Police Chief Raymond Tanner looked out his office window at the boy slumped over the metal desk a few feet away. A patrol car had picked him up, wandering aimlessly down the center of a dark road in the middle of the night. A rookie officer, unlucky enough to pull the overnight shifts that week, had immediately phoned the Chief when he recognized the boy as one of the town's sixteen missing teenagers.
Anyone on the force would have known him immediately, Cole Parks, serious delinquent and budding psychopath. At sixteen years old Cole had already generated a juvenile offender record of serious length, been kicked out of the local high school and done two small stints in the detention center. Once he had been violent, cruel and unpredictable; but now he sat limp and haggard in his chair. His usually handsome face was slack jawed and he stared blankly at the floor with wide unblinking eyes.
The Chief rubbed his eyes and reached for the lukewarm cup of coffee on his desk. It was 3 AM and so far the kid hadn't spoken a word. Hell, he hadn't even lifted his head to look anyone in the eye. He placed a third phone call to Cole's house and let the phone ring seven times before giving up. Cole's father, and only guardian, was most likely sleeping off a drunken stupor somewhere.
Even at this early morning hour, the station was starting to fill up as word started to spread amongst his staff that Cole had been found. The curious officers were lining the walls and silently observing the young man. Tanner knew they were all thinking the same thing, that Cole could possibly have had something to do with all of the kids going missing. Alright, it seemed unlikely that one suspect had pulled off 15 separate acts of abduction and slipped away unnoticed, staying hidden for months. But the parents and the police force were desperate and any answer, no matter how far reaching, seemed like a good idea right now.
The boy, although his eyes remained open, was drifting peacefully in and out of consciousness. "Cole," was the name the police officers kept calling him. He was fine with that, although it didn't quite register. Everything up to this point felt like a dream that he couldn't remember and he was struggling to wake from it. The first thing he could clearly remember was walking. First there was blankness, and then he was looking down at his heavy boots hitting the pavement over and over. Lift, step. Lift, step. Lift, step. The world surrounding him was dark and offered no clues as to where he was, so he just kept walking. Lift, step. Lift, step. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do.
He walked until somebody told him to stop then he allowed himself without hesitation to be placed into the back of a black and white squad car. The claustrophobic feel in the backseat of that car was oddly familiar. Now he was sitting in a cold room where every flat surface was metal covered in scattered papers, maybe this is the place he belonged, the place he was walking to. At least, it felt like a place he had been to before and that was a start.
A heavy fist slammed into the desk in front of him, waking him at last from the zombie like trance.
"Where the hell are the rest of them, huh? Where the hell is my daughter Cole? Start talking or so help me . . ." Officer David Sellers had just about come unglued trying to be patient and watching from the sidelines. Finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, he had launched his verbal attack on the boy. He towered over him with his fists clenched and ready to strike. Of everyone in the room he felt like he was the most entitled to punch this kid in the face. His daughter was missing and Cole was now suspect number one.
"Settle down Sellers," said the Chief who had sprung from the chair in this office the moment he saw the officer take a step forward. Sellers was a good officer but right now he was a scared father and he needed to be dealt with that way. "Someone take Sellers home, now."
"Hell no! I mean, hell no, sir! I can't sit at home not knowing what's going on here." He straightened up, struggling to reign in his anger and appear as calm as possible. "Just . . . give me a job to do. Anything."
"Oh hell, alright. Go check out the area where we found the boy, see if you can find anything unusual," said Tanner.
Cole remained speechless and averted his gaze to the far right wall where he saw sixteen photographs tacked to a corkboard. There were three perfect rows of five photographs each hung with careful symmetry. All of the faces were posed and smiling; school photographs. Underneath these rows was one last photo, a recent mug shot crookedly hung like an afterthought, of Cole Parks.
Tanner let out a long sigh and sat down across from Cole. "Cole?" The boy continued to stare at the pictures on the wall, his own in particular. "Cole?" Slowly the boy turned his head and looked the police Chief in the eyes. A shiver ran down Tanner's spine. The boys eyes were empty pools, void of any emotion at all. "Cole?" Uninterested, the boy turned his attention back to the wall of photos.
"We better call in a shrink," Tanner said and nodded to his Deputy. "And someone find his goddamn father."
A social worker brought Cole something to eat, a burger and fries. He snapped it up in as few bites as possible, practically swallowing the food whole. The sensation of hunger hadn't occurred to Cole until he saw the food but once it was in front of him he was ravenous. How long had it been since he had eaten, he wondered? How long had it been since he had showered, slept, gone to the bathroom or brushed his teeth, for that matter? The small details of daily life were starting to drift into his short term memory. It caused him no distress though as they faded back out as quickly as they had appeared.
Officer Sellers pulled up to the spot where Cole Parks had been first spotted. His body had shook with fear and anger the entire way there. Since the day his daughter had disappeared anxiety took up residence in his gut like a marble slab. First there was no phone call after the football game she had cheered at, when normally she always called. Then, there was the endless time that passed after curfew where anger was slowly replaced by terror with each passing hour. Finding out that other kids were missing didn't make him feel any differently. All that mattered was finding his own daughter. Not knowing where she was, or what was being done to her was sheer torture. He had been a cop for a long time, so he knew, the possibilities were endless.
Taking a heavy flash light with him he climbed out of the car and started to sweep the area. Everywhere the light touched looked ordinary; charcoal pavement, appropriately striped with white lines. Nature was more or less still, except for the loud chirping of the cicada bugs and the soft rustling of trees in the wind. If that son of a bitch touched one hair on her head I'm going to shoot his chest full of holes, he thought.
He was just about to turn around and head back when he caught sight of something odd, black markings on the road with a faint white smoke rising up from the ground. He bent down and reached out to touch the black marks but pulled his hand back sharply when he felt heat. The markings were branded into the ground but didn't resemble anything meaningful. They had a scatter-like quality to them as if something had exploded there.
Sellers reached for his radio and asked to speak directly to the Chief. "There's something weird here alright. Not sure what it is. I need forensics, over."
"Well, what does it look like? Over."
"Burn marks on the road covering a large area, still smokin'. Over."
There was a long pause. Too long. David got back on the radio. "You want me to stay and wait for forensics Chief? Over."
The other end of the radio came to life, static only for several long moments before the Chief's voice, flat and emotionless, finally answered him.
"Sellers, get back to the station immediately. That's an order. Over."
The radio went dead. Sellers shook his head and slipped behind the steering wheel of the squad car. What now, he thought.
In the station, everything had come to a halt. The sideline gossiping had ceased, the sounds of typing, texting and shuffling papers were silenced. The Chief still had his hand across his chest, positioned over the call button on his radio. He stood motionless, staring in amazement like everyone else in the room, at a girl standing in the doorway of the station house with her mother. A cream colored blanket was draped around her shoulders and the mother held on to her arm with an iron grip.
No doubt about it, the girl was Kate Sellers.