“Hey, television star,” one of the detectives shouted out just after nine forty-five that morning when I arrived at Lockwood, the floor with DETECTIVE BUREAU stenciled across the door.
“Hold your applause,” I suggested with a half smile that was my best shot at looking less than annoyed. “I don’t deserve all this. I just arrived and I haven’t done anything yet.”
“The way that mom tells it, none of us are doing anything,” jeered a white-haired detective in a baby blue polyester-blend sport coat. “You just got to be front and center, the public face of the incompetents.”
“Lucky me,” I said, brushing past on my way to the strategy meeting already under way on the Warner case. But when I arrived, the conference room was empty, except for David, who appeared to be organizing a stash of black vinyl three-ring binders.
“Hey, Sarah, looks like you got here just in time to see the case come together,” David said, looking better than I’d seen him since the kid disappeared. “We’re writing an arrest warrant.”
“Whose name is on it?” I asked.
“Crystal Farris Warner,” he said.
Since there wasn’t any celebrating in the room and the mood was far from joyous, I had a bad feeling, but I asked anyway. “My guess is that this doesn’t mean you found Joey.”
“I wish,” David said. “More than I can say, I wish we had. But no, we haven’t found him, and I don’t know that we will.”
“What have you got?” I asked.
“This is a conversation that took place last night, one the surveillance team picked up on the bug we left in the apartment during the search,” David said. With that, he hit a button on a CD player. At first there was static. A television or radio played in the background, at times so loud that the words and the sounds of those in the room became indecipherable.
“I’m telling you, Joey isn’t coming back,” Crystal could be heard saying over swelling music in the background, sounding like a movie score. “You two have to accept that. Joey’s gone, and he’s not coming home.”
“How can you say that?” Ginny screamed, her voice laced with panic. Whatever they were watching went to a break, and a Jack in the Box commercial could be heard in the background. “How can you know Joey isn’t coming home? Did you do something to him, Crystal? Did you?”
“New, at Jack in the Box,” the commercial blared even louder as Danny Farris cried out something I couldn’t understand, a reference to the police, but what came through loud and clear was one word: “body.”
“Why are you asking me that?” Crystal shrieked, so loud that even the television couldn’t disguise it. “I’m not telling you two anything. You two talked to those detectives after I told you the cops are trying to trap me.”
At that, Ginny wailed with pain and screamed, “Crystal, how could you? How could our own daughter—”
His wife never finished her accusation, but Danny threatened, “If you’ve done anything to that boy, you’ll answer to me!”
An announcer shouted, “For a limited time!” and the tape cut out.
“After that, there’s a lot of crying and muffled screaming we can’t understand. We think they were bunched together someplace the bug didn’t pick up well,” David explained. “But talking of a body and saying Joey would never be coming home, it sure sounds like this mom knows way more than she’s admitted to us.”
I thought about what we’d just heard. David was right, it did sound incriminating. But what did we really know? It seemed reasonable for Crystal to be fearful that Joey would never be found. And we couldn’t really make out what her father shouted. The word body was unsettling, that was true, but we didn’t know the context. This family was in crisis, so it didn’t seem odd that the Farrises circled the wagons in public while badgering Crystal with questions behind closed doors.
“I don’t know, David,” I said, picking my words carefully. “If this is all you’ve got, I’m not sure there’s enough here—”
“It’s not all we have,” he interrupted. “Look at this.”
With that, he flung open one of the black binders on the table. On the cover it read: “Crystal Warner, computer records.” Halfway through was a list of recently visited Web sites. Two-thirds of the way down the second page, the subject read: “How to beat a lie detector test.”
“The date on that entry is two weeks ago, before she had any reason to believe Joey would be abducted and that she might have to take a polygraph,” David said. He sat down at a nearby computer and pulled up the site. On it were instructions on how to do exactly what Ralph Goodson, the polygrapher who’d administered her test, thought Crystal might have done, manipulate her body by tightening muscles to raise blood pressure and invalidate the results.
