The Stolen Hours

by Allen Eskens

  The judge then said, “And for the State?”

  No answer came.

  Gavin looked over his shoulder at the young woman he’d been trying to place. She now stood at the counsel table, her face pale, her fingers wrapped tightly around the edges of that file, her eyes locked on Gavin.

  “For the State?” the judge repeated.

  The young woman began to breathe heavily. And still no words came out of her mouth.

  “Ms. Nash, are you okay?” the judge said.

  Nash? Gavin looked closer at her face and chin and eyes, but it was the name that triggered the memory. In a flash, it all came flooding back with the chill of an April lake. It couldn’t be.

  Another prosecutor, a polished Black woman with a cold confidence, stood and took over the hearing. “Andrea Fitch for the State, Your Honor.”

  Gavin turned to look at the judge, but all he could see was the face of a ghost, a woman he’d met only once, eight years ago in the backseat of a car.

  Chapter 23

  Lila had read and reread Gavin Spencer’s bail study, looking for arguments that Spencer might make to keep bail low. He might point out that he had no criminal history and had lived in Minnesota all of his life, with the exception of three years when he attended a private high school in Indiana. Lila would counter with the fact that Spencer was facing serious time in prison and had enough money to take flight. She went one step further, though, and prepared rebuttals for arguments that didn’t jump out as obvious, such as medical concerns, turning in his passport, or a request for home confinement.

  Lila had come away from her meeting with the detectives seeing that Gavin was both smart and careful. The lack of physical evidence meant that Sadie Vauk’s abduction had been meticulously planned. And if she hadn’t been a champion swimmer, she would have been just as dead as the other three women pulled from the river. More than any other defendant in her stack of files, Gavin Spencer seemed to be playing a game. And although he chose to appear without an attorney that morning, Lila had vowed not to underestimate him.

  As she had waited for court to start, the creak of the courtroom door pulled Lila’s attention to the back of the room, where Frank Dovey was walking in. He carried no files, no briefcase. He looked at Lila, locking his gaze on her for an uncomfortable few seconds before taking a seat in the back row of pews.

  Lila turned back around and looked at the file on her lap, although her focus floated away from the pages. Why was Dovey there? Had he come to watch her? It sounded paranoid, but why else come when he had no cases to handle?

  She did her best to shake Dovey from her thoughts, shuffling through the Spencer file to calm her anxiety. Then a side door opened and a jailer ushered six men in orange jumpsuits into the room, Gavin Spencer walking at the head of the line. She recognized him from his booking photo. He took a seat in the jury box and Lila returned to her prep work. He looked unimpressive—insignificant—his skin soft and squishy on his bones.

  The hum of conversations stopped when a bailiff entered through a hidden door behind the judge’s bench. He tucked his thumbs into his belt and called out, “All rise.” Everyone did. “The District Court of Hennepin County is in session, the Honorable June Anderson presiding.”

  Judge Anderson walked to the chair behind her bench and sat down. “You may be seated.”

  This would mark the fourth time that Lila would appear before Judge Anderson, the first being the Gray case—Lila’s very first court appearance. She liked Judge Anderson.

  Lila had barely taken her seat when the judge called the Spencer case, so Lila took her place at the prosecutor’s table, standing beside Andi, who remained seated. Gavin Spencer sidestepped the other inmates to get out of the jury box and followed the bailiff, who directed him to a podium just ahead of the judge’s bench.

  Judge Anderson asked Spencer to confirm his name for the record. He answered by saying, “My name isch Gavin Schpenscher.”

  Something in those words sent a bullet through Lila’s chest, opening a hole that stole her breath away. Her world tilted, her face flushed hot, and her tongue turned to dust. White noise filled her ears, and her peripheral vision began to fade as though she were about to pass out. She didn’t understand what was happening.

  Through the hum of her panic, she heard Judge Anderson say, “And for the State?” Lila tried to speak but nothing came out—no air, no sound, nothing. She looked at the judge, and then at Gavin Spencer, confused.

