Amanda King Stetson
“Again.”
Even Lee’s expression had become difficult. “Why?”
“There’s something there.” Amanda twisted her hands together, aggravated.
“What’s there?” asked Joe in an overly controlled voice.
“I don’t know!” she exploded, surprising even herself. “But if I did, it’s all we’ve got, and —” her voice broke, and she suddenly realized there were tears streaming down her face again. “It’s all I can think of.”
Joe and Lee exchanged a glance. In the hours since they’d adjourned to this featureless room, the two men had reached some sort of tacit agreement. Amanda wasn’t sure which was worse: having them barely tolerate each other, or having them about to unite against her.
She shook her head before either of them could verbalize a response. “Don’t even start.”
Lee, who’d been bending toward her chair, awkwardly landed on his knees. “Don’t start what?”
“Trying to calm me down, or whatever it was the two of you are thinking about doing right now. Just replay the recording.”
“Amanda,” he began, and while his speech was soft there was an underlying burr of annoyance. “Crypto’s been at this thing forward and back, and you yourself just admitted you don’t know what it is you’re hearing. How many times have we replayed this by now?”
“Not nearly enough.” She couldn’t keep it from coming out as a snap.
“We’re also all running without sleep,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, and now that she was looking, she could see that his eyes were on the verge of bloodshot. “At the very least we should take a break.”
“I can’t,” she whispered, feeling her throat threatening to close. “He’s my son.”
“He’s mine, too,” said Joe. His tone wasn’t as gentle as Lee’s, but it wasn’t harsh, either. “We aren’t going to get anywhere by playing that call over and over.”
“Maybe you can’t, but I intend to.”
“Amanda.” Now he sounded as unhappy as Lee.
“If you’re too tired, you can go to the barracks with Carrie,” she replied tersely. Joe’s wife had finally collapsed from exhaustion, and Francine had taken her to sleep in an actual bed. The other agent hadn’t yet returned herself, leading Amanda to suspect that Carrie wasn’t the only one who was getting some down time. “You can at least get some rest for yourself.”
He and Lee made eye contact again before he replied. “Only if you come with me.”
“No. I couldn’t sleep now if I wanted to.”
Lee pushed to his feet. “Amanda, don’t make me make this an order.”
“You wouldn’t.” He, of all people, should understand that she needed to be here!
He didn’t quite meet her eyes. “I will if I have to. I’m the senior agent.”
Amanda was on her feet before she realized it. “How dare you!”
He circled around in front of her so that their part of this conversation could be more private. “Next to Joe and you, there is nobody who wants to find Jamie more than me. But we’re all exhausted, probably to the point of making mistakes that we don’t even realize yet.” His hands scrubbed through his hair. “Two hours. Then we can come back.”
“Lee!” she cried, feeling her pulse pounding at her temples. “Please. It’s already —” she glanced at the clock. “Oh, my gosh. It’s already ten-thirty. We only have six hours left!”
“Two hours, Amanda.”
Her lips compressed into a line, and she realized her mouth was dry. When was the last time she’d had anything to drink? “One.”
“Ninety minutes, and you have something to eat. That’s my final offer.”
“If I can listen to the recording one more time.”
Lee shook his head. “There’s nothing there that won’t still be there in an hour and a half.”
She suddenly understood: he didn’t expect to find Jamie before the deadline. Based on her ex-husband’s expression, neither did Joe. The surge of anger from earlier returned, beginning to segue into true rage. How could Jamie’s own father just give up like that? And how could her husband agree in the same breath that he’d argued he wanted Jamie back just as desperately as she and Joe did?
Amanda stalked over to the tape machine and rewound the recording herself before putting her headphones back on. “Start it again.”
The technician glanced nervously at Lee, who rolled his eyes. “One time only,” he instructed. “Then Sunlight’s going to the barracks even if I have to pick her up and carry her there myself.”
