Come and Get Me

by August Norman

  She got up and checked the pair of plastic baskets near the shower. One wet towel on the left, three clean and dry on the right. She’d used one yesterday, so it could be her own, but even in this subterranean hell, it would have dried by now. She grabbed the terry cloth, felt enough water to wring out.

  Two chairs, two laundry baskets, 708.

  365 × 2 = 730 days

  She couldn’t remember the exact date Chapman had disappeared, but the rough math worked.

  She factored in a week or two of disorientation, guesstimated the difference between her arrival and Chapman’s last night, got slightly less than two years.

  Embower hadn’t discovered and torn Chapman’s notes from the Riverside. Angela had found the biggest book she could and tore out one page a day to keep track of time.

  “The police would never find my Angel in the Bro-duce farmland,” he’d said.

  Caitlin had thought that meant he’d buried Chapman somewhere else.

  He had—in a cell behind the playroom bookshelf—and she was still alive.

  After two years, Angela Chapman is still freaking alive.

  Caitlin’s heart wanted to explode, her mouth wanted to scream, but her brain wouldn’t allow either.

  Stop … breathe . . . think.

  Caitlin needed to get her a message.

  There were no writing utensils in the playroom, but the two shelves held hundreds of thousands of words, and Caitlin knew the text in one of those books better than anyone on the planet.

  She took Fallen Angels and the dictionary to the torture table and worked with her back to the camera.

  She opened a breakfast bar. Just as she’d hoped, bits of chocolate and granola stuck to the inside of the wrapper. She wet her fingertip, put it against the bar’s sugary cement, touched the first ripped piece of paper, then pushed down against page 709 of the Riverside Shakespeare.

  Seven bars later, she felt confident Chapman would get the message.

  Angela

  My name Caitlin Bergman

  I am prisoner too

  I know your parent

  I know your friend

  Will get us out soon

  Be ready

  Leave message here

  Her back still to the camera, she set the books aside, picked up the black walking bag, and bit a second eyehole.

  Once she could see with both eyes, she returned the books to the shelves, then went back to the couch and studied the TV’s cornfield.

  Caitlin hadn’t run in a week. Even bruised and beaten, her body ached for a workout.

  * * *

  Sometime near sunset, the wall speaker crackled. “Caitlin, it’s time.”

  Embower appeared in the front window. His black T-shirt had dark circles around the neck and pits, patches of powder everywhere.

  “Get the bag and walk to the door.”

  She picked up the bag, faced the eyeholes the right way.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t put it on yet.”

  He left the window. The steel panel in the door slid open. Caitlin saw his body through the opening.

  “Put your hands through the hole,” he said, no need for the mic now.

  “What about the bag?”

  “Fine, put it on,” he said, impatient.

  Caitlin did so, then fumbled toward the door like she couldn’t see. “Found it.”

  Her hands went through the hole and the cuffs went on. She pulled back. The panel closed and the door opened.

  He tugged her out. “Walk.”

  With the clarity of two eyeholes, Caitlin saw a large opening with a tray full of plates to the right past the door to her room.

  “Stop,” he said. “Turn left, walk forward.”

  She went into her bedroom, heard the door shut and lock behind her.

  “You can take the bag off.”

  Caitlin did, saw him watching through the window. He motioned her toward the door. She put her hands through and he unlocked her cuffs.

  “What do you think of the changes?”

  She looked around the room, impressed. “This makes the process so much better. Thank you, Embower.”

  His lips curled into a smile. “Anything for you.”

  He slid the metal panel closed, latched something, then walked away toward the playroom.

  He’d left dinner on the table, teriyaki salmon with rice and cooked carrots. Caitlin grabbed a bottle of water and dug in.

  Her feet felt a rough patch in the otherwise smooth floor. She looked under the table. Like the playroom, the bedroom’s limestone floor now had a strip of gray concrete that led toward the outside wall. Unlike the playroom, Caitlin’s line ended in a circular metal drain under the table. Two Phillips-head screws kept the four-inch steel disc and its waffle-pattern holes in place.