  “For the State?” the judge repeated.

  Lila put her hands on the table for balance.

  “Ms. Nash, are you okay?” the judge asked.

  Lila felt hands touch her shoulders as Andi stood up beside her, disappointment on her face. Lila sat down as Andi took over. Not much of what happened after that registered, other than Gavin telling the judge that he was okay with being held without bail.

  Andi walked out of the courtroom after the hearing, leaving Lila alone at the table. She felt naked, everyone’s eyes fixed on her as she stood to leave. The weight of her embarrassment was made a thousand times worse when she saw Frank Dovey watching, a slight smile angled into his cheeks.

  The sight of Dovey weakened Lila’s knees, but she took a step.

  Ten.

  Then another.

  Nine.

  She kept her focus straight ahead, counting down each step until she pushed the door open on the count of three.

  Two.

  The door closed behind her.

  One.

  Lila stopped and took a full breath, her first since that moment she heard Gavin Spencer speak.

  Chapter 24

  Gavin wanted to punch something. He would have torn the metal sink from the wall and flung it across his cell had it not been bolted and welded and immovable. His mouth went dry as he tried to swallow the anger that burned his throat. He needed to think.

  It’s panic. Just keep your head—figure this out.

  The yapping of inmates in the common area kicked at his concentration, breaking his thoughts apart before they could form. On top of everything else, a voice in his head barked like an angry dog, the words You’re fucked ricocheting off the cinder blocks that surrounded him.

  He took a seat on the edge of his bunk, squeezed the thin mattress in his fists, and clenched his jaw to hold back a wail. Gavin Spencer had walked into the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center with a perfect blueprint for his escape, a lifeline to freedom that he had formulated as he waited for the detectives to show up.

  Jails were designed to stop men from breaking out through barriers of stone and steel. Gavin’s strategy looked beyond the walls. In the end, his captors would be the ones to escort him out. His plan had been playing out exactly as he had anticipated, until he came face-to-face with Lila Nash, a contingency that had never crossed his mind.

  What the hell was she doing in court—an attorney, no less? She had been a wasted party girl, someone he had always imagined would drink her way to a stripper pole. He had dismissed her as fodder, a first draft that he could wad up and throw away, but there she was—a prosecutor.

  Had she recognized him? The thought of growing old in prison—surrounded by troglodytes and sodomites—suddenly filled Gavin with a dread so strong that he nearly lost his ability to breathe.

  Slow it down. Settle. Gavin moved to the floor of his cell, closed his eyes, and tipped his head down to concentrate. He needed to control the panic, calm the flurry of thoughts banging around his head.

  She’d frozen at the sound of his voice. That had to mean something, but what? If Lila remembered him, could they put a case together after all this time? What do they have? No DNA. No trace evidence. They have a victim with no memory. When he laid the chips on the table, they added up to nothing—not yet, at least. They would need time to put it together, and Gavin could use that time to bring this new threat to an end. He was Gavin Spencer, for God’s sake, a scalpel in a drawer full of meat cleavers. He would find a way.

  An
d just like that, Gavin’s heart rate began to slow, his lucidity returning. He stepped out of his panic, a butterfly freed of its chrysalis. He had time—not much, but enough. The plan remained the plan; he would just have to speed things up. He would fix the mistake he’d made eight years ago, but he had to get out to do it. How long did he have before they put him in the backseat of Lila Nash’s car, too?

  The race was on.

  Chapter 25

  It had happened once before, the panic attack, three summers ago when Lila drove to Iowa to visit her grandmother. She’d passed an old rusted car parked out in the middle of a fallow field, and the sight had nearly squeezed the breath from her chest. Her skin had turned hot and cold at the same time, and her stomach knotted up so tight that she had to pull over to the shoulder.

  To anyone else it was just a car in a field, but not to Lila. That was how her attackers had left her, unconscious in the backseat of her own car in the middle of a bean field, her memory stolen by a date-rape drug. It had taken several minutes on that long-ago morning for her eyes to find their focus, the backseat materializing out of nothing, and a few minutes more to understand why her clothing lay at her feet.

