“10-4,” Bo affirmed. “See, that’s also where the card was stuck in the book.”
Jane factored that it’s one thing to just slide a card into a book and quite another to make sure that others notice the page by turning down the corner.
“What came after this?” Weyler asked.
“We got the next clue here at the office in the form of a
voicemail message.” Bo then hollered out toward his office door, “Vi! Can you come here? And bring in Copeland’s file, would ya?”
Jane turned and saw Vi opening up a file cabinet, finding a folder and tearing off the top page that was stapled to the outside of the folder.
Odd
, Jane thought. But what was even stranger was that Vi took the top page and slipped it into her top drawer before heading into Bo’s office.
She nodded toward Jane and Weyler with a short and to the point, “Hey!” Vi’s wavy salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a no-nonsense style and fell just below her ears. She didn’t wear any makeup but she didn’t need to as her skin was surprisingly vibrant and youthful for her sixty-five years. Her 5’ 5” frame was solid and grounded, fully in charge of whatever needed to get done at any given time. Jane could tell that she and Bo shared an
understanding.
His demeanor clearly became more relaxed when she was in the room and he was, strangely, more than happy to let
her
control the events.
“Vi,” Bo said succinctly, “Morgan Weyler and Jane Perry from Denver.”
“Nice to meet you,” Vi said, “What do you need, Bo?”
“I can’t remember how to use this damn thing,” he groused, pointing to the phone. “Wanna play them the voicemail.”
“Sure.” With insouciance, Vi maneuvered her way around the clutter and, after pressing a few buttons, entering the voicemail code and releasing the
SPEAKER
button, a computer-distorted voice could be heard loud and clear.
“Do you know what it’s like to feel as if you’re two seconds from your last breath?
DO YOU
? It feels just like this…” There was a scratchy sound on the phone as if something was brushing against it, followed by the whimpering and pleading of what sounded like a very young male child from across the room. That lasted all of ten seconds and abruptly stopped before the scratchy sound against the phone reappeared and the distorted voice of the kidnapper spoke again. “He pounds on the window
and you do nothing.”
Click.
Bo was visibly shaken by the recording. “You…wanna here it again?”
Vi replayed the sickening message. Jane timed it using the second hand on Bo’s wall clock. It was thirty seconds exactly, short and untraceable—not that Midas had the ability to trace a call when the kidnapper left the message. But for Jane, it was a new aspect of the man’s personality. He knew the drill and he knew that it took at least forty seconds to trace a call if a live system was up and running when the call came in.
“We checked the incoming number,” Bo said, resting his cigar in an ashtray. “It’s one of them throwaway cell phones.” Jane added another element of the kidnapper’s personality to her visual list.
Methodical.
“Well?” Bo asked Weyler. “What do you get from the message?”
“He had to remove the voice disguiser in order to get the sound of the boy screaming,” Weyler offered. “That’s the scratchy sound you hear right before the boy screams and then right after when the last sentence is distorted again.”
“But the boy sounds like he’s six or seven the way he’s whimpering, not
fifteen
,” Jane argued. “And the screams just stop suddenly on cue before the guy re-fits the disguiser and starts talking again. Wouldn’t there be whimpering and screaming in the background
during
the whole message for better effect?”
“Hell, it’s a not a goddamn Hollywood movie here,” Bo said, irritated.
“No, Jane’s got a good point,” Weyler nodded. “It’s too rehearsed. Too planned out. And the kid
does
sound much younger than fifteen.”
Jane felt finally vindicated. “Like I said, Jake ran away and he’s pimping his parents with this shit! Look, I called…” She was just about to mention her conversation with Betty at the runaway shelter that morning when Bo interrupted.
“But if it’s a setup, the kid’s not askin’ for money!” Bo argued. “So, if there’s no ransom, what’s the point of all this?
Scaring the shit out of your parents?”
“Maybe so!” Jane replied. “Maybe he’s trying to teach them a lesson…”
“10-74. That ain’t Jake’s style, see! He’s a quiet kid, a little offbeat perhaps. If I had to describe him in three words, I’d say, scrawny, shy and…artistic.”
Jane noticed that when Bo said the word
artistic,
there was another word he wanted to use but chose not to. “What do you mean by
offbeat
?”
