personally, Gary, ask permission to look inside campers and Winnies. But don’t push it. Just keep track of the hesitant ones because that might mean coming back with a warrant.”

“Do you think?” I blurt out, “I mean-”

Shoffler gives me a look. “I don’t think anything, Mr. Callahan. I really don’t. It’s just – we have procedures, you understand?”

I nod, but I’m losing my mind. Warrants .

Shoffler turns back to Prebble. “Take down everybody’s name, note whether you took a look inside or not. Ask about folks who work for them, who might not be on the fair’s official list of employees. If this turns out to be an abduction, we need to ID potential witnesses.”

Although I’ve thought of this – of course I’ve thought of it – I’m still hanging on to the idea that the boys are lost. The word abduction crashes through my head like a dum-dum bullet.

Once Shoffler dispatches the search crew – the security personnel, Christiansen, and the newly arrived K-9 team, with their jumpy German shepherd Duchess – the detective lowers himself onto the bench outside fair headquarters. He pats the seat next to him. “Now you tell me about it,” he says to me, “your whole time here at the fair. Where you went with your boys, everything you can remember.” He pulls a small tape recorder out of his pocket. “Myself, I’m partial to handwritten notes,” the detective says, “but if you don’t mind, I’ll record what you say, too.”

“Why would I mind?”

Shoffler shrugs, turns on the machine, then speaks into it. “Saturday evening, May thirty-one, two thousand three.” A glance at his watch. “The time is seven-thirty-two P.M. I am detective Ray Shoffler, responding to a two-four-two called in by Mr. Gary Prebble, who runs security at the Renaissance Faire in Cromwell, Maryland. I am speaking to Alexander Callahan, the father of the missing boys, Sean and Kevin Callahan, who are six-year-old identical twins.”

He holds the small silver recorder between us. Its red diode glows.

“By the way, Mr. Callahan, where’s your wife? She at home? She know about this yet?”

Jesus. Liz. “She’s in Maine,” I tell him. “We’re separated.”

The detective hitches his head to the side with a little frown, as if this is not what he wanted to hear. “Uh,” he says.

“The boys are with me for their summer visit.”

“And where do you live? You local?”

“D.C.”

“Address?”

I give it to him.

“So you came to fair headquarters at, let’s see, five thirty-six. How long would you say the boys were miss-”

“What about an Amber Alert?” I ask him. “Isn’t that something you should be doing?”

Someone at the station did a segment about this a few months back. I don’t remember all the details, but the system, named for a murdered child, raises the alarm about missing children, triggering an elaborate network to inform the public – bulletins on TV and radio stations, crawls at the base of the screen on all the major channels. It even flashes information on those big electronic highway signs that usually warn of fog or accidents.

I feel a rush of guilt, remembering an argument at the station. I was opposed to screen clutter, the weather, the breaking-news crawls, which, in my opinion, distracted the viewer. The Amber Alert seemed like more of the same.

“Afraid we can’t put Amber in play,” Shoffler says. “Not yet, anyway. An Amber requires specific, time-sensitive information: a description of the perpetrator, a vehicle make and model, a license plate.” His hands float up into the air and settle back down on his thighs. “Something. Amber – it’s strictly for abductions. At the moment, far as we know, your boys are lost.”

“Right.”

“We’re not sitting on our hands, Mr. Callahan. Soon as Gary called me – before I even got here – and I realized these boys had already been missing almost two hours, I went ahead and issued B.O.L.’s to the surrounding jurisdictions.”

“B.O.L.’s?”

“Be On the Lookout.”

I nod but say nothing.

“Okay,” Shoffler says, smacking his lips together, “so start with where you were when you last saw your boys, and then let’s go from the top through the day, what you did this morning, how you got here, when you got here, and everything you did within the fairgrounds proper. Let’s get this down while it’s fresh in your mind.”