With the fresh cup of coffee in hand, David entered the hospital and headed toward the elevator bank. As he punched the elevator call button to go up to Jaxon’s room, a female voice called out, “Sheriff Newman?”
David turned to see FBI Supervisory Special Agent Roxanne Porter walking toward him, a second agent in a coat and tie two steps behind her.
“You made it to Millerton fast.”
She extended her hand and shook David’s firmly. “I appreciate the phone call. Not often we get happy endings in this business, especially after such a long time.”
A decade earlier, Roxanne had been the most junior member of the team the FBI dispatched to Millerton on the day of Jaxon’s disappearance. As far as the family understood, her primary role was inside the Lathan house, serving as a liaison to Heather. She kept the frantic mother as calm as possible, helping her to understand what law enforcement was doing to find her missing son. Nothing about the case looked like a kidnapping for ransom, though Roxanne had been prepared to coach the family through that process if the need arose.
While Roxanne supported the family, her second role had been to gain their trust so she could monitor them. The majority of kidnapped children were taken by a close relative. An estranged parent, particularly one like Harold, with his history of drug and alcohol abuse, made for a prime suspect.
Trusting Roxanne, Heather had shared stories of her ex-husband’s erratic behavior and struggles. Connor confessed how often he had lied about Harold’s failure to show up. That information, coupled with Harold’s inability to explain his whereabouts when Jaxon disappeared and the boys’ clothing in his trailer and car, painted a guilty image.
As the years went by, David had stayed in touch with the FBI about the case whenever a boy’s body was located. The senior agents on the original team retired, quit, or transferred to other units, elevating Roxanne to the FBI’s senior agent on the case through attrition. Contact between Miller County and the FBI team had been limited over the years, sparked by possibilities that were soon disproven. If a hiker or hunter stumbled across a decomposed body, DNA tests were ordered. Often, an arrested serial child molester was then questioned about dates and locations. But without a body or a confession, little happened to move the case forward, and their contact was infrequent.
Roxanne introduced the other agent, Anthony Gonzalez, who stood out in his dark suit, white shirt, and red tie among a sea of people in jeans, sweatshirts, and scrubs—FBI agents never seemed to blend well in small towns—then turned back to business. “Do you have confirmation of the boy’s identity?”
“The first confirmation was a visual by me, coupled with his recollections. His mother and brother are with him now and also believe it’s him. I’ve requested his DNA testing be top priority for Raleigh, but I think that’s a formality now.”
“We can run it faster if you want. We don’t want another Brian Rini.” In 2019, police in Kentucky had stopped a teenager wandering the streets of Newport. He’d identified himself as Timmothy Pitzen, a boy who’d disappeared in 2011 at the age of six from Aurora, Illinois. Investigators doubted his kidnapping story when he refused to be fingerprinted. DNA testing outed the impostor as a twenty-three-year-old felon named Brian Rini, who had made similar claims twice before.
“Agreed, and I’ll take all the help I can get.” The friction between local police and the FBI so often depicted in movies wasn’t always the reality, particularly not for a small police department without the resources of their larger-city brethren. “You need to come up and chat with the kid, anyway. I suspect he’s got quite a tale.”
“Have you notified Harold?”
David motioned toward the parking lot, where Harold was getting out of his Chevelle. He knew Roxanne shared the same qualms—Jaxon’s reappearance forced them to question their conclusion about Harold’s involvement. “Seemed genuinely surprised and shocked, but not worried the kid had reappeared. Said a couple of times he wants us to catch whoever took Jaxon. He didn’t argue when I explained he wouldn’t be able to see the boy without supervision.”
“In other words, he’s not acting like a man scared his old crime is about to be exposed.” Roxanne studied the waiting father as he settled into a chair in the lobby. “I’m not taking him off my list yet, but it’ll certainly make us reexamine things we thought we knew. He could still have been involved in the kidnapping. Maybe he had to settle a drug debt.”
“I’m with you about the disappearance, but I don’t see how he could’ve been involved in holding the kid alive all these years. Prison time would have made it impossible to hide the child’s whereabouts without a trusted accomplice, and we’ve not known him to have any close friends. Since being released, he rarely goes anywhere other than work, AA, and NA. No way he hid a kid in that trailer park without the neighbors knowing. If he was involved at the beginning, I think he’s as surprised as the rest of us that the kid’s still alive. We’ll watch the boy’s response when dad gets to see him.”
“We? So you want me in the room?”
David looked pointedly at Agent Gonzalez. “I don’t want to crowd him, but the boy’s scared and doesn’t want to talk much to me. I’ve seen you at work, building rapport to get information. We need to find out where he was being held, and I’m hoping you might be able to get that out of him.”
“Makes perfect sense. Gonzalez can coordinate transfer of evidence to our labs, and I’ll assist with interviews.”
The elevator doors opened, and they stepped on. With others around them, they rode to their floor in silence, waiting at each stop as people got on or off the elevator. When they reached the fifth floor, Roxanne spied Heather standing at the end of the hall and pulled David into a quiet alcove. “Has he said anything about other victims?”
“No, but that’s my fear. He hasn’t told us much of anything yet, but wherever he came from…” He looked out the window at the parking lot below them. The snow had been pushed into hills at the far end, and rivulets of melt ran across the pavement in the bright sunshine.
“If there are others, once his escape is discovered…”
“They could be moved or worse, killed,” David finished the gruesome thought.
“Gonzalez, let’s get the clothes he was wearing to our lab as well, see what we can pull off them and who and where it points to.” Roxanne turned back to David and asked, “How sure are you he came from the Wattsville exit?”
“Only an educated guess. If he was hitchhiking, he could have come from anywhere, but considering where we found him and the direction he was walking, Wattsville is the only exit that makes sense if he was on foot the whole time. The next one west of that is another four miles into Tennessee. I don’t see how he would have survived in last night’s weather that far. It’s a miracle he survived as long as he did. Plus, we would have received calls even earlier because people would have seen him walking that stretch of road.”
“And to the east?”
“Seven miles to the next exit, and that one is even more remote. Since he was headed that way, it really doesn’t make sense.”
“So the isolation helps us by narrowing it down to a single likely exit but hurts us because it’s a big search area.”
“The good news is there are only a couple of roads there, but it’s very rural, and houses are scattered. State patrol and the forest service have offered to get their choppers up, but they need to know what they’re looking for. The park service is checking shelters, but they’re mostly empty this time of year. Besides, they make no sense as a long-term kidnap holding. I’m going to send some deputies knocking on doors, but the residents up there, well, they aren’t exactly big law-enforcement fans. Cooperation is very iffy.” David sighed. “We need to know more about what we’re looking for.”
“So let’s go see what Jaxon can tell us.”