  After that first panic attack, Lila had made a trip to the university library, where she’d spent hours researching post-traumatic stress triggers: images, sounds, and scents that could transport a person back to the moment of the trauma. She’d understood why the car in Iowa had been such a powerful trigger. But why had Gavin Spencer now sent her spinning? Before she could face Andi, she had to understand.

  In her office, she spread his file on her desk, laying his picture on top. His face meant nothing to her. She studied his eyes, the roundness of his chin, his thin lips. He could have been cut from cardboard and construction paper for all that his image affected her. Gavin was a small man accused of a crime that made him even smaller in Lila’s eyes. But her reaction in court had the same debilitating effect on her as what she’d experienced in Iowa. Something in her gut opened the door to the unthinkable: What if they had crossed paths before?

  According to the bail study, she and Gavin were the same age. For their freshman years of high school they’d gone to schools geographically close yet miles apart economically—she went to South while he went to Southwest. But halfway through his freshman year, Gavin got shipped to a private school in Indiana. They had never been classmates, and after combing through every word of his file, she found no connection.

  She went online and searched for the private school in Indiana and found a link with pictures of his graduation ceremony. She read and then reread the date, the exact night that she had been attacked. Lila scrutinized each picture, looking for Gavin’s face in the crowd. He wasn’t there. Eight pictures in all and Gavin didn’t appear in any of them.

  His absence sent her mind racing with possibilities, a strange yet grim anticipation taking ahold of her. Her last memory before waking up in the bean field had been of a house party, one like so many others before it. Could Gavin have been at that party too? She always assumed that her attackers had been boys from her school, boys at the party that night, and Gavin was far removed from that crowd. Still, something had happened up in court. There had to be a reason.

  She hadn’t realized that she was holding her breath until she noticed the attribution beneath the pictures on the website: Photos courtesy of Gavin Spencer. Lila closed her eyes, breathed, and cursed to herself. Of course he wouldn’t be in any of the pictures. He was the photographer. She moved from optimism to despair in the span of a single heartbeat.

  She pulled up another link where some of those same graduation pictures had been published in the local newspaper, and each carried the same attribution. Yet another link took her to the school’s yearbook, where she found Gavin in a group photo of the yearbook staff, a camera strapped around his neck.

  Lila wanted to cry for letting hope bloom so easily.

  But if Gavin hadn’t triggered her panic attack, then what had? He’d used GHB on Sadie, the same drug that had been used on her. Had that been what sent Lila reeling? She dismissed that notion out of hand. GHB was a popular drug among the date-rape ilk. If that was all it took to throw Lila for a loop, then she might as well hang up her prosecutorial spurs now.

  Then she remembered that the panic attack didn’t start until she heard Gavin speak. Could she have been triggered by something as simple as a lisp?

  She started a new query on her computer, one focused on PTSD triggers rooted where the victim had no memory. In time, she found an article that talked about triggers causing a reaction even when the person had no recollection of the original instance. If one of her attackers had had a lisp, could she have buried the memory that deeply? But as she read on, she started tripping over terms like autonoetic awareness and intrusive traumatic memories. She was out of her depth—but she knew someone who could walk her through that labyrinth.

  She paused to consider whether she could go down that path.

  Dr. Roberts was the best person to make sense of what was happening to her, but seeing him again would take Lila back to that year, the one that nearly killed her. Those channels in her soul that once roared with fury and pain had dried up in the eight years of his absence—or so Lila believed. Just the thought of seeing him again brought back the heaviness that she had carried to every one of those early sessions.

  Her time with Dr. Roberts had been like crossing a bridge built of rotted wood, each step exposing new vulnerabilities. He’d explained that her suicide attempt had been about much more than a single attack. It had been about her father abandoning her. It had been about the uncle who touched her when she was too young to understand. And it had been about Sylvie Dubois, Lila’s best friend, and the betrayal that Lila still held close to her heart.

