“Get off the goddamn grass!”
The chief said to make the mother happy, so Police Officer Eddie Yates was chasing the crowd of reporters and cameramen off the Brice’s landscaped front lawn. They took one look at him—the angular twenty-three-year-old face, the sharp flattop, the dark sunglasses, the bulging biceps that had the sleeves of his uniform ready to bust at the seams—and moved to the sidewalk, bitching as they did.
One riot, one Ranger.
Except Eddie wasn’t a Texas Ranger. He was a patrol cop in a small suburban police department that didn’t even have a SWAT team—not that it needed one, seeing as how the biggest crime the Town of Post Oak had to offer was kids passing around a beer under the bleachers at the little league field on Saturday nights. Eddie usually spent his shift working the town’s speed trap out on the freeway, nabbing speeders while dreaming of being on a big city SWAT team, wearing a black paramilitary uniform, packing military style assault weapons, busting down doors to drug houses, beating up gangsters, and fighting the war on drugs. He would take the Dallas Police Academy’s entrance exam for the fourth time this summer.
Fight back, Johnny-boy!
Be a man!
Go on, run home to mommy, Little Johnny Brice, you fuckin’ crybaby!
All the taunts from all the bullies at all the Army bases came rushing back now. Little Johnny Brice hadn’t been man enough to protect his own daughter at a public park.
Just like he hadn’t been man enough back then to fight back against the bullies. When the colonel returned from deployment, Mom would beg him to stop the beatings and the colonel would order the bullies’ fathers to instill discipline in their ranks. But that had only made the beatings worse. He remembered the beatings and his face stung; but from Elizabeth’s hand today and the hurt would not go away.
Back then, he had gone inside himself, deep into his inner child while his outer child was getting the crap beat out of it. Afterward, he had run home to his room. Mom would always come in and hold him while he cried, and she would cry too; she would doctor his wounds and tell him it would never happen again. But it always happened again. Other kids had spent their childhood outside, learning to hit a curve ball; John had spent his in his room, hiding from bullies and teaching himself computer code.
Now, he had sought refuge in his home office, secluded on the backside of the house; he was hiding from his spouse and trying to escape the fear and loathing of the real world, as he often did. But there would be no escape this time. Fear and loathing had followed Little Johnny Brice home.
The phone rang. He let the machine take the call. It was Lou in New York, leaving another message: “John, did you get my earlier messages? Jesus Christ, it’s on the news up here. I’m stunned! I don’t know what to say, buddy. How could something like that happen in a public park? Man, I’m like …
shit
. Call me.” The machine beeped and went silent.
Because I wasn’t man enough to protect her, that’s how it happened!
A Cray supercomputer occupied the space inside John’s skull; his mind was capable of complex calculations and came with a near photographic memory—but he couldn’t remember yesterday.
Was the game just yesterday?
Elbows resting on the desk, hands gripping his head, eyes closed, John tried to reboot his memory: he’s sitting in the stands at the soccer field, talking to Lou about the IPO; Elizabeth has gone to the concession stand to find Gracie; then a piercing scream startles him so—
Grace!
He drops the phone and runs to the concession stand where parents are shouting for their children and panic is racing through the crowd like an e-mail virus until the panic and he reach Elizabeth simultaneously.
Grace is gone!
Gone where?
Taken!
Home?
No, goddamnit! Someone kidnapped her!
He has never before seen Elizabeth panicked and out of control, and it scares him. Then the sound of sirens, the police, the search in the woods. And Gracie was gone. And he might never see her again. And Little Johnny Brice hurt in a place the bullies could never touch.
“You’ve worked a hundred twenty-seven abductions?” the mother asked.
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“But no ransoms?”
“I’ve worked one ransom in thirty years with the Bureau. Not a child.”
He knew where this conversation would end. These conversations always ended there.
“Your job is to find abducted children?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“
Find
abducted children?”
He gave her the same answer he always gave the parents, hoping they would not ask the logical follow-up question; most parents didn’t because they couldn’t bear to know the answer.
“Eventually.”
From the mother’s expression, he could tell her mind was working through his answer. Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes bore into him. She was a tough broad, tough enough to ask the follow-up question.
