Lost Girls

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Emily’s fingers bled more, which bothered her not so much because of the pain, but because the blood made holding the wire more difficult. She had tripled the wire, which, while strengthening it, had also correspondingly shortened it, making it more difficult to work with. All morning long she had made slight adjustments to the wire, bending it so slightly, there were times she wasn’t sure she had actually even done anything to it.

Taking a break, she glanced up through the leaves of the oak tree and checked the sun’s position. Mid-day, give or take an hour. She carefully put the wire down on a leaf and flexed her hands, feeling the pain as the cuts in her fingers pulsed out in protest. She ran her tongue around her lips, which were already cracking.

Emily shook her head. Do not think about water.

Think about something else. Something useful. She tried to remember the drive. How long had she been out? She didn’t think it had been more than a day. She vaguely remembered that the van had stopped somewhere en route. She’d been awake for a little while. She glanced down at her arm, at the two puncture marks. He’d drugged her again. But there had been that moment of semi-awareness between the first injection wearing off and the second one kicking in.

Something about that stop nagged at her, begging to be remembered. Emily closed her eyes, blocking out, one by one, the input from her senses, focusing inward. The way her father had taught her to focus. She flowed backward into the memory of those senses.

Had it been something she saw? No, there had only been darkness until he took the blindfold off here in the forest.

Smell? It was the most powerful of the five senses, she knew that from her physiological psychology class.

Yes. Grass. Freshly cut.

Emily felt a slight prick of excitement. He had not planned for her to awaken during the trip. But she had. So he’d made a mistake. One mistake could mean he’d made others.

She opened her eyes and picked up the wire, sliding it into the lock, gingerly working it once more, her earlier weariness replaced by a surge of energy.

There was something else from that stop. She had been slipping into a drug-induced fog, but she knew she had made a discovery during that brief window of consciousness. Something else the man didn’t know. She lost herself in the thought and the lock but nothing was forthcoming.

Finally, she once more noticed the sun overhead and was happy to have at least five more hours of sunlight. She stopped picking at the lock for a moment, and studied her tree and the position of the sun.

The side of the clearing facing her seemed to be west. Unless the loon had driven beyond her little prison, and walked her back to confuse her; she would go east when she got this fucking chain off her foot. Why would he try to confuse her though? Emily doubted he planned for her to escape this tree. She had been driven from Panama City and it had been less than a day. He would not have sped, not taking the chance of getting pulled over with a blindfolded, drugged girl in the back.

Sixteen hours. Seventy miles an hour.

Emily felt some of her new-found confidence slip as she realized that added up to over eleven hundred miles. A damn big circle. The entire southeast, then north to Virginia, west into Texas. She knew that she wasn’t in Florida any more: too many deciduous trees. Staring at the deep green of the newly leafed trees Emily started remembering, conjuring up the smell of green: freshly-cut grass with a mix of pungent wild onions. And then, like the gentle clicking of a metronome, she heard the wire scraping the steel and her memory fell into consciousness. The music. She had heard music then when the van had stopped. It was a canned metallic sound coming from poor-quality speakers. She could see from another memory the speakers nailed to the trees surrounding the small brick and wood building. And everywhere there is the perfectly coiffed grass around the rest area. She and her friends had driven to New Orleans many times from Auburn. The last rest stop on the Interstate before you leave the highway plays Cajun music. Once she and Lisa had stopped to pee and fell into an impromptu dance on the lawn.

She had been there. She tried to remember how long the drive from school had taken. If she factored in the additional time of leaving from Panama City that made it about four hours. If the drug wore off around the time the loon pulled onto that rest stop, then she was initially unconscious four hours. She supposed he would maintain the same travel time, so that by the time of her next and, she was sure, last shot they had traveled five hundred more miles. If he had continued west that would put her somewhere in Texas. But she didn’t know of any place in Texas this well forested. If he had turned north at any time she could really be anywhere in Louisiana or Arkansas. Not Louisiana she decided looking around, unless it was the far northern part of the state. Most likely Arkansas.

