Shattered by Jay Bonansinga

time.”
    Grove did not notice his baby boy vanishing into the darkness of the rain swept backyard. The child was barely visible now, just a ghostly outline through the porch screen, trundling awkwardly over rain-damp grass toward the shadows beyond the birdbath.
    â€œYou are the man, Cedric,” Grove said with a satisfied nod, planning out the next day’s activities.
    â€œJust do me a favor,” the voice said.
    â€œName it.”
    â€œJust catch this guy already.”
    â€œI will do my—”
    Grove looked up then and saw many things at once: the empty porch, the banging screen door, the pale shadow of something moving out in the backyard. He dropped the phone. He leaped across the porch toward the open door. His heart raced as he stumbled outside.
    He froze.
    The child was maybe twenty-five feet away—maybe thirty feet—it was hard to tell in this light. But what made Grove abruptly stop and stare was a flicker of recognition in the back of his brain.
    It flashed behind his eyes only for a beat, almost like a twinge of déjà vu, but not quite, as he stared at his baby vanishing into the pitch-black shadows at the end of the property line, where a forest of hardwoods lay choked with weeds and foliage. In the dark of night, the woods looked as cavernous and black as a leviathan’s mouth which was, at this very moment, about to devour Grove’s baby.
    It was happening as savagely and suddenly as a giant fly trap closing around its prey. But there was something else about that image—a helpless infant voluntarily slipping into absolute darkness—that paralyzed Grove for the briefest moment, until he finally found his voice.
    â€œAaron!”
    Grove dashed across the dew-slick lawn in one continuous headlong rush and scooped up the baby in a single fluid motion with the muscular grace of a juiced-up halfback retrieving a live ball at the buzzer. Grove only slipped once, just a few centimeters on his back heel as he was lifting the child, but he managed to keep from falling as he cradled Aaron against his heaving chest. He found his footing and stood there for a moment in the darkness with the baby in his arms and his heart pounding out a tarantella.
    Aaron seemed oblivious. He wriggled and made squeaking noises.
    Grove started to say something to his baby son when he abruptly stopped. The sound of the telephone had pierced the silence behind him in the kitchen. An instant feeling of apprehension stabbed at Grove’s solar plexus. Something was wrong. It was too late for anybody in law enforcement east of the Mississippi to call him, and since he had just talked to Cedric and Hollister in California it was doubtful that it was the west coast. That only left two possibilities: a wrong number or his mother.
    â€œPlease God, don’t make it my mom,” Grove muttered under his breath as he carried the child back toward the house. The kitchen was dark and cold. Grove answered the phone on the fifth ring with the baby still in his arms.
    It was his mother.
    â€œLet me guess,” he said, after detecting the note of somber dread in his mother’s greeting. “You’re working on another one of your premonitions?”
    The silence that followed could have chilled the earth’s core.

SIX
    Around 10:00 the following morning, just outside Belleville, Illinois, a garishly painted panel van wended its way up the narrow switchback road that rimmed the Fenster Maximum Security Facility. The van had a small satellite dish mounted to its roof, and the NBC logo emblazoned across its bulwark. WJID-TV ST. LOUIS was stamped across its hood, and the driver wore a WJID windbreaker buttoned up to the collar, a Cardinals hat pulled down low against his dark glasses to mask his bloodshot eyes. The driver had spent the previous evening kidnapping, binding, torturing, and killing two nursing students from St. Vincent de Paul College in East St. Louis because the