Tyrese led the way with Nick bringing up the rear. I stepped to one side just inside the threshold so I could take a moment to deal with the onslaught of visual images, the cacophony of sounds, and the host of bodily sensations that were triggered by what lay beyond. I closed my eyes and tried to sort through them, singling each one out and mentally filing it into one of several boxes I created in my mind. One of the boxes was for sounds, one was for smells, one was for visuals, and one was for touch. Hopefully I wouldn’t need one for taste, but I did set aside a fifth box for the miscellany that I sometimes experience: manifestations triggered by emotional residue and by what I thought of as my sixth sense, for lack of a better description.
The first thing I filed was the most overwhelming one: the smell of blood. I knew that smell and its associated sound from my childhood, and I was reminded of it when both my father and Ginny were killed. My brain translated the sharp, acrid scent of blood into a sound I can only compare to shrill, high-pitched notes played on a trumpet. I forced my mind to push the sound aside, a trick I learned when I was very young. If not for my ability to filter through the many sensory experiences I have, I probably would’ve ended up in a nuthouse somewhere. The neurologist who diagnosed me said the sensory input I experience is akin to the voices a schizophrenic hears. He warned me that it might sometimes be difficult to distinguish my manifested experiences from the real ones, and if I didn’t learn to ignore my synesthetic responses, it might make me as crazy as all the doctors I’d seen before him thought I was.
After pushing aside the smell of blood and its associated sound, the next thing I focused on was a terrible taste. It was as if I had bitten into something rotten, like a bad peanut, or meat that had begun to spoil. The experience was both unpleasant and new to me. I pushed it aside but didn’t file it away in one of my mental boxes, knowing I would want to explore it more later on. Along with the taste, I felt cold, as if I were standing in a draft, and I wasn’t sure if that sensation was real, an emotional reaction, or a synesthetic response.
I was standing in a small foyer and the entrance to the kitchen was straight ahead. I took a few more steps and looked at the room to my left. It was a small but tidy living room furnished with a mismatched chair and couch, and a yard sale coffee table. Off in the far corner of the room was a door that I assumed led to the garage. On the wall in front of me was a fireplace with a brick surround and the cold, ashy remnants of a fire beyond the hearth. Hanging above that was a flat-screen TV and on either side of it were built-in bookcases. While the bookcase on the left was filled with paperback novels and a few hardcovers, the bookcase on the right held a DVD player, a Wii console, several games, and an assortment of G-rated movies. There were several framed photos of Davey at various ages, one of which I recognized as the photo Duncan had sent to my phone. Most of the pictures were of Davey alone, from infancy on up, but two of them also featured a pretty, smiling blond woman. Based on her age and the adoration I could see in her eyes—even in a picture—I assumed this woman was Belinda.
The floors were hardwood and there was an inexpensive beige-colored area rug on the living-room floor that had the faint remnants of a pink stain by one corner of the coffee table. I imagined a little boy sitting on the floor watching a movie, or playing a game, taking the occasional drink from one of those little juice boxes that he then somehow managed to spill.
As I entered the living room, the nasty taste in my mouth lessened a little and the air felt warmer. I stood next to the stain in the rug, closed my eyes, and let my other senses absorb for a minute. Nothing seemed particularly dominant and, as I turned back toward the foyer, I saw Nick, Tyrese, and Duncan—who was holding a camera—all standing there watching me. The sight of Duncan made my heart skip a beat, but I wasn’t sure if it was real or synesthetic.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. As usual, the sound of Duncan’s voice triggered the taste of chocolate in my mouth; it’d been that way since the first day I met him. Depending on his mood or the tone in his voice, the chocolate taste might be sweet or bitter, but it was always there. Duncan turned to my chauffeurs and said, “Thanks for bringing her.”
Nick and Tyrese took this as their cue to leave and they exited via the front door.
“What do you want me to do first?” I asked Duncan once the others were gone.
“Let’s go through the house a room at a time,” he said, handing me a pair of gloves that I dutifully donned. “Does anything leap out at you here in the living room?”
“I don’t think so. There may be something about the bookcase over there on the right side of the fireplace, like something has been moved or removed, but I’m not sure.”
Duncan said nothing, but he took a few moments to snap some pictures, including several of the bookcase I had mentioned. Then he turned to me and said, “Let’s move on.” He placed his hand at the small of my back and gently steered me into the kitchen.
I could tell from the strength of the blood smell and the lessening of the sound that went with it that little Davey’s mom wasn’t in the kitchen. But I didn’t want to be surprised by the sight of her body, so I hesitated and turned back to Duncan. “Where is she?”
