Vanished(27)
The man stilled, his head slumping to the ground.
Ben shoved at him with his toe. “Where’s Henley Fairbanks? If you’ve hurt that little girl, you’re a dead man.”
The man strained his neck to look up at Ben. His youthful appearance startled Ava.
“I don’t have her,” the teenager said.
Mason couldn’t believe it as he stared through the glass. A teenager sat slumped at the interview table.
He’s about the same age as Jake.
The FBI had taken the boy to the closest holding facility, the downtown Portland Police Department’s building. The teen had been processed and then handcuffed in an interview room, where he’d had a pleasant conversation with Special Agent Wells.
Ava had called Mason immediately. “A nineteen-year-old grabbed the backpack and ran. He says he’s not a kidnapper and that he was just trying to make a buck.”
“Did he leave the note?” Mason had asked.
“Yes. He claims he didn’t think anything would come of it, but he decided to give it a try.”
Mason had relayed this information to the family. The other three adults had just stared at him.
“He’s not the kidnapper? He doesn’t know anything about Henley?” Lilian had whispered. Lucas made her sit down. She appeared dizzy and unstable on her feet and seemed to crumple in on herself when she heard the news.
“We’re right back where we were,” Lucas said slowly. “All this time focusing on the ransom note, and it wasn’t even real.” The man looked numb.
“The FBI has been pursuing leads other than this one,” Mason answered. “They said from the beginning there was something fishy about it. Even Ava questioned why the note was left in such a public place, where it was bound to fall into the FBI’s scientific hands.”
“A stupid kid,” muttered Robin. “Yanking us around. Like we haven’t been through enough.”
Mason had left them to lick their fresh wounds and driven downtown, thankful the kid hadn’t been taken to OSP, where Mason might cross paths with some of his coworkers.
He wasn’t ready to face anyone yet.
Ava joined him at the window. “He’s just a kid, but I still want to slap him silly.”
“Slap him silly is too kind.”
“He has no idea the stress he’s put us and the family through,” replied Ava. Her hands were shoved in her slacks like she didn’t trust herself to be near the teen without popping him. Mason studied her out of the corner of his eye. The agent had fiercely aligned herself with the family. It was bound to happen, considering the close quarters they were living in and the turmoil she was witnessing. No one could be around Henley’s parents without their own heart breaking at the sight of their pain.
“You’ve adopted them,” Mason commented.
She turned to him, her eyebrows raised. “You’re surprised? What did you expect from me? I’m human.”
“I don’t know. More removed, I guess,” he answered lamely. Her blue eyes seemed to bore through him, and he realized she was wearing heavy eye makeup instead of her usual light look. And her hair was down and curled softly around her face.
“You look nice,” he said.
She dropped her gaze and picked at her gold jacket, staring at the fabric like she didn’t recognize it. “Robin dressed me up to look like I was out on a holiday date.” He immediately felt awkward for commenting on her appearance.
“I didn’t mean that you don’t usually look nice.” Mason fumbled for words. “Your hair looks different . . . in a good way . . . Not that it doesn’t usually look good . . . I guess you just look different. But a good different.”
Her eyes crinkled. “Wow, detective. You’ve got some smooth lines there. I bet Jake could give you some pointers.”
He wanted the floor to swallow him up. “I didn’t mean it . . . I mean, I shouldn’t have said you looked nice. Oh, fuck it.”
She laughed.
He watched her, abruptly blown away at the beauty of her face as she let go of her stress for a few seconds. “You should laugh more.”
“I could say the same to you.”
“I haven’t felt like laughing for a few days.”
“Amen,” she said. Her eyes were serious again, but there was a relaxed air about her that hadn’t been there before. He felt it flow over him, soothing him. “This has been a horrible few days, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy bits and pieces of life when the funny times strike. We don’t need to walk around in total despair. That’ll kill a person after a while.”
“You’re like the cop whisperer or something,” he said. “You see the good in the shittiest situations. They should put you on Oprah. Or Dr. Phil.”
She smiled at him, holding his gaze. “Now that was a real compliment. Thank you, detective.”
“I can see why Duncan picked you to stay with the family.”
“Well, that’s good, because most of the time I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m doing. I don’t have the psychology background that our victim specialist does, but I guess the people I work with see something in me that I don’t.”
“You seem to know what to say.”
“That comes from years of trying to calm my sister. I told you she was a little off. She liked nothing better than to stir up drama. I spent a lot of time counterbalancing that. I strove to be rational while she went off the deep end. I guess I have a knack for calming people around me and seeing the good side in everything.”
Something flashed in her eyes.
“You still balancing her out?” Mason asked.
“Now I try to simply avoid her. Makes my life easier. You know how sometimes being in the same room with certain people exhausts you? She is my kryptonite. She tears away my strength. To survive, I stay away.”
“Where does she live?”
“She lives in Portland.”
“That doesn’t sound like you’re staying away.”
“After five years in LA, I thought I was strong enough to deal with her. Part of me misses her like I’d miss my right arm. She’s my twin. When I’m not with her, something doesn’t feel right in my soul. But when I’m with her, she destroys me. I had to choose what I could live with. I really thought she’d changed enough to let us coexist in the same city. Instead, I found that nothing had changed; if anything she is worse. So now we communicate by text or email. The city is big enough that our paths don’t cross.”
The earlier light had gone out of her eyes. Her flat tone told him volumes about her relationship with her sister. Mason felt a bit guilty for bringing up something so deeply personal, but he was touched that she’d confided in him. Ava McLane had many layers. Sharp investigator, empathetic agent, and wounded sister.
He wanted to know more.
He looked back at the teen, who was now being interviewed by a pair of agents. “So where does this leave us? How certain are they that he had nothing to do with Henley’s disappearance?”
Ava swallowed hard, and he watched her shift her concentration back into work mode.
“They’re 99 percent certain. He spilled his story on the way over. He’d heard about the kidnapping in the news, and his family has taken a bit of a financial hit. Sounds like he’s a daydreamer. Spends too much time in his head, dreaming up ways to get his hands on money. Said he often had wondered what it would be like to stumble across a stash of cash, and the kidnapping sparked a fantasy of him making a fast buck. He acted on it.”
“He didn’t think the FBI would catch him?” Didn’t the kid watch TV? Or maybe that was the problem. He’d watched too many movies where the guys get away with the cash. Something like Ocean’s Eleven, where the thieves were glamorous.
“I guess his first plan had been to pretend to turn in the money at the restaurant and then try to claim it later. When he saw the rush of agents, he panicked and ran.”
“Dumb. Where are the smart crooks these days?” Mason muttered.
“I know where one was yesterday morning,” Ava said softly.
“Not smart. Lucky,” stated Mason. “And his luck will run out soon.”
“What an idiot,” the man told his television. Had the child really thought he could steal two million dollars out from under the FBI’s nose? He kept his respect for the abilities of the police at the forefront of his mind. He might have hated the police, but he knew they had skills. Maybe not every member of the police force, but most of them. Police had a set purpose in the world. They caught the bad guys and offered them up for justice. Without a police force, the country would fall out of balance.
Balance was vital.
If only everyone could see what he’d seen; they would understand that they needed to work to restore the balance in their personal lives. It’d taken him years to see the truth. He’d made a lot of wrong turns and horrible decisions in his life that had hurt the people around him. But he’d finally understood how life worked. Give and take. Rest and work. Black and white.
By thinking before he acted, he was able to make the right decisions. Every action a person made had a decision behind it. He chose what to eat for breakfast. He chose what to watch on TV. These decisions might have seemed like nothing, but they were everything.