She walked to the corner of the playground and answered it, "hello."
"Miss Schultz." There came the sound of a voice changer, which made it hard to tell the age or gender of the speaker.
"Who's that?" She asked in alarm.
"It doesn't matter who I am. What matters is, do you want to see your boy?"
"You took Kaiden away? Where is he? What do you want?" Savannah couldn't keep calm.
The stranger on the other end of the phone didn't say anything but moved the phone. A muffled hum of a kid came from behind a cloth.
It was not clear, but she knew it was Kaiden's voice.
"If you want to see your son, come to warehouse 19 on the wharf. Oh, I have to remind you, don't tell anyone. Come alone. I will kill your precious son at once if you tell the Sterlings or call the police." With that, the stranger hung up.
Savannah broke out into a cold sweat. Her heart was pounding,
"How's it going, Miss? I will go to the police now." The teacher came over to her anxiously.
"No," said Savannah busily.
"Why?" The teacher stood in amazement.
"Hm... Just now, my family called me and said that they had picked Kaiden up in advance, and they forgot to tell you. I'm sorry." Savannah said and quickly left the kindergarten. She stopped a taxi on the roadside, going straight to the wharf.
When Savannah got there, it was already dark. She found warehouse19 and went in a hurry. It was a warehouse for refrigerated containers.
"Anybody? Here I come! Let Kaiden go!"She summoned up her courage and gave a cry.
Just then, the iron door behind her creaked closed!
All she remembered was a heavy blow to the back of her head.
***
It was already midnight.
The lights in Beverly Hills were all on.
In the living room, Dylan stood in the middle with a dreadfully dark face, his hands behind his back.
Garwood was standing by him, looking as sulky as a bear with a sore head. The bodyguards were coming in and out to report on progress.
Miss Schultz went to the kindergarten to pick up the young master in the evening, but they all disappeared.
It seemed that the young master had been taken away by someone first, and after receiving a call, Miss Schultz suddenly gave up calling the police and left in a hurry.
It looked as if she had been coerced not to tell anyone.
When Mr. Sterling learned of this, he sent someone to comb the kindergarten and the neighborhood but found nothing.
Then he interrogated the staff on duty in the kindergarten personally one by one and got the surveillance video from the security office.
In the surveillance, Kaiden was caught playing on the playground slide when he suddenly seemed to see something and ran to the nearby railing, which could not be captured by the camera.
It could only be confirmed that Kaiden did not appear in the video again after he was lured somewhere. He was f.o.r.c.i.b.l.y taken away by someone.
Footsteps sounded, and a bodyguard hurried in.
"Did you find Miss Schultz's whereabouts?" Garwood asked hurriedly.
"The phone call that Miss Schultz got was from an unregistered card. We cannot find out who's the caller. In the monitoring along the road, we found that after Miss Schultz left the kindergarten, she took a taxi to the wharf's direction. There's no camera there, so we could no longer track her whereabouts. I guess she went to the warehouses on the wharf."
"Have you searched for the wharf?" Garwood frowned.
"A search is underway. But there are hundreds of warehouses on the wharf, and many of them are abandoned and hidden. It will take a long time…."
Dylan's face went darker.
***
Cold.
It was so cold.
It was like falling into a hole in the ice.
Savannah huddled herself and held herself tight but still couldn't resist the bone-chilling chill.
A familiar boy's voice was twittering in the ear.
"Mommy... Mommy..." He poked her as he called her with a trembling voice.
Finally, Savannah was pushed to wake up. The back of her head was throbbing after a heavy knock. She opened her eyes and saw Kaiden squatting in front of her, his nose red.
"Kaiden, are you all right?"She took Kaiden in her arms and felt him up and down, making sure he wasn't hurt. Before she could sigh with relief, she found him damp and cold.
A chill enveloped her. She shivered and went gooseflesh all over.
They seemed to be in a refrigerated container. The temperature here was obviously below freezing!
She and Kaiden were all in light autumn clothes, unable to keep out the cold.
"Mommy, where are we? I'm cold." Kaiden rubbed his hands together and sniffed at his runny nose.
Apparently, the man kidnapped her and Kaiden and put them in the refrigerated container, trying to freeze them to death.
Savannah got up and looked around. The container was confined with no windows, and the only door was a combination lock, making it impossible to escape.
They had to wait for someone outside to come to rescue them.
She walked over to Kaiden and hugged him tightly, trying to keep him warm with her temperature.
Kaiden shivered in Savannah's arms.
After some time, Savannah felt colder and colder, and the temperature seemed to be falling.
"Awful cold, mommy…" Kaiden's teeth chattered from the cold.
Savannah stood up, clapped her hands, and jumped around to stay warm.
"Come on, you will be warmer like me," she uttered a quivering sound.
Kaiden did the same. He rubbed his red nose and began to jump around.
But such exercise could only raise their temperature temporarily.
When the mother and son were tired and sat down panting, their body temperature went lower faster than before.
"Mommy, it seems to be getting colder... I want to sleep." Kaiden shrank into Savannah's arms, his face covered with hoar-frost.
Savannah gritted her teeth as she took off her coat and wrapped it around Kaiden, "Honey, don't sleep. Hold on a little longer, and your daddy will soon come and get us out."
"But I really want to sleep..." Kaiden slowly closed his eyes.