  She had expected Dr. Roberts to chastise her when she told him about her downward spiral of alcohol and boys. She was smart enough to understand that the self-worth she craved could never be found in the backseats of their cars, but that didn’t stop her from looking for it there. She thought her confession might dishearten the good doctor, but he simply nodded as if Lila were telling him what she ate for breakfast.

  Then he explained that her reaction to boys was not unexpected of someone who had been abused. And the drinking was simply a form of self-medication. He had a way of explaining things so that none of it seemed to be Lila’s fault, as though she were a casualty of some war being waged deep in her subconscious mind.

  But it was her fault, no matter what Dr. Roberts said. She chose to drink because it hid the ugliness. Lila embraced it—a hand to hold when she acted out. She could laugh when she was drunk, if only for a moment. Vodka had been the friendly nudge at her back when she flirted with the boys. It blunted the sharp edges of her regret and softened the memory of how they touched her. It whispered promises in her ear as she followed them to their cars. With enough alcohol, the broken parts no longer seemed vital.

  But those moments always came to an end, and when they did, she had to pretend that it didn’t hurt, pretend that she didn’t notice how the boys, who gave her so much attention at the parties, turned away when she passed them in school. She understood why. She heard the nickname, the one whispered by boys and girls alike—Nasty Nash. Even Sylvie, the one friend Lila thought she had left, called Lila by that name the day she spat in Lila’s face—the day Lila destroyed the last remnant of their friendship.

  And just when Lila thought she had found rock bottom, a place so low that her world could not hold any greater pain, there came a morning when she woke up naked in the backseat of her car. No one believed her—not even, it seemed, the detective assigned to investigate her abduction. Lila wanted to cry as she told him what happened, but she couldn’t. When she reached for emotion—any emotion—she found nothing. So she stared at the floor and told him what little she remembered.

  In the days and weeks that followed, a vile rage began to spread through Lila’s veins, thickening her blood and fillin
g her chest to the point that she could barely breathe. Her world became a muddle of emotion and chaos, all of it straining for release. Crying did nothing, and screaming only made it worse.

  Lila’s mother kept a utility knife in the kitchen, a packet of clean blades tucked inside its handle. Lila took one of the blades to her bedroom one night and examined it through her tear-filled eyes, the light dancing off the razor’s fine edge. She put the blade against her tongue and tasted the steel. Then, with her bedroom door locked, she pulled the blade across her left biceps, pausing halfway into the cut to let a wave of nausea pass. The bite of the razor chased a pathway of nerves straight to her heart, jolting her with a mixture of pain and pleasure—and release.

  Days later, when she cut herself the second time, there had been no hesitation, no nausea, and the relief she felt didn’t quite give her the same kick. Five more times, she pulled that razor blade across her arm, the respite from her anguish shrinking with each new incision until it seemed little more than an exercise for drawing blood.

  But the rage persisted—and Lila found her mother’s pills.

  How many Ambien would it take? Were there enough in the bottle? Could a person even overdose on Ambien? Lila would soon find answers to those questions. She had downed the pills with vodka and lain on her bed, no note to explain why. When she awoke in the Hennepin County Medical Center, Dr. Stephen Roberts had been at her side.

  Lila typed Dr. Roberts’s number into her phone and held her thumb over the send button, contemplating the hell out of which she had climbed. Phantoms of those dark days once again whispered in her ear, their soft voices tightening ropes around her chest. But something about Gavin Spencer had opened a door, and she had to find out why.

  She closed her eyes and pressed the send button.

  Chapter 26

  Six years ago, joggers in St. Paul’s Crosby Farm Park found the body of Eleanora Abrams floating at the edge of the Mississippi River, snagged in a fallen cottonwood tree. She had been missing for three days, having disappeared from a bar on Halloween night. Still wearing the sexy nurse costume, she was assumed to have gone into the river on the same night that she disappeared. The lead detective from the case had retired, so Niki sat alone in the St. Paul Homicide Unit as she culled through the reports.