Abducted Read online

  And here she was ridiculously vulnerable—naked, confined, thousands of miles away from home in a city of strangers.

  Her cell phone was in her purse on the bed, out of reach. Big mistake. Her eyes frantically searched the small bathroom for anything that could offer protection…serve as a makeshift weapon…

  A hairbrush…toothpaste…water glass…soap… towels…snap at them with a wet towel? Shit!

  Then she heard a voice murmur, softly. She couldn’t make out the words.

  Anita’s heart pounded at her ribcage.

  “Who’s out there?” she demanded, rising from the tub now, water falling off her body. “I will scream,” she said forcefully, hoping the words would buy her time because, at the very least, she needed to wrap herself in a towel. I will not let them attack me nude.

  She knew that her escape route was not far. The hotel room door was in close proximity to the bathroom. If she moved fast, she could dive out of the bathroom, seize the door to the corridor, and escape…

  There was silence from the other side of the bathroom door. Covered in a towel, she silently stepped forward. She wrapped her hand around the handle.

  One. Two. Three.

  Anita opened the bathroom. She ran for the hotel room door. She pulled it open and was halfway out when she quickly turned to glance…and saw no one pursuing her. The room was empty.

  Leaving the hotel room door open, she cautiously stepped back into the room. She checked the closet…under the bed…behind the curtains…and found no intruders.

  Then she heard more footsteps and murmured voices. Coming from the other side of the wall, in the next room.

  “Christ, I am an idiot!” she said out loud.

  Anita shut the door and sat on the bed. It took a good fifteen minutes to stop shaking. Even though it was a false alarm, the fear remained.

  Someone out there had Tim. Someone who might fight to keep him. Someone who might not hesitate to harm her—or kill her—to protect themselves.

  I don’t know what I’m up against.

  She wanted Dennis here, now. He was still three days away from joining the search. Could she stay safe that long?

  Anita got dressed back into her street clothes. Hair still wet, she went to see the concierge and asked him for a late-night pharmacy or convenience store that would sell her mace. The concierge directed her to a small food mart two blocks away.

  Anita found it, following the green glow of the neon LOTTERY TICKETS sign in the window. The store manager listened to her request. He was a heavy man with a missing front tooth and no shortage of nose hair. He examined the crowded racks of items behind him, going past the stock of porno magazines, and found a black canister of pepper spray. It was small enough that she could conceal it in her hand. It was actually a key chain.

  He explained how it worked, reading off the packaging. There was a trigger that locked. It contained five bursts of one second each. It was effective up to eight feet. And it was very potent.

  One spurt of the stuff would shut the eyes of an attacker and make breathing difficult. At twenty dollars, it was a wise investment.

  The manager rang it up. “But don’t forget,” he told Anita, “the best defense against a rapist or mugger is a good, old-fashioned kick in the balls.”

  “What if it’s a woman?” replied Anita.

  The manager was surprised by the comment and paused for a moment. “A woman rapist?” He chuckled. “Hey, you find one, you let me know.”

  Ugh, thought Anita. She left the store with her purchase, and the manager cheerily called after her, “Have a good night!”

  XIV

  Young voices filled the air at Little People Playground. The children fed off the energy of the morning sun, darting and climbing in perpetual motion.

  Anita and Roy sat together at a far corner on a bench, each wearing sunglasses. Roy had the big, mirrored kind that had gone out of fashion an era ago. Between them, two maps were spread out with blue ink outlining separate territories in the Lakeview neighborhood. They each had a bag containing about 350 posters, a roll of tape, and a staple gun. “We’re going to divide and conquer,” Anita said.

  Lieutenant Ford had told Anita to stay away from the playground after the “confrontation,” and Anita initially agreed. But Ford wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain: helping. Anita could sense she was slipping down his top 10 list of priorities, and possibly off the charts entirely.

  “This will be our meeting place,” she told Roy. It was 8:00 a.m. “Every two hours, back here, to touch base.” Then she conceded, “They probably won’t reappear here. But we can circulate the posters. Someone is bound to know something.”

  Roy nodded, studying his map for a moment.

  “Remember,” Anita told him, “if you think you’ve found them or you have a good lead, don’t intervene. Stay invisible. Get to a public phone as fast as you can and call me on my cell phone.”

  She waited for a response.

  “Pretty straightforward,” he finally said. “I’m ready.”

  Anita folded up her map. “Me too. Let’s go find Tim.”

  They headed off in different directions. After about a block, Anita looked over her shoulder and could see Roy in the distance attaching a poster to a telephone pole. Good boy.

  The posters had to produce some results.

  Anita unloaded about a hundred of them in the first hour. She passed them out to pedestrians, posted them on poles, and asked to place them in storefront windows.

  She received a lot of cooperation. After all, who could turn her down? They couldn’t. At least to her face. As the morning progressed, she realized that some of the small shop owners agreed to display the poster, but subsequently did not. It was probably too much of a downer to put alongside their cheery “Discount Supersale!” signs.

  At 10:00 a.m., she returned to Little People Playground, where Roy was already sprawled comfortably on a bench.

  “You been here long?” She eyed him suspiciously.