“He’s got a
ponytail
‘bout seven inches long,” Bo emphasized this statement with an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Usually stuffs it inside these hats he likes to wear. You know? The hats from the 60s that those fellas in the Rat Pack used to sport.”
“Fedoras?” Weyler asked.
“Yeah, them. ’Round here, it’s either ball caps or a cowboy hat, but not
fedoras.
” There was a slight mocking tone to Bo’s voice. “Nah, Jake’s the
sensitive
artist type. I mean, come on,
he’s got a goddamn ponytail.
No matter how pissed-off he might be at his folks, he’s
not
gonna go this far! He’d draw a picture before he did this!”
“What kind of stuff does he draw?” Jane asked.
“When we searched his room, we saw a bunch of sketch pads with doodles all over them. Nothin’ with guns or monsters. Just harmless doodles.” Bo turned to Vi. “Didn’t we start a file on little Juice Box?”
Vi nodded and left the room momentarily to grab Jake’s file.
Jane sat back in her chair, furtively glancing over her shoulder at Vi. Amazingly, she repeated the same pattern of removing the file from the cabinet, ripping off the sheet on the front of the file, securing that sheet in her drawer and then returning to Bo’s office. She handed the file to Bo.
“See what I’m talkin’ about,” Bo stated, laying several pages on his cluttered desk.
The drawings were hardly what Jane would call
doodles.
They were well-executed drawings, mainly of cars, dirt bikes and fedoras. However, in the corner of the last page was a small but precise drawing of pretty girl’s three-quarter profile. Jane recalled what Betty at the runaway shelter mentioned about Jake leaving town to meet a girl. “Who’s that?” Jane asked, pointing to the girl on the page.
Bo turned the page around. It didn’t take him long to respond. “That’s Mollie. Jake’s girlfriend. Daughter of the Methodist preacher in town. He and his wife also own the B&B you two are gonna be staying at. Jake was real smitten with Mollie.”
“Was?” Jane asked.
“Yeah, see, she broke up with him two weeks ago. He took it real hard.”
“A reason to want to hang himself on the ol’ bridge?” Weyler proposed.
“Or a reason to set it up like a suicide and then run away to gain sympathy,” Jane countered. “Did you find a suicide note in his room or at the bridge?”
“No,” Bo answered curtly.
“Well, if the suicide was spur of the moment, he might not have left a note. But most kids…most people…leave notes…
if
this is real. And you have to admit, the chances of Jake being kidnapped
while in the process
of attempting suicide is stretching the plausibility factor off the chart! We cannot categorically rule out that Jake is not involved in his own disappearance.”
“Well, I can tell you he wouldn’t be sending his folks this!” Bo exclaimed, signaling Vi to hand him the third clue. “This was also left in the Van Gorden’s mailbox.” Bo placed an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper shielded in a plastic bag in front of Jane and Weyler. On it, was the full-color figure of an eight- or nine-year-old boy that had been cut out of from a magazine. Based upon the clothing and the vintage red baseball cap on the kid’s head, Jane thought it looked like it came from an from an old magazine advertisement from the 1950s or 1960s. The figure was glued on the page to give the impression that the boy was being dragged
by his arm. The other arm had been artificially extended and highly exaggerated with a pen drawing that gave the impression that the flat of the boy’s palm was pressed against a surface. Below this, were letters cut out from various magazines that spelled the sentence:
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL INNOCENCE !
Bo laid the large envelope, also protected in plastic, next to the page. The only writing on it was the cryptic
BAWY
in the same unsteady hand. In the upper right corner was a lone, uncancelled, twenty-five-cent stamp with an old Packard on it.
“It was hand delivered to the Van Gordens, right?” Jane asked. Bo nodded. “So, why put a stamp on it?”
“Why did Jeffrey Dahmer pick up only certain boys to eat?” Bo cracked. “The criminal mind is complex!”
Jane thought back to the sinister voicemail message. “’He pounds on the window and you do nothing.’” Jane repeated as she pointed to the exaggerated extension of the palm on the third clue. “Doesn’t this look like a palm pressed against glass?” Jane held her hand up in the air to mimic the drawing.
“Maybe when he grabbed Jake,” Weyler interjected, “he threw him in a car and Jake was screaming or pounding on the glass trying to be heard.”
