Thief of Souls Read online

  “Nathan? I never knew his name. That was my late husband’s middle name.”

  “Small world.”

  “Yes, isn’t it? Well, I was right about here.” She turned outward. I came up next to her and looked out.

  “Where did you first notice the car?”

  She considered that question for a moment. “I can’t say that I actually noticed the car. I was looking through the binoculars and it just sort of pulled into view. I didn’t see it approach the boy, really. It just pulled into the field of the glasses.”

  I gestured toward the binocs. “May I?”

  She picked them up and handed them to me. I had already forgotten how heavy they were. I put the strap around my neck—you could do some serious toe damage if they dropped—and brought them to my eyes. It took some adjustment to correct the focus.

  “Where did you first start following Nathan?”

  “Do you see a fire hydrant?”

  I zoomed around. “Got it,” I said.

  “Count three lampposts. Right about there.”

  It was well before the cordoned area. The probable abduction site was still half a block away.

  As if an explanation for her nosiness was required, she said, “I like to watch that little boy. He has an odd way of walking, and it’s interesting. He touches everything along the way, all the fences, some of the bushes . . . when he turns his head, his lips are sometimes moving. I think he sings to himself.”

  I pulled the binocs away from my face and let my vision readjust, then pulled out my pad and made a note to find out if Nathan was dyslexic. Like my son, who had so many of the same mannerisms.

  “So the car pulled into the field of vision. From which direction?”

  “Coming from this way.”

  So the passenger door had been on the curb side. “And as you were watching through the binoculars, the boy got into the car.”

  “Yes. That’s just how it happened. But—well, maybe this is silly, and I don’t know if it’s even important—”

  “Everything has potential significance, Mrs. Paulsen. Please speak freely and don’t worry about anyone thinking you’re being silly.”

  “Well, it was odd—he hesitated a little bit. Like he wasn’t sure about something. And I saw that he dropped his jacket. It sort of fell off his bag.”

  Yes, yes, yes . . . “Did he just leave it lying there?”

  “Well, yes. It sort of got stuck at the edge of the bushes. Come to think of it, I thought that was a strange thing that his mother didn’t make him pick it up. But children these days don’t value the things their parents buy for them like we did. I meant to go downstairs and leave a note on their door that he’d dropped it. But I guess it slipped my mind.”

  Someone must have come along later and kicked it all the way under the bushes. Probably another kid. Maybe the litterer who dropped the receipt on it.

  “Is there anything else you can remember? The smallest thing, even if you don’t think it means anything . . .”

  She put one hand on her chin and pondered for a moment, with great concentration. “No, I’m sorry. That’s all I remember. At least right now. Sometimes it takes me a little while to bring things back up. Not like when I was younger. I had a good memory then, especially for figures.”

  I was willing to bet that she would remember her first telephone number, but not what she had for breakfast that day. “Thank you, Mrs. Paulsen. You’ve been a great help to me.”

  “Oh, I’m only too glad to help. I hate to hear of families having troubles. It’s awful, the way things are these days.”

  A mediocre defense attorney would tear her to shreds. But it was a start.

  Fred Vuska was peeved; he hates this kind of thing as much as I do.

  “You want Frazee to come in on this with you? He’ll drag it out of her like nothing.”

  Spence was our Father Confessor; he could make an Eskimo confess to sweating in about five minutes. We had to watch him sometimes because he made people want to come clean so badly that they would come clean to things they hadn’t done.

  “Not yet. I’m building a rapport with her. And I don’t want her to freak.”

  “What about the kid? Anything new?”

  I shook my head slowly. We both sat for a minute and contemplated our hangnails. I said, “He’s either perfectly fine and hidden away somewhere, or he’s dead.”

  “Yeah, that would be my take on it too.”

  “Is there any money in the budget for a profiler? It would help me to understand what might motivate someone to do this. Then maybe I could approach her again and get somewhere.”

  “There’s money—a lot, in fact. We haven’t spent it because all these gurus are busy writing books for big bucks or trying to nail down terrorists. You might manage to book one for next year, if you beg.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You might want to talk to Erkinnen, though. He’s pretty knowledgeable about this stuff.”

  Our department psychologist was known more for airheadedness than expertise, at least among the troops. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Yeah. He keeps up on things. Give him a call.”

  It couldn’t hurt, especially in view of the rarity of profilers in the postwar era. “I will, but in the meantime, I’m going to run Ellen Leeds and see if anything comes up.”

  “Sooner the better. I’d like to wrap this one up quickly.”

  He said that about every case and we all pretty much ignored him. But this time, I think he really meant it. An uneasiness sets in around here when a good kid disappears. None of us likes the things we’re forced to think about, but it’s our job to consider every possibility. I hate to tell you what the statistics are about abuse—it’s overwhelmingly at the hands of someone the child knows. That’s what makes it so unthinkable, that a human being could violate a position of trust so sacred. I mean, your own kid, or your sister’s kid, or your grandchild or your nephew . . . what kind of scumbag do you have to be? I can understand it more easily—well, not that much more easily—if there are rage problems or impulse control issues; those can be worked out sometimes. Kids can push your buttons on purpose; mine certainly do. There are occasions when I can barely walk away without pounding them. And I’m a cop. Also a grown-up; lots of folks just don’t realize what happens with kids because they’re not really grown-ups themselves when they have them.

