Abandoned

CHAPTER TWENTY

I walk into the hospital feeling refreshed and alert. It has been quite a morning, between the director’s phone call and HOA Darleen, but coffee, hugs from my daughter, and some satisfying last-minute shower sex have lifted my spirits considerably.

Alan and Burns are waiting at reception. Alan’s chatting with Kirby, who I’d called and asked to meet me. There’s another man standing off to the side. He’s thin and bald and watchful. He’s listening to everything without participating in any of it, and something about him makes me certain that this is Kirby’s second man. He seems mild enough on the surface, but I smell “predator.”

Kirby spots me first and flashes one of those über-white beach-bunny grins. “Hey, boss woman!”

I smile as I walk up to them. “Hi, Kirby. Alan, Detective Burns.”

Kirby frowns, cocks her head, and peers at me. “Hmmmmm,” she says.

“What?”

“You have that freshly fucked look.” She sidles up next to me and bumps me with a hip. “Did someone get lucky this morning?”

I’m mortified to find that I’m blushing. For his part, Alan smiles. Burns watches it all, fascinated. “None of your beeswax. Can I talk to you outside?”

She winks. “Sure thing. Come on, Raymond,” she says to the thin, bald man. “Time to go to work.”

Raymond doesn’t respond, but I get the idea he’ll follow. “I’ll be right back,” I tell Alan and Burns.

The three of us exit through the automatic doors. The sky above is covered in clouds. It’s a gloomy morning, though that could change by noon.

“Smoky, this is Raymond,” Kirby says, introducing us.

“Pleased to meet you,” I say, not really meaning it.

Raymond doesn’t speak, but he nods. Barely. He has green eyes. They contain a faraway look that I don’t like.

“Raymond and I did some work together down in Central America,” Kirby says. “He’s got great instincts, and I trust him.”

I don’t, but I let it go.

“Bonnie had some concerns,” I say. I tell her about our conversation at breakfast.

“Jeez,” Kirby says, somehow pouting and rolling her eyes at the same time. “You’d think having a bodyguard would be, like, a status symbol for a kid or something. But, hey, no problema. We’ll keep back unless we gotta kill someone, right, Raymond?”

Raymond nods, still wordless. I decide I’ve had enough of his menacing-silence act.

“I need to hear your voice,” I say to him. “If you’re going to guard my daughter, I need to hear your voice.”

He doesn’t reply. He glances at Kirby and raises his eyebrows.

“Uhhh … awwwkward!” Kirby says. “Raymond can’t talk, babe. Someone tried to cut his throat a few years back. He lived, but his vocal cords are screwed.”

“Oh. Shit. Sorry, Raymond,” I manage. “Now I feel like a complete idiot.”

Raymond reaches inside his jacket. He comes out with a notepad and writes something down. He hands it over to me. I read:

DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

Then:

IF ANYONE COMES TO HURT HER, I’LL KILL THEM. GUARANTEED.

I hand the notebook back to him. It’s a strange reassurance, this promise of murder, and disturbingly comforting. “Fair enough,” I say. What else is there to say?

“Cool stuff,” Kirby says. “You have her school address?”

I’d written it down on a sheet of paper this morning. I give it to her.

“Raymond and I will go there now. We’ll do the first day together, get the lay of the land, and then we’ll figure out the best use of our time.” She smiles, dazzling me. “Righty-right?”

“Sounds good.”

“Right on!” she cries, lifting both hands, fingers configured in the universal horns salute of rock-and-roll lovers everywhere. They walk away like a spiritual Mutt and Jeff: the assassin who can’t talk and the one who talks too much. I watch them leave and then head back into the hospital. I reunite with Alan and Burns.

“Interesting crowd you hang with,” Burns observes. “Girl scared me, but at least she’s cute. The undertaker-looking guy just gave me the creepy-crawlies.”

“Me too,” I admit.

Hopefully the bad guys will feel the same.

