The Stolen Hours

by Allen Eskens

  He had been up late taking photographs at the wedding the previous night, so Gavin allowed himself the luxury of sleeping in until nine in the morning. A good night’s sleep heightened creativity and attention to detail. His breakfast consisted of two eggs and a piece of toast, with orange juice to wash it down. Showered and shaved, he dressed like a man going to work—khakis and a long-sleeved shirt, buttoned to the neck—because that’s exactly what he was doing, even if that work was burrowing through the tunnels of the internet in search of his prey.

  It had been two years since he last performed this task, and that two-year hiatus had not been by accident. Police looked for patterns, their eyes and ears perked by those deaths most recently discovered. But police were human, apt to forget details as time went by. It only made sense that a connection would be harder to make over a span of years. Gavin had chosen a two-year break at random, but over the course of eight years—and four victims—it had seemed to work. And now the time had come to add to his collection.

  He began his routine by spending five minutes staring at the wall to clear his mind of prurient thoughts. He had learned that passion and emotion were venoms that needed to be sucked out and spat to the ground. Rule number one—keep your head. Be patient, look for flaws in the plan, and above all else, be prepared to abort if the risk ever outweighs the reward.

  He put Sadie Vauk’s place card on the desk and, right away, the face of the woman at the wedding came back to him. The bleached teeth, the bottle tan, the contempt in her eyes when she called him Picture Boy. She had invited what was to come.

  Gavin started to feel anger build in his chest, so he turned the card facedown and took a deep breath to expel the agitation.

  When he felt calm again, he went to his kitchen, knelt on the floor in front of his lazy Susan, and reached for the toe kick. His fingers found the loop of fishing line, the handle that opened his hiding spot. One small tug and the cupboard’s kick plate came free. He retrieved a small laptop, one he used for his most secret of tasks.

  As a student of the craft, he understood that computer forensics could find items buried on a hard drive, bits of data that lay entombed but intact, even after deletion. This was just the first of the many mistakes made by lesser men, troglodytes who blundered their way toward awaiting jail cells. Gavin, however, planned multiple options for every contingency. Redundancy was his mantra.

  For example, he would do his internet searches for Sadie Vauk on his special laptop, never on his home computer. And when he finished his research, deleting the search would not be enough. Hiding the computer under the lazy Susan would not be enough. He would also run an evidence-erasing program. And once he executed his plan, he would render the hard drive useless and dispose of the computer. It made for extra work, and extra cost, but such were the travails of a craftsman.

  Sometimes Gavin entertained himself by watching true crime shows on television, where purportedly brilliant investigators pursued what passed for master criminals. Gavin giggled at the buffoonery—the sheer slapstick comedy of it all. People left bloody footprints behind and kept the shoes. They gave no thought to tire tracks in mud or to DNA sloshed around like party confetti. He lived in a world full of amateurs and idiots.

  Yet despite his careful study and redundant cover-ups, Gavin understood that he had one essential weakness—an absolute violation of all his rules.

  Before launching into his search for Sadie Vauk, Gavin took a moment to visit his trophy room, a collection of protected files on a private server, one that he had installed in his mother’s garage attic back when he still lived with her. It was the perfect place to store his keepsakes should the police ever come to tear his house apart.

  He had taken great care to devise a system of online traps and hidden passages to keep his virtual trophy room hidden from prying eyes, precautions that mollified his unease over having a trophy room in the first place.

  There were four files on the server, and each held pictures of what he had done, and to whom. He would visit his trophy room on special occasions, the images taking him back in time so vividly that he could again smell their perfumed bodies and feel the softness of their skin against his fingers.

  Sometimes, he let his mind wander into the future, to a time when his bones would rest beneath a marble headstone, put there by nothing more exceptional than old age. In that daydream, he pictured some clueless bastard stumbling upon his trophy room. He hoped that the guy would have the good sense to take the computer and its files to the police. Gavin imagined their faces as they came to understand his skill. It sometimes bothered him that his artistry might go unappreciated, that his secret might follow him to the grave. His magnum opus deserved to be acknowledged—but not until after he was dead and gone.

