and apologize to everyone a thousand times once they find him, because they will find him, they have to find him, and once they do, once he’s back and safe in her arms, she’ll feel like a prize idiot.
She is desperately looking forward to feeling like an idiot.
“He was just here, I let go of his hand to text you, and the next thing I know, he’s gone.” She’s all the way hysterical now, and people aren’t just staring, they’re stopping, offering help, asking for a description of the little boy who’s wandered away from his mother.
Two security guards dressed in dark gray uniforms approach with the helpful husband, who’s already explained that they’re looking for a small boy in a fox sweater.
“Not fox,” Marin snaps angrily, but nobody seems to mind. “Reindeer. It’s a reindeer sweater, brown and white, with black buttons for the eyes—”
“Do you have a picture of your son wearing it?” one of the security guards asks, and it’s all she can do not to shriek at him, because the question is so stupid. One, how many four-year-olds can there be in this market right now with the exact same handknit sweater? And two, of course she has a picture of her son, because it’s her son, and her phone is filled with them.
They take the picture, forward it around.
But they don’t find him.
Ten minutes later, the police show up.
The cops don’t find him, either.
Two hours later, after Seattle PD has combed through all the security footage, she and Derek watch a computer monitor in shock and disbelief as a little boy dressed in a reindeer sweater is shown exiting the market holding the hand of somebody whose face is obscured. They disappear through the doors closest to the underground parking lot, but that doesn’t mean they went to the parking lot. Their son is holding a lollipop in his free hand, and it’s swirly and colorful, the exact same lollipop his mother would have bought for him if she’d had the chance. The person who gave it to him is dressed head to toe in a Santa Claus costume, right down to the black boots, bushy eyebrows, and white beard. The camera angle makes it impossible to get a clear glimpse of the face. Nor is it possible to tell if it’s a man or a woman.
Marin can’t process what she’s looking at, and she asks them to replay it, over and over again, squinting at the monitor as if by doing so she’ll be able to see more than what is actually there. The playback is jerky, staccato, more like a series of grainy stills playing in sequence than a video recording. Each time she sees it, the moment Sebastian disappears from view is terrifying. One second he’s there, his foot crossing over the threshold of the doorway. And then, in the very next frame, he’s gone.
There. Gone. Rewind. There. Gone.
Behind her, Derek paces, speaking in heated tones to the security guards and the police, but she only catches certain words—kidnapped, stolen, AMBER Alert, FBI—above the noise of her own internal screaming. She can’t seem to accept that this really happened. It seems like it’s happening to someone else. It seems like something out of a movie.
Someone dressed as Santa Claus took her son. Deliberately. Purposefully.
While the security footage is black-and-white and fuzzy, it’s clear Sebastian wasn’t coerced. He didn’t seem frightened. His face was just fine, because he had a five-dollar lollipop in one hand and Santa in the other. The ladies working at La Douceur Parisienne checked their computer and confirmed they’d sold seven lollipops that day, but they don’t remember any customers dressed as Santa, and there are no security cameras inside their tiny store. There’s only one CCTV camera across the street from the underground parking garage that Sebastian and his captor are thought to have entered, but because of the angle, the camera only catches a distant side view of the cars exiting the garage; no license plates are visible. Fifty-four vehicles exited in the hour after Sebastian was taken, and the police can’t trace any of them.
The time stamp on the video footage they do have shows that Sebastian and his kidnapper exited the market a mere four minutes after his mother realized he was no longer with her. The Pike Place security guards hadn’t even been notified at that point.
Four minutes. That’s all it took to steal a child.
A lollipop, a Santa suit, and two hundred forty