The day our child disapp.., p.1
The Day our Child Disappeared, page 1
THE DAY OUR CHILD DISAPPEARED
ROBERT J. WALKER
ALEXANDRIA CLARKE
CONTENTS
The Abduction
Robert J. Walker
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
The Frozen Child
Robert J. Walker
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
If She Only Knew
Alexandria Clarke
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About the Author
THE ABDUCTION
ROBERT J. WALKER
1
Jackson groaned softly as he shifted in his seat, his legs and lower back aching with a dull, persistent throb. The relentless muted roar of the aircraft’s engines felt like a miner’s drill slowly boring its blunt tip into the depths of his ear canals. He yawned, crushed by exhaustion but unable to drift into any sort of slumber longer than fitful periods of fifteen or twenty minutes.
“Man, I hate flying,” he muttered under his breath, checking his watch for what felt like the fiftieth or sixtieth time and noting with immense frustration that only seventeen minutes had passed since he had last checked his timepiece. It was almost four in the morning, so just over an hour before the Boeing touched down. Jackson couldn’t wait. After almost six hours shoved into this cramped economy seat, he was ready to sell his soul for a few moments of rest on a soft, wide mattress.
Everyone on the plane was asleep except for him, it seemed. Well, almost everyone. Movement in the periphery of his vision caught his attention. He turned to his left and saw one of the young kids in the center row of the airplane, the middle child of a family of five, getting up to go to the bathroom. Jackson turned his face back to his screen after this minor distraction and resumed scrolling listlessly through the movie titles on offer. He finally picked something he was vaguely interested in, put it on, and leaned back, praying for the last chunk of the flight to fly by swiftly.
When the plane finally touched down shortly after five in the morning, nobody knew that a major crime had been committed on board the aircraft, least of all the victims of that crime. Jackson, a twenty-two-year-old college student from Texas, had no idea that he was possibly the only witness to what had taken place. What he had briefly described in the gloomy half-light of the sleeping airplane hadn’t seemed at all like anything even vaguely criminal.
However, a couple minutes after the hundred or so passengers had disembarked from the Boeing and were waiting to collect their baggage, a bloodcurdling scream roused them from their half-asleep, zombielike stupor.
Jackson, who was almost falling asleep on his feet next to the baggage carousel, got such a fright that he almost lost his footing, for the piercing howl exploded from only a few feet away from him. Startled, with his heart suddenly pounding and his eyes wide open, he spun around.
“My baby! Someone’s taken my baby! This… this isn’t my child! This is a stranger! I don’t know who this child is! Someone’s taken my son!”
Jackson could barely make sense of what was going on. The woman doing this hysterical, almost-nonsensical screaming was the mother of the family of five who had been seated across from him on the plane. The father’s face was alabaster-pale, drained utterly of color, and both he and his wife were staring at the middle child of the family—a boy of around five years old—with a look of complete shock and horror on their faces. The boy’s older sibling, a girl around eight, was also staring at him as if he was some sort of monster out of her nightmares, while the only member of the family who didn’t seem completely rocked to their core was the baby in the woman’s arms, who was gurgling contentedly.
“Who… who are you?” the father suddenly screamed at the five-year-old boy, who was swaying groggily on his feet, blinking in the harsh fluorescent light of the baggage claim area and looking both terrified and confused as he emerged from what had seemingly been a deep slumber.
Meanwhile, Jackson and the other passengers were gathering in a circle around this unfolding scene of the bizarre and unsettling drama.
The father, a large, heavyset man in his forties with a grizzled beard and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, suddenly lunged for the five-year-old boy, picking him up by his shoulders and shaking him violently. “Who the hell are you? Where’s Wilbur? What have you done with my son?” he roared, spittle flying from his mouth.
“Where’s my son?” wailed the wife, a pale, slender redheaded woman in her late thirties. “This can’t be happening! Who is this child? Where’s my Wilbur? Where’s my baby boy?”
