The Perfect Mother(39)
Children are abducted all the time in Africa and in the inner cities of America, and nobody seems to care about that. Those stories don’t make it to the front page of the New York Times.
Why is this newspaper not reporting on the eyewitness accounts of a middle-aged Caucasian man spotted the night of July fourth, sitting on a bench across from her building. It’s on all the crime blogs and confirmed by at least two anonymous sources within the NYPD. The guy is a registered sex offender, on probation after molesting a young boy.
I’ll admit it. That last piece of information made me smile. I planted it myself. Why? Because somebody is going to pay for what happened, and I’m going to make goddamned sure it’s not me.
Anyway, I should allow my mind to rest, to enjoy how peaceful I feel. Or how peaceful I would feel if I wasn’t so on edge, if I wasn’t imagining, every moment, that I hear my baby crying.
Chapter Ten
Day Five
To: May Mothers
From: Your friends at The Village
Date: July 9
Subject: Today’s advice
Your baby: Day 56
Happy birthday, baby! Your little one is eight weeks old today. You did it! (It’s hard to even remember a time before you became a mother, right?) Time to celebrate these last few weeks of nurturing, feeding, snuggling, and loving your new little wonder. And go ahead, have that piece of cake. You’ve earned it.
They found a little boy, in New Jersey.
The entire police force of a small beach community had been summoned, but it was a member of the volunteer search team who discovered him. He was a mile down the beach, walking along the reeds looking for shells, two hours after wandering away from his parents in the moment it took his mother to unpack the sandwiches.
A girl in Maine was last seen getting off the school bus near her home. The police searched through the night, created a command post along Route 8; a rescue dog was brought in. The next morning, she was found alive at an uncle’s house.
It happens all the time: a kid goes missing, only to be discovered safe and sound not long after. But, Francie notes once more as she scrolls through the stories on the Center for Missing Children’s website, these kids were all found within twenty-four hours.
Five days.
It’s been five whole days, and the police are saying nothing. Not whether they’ve found any trace of Midas, no word on whether he’s safe. They haven’t even released any information linking Bodhi Mogaro—who is still being detained on trespassing charges—to the abduction.
Francie takes the bottle from the steamy pot of water on the stove and carries Will to the rocker, a few inches from the window fan. Shading him from the sunlight filtering through the curtains, she nestles him into the crook of her arm and lifts the bottle to his mouth, hoping (she can’t deny it) that he’s going to refuse the formula, that he’ll accept nothing other than her milk, that he’ll cry in disgust at the chemical smell. She teases his lips with the gummy orange nipple and he opens his mouth—the thin gray liquid spreading across his bottom lip—and then drinks in quick, nearly frantic gulps.
Francie ignores the twinge of disappointment and reaches for the remote. Oliver Hood is being interviewed on CNN. A civil rights attorney who made a name for himself arguing for the release of six prisoners from Guantanamo, he announced yesterday that he’s taken on Bodhi Mogaro’s case, pro bono.
“As far as I understand things,” the host—a middle-aged man in dark-framed glasses and a bold checked shirt—is saying, “Mogaro is currently being held on trespassing charges. But the real interest is in determining his role in the abduction of Baby Midas. Oliver Hood, what can you tell me?”
Hood is a slight man with large round eyes. “Well, I can tell you a lot of things, but the main thing I want to say is that my client is innocent. He didn’t knowingly trespass, and he most certainly didn’t have anything to do with the disappearance of Baby Midas. This is a textbook case of racial profiling. What is the evidence against him? He was seen around Winnie Ross’s building, and he’s of Middle Eastern descent. That’s it.”
“Well, if you talk—”
“And it gets worse. I spoke to two detectives who say the man identified by an eyewitness as Bodhi Mogaro the night of July 4, the man said to be walking near Ms. Ross’s building, ostensibly at the time of the abduction, yelling into a phone, acting erratically”—Oliver Hood pauses for effect—“is not Bodhi Mogaro.”
“What do you mean?”
Hood holds up a photo of a man wearing a white surgical coat. “His name is Dr. Raj Chopra, and he’s the head of surgery at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. He was rushing in to work, on his night off, to assist with a bus crash in which two little kids and a young mother were badly injured.”
Francie closes her eyes, letting it sink in. Bodhi Mogaro wasn’t even there that night? If that’s true, it’s possible the police have no credible leads.
“Well, some might argue you shouldn’t take anything a detective is saying about this at face value. Not with the mess they’ve made of this case. And your claim certainly doesn’t explain why Mogaro had that cash in his car.”
“I’ve spoken at length with Bodhi, his wife, and his parents. Bodhi was in Brooklyn to collect money from friends and relatives in the area, to help pay the funeral expenses of an aunt who’d died back in Yemen. It’s what they do in the Muslim culture.”