Blindside

This is Miles Kettering.”
    “Hello, Mr. Kettering, my name is Sheriff K. C. Benedict from Washington County, Tennessee. Don’t worry, I have your boy, Sam. He’s just fine. He managed to escape his kidnappers. He’s with me. Mr. Kettering? I promise you, he’s okay.”
    Miles couldn’t speak. His throat worked. “I don’t believe you. You’re the kidnapper, right? What do you want?”
    Butch Ashburn and Todd Morton were standing there staring at the phone, trying to look both calm and competent. Savich took the phone from Miles’s hands. “Who is this?”
    Katie understood. She said again, “This is Sheriff K. C. Benedict from Washington County, Tennessee. Sam is just fine. He managed to save himself. I’ve got him with me. Tell his parents not to worry, he’s okay.”
    “This is Dillon Savich with the FBI, Sheriff. Thank you very much. Give me your exact location and we’ll be there as quickly as we can.”
    Katie gave the man directions. She’d never before met a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She patted Sam’s shoulder, whispered, “Your daddy’s going to be here soon now, Sam,” but Sam didn’t hear her. He was asleep.
    She heard Mr. Kettering say in the background, “I want to talk to Sam.”
    She said to Agent Savich, “Sam’s asleep. Do you want me to wake him?”
    Miles Kettering came on the line. “No, let him sleep. I’ll see him soon. Please, Sheriff, tell him I love him. Whatabout the people who took him? Did you get them?”
    “I’m very sorry, but they escaped. But we’ve got a group of my deputies in the field and they’ll do their best.”
    When Katie hung up the phone, Keely said, nearly asleep herself, “What about his mama?”
    “She’ll probably come, too. If I were her, I’d beat his daddy here to get him.”
    “Stealing Sam was a bad thing, Mama.”
    “You’re right.” And she thought, I should have just brought the bastard down, not given him a kiss in the arm. I should have kicked his butt like Sam said.

6
    K atie’s phone rang at a quarter of seven that evening. It was Alice Hewett from Hewett’s Pharmacy, and she was out-of-breath excited.
    “Oh, Katie, that man who kidnapped the little boy—I think it was him. He just left. I called the station house and Linnie told me to call you at home.”
    Katie’s heart started to pound, deep and hard.
    “Was he the fat one, Alice?”
    “No, he was the other one, tall, almost sick-looking thin, but he wasn’t wearing that long black leather coat Wade told everyone about, just a white shirt and jeans, and some scarred black boots. But he had a ponytail, like you said. And he was shivering, which means he left that leather coat in his car because he was afraid to be seen in it. He bought bandages and antibiotic cream and some Aleve. And when he was leaving I saw blood on the back of his sleeve.”
    “He was in his forties?”
    “Yes, I’d say so.”
    “And he had a ponytail.”
    “Yeah, wet and stringy-looking. He didn’t say anything,just brought the stuff up to me at the register, and paid cash. He had a really big roll. I saw a couple of hundreds, lots of fifties.”
    “Did he just leave the pharmacy?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you see his car?”
    “Yes, Katie, the instant I saw that blood I knew. When I heard his car, I peeked out the front window. He was driving an old van, light gray I think, but it was hard to tell with all the rain.”
    Katie nearly held her breath. “License number?”
    “I just got part of it. He screeched out of here pretty fast. It was a Virginia plate, the first three letters were LTD—you know, like that old Ford sedan—LTD. I think the next one was a ‘three’ but I can’t be sure.”
    Katie wanted to leap through the phone line and kiss Alice. “That’s just great,” she said. “Now, was there anything about the man that was unusual, something that would make you remember him as opposed to another man?”
    Silence, then, “He was wearing a necklace, you know, a gold chain with some sort of pendant or stone hanging off the end of it. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Oh yes, his two front teeth overlap.”
    “Alice, do you want to be sheriff when my term is over?”
    Alice Hewett laughed. “No, Katie, it’s all yours. Just looking at that guy made my stomach cramp up. Besides, I’m too young to be sheriff, I just turned twenty last week.”
    Katie was pleased, as was the rest of the town, that Alice was no longer a