Gabriel Knight had simply vanished. He had attended school that day, where his behavior had been nothing out of the ordinary according to teachers and classmates; and afterwards he had taken the bus home, where he left his backpack and books on the kitchen table, along with a short note that said he was going to the park. Mrs. O'Brien, a neighbor from down the block, saw him ride past her place a little after three o'clock. She made a mental note to speak to his parents after he cut the corner and left a tire track across the edge of her lawn. Jonathan Chambers, who was in Gabe's fifth grade class, passed him on Sycamore Street a short time later. It was another two blocks from there to Kaplan Park. No one had reported seeing him at the park.

Gabriel Knight had simply disappeared.

As with most cases of this nature, Walt's focus had first turned to the boy's parents. Michael and Teri had been married thirteen years. From all outward appearances, it had been a good marriage. No financial troubles. No affairs. No history of child abuse. In addition, both parents had been working that afternoon, with a handful of coworkers on each side willing to substantiate that fact. There was little reason to believe either of them had been involved.

In fact, Walt had found it interesting a short time later when Teri Knight had all her accumulated vacation time to focus on keeping her son's disappearance in front of the public eye. Besides distributing flyers, she began doing interviews, and sending out regular press releases. And when public interest began to wane as it always did in these kinds of cases, she took on the task of tracking down whatever leads the department was willing to make available to her.

Michael Knight, though still not a suspect, had been quite a different study. He had quietly done his own vanishing act, preferring to deal with the loss of his son by burying himself so deep in his work that he was rarely seen outside the office. Walt remembered thinking that the marriage was probably doomed at that point. And he remembered thinking that the chances of the Knight boy ever showing up alive again were probably doomed as well.

The case had gone unsolved.

Several years later, Walt had found himself embroiled in the disappearance of another child. This case had involved a seven-year-old girl by the name of Andrea Kennan. She had been abducted on the way to school by a man, who witnesses described as a white male in his early forties with long brown hair and eyes as black as obsidian.

Walt was one of three investigators on that case. Nearly a hundred interviews, some twenty suspects and five months later they had fished the pond dry and moved onto other waters. Andrea's fate remained a mystery for better than two years, then suddenly her abductor resurfaced. He tried to pick up another little girl outside the Town & Country Mall. This time, though, the girl had managed to get away.

A witness jotted down the man's license plate number.

Within a matter of hours, they had the guy in custody.

During the follow-up investigation, it came out that the man had been responsible for kidnapping and murdering at least eleven other little girls over a four-state area. Andrea Kennan, it was believed, had been his first victim.

It was that knowledge that preyed most on Walt's psyche. For months afterward, the world felt like an ever-tightening noose around his neck. He found himself afraid to close his eyes at night, afraid of the nightmares that would take him to the cemeteries where the children roamed, lost and abandoned. No rest for the innocent. No sleep for the guilty.

Eventually, he had resigned from the department.

For a long time afterward, he had felt like one of the lost ghosts he so often dreamt about. No sense of time or place. No belonging. No sense of the world beyond his apartment walls. Then one day Teri had called. She said she had heard about his resignation, and she was wondering if he'd be interested in helping her follow up a lead in Gabriel's case. He had already let her down once; he didn't think he could do it again. Not if he ever wanted to sleep again. And so he agreed.

As it turned out, the lead was a case of mistaken identity. A Virginia woman thought she might have spotted Gabriel at a local swimming pool. The boy had been with a man in his late forties and a heavyset woman with a streak of gray in her hair. Walt called a friend back east, and in a couple of weeks they managed to locate the family. They were from Mexico. It had been their first trip to America. Their son, Roberto-who had been named after Roberto Clemente-was nine. Gabriel would have been nearly fifteen by then.

It was another in a long string of dead ends.

However, there had been an upside. The possibility of potentially solving the Knight case had rekindled a flame in Walt. For the first time in months, he found himself able to look past the ineffectiveness he had so often felt as a detective. It was a tiny flicker at best, but it was enough to steer him back into investigative work, specializing in missing children.

It was a flicker that he owed to Teri.

And now Gabriel Knight was home again.