Heather Hollister’s eye movements have slowed. They no longer dance over everything like a crack-addled ballerina, now they simply stare. She is lying on her back, arms folded over her stomach, staring at the white hospital ceiling. Her mouth is closed. Only the rise and fall of her chest and the occasional blink let us know she’s alive.

Burns stands just inside the room, staring at her. His mouth has fallen open, and his eyes are filled with a heartbreaking blend of raw hurt and exhausted spirit. I imagine he is seeing her at twelve, staring up at him with solemn eyes, telling him to catch the man who killed her daddy. It was a promise he’d been unable to keep, and things have gotten far, far worse.

He moves toward her bed. He finds a chair, and sits down next to her. His movements belong on a much older man. He reaches over and takes one of her hands in his. Alan and I stand back, watching, feeling like intruders at a funeral.

“Heather, honey, it’s Daryl Burns.” He squeezes her hand. “Can you hear me?”

I imagine the faintest twitch of her eye.

Burns sighs. “I guess I really let you down, honey. I’m sorry about that. One thing I can tell you, though, is we got that snake that called himself your husband. Douglas was up to his ears in this.”

This time I’m certain; I see the faintest tremor in the placid lake Heather’s become. Burns senses it as well. He cranes forward.

“You can hear me, can’t you? Come on, Heather. I know you’ve been through enough, God knows it’s more than anyone could handle, but you can’t stay locked away like this. We need you to help us get the man who did this to you.” He’s squeezing her hand, stroking it, and he looks more like a father to me than ever. “We need to get the bastard who cut off your beautiful hair, honey. Remember how you told me you had your dad’s hair?” His voice cracks. I think that Burns is an old-school man, raised in the tradition of hiding your tears, but he doesn’t even bother with an embarrassed glance back at us. He’s too humbled by his own pain to care.

The tremor passes over her now without stopping, like a pile of windblown leaves dancing in circles, aimless but vital and sometimes even beautiful. It’s a sign of life, however distorted, and Burns seizes on it as we watch.

“Heather? That’s it, honey. Come on back. I’m right here. It’s safe.”

She blinks a few times, then faster. Her cheek twitches. She turns to look at Burns, and it’s the motion of a skeleton turning on its own bones, like a creaky door. She opens her mouth and she laughs, a high, horrible cackle. It sends shivers down my spine. If birds were around to hear it, they’d fly off in terror.

“Saaaaafe …?” she croaks. Then the laughter again, but tears follow as well, cascading down her cheeks. Her face glitters in its pain, contorted by laughter that’s really just another form of screaming.

Burns gapes at it all, taken aback. He seems at a loss for what to do. He recovers quickly. His face sets into grim lines, but it’s contrived, a man pulling on a mask.

“Knock that shit off right now, Officer Hollister!” he barks. “Wherever you were, you’re not there now, and we need your help to catch the man who did this to you. Pull yourself together!”

It achieves the desired effect. The awful laughing stops. The tears roll on, staining the white bedsheets with water fingerprints. “D-Daryl …” she chokes. “I’m so so so fucked up. I’m sososososososo fucked up.” She grips his wrists with clutching, desperate hands. “Can you help me? I can’t get out of my head. Can you help me? Please?”

His true face again, a gelid, flash-frozen grimace of sorrow. He gets up onto the bed and gathers Heather into his arms. She writhes against him, alternately boneless and spastic.

Heather’s moans of despair draw the nurse into the room. She turns white at the quality of the shrieks and leaves. I guess she’s more comfortable with physical pain than spiritual.

Alan and I say nothing. We wait, watching without watching, a trick of respectful distance you learn after the third or fourth or fifth time you deliver the news of death to a loved one in their own home. They collapse into the reality and you become an intruder. You can’t leave, so you become a ghost instead. It’s a terrible talent.

Heather’s moans die down after a while. Burns continues to hold her as she quiets, patient with the gusts of grief that whip back up without warning. These become less and less frequent, turning into tremors, which crumble into sighs and, finally, silence.

