“I’m up!” a woman said, pounding down the stairs.

Mom was in a blue terry-cloth robe and barefoot. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were puffy, rheumy, and wild when she said, “You get him? Timmy’s killer?”

“Mrs. Walker?” I said.

She came up behind the girl, hugged her. “I’m his mom, Lenore. This is his sister, Kate.”

We identified ourselves, said we’d like to talk to her.

“So you didn’t get him?” she asked, bewildered.

“Not yet, ma’am.”

The dead boy’s mom swallowed thickly and looked off in despair. “No one tells me what’s going on. Months Deuce has been gone and no word from anyone in weeks, not the sheriff, not the state police, not the FBI … not even my coward of an ex-husband.” She broke down weeping.

Her daughter scowled at us and then turned around to hug her mother.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” the little girl said. “It’s going to be okay.”

CHAPTER

89

WHEN WE GOT Lenore Walker calmed down enough to talk, she invited us in, and we learned that she had, by her own description, led a fairly charmed life until the night Timmy disappeared. She’d grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and met Tim Walker her junior year at Pennsylvania State.

Walker got a good job working as an oil engineer right out of school and made enough in the fracking industry that they bought the house, restored it, and had kids. Timmy—Deuce—was his father’s favorite, and they spent many hours together early in the boy’s life.

Then Walker started moving up the corporate ladder and was gone a lot. And then he discovered “playthings,” as Lenore put it, and he was gone a lot more. After Deuce died, her husband, heartbroken and in love with a twenty-four-year-old, had left for good.

We asked her about the rumors, about the hole in the wall at the school. “Never happened,” Lenore said.

“Your son have a computer?” Sampson asked.

“Two, or one and a half, I guess, at the end. He was always buying and selling them on eBay.”

“Really?” I said. “At twelve?”

“Oh, sure. Computers, phones, iPods, anything electronic, long as it was used and cheap. It was kind of his hobby. He made pretty good money doing it.”

“Police look at his computers?”

“They took them,” she said. “I assume they looked at them.”

“And his phone?”

“They found one.”

“He had more than one?” Sampson asked.

“Sometimes three, but I only knew of two at that time. A Samsung, which they found, and a used iPhone, which they didn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“No. There’s not much left other than pictures, videos, and my memories.”

She started to cry again. Her daughter came over and hugged her until she was composed enough to tell us about the day her son disappeared.

“I wanted him to go to the store for me.” She sniffed. “He’d been in for a snack and then said he was going out to play. But when I called after him, he never answered.”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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