  She remembered the camera and decided to wait to investigate the drain. From the vantage point of the camper toilet post-dinner, she stared at the brand new drain and worked out a plan.

  There were only two ways out of the room—handcuffed with a bag over her head or drugged and unconscious. She needed to be both conscious and have her hands free—and Embower hated a mess.

  Caitlin had a new drain and enough tampons and maxis to destroy an entire dorm’s plumbing.

  CHAPTER

  73

  MIKE STARED AT the big man in the orange jumpsuit on the other side of the glass. Troy Woods had forty pounds on him, two inches of height, and shoulder muscles swollen from hours on weight benches.

  The inmate reached for the phone, showing the faded ink swirled around his right wrist. The institutional blue complemented the recent red wound over his cauliflower ear.

  Mike spoke into the handset. “You in the Aryan Brotherhood, Woods?”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Who do you guys even beef with? I figured everyone in Indiana was white.”

  Woods snorted. “Then you don’t know shit. We got Mexicans like everywhere else, except in here they don’t even mow the grass. You a cop?”

  “I understand you had a visitor yesterday. Caitlin Bergman?”

  Woods smiled. “Yeah, you’re a cop. Fuck you, cop.”

  Mike watched Woods puff up, typical jailhouse bravado. “Fuck me, but you’re not getting up? You that bored?”

  Woods rolled his shoulders back. “Seven out of fifteen, I got spare time. Guess whose fault that is?”

  “The Mexicans’?”

  “Caitlin Fucking Bergman’s.”

  “Thought you had some sort of car accident,” Mike said. “Something about a family of four and a fourth DUI.”

  “Links in a chain, Cop.”

  Mike stared him down. He’d met a hundred guys like Woods in prison, tough guys who believed they wouldn’t have been there if someone else hadn’t failed, never owning up to their own stupid mistakes. Having been one himself, he knew the best way to get them to talk was to treat them like the victims of circumstance they claimed to be. “You’re right. I used to be a cop, but then I ended up on your side of the glass, thanks to Bergman.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Four years in Corcoran, all because that bitch reporter had to prove she was smarter than me. Sound familiar?”

  He watched Woods process the mix of truths and lies. Woods’s hard-case act dropped a level. “Corcoran? That’s where Manson was, right?”

  Mike nodded. “Protective Housing Unit. Never saw him. What’d you and Bergman talk about yesterday?”

  “Why do you care?”

  Time for the big sell. “What kind of job do you think an ex-cop can get with a felony in his jacket? Nothing on the books, I can tell you that. So when I got out, I dove in dumpsters, sold scrap metal—all that shit not fit for a white man. Then I met a guy.”

  “Who?”

  Mike looked around. “Do they record this shit?”

  Woods leaned closer to the glass. “Video only, no audio.”

  “No names,” Mike said, all lies at this point, “but the guy worked f
or a big PI firm and needed some muscle. I spent two years taking pictures of cheating husbands, planting bugs on cars, and throwing the occasional scare into would-be snitches. Then we got a client, I’m talking big money, the kind of money that makes rules, not breaks them.”

  He had Woods on the edge of his seat. Every con loved a conspiracy.

  “You think you and I are the only ones Bergman fucked with? This rich guy has a real hard-on for her. Not only that, he’s got juice too. I don’t believe in God or anything, but all of a sudden I’m getting paid to dig up dirt on the woman who ruined my life. Might not be a miracle, but that’s what I call justice.”

  Woods nodded along. At this point Mike could sell him a timeshare. “So why are you here?”

  “She’s down in Bloomington trying to take on an old police chief named Hartman who’s still got some friends.” Mike raised his eyebrows. “She didn’t tell you about your part in her big exposé?”

  Panic flashed through Woods’s prison-yard-heavy routine. “No. She sat down yesterday looking like a freak show—thick-ass makeup, weird dyke haircut, said, ‘You remember me?’ I didn’t recognize her, so she said her name. I told her to fuck herself.”

