The Abduction

DAY SIX

Lying awake last night, Chief of Police Paul Ryan had begun having doubts about the prime suspect. Had Gary Jennings really abducted and murdered Gracie Ann Brice? All the evidence said yes: the jersey, the porn, the phone calls, the prior offense, the coach’s ID, and now her blood, but still… it just didn’t seem to fit. It was too pat. All the evidence pointed at Jennings when it shouldn’t. An educated employee at a computer company stalking the boss’s daughter? Calling from his own cell phone at work, no attempt to cover his tracks? Leaving her jersey in his truck? Child porn under the floor mat? Was Jennings really that stupid? And if that dumb-ass Eddie had found Jennings’s truck unlocked, who else might have?

A thorough search of his truck by the FBI’s finest turned up nothing but a thin blood smear, not another piece of evidence that put Gracie in his truck, not her hair or fingerprints or fibers from her clothes or grass from the soccer field or leaves from the woods. And the coach’s ID wasn’t all that positive, even though Jennings fit the suspect’s general description.

Of course, Jennings’s photo and residence address were on the state’s sex offender website; anyone who wanted to find a blond, blue-eyed convicted sex offender living in the county could easily do so. But one who worked for the victim’s father? What were the odds of that? And why would anyone want to? To frame a sex offender? It made no sense. He weighed in his mind the upside and downside of looking deeper and quickly decided there was no upside, at least not for Paul Ryan.

Fifty-two years old, there were no other police jobs out there for him. This was the end of the line. Seventy-five thousand a year plus benefits. Eight more years, he would earn his pension. Enough to retire to a little house in Sun City, him and the wife. A good life, or at least good enough. Was he willing to throw it all away for Jennings? For that little frat-boy fuckup? Hell, maybe his big-time lawyer can prove the boy is innocent. Not likely in an emotionally charged high-profile child abduction case-death by lethal injection, that was this boy’s future. But that wasn’t Ryan’s fault; that was the law! Why should Paul Ryan risk his financial security for this boy? On the off chance that Jennings might not be the abductor? Even a step in that direction would cost Ryan his job-the mayor would not be pleased-and where would that leave him? Unemployed and unemployable. No health care. No pension. Working at the Wal-Mart. He could not think of one good reason to look deeper.

Except that it was the right thing to do.

And there was the baby. The baby named Sarah was lying in the neonatal unit in critical condition, born almost two months’ premature. Was the baby on Paul Ryan’s tab? Damnit, he didn’t put the victim’s blood and jersey in Jennings’s truck! He didn’t make nine phone calls to the victim! He didn’t haul Jennings’s pregnant wife into the station!

But he did show her the porn.

Because he needed a confession to keep his job, a baby might die. So Paul Ryan felt guilty-a guilt that kept him awake through the night and pacing the house until a sense of shame had overwhelmed him: Baby Sarah.

By 4:00 A.M., whether born of a need for personal redemption or simply sleep deprivation, Paul Ryan had made a life-altering decision: he would do the right thing.

By 6:00 A.M., Jennings had done it for him.

Ryan was standing outside Gary Jennings’s cell, looking in at his lifeless form hanging there, one leg of his white jail pants tied around his neck, the other tied around the pipes of the new sprinkler system the town had installed last month to meet code.

Innocent suspects don’t commit suicide.

It was Wednesday morning and Coach Wally was whistling as he walked up to the entrance to the Post Oak Town Hall. Unlike most visitors who would arrive today to pay traffic tickets, Wally Fagan was a happy man. Happy and a bit proud of himself-heck, he felt so downright patriotic he wanted to salute his reflection in the glass doors.

He was here to free an innocent man.

At the entrance, Wally paused and checked himself over and adjusted the clip-on tie he had added to his short-sleeve shirt just in case cameras were present. Shoot, he might even make the national news, maybe even get interviewed by Katie Couric. They might even call him a hero.

He pulled open the door and entered the building. Just inside the door was a security checkpoint with metal detectors, like at the airport, manned by a uniformed cop. Wally began emptying his pockets into a small plastic container but looked up when another cop hurried over; he was grinning like he had just won a lifetime supply of donuts.

