I Will Find You(85)

Cheryl’s voice was barely a whisper. “Oh my God…”

Max kept his eyes on Cheryl. “Dr. Dreason?”

She just kept shaking her head. “David was Matthew’s father.”

“The DA’s results are conclusive.”

“Oh my God.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Then David is right.”

“About?”

“Matthew is still alive.”





Chapter

34



I have finally managed to access my old email account when Rachel turns into a parking lot at a PGA golf store off the Garden State Parkway. I am looking for an email from eight years ago. The search engine helps me find it. I read it just to make sure. Then I read it again.

“David?”

The PGA store parking lot is huge, much too large for the store, and I wonder what else is going to be built here. There is a car parked alone in the distant corner near the woods, a Toyota Highlander. I can see a golf course through a strip of trees. Convenient location, I guess.

“What happened with Cheryl?” Rachel asks.

“She went through with the sperm donation.”

Silence.

“Did you know?” I ask.

“No.” Her voice is soft. “David, I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t change anything.”

She doesn’t reply to that.

“Even if I’m not the biological father, he’s still my son,” I say.

“I know.”

“And he is mine. Not that it matters. But I know it.”

“I know it too,” Rachel says as she parks next to the Toyota Highlander.

A man in a Yankees cap gets out of the Highlander.

Rachel says to me, “Let’s go.”

She leaves the keys, and we head for the Highlander. The man in the Yankees cap says, “Drive out in the lane hugging the tree line. The CCTV doesn’t cover that area.”

We switch cars. Simple as that. Rachel’s attorney arranged it. We both realized as soon as we left the hospital that we couldn’t trust that Ronald wouldn’t make a call or that somehow our covers weren’t blown.

Rachel pulls back onto the highway. The man with the Yankees cap left us new burner phones on the car seat. We set them up so that any communications to our old burners will be forwarded to us. There is also a hammer inside one of those reusable grocery store bags. At a Burger King up the highway, I jump out with our old burners and the hammer. Once inside the bathroom, I close myself into a stall, obliterate the burners with the hammer, dump the remains in a garbage bin.

Rachel picked up food at the drive-thru. I always hated fast-food restaurants. Now a Whopper with fries feels like a religious experience. I scarf it down.

“What’s our next move?” she asks.

“Only two leads left,” I say, between bites. “The amusement park and the fertility clinic.”

“I asked Hayden to get us all the pictures from the company photographers.” We hit a red light. Rachel checks her phone. “In fact…”

“What?”

“Hayden came through.”

“He sent the photos?”

The traffic light turns green, so Rachel says, “Let me pull over and take a look.”

She veers onto the ramp for a Starbucks and parks. Rachel fiddles with the burner. “They’re in some kind of cloud we have to access. The files are too big to download.”

“Can we do that on a burner?”

“I think we’re going to need a laptop or something. I have mine, but they might be able to track it.”

“I think we need to take the chance.”

“I have a VPN. That might be enough.”

Rachel reaches into her bag and takes out a superthin laptop. She turns it on and gets to the relevant page. We don’t want to stay on too long, so we fly through the photos. They are all taken in front of that corporate banner/backdrop.

“How long should we sit here and go through this?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe you should drive? A moving target might be harder to locate.”

“I doubt it, but okay.”

I keep going through the photographs. I speed through a bunch, but this feels like a waste of time. If you’re going to an amusement park with a kidnapped boy, you don’t pose in front of the welcoming screen. Or do you? It’s been five years. He’s grown. Everyone believes he’s dead. No one is doubting it. So maybe you do. Maybe you figure enough time has passed. No one is going to spot a boy they believe is dead. And even if it is somewhat risky, what else can you do? Keep the boy locked up in a cage forever?

I skip around, but it all feels futile. I start blowing up photographs, trying to look in the deep background, because that, I figure, is where the gold lay. The files are so large that I can magnify and see pretty much every detail in every shot. At one point, I spot a little boy who might have been about the same age as Matthew, but when I zoom in, the similarities are only on the surface.

I hear a phone buzz. It is coming from Rachel’s burner. She checks the number and picks it up. She signals for me to move closer so I can listen.

“Hello?”

“Can you talk?”

“Yes, Hester.”

Hester Crimstein, I know, is Rachel’s attorney.