Another oldie, as I upload the parts of my oeuvre that don't violate 's TOS.
Memories of a Woman in White
by Helen W.
Some time during season three, say late Oct./early Nov. of 1997
The bedroom of Kenny Yates, missing for three days, was in perfect order, but the child's mother, Arlene, seemed to be unable to keep from further tidying. The room wasn't a crime scene, since Kenny had vanished, as nearly as anyone could tell, from right outside his first grade classroom, so they had no grounds for asking Arlene to leave, but Blair Sandburg suspected that the constant activity of the woman - changing the order of books on a shelf, straightening how shirts were hanging on their hangers in the closet, dashing off to get a solvent-soaked rag to wipe the computer screen - was making the work of his partner, friend, and research subject, Detective Jim Ellison, impossible. Jim sneezed and rubbed at his eyes; whatever Arlene had used to clean the screen must be bothering him.
How does one make small talk with a woman whose child is missing? "I bet Kenny is really into trucks," Blair said.
"Yes - yes he wa - he is," said Arlene. "Anything with wheels."
"Neat." That sounded profound. But the woman had stopped moving, and Jim shot him a grateful look. "He has a lot of books, too," Blair observed.
"Mostly from my parents," said Arlene. "He only likes stories with scary things in them, though. Dragons and stuff like that."
Hence, the dragon posters. It really was a nice room for a small boy, especially given that Arlene, a single mom who worked as an aid in a nursing home, couldn't exactly be rolling in cash. Tonka trucks and teddy bears, plastic swords and Transformers. The stuff of little-boyhood; in a year or two, the kid would probably be beyond most of these toys, as early childhood yielded to - what? The Wonder Years? Blair's own childhood had been pretty wonderful, and Blair fervently hoped that Kenny would get to experience those years.
He glanced over at Jim, who was continuing to scrutinize the room methodically, in the probably-vain hope that the original officers who'd responded to the report of Kenny's disappearance, using standard techniques, had missed something. If he'd been observed for a while by an abductor, or if his mother or an acquaintance were involved, there was a chance that there'd be something incriminating, or at least not right, in the house, particularly in this room. Arlene now watched Jim intently. Could it be that there was something here she didn't want found? No. Wringing hands, bleary eyes, slight tremor - this was a woman poised for deep mourning, hoping against hope that THIS might be the police officer who would tumble onto a clue that would bring her her child back.
A small rubber ball caught Blair's attention. It was the ball of a little kid, too light to be thrown very hard or very far. Instead of being colored to look like a basket ball or soccer ball, like the others it shared a basket with, it was blue with red circles and yellow triangles; the placement of the shapes seemed absolutely perfect. Blair reached for it, knowing how it would feel in his hands and how well it would fly. The smell of old rubber surrounded him; he could taste it, it was so thick.
Blair picked up the ball and tossed it lightly; the motion drew Jim's attention from the curtains he'd been studying. The message in Jim's scowl was clear: 'Don't mess with the toys.' But, damn it, this wasn't a designated crime scene, and Arlene had probably dusted the ball three times since Kenny had last been in the room. They were just grasping at straws - touching the ball wouldn't hurt anything.
While the logical part of his brain urged him to put the ball down, at least while poor Arlene Yates was watching, Blair started to swing his arm back.
Mid-swing, his arm stopped. He could picture the ball soaring across a vast lawn, being caught by someone who could have been Jackie Kennedy's slightly hipper little sister. The woman laughed and threw the ball back, her dark, bobbed hair spilling out from a blue kerchief which complimented her white linen dress perfectly.
'This is my ball', he thought. 'Jakie's ball.' The smell was making him sick. "Um, Jim, I'll wait in the truck", he said. Jim glanced up only briefly as he rushed past Arlene Yates.
Blair expected a lecture on crime scene procedure when Jim joined him a few minutes later; instead, as he started up the truck, Jim turned to him and looked him over with an intensity that made Blair feel vaguely uncomfortable. "You okay, Chief?" he asked.