  “What’d she do then?”

  “Bitch ran out in tears.”

  Not the reaction Mike expected. “Bullshit. You made Caitlin Bergman cry?”

  Mary Lubbers-Gaffney had told him about Caitlin’s panic attacks, but he’d seen the woman laugh with a knife to her throat. That this washed-up convict had a hold over her made Mike want to slip a guard five hundred bucks for a minute without the bulletproof divider between them.

  Woods smiled. “I tried to cheer her up, asked if she wanted to sign up for a conjugal, relive the old days.”

  Mike’s fingers strangled his handset. “When you raped her.”

  Woods shrugged. “So what are you gonna do to that bitch?”

  “Oh, I’m gonna take care of her.”

  “You won’t say what?”

  “You seem solid, but I knew plenty of stand-up guys who ratted to cut their sentences in half.”

  “Not me—ask around.”

  Mike smiled, finally able to speak truth to this asshole. “Know this, Woods. You’ll get your payback, and you’ll know I was the one who made it happen.”

  * * *

  “Agent Martinez said to give you anything you wanted.” The prison guard with the shaved head cued up the footage on the computer, two camera angles, side by side. “Here’s your happy couple,” he said, letting the video play.

  “No audio?”

  The guard shook his head. “Blame the ACLU.”

  The cubicle dividers blocked most of Caitlin’s visit with Woods, but Mike caught a glimpse of her face when she exited.

  Her hand went up to her eyes, blocking her nose and lips, and stayed there until she left the frame, like a celebrity avoiding the paparazzi outside a rehab center.

  “Could you play that at half speed?”

  The kid turned, revealed his impressionable twenty-year-old face. “You want the whole thing?”

  “Just the walkout.”

  “Okay. What’s that like, working for a Martinez?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We don’t get a lot of ezes or itas around here, not on this side of the bars.”

  Mike didn’t bite. “You gonna hit ‘Play’?”

  The footage played in slo-mo. Still hard to get a good glimpse—almost like Caitlin didn’t want the camera to see her face.

  “Freeze it there.”

  Mike stared at the image. Caitlin’s hand froze right below her lips on its path to her eyes. “Can I get a copy of this?”

  “I’ll get you a file.”

  Mike didn’t know everything about Bergman. They weren’t lovers, didn’t share hopes and dreams, talk about God, or exchange Christmas cards, but Woods’s words didn’t make sense.

  “Thick-ass makeup.”

  Mike had only seen Caitlin wear makeup when she’d been a TV reporter, and then, only because someone else applied it. She certainly never wore bright pink lipstick. But then, he’d never seen her cry either. He pointed to the upper-right corner of the screen, a bright yellow height strip along the doorjamb.

  “Is that thing accurate?”

  The guard leaned in. “Far as I know.”

  Mike shook his head. He didn’t know Caitlin’s measurements, but he’d have noticed if she was five feet ten.

  The guard handed him a thumb drive. “This is the whole visit. Anything else I can help with?”

  Mike pocketed the drive. “Who’s Woods been scrapping with?”

  “Big turf war between the Aryans and the beaners in the last two months.”

  Mike nodded, headed for the door.

  The guard followed. “Hey, Agent, maybe you’ll clue me in, since we’re both in law enforcement. From what I saw, it didn’t look like Woods said anything useful, either to her or you.”

  Mike stared at the bald kid’s hairline. Full and dark, no sign of recession, probably shaved daily. If the Aryan Brotherhood had a friend on staff, Mike stood close enough to smell his swastikas. “Law enforcement to law enforcement?”

  “Yeah, Woods seems like a real badass. Tells every cop he meets to go to hell.”

  Mike gave the youth Nazi his money’s worth. “Troy Woods gave me more than I needed to close my case. Hell, he offered to rat on everyone he knew—anything to shorten his sentence. You might as well put him in a stadium, ’cause every cop in the Midwest is gonna show up to listen to him sing.”