  But the ones who create trust as a way to get close to a kid, and then hurt them intentionally, well, there’s a special place in hell for them. At least I hope to God there is.

  I’d had only limited experience with Errol Erkinnen, our department psychologist. I recalled that he had a doctorate in forensic psychology and that he had written a number of academic books on the subject, but I forgot how friendly he was.

  “Oh, I’d be more than happy to talk to you, Detective,” he said. “More than happy.”

  More than eager, he might have said. You have to have a certain craziness yourself to diagnose and pronounce judgment on those who do criminally crazy things, and as I recalled, Erkinnen met that requirement. “All I have open today is lunch. Funny, I’ve been really busy for the last couple of weeks. Everyone needs a consultation now. Some kind of run on bizarre behavior.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was the overflow route for the double-booked FBI boys. “I’ll bring sandwiches.”

  “Lovely.”

  As I was entering the data on Ellen Leeds, I realized that I hadn’t asked her maiden name. If nothing came up, I would have to call and ask her, which would surely make her suspicious about my line of thinking. But it turned out not to be necessary.

  I plunked the printout down on Fred’s desk. “Ellen Leeds was investigated fourteen years ago for possible child abuse when her first child was found dead in his crib at the age of eight months. The death was eventually ruled to be from natural causes.”

  “SIDS?” he asked.

  “Supposedly. The investi
gator said she told him the baby didn’t wake up when she expected him to, and so she went in there and found he just wasn’t breathing. How easy is sudden infant death syndrome to fake?”

  “I don’t know. There weren’t any other marks on the baby’s body, according to the medical examiner’s report. But there was that woman in New York who got away with it eight times.”

  “That was New York.”

  I pouted silently.

  Fred said, “Yeah, I know you hate that fat-assed, big-mouthed pitcher they have there. But they don’t let baseball players do the postmortems, even in New York. They have medical examiners, just like we do. There was a big sympathy thing going on there. Everyone was saying, poor woman, lost eight kids to SIDS. Finally someone started to get suspicious. Turned out she liked the attention she got when something happened to one of them.”

  “I’m wondering if that’s what’s going on here too. The kid is way too big for SIDS, but just about the right age to get grabbed by the bogeyman. But the mother is keeping a really low profile. She’s not screaming to the press or banging on the mayor’s door. Doesn’t seem to be looking for attention, really.”

  “Well, maybe she figured out how big a deal this would turn out to be after it was too late.”

  “If that was the case, she would just have Nathan turn up and give us some lame explanation. Threaten him if he didn’t go along with it. You can make a kid keep quiet.”

  “If he turns up, I’m gonna want Spence to talk to him.”

  “Me too.”

  When I got back to my desk to grab my purse and gun, there was a light flashing on the phone. It was a message from my daughter Frannie. She forgot to bring her tap shoes to her father’s house and needed them for her lesson that afternoon. Could I bring them to the dance school before three?

  I was annoyed for a moment. But then I thought about what it would be like if she just dropped off the face of the earth.

  The department’s consulting psychologist is a tall, bony Finn named Errol Erkinnen. He was attractive in a sharp-faced sort of way, very angular and Nordic-looking. His mother was a big fan of Errol Flynn, hence his alliterative name. We all call him Doc, anyway. He’s a skilled listener, and it took him only one recitation of the facts to grasp the case and my concerns. You wouldn’t think so to see his office—it was a jungle. Papers and journals were strewn everywhere; there were no clear flat surfaces. A number of cardboard boxes, all bulging with files, were stacked up against one wall. Bookshelves, crammed full to the ceiling. But he never had any trouble coming up with paperwork when we needed it from him. I guess he was mentally organized in a way that most of us can’t understand. Smart people can be like that.

  He got right to the point. “Okay, first thing is, if you’ve got a mother who made her own kid disappear, there’s likely to be some mental illness going on there. Depression, Munchausen-by-proxy, maybe, but it may not be anything overtly visible. Remember the woman in Texas who drowned her five kids in the bathtub, one by one?”

  “Well, it goes without saying that she was nuts.”

  “Yeah, and everyone could see it in her, and she was supposedly getting treatment. But that visibility made her the exception. Mostly they hide it. You’re going to have to keep that in mind when you interview her.”

  “What do you mean, that I should be really tender with her?”

  He smiled. “Only if you go that way.”

  I bristled. “Come on, Doc. You know what I mean.”

  “I know. Sorry. I meant to say that you’ll have to remember that the questions you ask and how you ask them could set her off.”

  “I’ve read a little about that Munchausen thing, but I don’t know too much about it.”