“In her bedroom, at the end of the hall on the left. We’ll go there last and I’ll warn you before we get there. For now, I’d like you to walk through the rest of the house and tell me what sort of reactions you get.”
I told him about the acrid blood smell and the shrill trumpet sound it triggered, and then I told him about the taste and the chill I felt. “I’ve never experienced that particular taste before so I can’t tell you what it means, and I’m not sure if the chilled feeling is real or not. But I can tell you that it was stronger in the foyer than it was in the living room, or than it is in here, for that matter.”
Thus far, I had kept my eyes either on Duncan or the floor, purposely avoiding anything else in the kitchen. While this didn’t block out any of the sound or smell triggers I was experiencing, it did minimize the visual ones. Most of the sound and smell manifestations were minor ones that I knew to be part and parcel of the more ordinary aspects of my surroundings. To prepare for a more involved experience with the kitchen, I closed my eyes for a few seconds to brace myself. Then I opened them and focused hard on the room.
One of the first things I noticed was a calendar hanging on a small section of wall beside the refrigerator. The top half had a picture of a lake with cloud-studded skies above and snow-capped mountains in the distance. The bottom half was the calendar itself, accurately flipped to the current month of November. Though some part of my mind registered the fact that the numbers for each day were printed in black, another part of my mind saw them in an array of colors. Numbers often appear to me as colors, with each of the digits from zero to nine having its own unique color. The number five, for whatever reason, is always yellow and two is always blue. Oddly enough, this unique way of envisioning the numbers makes me very good at math.
The other odd experience I have with calendars is that each month has a personality. November is kindly and comforting, a bit drowsy at times, and it always feels a little nostalgic. I ignored these sensations and focused instead on the handwritten items filled in on some of the days: school closed was written in on the day after Thanksgiving; Dr. Fillmore, 10:00 was scribbled in two days ago on the twelfth; and 6:30 hair appt was written in on the twentieth. I recognized the name of the doctor since it was the same OB-GYN doctor I use, and therefore guessed that the appointment was for Belinda rather than for her son. I mentioned this to Duncan before turning my attention to the rest of the room.
Most of the houses in this neighborhood date back to the 1920s and 1930s, and this kitchen looked like it had last been overhauled in the 1980s. The cabinets were faux wood with a white stripe of plastic trim, the floor was linoleum worn nearly through to the subfloor in front of the sink, and there was a built-in banquette in one corner of the room with a rectangular table sporting the same pink and black Formica that topped all the counters. I wondered if Belinda Cooper owned the house or was renting it and asked Duncan, who informed me the place was a rental.
As I approached the refrigerator, the nasty taste in my mouth grew and I started to wonder if it was somehow related to a bad smell emanating from inside it. But smells don’t typically manifest themselves as tastes for me. I usually hear or feel smells. My neurologist suggested that I’m able to detect small molecules of odor that linger in the air and that these molecules trigger a wave pattern of sound, or a tactile sensation, or on rare occasions both, that I can discern from the rest of the air around me. My suspicion that in this case it wasn’t a smell triggering the odd taste was supported when I opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. The interior sparkled with cleanliness and the contents were all carefully placed with their labels facing out. Duplicate items were lined up in neat little rows and, as I looked over it all, I sensed that something had been moved recently from a shelf on the left. There was a front-to-back row of yogurts and three front-to-back rows of single-serve juice boxes. As I stared at the juice boxes, the skin on my back registered an irregularity, as if someone was tracing a finger down my spine and skipped a spot.
“I think something was either moved or taken from this spot here,” I said to Duncan, pointing to the juice boxes. After thinking on it for another second, I added, “Taken, I think, because I sense a void.”
Duncan opened the refrigerator door wider and started snapping pictures of the contents. “I imagine the missing item is probably a drink that Belinda or Davey had,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said, not convinced. “How long ago did all this happen?”
“The first officer got here about five minutes after the elderly woman next door called because she thought she heard a child screaming,” Duncan said, still snapping away. “She said she looked out her window but she couldn’t see anything because it was dark and all the shades in the house were drawn. The woman said she tried several times over a period of ten minutes or so to call Belinda, but no one answered, so she called nine-one-one.” He stopped what he was doing and glanced at his watch. “We’ve been here for just under half an hour and we got here minutes after the first officer called it in.”
“I know from the games I used to play with my father that my sensations regarding missing or moved objects fade and disappear after about an hour or so, depending on how enclosed or exposed an area is, so whatever is missing here was likely removed within that time frame.”
“Meaning we were very close to catching whoever did this. If the neighbor woman had called when she first heard the screams . . .” He didn’t finish this thought, but the sad shake of his head said it all. “Anyway,” he went on after a few seconds, “it’s possible that whatever was removed was done so by the victim.”