The circle, at first glance, appeared complete.

[7].

Teri and the boy sat in the car outside Denny's as Walt pulled into the parking lot. They had been waiting for a good fifteen minutes. In that time, she tried to explain to the boy that her son had disappeared a number of years ago and that because of that he couldn't possible be Gabe.

"Then how come I'm not older?" the boy asked.

"Precisely," she said. "You should be older, but you're not. That doesn't make any sense, now does it?"

"That's because you're lying."

"I wish I were," Teri said softly. She watched a blue Buick enter the parking lot and pull into a space across from them. A man in his sixties, thin and tall, wearing a long overcoat, climbed out and went around to the other side of the car and opened the door for his wife. Teri felt herself let out a breath that she hadn't even realized she had taken in. "Why don't you tell me about your bicycle accident?"

"I don't remember anything."

"Nothing at all?"

He shrugged. "Maybe some little things."

"Like what?"

"I remember leaving the note on the table. And there were some junior high kids that got off the bus at Bascom. One of them threw a banana peel at me." The boy grinned. "He missed by a mile."

For a moment, she found herself thinking what a precious sight that smile was and how lucky she was to have it back in her life again. And then she caught herself, and a chill went through her. She glanced away. "Anything else?"

"I don't know. Just little things, I guess."

"What about after the accident? What do you remember after the accident?"

"I woke up in this room, and there were a lot of other beds in it, and the lights were down low, and I remember thinking that it must be night, because everything was so dark and everyone was asleep."

"There were other people there?" she asked.

The high beams of another car cut across the windshield like a searchlight in the fog. Teri shaded her eyes and watched the car swing past them. It pulled into the space next to the Buick and Walt climbed out. He jiggled the door handle to make sure it was locked, walked around the other side and entered the restaurant.

"Is that him?" the boy asked.

"That's him."

"He doesn't look like a cop."

"Well, he isn't. Not any more. He works alone now, in private practice."

"Like Simon & Simon, right?"

She turned and stared at him, getting an eerie feeling that was hard to explain until she realized that Simon & Simon had been one of Gabe's favorite shows. It had been off the air for years now, except for syndication, and she hadn't given it a thought in longer than she cared to remember. But suddenly it was here at the fore again, a stark reminder of the huge gap in time that still separated her from her son.

"Are you all right?" the boy asked.

Teri nodded. "Sorry."

Through the restaurant windows, they watched a waitress show Walt to a booth. He sat with his back to them, and said something to her that Teri assumed had to do with the fact that he was expecting two more people.

"So let's go."

"Not just yet." She held him back with one hand, and watched as Walt thumbed indifferently through the menu. She wasn't sure exactly what it was she was waiting for-paranoia wasn't always that telling. But she thought it might be smart to wait a moment longer and make sure no one showed up behind him. She trusted Walt. Right now he was the only man she trusted. But... better safe than sorry.

After a few minutes with no one else turning up, Teri and the boy climbed out of the car. It had been raining on and off all day. Now, though, even as they were trying to walk around the puddles, she could see a patch or two in the clouds where the sky was blacker than black and Lucy was there with her diamonds, as Lennon had once sung. It was a beautiful night.

"You look silly," he said as she tiptoed barefooted around a puddle. She had lost one shoe back at the house when the man with the scar had pulled it off. The other shoe was on the front seat of the car, stuffed into the crack between the seat and the back.

"Oh, I do, do I?"

"Yeah." He giggled.

She took the boy's hand, and he surprised her by not putting up an argument.

When they entered the restaurant, Walt looked up and smiled. She thought she might have roused him out of his sleep earlier, but that didn't appear to be the case now. His eyes were bright. No bags. No redness around the edges. And his hair, which was blond and wavy and a little longish in the back, didn't appear to be watered down as if he had done a quick job of trying to keep it in place.

"Sorry about bothering you so late," Teri said, slipping into the booth.

"Lost your shoes, I see."

"You noticed."

"Hard not to." Walt glanced at the boy. "So who's this?"

"Who do you think it is?"

"Well, he's too young to be Gabe."

"That's what I thought at first, too. But now I'm not so sure anymore."

"Teri, he'd be in his twenties by now."

"Twenty-one," Teri said. "I know."

Walt took another look at the boy, and before he said anything, Teri could see he wasn't sure if he was supposed to take her seriously or not. He grinned crookedly, and behind his eyes, she knew he was busy trying to figure out the joke. "He doesn't look twenty-one to me."

"That's because he isn't."

He grinned again, this time with less ease, and glanced out the window. "So what's the catch, Teri? He's what? Maybe ten years old?"

"I'm eleven," the boy said.

"Okay, so make it eleven. It's all the same."

"Ask him his name," Teri said.

"Gabriel Knight," the boy blurted out.

"Ask him anything you like."

"You're serious?"

"Absolutely."

"Come on, Teri. This is crazy."

"I know it sounds that way, but-"

"Let me show you something." Walt patted down the pockets of his jacket, at first the two inside breast pockets, then the right front pocket, until he pulled out a sheet of paper. "I brought something I want you to see. I thought Gabe might be interested in seeing how hard we looked for him, so I brought along one of the old flyers."

He unfolded the paper, and flattened it out against the table. Across the top it said: MISSING! GABRIEL KNIGHT. Below the headline was a photograph of Gabe in his Little League uniform. They had printed nearly a hundred-thousand copies of this flyer. It offered a reward of $10,000 for his safe return, every penny Teri and Michael had been able to come up with.

Walt stared down at the photograph a moment, and then looked up at the boy. The photo had been taken three months before Gabe's disappearance. He was kneeling on one knee, a bat in his right hand, and a grin across his face that was warm and playful. In the distant background, a bright patch of blue sky cut a mat around the treetops. For a flyer, the photo was unusually clear and sharp.

"Okay, I'll grant you this much," Walt said. "He looks like him."

"Exactly like him," Teri agreed. "Except for the color of his eyes."

"Look, I know you've never stopped hoping," he said carefully. "But tell me now, honestly. Don't you see a little bit of him in every kid you come across? I mean, doesn't his face show up everywhere? In the grocery store? At the park? And haven't there been times when you would have sworn you saw him up ahead of you in line or in the back seat of a car that's just passed by, when it wasn't him at all?"

Yes, Teri thought.

Of course.

She couldn't count the times she had spotted a boy with Gabe's build, with his coloring, his gait. Or the times she had followed after a boy like one of those crazy women who couldn't have children of her own. Walt was right. One-hundred percent right. For years, she had seen Gabe's face nearly everywhere.

"Yes," she said, suddenly solemn. "But this isn't like that."

He shook his head, the uneasiness back and roaming naked across his face. He stared down at the flyer again, studied it a moment, and slid it across the table toward the boy. "Kid meet Gabe."

"I know my own son, Walt."

"I know you think you do."

"He knew where Michael kept the spare car keys in case of an emergency. In a magnetic box under the wheel well of the left front tire. Michael used to nag me about it whenever I'd forget and have to call Triple A. I still keep my spare keys in the same place, Walt. The boy he went right to them. He knew right where they were."

"How'd you know that?" Walt asked him.

"Dad always kept them there."

"Well, there's a safe enough answer," Walt said, sinking back into his seat. "Look, this isn't getting us anywhere. If you really want to believe all this-and it's gotta be a hoax, Teri, let me tell you that much right now, it's gotta be a hoax-but if you really want to believe it, at least check it out first, will you?"

"That's one of the reasons I called you."

"Well, I don't even want to know the other reasons."

"They can wait," Teri said, knowing that they probably couldn't. "First things first. I want you to ask him whatever you think might shed some light on this thing. You ask him, and he'll answer the best that he can. You will, won't you?"

The boy nodded. "Sure."

"And when you're finished, then we'll talk about this other stuff."

"Are they, by any chance, related?"

"Yeah, I think they are."

"Great." Walt scratched at an invisible itch near his right ear, and then looked across the table at the boy as if he were hoping he might be able to find some easy way of stepping inside his head. "All right. We'll play Twenty Questions and we'll see where it takes us. But I'm telling you right now, this is not going to get settled tonight. Not if you're expecting to make a convert."