Page 27 of Five
It reminds me of another list of names. All of the Lost Boys who disappeared twenty years ago.
Everything around me is a blur of memory closing in on me, forcing me to remember events that haunt me on a daily basis. I don’t need the reminder; those memories never leave. It’s just sometimes they affect me more than others.
But they’re there all the time, whether I’m awake or asleep, haunting me day and night. They’re joining forces and holding hands, these memories. There’s the one of a cute Iraqi kid who died because of me; and then another boy, this one my closest family, also taken because of me. Because I was too busy having fun to keep an eye on him. A typical thirteen-year-old, all angry adolescence and teen hormones who didn’t want to be bothered by a skinny, snot-nosed six-year-old who kept whining about everything.
Funny how I came to yearn for that whining in the two years that followed Oliver’s disappearance.
I’d vowed every day thereafter that I would protect Ollie, protect every little kid I came into contact with.
I’m just doing a fucking shit job of it.
The Lost Boys.Just the name is enough to make my gut cramp and a sick feeling form in the pit of my stomach. Bile rises in my throat, threatening to overwhelm me.
I thought I had it under control; that the years of therapy had helped me come to terms with my past.
And then this happens.
When the call came in about this attempted kidnapping, my captain nearly shit himself with excitement. “He’s active,” he told me from across his desk, rubbing his hands together.
“What are you talking about?” I’d asked.
“The Lost Boys kidnapper? It’s him, it’s gotta be.”
Despite my protests that there was no possible way—it had to have been twenty years, after all— he assigned me to the case, saying my familiarity with the original investigation would be useful.
I’m just not sure I agree. While I studied the cold case at length after I became a cop, after that length of time, it seems unlikely. And one incident with a single similarity is too soon to decide if there’s a real link or it’s just coincidence.
Or maybe I just don’t want to believe it.
To accept that scenario undermines so much of the peace of mind that my brother and I have battled so hard to find. Both of us have come to believe that the original perp is dead. If he’s not?
God, I don’t even want to think about it.
What the hell would that mean for us and our mental health, our carefully reconstructed lives?
My fingers itch to pull out my phone and call Oliver, even though I’m actively on the job right now. Everything about this situation is screaming at me.
I don’t need to ask him anything about what happened all those years ago. He and I? We’ve gone through it countless times over the years. Not just after it happened, when it was so fresh and painful, but also during the years of therapy that followed, and then again, many more times after I became a police officer and later a detective. Every single time I’ve wondered if there was just one thing I might have missed. One small detail that could make everything fall into place so we could have closure. Not knowing whether whoever orchestrated Oliver’s abduction was still out there was a big part of not having that closure.
Hell, I can probably recite the facts just as well as my brother… and I know some of it intimately, because there’s not a single day goes by when I don’t wish I’d done things differently.
But the day Oliver was found, I vowed to take care of him, and we’ve been inseparable ever since… except for when the military put us in different units thanks to their policy of not deploying siblings together. Hell, we’ve even gone so far as to share the same woman on occasion, so I kind of know where his mind is with Neve and the PolyApp.
But the idea that what happened here today is the same man? Yeah, that’s truly chilling.
I mean where’s he been for all this time?
And the boys he took are adults now… the ones that lived, anyway. We never learned what happened to the ones who “left.” But that doesn’t mean they’re safe.
And if my captain’s right and the perp has returned after all this time, then neither is a whole new generation of little boys in the Keys.
Four
Oscar
I’mpulledoutofmy daydreams—or are they nightmares?—by one of the beat cops who’s come to give me the rundown of what happened here. Stan Oberman and I have worked in the same precinct for years, and I know he’s a solid cop with years of experience.
“The kids were playing outside,” he tells me, checking his notes. “They seem to have been adequately supervised, if what I’ve been told so far is accurate.”