“What car?” Jane asked.
“The one on the bridge that left a stain of antifreeze. The peckerwood must have a leak in his radiator. We got tire tracks, which proved we can rule out smaller cars. We figure we’re lookin’ for a truck, van or SUV. That narrows our search from 1,000,000 to 500,000.”
“How do you know the car that was sitting there has any connection to Jake?”
“We have to make an ass out of you and me, and
assume
it does. This is an old bridge that’s hardly used. You don’t see cars just sitting there…waitin’…”
“What do you mean by
waiting
?”
Bo let out a tired puff of air. “One witness came forth. A woman walkin’ her dog. She said she saw a black vehicle sittin’
on the bridge. Couldn’t see the driver and, no, she didn’t get a license plate.”
“Black vehicle? Black what?”
“She’s
a woman
,” Bo stressed, as if Jane wouldn’t understand. “I asked her what the make was and she looked at me like a pig looks at a wristwatch. I was lucky to get the color of the vehicle out of her and even then, she said it could have been dark blue.”
Jane realized her next question was absurd, but she had to ask it. “There wouldn’t possibly be any security cameras on that road or outside town hall or the Van Gorden’s subdivision so we could see who’s dropping off these clues or identify the vehicle?”
“These yahoos are settin’ up cameras all over the damn town. But that’s on the QT. 10-4? There’s none in the subdivision yet. They put one outside the door here but it works about as good as the front buzzer. As for the road, we got a couple speed photo cameras out there by the bridge but it only takes a photo if someone happens to be speedin’. There was one photo on March 22
nd
but there was no vehicle on the bridge and no sign of Jake in the photo.”
“You have more clues?” Weyler asked.
“Oh, yeah. The hits just keep on comin’.” He turned to Vi. “Wanna play ’em
numero dos
?” Vi punched in the codes on Bo’s phone and then depressed the
SPEAKER
button. “This one came in after-hours on the same day as the other voicemail and the creepy cut-out of the kid with the red ball cap.”
There was the stark sound of what sounded like a young boy whimpering again in the distance, followed by the scratchy interlude and the distorted voice of the kidnapper. “He
cried like a baby
and will never be a real man.”
Click.
Bo shifted in his chair, clearly in some sort of discomfort. “Nice, eh? I’d like to see this peckerwood hangin’ by his goddamn nuts!”
Now it was Jane’s turn to shift uncomfortably in her chair. “Wait a second. There’s not a word wasted with this guy. He
used the word
cried
instead of
cries.
That doesn’t make sense when we just heard the boy actively crying in the background. Wouldn’t Jake
still
be crying when he leaves the message? So the guy should have said, ‘he’s
crying
like a baby.’”
“You a part-time lawyer?” Bo asked. “’Cuz you just took an ax to split a hair.”
Jane leaned forward, pressing her index finger into Bo’s desk. “Why is he telling us something obvious? We can
hear
the kid crying. Of course, the kid conveniently
stops
crying right before the kidnapper makes the final statement.”
“What in the hell are you sayin’?”
“She is saying,” Weyler interjected, “that the kidnapper is possibly playing both roles on the phone. He takes the disguiser off the phone, moves away, does the crying jag, puts the disguiser back on and says a message.”
“Thank you!” Jane declared to Weyler. “Which brings us back to the idea that there is no kidnapper and this is all Jake’s elaborate set up. That’s why I called…”
“You don’t know Jake, lady!” Bo bellowed. “
I do
! Vi knows him, too. He’s not involved in this!” Bo slapped another plastic covered drawing in front of Weyler and Jane. A crinkled blank page in plastic was attached to it. “Or this!” He slammed another plastic sheeting on the desk that held a smaller piece of paper. “
Or this
!” The final clue hit the desk, another protected sheet of 8½ x 11 paper. “This one,” pointing to a sexually graphic drawing of a young boy around eight or nine years old in bondage, with his pants around his ankles, “is
not
something Jake would draw!”
The other two were handwritten in the same hesitating and somewhat childish scribe. One was an odd riddle:
Name this classy car.
Seven letters.
The first four spell what you do before going on a trip.
The first three spelled backward is something you take on that
trip and
wear on your head.