Gone

by Lisa Gardner

  Now Kincaid pulled on a pair of latex gloves and carefully peeled back the plastic wrapping on the note. The paper inside had been folded twice to form a square. It was damp and ink smudged, despite the protective cover. Kincaid had to work the paper carefully to keep from tearing it.

  With the paper unfolded, Kincaid did the honors of reading aloud:

  Dear Member of the Press and Assorted Task Force Officers:

  I provided you with simple instructions. I promised if you did as I asked, no one would be hurt.

  You chose to violate my orders. You chose to challenge my authority. You chose to unleash the monster, and the consequences are on your head.

  The ransom is now $20,000. Cash. You will understand why soon enough. Tomorrow. 10 a.m. The officer must be female. Give her Quincy’s phone. I will call her with instructions from there.

  Disobey me again and things will get worse.

  As you can see, I am a man of my word.

  Sincerely,

  Nathan Leopold

  “Leopold?” Kincaid queried.

  The sheriff shook her head. Quincy, too.

  “I can look up the name on the Internet,” Kimberly said, but didn’t touch the computer. She was staring at the second item, the Ziploc bag. It was rolling side to side, moving on its own volition.

  Kincaid looked up sharply at the reporter, still loitering in the room. “Did you touch this?” He pointed to the rocking bag.

  “No,” Danicic said.

  “I’m not kidding. Did you open it at all, even try to take a peek?”

  Danicic flushed. His chin was up, he looked injured at the assault, then ruined it by saying, “Well, I thought about it. But the bag, uh, it kind of twitched in my hand—”

  “Twitched?”

  “Yeah, twitched. Honest to God. After that, I decided it was a matter best left to the professionals.”

  Kincaid arched a brow. For the first time, he noted Danicic’s stance, closest to the door. Clearly, the Daily Sun’s lead investigative reporter wasn’t taking any chances.

  Kincaid sighed heavily and reached for the bag. Behind him came a distinct snap as Sheriff Atkins unfastened her holster. Kincaid paused.

  “Do you know what’s moving in there?” she asked.

  “No, but I’d like to maintain use of both my thumbs.”

  “Fine, I’ll avoid your thumbs. Now, pinkies on the other hand . . .”

  Kincaid picked up the rain-dotted Ziploc bag. He rolled it several times between his fingers. The substance inside was thick, coiled. He didn’t like how it felt.

  “If it so much as hisses,” he murmured to Shelly, “I don’t care about my thumbs. Blow its damn head off. Just hit it.”

  “Roger.”

  “I shoulda become an accountant.”

  Kincaid pulled open the bag and dumped its contents on the table. A thick wet rope landed on the table with a small thud, gathered at one end, loose on the other. Kincaid waited almost frantically for something to happen. A hiss, a bite, a snap. Nothing. The dark coil simply laid there.

  “It’s hair,” Sheriff Atkins declared, peering over his shoulder. “Human hair.”

  Quincy was out of his chair, already coming closer. One look at the rich chestnut color, and Kincaid saw his own guess answered in the older man’s face.

  “Rainie’s hair,” Quincy said softly. “He cut it off. Look at the ends. He went after it with a knife.”

  Quincy prodded the bound end of the wet length with his finger, just as something burst out from beneath.

  Kincaid jumped back. The sheriff squeaked. The small black bug raced across the table and promptly buried itself in a stack of papers.

  “What the hell is that?” Kincaid demanded to know.

  In the corner of the room, Kimberly moaned softly. “Oh, Dougie.”

  21

  Tuesday, 7:32 p.m. PST

  THE SOUND OF DRIPPING WATER woke Rainie. Her head snapped back, she startled as if roused from a deep dream, and promptly whacked herself against a wooden beam. She winced, and the pain from her catalogue of injuries assaulted her all at once.

  She was someplace new. Same endless black void, of course, but different pungent smell. Wet dirt, fungus, decay. It was not the smell of happily ever after.