  “It’s a pretty rare syndrome, despite all the news about it lately. In a nutshell, the parent or caretaker—it’s almost always a woman, usually the mother—becomes fixated on the attention she receives when she has a sick child, so she deliberately makes the child sick to get that attention. Did you see the movie The Sixth Sense?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The little girl who was poisoned by her mother and haunted the kid to get him to tell her story so her little sister would be saved: that was a classic case—fictional, but well-portrayed—of the mother with Munchausen-by-proxy. But there are other diagnoses that could fit here too. The mother could be psychotic or depressed or delusional, any one of a number of conditions that might make her harm or hide her child. In some cases, she might not even be aware that she’s done it.”

  I thought about what he’d said for a moment as he worked on his sandwich. “You know, she looks too normal for any of that other stuff. I know it’s hard to tell, but you’d think there would be some visible signs of being whacked out. With the Munchausen thing, you might not see it unless you were watching specifically, but these other things, you’d think you’d see something in her behavior.”

  “Not necessarily. Some perpetrators of crimes against children are really good at looking perfectly normal. A lot of pedophiles look like the guy next door.”

  It was too true.

  “And don’t forget, you’re not seeing her under ‘normal’ circumstances. Her son is missing. That’s a stressful situation, even to a person who’s in the middle of a psychotic episode, even if she is the cause of him being missing.”

  “I suppose it would be.”

  “Any possibility that the ex is involved?”

  “I did a quick check and he looks clean.”

  “I’d interview him immediately. He’ll be able to give you a lot of subtle insight, if he’s willing to talk. And I probably don’t have to tell you that he’ll give you a sense of what happened when the first one died. Hopefully you’ll be able to figure out if he thinks she did it or not. Is he here now?”

  “On his way, due to arrive in a couple of hours.”

  “Good. When you talk to him you’ll be able to see his face.”

  Not that I’d want to, ever again—Daniel Leeds had a wart on his cheek big enough to support a hanging plant. I had a very hard time looking at anything else while we were talking, which we did very shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles.

  Having seen his ex-wife, who was petite and compact, I would never have put the two of them together. He waddled into the division reception area like a pregnant polar bear, pasty white, rolls of blubber hanging over his enormous belt. He had a plumber’s crack when he turned around.

  But he was articulate, intelligent, soft-spoken, and clearly upset by his son’s disappearance. Before we got into the difficult stuff, I needed to get him calm and to establish some kind of rapport. So after a few strained pleasantries and an expression of sympathy for his troubles, I started the interview with a question that’s usually pretty safe.

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a rocket scientist.”

  I almost had to force myself not to laugh. He just didn’t look the part. “Really?” I said, quite stupidly.

  “Yes. Really. My official job description is rocket propulsion engineer. The company I work for develops propulsion systems for high-tech weapons and airplanes. The military is our biggest customer.”

  “So you must be pretty busy these days.”

  “I am.”

  “You have other customers for that kind of stuff?”

  “Unfortunately, we do.”

  “Well, that must be very intriguing work, and I’ll bet you—”

  “I really can’t discuss anything about my work, Detective. There are security issues and I’m restricted by our government contracts from revealing anything about what I do.”

  So much for the safe questions. I cut to the chase; there seemed little point in trying to connect more fully. We’d already established in a phone call that he was at work in Arizona when Nathan was abducted. With the kind of security his employer was likely to have, it almost seemed an insult to try to corroborate his statement. I would, of course, but it would not be my top priority.
/>   “Tell me about your relationship with Nathan, Mr. Leeds.”

  He squirmed a little. I couldn’t tell if the chair was too small for his bulk or if the question made him uncomfortable. “I don’t see him often enough, of course. I try to maintain a working relationship with him, be an active father and all, but it’s hard from so far away. He’s such a great kid. I miss him a lot.”

  “Have you been having any problems with him lately? I know kids and parents go through tough times no matter how much they love each other. I do with mine, for sure.”

  “No, nothing worth mentioning. He’s doing well in school, he’s pretty respectful still, although I’m beginning to see signs that he’s becoming a teenager, so that may change soon.”

  I smiled, thinking of Evan, with his occasionally smart mouth. “It probably will. But it’s manageable if you work at it.”

  “I can’t say that there’s anything specific that I’ve noticed. We get along pretty well. Part of that is the distance, I know. If I were in the trenches with him every day like Ellen is, I’m sure I’d have a thing or two to say.”

  He had given me the entrée I needed. “I also wanted to ask you about your relationship with Nathan’s mother.”

  He let out a troubled sigh. “It’s as good as any divorced couple, I guess. We don’t try to make things difficult for each other, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What was the cause of the breakup of your marriage, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  He hesitated, then said quietly, “There was another woman.”

  It was true what they said about taste—there is just no accounting for it. That any woman would have coveted this man was beyond my understanding. Except that he was obviously intelligent, well-spoken, caring, and a devoted father. None of those qualities made him any less gross to look at.

  “Is there rancor between the two of you over that?”

  “There was at first, but I think when it all shook down she was pretty tired of me, anyway. I don’t get any indications that she’s still dwelling on all that. It was almost ten years ago when it happened, and we’ve both grown up a lot since then.”