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shadows.
    “I see you,” he said apologetically.
    He was not angry now. He was the Big John I knew. Sadistic John was gone. He seemed nervous, preoccupied. I asked him what had taken him so long and he told me that he went to Spaceplex and “looked for me.” At Spaceplex, he had the manager call the police. And he used the tape that “we” had made to call Aunt Linda and leave her a message.
    I told Big John that I wanted to go to sleep. So he left me for the night. If it were night. I didn’t sleep of course. I only said that to get rid of him.
    I remember everything, but in no particular order. Like the television images flickering on the soundproofed walls in the box where I laid, I can still see flashes of what happened in that dungeon but have no idea which day they occurred. With no windows, no light, no meals, no hope, it was one endless sickening day.

UNUSUAL SUSPECTS
    My television reporting days were often punctuated by reporting to my parents’ house at day’s end, where Dad sat on the other side of the television, a chunk of the left hemisphere of his brain missing after neurosurgery. He had lost the use of his right hand and a lifelong investment in his dental practice, but he was alive and at the time we thought we were lucky. I was dreadful it wouldn’t be for long; having looked up “astrocytoma” in my husband’s Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine , I found a survival rate of thirty percent for that sort of brain tumor. It was a devastating number. Dad turned to me one day and said, “Shorty, you better hurry up and have children.” I didn’t comply fast enough. My first child was named in my father’s memory.
    Dad was the original news hound and never lost that faculty. He always had his face buried behind The New York Times, sections scattered all over the den’s red shag carpet, fingers smudged with newsprint. If news junkie is an inherited trait, my addiction surely came from him. He wanted to know every detail of the stories I was covering and he couldn’t get enough of the Katie Beers case. He and everyone else.
    A swarm of Suffolk police officers camped outside Spaceplex in Nesconset, a stucco behemoth of a building which blended into the rainy winter landscape. Inside, the cavernous play space glowed with disco lights. Co-owner and general manager Gary Tuzzalo was granting interviews, one at a time. He was practiced, but his curt answers and focused grey eyes couldn’t hide the tell-tale look of panic over the thought of a missing child in his arcade.
    “It’s hard; we see hundreds of families in here a day. It’s hard to pick out one face.”
    Did anyone see a child taken from here with a stranger?
    “We have private security, we have staff, and nothing strange seemed to happen.”
    Did you see John Esposito?
    “He went to one of the mangers and said ‘I can’t find a little girl,’ so we began paging her and when she didn’t answer the page, the police were called.”
    Spaceplex was a very noisy place. Maddeningly noisy. Midnight blue walls were painted with tempera cartoon characters and in the vast space below them, kids held tight to their daddies’ hands, nibbled on salted pretzels, took aim into skee-ball machines and crashed blinking bumper cars into one another. It was business as usual in the frenetic space, but for the reporters talking to tuxedo-shirted employees, scribbling down notes on spiral steno pads.
    Outside, what looked like a class of police cadets searched in and under big blue dumpsters and walked through the leafless forest around the building, eyes fixed downward, scouring the ground for clues.
    Randy Jaret, a spokesman for the Suffolk Police Department, agreed to an on-camera interview. He wore plainclothes and spoke in plain English.
    Was John Esposito cooperating?
    “We have been talking to Mr. Esposito—of course we would want to talk with the last person she was with—and yes he’s cooperating.”
    What has he told you?
    “He