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  “Sammy would’ve been eleven tomorrow,” Black Jack gloomily remarked after he read the last of the faxes Sam had passed on to him.

  “He will be eleven tomorrow,” Sam corrected him, then instinctively looked to his calendar. It was March 18, 1995.

  As the years passed, treating his son’s existence became more and more ambiguous to many of his acquaintances and friends, even to Black Jack, his closest friend, but never to Sam who refused to believe in anything other than his little Sammy being alive. In his darkest hours throughout the yet-to-be-resolved ordeal, he would refuse to succumb to morbid thoughts concerning his son’s being. Lately he had begun to concede the idea that he may never get to see his son again, but never would he concede to thinking he no longer lived. This belief was quintessential to Sam’s own survival and he had told Black Jack early on, that so long as there was no hard proof, he would never accept such a fate, and if he ever did, he would have nothing to live for.

  Sam’s brother, Robert, three years his senior, a professor of law at UCLA, had been the first to arrive at the hospital. Black Jack, one of the first detectives to reach the dreadful murder scene, had found his phone number in Michelle’s Rolodex in the kitchen and had delivered the horrible news, suggesting he hurry to the hospital to be with his brother. Robert had called Sam’s sister, Rebecca, and she had alerted his parents.

  His entire family was by his bedside when he awoke early the following morning but he would not utter a word to any of them. Then he tried to flee his bed and had to be sedated again. He floated in and out of consciousness, whispering his son’s name from time to time but it was only when Detective Black Jack appeared that Sam had, for a few minutes at least, shown any interest in what was being said around him. Michelle’s mother, Laura Kent, arrived that afternoon without Michelle’s father, James, who later spoke to Sam briefly at the funeral, then never spoke to him again. Michelle’s sisters, Sally and Cindy, both married and living on the East Coast, just made it to the funeral. James Kent would blame Sam for his daughter’s terrible death and later suffer a fatal cardiac arrest, the result of bitterness and reproach he could not curtail.

  Sam would wonder about the funeral for many years to come and he was convinced that it was there, alongside his wife’s fresh grave that he would cease to embrace the faith he had in human nature and inverted his attitude toward life.

  Sitting in the wheelchair above the black pit into which they were about to lower his wife’s lifeless body, paying little attention to the words being spoken, he tried to envisage her as he knew her, but couldn’t. Her final pose overshadowed every memory he had of her: her body, violated; her flesh ashen; life so cruelly drained out of her. He could not erase the memory, nor could he continue to view mankind as he had his entire life.

  Before they married, Michelle had once told him that what she loved most about him, was his no-nonsense, reckless faith in people. Sam believed it to be true. He did not deem himself naive or unseeing but he never wished to doubt people’s motives. He knew, of course, that deceit existed all around him, but in his personal dealings with people he believed he could overcome intrinsic suspicion with simple straightforwardness. To women and men alike, he believed in speaking God’s honest truth, presenting himself as is, with no hidden agenda. People would naturally become skeptical of such simplicity but would seize such quality once convinced it was sincere. He had his eccentricities and scruples with society but he lived with a naive sense of security that basic mankind was good and bad things did not happen to people who functioned honestly.

  He knew it to be his mother, Diane, who instilled that trust in him. She had been an educator all her life, teaching kindergarten, elementary school, high school, and college, and it was her extraordinary presence, conveying patience and leniency, that most influenced his childhood. His father, Stewart, had become a judge when Sam was still a toddler and that had taught him diplomacy and compromise at a very young age. He had mostly gotten his way with both his older brother and younger sister employing those inherited virtues and had later coasted through life in similar fashion. A family friend had once told him that she thought he was the most balanced of the Baker children, his brother being overly ambitious and his sister overly anxious to please.

  Besides the grievance and sense of loss, Michelle’s rape and murder left him wondering what evil nature existed in humans ready to commit such acts to other humans who did them no harm. The tragedy had a profound effect on what followed. Refusing to go back to his house, his parents, sister, and brother took turns lodging him during the first few weeks following his release from the hospital. He became weary and aloof, practically unreachable. He sat brooding for days, cocooned in his misery. His law firm colleagues came by, several old college friends, Michelle’s sisters and mother, and even Albert Sweeny, senior partner at the firm, suggesting Sam would be better off keeping himself busy at work. But Sam had retreated into a state of mind so withdrawn, no one, not even his mother, could reach him. It was only when Black Jack would arrive with updates of the investigation, that Sam would show any spark of awareness, only to be thrown back into his torment when odds remained bleak.

  His mother, Diane, suffered for him more than anyone did. Trauma from the ghastly affair, losing a daughter-in-law and a grandson, along with such drastic change in her son, proved too much even for her. Her son’s reaction was, at first, reasoned to be a mourning period, a period of adjustment, but it went far beyond. She knew the change in him went much deeper and was much more significant than what would ordinarily be considered grief. She knew that, together with his wife, his natural optimism had died, his naive trust in people, his kindness. The light that had always flickered in him had been extinguished and she felt it her responsibility, her burden, to bring him back from the dead. When he did not react to her efforts, her world collapsed. She suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for a month. She returned, not the same person, in need of constant medication.

