“Oh, it’s an eclectic menu,” Debbie said. “Shortened attention span, loss of short-term memory, poor judgment, uncoordinated movements. People can recover. To varying degrees. Then there’s the severe cerebral hypoxia. The patient enters a prolonged vegetative state. They can breathe on their own. They can open their eyes. They sleep. But they don’t respond to their surroundings; they don’t know you’re there.” She looked him in the eye. “They usually die within a year.”

“Not Henry,” Archie said.

She squeezed his arm. Her mouth formed the word No, but no sound came out.

Archie coughed. The effort of it hurt. Sputum filled his throat and rattled around in his lungs. He sounded like he belonged in the ICU himself. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

Debbie’s brows furrowed. “Are you sick?”

Archie looked away. “It’s just a cold.”

She appraised him for a long moment. “O-kay,” she said slowly. “I’m going to get some food. Do you want anything?”

He hadn’t eaten since morning. “Yeah.”

“What?”

Archie’s phone rang. “You know what I like,” he said. He got out his phone and glanced down at the caller ID. “I have to take this,” he said, looking up. But Debbie had already turned and started down the hallway.

He brought the phone to his ear. “Go ahead,” he said.

“We found it,” Heil said excitedly. “They were right. The opening is small. But we snaked a camera in and it widens up a little once you get in there. Looks like a kid was definitely up there. We found more Star Wars figures, bags of dried fruit, a flashlight. No sleeping bag or blankets, though. So maybe he cleared out.”

“Take the sleeping bag and leave the Star Wars figures,” Archie said. “You don’t have kids, do you, Heil?”

“No, sir.”

So the kid was staying under the bridge during the day. Which begged the question, where did he go at night? Archie knew the answer. Patrick Lifton went back to his captor—just as he had returned to him from the hospital. The boy had been under the kidnapper’s control for a year and a half. Children were especially vulnerable to Stockholm syndrome. Giving Patrick room to roam, and always having him come back, was probably part of the killer’s whole power trip.

Wherever the kidnapper was staying, it was close enough to the river for the boy to come and go by himself.

“Oh,” Heil added, “and we found some more of those keys. Like the one under the hospital bed. Six more so far. All the same size. Look old. All look like they fit different locks.”

Chapter 37

CHAPTER

37