  The guard looked like Mike had just pantsed Hitler. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Don’t let that get around. People hear something like that, you’ll find your badass dead in a shower.”

  CHAPTER

  74

  “YOU’LL STAY IN your room until nighttime.”

  Caitlin watched Embower’s lips through the window, heard his voice through the handcuff slot.

  “I have two classes. There’s breakfast in the drop and a sandwich for lunch. Also a stack of books.”

  He slid the panel shut and left. If he’d be away most of the day, he wouldn’t be watching the camera feed. He’d have recordings, but Caitlin would work on the presumption he only checked past footage when something went wrong.

  She downed some Tylenol and ate breakfast. After her last bite, she casually knocked her open water bottle off the table, swore dramatically, and dropped to her hands and knees.

  The bottle landed inches from the drain. She poured the remainder in, listened, but didn’t hear anything, then tried to turn a screw with her fingertip. No luck, but something seemed unusual. Usually, a cover plate like that sat inside a grooved ring, its screws sunk into predrilled holes. From what Caitlin could see, Embower had tapped metal anchor bolts into the limestone, rather than the strip of concrete, then rested the cover on top of the hole, probably to save time while the concrete hardened. Either way, her focus now was how to clog the holes in the cover.

  She got up, dropped the empty bottle in the metal drop, and inventoried the shelves. Twenty-three bottles of water, twelve Sprite, twelve Coca-Cola, eight Diet Coke, two boxes of maxi-pads, and three boxes of tampons.

  Too big to squeeze through the openings, she took each tampon from its applicator and split the cotton in two. When she had ten disassembled, she went under the table and thumb-fed the material down the drain.

  She needed to make a wad. She grabbed a paperback copy of Steven King’s It from the stack of books, tore out twenty pages, rolled each, and fed them down as well. She repeated the process with another box of tampons, another chunk of a different book.

  Time to test the dam. She grabbed a bottle of Sprite, poured some down. The liquid hissed its way down the tube, but the last two pages she’d dropped didn’t move. She poured a little more, missed the drain.

  “Shit.”

  Sprite splashed on the limestone floor. She expected a little bubble from a soda, but the liquid tu
rned into foam instead. A chemical reaction.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Troy Woods’s fifth-grade science fair project had taught her the basics. The carbolic acid in the soda caused the unsealed limestone to break down.

  She poured the rest of the Sprite where the screws entered the stone. She had no idea how much soda it would take to loosen the screws but needed to fill the drain regardless. She emptied another two bottles then returned to tampons and books. She stopped for lunch, put one of the empty Sprite bottles in the metal drop, replaced the caps on the other two, and tucked them into her bed sheets.

  After lunch, she risked another hour under the table. Overall, she squeezed one hundred pages, twenty tampons, three granola bars and their wrappers, and the bread from her sandwich down the drain before climbing into bed to await playroom time.

  * * *

  Hours later, the metal slot clanged open. Embower stood outside Caitlin’s window, handcuffs in hand. “Who’s hungry?”

  Caitlin walked over. “What time is it?”

  “Seven.”

  She bagged herself, put her hands through the slot. They walked to the playroom, no discussion. She heard the door lock behind her, found the hole, put her hands through once more.

  “You’re not eating with me tonight?”

  No window in this door. She couldn’t see his reaction, but his hands stopped moving on the handcuffs. “Not tonight.”

  The cuffs slipped off. She left her hands in the hole. “Embower? Can I have a clock?”

  His answer came slow. “Why a clock?”

  “It’s like Vegas in this place. My circadian rhythm’s gone crazy. Nothing big, maybe a little alarm clock.”

  He squeezed her hands gently, then pushed them back through the door. “We’ll see.”

  The metal slot slid shut.

  She reached up and removed the bag.

  A takeout container waited on the torture table next to a crisp copy of the latest Daily Student. Her own face stared at her from center page, above the crease. The headline—“Missing Reporter Found.”

  He’d be watching—no doubt in her mind about that—but she couldn’t wait. She picked up the paper.