Chapter One
I was staring at the late news with the volume turned down when Danny’s picture flashed on the screen. It took a moment for my brain to catch up to the fact I was seeing his picture on television. I sat up, reached for the remote and turned up the volume. The serious anchorlady was saying that the boy was missing since late that afternoon. He was last seen leaving a pick-up baseball game at Fletcher Middle School, riding his bike in the direction of home.
They showed his vital information on screen. Danny Darwin, twelve years old, five feet tall, ninety pounds, brown hair and blue eyes. Last seen wearing a red Nike tee shirt and blue jeans.
I knew most of this.
I’d just met him that afternoon when I almost ran him over. I was driving home from work, brooding on my soon-to-be ex-wife, when he rode his bike right out in front of my car. I swerved and avoided hitting him, but he dumped his bike and took a little slide.
“You okay?” I asked, getting out of the car as he picked himself up. He was skinny, with limp brown hair that hung down in his face. His red Nike tee shirt was a half size too big. I’d guessed him to be ten or eleven.
“Oh, man, that was close,” the boy moaned as he examined a tear in the knee of his jeans. I squatted down to get a better look at the damage as the surge of adrenalin started to melt away and the sledgehammer in my chest slowed its tempo.
He sat back down on the ground and pulled up his right leg, looking at the wound to his jeans and the blood on his knee. Tears threatened to spill as he turned his pale blue eyes up to mine. He swallowed hard.
“I’m okay,” he said.
I liked him. He was a tough kid. Aside from a skinned knee and a small cut on the palm of his right hand he was fine.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Danny,” he said. “Danny Darwin.”
I gave him my hand and pulled him up. “Okay, Danny, my name’s Mack. I’m sorry about your jeans but I think your bike is alright.” I stood the bike up and looked it over. A baseball mitt dangled from the handlebars.
He smiled and looked at his bike, hardly a scratch, his knee already forgotten as he took the handlebars.
“Thanks, mister.”
“We’re friends now, Danny, and all my friends call me Mack,” I said. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave him a gentle squeeze. “Now listen. People driving cars aren’t always paying attention like they should, so you have to be responsible for your own safety. You understand? You’ve got to be the one paying attention.”
“I’m sorry, Mack, I’ll be more careful,” he said. “I promise.”
“You could have really gotten hurt. You’re lucky I have cat-like ninja reflexes,” I said, trying to take the bite out of the scolding.
“I’ll pay better attention, I promise,” he said. His eyes shone with the truth, pure and simple.
An old Monte Carlo was stopped at the intersection a half block away. It turned in our direction and I motioned Danny to the side of the street. It rumbled toward us slowly, leaving a trail of gray smoke in its wake. We let the car pass and then I gave Danny a serious look.
“You gonna watch where you’re going?”
He nodded vigorously. “You bet I am.”
I chucked him on the shoulder and smiled. “Alright, Danny. You take care, now.”
He got on his bike and rode away, looked back over his shoulder at me, smiling and waving as he pedaled down the street. I waved back and hollered for him to watch where he was going.
A graphic with a phone number appeared on the screen and the anchorlady implored the viewers to call with any information that might help locate Danny. I memorized the number as they switched to a story about a double shooting on the Westside.
I went to the kitchen with Bandit, my yellow Labrador, following closely. I dropped some ice cubes into a tumbler, soaked them with Jack Daniels and added a splash of water. I picked up my cell phone on the way to the back door. Bandit led the way out to the deck. I savored the slow burn of the whiskey as the dog sniffed around the perimeter of the yard, hoping to root out an opossum or a coon.
Naturally, I wondered if my encounter with Danny had anything to do with his disappearance. Did he hit his head when he fell and suffer a concussion? Maybe he’s disoriented, lost on his bike somewhere.
Not likely. His head never even hit the ground and he was fine when we parted.
Would he run away? I had no idea, but he seemed like a happy, well-adjusted kid to me. You never know what someone’s home life is like, sometimes even when you know them well, but I didn’t sense any fear in the boy in our brief meeting.
It could be as simple as a miscommunication with his parents. It’s Friday night; maybe he made plans for a sleepover with a school buddy, and maybe his parents forgot about it.
No. That’s a reach, and the cops would have covered that angle by now, anyway.
The simple explanations that resulted in a safe outcome for Danny were few, and would have been investigated first. It’s only been five hours, but if it’s already on the news, the boy didn’t turn up in the most likely places.
This felt different from all the other times I’d seen or read news stories about missing children. I’d met him; he was more than just a picture on TV -- he was a kid in the neighborhood.
I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach; an unpleasant, rolling sensation. I gripped the deck railing and tried to imagine that everything would be fine; Danny would be found unharmed, smiling and riding his bike with his baseball mitt dangling from the handlebars. But a dark wind kept blowing the thought away before I could get my arms around it.
This kind of thing is on the news all the time, but it’s never in your neighborhood. And as long as it doesn’t happen in your neighborhood, you can keep it from being quite so real. It’s a sad story on the news, and sure, those are real people, but not to you, not really.
Now it happens right here, right down the street. The media would soon have the Darwin house staked out, if they didn’t already. Danny’s parents hadn’t been on the news tonight, but it was only a matter of time. Their nightmare would be there for all to see. The neighbors, my neighbors, would voice their horror and pledge their support. The other locals would watch in a mild state of horror from their couches and dinner tables.