  Her hands were still bound in front of her, her ankles tied, the blindfold tight around her eyes. In the good-news department, her mouth remained gag and duct-tape free. She could swallow, move her tongue, small luxuries nonkidnapped people never fully appreciated. For a moment, she was tempted to raise her head and scream, but didn’t think she had the strength. And then another thought came to her—why hadn’t he replaced the gag? Maybe because it didn’t matter anymore if she screamed. Maybe she was that alone.

  The ground beneath her felt damp. She started shivering, then realized for the first time how cold she was. The wet had seeped into her clothes, penetrating her skin. She was curled up, an unconscious attempt at preserving heat. It wasn’t enough. Her teeth were chattering, increasing the throbbing in her head. Her arms were trembling, making the various cuts and bruises sting.

  Basement, she thought. Someplace cold, damp, where months of rainfall still seeped down the walls and pooled on the floor. Someplace ripe with the scent of decaying plants and moldy linens. Someplace dank and forgotten, where fat spiders wove huge masterpieces of sticky lace and small animals came to die.

  She tried to sit up and failed. Beneath the blindfold she was relatively certain her left eye had swollen shut. Further inventory revealed a split lip, a welted head, and a cascading pattern of cuts, starting at her neck and working their way down, some shallow, some dangerously deep, all too numerous to count. She was light-headed, from loss of blood, lack of food, it didn’t really matter. She was officially bruised and battered, with a rib cage that throbbed dangerously anytime she tried to take a deep breath.

  And she was freezing, literally freezing. She couldn’t stand the feel of her own skin, cold and clammy to the touch, like a body pulled from the morgue refrigerator. She needed to find someplace dry. She needed fresh clothes, heaps of blankets, and a hot crackling fire. She would warm her hands near the flames. She would lean back and remember the days when she could still curl up against Quincy’s chest and feel his hands stroking her hair.

  It was the memory of her hair that did it. She started sobbing, giant, broken waves of grief that aggravated the ache in her ribs and the emptiness in her stomach. She cried and the inevitable conclusion came to her: She was not doing well. In fact, if something didn’t change soon, she was probably going to die.

  Funny how it took the little things to see the big picture sometimes. Funny how it took the shearing of her own locks to make her finally feel afraid.

  She hadn’t realized what her captor was going to do at first. She heard the rasp of the knife. Felt his hand wrap around the rope of her hair. He yanked back her head and her first thought was to protect her throat. Her restrained hands flew frantically to her collarbone, her mind flashing with the visions of crime scene photos where white throats were carved into macabre smiles.

  He started sawing away on her hair, and something strange happened: Rainie had gone insane.

  She could take the bound hands. She could handle her immobilized feet, the blindfold that obscured her sight, the gag that wicked all the moisture from her mouth. But she couldn’t stand the thought of losing her hair. It was her only vanity, her only claim to beauty. How would Quincy ever love her again if she didn’t have any hair?

  She had lashed out with her elbow. He hadn’t been expecting it, so she got lucky and connected hard with his ribs. He made an odd, muffled sound, a man choking on his own breath. Then, savagely, he ripped the last of her hair out of her head.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled. “I’m holding a hunting knife, for Christ’s sake. Stand still!”

  Rainie didn’t stand still. She charged with all her might, catching her abductor dead-center. He went down. She went down. Then
they were rolling in the muck, her squirming around like a worm with her bound limbs, him thrashing about like a toppled rhino. She was vaguely aware of screaming, some deep primordial cry of rage and grief and hatred. No sound emerged from her throat, however. Even without the duct tape sealing her lips, her rage remained locked tight inside her chest.

  He hadn’t been lying about the knife. First time he sliced her arm, maybe it had been an accident. The second time, they both knew he meant it, and still she couldn’t bring herself to stop.

