Jack Ryder Mystery Series: Vol 1-3

  As the years passed, he started to wonder if it was worth it…if he would ever get the visa. There was a lot of tension in the country, and the stories of people who tried to get away, but were incarcerated or killed instead were many. Yet, he didn’t feel there was any future for him in Cuba anymore, and especially not for his daughter. They weren’t told how long they had to work the sugar cane fields in order to gain the visa, and Hector was beginning to wonder if they would ever get it.

  Until one morning, after four years in the fields, when his foreman came up to him. Hector was sweating heavily in the heat and his hands were bloody from the hard labor. The foreman looked at him with a disgusted look, then said the words Hector would never forget for the rest of his life.

  “Suarez. You’re done here. You can leave Cuba.”

  Hector decided to leave Isabella with her grandmother until Hector had found his brothers and gotten a job to be able to provide for her. She was too young to endure this travel and their future in the U.S. too uncertain. He would have to send for her.

  The very next day, Hector was put on an airplane by three of Castro’s soldiers. Right when they let him go, one of them stopped him and said:

  “If you ever come back to Cuba, we will shoot you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  May 2015

  “I have an ID.”

  Yamilla sounded excited on the other end of the line. I shared her enthusiasm. A week had passed, and we still had no idea who this little boy who was found on the construction site in Sebastian was. It had been driving me nuts. I had been going through old cases of missing teenagers in the beginning of the eighties for days, but had come up with no results.

  “Finally. Who was he?”

  “It was the teeth that gave him away. Dental records show me this is the body of Scott Kingston, who, according to the file, disappeared from his home in Cocoa Beach in 1986.”

  “1986?” I repeated and noted the name. “That’s a lot earlier than we expected.”

  “And he was a lot younger when he disappeared,” Yamilla said. “Only seven, according to our records. His dental records were only a match on the two front teeth. The rest had fallen out and new ones grown in.”

  “So, you’re telling me he wasn’t killed in 1986?” I asked.

  “No, definitely not. This boy we found was older. I’m guessing thirteen or fourteen years old. He had developed all of his permanent teeth.”

  “So, he lived several years after he disappeared, then,” I said, and wrote everything down.

  “That’s safe to say, yes,” Yamilla said.

  “Thank you.”

  I hung up and went into Ron’s office. He was on the phone, but finished his call when he saw me.

  “What’s up, Ryder?” he asked.

  “We got an ID on the boy.”

  “Finally,” he exclaimed.

  “His name was Scott Kingston, disappeared from his home in…”

  “Scott Kingston?” Ron said very loudly. “The Scott Kingston?”

  “I take it you know more than I do,” I said, and sat in the chair.

  Ron drew in air between his teeth. “It’s one of the greatest mysteries in our district. The little boy was taken from his house in the early morning hours while he was asleep and simply vanished. Later, a guy was convicted of having kidnapped and killed him, but the body was never found.”

  “How was he convicted if there wasn’t a body?”

  “I believe there was a witness or something. Someone saw him, but you might want to look into that. Come to think of it…” Ron went through his pile of papers on his desk and pulled out a newspaper.

  “Here.” He showed me an article in Florida Today. He pointed at the picture of a guy in the arms of his mother under the headline “A Free Man: Vernon Johnson to leave prison 28 years after a lie helped put him behind bars.”

  I remembered reading about this guy.

  “Vernon Johnson here was just released about a week ago, after spending twenty-eight years behind bars for killing Scott Kingston in 1986,” Ron said. “He was convicted in 1987.”

  “But, wrongly? It says here the witness recently admitted to having lied about seeing Vernon Johnson with the boy. The witness was a paperboy and doing his early morning rounds at five o’clock, when he saw Vernon Johnson carrying the boy to his car in front of the Kingston’s house. The witness, a boy who was only sixteen at the time he gave his testimony, is now terminally ill, and told a priest recently that he had never been sure that it was Vernon he saw back then, even though he told the police he was certain. The priest then convinced him to tell the police the truth. He told them he had felt coerced by the police to testify that he was certain it was Vernon Johnson he saw, when he had his doubts.” I looked at Ron and put the paper down. “So, they based the entire case on a sixteen-year-old’s testimony? They took twenty-eight years of a man’s life just like that? That’s crazy.”