“Sonofabitch offed himself!”

The other cop’s mouth fell open. “No shit?”

“Yep.” The grinning cop grabbed his neck, stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth, and made a gagging sound. “Hung himself in his cell last night. Course, he might’ve been playing some kind of perverted sex game with himself.”

The two cops laughed merrily, but a sick feeling crept over Wally. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to know.

“Who?”

The grinning cop turned his way and said, “Jennings. Guy that abducted Gracie.”

“He’s… dead? ”

“As a doornail. Did the world a favor. No trial, no appeals, no execution. Case is closed.”

At that moment, the double doors behind Wally flew open and excited reporters and cameramen rushed inside and pushed past Wally.

“Is it true?” they shouted. “Jennings committed suicide?”

“Yep,” the first cop said, waving them through the checkpoint without checking. “Give himself the death penalty.”

In a split-second, Wally Fagan’s mind played out two alternate paths in life for him to choose from, as clearly as if he were watching a movie of his life, a choice he knew would determine the future course of his life. The first path was to continue inside, straight to the chief’s office, which would be crowded with the media, stand in front of the microphones and bright lights and cameras and tell the world what he knew, what he had remembered last night at work: the blond man in the black cap and plaid shirt who had asked about Gracie after the game was missing his right index finger. Gary Jennings was not. He had all of his fingers. Jennings was not the abductor. He was innocent. But now he was dead. And it was Wally’s fault. That’s what they would say-the chief, the press, the FBI, Jennings’s pregnant wife, the world. Wally Fagan would make the national news all right, but they wouldn’t call him a hero. They would blame him for the death of an innocent man.

Someone is always blamed.

Wally chose the second path. He retrieved his personal items from the small plastic container, stuffed them into his pockets, and exited the building, vowing to take his secret to the grave.

At seven in the morning Texas time, being eight on the floor of the NASDAQ exchange in New York City, only ninety minutes prior to the opening trade in the BriceWare. com IPO-that is, on the day all of his dreams were supposed to come true-the company founder, president and CEO, chairman of the board, and creative genius, John R. Brice, who boasted a Ph. D. in algorithms from MIT and a 190 IQ, lay crashed on the couch in his home office. He was curled up under a Boston Red Sox souvenir blanket. His boyish face was buried in the thick folds of soft leather where the couch back met the seat. He was wondering why his wife did not love him.

And he was sure she did not love him.

They had had sex exactly two hundred forty-nine times-twice a month for the ten years and four months they had been married plus once before marriage. Which sounded like a lot of sex when you said it out loud, way more than he had ever hoped for at MIT, once every fifteen days. But then, major league pitchers take the mound every fifth day. FYA (For Your Amusement), during the same period, Roger Clemens had pitched three hundred two games!

He didn’t think Elizabeth enjoyed sex with him, much less had orgasms. But he was too afraid to ask. Little Johnny Brice had asked his only other sex partner, a sixteen-year-old Army brat who had done every soldier’s son before him at Fort Bragg, if she had had an orgasm; she had laughed in his face and said, “It takes me longer than five seconds, stud.”

Sex was not plug and play.

For him, sex was plug and pray, female orgasms being so highly nontrivial and all, what with hardware that had to be booted and software that had to be tweaked for optimal performance. No point-and-click on the female architecture. No Help button. No Progasm Wizard to guide him through the procedure. So he had searched for technical solutions, even buying a user’s manual- The Female Orgasmand learned to his dismay that writing twenty-five thousand lines of code was cake compared to bringing a full-grown female to orgasm. But John R. Brice, Ph. D., was nothing if not determined; he had devoted his considerable intelligence to learning the deep magic of orgasms, because he knew, as well as he knew the back of his computer, that if he could take Elizabeth Brice to orgasm just once- just freaking once! — her indifferent attitude toward him would instantly morph into extreme love.

Geeks need love, too.