The important thing was that she had some idea of her geographical location, and a direction to take if she ever got out of the shackle. She dropped all other thoughts, and focused on picking the lock. She smiled. If someone had seen her at that moment, he or she would have been stunned at the beautiful half-naked, young girl wearing a small smile of self-satisfaction. She appeared the most relaxed and confident of women.

The Sniper frowned at her smile and change in demeanor. It filled the lens of his scope and he placed the reticule right on her white teeth, his finger sliding over the trigger. It would be so easy to take away the smile and her entire essence.

But he was not that tempted. She was a piece of the plan. There were bigger and better things in store for her. She was the linchpin around which the entire plan revolved. He put the rifle down and leaned back in his camp chair set in the three-foot deep hole. He’d built the blind two hundred meters away from the oak tree, carefully camouflaging the top and leaving just a small slit in front so that he observe the target. There was a large hole in the back so that he could come and go without being spotted.

The Sniper knew what would wipe the smile off the girl’s face. He reached in to his pocket and pulled out a small piece of plastic. He looked at her picture on the license. She had not been smiling when the photo was taken.

That had been smart of her, dropping it. But after chaining her to the tree, he’d checked their back trail, making sure it was covered, and found it just as she’d intended, except, of course, in the hope some would-be rescuer would have picked it up.

He took the license and ran one hard corner along the scar on the side of his head, trying to cure the itch that burned there.

It didn’t help. He knew it wouldn’t. There was only one thing that would cure that itch.

When the plan came together.

He slid the license back into his pocket. He would take the smile off her face tonight.

Gant watched Golden sleep. It was a short flight to Pensacola, and then there would be a drive to the coast. Golden had fallen asleep as soon as she fastened her seat belt. He was unhappy with her presence, especially after realizing her previous relationship with Colonel Cranston. Gant knew that Nero would never bow to any external pressure regarding a Sanction. But the woman behind the desk, Masterson, he knew nothing about her. Was Golden here because she was to truly be an asset or because Cranston, or someone Cranston knew who had some real power, was pulling strings? So far Golden had contributed nothing to the investigation in Gant’s opinion.

“Better watch out; your head is going to burst into flames.”

Gant looked into her now open eyes. “You have a bit of drool on your chin.”

She didn’t take the bait. “Lets just talk about it. No way are we going to be able to work together when you’re acting like you got the slow girl in a three-legged race.”

“What do you mean?” He tried to look surprised.

“Please do not treat me like an idiot. I know you don’t want me tagging along, but that’s ok. You don’t know me, and you don’t know my work. I understand that I haven’t proven myself to you, but I don’t understand this other thing: this dislike you’re carrying around when you specifically don’t know me.”

“I don’t know why I need a psychologist on this mission.”

She reached into her backpack and pulled out a small laptop. “Because of what I know and what’s in here.”

Gant didn’t like being baited into asking the obvious, so he waited.

“Speed is of the essence in tracking these perps down,” Golden finally said.

“If the Cranston girl is still alive,” Gant noted.

“You know she’s alive,” Golden shot back.

“How do I know that?”

“Because she’s bait.”

Score one for the shrink, Gant thought.

“The bait for what?” Gant asked.

Golden shrugged. “That, I don’t know. If it were simple revenge, Emily would be dead. There has got to be a reason they’re keeping her alive.”

“You said perps and they.”

“Are you asking how I know there’s more than one or questioning my choice of terms?”

“Both.”

“If you’re going to ask me things you already know,” Golden said, a trace of irritation crossing her face, “then we’re going to waste a lot of time. You know there’s got to be more than one person doing these crimes simply because of the logistics and distances involved.”

Gant nodded, giving her that point.

“As far as the term perp, that comes from my background with the FBI. I was with Behavioral Sciences in Quantico for eight years before going to Fort Bragg.”

Gant wished someone would have told him that. But it made her actions at the first site near the lake kind of strange. Unless she had never done field-work.

“I call them targets,” Gant said.

“You would.”

“You didn’t do field work,” Gant said it as a statement.

“You know I didn’t from observing me with the body.”

Gant began to wonder if they needed to talk about anything. She seemed far along the curve of his thoughts, which made uneasy. “Why did you leave the FBI?”