  “I know. Times were different back then. But, once the boy came forward and told them he wasn’t certain and never had been, that was when the Florida Innocence Project took up Johnson’s case again and went through the evidence. It was all only based on that one eyewitness testimony. The judge had no other choice than to let the guy go.”

  I looked up at Ron. “And now we have the body? The body of this boy that apparently was still alive for several years before someone buried him at the construction site of the new condominiums.”

  “Looks like we just blew the case wide open,” Ron said. “And it’s all yours.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  May 2015

  Noah loved his new room. It was painted light blue the way he preferred it. Noah was a real boy. His favorite toys had always been trucks and cars and his favorite place to go for his birthday was the airport to watch the planes take off and land.

  His mother and father gleamed with pride as they looked at him standing in his new room with pictures of trucks on the walls.

  “Do you like it?” his mother asked.

  “I looove it!” Noah said, turned, and hugged his mother’s legs. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Then he threw himself in the beanbag in the middle of the room and just laughed. The bed was the best part, he thought. It was shaped like Lightning McQueen from the movie Cars and had a steering wheel and everything.

  “We’re glad you like it, son,” Noah’s dad said. “Your mother and I spent many hours painting it, and especially your mother spent a lot of time decorating it. We want you to feel at home in our new house.”

  “We know it’s been hard on you with the move and everything,” his mother said, and looked at her husband who nodded. “I mean, with the change of school and everything. Hopefully, this will help make it easier.”

  Noah grabbed one of his monster trucks. When his parents left, he found another truck and let them smash into each other with a loud noise.

  Noah played with his trucks, and soon he was lost in time and space, and forgot everything about the fact that he missed his old friends at his old school on Merritt Island. It was the first time Noah didn’t feel sad being in the new house in Cocoa Beach. Since they had moved there two weeks ago, he had hated every moment spent in it and every moment he spent in the new school, where the teachers seemed to correct everything he did.

  Noah set up train track and began rolling trains across it. He grabbed a sword and pretended he was a zombie-fighter and started fighting his toy elephant and tiger.

  “Ha! Take that, Evil Ely Elephant,” he said, stabbing it with the sword.

  “And you too, Tiny Tiger!” he yelled and stabbed the tiger in the stomach as well, causing it to fall backwards.

  “Ha!”

  “Don’t you know that zombie-tigers can only be killed with a light saber?” A strange voice asked.

  Noah gasped, then turned to face the open sliding door. Behind the screen, a set of brown eyes were staring at him. The man smiled. Noah remembered having seen him before and wonde
red if he was one of the neighbors.

  “You do have a light saber, don’t you?” the man asked.

  Noah bit his lip, then shook his head.

  The man lifted up a black sword, just like the one Robert from his class had. The one he had brought to school once and everyone had admired. The one Robert had never let Noah touch. Noah gasped again.

  “May I join you?” the man asked.

  Noah looked back at the closed door leading to the hallway and the rest of the house where his parents were. Would they mind? The man did seem awfully nice and he had brought his own sword. Maybe he would even let Noah use the sword?

  He turned and looked at the man, then nodded. “Sure.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  May 2015

  “He really loves his new room, huh?”

  Steven Kinley looked at his wife, Lauren. “We haven’t heard a sound from him in hours. He must be having a great time.”

  “I’m so happy,” Lauren said. “It was all worth it. Did you see his face? It was priceless.”

  Lauren looked through the hallway at the closed door at the end of it. It was a relief for the both of them to finally see their son with a smile on his face.