He had studied the manual’s recommended troubleshooting techniques as if studying for a final exam at MIT, applying a new one every two weeks until he had tried them all; he even did algorithms in his head during sex to prevent premature cache burst. In the hacker world, that was known as the brute-force method, trying every conceivable solution to a problem until you found one that worked. He had employed that method on numerous occasions at work and with great success. But not with Elizabeth. He had no doubt that pilot error was to blame, that he simply wasn’t up to the manly task of driving a beautiful and complex woman like Elizabeth to brain-banging orgasms-as they say in the tech support department when the customer doesn’t have a clue, PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair). John R. Brice didn’t have a clue.

And the few times he had thought the techniques might be enabling her, when he had felt her body responding to his hardware, just at the moment when he thought she might experience a power surge, she seemed to freeze up, as if he had performed an illegal operation and her control panel shut down her program. He had downloaded his content and uninserted his floppy; she had gotten out of bed, gone into the bathroom, and left him alone to wallow in unexplained failure. Why didn’t women come with a freaking Error Message box?

He had never forgotten her birthday, their anniversary, Valentine’s Day, or Mother’s Day, always sending flowers and gifts to her office. He had even signed up with the company’s personal trainer and worked out daily. But his efforts had had no discernible romantic effect. He should have taken Gracie’s advice, upgraded his graphics, dressed in cool clothes, gotten a stylish haircut, and ditched the glasses for laser eye surgery. She had said he’d be totally studly then. Which had sounded like a good thing.

If only being totally studly would have brought him Elizabeth’s love.

But he had lived for ten years without her love and without regret, from the moment he had first laid eyes on Gracie in the hospital nursery. It didn’t matter if he loved Elizabeth more than she loved him because Gracie’s love more than made up the difference. Now Gracie’s love was gone. And for the first time in ten years, he felt the difference, an emptiness inside him that no IPO could fill.

Someone sat down on the couch next to him and put a hand on him, over the blanket. He prayed it was Elizabeth, that she had come down to tell him that together they would survive without Gracie, to ask if she could lie next to him and hold him, to whisper that she loved him with all her heart.

Ben sat next to John on the couch, quietly so as not to wake him, and rested his hand on his only son. He recalled the day in 1969 they had brought John home, wrapped in an Army blanket and in desperate need of a father. But all he had gotten was a mother. A month later, Lieutenant Ben Brice had returned to Vietnam to free the oppressed.

He had failed.

By the time Ben had left Vietnam for good, John had already departed on his lifelong journey leading away from Ben Brice, two wounded souls fighting their own demons. Army life had been tough on John; he hadn’t fit in with the other Army brats on the bases where they had been stationed over the next decade as the Army tried to hide the most decorated soldier of the Vietnam War-tried to find a way to forget a war and its warriors. Ben would have left the Army, but he couldn’t; he needed twenty years of service to qualify for a pension to take care of his family. It wasn’t as if Colonel Ben Brice’s peculiar skills were in great demand in the private sector.

At least John’s life had become his own when he left Fort Bragg and North Carolina for Boston and MIT, a perfect score on the entrance exams and a full scholarship in his pocket, the same year that Ben had quietly retired. But Ben Brice’s life would never be his own; a warrior’s life is forever a chattel of war.

John turned over. His eyes expressed undeniable disappointment, as if Ben Brice were the last person on earth he wanted to see at that moment. Father and son regarded each other silently. Then John spoke.

“Why’d you come, Ben? I grew up without you. Only time you came home was to move us to another base, another school, another set of bullies to beat up the geek. And you didn’t save those people-you lost your great war. You were an American hero and what’d it get you? You live with a dog.” He sat up. “You weren’t there when I needed you. I don’t need you now.”

His son’s words hit Ben like a two-by-four across the face. He gritted his teeth to hold back his emotions.

“I know you don’t need me, son. I failed you, and for that I am sorry. Maybe one day you’ll find a way to forgive me.” He stood. “But this isn’t about us, John. This is about Gracie. She does need me, and I’m not going to fail her, too. I’m leaving for Idaho in the morning.”

“ Idaho? What’s in Idaho?”

“Gracie.”

“Ben-”

“She’s alive.”

“Jennings isn’t.”

Kate was standing at the door.

Mark Gimenez

The Abduction