I drained my glass and set it on the railing, picked up my cell and dialed the number for the police.
“Jacksonville Beach Police Department, Officer Wallace speaking,” a man’s voice announced.
“Hello, my name is Mack Anderson and I have some information regarding Danny Darwin.”
“Hold one second, sir,” Officer Wallace said.
The air was thick with humidity and the sea breeze seemed to have given up for the night. I felt the familiar sting of a mosquito on my neck. I killed the insect with a quick slap and wiped its bloody remains on the leg of my softball shorts.
A metallic click in my ear and a new voice came on the line. “This is Detective Cahill. Who am I speaking with?”
“My name is Mack Anderson. I have some information on Danny Darwin that might be helpful.”
“What have you got, Mr. Anderson?”
“I saw Danny this afternoon. He was riding his bike and I almost hit him. I got out of my car and talked to him to make sure he was alright. He seemed fine, and we went our separate ways.”
“Where did this happen?”
“I was driving west on Seagate Avenue, on the block between 9th and 10th Street. Around five thirty this afternoon.”
“You sure about the time?”
“I’m sure about the approximate time. It was between five thirty and five forty five.” I explained the sequence of events that approximated the time.
Cahill took down my full name, address, and contact numbers. “The detective in charge of this case will want to speak with you. Probably tonight. Are you at home right now, Mr. Anderson?”
“Yes.”
“Keep your phone handy. I’ll call you back.”
I went inside, showered and put on khaki shorts and an Allman Brothers concert tee shirt, vintage 1988. Then I mixed another drink and went back outside. The first drink hadn’t done much for me, but as I sat on the deck looking up at the stars in a moonless sky, the second one began to work. I realized that I hadn’t thought about my soon-to-be ex-wife in at least three hours. Had to be a new record.
Cahill called back.
“Mr. Anderson, would it be alright if I stop by in about fifteen minutes? I can save you the trouble of having to come to the station.”
I looked at my watch. Five minutes past midnight. I wasn’t going anywhere, and I wasn’t ready to go to bed, so I told him sure, drop on by.
True to his word, fifteen minutes later I heard a car door slam in the driveway. Bandit barked twice and looked at me. I waved him down as I stood and walked inside. He trailed me through the house and I opened the front door just as a man was reaching for the buzzer.
I guessed him to be in his early sixties, with thin gray hair combed across a deeply creased forehead. He was taller than average, with a narrow face and strong jaw line. His eyes were gray and hooded, a spray of crow’s feet fanning out from the corners. The sleeves were rolled up on his white Oxford button-down, the collar was unbuttoned and his blue and red striped tie hung an inch low. He had the air of a hard-working man who was having a hard day.
“Mr. Anderson?”
“That’s me.”
“Detective Cahill,” he said, flipping open a small leather case to display his badge.
We shook hands. He had a wide hand and a solid grip. I invited him in and showed him to the kitchen.
“Coffee? Something stronger?”
“Just some water, please,” he said.
I fetched him a bottled water from the refrigerator and we sat at the kitchen table. He asked me to go through the account of my meeting with Danny, and I gave it to him as I had done earlier on the phone. He checked his notes as I did so, letting me recount the tale without interruption.
“Do you recall anyone else in the vicinity at the time? Any cars, pedestrians walking by, neighbors out in the yard, anything like that?”
I reviewed the encounter in my mind once again, but no images of bystanders emerged.
“Sorry, detective, but I don’t recall anyone at all.”
“Try to keep your mind open to it, maybe something will pop up. That happens, sometimes. The human memory is a quirky mechanism.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, but I didn’t hold out much hope for a forgotten detail.
He flipped his notepad closed and stood up from the table. “We appreciate the information, Mr. Anderson.”
“I know it’s not much, but I thought it might be helpful,” I said, wishing I had more to offer.
“It’s very helpful. It narrows the time frame and helps us track his movements.”
“Am I the last one to see him?” I asked.
“I’m not in charge of the investigation, so I couldn’t tell you that,” he said. He didn’t say if it was because he didn’t have the information, or didn’t have the authority to share it. “Either way, we appreciate your help.”
“If there’s anything else I can do, don’t hesitate to ask,” I said.
“I can’t think of anything, but I would like to use your facilities if that’s alright.”
“No problem. Through the den, down the hallway on the right,” I said. He probably wanted to take a covert look around, but I didn’t care. I figured that was why he wanted to “save me a trip to the station”. He was smooth if somewhat transparent.
When he returned he thanked me for my time and suggested that the detective in charge of the investigation would still want to talk to me. I was sure a thorough background check would be performed, but there were no marks on my record, save a misdemeanor Drunk and Disorderly charge from my college days, the result of an unfortunate incident at a frat party.
I walked him to the driveway. His car was an unmarked gray Chevy Malibu of recent vintage. We shook hands again.
“Good luck, detective. I hope he turns up in good shape.”
Cahill gave a weary nod. “You and me, both.”
Bandit stood next to me in the driveway and we watched Cahill’s taillights as he turned the corner at the end of the street. Maybe it was just my state of mind, but I didn’t get the feeling Cahill was holding out much hope for a safe recovery. Bandit looked up at me. There was doubt in his eyes, too.