  The move from Merritt Island to Cocoa Beach had been hard on all of them, but mostly on Noah. He had no siblings, so his friends were his everything, and back at their house on Merritt Island they had lived at a cul-de-sac where both neighbors had kids that he played so well with. Where they lived now, their neighbors were elderly people, who didn’t care much about children. The house was much nicer and it was better for Steven to be closer to his job at City Hall in Cocoa Beach. Plus, it was a better school, they believed. It was better for Noah in the long run, but that was hard to see when you were only eight years old and had to leave all of your best friends.

  “So, should I start making dinner?” Lauren said and looked at the paperwork in front of her. As the director of Minutemen Preschool, she always had a ton of work to do.

  “That would be wonderful,” Steven said. “I, for one, am starving.”

  Lauren put the chicken in the oven, then chopped up some vegetables, and roasted them in the pan. She kept wondering about Noah and how much this move had affected him. She deeply hoped it wasn’t a mistake. Noah had seemed a little depressed lately and didn’t like his school at all. The teacher had more than once had to call Lauren to let her know Noah wasn’t behaving well in class. It wasn’t like him to act like this. They did have a lot of tests, Lauren thought, and it made Noah constantly anxious. There had been more than one time he had to stay home from school because of a stomachache. It worried Lauren, while Steven kept telling her it would pass, that Noah simply needed time to adjust to his new reality. He hadn’t made any friends in his class yet, and Lauren had started to wonder if he ever would. What if nobody liked him? What if the teacher was mean to him? Was that why he was constantly having nightmares?

  Lauren shook the thought and set the table. No, everything was going to settle soon, and then they would be very happy here in their canal-front house. There were so many fun things for them to do here. They could go kayaking or paddle boarding, or he could fish with his father. They even had a pool now, and Lauren knew how much Noah had wanted that while they lived at Merritt Island. He had been begging for one for years. Now that they finally had one, he hardly used it. Well, at least not yet. Maybe he would, later on, when he was more settled in.

  It’ll come. It’ll come. Just give it time.

  “Dinner is ready,” Lauren said, addressed to Steven, who had his nose buried in his iPad. Probably playing Candy Crush, she thought to herself and walked towards Noah’s room.

  She knocked on the door. “Noah? Dinner’s ready. Come and eat.”

  There was no answer, and Lauren figured Noah was simply too deeply buried in his playing to answer. She was certain he had heard her and returned to the kitchen to get the chicken out and start cutting it. When Noah still hadn’t come out, she looked to Steven, a bad feeling starting to nag at her from the inside. She decided to ignore it. It was silly.

  “I’m kind of busy here, could you?” she said.

  “I will,” he said, slightly annoyed, then walked to the door and knocked. “Noah. Your mom said it was time to eat.” He grabbed the handle and walked inside. “Noah?” he called. “Noah!?”

  Whether it was the fearful pitch to his voice or simply an awful premonition inside of Lauren that made her drop the plate with the chicken on the tiles, she never knew. But she did know why she started to scream as she entered her son’s room to find it empty, then ran into the yard, screaming his name in anguish and terror.

  Because that was the only thing she could do. That was the only thing anyone could do when their worst nightmare suddenly was realized.

  Chapter Sixteen

  May 2015

  When someone loses a child and never knows what happened to him, something happens to them, something indescribable. You can see it in their face, in their glassy eyes. It’s like they’re in this constant haze, like they’re not really living and not really dead. I had seen it before, and now I was staring right at it again.

  “Carrie Kingston?” I asked, looking at the woman in the doorway. My first impression was the she didn’t look at all like herself, like the woman I had seen in the old newspaper clips from 1986, or in the recent articles written about her when the man who was imprisoned for the kidnapping of her son had been freed a few weeks ago.

  “I feel awful about the whole thing,” she was quoted saying. “All this time, I thought they caught the guy, and now it turns out that he didn’t do it.”

  Mrs. Carrie Kingston was thinner now, a lot thinner. Her eyes were dark with hollowed sockets. Her skin colorless. Gray wasn’t a word that fully covered it.

  “Yes?” she asked hardly looking at me.