“Maybe. Have you seen any yogurt containers or juice boxes on top of the trash or lying around?”
“None so far,” Duncan said, glancing around the kitchen. He walked over to a lidded trash can by the sink and opened it with a gloved hand. “Nothing here,” he said, snapping a picture of the garbage. “We’ll keep an eye out as we go through the rest of the house.”
Both sides of the double kitchen sink were sparkling clean, and an empty dish rack sat on one side. A quick perusal of the cabinets and drawers showed neat rows of items, with food labels facing outward, dishes organized by size and color, pots and pans all polished to a gleam. It seemed Belinda Cooper was all about neatness and organization.
We left the kitchen and went down the hall to the first room on the right. It was small and likely meant to be a bedroom, but was being used as an office instead. There was a small wooden desk with a computer on top, a dented two-drawer metal filing cabinet, a standing lamp with a plastic shade, and a desk chair with a wheeled base and worn fabric on the seat. Everything looked old and used, but also clean and well cared for. The office offered me nothing in the way of interesting reactions and I told Duncan so. With that, we left the room and went across the hall to a bathroom.
Like the room we had just been in, the bathroom was also small though functional. Immediately inside the door and to the left was a small vanity, beside it was the toilet, and beside that was the combination shower and bathtub. While the vanity, toilet, and fiberglass bath and shower structure appeared to be newer, the tile on the floor reflected the age of the house. It was a basic black-and-white hexagon design, and in a few spots the tiles were cracked or missing.
Built into the wall across from the sink was a decent-size wooden cabinet, and tucked into the larger bottom section was an empty laundry bag. The cabinet shelves were as organized and neat as those in the kitchen had been and they were filled with typical bathroom items: towels, washcloths, cosmetics, soaps, shampoo, and other hair products. In the cabinet below the sink, we found tampons, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies. There was also a medicine cabinet above the sink, which contained deodorant, toothpaste, and some basic over-the-counter medications, both for adults and for children. In a cup sitting atop the faux marble vanity topper were two toothbrushes, one large and one small. Though the sight of the tiny toothbrush made my throat tighten, I thought this was nothing more than an emotional reaction since I already knew the child was missing. On one side of the sink was a hairbrush that looked as if it was brand new; there was a single short, brown hair in it that I guessed must have been Davey’s since Belinda was blond.
We left the bathroom and went to the end of the hall, where there were two more bedrooms. Even if Duncan hadn’t already told me, I would have been able to tell from the smell that Belinda Cooper was in the bedroom on the left, so it didn’t surprise me when he steered me into the bedroom on the right.
It was obvious this was little Davey’s room. A colorful area rug done up to look like a collection of children’s wooden alphabet blocks covered most of the floor. In the far corner was a bunk bed, the top level covered with stuffed animals, the bottom one made up with a Thomas the Tank Engine comforter set. Even though the lower bunk was neatly made, I sensed a void there because I felt a hollow sensation on my back between my shoulder blades. I also heard a faint sound, the distant tinkle of music from a child’s toy, something like a jack-in-the-box. I mentioned it to Duncan, even though I didn’t understand what it meant.
A long, wooden dresser with two columns of drawers stood to the left just inside the door. It was painted white with red knobs on the drawers, and on top of it was a lamp that had Thomas the Tank Engine for the base with more images of Thomas on the shade. Stacked neatly on one side were two piles of books. A quick scan of the spines showed several Dr. Seuss books, some fairy tales, a couple of popular modern-day children’s books, and some coloring books. A box beside the books held an assortment of crayons and colored markers, as well as a set of watercolor paints and several brushes.
Something about the dresser triggered a physical sensation in me. Looking at the top of it didn’t seem to bother me, but when my eyes settled on any of the drawers, I felt an odd sensation, as if something were pushing me away.
“I’m getting an odd sensation from this dresser,” I told Duncan. “When I look at the drawers, it feels like something is pushing me away, or maybe blocking me. I’m not sure what it means, but I suspect those drawers were opened recently.”
“Which of the drawers?”
I took a few seconds to let my eyes settle on each drawer, one at a time, before I answered. “I get the feeling when I look at every one of those drawers. I may be wrong, but I think all of them were opened.”