  “Just got here,” he stated.

  “How’d it go?”

  “I put up a lot of posters.”

  “Did you give them to people? Did you ask questions?”

  “Nobody’s seen him. But they look at it pretty fast. They’re on their way places, you know.”

  She sat down next to him. “OK.” She reviewed the kids and parents at the playground. There was no one she recognized from the other day, so it was time to circulate. “I’m going to hit the crowd here,” she said. “You wanna help?”

  Roy grumbled. “Sure.”

  Most of the parents reacted with apprehension. “We’ve got a child abductor in our neighborhood?” asked a freckled woman with a paperback. Her freckled daughter threw bark chips at a boy nearby.

  “Well, he was taken in California, but he’s been seen in this neighborhood,” replied Anita.

  The woman’s face lit up with concern. “How terrible, how terrible,” she said.

  Another mom reviewed the poster carefully, nodding, and said, “I heard there was a crazy lady loose in the neighborhood. She tried to steal a little boy from this playground a couple days ago.”

  Anita couldn’t quite tell her, “Actually, that was me.” Instead she asked, “Do you know anything about the boy that she…tried to take?”

  “No,” the mom responded. “Just some four-year-old who lives around here.”

  After every parent at the playground had a poster, Anita returned to Roy. “Well, let’s go pound the pavement. See you back here at noon.”

  She covered another series of blocks, this time residential. She put posters under the windshield wipers of parked cars. She gave one to every person who crossed her path.

  All she needed was one person who could make the identification or provide a location. One lousy person.

  Anita was taping a poster on the side of a mailbox, when her cell phone rang. She snatched it and almost answered, but stopped.

  She recognized the number on t
he display. It was Sacramento. It was Clifford. It was work.

  She chose not to answer it. It was the last thing she needed right now. It would mess with her focus. Clifford had her email, that would have to do for now.

  After she found Tim, Clifford would understand.

  Another phone call came fifteen minutes later, as she was sharing a poster with a twelve-year-old girl with a ponytail who looked ready to cry. “This is so, so terrible,” the girl said.

  Anita didn’t recognize the phone number. She answered. It was Roy.

  “I think I found him,” he said quickly.

  Anita’s heart nearly jumped out of her chest. “Oh my God. Roy, where are you?”

  “At McDonald’s.”

  “The one on Broadway?”

  “I think so. Yeah.”

  “Check your map.”

  A rustling noise on the other end. “OK…Broadway. Yeah.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Eating.”

  “Don’t draw attention to yourself. I’ll be right there.”

  She hung up, feeling shivers climb up her body. The ponytail girl was staring at her.

  “Did you find him?” she asked.

  “Maybe.” Anita turned and headed up the sidewalk.

  “Can I come with?”

  “Whatever you want.” Anita was in a daze. She started to run, tugging the bag of posters with her. The twelve-year-old followed.

  Four blocks later, badly winded, Anita entered McDonald’s and immediately started looking at faces. She tried not to look obvious.

  A lot of kids to examine. One by one, she checked them off.

  Not Tim, not Tim, not Tim, not Tim…

  Roy. He was seated alone at a small table, sipping on orange soda.

  Anita slid into the plastic chair across from him. “OK. Where?”

  Roy unwrapped a finger from his drink and pointed over her shoulder.

  Anita turned.

  “Where?”

  “The booth. Under the clown picture.”

  Anita saw a boy and a woman.

  Not even close.

  “That boy is probably seven years old!” Anita lost her temper. All of the tension inside of her erupted. Another hope dashed; she couldn’t take this. “He looks nothing like Tim. Nothing! Did you even look at the poster?”

  Roy shrunk back. “OK, OK. I’m sorry. So it’s not him.”

  The ponytailed girl entered, also out of breath, face eager to see a reunion. She spotted Anita and headed over.

  “It’s not him!” growled Anita, and the ponytail girl backed off. She looked like she was going to cry again.

  Roy nervously sipped his drink until it was just ice, and the cup gurgled.

  “I’m sorry,” Anita told Roy. “I’m on edge. You can understand?”

  “I’m just trying to help you,” he said.

  “I know, and I appreciate it.”

  They stayed for hamburgers, and then returned to their respective searches.

  For Anita, it was a lousy afternoon. Her cell phone number on the poster merely provoked crank calls, cruel ones, including a demented voice that exclaimed, “I cooked him and ate him!” There was also a shrill woman who was pissed off at Anita for posting posters on a tree on “private property.” Anita didn’t remember doing that, so it was probably Roy.

  Outside an elementary school, a teacher reprimanded Anita for passing out posters in close proximity to the students. “Several of the younger children have seen the poster, and they’re asking questions, and it’s making them quite upset.”

  “Talk to them about it. Make it part of their education,” Anita answered. “Ever heard of ‘stranger danger’?”

  Then, during the final meeting with Roy at Little People Playground, a short, balding man in jean shorts and a Chicago Bulls T-shirt approached her and started yelling: “Get away from here!”

  Anita looked up at him.

  “I know who you are. I saw you here Saturday trying to take that kid. You better leave before I call 911.”

  Roy stood up. “Listen bud, you don’t know the real story.”

