A Son's Tale

“I have parental controls in place but he knows how to hack through them.” Her voice sounded far away—a disconnect from the cottony haze of unreality that had her in its grip.

“You think he might have met someone there?” Whittier’s piercing gaze confirmed that she was in the conversation.

Morgan held on to that look. To him. And touched ground for a second. “No.” She shook her head again. “I caught him before he could clear history and cache. He was looking at basketball shoes.” She repeated what she’d told Detective Martin an hour before. And her mother and father when they’d arrived at the police station.

“Does he clear history and cache regularly?”

“He used to, before I caught on to the fact that he was sneaking on to the computer behind my back. Then he figured out that if I saw everything cleared, I’d know he’d been on.”

“Do you have any idea what he was looking at?” His tone held the same deep concern he’d expressed the previous spring when she’d first told him about the son she was raising alone and struggling to let go of enough to give him some independence, but hold on to enough to keep him safe.

“Basketball,” Morgan said, breathing normally for a moment. “Stats, schedules, shoes, basketball video games, autographed balls…”

Whittier frowned. “If that’s all he was into, why delete the history?”

“So I wouldn’t know he’d been on the computer without supervision.”

“Because he thinks you baby him too much.”

She’d appreciated Whittier’s conversation regarding her son these past months. Appreciated his male perspective.

“I know you agreed with him when it came to showering. I have to trust him to get himself clean enough and to give him his space to grow into a young man. But there are just too many dangers on the internet. I still won’t let him go on unless I’m sitting there with him.”

“And he probably sees that as more proof that you don’t trust him.”

“Right. I can’t budge on this one. But I make sure that I put aside time to let him surf to his heart’s content. I want him to learn the internet, to know how to get around and to be privy to the wealth of good information out there. Seems like we’ve been to every basketball site ever uploaded. We look at all the baseball sites, too, but basketball is his first love. Did you know that in the history of the NBA only eight players were born on May 3? And that the most recent was in 1977? That was Tyronn Lue. He was drafted by the Denver Nuggets and played for ten years. Sammie’s birthday is May 3… .”

“Morgan, Detective Martin needs to speak with you.” The booming—and openly reproving—voice rent through her like a shard of lightning. She should have been more focused on the moment, should have known the second the detective had reentered her residence, seeking her attention.

She’d been rambling. Her father thought she talked too much. That she took a hundred words to say what could be said with ten.

The detective was waiting for her in the foyer. “No one in the neighborhood has seen your son since the two of you left this morning.” Elaine Martin’s tone was all business now. “But we found one eyewitness, a seventy-year-old woman who says she saw Sammie on the corner of Bohemian and First.”

Heart pumping, Morgan took a step back until she was almost leaning against the man who’d sired her. Bohemian was four blocks from school.

“He was speaking with a man.”

“What man?” She couldn’t stop the shaking that had control of her body.

“We don’t know. We’re hoping you can help us.” Detective Martin pulled an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch copy of a hand sketch from the portfolio under her arm. “Do you recognize this man?”

Morgan stared at the chiseled features. The longish hair. And the tattoo on the muscled shoulder. Some kind of spiked something.

“I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

“Look closely, Morgan. Take your time,” Elaine Martin said. “Our witness says the man was in his mid-thirties and was well over six feet tall.”

She wanted to know the man, wanted to find her son, and choked back tears as she shook her head.

“Look again, Morgan.” Her father’s voice jarred her further. “You must have seen him someplace.”

She stared at the photo, studying the tight cheeks, the shoulders. The tattoo. Eyes that were…human. Trying to place them all. Running the image through her mental memory bank. A coach? A relative at the day care? Someone at the grocery store? The mall? Or the pizza place?

“I don’t know him… .” Her voice was only a thread—a thin thread—a testimony to the fragile hold she had on her composure. And as she turned and looked directly at her father, tears filled her eyes.

“I swear, Daddy, I don’t know him. I wish to God I did.”

Morgan glanced back at the freehand drawing. If that man…that fiend…had her son…

If he touched him…

Sammie could already have been—

No, he’d run away. He was fine. Just hiding from her. And they’d find him. Sammie wasn’t as grown up as he thought.

“What about an Amber Alert? Can you issue one of those now?” Did they have reasonable belief that Sammie had been abducted? If they issued an Amber Alert anyone who saw him would know that he was missing.

“We issued it half an hour ago.”

Which meant they no longer thought Sammie had just run away.

The words struck a new chord of fear that Morgan couldn’t ignore.

CHAPTER FIVE

CALEBKNEWLONGnights. He’d lived with them for most of his life. Which stood him in good stead over the next several hours as he stayed with the Lowens and Julie Warren and waited for news of Sammie’s whereabouts.

He’d offered to stay. Morgan had accepted his offer immediately, with none of her usual assurances that she would be fine. He made coffee and small conversation when fatigue and panic threatened to get the best of the women. He sat quietly, a steady breath in the storm when detectives reported in or the phone rang.

And he studied Mr. Lowen with the outside eye of a scholar. Or so he told himself.

“I didn’t realize George Lowen was your father,” he said softly, sometime after ten that evening as Morgan accepted his invitation to step outside for some fresh air.

He’d thought the man heartless when, two years before, Lowen had bought up a block of real estate that included the city’s oldest library and the complex that held the young artists’ league studios and small gallery and tore it all down to replace it with a gated community of luxury condominiums. His perusal of George Lowen over the past few hours hadn’t softened his opinion of the business mogul much.

With her hands hugging her upper arms, Morgan shrugged. “We don’t associate much.”

He hadn’t realized she had parents in the area until a few hours before.

“He’s here tonight.”

“Yeah.”

Her expression blank, she gazed out into the darkness.

“You have to keep hoping, Morgan. Hope gives you the strength you need to take the next breath.”

They were walking on the sidewalk in front of her place. While the curb was lined with cars—his, Julie’s, her parents’, and the detective’s who’d replaced Elaine Martin and was going to sit with them through the night to monitor any possible contacts from kidnappers—the street was quiet. Searchers would resume looking for signs of the young boy at daylight.