“Were any of the children found … alive?”
Looking at the mother, Devereaux found himself hoping mightily that her child had been abducted for money, as unlikely as that was. But he had hoped just as mightily one hundred twenty-seven times before for a happy ending to an abduction, each time in vain. One hundred twenty-seven abductions of children by strangers— ninety-three had ended with a dead child; the other thirty-four had never been found and were presumed dead—had taught him that holding out false hope only victimized the family a second time.
“No, ma’am.”
The mother’s entire body slumped. The tough-broad lawyer façade faded from her face; for a brief moment, Elizabeth Brice was just another desperate, tortured mother, no different from those dirt-poor mothers of victims living in trailer parks, because they now shared something in common—the peculiar pain of knowing your child was in the arms of a stranger. After a silence, she spoke, slowly and softly.
“This isn’t going to end well, is it?”
“Mrs. Brice, Gracie was extremely low-risk for a stranger abduction—upper income, non-urban, intact family … kids like her just don’t get abducted by strangers. And ransom is a long shot. It just doesn’t happen in this country. But this wasn’t a random grab. He targeted Gracie. He asked for her by name. Why? Of all the little girls at the park, why did he want her?”
Bobby Joe Fannin was breathing hard, fast as he was having to run to keep the dogs in sight. They got something, way they were yelping. Deep into the woods, the dogs abruptly stopped. Bobby Joe caught up and looked down. He spat.
“Shit.”
Last fall’s leaves and twigs crunched and snapped beneath their feet as they ran through the thick woods toward the sound of barking dogs, but Ben’s thoughts were of another time and place when he had run through woods to a bad ending.
She’s twelve or maybe thirteen. They dragged her into the nearby woods. He heard her muffled cries and came running. “Get off her!” he yells as he drives his boot into the soldier’s ribcage, knocking him off her. The other soldier grins and points down at the girl. “Go on, Lieutenant, get yourself some.” He glances down at the terrified girl then back at the grinning soldier. He raises his rifle and puts the muzzle against the soldier’s forehead; the grin drops off the soldier’s face. The urge to pull the trigger is overwhelming. Instead, he pivots and slams the butt of the rifle into the soldier’s brow, knocking him unconscious. The two soldiers would have been court-martialed had they not been killed that same afternoon, their legs blown off by VC land mines, their death cries rising above the Plain of Reeds as they bled to death on a hot day in the Mekong Delta.
Ahead, Elizabeth stumbled and fell again; a skirt and heels were not suited to the terrain. Ben stopped to help her up. The heel on one shoe had broken off; she tossed the other shoe aside, pushed his hands away, and ran on, her face distorted by fear.
The local police chief was now in the lead, followed by Agent Devereaux then John, Elizabeth, and Ben. Chief Ryan
had started off walking, carefully pushing limbs aside for Elizabeth’s safe passage, but when she had taken off running into the woods, hands flailing at the sharp branches striking at her face and arms and legs, he had realized that walking was not an option. They had overtaken Elizabeth on her first fall.
They were now deep into the woods. From the intermittent sound of cars, a road ran nearby. Thirty meters ahead, uniformed cops and FBI agents stood silently in a circle, their heads down, as if joined in prayer. Chief Ryan and Agent Devereaux arrived first then turned and stopped John. Ben saw his son slump and fall to his knees; Ben ran faster and his heart beat harder. Agent Devereaux tried to block Elizabeth’s view—
“Mrs. Brice, you shouldn’t …”
—but she shoved him aside and pushed her way inside the circle; she cried out, and her hands snapped up to her mouth like a reflex. Her legs gave way, and she dropped to the ground. Her clothes were ripped and covered in dirt and dried leaves, one shoe was on and one shoe was gone, and her arms and legs and face were striped with fresh scratch marks. Ben stood over her, staring down and breathing hard. He took the pain and buried it deep inside him with all the other pain, clamping his jaws so tight his teeth hurt. The woods were eerily quiet, as if even the creatures understood the violation only they had witnessed.
Elizabeth crawled forward and reached out to the blue soccer shorts and white soccer shoe lying on the ground.