  He closed the connection to his private server, letting his pulse return to normal before typing Sadie Vauk’s name into his search engine.

  She had already posted thirty-six pictures from the wedding to her Facebook page, godawful shots, like someone had handed a camera to a baboon.

  Gavin had taken up photography when he got his first camera on his twelfth birthday, a gift that his mother could afford only because she married that man who had handled her like Play-Doh. He was an ugly man, a shaved llama with too many teeth, but he was also a man who lived in a big house with a swimming pool. Gavin called the man Dad, not because his mother hit him when he called him Mr. Balentine, but because Richard Balentine bought nice things for Gavin—things like a camera.

  That birthday was the last one that Gavin would spend with Richard Balentine. A few months later, Richard would be dead, and his beautiful house with the big swimming pool would become the property of Gavin’s mother.

  In the comments section below the Facebook pictures, Gavin read a message from the bride, Janelle Rice-Halloway, thanking Sadie for doing her hair. Sadie was a hairdresser? Gavin opened a second search, adding the word salon after Sadie’s name, and found a link for Queen Bebe’s Hair Salon. He clicked on it.

  Queen Bebe’s was in the Lyndale neighborhood, a ten-minute drive from Gavin’s home in Kenwood, but a world away on the socioeconomic map. The shop squatted in the middle of an old strip mall and housed two stylists, Bebe Kavenaugh and Sadie Vauk. It stayed open until six in the evening, and had no bank or convenience store nearby, which cut down on the possibility of surveillance cameras.

  A plan began to form.

  Sadie’s social media presence extended to Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, but it was a collection of videos on YouTube that Gavin found most helpful. They were promotional shots taken inside the salon, showing the layout. How stupid to put her life on the internet like that—as if she wanted someone like Gavin to come along.

  Gavin searched old news articles and found one about Sadie’s high school swim team taking top honors at the state championship. A more recent article announced that Queen Bebe’s was now offering body piercing. It had a picture of Sadie giving a customer a nose ring. Gavin hated nose piercings, although he had once dated a girl with a nose stud.

  Well, to call it a date was a stretch. He had taken her to the homecoming dance his freshman year, a mistake that ultimately led to Gavin getting shipped off to a private school in Indiana.

  Her name was Eleanora Abrams, and he’d only asked her to the dance because his mother had pressured him for weeks to find a date. Eleanora had sat next to him in chemistry and talked to him on a few occasions when she didn’t understand her assignments. It had been the closest he had ever come to connecting with a girl, so he decided that if he were going to ask anyone to the dance, it would be her.

  He found her alone in the school library one afternoon, and, summoning all the courage he could muster, said, “Eleanora, would you go to the dance with me?” But because of his speech impediment, the word dance came out as dansche. Gavin’s cheeks turned hot when she didn’t answer right away.

  Then she said, “What?”

  He hadn’t prepared to say it twice—he dou
bted he could—but he pushed forward anyway. The second attempt came out even worse because he tried to ask without repeating the word dance. He instead muttered, “Homecoming,” pointing at her and then back to himself. Was it confusion on her face, or panic? He’d wanted to run—instead, he begged. “Please?” But what she heard was “Pleasche?”

  Backed into a corner, she looked around for help. No friends nearby. No lifeline. “Um…” She bit her lip. “Uh…I guess so.” He could feel her regret almost immediately.

  Gavin’s mother drove them to the dance in her Jag, squawking the entire time about what a cute couple they made, and how lucky they were to be young. Gavin and Eleanora sat on opposite ends of the backseat, neither saying a word.

  At the dance, Eleanora joined a cluster of her friends, and the group sat so tightly together that Gavin couldn’t get close. He understood what they were doing, and why, and he wanted to be invisible.