Oddly, the threat and his use of her code name steadied Amanda, and she felt her emotions settle. She took a deep breath, focusing her concentration, as the tape clicked back on.
“Stetson.”
“It’s me.”
The fear and relief were both unmistakable in Lee’s tone as he answered on the recording. “Jamie? Where are you?”
“I dunno,” came the reply. “Lee, I’m so sorry I ran away —”
Although she hadn’t recognized it at the time, Amanda had long since identified Lee’s harsh intake of breath, but his tone of voice, when it came back, was almost gentle. “We’ll worry about that later. Is there anyone there with you?”
“Yeah.” Jamie’s voice shook. “Couple of men with guns and there’s a lady, too. I don’t think she’s with them though. They’ve got us in a room together.”
“What’s her name?”
Amanda focused her awareness, trying to ignore her husband’s and son’s voices on the recording tape. Whatever it was she’d heard, it wasn’t in anything either of them had said. Had Zeta made some faint noise? Is that what she was hearing?
The recording continued, and she heard her own voice enter the conversation. “I know you’re scared. We’re all scared. But you just need to hang on for a little bit. Has anyone hurt you?”
“N-no,” came the response. “Well, they took my backpack.”
There was that faint sound again, and Amanda forced herself to listen, not to her son, but to the background noise. She’d heard something like that before, not too long ago, hadn’t she? But when? And where?
Her eyes opened wide. “Sea gulls!”
Joe’s eyes widened. “What?”
The machine’s wheels stopped with an audible click when Amanda switched it off. “In the background. I can hear sea gulls. They’re near a coast.”
Lee reached for the telephone. “Beaman? You’re the one on today? Well, good. Listen, we’ve got the second tape up here and we need an enhancement on the background noise.” He paused. “Bird calls.” Another pause. “Yes, ‘seriously,’ and we need this top priority for the case! I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Amanda and Joe accompanied him to the elevator. Ordinarily, Amanda would have gone into Beaman’s office with Lee, but since Joe needed an escort, she stayed out in the hallway instead. Absurdly, the situation reminded her of all the times Lee had told her to stay in the car, or some other supposedly safe place.
She hadn’t even realized she was swaying until Joe took her arms to steady her. “You’re falling asleep on your feet. You need some rest, even if it’s only an hour or two.”
Lee came back through the door. “We all do. Beaman says they need a minimum of two hours to do the work anyway. They’re also going to pull up Zeta’s proof-of-life video and analyze it for anything similar.”
“We should call T.P.,” she murmured, vaguely irritated that the words were coming out slurred. “He can identify the birds.”
“Francine or Billy can do that. Come on,” he said, and this time his tone turned firm. “It’s time to sleep.”
Was he really going to pull rank on her? She opened her mouth to protest, but then she saw the determined look on his face alongside the sadness in his eyes. Amanda wasn’t sure which one of them she was responding to when she simply nodded and followed.
“Yes,” came T.P.’s voice over the phone speaker. “Those are, in fact, sea gulls. American herring gulls, to be exact.”
“So he’s near the water,” Amanda surmised.
“Now, wait a minute,” said Lee. “Don’t sea gulls migrate inland this time of year? And these don’t sound like what I remember. When I’ve been to the beach, they’ve always sounded like someone’s mean laughter. But these sound like cats, or crows.”
“Very good, Lee.” T.P. sounded as though he were praising a precocious child. “Laughing gulls do migrate inland. But American herring gulls don’t. If you go out on the Delmarva, they’re everywhere this time of year.”
Amanda and Lee exchanged a glance before she asked the next question. “What makes you bring up Delmarva?”
“Well,” their friend began, “you did say you think they’re close by, right?”
“Right.”
“It’s a large flock. You can tell from their cries. Except that you don’t usually find American herring gulls north of Cape May during the winter. Since they don’t migrate inland, and since they’re presumably not well south of here, that pretty much means they’re somewhere along the Bay.”