  It was three months before Sam set foot in his home. Black Jack had accompanied him. He walked around feeling his wife and son’s presence everywhere. The place had not been altered. The police had left it as he had last seen it except for the bloodied covers and sheets, which had been checked for traces of semen and prints and discarded. His brother Robert had offered to have the house cleaned but Sam wanted it left alone. When he reached the bedroom, he had a momentary lapse, feeling faint again, but regained his poise, walked in and sat on the bed, Black Jack watching from the doorway. Sam surveyed the room, chilled to the bone. He looked up at Black Jack and began to sob, silently at first, then in short gasps, cupping his face with his hands. Later, sitting opposite Black Jack at a nearby coffee shop, he heard the horrifying details for the first time as Black Jack disclosed the gruesome findings of his investigation. Sam sat through it, feeling numb, as he found out his wife, cuffed to the bed frame, had not only been raped but sodomized as well before being shot from point blank range by a 9mm Beretta. Evidence found in the house clearly identified two men from semen samples found on Michelle’s body and fingerprints in the bedroom. He thought of her there, helpless, being butchered by animals. Feeling totally impotent he began to sob once again. Black Jack had paused, then offered to stop, but Sam, through his tears, urged him on.

  Prints were found all over the place, but had not been matched with any local or federal offenders. The two had obviously been careless covering their tracks, leading investigators to believe they were foreigners but Interpol and other foreign agencies had come up empty as well.

  There were no witnesses who could point to a strange car or prowlers in the neighborhood at the time. None of the neighbors saw or heard anything out of the ordinary that night and no random passerby had come forth with any useful information. The two men had come in, performed their terrible deed, and were gone - presumably with little Sammy - like ghosts in the night. The search for little Sammy had also proved fruitless. Local and state police, federal and border autho
rities had been alerted a mere seven hours after Sammy had presumably been kidnapped but three months into the investigation no solid identification of him had been established. Black Jack had gotten a few reports of toddlers fitting the description and had pursued several of those leads with a vengeance, but came up empty each time.

  Sam managed only a few months back at the office, getting nowhere with work. Files piled high on his desk, memos and phone messages were ignored as he sat in his chair unable to allot any attention to everyday chores. The first few days were spent staring into space waiting for word on his missing son. Devastated by his predicament and the barren investigation, as the weeks dragged on, it became apparent that he could not perform his duties. The firm’s seven partners, Sam’s colleagues, secretaries and clients alike, had all tried in vain to lull him back to existence but his torment was just too great to overcome. Eventually any pending cases were assigned to other attorneys and Sam’s contribution was reduced to meager assistance of the attorneys assigned his cases. Finally, almost a year after the tragedy, when Detective Black Jack had formed his federal task force for locating missing children, Sam took all vacation days owed him, then resigned from the firm and dedicated his life to locating his son and other children with similar fates.

  By the time Sam had offered to join Black Jack’s task force, the investigation into Sammy’s disappearance had taken a slight turn for the better. Agents got a break when Interpol discovered an Algerian ring assisting divorced Muslim fathers snatch children away to Northern Africa from their estranged Western European wives, mostly from France and Belgium where mixed marriages were quite common. The most prevalent way of abducting these children away from their mothers was a seemingly innocent vacation to the father’s homeland from which child and father would never return. The more suspicious mothers would not allow such a vacation and end up getting a divorce and custody of the kids before letting the child out of their sight. It was these divorced fathers who used the Algerian ring’s services. They would trap the child at school or at a playground then smuggle him or her out of the country by cargo boat.

  A French newspaper reporter investigating complaints on behalf of a group of victimized mothers whose children had been kidnapped, but whose resident Governments were too constrained by international treaties and political considerations to deal with the matter, stumbled upon the ring and alerted Interpol and the French police. After further investigation and verification of corroborating evidence, a suspicious merchant ship hauling grain for Algiers was put under surveillance in Marseilles and the offense was eventually observed. The conspirators were caught red-handed with twin boys they had snatched from a playground in Paris.

  A photo of a child resembling Sammy Jr. was found in possession of the ring after the French police raided their hideout in Nice, confiscating incriminating materials which included lists of names, addresses and photographs of children.

  Sam and Black Jack flew to France to look at the photos and list of names. The resemblance to Sammy was not conclusive and his name was not found in any of the lists. Still, it was more to go on than they had ever had. It turned out the names on the list were all aliases, not the children’s real names. The mother of the kidnapped twins and another, who clearly identified her daughter from the photos, soon discovered their marked children were cataloged with false names. The captured kidnappers, working on orders from a larger organization assumed to be based in Libya, were not aware the children’s names were false.

  It gave Sam and Black Jack some more hope. The name assigned to the child resembling Sammy was Jacques Piccard, his address in an apartment building in La Defense, Paris. Sam and Black Jack joined the French police inspecting the apartment but found it had been vacated by a family with two children, a boy and a girl, only a few months before. The current male resident had never met the family but neighbors and the building’s superintendent recalled the boy was about Sammy’s age. A copy of the lease and information from the landlord’s office revealed the family name was Trevor, not Piccard, and the boy’s name was Jon. Further investigation revealed the family had moved to a small village in the French Alps.

