A Son's Tale

* * *

DETECTIVE RAMSEY MILLER from the Comfort Cove Police Department in Comfort Cove, Massachusetts, didn’t believe in anything as certain as fate. Spending his days and nights viewing gruesome details of crime scenes had taught him one thing for certain—life was a crap shoot. Sometimes the bad guys got it. Sometimes the good guys did.

And sometimes a guy just happened to be at the right place at the right time. Since his divorce he’d taken to drinking his morning coffee in bed, reading national and local news via the laptop computer that was always either on his nightstand or, if he’d fallen asleep while working, sharing the covers with him.

The thing about internet news sources was that they were so plentiful he was never without company, even if it meant that he was reading about an Issaquah couple caught having sex in their car. This time on the fifth floor of a Park and Ride. It was news to someone. And as long as there was internet and people to talk about, there would never be a time, no matter how late in the night or early in the morning, when he would have to settle for his own thoughts.

The second Saturday morning in July was when he was the lucky guy who ended up in the right place at the right time. He’d taken an extra hour in bed to surf other people’s troubles instead of working on the pile of unanswered questions waiting for him on his own desk. Sort of.

He’d been perusing a local news site from Tyler, Tennessee, but he hadn’t been there just randomly. He’d chosen the town because he was trying to reach a man there who wasn’t returning his calls. Caleb Whittier. The guy worked as a professor at the university there, he’d discovered from tax returns. He needed some answers from Whittier so he could lessen the pile on his desk and instead all he was getting were more questions.

That was until he got lucky.

A kid was missing from Tyler—which wasn’t lucky. He’d seen the Amber Alert go out because he was on the internet looking at Tyler news. He’d called Lucy Hayes immediately. He and the detective from Aurora, Indiana, were long-distance compatriots—they’d both, for different reasons, dedicated their lives to missing children.

And then a live video feed flashed on his screen. Pursuant to the missing child. It was a press conference that was taking place. Ramsey clicked.

The kid hadn’t been found. Damn.

And more bad news—the kid was the grandson of some local millionaire who was offering half a mil in reward money.

If Sammie Lowen had been kidnapped for ransom, chances were his family wouldn’t see him alive again. Of course, there were other reasons kids were snatched that weren’t any better. He’d hoped the kid had just run away. He was ten, after all.

And Ramsey had his right-place-right-time moment.

There on the screen. The guy standing behind the mother of the missing boy—his image was also on the file on top of the stack waiting for him at work. Granted, the photo on Ramsey’s desk had been gleaned from the department of motor vehicles, a driver’s license shot, but he was certain that he was looking at Dr. Caleb Whittier. A grown-up version of the seven-year-old boy whose photo was also in the file.

Sitting up straight, Ramsey held the portable computer with both hands and stared. He still had questions. Just different ones.

Like, why was a man who, as a boy, had been involved in a missing-child case, involved in another missing-child case as an adult?

Whittier had only been seven when the two-year-old daughter of his father’s fiancée had gone missing. The boy could hardly have been a mastermind child abductor at that point.

He watched the rest of the video. The kid’s mother never spoke. She just stood behind the grandfather and Captain Dennison, who was representing Tyler law enforcement, with an older woman Ramsey assumed was her mother. Caleb Whittier was farther back than they were, probably unaware that he was on camera. Others were with him. Neighbors, maybe.

And maybe that’s all he was. Maybe there was no connection to him and the missing boy at all. Maybe he’d never even met the kid.

But there was definitely a coincidence here.

And to Ramsey Miller a coincidence was like a toothache. It bugged him until he did something about it.

* * *

“YOU REALLY DON’T have to stay.” Morgan found herself alone in her living room with Cal Whittier after the press conference Saturday morning. “You haven’t slept at all.”

“Neither have you.”

“He’s my son. My mind isn’t going to relax enough to allow me to sleep.” Detectives Warner and Martin and Captain Dennison were in the kitchen conferring. Her father and mother had left to shower and change and would be back within the half hour. Detective Martin had suggested that Morgan call her doctor and request a sleep aid, but she wasn’t planning to heed that particular piece of advice. At least not for the next twenty-four hours.

“I’ll go if it will make it easier on you.”

They were sitting on opposite ends of her couch. “No!” The volume of her emission embarrassed her. “You’ve…helped. I just don’t want you to think you have to stay. I’ll be fine.”

She didn’t want him to leave. Ever.

And that wasn’t fair to him. Or right.

Cal Whittier owed her nothing. And had no idea she’d had a crush on him for years.