“The Bay?” asked Lee. “Why not the ocean?”
“Listen to the water.”
“The water?” he repeated with an incredulous look.
“It’s coming in waves,” explained T.P., “but they’re not crashing. More like lapping. That’s too soft to be the ocean. I don’t hear a lot of cars, though, which means they’re probably not in a city or along the western shore. My guess is they’re on the other side of the Bay.”
Now that Amanda was listening herself, she also heard it. “T.P., I don’t know what I’m ever going to do to thank you for this. It means so much to us. We’ll owe you one.”
“No you won’t,” he answered before hanging up. “You just get out there and get your people.”
During the conversation, Francine had come in with the videotape from Zeta and set it up to replay. She was clearly seated somewhere indoors, but there were no other details to indicate where she might be. Analysis had been all over the tape trying to find something.
With this replay, though, all three of them closed their eyes to concentrate on listening. Amanda heard the waves, and the gulls, and an occasional car, but there was another type of engine too.
Lee sat up straight. “Helicopter traffic. And what sounds like an ultralight. You can tell from how fast the propellers are turning, and there’s a counter-rhythm to one of them. That’d be a tail rotor.”
Francine frowned, leaving the video playing in the background. “Great. So now we need to check out every little airport on the Eastern Shore.”
“Wait a minute,” said Amanda. “Play that last part again.”
Francine gave her a look. “You hear something else?”
“No,” she replied. “Look at her. Not at the surroundings. At her. You’ll want to go back a minute or two.”
Francine rewound and restarted. Zeta looked tired, and there was a bruise forming on one cheek, but she seemed calm and unafraid. “…they’ll include a written list of demands with this video. I’m also supposed to tell you I’m being treated well. They even brought me a porchetta sandwich and a Coke from the local depot. My…friends…say they’ve been breathing ‘Yankee air’ long enough, and want to go home. That’s why their deadline’s so short.”
Thinking furiously, Amanda signaled Francine to stop the recording. While she hated admitting it, doing so was far easier than it had been before the hour-and-a-half of sleep Lee had insisted she take. A part of her envied Joe and Carrie, who were still downstairs, twined around each other in one of the barracks’ single bunks.
She blinked back to the moment. “…clearly some sort of coded language,” Francine was saying. “Crypto’s made this a top priority, but we haven’t been able to break it. There’s a company called Yankee Air Services out of Easton Airport, but that lead didn’t pan out since there are no Italian restaurants there or anywhere close by.”
Lee shook his head. “I’ve flown Easton. It’s not close enough to the water to be where we want anyway, and there’s also a decent amount of traffic in the area.”
It hit Amanda suddenly. “Does Yankee Air Services have another location? Maybe at some other airport out there?”
“Yeah,” said Francine. “In Stevensville. That’s not near water either.”
“But Bay Bridge Airport is,” said Lee suddenly. “Don’t they have a Stevensville address?”
Amanda had already pulled the phone book down and retrieved it, turning to the map pinned up behind her, and suddenly her heart began thumping. “Look at this. Bay Bridge Airport’s address is on Airport Road, but that opens up off Romancoke Road.”
Francine shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you see?” She couldn’t keep her voice from rising or her speech from accelerating. “The porchetto sandwich. Lee, didn’t you tell me once that they serve those as street food in Rome?”
“Yes,” he said, and by his intent expression, he was following right along with her. “A Roman sandwich and a Coke. Romancoke. She must have figured out where she is. How close to the water are they?”
Amanda pointed. It was right next to a marina. “Those other engines I heard. Could they have been from boats?”
“How much do you want to bet they were?” asked Lee as he grabbed his jacket. “Come on, let’s go.”
Author’s Notes:
- The different cries of American herring gulls and laughing gulls (which is what Lee is remembering) are as described.
- Bay Bridge and Easton Airports are actual general aviation fields and are located as described. Yankee Air Services is fictional.