  With help from the French reporter who had discovered the ring, Christine Patrese by name, Sam and Black Jack located the family in Chamonix, a picturesque ski resort in a hidden valley not far from the French-Swiss border, altitude three thousand meters. The parents, Serge and Jeanne Trevor, had found jobs at the resort, he as the resort’s accountant, she as a ski instructor. Their two children were receiving ski lessons when Sam first saw them. The boy was Sammy’s age and could be said to resemble him.

  The mother, Jeanne Trevor, was caught totally unprepared when Sam first approached her with the tale. They had discreetly inquired about her when they first arrived at Chamonix intending to approach her alone, not knowing how aware she was of the danger, if at all, assuming her husband was the reason little Jon Trevor had appeared on the list. A fellow ski instructor at the resort cafeteria pointed her out to Sam who cornered her alone at her table. At first she refused to acknowledge there was any threat to her children but eventually revealed that Serge Trevor was not the children’s biological father but her second husband. Her first, a carpenter by trade, named Abdul Rahimi, the children’s biological father, had decided to return to his home country of Morocco, shortly after little Jon was born. Jeanne had no intentions of following her husband to his homeland, so he filed for a divorce, intending to take his son with him; for their four-year-old daughter, Maya, he had no use.

  After failing to win custody in court, he tried to kidnap little Jon himself from their home, but the babysitter had alerted Jeanne in time to thwart the attempt. Before he left for Morocco, Rahimi swore he would return for his son. Jeanne and her family had been on the move ever since. She married Serge Trevor, a high school sweetheart, as soon as she could, adopting his family name, then moved twice within Paris before landing the job in Chamonix. Obviously, she mused, they had done a poor job covering their tracks, if Sam and his crew were able to find them so effortlessly.

  She was quite shaken by the news that her son was on a list of children to be kidnapped but was grateful for the advance warning. She opted not to involve her husband at that stage and took Sam to see two-year-old Jon taking his first ski lesson at the resort’s daycare center. As he watched him, tears welling up in his eyes, the now familiar feeling of despair engulfed him, and once again he wondered if he would ever get to see his own son taking ski lessons or any lessons.

  The failed endeavor in France was a blow, but out of it sprang reinforced ties to various European agencies working to similar objectives. The Federal Task Force for the Location of Missing Children, commonly referred to as LMC, was a country wide organization assembled from cross disciplines such as law enforcement, both federal and local agencies, private investigators, psychologists, social workers, civil servants and a few attorneys who handled legal matters and international disputes. Sam was originally accepted to perform legal duties but was given a more active role when it became apparent he would not remain behind his desk. He soon became an expert on worldwide matters having to do with child abduction and kidnapping. It became his life. He shunned any and all activities not strictly related to the pursuit of locating missing children. He knew names, locations, size and make of any illegal indulgence in child abuse of organizations and people under LMC investigation. One had only to ask Sam rather than look for a file to get an answer to whatever it was he or she was looking for. He memorized entire files of child abduction incidents to the smallest detail and would eventually help the team piece cases together. He became so proficient at what he did that he was eventually put in charge of the western United States section, compensating for his lack of investigative experience with ambition, fervor and a sense of purpose unmatched by anyone on the force. Finding Sammy Jr. was what drove him but he was passionate and involved with all cases under his responsibility and soon every missing child became his Sammy.

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nbsp; He was sometimes accused of making irrational decisions, becoming too emotionally involved with his cases. In one such case, a seven-year-old boy had to be liberated from a cult his mother had joined, tearing herself and the boy from the father and two older sisters. The father had tried for years to win custody, claiming the cult was depriving his son of a normal upbringing and education, instilling in him traits that would, eventually, deprive him of properly functioning in society. The mother, represented by the cult’s leader, a high school drop-out, unemployed Guru-turned-lawyer, argued the definition of “normal upbringing” proclaiming the cult’s way superior to any “Western” type upbringing. After three appeals, Utah’s Supreme Court finally ruled in the father’s favor. The father had managed to sneak into the cult’s encampment and videotape ongoing activities such as his wife indulging in sexual intercourse with two men out in the open, her son and several other children splashing themselves silly in a neighboring stream, meters away. He had also managed to shoot her sniffing a white substance, through her bunk window, though it was never proven she was doing drugs. A panel of three judges ruled the cult an inappropriate environment for bringing up children, claiming no facilities, tools, and/or educated personnel to provide for children so young. The panel judged the mother unfit to provide for her boy based on the videotape, which was admitted as evidence though taken illegally, and testimony from two former cult members who were dug up by a private investigator employed by the father.

  Shortly after the ruling, when the father, escorted by county sheriffs, came by to claim his son, the two, mother and son, had disappeared. The cult people pleaded ignorance, claiming she escaped on her own. Statewide and federal searches came up empty and after six futile months, the matter was turned to Black Jack’s task force, LMC.