We wait out the silence too. Comfort comes best in silence, in that wordless closeness only another human being can provide.

Eventually she lies back, and Burns takes his seat in the chair again.

“Better?” he asks.

She nods, then shrugs, then scratches her arm and her head. She’s a mess of constant motion. “I guess. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, you’re talking again. That’s a start. Are you ready to talk about what happened?”

Her eyes widen. “I think so,” she says. Her right cheek twitches three times. “I’m scared, Daryl. Maybe it will help, though. I don’t know. I guess so.”

Listening to her reminds me of a conversation with a methamphetamine addict, except that Heather has been overdosed on terror. Her fight-or-flight mechanism is set in the “on” position, and the switch is out of reach.

I know all about this feeling. About its constancy. After my rape, when I got home from the hospital, I couldn’t sleep for a week. It wasn’t just the pain of losing Matt and Alexa, I was also terrified. Every creak or wind moan got my heart racing. Adrenaline would spike through me at the sound of a car alarm. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin because it was on fire, but of course I couldn’t, I could only scream inside the burning house of me.

I walk forward, putting a hand on Burns’s shoulder. I make sure to face Heather, so she can see my scars.

“Hi, Heather. I’m Special Agent Smoky Barrett, with the FBI.”

Her eyes jitter over me, widening a little as they grope past the scars.

“What happened to you?” she asks. There’s a desperateness to the question that I understand: Tell me something worse than what happened to me. Please.

“A serial killer broke into my house. He raped me and tortured me with a knife. He tortured and murdered my husband and daughter in front of me.”

I don’t know if it’s worse than what she experienced or not. I don’t think you can qualify mental agony that way.

“What happened to the guy who did it?” A different kind of wanting laces her tone now.

“I shot him dead.”

She hoots in laughter. “Good!” She licks her lips and repeats this in a firmer voice. “Good.” Her eyes widen again. “Avery. Dylan. What about my boys? Can I see them?”

“We’ll deal with Avery and Dylan soon, I promise,” I answer, keeping my voice soothing, feeling traitorous and awful. “First, if you’re up for it, I’d like to talk about what happened to you, and especially anything you can tell us about the man who did it to you. Do you think you can do that?”

The twitching again, one, two, three. “I think so. Yes, I can do it. Where do you want me to start?” She scratches her skull a little too hard, leaving a livid red mark.

“How about the night you were abducted? What do you remember about that?”

She squints. “That was so long ago … lifetimes ago. Crazy times ago. I tried to keep track of time, I really did. But it was so hard, because he never gave me any light.” She says it again, emphasizing what he’d denied her. “Any light.”

“The lights were out in the area of the parking light you were taken from, right?” I ask, pulling a thread from her free association and connecting it to a real memory.

She frowns. “Were they? Yes, yes, I guess they were. He did it. He’s smart. Very, very, very, very smart. And cold.” She shivers, picks at her left arm until it bleeds a little. “Too cold.”

“You’d just come out of your cardio class,” I remind her, keeping my voice low and soothing. I want to put her into that moment of her past while keeping the now as unthreatening as possible. “The police found your keys on the ground near your car. What happened?”

She cackles again. “That was smart of me. Most times he’s the smart one, but that was smart of me. I dropped the keys so everyone would know I’d been taken and hadn’t just run off.” She says it with a childlike pride.

“That was smart, Heather,” I agree. “You were smarter than he was at that moment, and it worked out just like you planned. Everyone knew you’d been kidnapped.”

She nods, back and forth. “Yep. Yep. I was smart. He took me, but I was smart. He took me …” Her words trail off, and the twitching returns.

“How did he take you, Heather?” I ask. “Do you remember? Can you tell me?”

She turns her head to look at me. Her eyes and mouth are wide, making her look exactly like a scared little girl. “It was the whispers,” she says, whispering herself. “What he whispered. He put a gun in my back and he whispered into my ear.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I had to come with him right then and there or he’d kill me and then he’d go and kill Douglas and Avery and Dylan. He told me things about them, about where Douglas worked and about what doctor the boys saw. I believed him.”

