But he is real. He’s a man who lives somewhere, who buys groceries, drives a car, wears a particular kind of socks… and he kidnapped my sons. Since I don’t know enough about him to have a real image of him, I have to concentrate on what I do know. And on what he did. He took my kids and he had a reason for it.

MOTIVE, I write at the top of my yellow pad. And then I think about the possibilities.

Profit? The absence of a ransom note would seem to rule that out.

Retaliation? Did someone abduct the boys in retaliation against me, for some story I did? True, my work put me in contact with some bad people, but Shoffler looked into this angle and ended up discounting it. In revenge crimes, the perpetrator almost always sends a signal to let the victim know. The “smirk factor,” Shoffler called it. “This guy’s real cute – with the T-shirt and the phone call and all that, but we still got no smirk factor. If the guy getting even with you doesn’t let you know he’s settled the score, where’s his satisfaction?” Shoffler and I worked at it, trying to connect the clues the Piper left behind with one of the investigations I’ve done, but there didn’t seem to be any connection.

Sexual predator? This is the default position, but I don’t really buy it. Why grab two kids – which would only make the abduction more difficult? And then – why return with them to the house, why call my cell phone, why deliberately confuse matters with the bloody T-shirt? Sexual predators are impulsive and opportunistic. Or so they say. Going back to the house, leaving mementos – that was premeditated. Not a classic pattern.

Kiddie porn? Cute blond twins. Were they abducted by a ring to make a film or procured for sale to someone with a twin thing? Shoffler looked into this – hard – but it didn’t go anywhere. For one thing, most children caught up in the murky world of kiddie porn are not abducted but “purchased” from relatives or foster parents. And a high-profile kidnapping that was sure to provoke a storm of media attention was unlikely in a subculture that preferred the darkest corners. Still…

Religious wacko? There was really nothing to suggest that.

Medical experiment? Shoffler rejected the Dr. Mengele Theory on the basis that there were virtually no cases on the books of pairs of twins going missing. But suppose Kevin and Sean were the initial pair?

I sit for a long time trying to think of other possibilities. In this world of delayed childbearing and infertile couples, it’s conceivable that the boys were abducted by someone desperate for children. Someone stalking the fair, who saw his chance and went for it. I mull this over for a while, the idea of an obsessed wannabe parent.

Whoever it was, he or she would have to be a total recluse, living outside of society – because there’s been no credible sighting of the boys since the day they were abducted. And what about the dimes? The T-shirt? The phone call? How would any of that fit into the would-be parent scenario?

A recluse. An obvious thought occurs to me, but one that never occurred to me before. Unlike Elizabeth Smart, there’s no way someone could wander around with identical twins in tow, not without arousing suspicion. So wherever they are, whoever’s got them, if the boys are alive, Kevin and Sean are hidden from view, isolated.

I glance over my list of possible motives: profit, retaliation, sexual predator, kiddie porn, religious whack-job, Dr. Mengele, wannabe parent. Stripped down like this, the bare list gives me a chill. The least terrifying motives suggest reckless lunacy; the most alarming are truly evil.

I take a deep breath. Beneath the list of motives, I write a second word: CLUES.

Origami rabbit.

Chicken blood.

Row of dimes.

The abductor’s mementos. Judy Jones established that the rabbit was folded of standard material, bore no fingerprints, was of high-intermediate difficulty. And that was about it.

Still, The Piper left the thing on Sean’s side of the dresser. Why?

The chicken blood. It was possible that the blood-soaked T-shirt was a ruse to focus suspicion on me, but that was only an assumption. The chicken blood might have some other meaning. The police lab did establish that the blood came from a breed of chicken common in the commercial poultry business.

The dimes. The lab checked them for prints and struck out. There was also an attempt to source them – but it turned out that although you don’t see many “Mercury” dimes in circulation, there are millions of them out there. They were minted for almost thirty years, from 1916 to 1945, at which point the FDR dime replaced the Liberty head design. The police and the FBI had also looked into mint marks, and the dates of the coins left by the abductor, but there was no discernible pattern.

Still, the coins were placed deliberately; the Piper took the trouble to line them up. They must have some meaning.

There are other clues. For instance, the dog. The Piper used the cute little dog as a kid magnet. Shoffler checked into whippets and told us that the breed was rising in popularity. Lots of whippets out there. But how many can there really be? I never see whippets out for a walk.

And then there’s The Piper himself – his costume. Was that just a disguise, or did it, too, have meaning? I needed to check into the fairy tale of the Pied Piper. And what about the costume – where do you go for Piper gear? I got just a glance, but it seemed pretty elaborate. And what about the ruffs? One for him, one for the dog. Where do you buy a ruff? Did Shoffler check that out? And if so, what did he find out?

Under CLUES, I add:

whippet

Piper: fairy tale

costume

ruff

I’m going to need a look at Shoffler’s files. Only I guess they’d be Muriel Petrich’s files now.

I pick up the phone and call Petrich. She’s not in. I leave a message and try her home number. Instead of a crisp message or the voice-mail robot, I hear a young child’s voice, a child who has trouble pronouncing the letter R. “Hi, you’ve weached the home of Petew, Muwiel, and Bwittany. If…”

The sound of the little girl’s voice, so sweet and vulnerable and proud of herself, is more than I can handle. It’s like stepping off a cliff. What I’ve lost. I hang up.

I have an impulse to call Petrich back. I want to tell her to get the kid’s voice off the voice mail. As she would know, anyone can get the address from a criss-cross directory. Is she crazy? Advertising to random callers that there’s a child in the house?

I take a deep breath, retreat from my impulse and my proxy vigilance. Despite her job, Petrich still lives in a world that seems like a friendly place. She knows – but she doesn’t know, not really – that it can all evaporate in an instant.