“I didn’t. I was sent to Bragg to help Special Operations Command set up its own database. I was still assigned to the Bureau.”

“A database of perps in Special Ops?”

“Profiling isn’t just for bad people.” Golden flipped up the lid to the laptop. “You can profile anyone. I did profiles of everyone serving in SOCOM. I also worked on profiling various positions and the type of person who would best be suited for filling that position.”

Gant frowned. He’d never heard of this but it made sense. “And that’s how you met Colonel Cranston?”

“Yes.”

He noted she wasn’t being forthcoming about that. “I still don’t see how your profiling can help on this Sanction.”

“I was at Special Operations Command to ostensibly evaluate personnel for assignments.” Golden spread her hands. “But it’s obvious someone else had something else planned since I’m here now. I suspect someone had something secondary in mind, especially given my background working with perps.”

Nero, Gant thought. Always planning. Always seeding people. Sometimes waiting years for the seeds to grow and bear fruit. Which made him wonder about Masterson and how she had been seeded and cultivated. Gant waited on Golden to continue, tired of the sparring and digging.

“When I was with the FBI I was still a psychologist; I just didn’t see patients any more. I was building a nation-wide database to catch serial killers by using available information. I took clues, evidence or an actual list of suspects, and tried to identify the one person whose past most closely fits the evidence of the present crime.”

Gant nodded. “As you said, you’re a kind of profiler.”

Golden shook her head. “Not exactly. I was doing something new, something different. A profiler uses the evidence to describe the type of human being capable of the crime. My section took the profile, and tried to find the human being capable of that type of evidence. We had records beginning from the early 50’s, which is about the time that information collection became common. We used anything from emergency room records to a school nurse’s recording of a child’s peculiar scars.”

“So you think you’re going to find these guys by checking out their high school truancy report?”

“That’s a stupid remark. My program at the FBI faltered because the country’s population was so big, and the available information on each particular person so scanty. To prove my program worked, I needed a smaller number database with more available information on each individual.”

“The Army.”

Golden nodded. “Yes. And not even the entire Army, but rather a specific subsection of it, Special Operations, where there are extensive records on each individual and their backgrounds and their training highly scrutinized and recorded.”

“To look for serial killers?”

“No. At least that wasn’t what I was told. Officially SOCOM wanted to get better at identifying the types of soldiers in its units and which ones were successful and which ones weren’t so that could refine their recruitment and training process. Also, I worked with the Special Warfare Training Center, which Sam commanded, in their selection and assessment process.”

Gant remembered the psychological screening process he’d gone through years ago when he’d gone into his first Special Operations unit. He mentally processed what Golden had just told him. “So you can check your database and try to find the targets that would do these things?”

“Yes. At least get us a ballpark list.”

“And you planned on doing this when?”

“When you’re done asking me questions.” She paused. “However, I’ve been off the job for a year, so I need to update my database.”

Gant held up a hand. “Wait. I need to understand this. I work off what I see, hard evidence. You’re working off of theory. You give me a target, I’m not going to be reading him a Miranda warning. I’m going to be pointing a gun at his head with my finger on the trigger. I need more than just a best guess.”

“I’m not guessing,” Golden said. “I have spent most of my professional career working on the theory behind predictive indicators. Before I was recruited into the FBI I was in private practice, dealing mostly with young adults in the court system. After a few years of dealing with the broken psyches that a truly dysfunctional home can produce, I was left wondering why only a handful of men, because they are always men, become sexual sadists and murderers. At first I thought it was the depth of the abuse. Then I wondered if it was the length of the abuse. After years of investigating the backgrounds of true sexual sadists, I became of the opinion that it was the perversity of the abuse that set the stage for killing. Sometimes, I think there may be a genetic code for sadism, and that the parent introduces the stressor which produces the inevitable psychic break.”

Gant took the opportunity to voice his opinion. “That’s exactly the kind of crap I hate. I don’t give a shit how fucked your childhood is, if you’re not crazy, and these guys aren’t in the legal sense of the word, your behavior is a choice. Like you said, women don’t commit these crimes, yet they come from places just as fucked up. I know your work is important, but you’re just giving these guys an excuse.”

