Baby Blue

It was the height of summer and all of the little girls were locked safely in their cages.

Wilton, Connecticut

Six-year-old Brianna Iverson disappeared on a sunny morning six blocks from her home. She was there one second, and gone the next.

Just like all the others.

“OK,” said the man in the darkness. “We need you to focus.” The child’s mother, Carly Iverson, thought harder—put everything into remembering. She stopped at the post office to drop a letter in the mail, she said. It must have been around ten that the morning, maybe a bit earlier. She was only inside fifteen seconds, tops. The post mistress could confirm that.

No, it wasn’t a typical errand, she said. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in the Wilton Post Office.

From the darkness came the scratching of pen on paper, as though she’d said something significant. She squinted into the harsh lights. “What?” She wiped a stray lock of blond hair from her red, swollen eyes. “I mean, did I say …” She stopped and began sobbing.

“Please continue, Carly,” said the man.

After taking a few moments to compose herself, she resumed. Her husband already was in his Wall Street office in Manhattan, and she stopped by the post office on the way to the market. She was going to fix a beef roast for dinner, one with diced carrots and potatoes, so when she popped into the post office, she’d been thinking about whether she was going to use a gravy mix or make her own from scratch. Her husband liked the homemade, but it was so darned time consuming.

“I was only inside a few seconds,” she said. “I swear.” She already knew she’d made a terrible mistake. And mistakes like this, when they come, almost always come without warning but seldom without blame. This was on her. That much was already clear to Carly.

When no one answered, she hung her head and emitted a sound—guttural and filled with anguish. She went silent for a moment and then steeled herself to continue.

One second, she said, her beautiful daughter was sitting in her car seat in the Range Rover’s rear compartment reading Where the Wild Things Are. The next, she wasn’t. Instead, there was only an open car door, the book on the floor—and the sound of tinkling bells fading off into the distance.

Carly had stared at the Rover’s open door, too bewildered to move. She remembered hearing a pulsating buzzing sound, which she later realized was the Rover’s way of telling the world that someone left a door open. She looked around and said, rather stupidly, “Brianna, honey?” Hearing nothing, she ran into the street and looked both ways. Empty. Her daughter was gone. Carly screamed the girl’s name over and over, and that’s when the woman from the post office came hurrying out in her old-lady tennis shoes, a look of abject terror on her face.

“I don’t remember anything else,” Carly said, looking up. “They said I passed out.”

“Would you like to take a break, Carly?” The speaker was Ross Lawrence, special agent with the FBI out of Washington. He glanced at his partner, Gina Montgomery, and nodded. Gina leaned down and put her arm around Carly. Ross flipped on the overhead lights, bathing the cramped room in a harsh florescent glow. His gut told him she was not a suspect in her daughter’s disappearance, therefore no reason to treat her like one.

“What I would like is for you to find my daughter,” Carly said, looking up from the battered wooden table at which she sat. Ross knew the woman was getting close to another breakdown. She’d already curled up in a ball in the corner of the Wilton Police Department’s interrogation room and screamed for several minutes, and only uncurled herself after an EMT administered some kind of sedative by way of a needle in the arm. The drugs left her almost eerily robotic, and that concerned Ross, although it was an improvement.

“We’re doing everything we can to find to find Brianna.” He always made it a point to use the child’s name in an effort to personalize her, to let the terrified parent know that he cares, that the bureau cares. It wasn’t a lie. He did care, very much so. His eyes dropped to Carly’s slender, tanned arms. There was a small flesh-colored band-aid near her left elbow, as though maybe she’d been bitten by a mosquito at a backyard barbecue—before her life as she knew it had ended. For some reason, the forlorn little band-aid broke his heart. “There are dozens of officers scouring the entire town at this moment, talking to anyone who might have seen something. I can assure you, we are not wasting a moment of time.”

Carly Iverson looked at him with such trust in her eyes that it nearly killed him. She was a slender blonde of forty-four. Eye makeup dribbled down her cheeks in thready black streams. It gave her a stunned look, like a boxer right before he hits the canvas. “But you’ll find her, right? I mean, you’re the FBI and not these …” she paused, “these local cops.”

