The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [3]
“That’s the boy,” the man with the burn said.
“What boy?” the second man asked.
“The son, you fucking idiot. I thought you memorized the picture.”
“Her,” the man protested. “Not the kid. You never said anything about a kid.”
“But she didn’t show. Now we have to improvise.”
The man with the burn took the walkie-talkie from his pocket, whispered into it urgently, and hurried after Kyle. His companion hesitated a moment and then followed. He was in too deep to object.
The driver of the BMW lowered his passenger window as Kyle approached. Woman or kid, he didn’t see any difference.
“Excuse me,” he called politely.
Kyle took a step toward the car and bent forward uncertainly.
“Yes?”
The man with the burn closed in from behind and tapped Kyle behind the ear with a sap. The second man caught him as he sagged, his green hat falling to the ground. When the BMW drove away a moment later, the boy was wedged between the two men in the rear.
The wind caught the hat and sent it tumbling down the mouth of a storm drain. It reached the river an hour later, where the tide was running toward the harbor and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Come daybreak, the hat was miles offshore, never to be seen again.
Seven Years Later
1
I woke early and listened to Claire breathe. She had her back to me, but she didn’t sound like she was sleeping, so I rolled onto my side and used one hand to gently massage her neck and shoulders. Some mornings she ignored me, some mornings we made love, and some mornings she wept. After a few minutes of no response, I got up and got ready for work.
The kitchen was dark and cold. I flipped on the under-counter lights, opened the valve on the softly clanking radiator, and then set out the usual weekday breakfast for Claire and Kate—fruit, cereal, and yogurt. On Fridays I add a chocolate croissant, cutting it in half for the two of them to share.
Frank, the night doorman, had a taxi waiting by the time I got downstairs. He said good morning and solemnly handed me a few pieces of mail addressed to my son. It was a shock when I first received mail for Kyle about a year after he disappeared—a solicitation from some preteen magazine. I spent the day thinking about it and then knocked on the door of the building super, Mr. Dimitrios. Tears in his eyes, he admitted that he’d been intercepting junk mail addressed to Kyle for the past twelve months and turned over a shoe box full. I made myself go through it—Reggie Kinnard, the detective working with us, had mentioned that the psychopaths who kidnap children will occasionally amuse themselves by sending mail to the victim’s family. There wasn’t anything unusual in the box. A friendly representative of the Direct Marketing Association, who I spoke to on the phone, suggested I simply scrawl the word “deceased” on everything and return it to the post office. Instead, I had Mr. Dimitrios continue intercepting it, so Claire and Kate wouldn’t see it, and arranged for Frank to pass it along. These days, it’s all solicitations for acne products and CD clubs and summer-job programs and magazines like Maxim and Outside. The kind of stuff any nineteen-year-old might receive. The kind of stuff Kyle might actually be interested in, if he’s still alive somewhere.
I stopped to pick up the papers at an all-night newsstand on Seventy-second Street and then went to work. There’s always someone at the office when I arrive, no matter the time—the hedge fund I rent space from trades twenty-four hours a day. There are only about sixty employees, but they occupy an entire floor of a Midtown office building, the northern half of which is a single large unpartitioned trading room. One corner of the room is taken up by the fund’s namesake, a midnight blue 1966 Ford Shelby AC Cobra that sits on a low dais, halogen spotlights reflecting off its mirrorlike finish. The car had proved too large for the elevators,