  “Detective Jack Ryder, Brevard County Sheriff’s Office. This is my partner Beth. May we come in, please?”

  “Naturally,” she said and let us in. She moved as if she was in slow motion.

  We sat down in the kitchen. The house in Palm Bay was neat and clean, but smelled stuffy and confirmed my suspicion that Carrie Kingston didn’t go out much. According to our research, the Kingstons had moved away from Cocoa Beach two years after their son disappeared. They were both retired now, while their oldest daughter lived up north.

  “Where is your husband?” I asked when I sat down.

  She looked at the clock on the wall. “He’s out golfing. He should be here any minute now.”

  I looked at Beth. “We’ll wait for him, then.”

  “Can I offer you some coffee while you wait?” Carrie asked.

  We accepted and she poured each of us a cup. It was late in the afternoon, and I needed a shot of caffeine to keep me awake for the drive back. Luckily, we didn’t have to wait long before Mr. Kingston entered the door through the garage. He stared at us, startled, then put down his sports bag.

  “What’s going on here? Carrie?”

  “These nice detectives are here to talk to us, Jim. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Jim looked skeptical. “What about? Is it about that bastard Johnson? ‘Cause if you ask me, he should never have been let out.”

  “It is not about Johnson,” I said. “Please, just sit down, Mr. Kingston, and we will get to it.”

  Reluctantly, Jim Kingston pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “You have to excuse my husband,” Carrie said. “But we have been through a lot, especially lately with Vernon getting out and everything. The hard part is not knowing. We have no idea what happened to Scott. At least, up until now, we thought we knew who took our son from us; we believed he had received his punishment, but now it turns out, we didn’t. It’s very frustrating to never get closure.”

  “I have closure,” Jim snorted angrily. “I know that bastard did it, and somehow he fought the system and got out. He was supposed to have been killed. But he managed to work the system. He is clever,
you know. Now he is a free man? After all he has put us through? There is not a day where we don’t think about our son.”

  “I understand your anger,” I said and looked at both of them. “But that is not why we are here. We are not here to discuss Mr. Johnson.”

  Carrie Kingston looked into my eyes and gasped. She cupped her mouth. “Oh, my God.” Her eyes welled up. “You found him, didn’t you?”

  I nodded with a sigh. “Yes.”

  A change went over Jim Kingston’s face. He was no longer fuming with anger and despair. Tears were welling up in his eyes as well. It was hard for me to hold mine back.

  “Where? How?” Carrie asked, her voice shaking.

  “At a construction site,” I said. “In Sebastian Inlet. The building has been there since 1993. We believe he was put in the ground before then.”

  Carrie Kingston didn’t move. She simply stared at me, holding a hand to cover her mouth, while years of sorrow and frustration left her body. Her torso was trembling.

  Jim Kingston sank in his chair. After years of having his shoulders in this tense position under his ears, he finally let them go with a deep sigh. Tears streamed across his cheeks. “And you’re sure, right? You’re sure it’s him this time…? I mean, so many times we’ve thought…”

  I nodded. “Yes. A few years after Scott disappeared, a body was found in Cocoa Beach that we believed might have been Scott. DNA profiling was the new thing back then, and you were asked to provide us with hair from Scott’s brush. We found out it wasn’t a match, but we kept his information, and to make a long story short, the ME ran a DNA test again this time. We had the result this morning, and it was a match.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Carrie said. “After so many years of not knowing. Of constantly staring at every little boy you see in the street or at the beach or in Wal-Mart. Even later, I kept looking for him everywhere. In crowds. He would have been thirty-seven this year, and just the other day, I stopped myself from staring at this man in his mid-thirties, just because I wondered if it could be him, or what he might look…in case…well, in case he wasn’t dead. You keep hoping. That’s what hurts the most. I guess I had accepted the fact that he was gone, but there is a part of you that wonders. What if he isn’t dead? What if he is out there somewhere…alive? But, I guess…I guess we know for sure now.”