“Did you fight him?”

She leans back and sighs. “It didn’t do any good. That was my plan, you see?” She nods, answering herself. “Yes, that was my plan. It was a good plan. I’d go along with him and watch for my opportunity.” She chews on her lip. It would look pensive on someone else, and perhaps the same instinct is behind it here, but Heather continues until her lip begins to bleed. A thin line of blood runs down her chin.

“Heather,” I say, reaching out to touch her.

She doesn’t look at me, but it startles her out of the behavior. “What?” she asks.

“You were talking about fighting back.”

She shakes her head. “It didn’t work.”

“What didn’t work?”

“Fighting back. He put me in the trunk of his car, but he didn’t tie me up or anything. When it stopped, I was ready. The trunk opened, and I was like, ‘hi-yaaaah,’ ready to go all kung fu on his ass, but …” She shakes her head again. Sighs. “He was ready. He sprayed pepper spray in my face and then he used a stun gun on me.” The little-girl wonder stamps on her features again and the baldness adds to it, making her seem even more vulnerable. “You know what the scariest part was? He never said anything. He sprayed me and he shocked me and then he dragged me into that place and”—she swallows hugely, whispers—“threw me into the dark.”

I go to ask another question, but she’s been fully captured by the moment. She’s not here, she’s there. I stay quiet and wait for her to continue on her own.

“Have you ever experienced perfect darkness?” she asks. “It’s hard to find. Douglas and I went on a trip to Carlsbad Caverns one time. They take you waaaay underground. At one point in the tour they talk about that, about perfect darkness, and then they turn out all the lights. It’s incredible.” She marvels at the memory. “You can’t see anything. There’s no ambient light of any kind. There’s nothing for your eyes to adjust to. Just blackness.” Another huge swallow. “The darkness in my cell was like that. Heavy. It has a weight, did you know that?” She nods, more in a conversation with herself than with me. “Yes, it does. You can feel the dark when it’s complete like that. It slides against your skin. It gets into your mouth. You try not to let it, but if you close your mouth it just crawls in through your nose or your ears. You choke on it at first while you resist it, but it’s just too much. One big gulp, and you drown.” She twitches, twitches, twitches. “Except this drowning doesn’t kill you. It goes on forever and ever and ever. It’s like falling off a cliff for years.

“He didn’t do anything for about a day. Just left me there in the dark. Then he turned on the lights. So bright. Yes, they were. So bright. I couldn’t see anything, and I banged into a wall. Three blind mice, see how she runs.” She giggles. Picks at her arm. “I was staggering around and heard the door open and then he used the stun gun again. I felt a prick in my arm and I went to sleep.

“When I woke up, I was naked and shackled and in the dark. The shackle was attached to a chain, which was attached to a wall. I had ones on my ankles and ones on my wrists, four of them, one two three four, so I could move around about half of the length of the cell.

“There was a speaker—something—built into the room. Sometimes his voice would come out of the dark. ‘There are rules,’ he told me on the first day. ‘You eat every meal given unless you’re sick. You exercise every day, without exception. Start with push-ups and running in place. Failure to comply with any of these rules will result in punishment.’”

She glances at me, a sly, knowing glance. “I didn’t listen at first, of course. He brought some food and shoved it through a small opening in the bottom of the door, just like in one of those prison movies.” She stops talking and stares. Moments pass.

“Heather?”

She jolts and begins talking again, as though nothing had happened. It reminds me of a needle jumping the groove on a record. “The only time I’d see light was when he brought the food. He’d unlatch the opening and place the tray inside. I’d have to get down on my stomach to eat. I loved the light so so much. It was kind of him to give me that, don’t you think?”

My stomach rolls. She continues.

