“I understand your feelings. With hindsight, we’re all geniuses. But you have to understand that there’s nothing in the conduct of the case that warrants criticism. As soon as he was summoned, Detective Shoffler took steps to secure the scene – a very difficult scene to secure, by the way. He immediately launched a vigorous search and inquiry. In the time since the boys disappeared, he and his team have questioned a large number of witnesses, some of them more than once. He’s made a good liaison with the District police. He’s pursued the case by the book, and that includes” – she glances my way and offers a tiny sympathetic grimace – “suspecting and questioning Mr. Callahan.”

“How’s that?” Jack says, his face red with belligerence. “They waste their time with Alex here, and boom – no one’s even looking for my grandsons. Everyone thinks they’re dead.”

Jones looks down at her fingers – the nails are bitten raw. “In the field of criminal justice,” she says, “we are all to a certain extent students of history. We have to rely on known precedent. In suspecting Mr. Callahan, Detective Shoffler was going with history. The truth is that most child abductions and murders are committed by parents – especially when those parents are separated.” She hefts the police file. “This kidnapper didn’t go by the book. You just don’t come across many cases – I couldn’t find a single one – where a kidnapping occurs many miles from a victim’s home and yet the kidnapper returns to that home, where he has one of the victims place a phone call to a parent, a phone call that is not a ransom plea.” She shakes her head. “It’s all very risky behavior.”

“What about the T-shirt?” I ask. “Do you have any theories about that?”

She sighs and glances at Detective Shoffler. “There’s nothing in the database, really nothing. Maybe some kind of animal sacrifice. We’re looking into that.”

Shoffler grimaces. “What I think is maybe the T-shirt was just to throw off pursuit. Not that we let up on other suspects or possibilities. You got two kids missing, the search is really relentless. But until that lab test came back, it was natural to focus certain resources on Alex.” He wags his head sadly. “I think the T-shirt was deliberate and it worked like a charm.”

“A red herring,” Jones says, “almost literally. Except the fish on the T-shirt was a whale instead of a herring.”

Liz groans and her head droops.

“This guy is too fucking cute,” my father says.

“Detective Shoffler has asked me to pick up a couple of threads in the investigation,” Jones tells us. “First, that folded rabbit – I’ve already checked into that.”

“Really – what did you find out?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Not much. We ran it by an origami expert. He said it was cleverly constructed and of high intermediate level, but that’s about all he could tell us. It’s now with a second expert, but I’m not very confident this lead’s going anywhere. Like any other subculture you get into, from skydiving to candlepins – origami has more devotees than you’d think possible.”

“What about the material?” Liz asks. “That skin or whatever it is.”

“Apparently it does feel like skin. It’s called elephant hide. But in fact it’s a special kind of paper used in origami.”

“Really.”

“It stands up to being folded wet, the expert explained. Very commonly available and pretty much the paper of choice at a certain level, especially for animal forms. I’m afraid tracking the source of the paper does not look promising. The Internet alone has dozens of sources.”

Liz looks as if she’s going to start crying.

“The other area Detective Shoffler has asked me to pursue,” Jones says, “is the question of Mr. Callahan’s possible enemies. I’ve got a copy of the list Mr. Callahan supplied, and when we’re done here” – she shifts her gaze to me – “I’d like to go over it.”

My mother sticks up her hand, as if she’s in a classroom. Her face is bright red. “What if it’s because they’re twins,” she blurts out. “I keep thinking about that Nazi doctor… his experiments.” She presses her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at Liz and me.

My father puts his arm around her shoulder. “I thought of that, too,” he says.

This is a possibility I try to keep out of my head. I can’t handle it, can’t stand the idea of some modern-day Mengele doing things to the boys. They’d be better off dead. And so would I.

“I checked on twins,” Judy Jones tells us, with a negative shake of the head, “and I can tell you that in the past twenty years, there are very few cases of twins being kidnapped. Or twins going missing. None at all that seem relevant to this case.”

“What about those boys out in L.A.? Lopez? Some kind of Hispanic name.” This from Jack.

“The Ramirez twins,” I say.

“It sounds like Alex knows why that case isn’t relevant,” Jones says, with a nod my way.

“Police caught the kidnapper with the bodies of the boys,” I tell them. “Then he committed suicide.”

“That’s about as closed as a case can get,” Jones says. “So…”

Liz’s mother, Marguerite, flies in from Maine, and nearly requires hospitalization again after fighting in through the press crowd.

Although, already – just one week after the abduction – that is beginning to diminish.

Compassionate strangers keep on volunteering for the search teams – which continue, weather permitting, to comb the area around the fairgrounds. When we can, we join them – Liz, Jack, Liz’s mother, my father, and me. Outfitted in cutting-edge gear donated by Tenleytown Outdoor Sports (a friend of a friend of mine owns it), we drive the hour and a half to Cromwell and then separate, according to police direction, each of us joining a different search team.

Mom’s eyesight won’t allow her to stumble around in brambles and ravines. She stays behind to help with the Power-of-Prayer outreach group launched by one of her friends, working a vast network of e-mail circles.

The single telephone in my study has been joined by half a dozen other receivers, spillover lines installed by the authorities. “If the kidnapper does call,” my mother explains to one of her group, “we don’t want him to have any trouble getting through.”

The phone never stops ringing. When we’re at home, we all pitch in to answer calls, logging name, number, and purpose of call on printed information sheets.

Shoffler stops by one afternoon, now ten days after the disappearance. Everyone else is busy so we talk alone.

First he tells me he’s getting a lot more information about the man with the dog. “What we’re getting is that this guy had kids around him all the time. It’s the dog, right? It’s a very cute dog. It works like a magnet for this guy. A kid magnet.”

“That’s what I saw – a bunch of kids petting this dog.”

“We got some confirmation from one of the ticket sellers at the gate. He remembers the boys leaving with a man and a dog.”

“Remembers them leaving? Really? Where’s this ticket seller been?”

“He’s kind of a reluctant witness. Has a rap sheet. He wasn’t coming forward to volunteer, that’s for damn sure. We got to him the second time around. We’re going through the whole employee roster again, see – and this time we ask did he see a tall man with a dog and two kids leaving the park. Well, this kid, basically a kind of nervous Nellie, a law-abiding citizen except he likes to smoke pot, you know – he worries about it. What if he keeps his mouth shut? Would that be lying? Would that be obstruction? Would that be a parole violation? So, he comes forward.”

“Huh.”

“I was skeptical, too. How can he remember this? Thousands of people coming and going every single day – half of ’em dressed like Friar Tuck or King Arthur. And we’re talking about more than a week ago now.”

“Ten days.”