Jackson didn’t know what was happening and was as confused as he was shocked, but he couldn’t stand to see a child being abused, no matter what had happened. He charged forward and got in the father’s face. A football player, Jackson was powerfully built and very strong, and usually, a mere dirty look from him was enough to cow most people into submission.
“Let go of the kid!” Jackson yelled. “Are you insane, man? Get your hands off him! You can’t shake a kid around like that!”
“This isn’t my boy!” the man screamed, his voice hoarse, his eyes wild. “They’ve… someone has swapped this child with my son! Someone’s kidnapped my son!”
“I saw your kid. I was sitting across from you!” Jackson yelled, grabbing the five-year-old under his armpits and yanking him out of the man’s hands. “Have you lost your damn mind or something?” he asked, putting the boy down behind him and placing his own body between the father and the child. “I saw him, man. He was wearing these exact same clothes!”
“That isn’t our son!” the woman shrieked, staring at the child, who was now bawling as if the boy was a demon summoned from the pits of hell. “He’s wearing my Wilbur’s clothes, but he’s not Wilbur! That isn’t my child!”
“Lady, what on Earth are you talking about?” an elderly man asked. “We were all on that plane. I walked behind you and your husband when we got off the plane! I saw you carrying this child in your arms! How could you carry a child all this way, then turn around and freak out like this and say he’s not your kid? Are you people on drugs or something?”
At this point, airport security, drawn by the commotion, arrived on the scene. Jackson, who continued to use himself as a buffer between the howling child and the raging father, glanced over his shoulder to see if the boy was okay. The child had pulled the large, low hood of his hoodie off his face, and now Jackson was able to see that the boy—who was clearly Hispanic, with olive skin and black hair—looked nothing like the rest of the family, who all had very pale, freckled skin and light eyes. Could the hysterical parents be telling the truth? Could their son have somehow been kidnapped and switched with some other child on the airplane? It seemed like something utterly impossible… yet it also seemed more and more like it had actually happened.
“What’s going on here?” one of the
“R-round up everyone who was on the flight!” the mother gasped, looking as if she was about to pass out, vomit, or both. “Someone has. They’ve switched my son with a stranger’s child!”
Jackson, meanwhile, tried to comfort the wailing boy behind him. “Hey, kid, it’s okay,” he said in a gentle and reassuring tone, squatting down next to the child and holding his hands. Despite his youth and his menacing appearance, Jackson had plenty of experience with young kids since he often babysat his nephew and niece, who were four and five years old. “I’m gonna help you find your mommy and daddy, all right? Don’t worry about those mean people back there. I won’t let ‘em hurt you. I’m here to help you. We’ll get you back with your mommy and daddy right away. Can you see ‘em here? Can you point to ‘em for me?”
Despite Jackson’s reassurances, the boy continued to howl hysterically. It seemed to Jackson, though, that on top of the boy’s obvious fear and panic, he couldn’t actually understand what was being said to him. There was no look of any sort of comprehension in his eyes, not even a speck of it. There was only intense fear, disorientation, and confusion.
The airport security officer, meanwhile, had radioed for assistance. “All right, people!” he yelled after getting off his radio. “Nobody on that flight leaves this area until we’ve found the missing child! I’m going to need you all to show me your boarding passes and stay exactly where you are!”
“This is insane!” the elderly man huffed. “I’ve got a driver waiting for me. I’m getting charged by the minute! How can a child be ‘switched’ like that? How could you people not have noticed back on the plane that this wasn’t your son? What kind of parents are you? I’ve got nothing to do with this fiasco. I need to leave!”
“Nobody leaves, sir. I’m sorry,” the security officer said gruffly.
“He’s wearing my son’s clothes, you selfish, insensitive asshole!” the father roared, charging at the elderly man, his eyes wild with grief and rage. “He came back to my son’s seat, wearing those clothes, and he fell asleep with his hood over his face!”
One of the security officers grabbed and restrained the father before he could attack the old man.
