Gone

CHAPTER 15

Tuesday, 3:09 p.m. PST

“DO YOU BELIEVE IN TRUE LOVE? ”

The voice came from far away, accompanied by the rattle of pots and pans. She was dreaming again, Rainie thought. Dreaming of a dark void filled with a booming voice. Maybe this was heaven.

Heaven smelled like bacon, she realized without a trace of irony. Then the voice boomed again.

“My mom believed in true love. Believed it when she fell in bed with my father. Believed it when she scrubbed his clothes, bought his whiskey, and bruised from the impact of his fist. Yeah, my mom was a real romantic. Probably loved my father right until the moment he beat her to death. My mother called it love, my father called it obedience. Frankly, I think they were both full of shit.”

A hand touched her shoulder. Rainie flinched, discovered that she was propped precariously on the edge of a hard wooden chair and nearly fell off.

“Relax,” the voice said impatiently. “It’s time you pulled yourself together. You have work to do.”

More sounds, the person-lone male, probably early twenties to early thirties, based upon the voice-was moving around the room. A refrigerator door sucked open, slammed shut. A crack, sizzle, then a new smell filled the air. Eggs frying. Bacon and eggs. Breakfast.

It must be morning, she thought, but that estimation didn’t feel quite right. Still blindfolded, hands bound, it was hard to get her bearings. She’d been drugged, fading in and out. She could remember white light, movement, writing a note. Surely those things took time. But how much time?

She should sit up, clear her head. It was easier to remain in her dark, bound cocoon, slouched in the middle of God knows where. Captives didn’t have to think. Captives didn’t have to feel.

She realized faintly that the gag was gone, though her mouth was so dried out, it was no more capable of forming words without the gag than it had been with it. After another moment, she determined she could move her feet. So he’d removed the gag and unbound her feet. Why? Because she had work to do?

It couldn’t be morning, she decided. She had left her house shortly after one a.m. It felt as if that had been at least twelve hours ago. Her abductor must have gone back to bed. That made sense to her. After rampaging around in the middle of the night, he’d gone back to bed and was now eating a late breakfast/early lunch. Midday. That felt better to her.

He was scraping a pan now. The air in the room tasted smoky, laced with grease. She had a mental image of a small room without being sure why. Tiny kitchen in a shut-up house. Beneath the grease, she thought she could smell moldy linens and stale, uncirculated air.

The squeaking sound of something-a chair-being dragged across linoleum. The man sat down heavily and Rainie suddenly felt a forkful of eggs pressed against her lips.

“Eat, but slowly. The drugs can leave you feeling queasy. Throw up and you’re on your own. No way I’m dealing with that kind of mess.”

Just the smell of the eggs made her stomach roll. Rainie licked her lips, tried to form a word, had to try again. “Water,” she croaked. Then, slightly louder, “Water.”

Her voice sounded foreign to her. Harsh, guttural, raw. The voice of a victim.

The chair screeched again. The man was up, moving. She could sense his impatience in the hard slam of a plastic cup against a counter, the jerk of a water faucet being snapped on.

A moment later, the cup was thrust against her lips. “Four sips, then some eggs, then more water. Come on, start drinking. I don’t have all day.”

She did as she was told. On some level this surprised her. But maybe it didn’t. How long had she been feeling helpless now? It had started way before Abductor A had discovered her at Point B. She had felt overwhelmed and powerless since first walking through that house in Astoria, since gazing down at that small lifeless body. Since feeling the terror that still pervaded that room, since knowing what that little girl had been forced to know. No one to help her anymore. No one to save her. And that man would have loomed so large and powerful, as he ripped off her pajamas, as he prepared to do what he was going to do.

No happy ending here. The man had done what he’d wanted, then he’d placed a pillow over four-year-old Aurora Johnson’s face and smothered her to death. Where was the justice in that? Where was God?

And Rainie had been feeling herself slip away ever since. Time spent on the Internet, searching for stories she knew she shouldn’t read. A twelve-year-old boy who raped and murdered a three-year-old toddler. A mudslide killing a mother and three small children after the husband popped out the door to buy them all ice cream. Then there was the tsunami. Over two hundred thousand people gone in the blink of an eye, a third of them children who never stood a chance. Not that the survivors were much luckier. According to news reports, slave traffickers promptly took advantage of the chaos to pick off orphans and turn them into sex slaves.

All of these children born into the world simply to lead lives of terror, misery, and suffering.

What was one person to do? For every murder she helped investigate, millions more were happening. And the perpetrators were no longer hard-bitten criminals, with yellowed crooked teeth and small beady eyes. They were charming suburban husbands. They were soccer moms. They were children themselves, ten, eleven, twelve years old.