“So you’ve got her preparing ahead of time,” I said. “And you’ve got her talking as if Joey is gone forever, perhaps even dead.”
“Yeah,” David said. “And one more thing.”
I looked at him expectantly and waited. I could tell this wasn’t something he wanted to say, but he took his time and spit it out. “We think that maybe she sold the kid,” he said, as if it were too awful to even suggest. “We ran a check and found a savings account in her name. A deposit was made, a wire transfer, the morning after the boy disappeared. Thirty grand.”
Stunned, I sat down, wondering if David’s reasoning could be possible but seeing no other alternatives. All the pieces of the case were lining up. “Crystal Warner sold Joey, her own kid,” I repeated. “For thirty grand, she gave him away.”
“Yeah. Stinks, doesn’t it?” David said, his voice low. “But, yeah, we think so.”
The horror of Joey Warner’s young life assaulted me, and I sat quietly, unwilling to speak. He was a little boy, a handsome child with hair the color of ripened wheat and big, sky-blue eyes, and it appeared possible that his own mother had handed him over to someone for a fistful of cash.
“You okay, Sarah?” David asked. He looked as injured as I felt. Sometimes cases tear away the illusion of living in a civilized society, where husbands and wives love each other, where parents cherish and care for their children, and where a mother would never give away a child for anything, especially not money.
I thought about what we knew, about what we suspected. “So did this person show up at the park, and Crystal just handed Joey over? Or was it kind of the way she described? Did she take Joey to the park, make a phone call, and turn her back?” I asked, visualizing the scene as it might have played out two days earlier. “When it was over, maybe she called the boy’s name a couple of times, in case someone was watching. Then she called the boy’s father and said Joey was missing. She ate up time waiting for the dad and then another hour looking around the park, although she knew the kid wasn’t there. That gave whoever had Joey time to get away. Finally, she called the police, and then she sat back and let us spin our wheels. She confused the issue by not helping, making unfounded charges against those looking for Joey, even gave us an old photo, one that didn’t look like him, to make sure he wouldn’t be found. It was that easy?”
“Yeah,” David said, his face mirroring my disgust. “I think so. I think it was that easy.”
Still, even as the depression settled over me, somewhere a thought needled at my subconscious. David had sounded so resigned to it being the worst of endings, yet I wondered, “You can’t be sure Joey is dead.”
“No. I didn’t mean to imply that. There is the possibility that he’s still alive,” David said with a shrug. “But we’re figuring that by now the abductor has either killed the kid or taken him away, somewhere we’ll never find him. We’re going to keep looking, but it’s been nearly two days, and now it appears that the scumbag who took Joey had his mother’s cooperation and plenty of time to plan and escape. We figure that this isn’t looking good.”
I thought about that. “What about tracking the money back to the source? You’ve done that, of course.”
“We tried,” he said, sounding resigned. “We hit dead ends. It originated somewhere overseas. So far, no luck. We’ll keep trying, but at this point, it’s not promising. Our computer experts figure we’ll ultimately be led to some dummy account in a fake name. This guy planned well, figured out how not to lead us back to him.”
“I gather our only shot at finding the boy is getting Crystal to open up,” I speculated. All the tips investigators had chased led nowhere, disappointments one and all. “There’s no one else who could point us in a direction.”
“That’s all we’ve got going for us, that maybe the mom will talk,” he said. Yet he shook his head, as if it were inevitable that we’d come away disappointed. “From past experience with Crystal Warner, I’m doubting that that’s going to happen.”
Just then, one of the detectives came by, gave David a tap on the shoulder, and said, “We’ve got the warrant. We’re rolling.”
After slipping his suit coat on over his holster, David walked with me out the door. “Saw you on television this morning,” he said. “You looked good, but you should have lost the bill cap.”
“Thanks. The captain enjoyed it even more than you did. I’ve been ordered not to do an encore.”