Duncan walked over to the dresser and pulled open the top left drawer. Inside it was a collection of children’s socks and little boy underwear. Modern-day superheroes and cartoon characters dominated the designs on them. I saw more of Thomas, plus Super-man, Batman, Spider-man, Transformers, SpongeBob SquarePants, and several Sesame Street characters including Oscar, Elmo, and Cookie Monster. Most of the socks were paired up but there were some singles in there as well. The socks and underwear along the far sides of the drawer were neatly folded and laid out, as if someone had tried to keep the drawer neat and organized. The rest of the drawer, however, was a jumbled pile of half-folded shirts and underwear. Looking at it gave me the sensation that I was wearing an ill-fitting hat, and that the hat was riddled with holes that allowed the wind and the heat to come through. This was a sensation I recognized because I’d experienced it a few times before when my father and I were playing games with my abilities.
“I think someone went through this drawer very recently and in a hurry,” I told Duncan.
He nodded. “I would’ve come to that conclusion myself,” he said with a smile. “Based on other things I’ve seen in the house, our victim is a very neat person. Things in the closets, the kitchen cabinets, and all the drawers are very precisely organized. She might have even had a touch of OCD. It looks as if this drawer was originally laid out in a similar fashion, but someone rummaged through it.”
“Whoever did it either lacked finesse or they were in a big hurry. Maybe both.”
“I suppose it could’ve been the kid,” Duncan said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I turned and looked behind us, across the room at the wooden toy box that sat beneath a window, its lid opened to reveal its contents. “I get the same sensation when I look at that toy box over there that I get when I look at this drawer,” I explained. “Not only have things been hastily shoved around, there are some voids there.”
“You mean things have been taken?”
“Yes.”
“That may bode well for little Davey,” Duncan said.
“How so?”
“Well, if whoever nabbed the kid took the time to gather clothes and toys for him, it suggests they have no intention of hurting him.”
On the wall above the dresser, attached by a thumbtack, was another photograph of little Davey with the smiling woman I presumed was his mother. In every picture she was in, Belinda was looking at her son with obvious love and adoration in her eyes.
I turned to Duncan with tears burning behind my eyes. “If whoever took this child is hoping not to hurt him, they are too late,” I said. “His life will never be the same.”
Duncan sensed the depth of the emotion I was feeling. “If you need to take a break, we can do that,” he said.
I shook my head and swiped at my eyes. “No, I’ll be okay. I’m just angry and disappointed.”
“Disappointed?”
“Yes, disappointed that our civilized society can be so uncivilized, that there are those in the world who can inflict such hurt, and pain, and cruelty on others with hardly a second thought.”
Duncan walked over, took hold of me by my upper arms, and looked straight into my eyes. His touch made me feel lighter, as if I were floating above the ground. “There is a lot of beauty and love in the world, and you can’t ever forget that, Mack,” he said, making me taste sweet milk chocolate. “You have to hang on to the good stuff. If helping me do this kind of work is going to make you forget that, I don’t want you to do it.”
As I looked back at him, his face moved a hair’s breadth closer to mine. I saw warmth, caring, and genuine affection in his eyes, and though I couldn’t be sure, I got a strong sense that he wanted to kiss me at that moment. But then the reality of where we were, what had happened, and what lay in waiting for us in the other bedroom intruded. Duncan broke our shared gaze and looked down at his feet. His hands let go and he sighed long and heavy before turning away from me. He turned back to the open drawer of the dresser and, after taking a picture of its contents, he pushed it closed and opened the one beneath it.
I walked over and stood beside him, studying the contents. This drawer contained shorts and pants, and the same mix of organization and chaos that we had observed in the underwear drawer. Once again I sensed there were items missing. Duncan then opened the other two drawers, which held shirts and pajamas, and we saw that they were more of the same.
“You know, it seems odd to me that whoever took Davey gathered up clothes and toys for him, and yet they left behind his toothbrush,” I said.
Duncan paused in his picture taking and gave me a quizzical look. “How so?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “It’s as if someone was gathering up items they would need to take care of the kid. And his toothbrush would be one of those things.” I shrugged and shook my head. “Maybe it was just an oversight.”
“A lucky one for us,” Duncan said. “Toothbrushes are often good sources for DNA.”
I assumed DNA would be needed only to identify a body and, as such, I shot him a horrified look. “You think he’s going to end up dead?”
“Not necessarily,” he said, seeing the expression on my face. “But the reality is that sometimes these kidnapping cases don’t get solved for years, and kids change as they grow. DNA may be the only reliable method for identifying a living victim who’s been missing for a long time.”
After a few more minutes in little Davey’s bedroom, Duncan prepared me for going into Belinda’s room. “It isn’t going to be pretty,” he warned. “There’s a lot of blood.”
“I can tell from the smell,” I told him. “Is she maimed in any way? Dismembered? Anything like that?”
“No.”
“Then I think I’ll be okay.” I sucked in a deep breath and focused on mouth breathing, hoping to keep the smell from overpowering my other senses. Then I followed Duncan inside, to one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen.