Terrified by Kevin O'Brien

replied, his back to her. He pushed at a door marked, DO NOT ENTER—EMPLOYEES ONLY.
    Megan followed him down a white-walled corridor to what must have been the employee lunchroom. Four policemen milled around the small room that had cheap-looking round white plastic tables and folding chairs. Two of the cops were sitting down. Another was at the vending machine. The fourth cop wasn’t in uniform like the others, but in his gray suit with the ugly tie, the handsome, fiftyish silver-haired man looked like a police detective. He was at the sink, slurping water from the faucet when Megan stepped in with Officer Williams.
    Wiping his mouth, the silver-haired man approached her. The two officers stood up. On the table behind them, there was a white plastic garbage bag laid out with something on top of it. Megan couldn’t see what it was.
    “Mrs. Keeslar?” the plainclothesman said, frowning slightly.
    Megan nodded. She couldn’t talk—or breathe.
    “We found these items in the men’s room by the food court,” he said. “They were in the trash receptacle.”
    One of the cops stepped aside, so Megan could see what was on the table behind him.
    “Could you identify these for us?” she heard the plainclothesman ask.
    Megan gasped. Laid out on the white plastic bag were a little green polo shirt and a pair of plaid shorts.
     
     
    “Will they give her a noperation and make her better?” the little boy asked.
    “Yeah, but we need to get to the hospital soon if you want to see her,” the man answered, pulling him by the hand. “C’mon, hurry up… .”
    They headed down the stairwell of the Bon-Macy’s garage toward where he’d parked his car. He’d been on the hunt at Westlake Center this afternoon, so he’d parked across the street at the Bon-Macy’s garage. He didn’t park in a garage connected to a place where he took a kid, not anymore. Even with his prey chloroformed and well-hidden under a blanket on the floor of the backseat, he could still get stopped by a cop at the garage exit—especially if it was the store where the kid had gone missing. He’d learned that the hard way a while back. He’d been arrested in a Spokane shopping center’s garage, where they’d found an unconscious six-year-old girl in the backseat of his car. After his arrest, they’d tried to pin three missing-child cases on him, too, but couldn’t make the charges stick. If they’d only combed some woods near Post Falls, Idaho, they might have gotten even more than they’d been looking for. Still, he’d spent two years in prison for making that mistake in the Spokane shopping center garage.
    The clothes he’d put on the kid were a size too big. So he’d rolled up the cuffs of his little jeans, and pushed up the sleeves of his red checkered shirt. The blue baseball cap had kept people from noticing the hair color right away. The kid wouldn’t stop whimpering, but that had been expected since he’d been told his mother had an accident and was on the way to the hospital. It was funny how kids didn’t question certain things like, “You need to change your clothes before I take you to see her.”
    The mother must not have wasted much time getting ahold of a cop or mall security, because they’d made the first announcement over the public address system as he’d been pulling the kid toward the Fourth Street exit in back. He’d started talking to the boy—so the kid hadn’t heard his name announced.
    They’d walked around the back of Westlake Center, and across the street into the Bon-Macy’s, where he’d waited for an empty elevator to take them up to the sky bridge. No sense taking a chance someone else on the elevator could identify him later. The kid had stopped crying for a few moments, apparently fascinated by the sky bridge leading to the Bon-Macy’s parking garage—five stories over the crowded street.
    But now, he was sobbing again—and having trouble holding on to his loose jeans and maneuvering the steps