“I threw the food and he closed the opening. I sat there in the dark for a long time. Sometime later, I don’t know how long, the blinding lights came on again. I couldn’t see anything but white. He did the same thing as before, the stun gun and the needle. I woke up on my stomach, strapped to a table.” She scrunches into herself like an abused child, trying to present as little body surface as possible.

“‘You broke the rules,’ he said. ‘Now you have to be punished.’ He didn’t sound angry or anything. I really didn’t get that feeling at all. He sounded like someone who had a job to do. Yes.” Big nod, back and forth, happy to have put the right words to it. “He had a job to do.” She pauses. “He used a whip on me. It felt like white fire, like someone was pouring lines of gasoline across my back and lighting them up. I screamed right from the beginning.

“Once he was done, he put some greasy stuff on my back, over the cuts. ‘Next time you break the rules, the punishment will increase in duration by a third. And again the next time after that. And before you get any ideas—it’ll never get bad enough to kill you.’

“I tried to ask him a bunch of questions. ‘Why me? Why are you doing this?’ Things like that.” She pouts, picking at a forearm. “He wouldn’t answer me, no, he wouldn’t. He just threw me right back in that room in the dark.”

Again her eyes slide over to me, and again that sly smile intrudes. “I took another five punishments before I believed him.” The smile evaporates, replaced by wide-eyed wonder. “After that, I was a good girl. He never, ever hurt me when I was a good girl.”

She seems to have wound down. I give her a gentle push. “Were you in the dark all the time, Heather?”

She’s staring again.

“Heather?”

She jolts. “What? Oh yeah. Pretty much all the time. There was a toilet there; I had to find it in the dark and use it in the dark. The only way of marking time was meals. That’s how I counted the days. Three meals was a day, and I’d count that. The problem was, there were times he’d be gone for a long time. Then he’d leave me dried food to eat, divided up into meal portions.” She frowns. “I’d try and count the portions and divide by three and keep track of the days, but …” She sighs, her head falling forward in a gesture of futility. “I just lost track. Especially when I started talking to myself a lot and even more when I started talking to them.”

“Who is ‘them,’ Heather?” I ask.

Her smile is beatific. It erases the look of insanity and suffering from her features, replacing it with a kind of peaceful joy. “My boys,” she says. “The voices in the light that would comfort me. Without them … I don’t know.” She picks at her arm until it bleeds. “I might have gone insane.”

I feel my stomach rolling again, not in revulsion but in horror. My greatest fear, since I was a little girl, was exactly this: to go crazy and not know it. I remember seeing that movie about John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, and not being able to sleep afterward.

“Heather,” I ask. “Did you ever see the man who did this to you? Did you see his face or anything else that might help us identify him?”

The twitch in her cheek again, four times. She shakes her head. “Noooooo … all I ever saw was the dark, the dark and my light through the hole in my door.” She grimaces. “You can see the dark, just like you can taste it. Everything gets more acute. I have bat ears now, did you know that?” She startles me by emitting a few high-pitched squeals—her imitation of a bat—which then dissolve into cackles. “And my skin …” She runs her hands over her arms, and I watch goose bumps rise. “It’s all more sensitive.” She squints at me. “But I’m seeing now. Am I really seeing? Or is this a dream?” She picks at the bloody spot on her forearm. “It’s real,” I tell her.

She looks around, peering with care at everything in the room. She shrugs. “It doesn’t seem real.” She sighs, lies back. “I’m tired again. It’s sleep time.” She sits up suddenly, fearful. “Or is it eating time?” She reaches out to me, her hand shaking. “If I missed eating time, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You won’t hit me, will you?”

I fight the welling tears and reach out to take her hand. “No one’s going to hit you anymore, Heather. I promise.”

She calms, but I can see in her eyes that she does not believe me.

“She’s not in any condition right now to give us more than that,” Alan observes.

We’re standing outside Heather’s room. Burns is silent, and he looks stricken. I feel tired already. The day is young, and we’ve only just started foraging through the sticky meat locker this perpetrator left for us. Heather Hollister could easily be the least of it.

