Little Secrets(83)
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s eleven.”
“They issue an AMBER Alert?”
Jamie nodded. “They did. Based on things he’d said during the custody dispute, I had reason to believe he was going to take her far away and never bring her back. They found his car a mile away in a shopping mall parking lot. There was no way to know what he was driving after that, and no way to know where they went.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marin said.
Jamie looked at her. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I know we all have our own unique stories, but I feel like I said the wrong thing when I saw you at group last week. I told you at the end that I felt better, and that wasn’t fair.”
“It’s perfectly okay—”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s not fair to you. Regardless of the issues my ex-husband has—and trust me, he has a lot—he adores Olivia. Wherever they are, wherever they end up, he’s not going to hurt her. This, I know. Unlike you, and Simon, and Lila, and Frances—up until she found out about Thomas—I don’t live in constant fear that Olivia isn’t going to survive. The only fear I have is that I’ll never see her again. Not because she’ll be dead, but because he’ll turn her against me. It’s exactly what he’d do, paint me as the bad guy so she’ll never want to come home.” She glances up at the gaudy yellow Big Holes sign and then down at her shoes. “That’s why I felt better after the group meeting. Which makes me an asshole. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t make you an asshole. It makes you a mother.” Marin touched Jamie’s arm. “I’ve learned not to make comparisons. Hell is hell, in all its incarnations.”
Unlike with Jamie’s daughter, no AMBER Alert was issued for Sebastian. His kidnapping did not fit the criteria. It was ridiculous when the police first explained this to Marin and Derek. AMBER Alerts were used in cases of child abduction, and nobody was disputing that it was a child abduction. The video made that clear.
However, there was no vehicle that witnesses could place Sebastian in. There was no identity, no description for the abductor other than the Santa Claus costume. The authorities have to believe that there’s sufficient information about the disappearance of the child in order for an AMBER Alert to be able to assist in finding the child. It’s decided on a case-by-case basis, and Sebastian’s case didn’t qualify.
There were other things they could do, however. The security footage from Pike Place Market was circulated across the country. Anybody with a TV would have seen Sebastian’s picture on the news in the days that followed his kidnapping. His Missing Child poster was retweeted and shared on Twitter and Facebook nearly a million times combined. The idea that “Santa” kidnapped a child three days before Christmas was titillating, and it made the story go viral in a matter of hours. The evening of the abduction, Derek and Marin were filmed outside their home by local news stations, begging the public for any information about their son. By the end of the week, they were on CNN, pleading for his safe return.
The lack of information about her son’s disappearance was both mind-boggling and frustrating. Early on, Marin overheard one of the police officers say to another, “Either the kidnapper planned this meticulously, or the sonofabitch got ridiculously lucky … There’s no way to know.”
It was easy to assume that Sebastian and his abductor had entered the underground parking garage, based on the exit that was chosen by the abductor. But there was no specific evidence to confirm that. They could have walked to a side street and gotten into a car, a truck, or a van. They could have been picked up by someone. Or they could have gone into the parking garage and been one of the fifty-four cars to exit the underground lot within the next hour. The angle of the only working security camera, across the street, made it impossible to catch license plate numbers on those vehicles.
Derek used his connections to get as much coverage as possible. So did Marin. A wealthy, prominent Seattle couple whose child was abducted in broad daylight? The police assumed ransom. But ransom demands usually happen within the first twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most. Neither Derek nor Marin was contacted. There were no notes left on the doorstep, no texts, no strange phone calls from unknown numbers.
The five-dollar lollipop was what had convinced Marin that the kidnapper knew Sebastian. At the time, it had seemed like such a specific thing to give to him, and only seven lollipops were sold at La Douceur Parisienne that day. But five out of the seven sold were paid for by debit or credit cards, and those customers had been tracked down. They all checked out. The last two were paid for in cash, and the ladies working at the candy store said they remembered that customer clearly, a grandmother who’d bought matching lollipops for her twin granddaughters.
In any case, La Douceur Parisienne lollipops were oversize, colorful, and probably a magnet for any child under the age of ten. The lollipop could have been purchased anytime in advance and stuffed into a coat pocket or a shopping tote, ready to be used as bait when the perfect moment arrived. As part of the investigation, every single person in Marin’s and Derek’s lives who knew Sebastian was in terviewed. All the vendors at the market that day were questioned. Nobody seemed to know anything.
Sebastian just vanished. Without a trace. And sixteen months later, Marin still has no answers.