  After an hour of that hell, he left the gymnasium and took a seat on the stone wall, where he and Eleanora were to meet his mother after the dance. He had a cell phone and could have called his mother, but he didn’t. Instead, he spent the next three hours waiting, and thinking, and plotting how he would make Eleanora regret the way she had treated him.

  “Where’s Eleanora?” his mother had asked when she pulled up.

  He had practiced his answer as he waited. Amy hated his speech impediment, so when he had the opportunity to formulate his sentences in advance, he avoided words with the letter S in them. No reason to add to the revulsion she already felt for her son.

  “Eleanora will ride home with a friend.”

  “What do you mean? She’s your date. She came with you, so she should leave with you.”

  Gavin got in the car. Angry and embarrassed, his next words came out sharper than he had intended. “Go, would you!”

  “Don’t you talk to me that way, young man! What’s going on? Did she dump you?”

  “I told you—”

  “If that little bitch—”

  At that exact moment, Eleanora walked out of the gymnasium with her friends, and Gavin’s mother grabbed her Styrofoam cup of coffee and jumped out of the car. Gavin opened his mouth to stop her, but the door slammed closed before he could get a word out. He watched Amy march across the parking lot toward Eleanora and the others, tossing the coffee lid to the ground as she neared them.

  Gavin couldn’t hear what was said, and the exchange lasted only a few seconds before his mother threw the coffee into Eleanora’s face, causing the girl to fall backward to the ground. The others stood in stunned silence as Gavin’s mother walked casually back to her Jaguar. Gavin cursed his mother under his breath. He had been hatching his own plan in those hours as he waited for his mother to show up, but now, any misfortune that might befall Eleanora would be traced back to him. Why hadn’t his mother stayed out of it? The woman had no more cunning than a clod of dirt.

  The cops arrived a few minutes after Gavin and his mother got home. It was the second time his mother had been questioned by the police, the first time being the morning they’d found Richard’s body floating in the pool.

  Stupidly, Amy chose to act confused. “What assault? What are you talking about?” She was about to talk herself into a criminal charge, so Gavin stepped in, laying it on thick, using words that exposed his speech impediment. He even threw in a bit of a stutter for good measure.

  “Sh-sh-sche grabbed Mom’s arm. That’s how sche sh-sh-shcpilled the coffee. She was yelling and sh-sh-shcwearing at Mom, sh-sh-shctepping in like she was gonna hit her. Mom defended hershcelf. I schaw the whole thing.”

  How could they not believe the pathetic pleading of a kid so messed up that he could barely get the words out? Besides, the coffee wasn’t hot enough to burn, so maybe Eleanora had exaggerated her story. The police closed the books on Eleanora’s assault and left Gavin’s house with a polite nod. And for the second time in his life, Gavin got away with lying to the police.

  Chapter 5

  Lila stared at Frank Dovey’s invitation on her computer screen—no, not an invitation, a command: Come see me, three words that sucked the marrow from her bones. She thought back to that day in the elevator, the way he stared at her like a mean dog sizing up a meal. It had been two years since the Pruitt trial. For Dovey to fire her now seemed like a fight well below his weight class.

  Lila took a few calming breaths and counted down from ten. When she got to one, she stood and walked out of her office. Whatever Dovey planned to do to her, it had already been decided. All she could do was hold her emotions in check as he placed her neck beneath the blade of the guillotine.

  Frank Dovey’s office had windows, and shelves, and a wall behind his desk chock-full of diplomas, plaques, and pictures. His door was open, but Lila knocked anyway. Frank didn’t invite her in but simply pointed to a chair. She took a seat.

  His face held no expression as he stared at her. If he was trying to unnerve her, it was working. Then he said, “I assume you heard what happened to Ms. Malone?”

  “I did. How’s she doing?”

  Dovey ignored the question. “I also assume you’re aware that I am in charge of the Adult Prosecution division in her absence.”

  Lila figured this question to be rhetorical and didn’t answer.

