Long Lost by David Morrell Page A

required stitches, but the hospitals in the area don’t have any record of a construction worker coming in last summer with that kind of injury. However, the Colorado Springs police have a security—camera tape of a man who looks like Dant beating a clerk in a liquor store robbery. A police car chased his vehicle into the mountains. He may have gotten the injury to his face when his car skidded off a curve and tumbled into a draw. There was blood but no driver when officers climbed down to examine the wreckage.”
    Bitterness twisted my voice. “Yeah, Petey has a habit of vanishing.”
    “You mean Dant.”
    “Sure… . Dant.”
    “We’ll get him,” Gader said. “The money he took from you won’t last long. Eventually he’ll have to steal again. One mistake. That’s all he has to make, and we’ll get him.”
    “Eventually.” The word that Gader had used stuck in my throat. I tried not to think about what was happening to Kate and Jason.

6
    So a man who was my brother or who
wasn’t
my brother but who was pretending to be him had abducted my family and torn my world apart. He’d covered his trail by fooling me and the police into thinking he was going to Butte, Montana. Then he’d vanished off the face of the earth. No other motorists were reported missing for that time period, which meant that the police didn’t have a license number and a description of a carjacked vehicle to focus their search. There were numerous reports of stolen cars. Hundreds in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Thousands nationwide. But when any of these were located, Petey (I still couldn’t bring myself to call him Dant) was never linked to them. Perhaps he’d switched license plates with another vehicle. The owner of the other vehicle might have taken quite a while to notice that the plates had been switched, by which time Petey might have stolen another car or switched plates again. Or perhaps Petey had taken the money he got for the things he stole from my house to buy an old car and then showed a fake ID to register the car under an alias that the police didn’t know he had. Perhaps. Could have. Might have.
    The local TV stations repeated the story. The networks picked it up, especially CBS, which included excerpts from the
Sunday Morning
segment that Kate, Jason, and I had been in. They emphasized the sick twist that a man who claimed to be my long—lost brother had vanished again, this time with my family. I got calls from men who claimed to have taken Kate and Jason. In graphic detail, they described the torture they inflicted. The police traced the calls, but nothing was learned, except that some people love to aggravate the suffering of others. Several of the callers were charged with obstructing the investigation, but none ever went to jail.
    Despair and lack of sleep gave me headaches. I went through the motions of working, but my staff ran the business. I spent most of my time in a trance. As the search lost momentum, it became obvious that unless Petey—again I tried to substitute Dant’s name, but I couldn’t manage to do so—unless Petey stumbled into a policeman, he was never going to be found, especially if he grew a beard to cover the scar on his chin so his mug shot would no longer resemble him.
    Blurred photos of Kate and Jason appeared on milk cartons and in mailers.
Have you seen this woman and this boy?
the caption read. But if
I
couldn’t recognize the indistinct faces, I couldn’t imagine anyone else being able to. I’d never paid attention to the faces on those milk cartons and those mailers when it was someone else’s wife or child who was missing. How could I hope that anyone would pay attention when it was
my
wife and child who were missing?
    Friends were supportive initially: phone calls of encouragement, invitations to dinner. But after a while, many wearied of my despair. Unable to come up with fresh expressions of sympathy, they kept their distance.
    A few remained loyal, though, and it was