The Abduction (10 page)

FBI procedure was to secure the victim’s bedroom and seal it off from everyone, even the family. But he didn’t have the heart to wake the father, not after what he had been through the last twenty-four hours. So Agent Stevens was working quietly.

The entire house was quiet.

Downstairs, eleven somber FBI agents manned the hot-line phones in the command post, logging every lead, no matter how unimportant, and every reported sighting, no matter how inconceivable, into the computer. And waiting. Mostly waiting, as few calls were coming in.

Agent Jan Jorgenson sat at one computer, running database searches on the family per orders; she was still shaken from having witnessed the victim’s mother slapping the father, defenseless in his despair. If this was a typical child abduction case, Jan had no desire to become a specialist like Agent Devereaux. She glanced across the room at him.

FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux felt tired, so godawful tired. He was holding his personal cell phone to his ear as the call rang through and thinking,
What the hell’s wrong with people, a man could do that to a child?
And leaving her soccer shorts behind like a perverted calling card: See what I did?
Yeah, we see—die and go to hell, you sick bastard!
When Devereaux’s seventeen-year-old daughter answered, he said, “Hey, baby, I just wanted to tell you I love you.” She laughed and said, “What, are you dying or something?” Somewhere deep inside him, he was.

Coach Wally Fagan sat at another computer; he was scrolling down mug shots of the forty-two thousand registered sex offenders on the state’s official sex offender website—pictures, names, addresses, and criminal histories—starting with those registered in the county, hoping to ID the blond man in the black cap and plaid shirt who had asked about Gracie after the game and wishing he had never pointed her out to him. The mother was right: he was a fucking idiot.

In the kitchen, Sylvia Milanevic, the Brice family maid, was preparing a fresh pot of coffee for the FBI agents. Sixty-three, an immigrant from Kosovo, she had lost two children in the war. She had concluded long ago that life was about enduring pain: you’re born, you suffer, and you die. The small TV on the counter was on: “A child abducted by a stranger has a life expectancy of three hours. Gracie Ann Brice has been missing for twenty-four hours now …” Sylvia looked out the window over the sink at the lonely figure by the pool.

Ben was sitting in a patio chair. His face was wet with tears and the pain was eating at his insides like a cancer. He closed his eyes and thought back to 1964 when he was eighteen and boarding the train to West Point. His father had shaken his hand and said, “Do your country proud, son.” His mother had hugged him tightly and whispered in his ear, “God has a plan for Ben Brice.” Ben opened his eyes now and turned them to the heavens above.

“Do you still have a plan, God?”

The morning sun filtered through the shutters of the spacious master suite on the second floor of Six Magnolia Lane. Elizabeth stirred under a thick down comforter in the tall king-sized four-poster bed that was accessible only by wooden steps. A faint smile crossed her lips.

Not guilty on all counts.

She rolled over and groaned. Her body was sore. Her head was groggy, like she had a hangover, but she didn’t remember having anything to drink last night. It was probably just the trial; a long trial always left her physically and mentally exhausted, especially after coming down from the adrenaline high of victory.

Twelve good citizens with the mental range of a windshield wiper.

Was today Saturday? Or Sunday? Must be Sunday. John and Kate probably had the children at church. She did not attend church; religion and the law were the opiates of the masses in the twenty-first century, holding the peasants at bay with their firm faith in God and justice. Elizabeth Brice knew better. Her faith in the justice of the law had ended five years out of law school, late for most lawyers, and she had not prayed to God since …

Yesterday?

Did she pray yesterday?

Elizabeth tried to shake her head clear of the fog. She took a deep breath and realized she was hungry. Very hungry. When had she last eaten? She couldn’t remember. A big breakfast on Sunday morning while the others were at church would be nice, a quiet time to drink coffee, read the paper, and relive her courtroom victory—there might even be an article about the stunning
Shay
verdict! Thus inspired, she stretched, threw off the comforter, and rolled out of bed.

She hit the wood floor hard.

What the hell?
Her legs were tangled in her pantyhose … The hose was ripped and shredded … She pulled dried brown leaves from one leg of the torn hose … Why was one leg off? … Why was she sleeping in her pantyhose? … Why were her legs dirty and streaked with fresh scratch marks? … And her arms … And her hands … Nails broken … Clothes dirty and torn … Why was she sleeping in her clothes? … She touched her face … Why had she gone to bed without cleaning her face of makeup? …
What the hell was going on?

A nauseous tide washed over her. She crawled on her hands and knees to the front windows, dragging one leg of her pantyhose behind her like a bridal veil, knelt up, and peeked through the shutters. Down below, out front of her house, were police cars, TV trucks, cameras, and people. The media circus. She slumped against the wall. She remembered now.

Grace was gone.

Downstairs, Ben entered the kitchen from outside. Kate and Sylvia were busy cooking enough breakfast for a battalion, and the smell of pancakes, sausage, eggs, and biscuits lured a steady stream of cops and FBI agents to the kitchen.

Ben had woken at dawn after only a few hours of fitful sleep. He had heard the back door, Kate leaving for early Mass to do what Irish-Catholic women have done for centuries in the face of famine, poverty, pestilence, war, and evil: pray. He had showered and dressed then gone outside and watched the sun rise over the trees, the start of another day without Gracie—and the first day knowing that money would not save her.

Now Ben was trying to pour a cup of coffee, but he was fighting the morning shakes. Kate took the coffee pot from him and poured then walked the cup and saucer over to the breakfast table without a word. Ben sat down
,
held the cup with both hands, and sipped the coffee. Five years since she had made his morning coffee, but Kate remembered the routine; there was enough caffeine in this coffee to defeat the mother of all hangovers. But Ben Brice had not surrendered to the bottle last night.

