Page 10 of Five

I’m simply not used to it, not comfortable with solitude.

All I’ve ever known, since the age of eleven, is institutionalized living.

My dad, the only person who ever believed my abduction story, died within a year of my disappearance.

Cancer.

We were so close, he and I, after my mother walked out on us both. It was us against the world. But I ended up in the foster system even before he died, since he wasn’t well enough to care for me.

And the world was just too big a place for me to deal with on my own. I went off the rails for real. Got into all sorts of crazy shit until I was finally given an ultimatum. Military service or juvenile detention.

Thank God he wasn’t there to see it.

You’d think after being forced into an overcrowded group home situation and having to share my personal space not once, but twice, I’d embrace my current privacy and solitude, but that hasn’t been like that for me.

There’s no way I’ll get back to sleep now, and it’s almost dawn anyway, so I climb out of bed and since I’m already sweaty, I head for the gym in my apartment building. It was one of the biggest draws in choosing this place.

Just like I hate to be alone, so do I also detest feeling weak, and my workout routine is another of those things forged from the circumstances of my childhood.

Ninety minutes later, feeling invigorated from putting my body through its paces, I shower to rid myself of the sweat that drenches my body.

When I’ve dressed and eaten, I call my publication office. The best thing about being a reporter is that the newsroom never sleeps. It’s always bustling, and there are always people out for a scoop.

It means there are always people, and I don’t ever have to be alone, unless I choose to.

“Yo!” I say into the handset, when Jack Arnold, one of the paper's twenty-four-hour team of editors answers. “What have you got for me?”

“Jesus, Wilder. You only just went home, like…” There’s a pause and I imagine him checking his watch. “…five hours ago. Don’t you ever sleep?”

Not much.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

Or when I have someone in my life to sleep with, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. If I was a woman, I’d probably be described as high maintenance. I like to have what I need when I want it, and my tastes are not what anyone would call mainstream. I’m sure the psychoanalysts would have a field day with that, considering my past. Since I’m a guy, I guess that just makes me an asshole.

There are plenty who would agree.

“Something has come across my desk that I thought you’d be interested in. Some new interest in a cold case that I seem to remember you poking around in.”

My senses all go on high alert. There’s only one cold case I’ve ever been interested in.

The one that caused me to become a journalist in the first place, so I had the resources and access to investigate it.

The Lost Boys.

“What is it?” I ask, grabbing the pen next to my note pad so I can jot down any pertinent details.

“You remember you covered that break in at the daycare last week?”

“Yep.” It wasn’t much of a story, but I covered it because it involved Neve Murray, a ‘person of interest’ in the Lost Boys case, since her kid brother was one of the boys that was snatched years ago.

Snatched and never found.

“Well, there’s been an attempted abduction at the same daycare.”

I stop writing and freeze, a frisson of foreboding trickling down my spine and making the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Girl or boy?”

“Boy. Name withheld because he’s a minor.” Jack tells me what my instincts already know.