  She hated him. She hated him with a force that was twelve times her size, with a fury that had been stamped into her bones for decades. She hated him for the father she never knew. She hated him for every time one of her mother’s boyfriends had split open her cheek. She hated him for Lucas, who had forced himself upon her when she had been too young to defend herself, and too white trash for anyone to believe. She hated him for Aurora Johnson, because children shouldn’t have to know that amount of terror and pain.

  And she hated him for Quincy, especially for Quincy, because Quincy was supposed to save her. Deep down in her heart, she had always believed that somehow, some way, Quincy would still save her. That’s how these things worked. She was intense, angry, self-destructive. But Quincy was her rock. He waited, he held course. He loved her. Even when she was horrible, even when she could barely stand herself, he loved her.

  He was the only good thing that had ever happened in her life.

  Somehow, she had gotten herself on top of her captor’s body. He was on his back, unable to get footing in the slippery mud. If she could keep him down, keep him as mired and immobilized as she felt . . .

  He sliced her forearm again. She blindly followed the direction of the pain, beating at him futilely with her bound fists. Then her fingers found his wrist. She dug her thumbs into the soft collection of nerves and tendons at the base of his palm and was immediately rewarded by a low hiss.

  “I will fucking kill you!” the man roared.

  “Then do it!” she screamed right back at him.

  He bucked his hips, dumping her into the mud. She held on to his wrist, thumbs clamped like a pit bull.

  “Bitch!”

  She could feel him trying to struggle to his feet. She lashed out, catching him in the ankle, and down he went.

  Now he was beating her with his left hand, pummeling her head and shoulders with his fist. She didn’t care. She was too close to him, inside the kill zone, so he couldn’t get any force behind the blows. She just kept working his wrist, visualizing his fingers opening, the knife falling . . .

  His fist caught her in the ribs. She gasped. He seemed to realize the advantage and used two fingers to dig into her kidney. A new pain shot up her lower back, accompanied by a warmth between her legs. She’d wet herself. He’d reduced her to the state of an animal, pissing on its legs in its terror to get away.

  Fuck it. She let go of his wrist and clamped down hard on his forearm with her teeth.

  “Aaaaaaagh!” her captor said. She shook her head from side to side, picturing every feral dog she’d ever seen. She wanted to bite bone, wanted to taste blood. She chewed on his forearm, ground her teeth.

  “Son of a—” He still couldn’t use the knife in his right hand and couldn’t hit her hard enough to dislodge her bite with his left. She was winning, she thought, and in her delirious state, she saw herself chewing off his arm, spitting out his hand. When asked how she managed to get away from her armed captor while being bound and blindfolded, she would reply, “I just pictured him as a nice juicy steak.”

  He jabbed her kidney again, trying to hit her spleen. Now he had his legs wrapped around hers, was coming up and over, trying to pin her into the muck. She used her hands to fend him off, to keep her precious stance, half on top of his body, her teeth sunk into his forearm.

  She fought and she hated and she raged. Her captor, on the other hand, finally got smart.

  He pinched her nose shut, and that quickly, it was over. Continue biting and be asphyxiated. Stop biting and be stabbed.

  Funny, right up until this moment, Rainie herself had not realized how much she wanted to live.

  She thought of Aurora Johnson again. She thought of all the little girls who never had a chance. And she thought, for the first time in a long time, of Quincy’s daughter Mandy.

  I am sorry, Rainie thought, except she wasn’t apologizing to the victims anymore, she was apologizing to Quincy. Because he had already lost so much, she would’ve liked to have spared him this pain.

  She released him. Her captor’s arm ripped away. He screeched, half relief and half curse. Then he socked her in the eye.

  The force of the blow rocked her back. She tumbled off him, rolling into the mud. Her eye socket exploded. Behind the blindfold, there was a miraculous display of white, shiny lights.

  Then she heard him, rising in the rain, pulling himself out of the muck. He stomped toward her. She had the mental image of a large, hulking beast, maybe the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  I love you, Quincy, she thought.

  Then her captor raised the knife and smashed the handle across her head.