The ten-thousand-square-foot residence at Six Magnolia Lane stood silent as night fell. Upstairs, Kate sat in her room saying the rosary through quiet tears. Elizabeth was sleeping in her bed, having succumbed to exhaustion after thirty-seven hours awake; she had managed to remove one leg of her torn pantyhose before falling asleep. Sam was watching
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
in his room with Hilda;
Pirates
was rated PG-13, so he wasn’t supposed to be watching it, but Hilda didn’t know that—heck, she couldn’t even read English.
In Gracie’s bedroom, Agent Chip Stevens, an FBI computer specialist with the Bureau’s Computer Analysis Response Team, aka the “geek squad,” was quietly examining the victim’s computer; he was reviewing her e-mail history, checking the browser cache to see the websites she had visited and webpages she had downloaded, and trying to determine if she had been contacted over the Internet by a computer-literate sexual predator. Perhaps she had wandered into the wrong chat room and had been lured into disclosing personal information that had led the perpetrator to her soccer game. The Internet had opened a whole new world to sex offenders.
God, he hated child abductions.
Stevens dwelled on the victim’s last e-mail. Dated yesterday, from [email protected] to [email protected] On the screen, Stevens saw:
ACK. Hm frm NYC. Nsnly dspr8 2 CU. Gd wk @ skl? RdE 4 mg gm? Gm tm? Wldnt ms 4 E9$. Rly. Pstgm, srs fdg n qlty fctm, grilf. CUL8R, alEG8R. X0XO, Kahuna.
He translated the message from Mr. Brice to the victim:
Hi, I’m here. Home from New York City. Insanely desperate to see you. Good week at school? Ready for the big game? What is game time? Wouldn’t miss for a billion dollars. Really. Postgame, serious foodage and quality facetime, girlfriend. See you later, alligator. Love and kisses, Kahuna
.
Stevens smiled. The victim and her father obviously had a running joke because no one abbreviated every word of their e-mail like that anymore. He found the victim’s reply e-mail:
E9$? ROTFL. PANS 2 tl U abt skl. Am I rdE 4 sccr gm? IMHO, I grok sccr! Gm @ 5. BthrRB[]. MB vprmom wl sho … Nt! UR my fv prpllrhd n ntr bg rm. Ctch U ofln, d00d. OnO. Gracie. :-)
Tears welled up in Stevens’ eyes as he read her reply:
A billion dollars? I’m rolling on the floor laughing. Pretty amazing new stuff to tell you about school. Am I ready for the soccer game? In my humble opinion, I am soccer! Game at five. Be there or be square. Maybe vapormom will show … Not! You are my favorite propellerhead in the entire big room. Catch you offline, dude. Over and out. Gracie
. Signed off with the online emoticon of a happy face.
The victim and her father must have had a great relationship. Stevens wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Problem was, he got way too emotional working child abductions. Sitting in the victim’s room among her personal effects, he couldn’t help but wonder about her life and the importance of each object in her life—like this, a framed portrait of a young soldier in full military dress, wearing a green beret, a chest full of medals, and what Stevens knew was the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck. Who was this soldier and why did he rate a front-row spot on a ten-year-old girl’s desk, where she would look at him first thing each morning and last thing each night? Questions like that haunted him for weeks after the child’s body was found.
Other than being about five times as big with an adjoining bathroom that was like something out of a fancy hotel, the victim’s room looked remarkably similar to his nine-year-old daughter’s room: posters on the wall, the same Orlando Bloom
one and a life-sized Mia Hamm, trophies, books, TV/DVD, telephone, boom box, electronic keyboard, soccer ball, and a closet stuffed with clothes. Gracie Ann Brice is a real live kid. Or was. She had sat where he sat, done her homework on this computer, watched TV in this room, talked to her friends on that phone, and slept in that bed, where her father now slept, curled up in the same dirty clothes and clutching the girl’s teddy bear. He did not appear at all like the genius Stevens had read about in that
Fortune
magazine article. Stevens had felt envious that day: he was a GS-11 geek making $51,115 a year and Brice was a geek about to become a billionaire. But now that Brice’s daughter had been abducted and murdered—he had never worked a stranger abduction where the child hadn’t been murdered—Stevens was not so envious. He wouldn’t trade his daughter for Bill Gates’s money.