  He continued. “I’ve been looking over your work here, and I don’t think you are living up to our expectations.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He picked up a piece of paper—Lila’s résumé—and started reading. “Editor of the law review, Dillard Award with the Jessup Moot Court, teaching assistant for the litigation practice class.”

  In her head, Lila added, Second chair of a murder case where we kicked your ass.

  “You’ve been here six months and in all this time, you’ve never appeared before a judge.”

  “A judge? No.”

  “And why is that? Has Mr. Hernandez lost faith in you?”

  “Mr. Hernandez prefers that I do research and prepare exhibits.”

  “One of the purposes of a clerkship is to see what a person’s made of. Trying a case isn’t like moot court or sitting in an office, drafting memos. It’s pressure. People’s lives and livelihoods will be at stake. Victims need to know that you can handle the case—that you won’t strike out on a curveball.”

  “I’ve asked Mr. Hernandez to let me—”

  “Don’t interrupt.”

  On the wall behind Dovey, Lila noticed a picture of Frank standing next to Colin Nelson, the county attorney, her boss—Dovey’s boss. In the picture the two men stood in a thick wood, bonding over camouflage and dead turkeys.

  “Your offer of employment here remains contingent, not only on passing the bar exam but on showing this office that you have the mettle to handle the job, and so far I’ve seen no evidence of that.”

  “What have I—?”

  Dovey jabbed his hand into the space between them, his fingers clamped in a pinch, the message clear: No talking. “I’m reassigning you to an attorney who will get you in front of a judge. Report to Andrea Fitch. Tell her I sent you.” His lips crept up into the slightest grin. Then he cocked his head as if he couldn’t understand why Lila was still in his office, and said, “That’s all, Ms. Nash.”

  Lila stood, left Dovey’s office, and counted her steps in sets of ten as she made her way to the office of Andi Fitch. Dovey had moved the first piece on his political game board, a move Lila believed she understood. Assigning Lila to Andi Fitch had nothing to do with getting her in front of a judge and everything to do with building a paper trail that would justify his firing her. The quarterly performance review Fitch had written for Ryan was microscopic in its thoroughness, detailing every minor stumble and flaw. Dovey planned to kill her with paper cuts, and she would have no choice but to take it.

  Lila paused outside of Fitch’s door to gather her resolve before knocking. She wanted to present herself as the epitome of confidence: no shake in her voice, no fidget in
her hands. At the very least, she wanted to hide the biting anxiety that roiled in her stomach. Then she knocked.

  “Enter.”

  Lila stepped in, closing the door behind her. “I’m Lila Nash,” she said.

  Fitch gave her a glance and then turned her attention back to the document she was reading. “Congratulations,” she said. “Why are you standing in my office, Lila Nash?”

  “Mr. Dovey didn’t tell you?”

  At the mention of Dovey’s name, Fitch put the paper down and looked at Lila. “Tell me what?”

  “I’ve been reassigned to you.”

  Fitch pursed her lips and took in a slow, deep breath. “Is that a fact?”

  Lila was about to answer, but Fitch pointed at a chair and said, “Sit,” which Lila did. Then Fitch punched some buttons on the phone and set the ringing line to speaker. Frank Dovey answered.

  “Frank, Andi here. I have a confused girl in my office who thinks she’s been assigned to me for supervision. That has to be a mistake, so could you clear things up for her?”

  “No mistake, Andi. I sent her there.”

  Andi picked up the receiver so Lila could no longer hear Frank. “What part of ‘no more clerks’ did you not get?” There was a long pause, after which Fitch said, “I’m tired of babysitting, Frank. We’ve talked about this.”

  Lila wanted to say, I’m right here, but she held her tongue.

  “Goddammit! I don’t know what your game is, but—”

  There was another pause before Andi said, “Go to hell, Frank,” and hung up the phone.

  Andi looked at Lila as though she had just noticed that Lila was still in the room. Then Andi took her seat and dialed the phone again, keeping it on speaker. Ryan answered.

  “Yes, Ms. Fitch?”

  “Grab your files and bring them to my office.”