More airport security officers arrived, and soon the police did, too. Jackson stayed with the boy, who kept bawling in a state of absolute panic. No matter what he said to him, the boy didn’t seem to understand a single word. One of the other passengers, a petite woman in her fifties, came over to Jackson and the boy. Smiling, she knelt down next to the child.
“Do you mind if I try something?” she asked Jackson.
He shrugged. “Be my guest. I can’t seem to get the poor kid to understand a word I’m saying.”
She turned to the boy, giving him her warmest and most reassuring smile, and then began to make gestures in universal sign language at him. As soon as she did this, the light of comprehension shone in the boy’s eyes. He signed back with his own little hands, which were trembling.
“Oh, man,” Jackson gasped. “That never even crossed my mind. He’s deaf!”
“Not just deaf,” the woman said. “Mute, too. And what’s more, he doesn’t understand English. But he can lipread some Spanish.”
A burly security officer came over to the three of them. “Can you communicate with this child, ma’am?” he asked gruffly.
“I can,” the woman answered.
“Ask him who he got on the plane with. There’s no way the airline would have allowed a minor his age to board an aircraft unaccompanied by an adult. We just need to find the person he got on the plane with, and hopefully, we can straighten this whole thing out.”
The woman used sign language to translate these questions, which the boy answered. When he was done answering, she looked up at the security officer with a worried expression on her face. “He says that it was an old man. But he can’t remember much of the last twenty-four hours. He says he doesn’t know the old man, that the man gave him ‘medicine’ that made him feel sleepy and confused. This child has been drugged and was very likely kidnapped! All he wants is to go back to his parents.”
“Can he point out the old man in question? Is he here?”
The woman relayed this question to the boy, who peered around the baggage claim area with teary eyes. After scrutinizing all the people in the area, the boy shook his head. The man who had accompanied him on the airplane was gone … and so was the other child, who had clearly been kidnapped under the strangest and most impossible circumstances.
2
Ray Adler gripped his pistol tightly, his heart pounding in great, booming thumps in his chest. Although he had done this many times before, it never became easier. Indeed, as he’d gotten older, it had only seemed to become more of a challenge, and the same adrenaline he had so craved as a younger man now felt like an unwelcome intruder as it surged through his veins. His back pressed up against the graffiti-covered wall, he glanced across at Smith, who was on the other side of the doorframe.
Smith, a rookie cop who had only graduated from the academy two years prior, was exactly half Ray’s age at twenty-three. Despite their difference in years, Ray, whose powerful build, tall stature, and long reach had made him a feared boxer in amateur leagues in decades past, was just as fit and strong as his younger colleague. Indeed, due to the latter’s penchant for fast food and video game binges in his free time, Ray was likely fitter and stronger than Smith.
“You ready?” Ray whispered.
Smith nodded, trying to come across as confident, but fear and apprehension were written as plainly across the younger man’s broad, hairless face as the colorful tattoo sleeves he had on both arms.
Ray tucked a lock of medium-length hair—far more gray than brown these days—behind his ear, drew in a deep breath, and narrowed his eyes as he prepared to act. He counted down from five in his head, then he swung around, positioning himself in front of the rickety door, and aimed a powerful frontal kick at the door handle.
The rotten wood gave way at once, the door swung open, and Ray charged into the derelict house, his pistol aimed ahead of him, adrenaline coursing through his veins. Smith was hot on his heels behind the veteran detective.
“Don’t move! Police!” Ray yelled hoarsely as emaciated, intoxicated addicts, sprawled over ratty sofas or laid out on the trash-strewn floor of the crack house, looked up in stupefied bewilderment at this surprise intrusion into their realm.
He and Smith weren’t here for the junkies, though. Instead, they were here to take down the man supplying these tragic figures with their fix—a man on whose trail Ray had been for almost a year. Ray’s expert sleuthing had finally brought him here, and after months of frustrating cat-and-mouse, he had the drug dealer where he wanted him: a place from which his slimy and extremely slippery prey could not escape.
