Six Seconds Read Free Page B

Lyle Billings, a P.I. at Farrow Investigations.
Maggie gave Billings copies of all their personal records and a check for several hundred dollars. Two weeks later, he told her that Jake had not renewed his license in any U.S. state, Canadian province or territory, nor was Logan registered in any school system.
“Assume he changed their names,” Billings said. “Creating a new identity is easier than most people think. It looks like your husband went underground.”
The agency needed more money to continue search ing.
Maggie couldn’t afford it.
There was just enough left in their savings for her to keep things going with the house for another three, maybe four months. Then she’d have to sell. She’d been cutting corners. She still had her bookstore job, but things were getting desperate.
So Maggie held off paying the agency more money. She searched on her own, spending most nights on her computer. She contacted truckers’ groups and missing kids organizations, pleaded her case to newsletters and blogs. She scoured news sites for crashes involving rigs and boys Logan’s age.
With each new tragedy Maggie’s stomach knotted.
Maggie attended support groups. They told her to get the press interested in her struggle to find Jake and Logan. Every few days, then every week, she worked her list: the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, the Riverside Press-Enterprise and nearly every TV and radio station in the southland.
“Oh, yeah, we looked into it,” one apple-crunching producer told Maggie after she’d left three messages. “Our sources say that while it’s classified as a parental abduction, it’s more of a civil domestic thing. Sorry.”
Every newsperson had stopped taking her calls, except Stacy Kurtz, the Star-Journal ’s crime reporter.
“I don’t think we’ve got a story yet, but please keep me posted,” she said each time Maggie called.
At least Stacy would listen. Maggie had never met her but sometimes her picture ran with her articles. Stacy wore dark-framed glasses, hoop earrings and a smile that her job was slowly hardening. Daily report ing of the latest shooting, fire, drowning, car crash or variant urban tragedy was taking something from her. Some days, she looked older than she was.
“I can’t guarantee we’ll do a story, but I’ll listen to your case as long as you promise to keep me posted on any developments.” Stacy’s to-the-point manner placed a premium on her time in a business ruled by deadlines.
For Maggie, time was evaporating.
What if she never found Logan? Never saw him again?
Now, here she was standing before the Star-Journal, a paper that covered Blue Rose Creek from a forlorn one-story building on a four-lane boulevard.
It sat between Sid’s Check Cashing and Fillipo’s Menswear, looking more like a 1960s strip-mall cast away than the kick-ass rag it once was. A palm tree drooped above the entrance. Weak breezes tried to stir a tattered U.S. flag atop the roof, where a rattling air con ditioner bled rusty water down the building’s stucco walls.
To locals, the Star-Journal was an eyesore in need of last rites.
To Maggie, it was a last chance to find Logan, for, day by day, her hope faded like the flag over the StarJournal. But she’d come here this morning, all the same, with nothing but a prayer.
“May I help you?” a big woman in a print dress asked from her desk, which was the one closest to the counter. The other desks were nearby, situated in the classic newsroom layout. About a dozen cluttered desks crammed together. Most were unoccupied. At others, grim-faced people concentrated on their computer screens, or telephone conversations.
The off-white walls were papered with maps, front pages, news photos and an assortment of headlines. A police scanner was squawking from one corner where three TVs were locked on news channels. At the far end, in a glass-walled office, a balding man with his tie loosened was arguing with a younger man who had a camera slung