  The short man shouted, “Who the hell are you, her accomplice?”

  Other parents and kids were staring now. “I mean it, I will call the police unless you get off this playground.”

  Roy took steps toward him. “You can’t make me do shit, asshole.”

  Anita grabbed Roy’s arm. “Don’t, don’t. This won’t help. Let’s leave.”

  Roy and the man continued glowering at one another, but when Anita tugged again, Roy relented and left the playground with her.

  “I could have kicked his ass,” said Roy

  “Then I would have kicked your ass,” responded Anita.

  Evening put the cap on a crummy day. They returned to the hotel in a cab, tired, without leads, but several hundred posters lighter.

  “How about if I pick a place for dinner?” asked Roy as they stepped back into the hotel lobby.

  Anita looked at him, shrugged. “OK. I don’t know how hungry I am…”

  “How about Mexican and margaritas?”

  “Sure.” At the very least, chips and salsa sounded good.

  They split up, cleaned up, and Roy tracked down a Mexican restaurant. It wasn’t too far, but they cabbed it.

  The restaurant, Siesta, was located in a dark, glamorless strip somewhere between Michigan Avenue and Navy Pier. There wasn’t much nightlife nearby: a couple of big, mostly empty parking lots for daytime commuters, a closed currency exchange, a scary looking liquor store, and a shuttered automotive parts shop.

  “The food here is supposed to be great,” said Roy as they stepped out of the cab.

  “I hope it makes up for the ambience,” Anita replied.

  Inside, the crowd lacked tourists and had a gritty feel that seemed to re-energize Roy. He finished his margarita before she had taken two sips from hers.

  Anita had brought the Lakeview maps and started to open one. “OK. Here’s the plan. Tomorrow we’ll widen our search.”

  “Can it wait until morning?” asked Roy. “Please?”

  She refolded the map. “Sure, I guess.”

  Anita tried Ford on her cell phone. She had tried several times before without an answer. This time, he answered.

  “Have you received any leads?” she asked.

  “If I had heard anything, I would have called,” Ford said with a sigh.

  She told him about the posters, and he was nonresponsive. He eventually cut the call short. She could hear a lot of activity in the background.

  “I have to be a pest,” she explained to Roy after putting away the phone. “I won’t let them forget about me.”

  Roy grumbled, “The police are worthless. You shouldn’t even bother with them.”

  “Really,” agreed Anita.

  “I would give up on the cops helping you,” he said again, pouring more margarita down his throat.

  “Well, in two days, Dennis will be here, so that will give me a boost.”

  Roy appeared startled. “What, your ex?”

  She nodded.

  He became curious. “What’s he coming out here for? You guys still have a thing?”

  “No,” replied Anita. Now she needed to pour down some margarita. “We’re over. It all fell apart when this stuff happened, you know. It was a horrible time. I don’t know how any couple could survive it.”

  “So if you find Tim, are you guys getting back together?”

  She chuckled. “I’m not thinking about that.”

  “So he’s here in two days?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Roy seemed to focus on this for a moment. Anita dipped a chip. The liquor was making her drowsy.

  When their combo platters came, she could barely eat half of her meal. Roy finished most of his and consumed a steady succession of drinks. He became quiet.

  In many ways, he is similar to Pam, thought Anita. Not the conversational type. But not shy like Pam. Just priva
te.

  As the waitress cleared away their plates, the cell phone rang. Anita inspected it before answering to make sure it wasn’t a Sacramento area code. Then she clicked on.

  “I saw your poster,” said the boyish voice on the other end.

  “Do you know something?” asked Anita.

  “How much is the reward?”

  She had never really established a number. How much did she have in savings? “Twenty thousand,” she replied. Was this for real?

  “I’ll tell you where they are for twenty thousand. In cash.”

  “Why cash?”

  “You know, uh, taxes.”

  “I’ll cover the taxes.” Anita’s initial surge of hope was giving way to skepticism. “I can’t pay in cash.”

  “You can get it.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Uh, Robert.”

  “Robert, where’s the little boy?”

  “No, no, no. I want the money first.”

  “I see.”

  “Meet me at ten o’clock on the corner of Forty-Third and Western.”

  “Where’s that? In Lakeview?”

  “Hell no.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Robert. You’ll get your reward, but I’ll have a policeman deliver it. Just to make sure you’re not some liar who thinks they can take advantage of a woman who might be a little desperate and vulnerable.”

  “A policeman?” The tone was disappointment.

  “I have your number.” She read it back to him from the display. “I can use it to get your address. I’ll send a police officer over right now. He’ll give you the reward money, you give him the information, no questions asked.”

  “Wait, no, no. Don’t do that.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  The voice struggled for a response.

  Then Anita heard another person on the line, snickering.

  It sounded like a couple of teenage boys.

  “How old are you?” asked Anita.

  “Ah, go to hell, lady,” said the caller. The other voice on the line exploded into laughter.

  “You little shits—” started Anita, but before she could get any further, Roy had snatched the cell phone out of her hands. He was on fire.

  “Listen you cocksuckers I am going to personally come over to your house and pull your fucking brains out of your eye sockets and wipe the streets with you.”