  Now, Rainie forced herself to uncurl from the damp floor and got up. Her bruised muscles spasmed in protest. She could not stand straight; it brought too much pain to her ribs. She huddled over, moving like an old woman as she shuffled with her bound feet across the space.

  Her fingers touched the wall, recoiled. Cold, slimy, definitely wet cement. She picked a different direction and used little shuffling steps to map out her domain. Once she hit a hard wooden structure, pain rocketing up her shins. Further inspection revealed a workbench, now devoid of tools. Then she tangled in one spider web, only to recoil into a second. Something big and hairy brushed her cheek; she did her best not to scream.

  On the other side of the room, she found wooden stairs. With her hands, she counted over ten steps before they rose up out of her reach. They probably led to a door. She didn’t trust herself to climb them in her current state, however, and didn’t doubt for a minute that the lone exit would be locked and barred. She returned to the bench. The dusty, wooden surface felt warm compared to the floor. She swung her feet up, curled up in a ball, and told herself she was at Club Med.

  Her throat hurt. She coughed and that made her ribs ache. She wondered what Quincy was doing now. Probably driving the case detective crazy, she decided, which at least made her smile.

  Her hands moved on the bench. With one finger, she traced the only words he needed to know: I love you, too.

  Then a sound came from overhead. Door opening. Footsteps on the stairs.

  She stiffened, tried to swing herself off the bench, tried to prepare herself to defend.

  There was a soft thud, followed by an immediate moan.

  “Brought you something,” the man said, then his footsteps retreated back up the stairs. The door slammed shut, she heard a lock click shut. Then, silence.

  “Hello?” Rainie tried.

  Slowly she crossed to the stairs, her hands groping out in front of her, her fingers feeling in the dark. She found the body at the bottom, curled up against the floor as she had been not that long ago. Smaller frame than she expected, encased in wet jeans and an even wetter sweatshirt.

  Her fingers moved, determining the welt at the back of the head, then discovering the face.

  “Oh no. Oh no.”

  She rocked the boy up onto her lap. She cradled his still form against her, stroking his chilled cheek and willing some heat from her own cold frame into his body.

  “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay,” she murmured over and over again. But she didn’t know who she was trying to convince anymore, herself or Dougie Jones.

  22

  Tuesday, 8:20 p.m. PST

  QUINCY SAT ALONE IN A CORNER of the command center. He had a blanket on his lap, a mug of black coffee in his hands. In front of him, officers buzzed around the conference table with the brisk steps of people who had serious wo
rk to do and not nearly enough time to do it. Kincaid and Sheriff Atkins were in the middle of a heated debate, both looking tired and strained. Mac was talking on his cell phone, glancing from time to time in Quincy’s direction like the diligent baby-sitter he’d promised to be. Kimberly had been sent out on an errand at Quincy’s personal request; his daughter had departed only after wringing a blood oath from Mac that he wouldn’t let Quincy out of his sight.

  When Mac glanced over for the third time, Quincy couldn’t resist raising a hand in acknowledgment. Haven’t managed to croak yet. Please, carry on.

  So this, he thought, was how it was going to feel one day when his workaholic daughter stuck him in an old folks’ home. He took another long sip of coffee and pretended his hand didn’t shake.

  In contrast to his daughter’s opinion, he did not think he was going to drop dead just yet. No tightening of the chest, no tingling in the extremities, no cramping in his stomach. He was just tired. Bone-deep weary, hitting the stage that was officially beyond stress.

  He didn’t only miss Rainie anymore. He didn’t just worry and wonder and ache. He could feel himself slowly but surely letting her go. Shutting down the small details—the flannel-gray color of her eyes, the quick, lithe way she crossed the room, a woman who made no effort at all to be sexy and thus captivated the attention of every male around.

  First time he’d met Rainie, it had been professional. She’d been a deputy in Bakersville, serving as the primary officer on her first big case—a shooting at Bakersville’s K–8. The number one suspect was the sheriff’s son, which put the whole department, of course, under enormous pressure.