“You just said ‘they,’” I say, interrupting. “So you really think I’m right? There’s more than just, um, Bruce?”

“I do,” he says. “An abduction that involves ransom or extortion almost invariably requires teamwork. I’m assuming Bruce is team leader.”

“Okay,” I say, keeping my eyes on the fleet of battle-scared cabs that have suddenly surrounded us. “Sorry for interrupting, you said something about motivation.”

“Yes. There’s a strong possibility this wasn’t just about the money.”

“And that’s good?” I ask hopefully.

He shoots me a wary look. “Can I be blunt?”

“Go ahead.”

“Once Bruce had the money, why not kill you? From his point of view, you’ve served your purpose. Why leave you alive and go to the trouble of planting evidence implicating you in a murder?”

“How about this?” I say vehemently. “Because he’s a sadistic monster. Because he’s a sick, sick son of a bitch.”

“No doubt,” Shane agrees. “But he’s a sick monster with a very specific and well-planned agenda. I’m assuming the whole thing of setting you up for a murder, making it look like you’re in a custody dispute, all of that is an elaborate diversion from his actual purpose. He’s creating a lot of light and smoke, making sure the major law enforcement agencies aren’t treating this as a straight-ahead child abduction. He’s got something else planned.”

“And taking Tommy is part of his plan?”

“Yes. He’s buying time. Which means, whatever he wants to accomplish, it isn’t over yet.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Absolutely. Everything Bruce has done so far convinces me your son is still alive.”

A horrifying thought: Shane has been searching for a reason to believe that my son is alive.

“What about this woman who claims to be his birth mother?” I ask somewhat lamely. The air now definitely out of my optimistic balloon.

“We’ll know more by the end of the day,” Shane assures me. “But my experience is that birth mothers rarely kidnap children after so many years have elapsed without contact. Your son is what, eleven years old?”

“Eleven, yes.” I get a flash of his last birthday party—total chaos of screaming boy-monsters—and feel a lump forming in my throat.

“A distraught birth mother might change her mind and take drastic action after a few months. Possibly even a year or two,” Shane says, nodding to himself. “But after a decade? After that long, why not just go through the courts to establish shared custody, or visitation, or whatever? Why risk a felony conviction—a very serious felony conviction—when the child is going to be legally of age in two more years?”

“Legally of age? What are you talking about? In two years Tommy will only be thirteen.”

“Exactly,” Shane says. “And at age thirteen, most custodial judges will defer to the child. All things being equal, they’d let him make up his own mind regarding who has custody, or at least who he lives with. It’s actually a practical application of the law, because by the time they’re teenagers, unhappy kids run away, or find their way back to the parent of choice anyhow, no matter what the law or the social workers decree.”

The whole subject of a possible birth mother makes me feel very unsettled. Not quite skin crawling, but close. Reminds me of how relieved I’d been when Ted told me the parents were deceased, that we were adopting an orphaned child. Which also made me feel guilty, for benefiting from a tragedy. Guilt that was swept away by the flood of joy when I took the baby in my arms and felt his little heart beating. He’s afraid, too, I thought, and then, but I can fix that. And I did fix it, by a simple act of love. Proving to myself that I could mother a child not my own, and in that way make him as much a part of me as if he had been conceived with my own DNA.

Or so I thought at the time. The idea that his birth mother might be alive changes everything, throwing me back into a deep unease about my place in Tommy’s world. Unease somehow separate from my anxiety about his current well-being.

Every minute, every hour without my son makes me more uneasy, motherwise. Anxious not that my love for him will ever abate—no chance—but that he will no longer feel the same way about me. Knowing there may be another Tommy-mom in the world changes everything, doesn’t it?

“So how did you get into this crazy business?” I ask my passenger, if only to distract myself.

Shane studies me, as if unsure how much information should be shared with a client. “I was with the bureau,” he finally admits. “The FBI. After I took early retirement, I needed something to do.”

His hesitant tone makes it sound like he’s far from certain about his own motivation. Or at the very least unwilling to discuss it with me. But I’m not ready to let him off the hook. I glance over—one eye for the traffic, one for the passenger—and ask, “So this is what you did in the FBI? Located missing children?”

Shane rubs his chin, stroking his trim little beard and grimacing slightly. “No, no. At least not like what you see on TV,” he explains. “I was a special agent with an expertise in fingerprint identification. Really not so much the prints themselves, as our system for accessing prints and connecting them with perpetrators. Which means linking up with other systems, worldwide. Software stuff.”

“You were a computer geek?”

“Sort of. It’s not that simple. Because in addition to the prints, I also worked cases like the other agents. Mostly interviews, surveillance, wiretaps. Sometimes pure abduction cases. But I was never part of an official child recovery team.”

Clearly he wants to take the conversation elsewhere, but I decide to bear down. “So you take early retirement,” I say. “And then what, out of the blue you decide to set yourself up as a child recovery expert?”

A glance reveals that he’s wearing a slightly bemused expression. As if letting me know that an intrusion into his personal space will be tolerated just this one time. “Not exactly,” he says. “I just retired, period. Never to work a full-time job again, or so I thought. Fooled around going to sleep disorder clinics for a while, to make myself useful, you know? For research? That’s where it happened.”

“Where what happened?”

“Kid got snatched from the clinic day care. This technician, Darla, she brought her two-year-old to work, left her at the day care. And Darla’s sicko boyfriend, who was not the little girl’s father, took her. Had a pass, so he just picked the kid up and walked out with her.”

“And you helped Darla get her little girl back?”

Shane nods, studying the traffic, his hands, anything but make eye contact with me. “That’s what I did. The boyfriend was trying to ‘loan’ the little girl to another pedophile he met on the Internet. I found out where the handoff was going to take place and recovered the child.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

“He’s doing thirty years in Leavenworth.”

“Nice work, Mr. Shane.”

“Thank you.”

“So you recover the little girl, then you decide to make a habit of it?”

“More or less. Darla, she’s very religious, she said I’d found my true calling.”

“Is she still a girlfriend, Darla?”

The very idea makes Shane chuckle. “Darla? Hardly. Never was. Darla likes her men short, round and brown. I lose out in all three categories.”

“Guess you would at that. Mind answering one more question?”

“Won’t know until you ask it.”

“What are you charging me?”

His looks surprised or bemused, or possibly both. “Haven’t thought about setting a price,” he says. “We’ll see how it plays out.”

“You don’t have an hourly rate like lawyers?”

“Nope. My fee depends on what happens.”

I let that soak in, absorbing the implications. “You mean your fee depends on if you get the child back alive?”

“Among other things, yes,” he admits. “Is this our exit?”