It doesn’t make sense to get into the dimes or origami without at least looking at the police files first to see what they’ve got. So until Petrich gets back to me, I hit the Internet.

And once again, I descend into the world of missing children. I’ve been to a lot of the sites dealing with abducted children before; maybe there’s something I’ve missed, some angle I’ve overlooked.

I’m back in Milk Carton Land, accompanied by sidebar ads for private eyes who suggest they can find the missing children. I’m engulfed by the faces of the vanished – including the smiling faces of Kevin and Sean.

I correct myself. No one “vanishes.” It’s not a magic act. These kids were abducted. The man who went to the Renaissance Faire dressed up as the Pied Piper is the one who ripped my sons out of my life… and into his world. And I’m going to find out who he is and why he did it.

I visit a website maintained by the IRE – an organization of investigative reporters and editors. At first, it doesn’t seem relevant. Most of the database on kidnappings concerns the online world – as in “Dangers of the Internet.” There are dozens of stories about intrepid cops and FBI agents working stings in chat rooms.

But this can’t have anything to do with my kids. Some six-year-olds have amazing computer skills, but not Kevin and Sean, whose access to computers is strictly controlled by Liz. Anyway, they’re just learning how to read; they don’t know how to spell or type. There’s no way they could get into a chat room, let alone make some kind of arrangement to meet a stranger.

But some of the articles in the IRE’s archives scare the hell out of me. One concerns a churchgoing couple who ran a “foster home” in rural Illinois – from which they sold children to pedophiles. Another is about some killer nerds in Idaho who abducted a ten-year-old with the intention of making a snuff flick. It’s one nightmare after another, each one darker than the one before.

A second site reminds me that there are fewer than one hundred kidnappings by strangers each year and that small children are not the usual targets. Teenagers are. Girls older than twelve make up more than half the cases. I scan through the dozens of websites that one of my search requests prompts, each representing a missing child. It’s depressing, clicking through this forlorn catalog of faces. And the websites themselves seem remote outposts in the vastness of the world, like the photos on milk cartons: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

Shots in the dark.

The sites for certain children – findkevinandsean.com is one of them, I’m glad to see – surface over and over again while I browse. There are also paid ads for missing children that show up on the right of my screen. I make a note to check with Ezra, my computer-genius friend. How much does that kind of thing cost? Now that the boys are relegated to the occasional news update, maybe a paid ad connected to search terms such as “abducted child” would be worthwhile.

And maybe it’s time, after all, to get a PR person. Someone who might line up a special on 20/20 or Dateline, keep the boys in the news. The Smart family managed this after their daughter had been missing for several months, an hour-long special flooded with images of their missing child. The special, which I watched at the behest of Claire Carosella from the Center, made it clear that the police had fastened their attention on a handyman, an ex-con who died several months after the kidnapping. It was a believable theory, bolstered by some suggestive evidence about a car – although the dead man’s wife insisted on his innocence.

Even with the suspected man dead, the Smart family continued to lobby for attention to their daughter’s case. Maybe they were just hoping to find her remains, but there was a lesson to be learned. Don’t get too tied to a theory.

On an impulse, I plug twins into the search field along with a couple of my other key words: abduction, missing, disappeared, children.

Google kicks out more than a hundred thousand sites.

I specify missing twins. Still more than thirty-three thousand listings. I scroll through for twenty minutes or so, only to learn that virtually all of the stories are about Kevin and Sean.

I log on to Lexis/Nexis, using my password from the station. I enter the search terms missing twins and restrict the search to news stories published before the date of the boys’ abduction.

The list includes more than a thousand stories, but once I get into it, I see that in real terms there are only three stories about abducted twins.

The Ramirez boys. The press raised this case within hours of the story about Kevin and Sean breaking because the similarities were so striking. Julio and Wilson Ramirez were abducted from a rec-center gymnastics class in West L.A. Not only were the Ramirez boys identical twins, but at the time they were abducted, they were seven years old – almost the same age as Kevin and Sean.

I thought of them in the very first hour of this nightmare, sitting on Gary Prebble’s bench outside Faire Security.

It happened just about a couple of years ago. The boys disappeared and there was a massive hunt – although not so massive as to keep criticism from surfacing about how much greater the effort would have been if they’d been Anglo kids.

Three months after their disappearance, the killer was caught red-handed, so to speak. He was apprehended at a ramshackle cabin in the mountains not too far from Big Sur. The bodies of the dead boys were found at the cabin – one in his refrigerator, neatly packaged like cuts from a side of beef, the other suspended in a well shaft. The killer was taken into custody and promptly identified himself to the authorities. He turned out to be Charley Vermillion, a sexual psychopath who’d been released from a Louisiana loony bin about a month prior to the boys’ disappearance. Vermillion was cuffed and Mirandized and slapped into a squad car. But before the squad car made it to the local lockup, he was dead, having chewed a cyanide capsule he’d taped under the collar of his shirt.

So the Ramirez case was closed, and with the perp dead, there wasn’t any way it could be relevant to my boys. Thank God. Both the FBI and Ray Shoffler explored the notion of a copycat crime – but it didn’t go anywhere.

The second set of sites involves the Gabler twins. This is a false hit, though, because the Gablers were women – and Vegas showgirls, at that. The story showed up because one of my search terms was children and the newspapers reported that the Gablers had recently appeared in a musical revue at a place called the Blue Parrot. The revue was called Children of the Future.

They disappeared about three years ago and turned up a month later, their decomposing bodies recovered in the usual “rugged area” twenty miles outside Vegas. The press photos show the Gabler twins alive, side by side in skimpy costumes, their long legs in fishnet stockings, smiling faces encased in futuristic headdresses. It’s hard to see how they could possibly have any connection to my boys.

Which leaves the Sandling twins: Chandler and Connor. I’m familiar with this one, too – the one with the happy ending. The way I remember it, the mother was implicated in the abduction of her kids – although never prosecuted, as I recall. There was something about a boyfriend, too.

Because of the mother’s alleged involvement, I never really focused on the case. I’m willing to take a second look now, because it’s just occurred to me: Who else do I know wrongly suspected in the disappearance of his children?

I take a look. Initially, it’s as I remember. Unlike me, Emma Sandling was not an upstanding member of the community but a vagabond for whom “unconventional lifestyle” would be an understatement. A heroin addict who’d been through countless rehab programs, she wasn’t much of a mother. Her kids were often cared for by friends or relatives, and they’d been in foster homes more than once.