It hadn’t occurred to her yet to wonder why the Federal Bureau of Investigation was in Wilton, Connecticut, looking into her daughter’s disappearance. Why the grim-faced agents had arrived within an hour. Why they immediately took over the investigation, pushing the local cops aside.

Ross smiled reassuringly. “We’re doing everything we can, Carly. I promise you.”

He consulted his notebook, cleared his throat, and asked about the letter she mailed.

It was to her elderly grandmother in Florida, she said. Her Grandma Elliott, who turns ninety-two in October and who doesn’t understand the Internet and doesn’t want to at this late stage in life, simply adores receiving letters from her grandchildren. Carly was only trying to be thoughtful.

The bells, she explained through a round of fresh tears, must have belonged to one of those little white trucks that dispenses ice cream cones and fudge bars, and which are virtually everywhere in her small town neighborhood during the summer months. Yes, she said, it did occur to her that it was early in the day for ice cream. But she didn’t think much about it. Not then, anyway.

Now it was all she could think about. Because when the police finally arrived, there wasn’t an ice cream truck within a ten-block radius of the post office. In fact, none were found anywhere in Wilton at that hour.

She paused. “When can I see my husband?”

“Soon,” Gina told her. “I promise.”

“You people promise a lot.” Her eyelids were drooping and her speech was growing progressively more slurred. Ross made a mental note to kick the ass of the needle-happy EMT once this was over. He’d get nothing useful from a passed-out victim.

The woman’s husband, Trent Iverson, arrived a few hours earlier in a state of panic. He was currently parked in a smaller interrogation room down the hall, being questioned by agents from the Connecticut Bureau of Investigation. Not that he was a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance. Not yet, anyway. But every cop in the world knew that the vast majority of such crimes were committed by family members, usually the father—especially when it came to daughters. Stranger abductions were rare, or at least they used to be, Ross amended. Because of that, husband and wife were separated during questioning, allowing agents to detect the smallest of discrepancies in their stories. Meanwhile, officers were searching every inch of the couple’s home and combing through Carly’s Range Rover and Trent’s BMW. A federal crime scene unit was at the post office, setting up a mobile command post in the parking lot. It was all standard operating procedure these days—given the possibility that this was more than it appeared.

Ross glanced down at the photograph the father brought as requested, which Ross held in his hand. Brianna Iverson was simply beautiful—blond hair, big blue eyes, a heart-melting smile, the spitting image of Ross’s little Laura at that age. He stopped himself, felt the familiar clutch at his heart. He placed the photo on the table so Carly and Gina wouldn’t see his trembling hands. But now it was rage and not fear or grief that caused the tremors. Goddamn it, it’s happening again. He struggled to contain his anger, to not let it distract him from the task at hand. Now, more than ever, he needed to focus.

Gina took notes as the woman continued. Carly and Trent, a Wall Street banker who managed to hang on to his career during the Great Recession, moved to Wilton from Manhattan three years earlier. They brought along their daughter, Brianna, who was only three at the time. Carly made arrangements to work from home much of the time, with only limited one-hour commutes into the city. That allowed them to raise their daughter in the kind of place where nothing bad ever happened. Or so they thought.

Getting to that point had been a long, tough road for the Iversons. They tried for five years to conceive, with no luck. Both were highly successful in their respective career fields—the Times social page once referred to them as a “power couple”—so they decided to wait before trying for a child. Carly, especially, hungered for parenthood as she got older. Getting pregnant became the focal point of her life. Numerous tests showed nothing wrong with either of them, and they were told to keep trying.

Finally, when Carly turned 38 and remained barren, they decided to give in vitro fertilization a shot. A couple weeks later, the rabbit died and her life suddenly had meaning. The process was exceedingly expensive, but the money hadn’t been important. She was going to be a mother. After three years of city life, the family sold their townhouse and bought the rambling Tudor in Wilton. It was only an hour’s drive from New York, but a million miles away in every sense.

When she finished telling her story, Carly sat silently and stared at the wall. The only thing of real value in her life was gone, taken in broad daylight. There was nothing left to say. Ross could feel the woman’s anguish radiating from her in waves. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to find the bastard responsible and put a bullet right between his fucking eyes.

“I’ll go see if they’re finished with your husband,” Gina said, looking at Ross. He nodded his assent and she left.

“I want you to know that I won’t rest until we find Brianna,” he told her.