"Sure."
"I'm the one who goes off into la la land in this partnership, got it?"
"La la land? Jim, you wouldn't know la la land if it..." Blair couldn't think of a physically possible thing for a fictitious land to do, though, so he let the sentence trail off.
"Good," said Jim. "I have some things to bounce off you."
"Oh?"
"What did you think of the house?"
"Cute. Ms. Yates has a good eye."
"Ms. Yates makes twenty-two-five a year, counting overtime."
"So her boyfriend is picking up the tab?"
"That's what I wanted to bounce off you. Arlene Yates is known to the authorities, it turns out, as the girlfriend of Jimmy Baxter. Remember him?"
"Ummm."
"He owned some laundromats that were being used for washing more than clothes. He was killed in a shoot-out with the feds in one of their classic screw-ups a few years ago. On the Green Street Bridge, on the side opposite from where we took Veronica Sarris down, as a matter of fact. It was in the papers."
"To be honest, Jim, before I met you I didn't much pay attention to that sort of thing."
"Really?"
"Can't fathom why not, though. New boyfriend?"
"She says not."
"So Baxter bought her the house with cash or something?"
"I confronted her, and she was completely up front. He gave her the house when Kenny was born."
"So, what's odd about that? Especially a few years ago, that house wouldn't have cost more than 70K. Maybe less."
"What's odd is that the house was probably bought with drug money, and nobody has gone after it."
"Um... compassion on the part of the DA or something?"
"Chief, do we live in the same city here?"
"Huh."
"So I asked her if she thought that maybe some of Jimmy's old friends might have gotten to Kenny in revenge. She said she doubted it - most were in jail. Then she swore me to secrecy..."
"She WHAT? You didn't agree to that, did you?"
"Well, not exactly. But she's not officially a suspect..."
"So what did she tell you?"
"She thinks 'the guys' still care about her and Kenny - seems she gets anonymous gifts for him, like his winter coat."
"Huh."
"Exactly, Chief. I don't think Jimmy's dead. Either some of his old pals know this and are using Kenny to get to him, or he's grabbed Kenny himself."
"Shit."
"Actually, it's good news. If he has Kenny the kid is probably safe. Jimmy's rep had him as being fundamentally non-violent."
Being in a shoot-out with FBI agents didn't meet Blair's definition of non-violent behavior. "But poor Arlene."
"And, if Kenny is being used to get to him, than we have something to work with here. We might just be able to get our hands on Jimmy and some of his pals in the process."
"Wonderful."
"Hey, Blair, it's my job."
"So, you really don't think some pervert grabbed him, and..."
"Do you have any idea how rare real non-family abductions are? Real kidnappings, not some kid grabbed for five minutes during a hold-up? There are maybe a hundred a year in the U.S., probably fewer. And we've already had one this year in Cascade."
"Right. Nothing improbable ever happens here. So, where to now?"
"Kenny's school. I want to take a look at the playground where he might have vanished from."
"'Might have'?"
"The stories conflict a bit. Truth is, nobody really knows. That's pretty typical."
Neither man spoke for a few moments. Then, in a voice Blair recognized as Jim's best impression of someone not really prying, he asked, "So, what was the deal with that ball?"
"I don't know. It seemed really familiar."
"I think every kid in America has a ball like that."
But it wasn't the ball that had him rattled, Blair realized - it was the woman in white, and the name that filled his mind when he thought about it. Jakie. Had Jakie been a friend of his? Was the woman Jakie's mother? Maybe she'd been his babysitter. Blair closed his eyes and imagined holding the ball with smaller hands. In his mind's eye, the yellow triangles which spanned the ball's equator held scraggly black letters. J-A-C-O-B. The C was backwards, and Blair felt a flush of remembered embarrassment. His middle name was Jacob. For some reason, he'd written his middle name on the ball.
TBC
All feedback welcomed, here or to helenw at murphnet dot org.