While some in the crowd ran to the screaming woman, others found their children and scooped them up, holding them tight, circling the wagons of their hearts while they waited to hear who and how tragedy had struck. A few knew the screaming woman and guided her toward a bench, getting her to sit long enough to elicit the story: her son was missing. He was a four-year-old boy with curly brown hair, small for his age, wearing blue shorts and a T-shirt with dinosaurs on it. His name was Tyler.

She had only left him alone for a couple minutes. Drawn by the sirens and the gathering crowd, she had drifted toward the cottage, leaving her son on a swing. When she returned a few moments later, he was gone. No one had seen a thing. They had all been focused on the small, white house rimmed by crime scene tape. The mother had immediately started pushing through the crowd, expecting to find her son. The little boy loved policemen; he wanted to be one when he grew up. Surely he had wandered across the street, searching out his heroes?

He was nowhere to be found.

Unnoticed by the distracted crime scene crowd, the mother had searched the open lawn with a rising sense of panic before, in full-blown terror, she had begun to run blindly through the park, calling out her son’s name, each step without an answer sending her further over the edge of reason. The scratches on her face and hands told of how frantic and alone she had been during her search. Not finding him anywhere and too overwhelmed to continue, she had returned to the playground. There, she’d overheard two women repeating a rumor: the dead nurse in the cottage across the street had been shot to death.

The mother was sure the killer had taken her son. No one could tell her otherwise.

She was a heavyset woman with curly red hair and freckles sprinkled up and down her arms and legs. Her face was splotchy, and she could not stop shaking as she sobbed out her fears. She carried an immense sorrow with her, as if her whole world had been lost. But it was not a new emotion; I could sense she had grown as used to it as a beetle to its shell. Her fear was fueled by past tragedy as much as by the present circumstances.

A small crowd had surrounded the sobbing woman, wanting to lend support. Other playground mothers, grim-faced, tried to calm her as their children, ashen-faced, tried to understand what was happening.

Calvano pushed away those trying to comfort her and sat beside the mother, assuring her that he was a detective and that they would find her son.

It was as if the woman were deaf. She continued to sob uncontrollably, unable to assist at all.

After a few minutes of cajoling, Calvano started to lose patience. I could not say I blamed him. They were losing precious moments better spent looking for the boy. Others realized this as well. Spurred into action by Calvano’s increasingly impatient voice, a woman who was holding on firmly to the hand of her daughter tapped Calvano on the shoulder and beckoned him to follow her. They stood away from the bench where they would not be overheard by the sobbing mother.

“She lost her husband in Iraq a year ago,” the woman told Calvano. “She was hospitalized for a month when she found out. I don’t think she’ll be of much help at all. If you don’t find Tyler, she’ll have nothing left and she knows it. I think you better call her doctor.”

Now it was Calvano’s turn to panic. The mother’s help was essential. If the cases were related, they needed to know. If not, if someone had just taken advantage of the distraction and snatched the boy, it could be the worst kind of case. Without the mother’s help, they had nothing.

It was about to get even worse. Calvano left the sobbing woman with her friends and went to consult with Maggie just as dozens of well-meaning neighbors and strangers alike organized into search teams. They scattered across the park and began calling the young boy’s name, pulling bushes apart, searching the branches of trees, trampling the ground with their feet. Within minutes, before Calvano or Maggie could stop them, any evidence had likely been destroyed by well-meaning strangers. They would have nothing to go on at all.

Which meant it was all up to me. If I hurried, I might be able to pick up a trace of where he had gone.

Maggie had reached the edge of the playground, angry at being called away from her crime scene. But when told of the boy’s disappearance, she looked every bit as disbelieving as Calvano had. She began arguing with Calvano in a tight circle formed by patrolmen to keep civilians out. It looked oddly like a football huddle, and it did little to conceal the heated argument they were having. Calvano had about three theories, all of them confusing. Maggie had one: the two crimes were not related. Both she and Peggy Calhoun had estimated the nurse’s time of death at least twenty-four hours before, and there was no reason to suspect the boy being taken was anything but a crime of opportunity.

Calvano was of the opinion that they should take the missing boy’s mother over to view the nurse’s body just in case it turned out that she knew the woman—proving there might be a connection between the two cases. The silence that met this suggestion did not faze him. “It’s fast and efficient,” he insisted.

“Let me get this straight,” Maggie asked, trying to keep her voice neutral. “This poor woman loses her husband to war, and now her only connection to him, their son, is missing, and you want to ask her to go look at the dead body of a woman with a bullet through her head?” Maggie’s voice broke with frustration. “I’ve called in Gonzales. Let’s let him make the call about how to approach this.”

“There’s not going to be anything left in the park to go on,” one of the beat cops said. “People are trampling any evidence there might have been.”

“All we can do right now is try to talk to the mother and pray that someone she knows did this,” Maggie said. “If it’s a stranger abduction, we’re done.”

“It was that weirdo,” Calvano told the others. “This fat guy with flour in his hair. I questioned him earlier. I got a weird vibe off him. And he lives around here. He’d know how to get out of the park fast.”

Some of the gathered officers looked hopeful at this, but Maggie knew Calvano too well to believe his hunches were worth a damn. “We’ll let Gonzales make the call,” she repeated. “In the meantime, I need the door of the cottage under guard at all times, no one gets in or out, and, for God’s sake, keep the search for the missing boy from spilling over into my crime scene. No one goes near that yard. The rest of you need to search the surrounding neighborhood.” When Maggie gave orders, she had a way of sounding as if she were asking for your help personally, and that you and you alone could help her out. The uniforms began their organized search for the boy without hesitation.

Maggie sat by the sobbing mother, waiting patiently while the woman fought for control. She was hoping to get something from her before Gonzales arrived. I didn’t think it would happen, and I could feel that Maggie didn’t either. Still, she had to try.

Meanwhile, Calvano went running after some civilian searchers so he could blow off his frustration by screaming at them

And me? I went in search of the abductor.