Free Hide by Lisa Gardner Page A

parameter:
Massachusetts.
    The very first hit sent me reeling. Three photos of the same boy, starting when he was ten, then age-progressed to twenty, then to thirty-five. He had gone missing in 1965 and was presumed dead. One minute he’d been playing in the yard, the next he was gone. A pedophile doing time in Connecticut claimed to have raped and murdered the child, but couldn’t remember where he’d buried the body. So the case remained open, the parents working as feverishly now to find their son’s remains as they must have once worked, forty years ago, to find their child.
    I wondered what it was like for the parents to have to look at these age-progressed photos. To get that glimpse of who their son might have been, had the mom not gone inside to answer the phone or the father not rolled under the car to change the oil….
    Fight, my father always told me. Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are murdered are killed within the first three hours. Survive those three hours. Don’t give the bastard a chance.
    I was crying, I don’t know why. I never knew this little boy. Most likely, he died over forty years ago. But I could understand his terror. I felt it every time my father started one of his lectures or training exercises. Fight? When you are a fifty-pound child against a two-hundred-pound male, whatever in the world can you do that will honestly make a difference? My father may have had his illusions, but I have always been a realist.
    If you are a child and someone wants to hurt you, chances are, you’ll wind up dead.
    I moved to the next case: 1967. I looked at just the dates now; I didn’t want to see the pictures. It took me five more clicks. Then, November 12, 1982.
    I was staring at Dori Petracelli. I was looking at her photo, age-progressed to thirty. I was reading the case study of what had happened to my best friend.
    Then I went into the bathroom and vomited until I dry-heaved.
    Later, twenty, forty, fifty minutes, I didn’t know anymore, I had the leash in one hand, the Taser in the other. Bella danced around my feet, practically tripping me in her haste to get downstairs.
    I clipped the leash to her collar. And we ran. We ran and we ran and we ran.
    By the time we returned home, a good hour and a half later, I thought I had composed myself. I felt cold, even clinical. I still had my family’s luggage. I would start packing immediately.
    But then I turned on the news.
             
    B OBBY ARRIVED HOME shortly after nine p.m., a man on a mission: He had approximately forty minutes to shower, eat, chug a Coke, then return to Roxbury. Unfortunately, South Boston parking had other ideas. He worked an eight-block radius around his triple-decker before getting pissed off and parking up on the curb. A Boston cop would take great personal delight in ticketing a state trooper, so he was living dangerously.
    A pleasant surprise: One of his tenants, Mrs. Higgins, had left him a plate of cookies. “Saw the news. Keep up your strength,” her note said.
    Bobby couldn’t argue with that, so he started his dinner by eating a lemon square. Then three more as he sorted through the pile of mail scattered on his floor, picking out key envelopes bearing bills, rent checks, leaving the rest.
    One more lemon square for the road, chewing without even tasting anymore, he headed down the long narrow hallway to his bedroom at the back of the unit. He unbuttoned his shirt with one hand, emptied his pants pockets with the other. Then shrugged out of his shirt, kicked off his pants, and hit the tiny blue-tiled bathroom in beige dress socks and tighty whities. He got the shower going to full roar. One of the best things he still remembered from his tactical team days—coming home to a long, hot shower.
    He stood under the scalding spray for endless minutes. Inhaling the steam, letting it sink into his pores, wishing, as he always did, that it would wash the horror away.
    His brain was a spin cycle of