“OK, now I want you to tell me what you really think.” Surprisingly she was smiling.

Gant realized she’d pushed him for a reaction and he’d fallen into it.

Golden leaned forward. “What my research does is to help catch these killers. I don’t care if it gives them an excuse from here to China. The point is that if we can track some guy down by the cigarette burns on his feet from childhood then great.

“Of course, it’s not as simple as that. But I know it can work because we did track down a killer using the database when I was at the FBI. They gave me the scene of the crime, and I gave the agents conditions that could produce such a sadistic response. And we were lucky, because the situation indicated the killer was based at Fort Sill and I was allowed access to the personnel files of everyone there.”

“Tell me about it,” Gant said, intrigued in spite of his misgivings.

“We had three bodies within six months all found in abandoned sheds around small farms on the outskirts of Fort Sill. The women were different races, different ages and had different builds so the conventional profilers were having trouble from the get-go. The victims had all been strangled and they also had severe postmortem injuries. They had all been violated with branches from nearby trees. Also, the branches became larger with each murder, so that the last victim was basically ripped in half to accommodate what was essentially a tree limb.” She stopped talking and leaned back covering her eyes with a hand as if blocking out the picture.

“I thought you didn’t do field work,” Gant said.

“I did all this from Quantico. They gave me access to the photos and videos of the crime scenes.”

For a moment Gant felt sorry for her. She knew too much. Had seen too many things that were beyond comprehension. He realized he had ascribed the wrong motives for her reaction at the kill scene in Tennessee. But the feeling passed quickly.

Golden finished the story. “The reinvention here was the branch. That the victims were killed by manual strangulation meant that there was strong emotion involved. The killer hated these women and killed them in a brutal but also sexualized manner. The signature of the murders, the tree branches, occurred after death.

“The victims shared no physical traits, so one must assume that they themselves were of little importance to the fantasy of this killer. The postmortem violation evolved as the killings continued. This to me was significant. I began my search in the medical records for boys or adolescents abused with branches or wood of any type. I found a medical report for a ten-year old boy born in Oklahoma. He had been hospitalized because, according to his mother, he had been climbing a tree and fell. On his way down, he hit a limb and drove a small branch up his rectum, which perforated his abdominal wall. The boy was also covered with bruises and he had old bondage scars. He was taken from his mother and placed in foster care. His mother successfully litigated for custody. He was returned to live with her. Unsupervised. After that he joined the army, but luckily for us his medical records followed him and he was arrested for the three murders. He confessed within thirty minutes.”

“Shit.” Gant wondered if the whole world was mad.

“No shit.” Golden wasn’t smiling, but she did seem to understand his thoughts.

“So when are you going to run this program?” Gant asked.

“It’s been running,” Golden said. “It takes a while but I really don’t have enough data yet.”

“You mean killings.”

“I also need to update my data at Bragg.”

“Why were you living on Hilton Head?” Gant asked, the unexpected question causing her to stare at him in surprise.

“After my son—“ she paused. “I was offered free use of a house there.”

“By who?”

“A man from Special Operations Command. Why do you ask?”

“I was living on Pritchards Island. One island up the coast. For a year and a half. Nero knew this. I don’t think you were offered a house so close to me by chance.”

Both fell silent as the plane banked and descended, taking them toward another scene of violence.

Emily tried to control her breathing as she increased the pressure on the wire. It had taken her four hours to get to this point. The near end pushed deeper into the open wounds on the tips of her fingers but she ignored the pain. She was on the latch, she was sure of it. And it was moving. Just a little bit more—

A guttural cry escaped her lips as the wire snapped, the bloody remnant slipping from her fingers and falling into the dirt. Emily began sobbing and this time she couldn’t stop. She curled into a tight ball, arms clasped around her knees, the sudden defeat layered on top of the strain of the past twenty-four hours breaking through her dam of resolve.

From his hide position, the Sniper calmly watched the girl. Then he nodded to himself as he gathered his gear, confident she wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. Most importantly, she wasn’t smiling any more.