“I won’t either,” Carly said, still staring at the wall.

After a few more questions, Ross stepped out into the hallway and left the woman nodding off in her chair. When Gina returned a minute or two later with two cups of coffee, she shrugged. “Hubby’s not done yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. She’s zonked out anyway.” He took one of the coffees and sipped it gratefully. “So, is there a problem with him?” He felt a bit guilty because, deep down, he’d hoped it was just another “routine” case—that the father killed the girl after molesting her once too often. Ross knew that when children get old enough to tell someone about it, a teacher or their mother, for instance, they become disposable. It said something about society today, he thought wearily, when that passed for “routine.” But he’d seen it often enough during his twenty-three years on the job. As awful as it sounded, it beat the hell out of the alternative.

“Nope, it’s just taking a while,” Gina said. “The CBI guy, Bloom, thinks the dad’s solid, that he never left his office all morning. It wasn’t him.”

Ross closed his eyes. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Gina said. “It’s one of ours, isn’t it?”

He sipped his coffee and didn’t answer, which was answer enough for his partner.

Ross Lawrence headed an elite multi-agency task force assembled a month earlier to investigate a disturbing and rapidly growing number of unsolved child abductions and related murders across the nation. He and Gina were hustled aboard a bureau helicopter bound for Connecticut within an hour of Brianna’s abduction, based on nothing more than a hunch by the Wilton police chief. Unfortunately, it was looking more and more like his hunch was right on. The remainder of the team was scattered across the country at other abduction scenes. So far, twenty children had disappeared under similar circumstances. All occurred in small towns from New England to California, the mother was always alone with the child, there were never any witnesses, and it was done as quickly as a cobra strike. All of the children were between the ages of four and eight. All were white, most were blond and female, and all were described as unusually attractive.

Near all of the abduction sites, adult bodies were found. In one case, a school bus driver was found in a Kansas ditch a few miles from an abduction scene. She’d been shot once in the back of the head, execution style. Her bus was finally located in a barn several miles away. In another instance, a Fed-Ex driver was found shot to death a dozen miles away. His truck had yet to be found. They were all similar—bus drivers, truckers, delivery people, taxi drivers. In many of the cases, their vehicles were found elsewhere. Others still hadn’t been located. Although they all occurred within a few miles of each abduction site, no one could be certain they were connected.

Ross, however, knew in his heart they were.

He figured the abductor, who must be a frequent flier with unlimited funds, was using almost invisible means of ground transportation, like buses or delivery trucks, to get in and get out without raising any suspicions. No evidence was found at any of the crime scenes, not even a stray hair or a piece of dried skin. No DNA for the lab people. Whoever he was, he was good.

Only four boys had been abducted. Ross privately thought of them as The Outliers. Their bodies were discovered in shallow graves hundreds of miles from where they were grabbed. So far, none of the girls had been found. Pressure from within to find the perp was mounting, and the stress of it all was keeping Ross awake at nights.

He didn’t have to wonder how the victims’ parents felt. He already knew.

“It’s that fucking letter that bothers me,” he said, ignoring his partner’s previous question. “It’s too random. No way in hell anyone knew she was going to the post office this morning.”

“Opportunity,” Gina said, sipping her coffee. “It fits with the others.”

Ross nodded, deep in thought.

“What do you make of the bells?”

“Not sure,” he said, absently rubbing his temples. “It might not even be connected. It’s not something we’ve seen before.” He suspected, however, that it really had been an ice cream truck, which fit the perp’s modus operandi. If he was right, someone would find the body of an ice cream vendor sometime in the next few hours.

“What do we tell her?” Gina asked, jerking her head toward the room in which Carly Iverson waited, calmed now by sedatives and a misguided sense of hope.

“Nothing yet,” Ross said, keeping his voice low. “Not until we’re sure.”

But he was already sure. This was one of theirs. He could feel it in his bones.

Brianna Iverson was gone, her trail as cold as an ice cream truck’s freezer.

It was still oppressively hot at six that evening when Ross and Gina lugged their small leather overnight bags into the rustic little bed and breakfast a block from the Wilton P.D. Agents generally stayed at a Motel 6 or some similar place when conducting field work, but the bed and breakfast was the only lodging within twenty miles of Wilton—probably by design to heighten the optics of small-town seclusion. Since Ross was the head of the task force, he was pretty much free to book himself into whatever hotel he saw fit. He noticed a decent-looking little restaurant located off the lobby and mentally congratulated himself on his choice of accommodations.

