“Did he say anything to you when you last spoke to him? Anything odd? Someone new he might have met or-”

That’s when the phone on the antique sideboard beside her rang. She stared in horror at the caller ID number, then at me as it rang again.

“I don’t know that number,” she said, raw panic in her voice. “I don’t know that number!”

“That’s okay,” I said, trying to calm her down. I scratched down the number, and let my instincts kick in.

“Listen, April. Look at me. If it’s someone involved with Jacob being gone-I don’t think it is, but if it is-you need to ask them exactly what you need to do in order to get your son back, okay? And if you can, say that you want to speak to Jacob.”

Tears were streaming down her face as the phone rang again. She used a shaking fist to wipe them away before she grabbed the receiver. I listened at an extension in the adjacent study. I pressed the phone’s answering machine’s Record button as I lifted the receiver.

“Yes? This is April Dunning.”

“I have Jacob,” a strangely serene voice said. “Listen.”

There was a click and hum on the line and then what sounded like a recording.

“Question number nine: If you were born in Sudan, what would be your chances of living to forty? And what does that have to do with your cute little red iPod nano?”

“I don’t know,” a young man sobbed. “Stop. Please stop.”

The recording clicked off.

“You’ll receive instructions in exactly three hours,” the calm voice said. “Follow them to the letter or you’ll never see your son alive again. No police. No FBI.”

The connection was cut. I was hanging up the extension when there was a crash in the hallway. Mrs. Dunning was kneeling on the herringbone floor, sobbing inconsolably.

“It’s Jacob,” she moaned. “That bastard has my Jacob.”

The butler arrived a step before me and helped her into a chair.

I speed-dialed the chief. Unbelievable. This really was a kidnapping. We had no time to waste to get set up. We needed to hustle if we were going to have all our teams in place in three hours. It was going to be close.

I frowned out the window. Down across Central Park West, a tour bus was disembarking, people checking their cameras as they crowded toward the Strawberry Fields John Lennon memorial. My boss’s phone rang with a painful slowness as Mrs. Dunning’s cries carried through the high-ceilinged rooms.

“C’mon,” I said in frustration. “Pick up.”

A BUSINESS JET inbound for Teterboro Airport made FBI special agent Emily Parker duck her copper-colored head as she hurried across the Enterprise parking lot on Route 46 in New Jersey. She stopped for a moment and watched it streak down the runway toward the sleek Gulf-stream G300 that had just dropped her off.

She checked her watch after she turned over the engine of her rented Buick LeSabre. It was not yet three. Her boss had called her at twelve-thirty at her home outside Manassas, Virginia. She’d traveled two hundred fifty miles in under two hours.

Now, that’s what I call a rush job, she thought. Granted, she was used to the pace, having been in charge of the FBI’s northeast regional CARD, or Child Abduction Rapid Deployment, team for two years.

“The ADIC asked me to put my biggest badass on this one, Emily,” John Murphy, the special agent in charge of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, had said to her. “Guess what. You’re it.”

She hadn’t been told much. Only that she was to be a special kidnapping adviser to the NYPD on the abduction of some kid named Jacob Dunning. Jacob’s father, Donald Dunning, was actually the one who had sent his Gulf-stream for her, which was about as far from normal procedure as you could get.

She was beginning to wonder what kind of special assignment she’d just gotten herself into.

She speed-dialed home as she gunned out of the parking lot. Her brother, Tom, answered his cell on the second ring.

“Just got off the plane,” she said. “How’s she taking it?”

“Everything’s fine. We set up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway. That’s so cute that you guys do that every Sunday.”

“That little fibber,” Emily cried. “A lemonade stand? Near the street!? Oh, that’s just like her. She’s got her hooks into you already. I told her no last week. What about the traffic? Are you there? Right now? Who’s watching her?”

“Of course I’m here, Em. What do you think, I’m talking to you from a bar?” her brother said. “Me and the Olive are glued together at the hip.”

Tom had gotten a job with a defense contractor in Bethesda after getting out of the Marines the month before. He was due to start next week. Renting him the basement apartment in her split-level had turned out to be a win-win stroke of genius, a built-in babysitter. Emily grinned, picturing her precious goofball of a four-year-old, Olivia, out by the end of the cul-de-sac in her winter coat, wondering where the customers were.

“Do we even have lemonade?” she said.

“I made a command decision and substituted Kool-Aid.”

“Kool-Aid!? That’s pure processed sugar and dye. Kool-Aid! She can only have one glass. One.”

“You sound like I’m force-feeding her antifreeze. Besides, she’s not drinking it, she’s trying to sell it. Try not to have an aneurysm, please. I survived Kabul, I think I can look after the Olive. You have any idea how long you’re going to be gone for?”

“Not yet, but I’ll let you know. Kiss her for me, okay, Tom? I know you can take perfect care of her. I just get nuts leaving ever since… you know.”

“The D-I-V-O-”

“Shut up, Tom, would you? She can spell better than you. Good-bye.”

After her divorce the year before, Emily had taken a transfer to ride a desk at CASMIRC, the Bureau’s Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center, because it had regular hours. The case files that came in for review from every corner of the country weren’t exactly light reading, but when you were a profiler, you had to take the work where you could find it.

The job was ideal for taking care of Olivia, but to say Emily was starting to climb the beige walls of her cubicle in the basement office at the FBI Academy would be putting it mildly.

Emily smiled as she dropped the Buick’s hammer up the entrance for the turnpike, cutting off a tricked-out Cadillac SUV. Off to her right, New York City ’s metal-and-glass skyline appeared like a vision over the Jersey swamp.

Still got it, she thought, keeping the gas on the floor. Gangway, badass coming through!

I DON’T THINK I’d ever been as proud of the NYPD. In only two hours, we’d managed to get everything up and running.

I, two other Major Case detectives, and a PD tech were stationed at the Dunnings’ apartment. Another team of detectives was busy scouring NYU to find out where Jacob had last been seen. A third surveillance team, made up of undercover Emergency Service Unit tactical guys, was spread around outside the Dakota, especially the Strawberry Fields area in Central Park.

After Lennon was shot, the building had become a kind of morbid landmark, like the grassy knoll in Dallas. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Jacob lived here, but for the time being, we couldn’t rule out the pull of the place for some unbalanced person.

An NYPD TARU tech had already spliced recording equipment onto the Dunnings’ line. The phone company had been contacted and was ready with something called a time-stop trace. Its billing computer would zip through its millions of circuits that were operational at the exact second the Dunnings’ phone rang and find the one calling the apartment.

All we had to do now was the hard part. To sit and wait until four o’clock. Sit and wait and pray.

My heart rattled like an alarm clock in my chest cavity when the phone rang at three-thirty. It took me a long second to realize that it wasn’t the apartment phone but the building’s intercom buzzer in the kitchen.