“I agree,” I say. “Still, she helped. We know now how he took her and how he treated her. It’s going to help us with his profile.”

“Profile?” Burns croaks. “I’ll tell you what his profile is. He’s a dead man.”

Neither Alan nor I respond. We could give him the lecture about death threats in our presence, but we won’t. We empathize. “What’s next?” Alan asks.

“I’m going to call Callie and see if she’s confirmed the ID of Jeremy Abbott. Then we’ll go and check up on both him and Dana.”

“I’m going to pass on that,” Burns says. “I’ll keep Heather company for a while. If you need anything, call me.”

He looks old again, ancient and bent. Burns is one of what I call the old guard, a brand of man that seems to be dying off in the world today. Built not of stereotypes but stone: heavy, strong, enduring like a mountain. Alan has these qualities, as do Tommy and AD Jones. Burns looks cracked, fissured, crumbling at the base.

“Call us if anything changes with her,” I tell him.

He nods and reenters Heather’s room.

“I don’t think her outlook is good,” Alan murmurs. “What happens when she finds out one of her sons is dead?” He shakes his head.

How would I deal with it? Eight years shackled up and locked away in absolute darkness, unable to track the days, without the benefit of human contact?

“It depends on her. You never know, she could bounce back.”

I don’t sound convincing.

“It’s confirmed,” Callie says to me. “The man in the hospital is Jeremy Abbott.”

My heart sinks. More bad news for Heather.

“Good work. Alan and I are going to see Dana Hollister and Jeremy now. What else is happening there?”

“James has almost finished the timeline and collation of the case files. He’s also discovered some interesting things about the car crashes.”

“He can fill us in when we get back. In the meantime, can you get in touch with LAPD CSU and get briefed on what they found in processing the Hollister home? Oh—and get hold of Leo Carnes. We’re going to need his expertise on this case.”

“Anything else you want to add to that laundry list?” she complains. “When I say, ‘I live to serve,’ I’m talking about others serving me.”

Finally, something that makes me smile. “We’ll see you soon.”

The doctor attending to both Dana Hollister and Jeremy Abbott looks like a teenager with old eyes. His blond hair and baby face contribute to the effect; I’m sure he gets plenty of jokes about being able to do surgery before he could shave.

“Both patients have had extreme damage to their prefrontal lobes,” he says, confirming what I already knew.

“A homemade lobotomy.”

“In essence.”

Alan shudders. “Jesus!”

“I’ve seen this once before,” I tell him. “A doctor did it to his wife.”

“Then you’re familiar with the prognosis,” the doctor continues. “The damage is done. Mrs. Hollister got the worst of it, but Mr. Abbott isn’t much better. Mrs. Hollister is in a vegetative state.”

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Alan mutters.

“That’s right. She’ll have to be cared for like a coma patient. She can’t feed herself, she can’t speak, she can’t be responsible for her own continence. It’s unlikely that she has any awareness of the world around her.”

“And Jeremy Abbott?” I ask.

“He’s operating at the level of an infant. He can’t form words, and he wears diapers. He’s able to eat and crawl, though, so his physical prognosis is better than hers. If you can call that better.”

“What do you think he used to do this?”

“I’d imagine he got his hands on a classic orbitoclast—what laymen refer to as an ice pick. The diameter seems right, and I doubt they’d be hard to purchase. The procedure itself is pretty simple, though it would require some practice. The doctor who developed the lobotomy experimented on cadavers, using an actual ice pick from his own kitchen.”

I look down at Dana Hollister’s still form, lying on the bed.

“She’s not aware of anything?”

“Probably not. It’s hard to know for sure. There are accounts of coma patients coming out of long comas who remember snatches of conversations that occurred around them while they were comatose. When it comes to the brain and consciousness, we still have a lot to learn.”

I hope that he’s right, that Dana is living in a world of nothing, that she’s not floating alone in the dark instead.