Dad gave up on the crossword puzzle. He slapped down the paper with obvious frustration and stood up from the counter. “I’m heading to the office.”
“Okay, I’ll be there in a minute,” I told him.
He left, tipping his hat to the others in the diner. They smiled back at him uncomfortably. Monica’s eyes followed him discreetly as he headed out the door and across the street toward the Carnegie Library.
“He’s not very good today, is he?”
“Not very good,” I agreed.
“Stress makes it worse. He’ll bounce back.”
“I hope so.”
“He’s going to need you, dear. Are you ready for that?”
“Of course, I am.”
She patted my back. “Well, count on me to help you, Shelby. Believe me, this situation will grow you up fast.”
She meant nothing by her comment, but I felt a little annoyed. It made me realize that the people around here still saw me as young. Twenty-five years old, but not grown-up, not ready for life. Monica, Dad, Adam, Trina, Ellen. To them, I was just a kid, and maybe they were right. I was still the girl who didn’t know who she was or why she was alive.
I still didn’t know why God had bothered to save me, and I didn’t feel any closer to figuring it out.
But I had no time to think about myself. Somewhere outside, distantly, I heard the guttural throb of an engine getting closer. Monica and I both looked at each other in confusion. The others in the café heard it, too, and people gravitated from their booths to the diner window and then outside to the street, where a crowd was gathering.
I hurried outside with Monica next to me.
The throb got louder, almost deafening, making all of us cover our ears. I looked up in the sky and saw a black helicopter slowly descending toward the open grass yard in front of the courthouse. Down it came, like some giant insect, and when it was nearly on the ground, I could see white letters painted on the side.
FBI.
Monica leaned toward me as the helicopter engine cut out and the rotor blades slowed. “An unwanted visitor in a tableware emporium,” she murmured in my ear.
I shook my head, not sure what she meant.
“Remember Tom’s crossword clue yesterday? We were talking about a bull in a china shop. Well, dear, now we’ve got one.”
Chapter Thirteen
Special Agent Bentley Reed of the FBI didn’t look impressed with the basement office of the Mittel County Sheriff’s Department. He was a city man, and this was the country. He was as tall as my father, with mocha-colored black skin, thinning hair that gave him a very high forehead, and a trimmed goatee flecked with gray. He was dressed in a pinstriped blue suit with leather shoes shined to such a bright finish that I was scared to look at them directly for fear of blindness. He was smart. I could see that in his eyes, which moved fast and didn’t miss a thing. I guessed that he was in his forties, and he had the bearing of an ex-military man. He didn’t walk, he strutted. He didn’t talk, he commanded.
Violet introduced him to us, and we all got the message loud and clear. Bentley Reed was in charge.
Our entire county team was gathered in the basement, about a dozen of us. Dad had called in all the shifts for the early morning meeting. I stood next to Adam, who was quietly seething at the prospect of taking a back seat to the Feds. Adam never took orders well, even from my father.
Agent Reed took off his suit coat and folded it carefully over the back of a chair. He stood in the center of the room with eight other federal agents behind him, eyeing the surroundings with the same disdain their boss did. I could feel their impatience, the pros staring at the small-town cops who’d wasted so much time before calling them in.
Reed had a throaty voice like a drumbeat that filled the room.
“Sheriff Ginn, I want to thank you for making your whole team available to us and for your partnership in this investigation. My colleagues and I are members of the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team, and we have one goal. That’s to find Jeremiah Sloan and bring him home safely to his family. Unfortunately, he’s already been missing approximately nineteen hours. That’s not good. In a potential abduction situation, every second counts, so we’re already playing catch-up, and we need to move swiftly.”
I glanced at Dad, whose face was as blank as marble before it was carved. He knew he was being chastised.
“Jeremiah could still be lost in the woods,” he pointed out.
Reed nodded. “Yes, we’re aware of that possibility. We have heat-sensing technology in the helicopter, and we’ll be launching a grid search over the forest in less than an hour. Of course, again, time has hurt us here. If Jeremiah spent a night outside, the boy’s body temperature has likely dropped. That will make him harder to detect. As far as a ground search goes, one of my team is a veteran of wilderness search-and-rescue operations, and he’ll be leading the search process and coordinating volunteers from the general public. As news gets out about this case, we’re going to have a lot of people showing up to help, which is both good and bad. I know you’ve had locals out searching already, but we’ll be going over the entire area again from the beginning.”
Translation: Who knows what you people missed?
“Next, let’s talk about the sex offender registry,” Agent Reed went on. “Where do we stand on interviews with people on the list?”
“We haven’t talked to anyone yet,” Dad began, but Reed cut him off.
“So we’re nowhere on that. Got it. Okay, we’ve identified nearly a hundred level-two and level-three sex offenders in Mittel and Stanton counties. I want in-person interviews and alibis from every single one of them. Talk to their neighbors, too, and show them Jeremiah’s photo. I also want the state patrol showing that photo at every gas station at every exit on the interstate. Ditto for every gas station within a two-hundred-mile radius of the national forest. If Jeremiah was taken out of the area, this guy had to fill up somewhere. And let’s get copies of the guest registers from every motel and resort in both counties, so we can run them against criminal records.”
Behind Agent Reed, his team keyed notes furiously into their phones. Several of them were already coordinating their next moves with each other in whispered tones. These people had worked together before, and I couldn’t help but be impressed. Reed may have been arrogant and condescending when you met him, but he was a pro. As painful as it was to admit, Violet had been smart to bring him in.
“We need a command post,” Reed went on. “Large, somewhere we can process physical evidence as we gather it and set up our computers. Ms. Roka, what do you suggest? What’s available in town?”
“There’s a gym at the school,” Violet proposed. “Will that work? It’s wide open, and no one’s using it during the summer. We’ve got power in the space, and we can bring in dozens of tables as needed.”
“Perfect,” Reed went on. He jabbed a finger at a special agent on his right who didn’t look much older than me. “Next, media. Tiffany Ball is our media relations specialist. We’re already getting plenty of queries, but we want to control the message, so Tiffany will be working with all of you and the boy’s parents to craft a press release, profile, and media kit regarding the disappearance. Same for social media. I expect to hold a press conference early this afternoon, once our infrastructure is in place. Questions on any of that?”
My father and the rest of us stood in shell-shocked silence. Life moved at a slow pace in Mittel County. Not so at the FBI.
“Excuse me, Special Agent Reed?”