“I’m going to call in,” he told Gina after they checked in and received their room keys. “Let’s meet for dinner here in an hour and go over what we have.”

“You got it,” she said, smiling tiredly. Ross watched the young agent trudge up the stairs before settling into an antique Colonial chair off to the side of the lobby. He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number.

“Eagle,” he said to the woman who answered. “For Chopper.”

Eagle was his code name in the field, while Chopper denoted the bureau’s deputy director, John Gilbert. Gilbert was an athletic man of about fifty who loved his customized Harley Davidson motorcycle, hence his code name. Ross had yet to figure out why he was called Eagle, but he was fairly certain it didn’t refer to his vision, which was beginning to fail as he entered his fifties. A pair of dark-framed reading glasses now resided at all times within the inner folds of his dark suit jacket.

“Talk to me,” Gilbert said upon answering.

“It’s one of ours.” There was a bubble of silence on the other end that went on so long Ross felt the need to puncture it. “All the signs are present. The parents are clean. We checked the father out especially hard, and he’s solid. No other explanation. We’re looking at number twenty-one.”

“Fuck. Where’s Sparrow?” Gilbert asked. Sparrow was Gina’s code name.

“Upstairs. We’re meeting in an hour to discuss what we have.”

“Okay. Work it hard in the morning and then get back here by mid-afternoon. This just might be the one to finally blow the lid off this thing. We need to be prepared for a major shit storm.”

“Will do,” Ross said, ending the call. The media hadn’t yet managed to put things together, simply because the individual cases occurred in small towns and rural areas far from the big-city media centers. Grabbing kids in flyover country wasn’t a bad plan if you wanted to operate outside the glare of publicity. But twenty-one missing and presumably dead children (provided, of course, that Brianna Iverson was another victim) couldn’t go undetected forever. Ross understood what Gilbert was saying: The Iversons’ high profile and New York City connection might finally alert some intrepid New York Times reporter, who would then start putting the puzzle together. A few phone calls, a Google search or two, and voila: fairly solid circumstantial evidence that a highly mobile serial killer was on the loose, preying on society’s most vulnerable little citizens. That’s why Ross was dispatched personally on this one—to contain it. Because once word leaked out, widespread panic would ensue. They needed more time to process how best to respond. Ross couldn’t imagine how the nation’s parents would react when they learned someone was grabbing their children right out from under their noses every couple of days.

He sighed and closed his eyes.

A hundred miles north of Wilton, an ice cream truck, its side panels decorated with a hand-painted clown eating a double-dip cone with a look of pure contentment on its pallid face, pulled into a double garage. The overhead door rolled down silently behind it. A man and woman stepped out and over the body of the white-clad ice cream man sprawled on the garage floor with a bullet hole between his eyes. Inside the farm house, an elderly couple lay dead in their bedroom, each shot cleanly through the head. Already, the couple’s two striped cats were eyeing the cooling corpses. Food is food, after all.

The truck spent most of the day cruising small towns with its bells tinkling, handing out ice cream cones and popsicles, always heading progressively north from Wilton, looking like it belonged—just one of dozens of similar trucks on the prowl for hot and hungry children in the scorching summer heat.

Now that they were safely back in the garage, the man took out a cheap burn phone purchased the previous day at a Walgreen’s outside of New York City, and made his call. He kept his tight-fitting surgical gloves on. It was strict protocol.

“We have the product,” he said. The woman, who wore similar gloves, glanced at him and smiled.

He listened and nodded. “Yes, it’s Grade AA. You’ll be very pleased.”

After hanging up, he looked at the woman. “Bring the car,” he said. She reached up, kissed him quickly on the cheek, and slipped out the side garage door to begin the half-mile walk to the roadside rest area where their real vehicle was parked.

It went well, the man thought. Of course, it always went well with all of the field teams. There was nothing like solid planning to make a business trip successful. They were, after all, consummate professionals. He smiled and went about the mindless task of fetching today’s product, which lay still and unmoving in the back of the truck.

Grade AA product, he corrected himself. Flawless, blonde, and quite beautiful.