Sam sat across the table. He was still wearing the Boston Red Sox uniform, but he now had a blue scarf wrapped around his head. He was alternating between taking syrupy bites of his pancakes and reciting lines as if acting out roles in a play.

“Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren—”

Sam turned slightly as if facing another character; his voice changed.

“First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement. So I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirates’ code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the
Black Pearl
, Miss Turner.”

Ben looked at Kate by the stove. She said, “Movie dialogue. He’s got John’s memory. He can recite entire movies verbatim.”

Sam continued: “So that’s it then. That’s the secret grand adventure of the infamous Jack Sparrow. You spent three days lying on a beach drinking rum!”

Sam gestured as if his knife and fork were bottles.

“Welcome to the Caribbean, luv.”

Kate said, “Sam, is that from a PG-13 movie?”

Sam froze, his mouth full, his arms still outstretched, and his eyes suddenly wide as if he’d been caught red-handed. His eyes darted to Ben. He decided to save his grandson again.

“The Red Sox are your team?”

Kate shook her head and turned back to the stove; Sam turned back to his pancakes and said, “After the IPO.”

“What?”

“Dad’s gonna buy the Red Sox for me, after he’s a billionaire.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” Sam took a huge bite of pancakes—his cheek was now bulging like a baseball player’s with a wad of chewing tobacco—and said, “So how much money does the cretin want?”

“Who?”

“The man that took Gracie.”

Ben glanced over at Kate. “Oh. He hasn’t said yet.”

Sam sighed. “Well, I wish he’d shit or get off the pot.”

“Sam!” Kate said.

Sam shrugged. “Yeah, then Dad can write a check and Gracie can come home.”

“Our town’s a damn safe place to call home!”

Across town, Police Chief Paul Ryan was standing in the mayor’s office, looking at the mayor’s broad back, and listening to the mayor’s whiny voice as His Honor pleaded with a Dallas newspaper reporter not to write a negative story about Post Oak, Texas. But as if his mind were repeatedly pressing the ALT CH button on the remote control, his thoughts kept switching back and forth between dark images of a little girl he didn’t know lying dead somewhere and the bald back of the mayor’s head, wondering how much hair spray it took to keep his comb-over in place. Paul Ryan never trusted men who combed over.

The mayor never came in on a Sunday and never early on any day of the week. But this Sunday, Ryan had arrived at seven and been immediately summoned to the mayor’s office. He knew the mayor would not be pleased, what with the town just getting over the heroin OD at the high school, and now this. Bad for business, heroin in the high school and kidnappings at the park. And the mayor was all about business.

Theirs was a tenuous relationship at best. Ryan was a holdover from the old days, back before the Dallas developers had discovered their sleepy little town forty miles north of the city and had bought up the open land he used to hunt as a kid and carved it up into exclusive gated communities promising peace and prosperity, bait to Boomers fleeing the ills of urban life. And the Boomers had come, arriving in their Beemers and Lexuses and Hummers like fire ants in the backyard—one day they’re not even here, the next day they’ve taken over the goddamned place. Ten years ago this had been a farming community with a land bank and a feed store; today it had a Victoria’s Secret and a Starbucks.

Paul Ryan hated the Boomers.

But the mayor had welcomed them with open arms. Because the mayor owned the land, or damn near most of it, inherited from his daddy or acquired at foreclosure for pennies on the dollar during the drought years when the farmers couldn’t keep up their payments to the bank, which the mayor and his daddy before him owned. Paul Ryan’s father had committed suicide less than a year after the mayor’s father foreclosed the farm.

Paul sighed. The mayor was a short, pudgy bastard who couldn’t even make the high school football team that Paul Ryan had starred on. But now, just like the mayor’s daddy had held the note on the Ryan family farm, the mayor held the note on Paul Ryan’s career, a career he could foreclose at any time: the town charter expressly stated that the police chief served at the pleasure of the mayor. And the mayor was not pleased. He hung up the phone and glared at Ryan.

“Paul, why the hell did you bring in the FBI?”

“To find the girl! The Feds got more experience and a helluva lot more resources than we got.”

“Yeah, but they don’t got jurisdiction!”

“FBI helps local police in all child abductions. They bring a lot to the table, Mayor.”

“They bring the media to my town!” The mayor pointed a fat finger at Ryan. “Paul, you either find that girl alive or you find her dead, but I want her found, I want someone arrested, I want this deal closed in forty-eight hours or you’ll be a goddamn security guard at the Wal-Mart!”

FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux dodged the little Brice boy as he entered the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He knew the caffeine would only inflame his prostate, but a little girl was missing and he needed a shot of caffeine to get sharp. He had gone to the motel at midnight and just returned with an empty gut. He would normally lose ten pounds over the course of an abduction investigation. Hell of a way to diet.

Devereaux was about to walk out when the grandmother shoved a plate of food at him. The smell reminded him of his own grandmother’s breakfasts back on the farm in Louisiana. He figured it was better to eat her food than donuts all day. So he sat across the breakfast table from the grandfather; they acknowledged each other with grim nods. The grandfather’s hands exhibited the morning tremors of an alcoholic. After Devereaux had eaten half his stack of pancakes in silence, the grandfather said, “Why would he leave her shorts in the woods?”

Devereaux was trying to think of an appropriate answer other than
because he’s a sick bastard
when the father rushed through the kitchen looking like he had just rolled out of bed; his black glasses were riding low and lopsided on his face, one side of his curly hair was pressed flat, the other side was standing on end, and he was still wearing the same dirty clothes. He exited through the back door without a word. Minutes later, the father returned and walked directly over to Devereaux; he held out a camcorder like the one Devereaux had given the wife for Christmas.