N ELSON rubbed his hands over his face and then opened the car door. The dome light went on, and the motion detector in the garage quickly snapped the overhead on as well.

He thought of Elisa. Should he call her?

No, he decided. Be patient.

Sunday, April 23

8:15 A.M.

LAS PIERNAS

THE rain was ruining someone’s weekend, no doubt, but I didn’t mind it at all. I was pleased to be where I was-in bed next to my husband, warm and cozy. We had been awakened by a thunderclap just after dawn, but apparently our houseguest, Ethan Shire, had slept through it, giving us a couple of unexpected hours of privacy.

I’m a reporter and my husband, Frank Harriman, is a homicide detective, so our plans are often overset by the demands of our work. Lately, our schedules had been further complicated by Ethan Shire’s recuperation. Ethan was a coworker of mine who was staying in our guest room. Since he had been shot trying to save my life, giving him a place to stay and a little of our time while he recovered wasn’t perceived as a burden, but it had changed how we walked around the house in nothing but our underwear.

At the moment, having read the sports section and comics and now feigning interest in the obituaries, I waited for my husband to finish reading page fifteen of the A section of the Las Piernas News Express. I work for the Express, and a story I had written on missing children was on pages one, fourteen, and made its final jump to fifteen.

He finished and gave me a wry smile. “The phones in Missing Persons will be ringing off the hook.”

I shrugged. “Probably in the newsroom, too.”

“Tough subject to write about.”

I couldn’t argue with that, but it was a story I couldn’t ignore.

A few weeks earlier, looking up some background for a story on an old kidnapping, I had learned that kidnapping is not one of the crimes included in the FBI’s national Uniform Crime Reporting system.

This struck me as odd. Not long after the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932, kidnapping became a federal offense if the abductor crossed state lines or sent a ransom note by mail. The FBI investigated all such kidnapping cases and was often called in to advise on others.

But kidnapping didn’t count in one of the leading reports on crime in the U.S. It was literally easier to get statistics on auto thefts than child abduction.

I got curious.

I found a Department of Justice study on missing children for the year 1999. That study estimated that in the U.S., an astounding number of children had been reported missing-797,500-which meant that on the average, Americans lost track of more than 2,100 children every day-91 kids an hour.

If they had just been numbers, I suppose I would have gone on to something else. But they were children.

The reasons for their disappearances were complex. The largest number were reported to be runaways, a sad commentary in itself, and again not a problem with a single cause or solution. It wasn’t always a certainty that children labeled runaways had voluntarily disappeared. In some jurisdictions, it was a fact of life that the police would rather not spend time hunting down a teenager who probably didn’t want to be returned home. Runaway was an easy thing to write on a report if you didn’t want to trouble yourself much.

One woman told me that when she sought the help of police in the disappearance of her seventeen-year-old son, she spoke to a detective who did nothing more than take down her son’s name, age, and general description. At the end of which he cruelly remarked, “Lady, he probably just wanted to get away from you.” That was just about the sum total of the police investigation thirty years ago, and despite continued effort on her part, she never learned what became of her son.

Police claimed that reporting procedures had changed since then, but they simply did not have the resources to devote much attention to cases other than those that clearly indicated the immediate endangerment of a child. Those presumed to be voluntarily missing were a much lower priority.

I talked the executive news editor of the Express, John Walters, into letting me write a story about the children who weren’t voluntarily missing. This included the second-largest group after runaways-so-called “family abductions”-and I focused on the more than 203,000 cases that fell into that category. In one year, that was the number of children whose custodial parent reported them as abducted by a former spouse or other family member.

Like any good-sized city-about half a million souls live in Las Piernas-ours had its share of these cases. I interviewed several people who didn’t believe their former spouses would harm their children, or cause them to be in the way of harm, but who were both angry and heartbroken that they had been separated from their children. They also felt concern over what the children had been told about them, and anxious about the effect that being “on the run” would have on their kids.

I interviewed other people whose children or grandchildren had been taken from their lives by a noncustodial parent, but who had good reason to fear the children might be in danger-the ex-spouses had histories of substance abuse, mental illness, or violent criminal records.

For an accompanying story, one of my coworkers interviewed a fugitive mother who had taken her children from their father-he was the parent who had legal custody. The mother was now living in Mexico with her two kids and her second husband. We talked to grandparents and aunts and uncles, all of whom were affected when a child was abducted by a noncustodial parent.

Frank predicted we’d get complaints on that one.

“We’ll get complaints about all of it. I couldn’t write about all of them, so other people whose kids are missing will be upset. Noncustodial parents will complain that we didn’t write more about them. Some days I think I’m in the business of making the public unhappy.”

“Another thing our jobs have in common.”

He was about to say more, but we heard Ethan moving around in the living room. The dogs, who had been sleeping on the bedroom floor, perked up and wanted out to see if they could persuade him to give them treats-our animals were gaining weight due to his lack of resistance.

We stretched and hurriedly dressed. I managed not to look back at the bed, although I couldn’t help thinking about how much longer those lazy moments would have lasted on most Sundays. I comforted myself with the thought that we couldn’t be the only people on Earth who had to get up early on weekends.