Rainie’s head was filled with too many things she didn’t want to know. Pictures that tormented her. Questions that haunted her. Had little Aurora died knowing how much her mother had loved her, how hard her mother had fought to the bitter end? Or had she died hating her own mom for failing her so completely?

“Another bite,” her captor demanded.

She opened her mouth, obediently swallowed, then much to the surprise of them both, projectile-vomited across the table.

“Ah, Jesus Christ!” The man sprang back, his chair clattering to the floor. “That’s disgusting. Oh, man…”

He didn’t seem to know what to do. Rainie continued to sit, an impassive lump, letting him sort it out. She could taste bile in her mouth. Water would be nice. Maybe orange juice. Anything to soothe her throat.

And then she thought of Quincy. She saw him, standing in front of her so clearly she tried to reach out her bound hands. She was in the study. It was late at night. He stood in the doorway, his dark green bathrobe belted around his waist.

“Come to bed,” he said.

But she couldn’t. She was reading another horrible story and couldn’t possibly tear her eyes away. She was a sponge, soaking up the sorrows of the world and feeling the last of herself silently erode away.

“Rainie, what are you looking for?” he had asked her quietly.

She didn’t have an answer for him and when she looked up again, he was gone. So she reached down into the filing cabinet, and pulled out her beer.

“Shit, shit, shit,” her captor was grumbling now. “I mean, really. Ah jeez.” Water running in the sink. The sound of a sponge being squeezed. So he was cleaning it up after all. His only other choice was to untie her hands and he couldn’t do that.

The thought amused her. So her captive was helpless, too, a victim of his own making. She started to smile.

The next instant, the man slapped her across the face and she slammed to the floor.

“Get that goddamn smirk off your face,” he roared. “Don’t you smile at me!”

She could feel him towering above her, his rage a physical presence that suddenly filled the room. In her mind, she could see him clearly. Hands fisted. Jaw clenched. He wanted to do it: pound her, smack her again and again. Beat her like his father had beaten his mother. Beat her, like her own mother had been beaten by an endless slew of faceless boyfriends.

What comes around goes around. The children who suffer today will be the monsters who inflict suffering tomorrow.

And then, even with the blindfold on, Rainie knew exactly who her abductor was. She had known him most of her life. He was a piece of herself, her past coming back to get her. The minute she’d opened that first beer three months ago, she had plummeted into the abyss, and he was simply the devil who’d been waiting her whole life to find her.

The man grabbed the collar of her shirt. He jerked her to her feet, dragging her shoulder through the vomit and smearing the unbearable stench upon her clothes. She reeled, off balance. He pushed her again and the back of her legs connected with something low and hard. A coffee table, a chair. It didn’t matter. No place to go. No room to retreat. She stood there, breathing hard and feeling his advance.

“Your husband left you, Lorraine,” the man jeered.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t quite understand. How could he know that?

“What’d you do? Whore around? Sleep with his best friend?”

“N-n-no,” she finally whispered. Her heart was pounding. Funny how his physical advance did little to intimidate her, but his questions left her terrified.

“Are you a slut, Lorraine?”

Her chin came up. She didn’t answer.

“Yeah, I can see it. Probably screwed around all over town. Left your husband no choice but to run out with his tail between his legs.”

Rainie surprised herself. She drew together what little moisture she could find in her mouth and spit in the man’s direction.

In response, her captor grabbed her hair and jerked back her head. She couldn’t quite stop the cry that escaped from her throat.

“Does he hate you?”

“N-n-no.” At least she didn’t think Quincy hated her. Not yet.

“You wrote the note, you know what I want. Will he pay it, Lorraine? Will your husband cough up ten grand for his lousy, whoring wife?”

“Yes.” She said the word with more confidence. Quincy would pay. He would pay ten times that amount, a hundred times that amount. And not just because he was a responsible man or a former FBI agent, but because he did love her, had always loved her. Those had been the words in his note. Not “goodbye,” not “get your head out of your ass,” not “stop drinking, you stupid bitch.” He had written, her man of few words, “I love you.” And that had been it.

“I hope for your sake you’re telling the truth,” her captor said now. “I hope for your sake your old man coughs up the dough. Because I’m not looking for a roommate, Lorraine. In the next hour, I get the cash, or you get an early grave. So don’t play any games. Don’t you try messing with me.”

The man’s hand was still wrapped around her hair. He used her mane like a rope, jerking her toward the door.

“There is no such thing as true love,” the man said again. “There’s just the beauty of cold hard cash. And now, it’s time for Quincy to pay.”