by Tracy Sharp
“So you think she might be with this other man?” Jack asked him.
“I imagine so, yes.” He lifted his chin and squared his shoulders.
Wow. What a guy. So mature and enlightened. “You’re taking this all pretty well, doctor, if you don’t mind my saying. Especially considering your wife is pregnant with your child.”
“Uh,” he shook his head, looking at the carpet. “There’s some doubt in my mind about that, actually.”
“Really,” Jack said.
“The timing of conception. We were going through a rough patch. We weren’t making love, hadn’t really for months.” He glanced up at me, then back down at the floor.
Boy, he was just painting a lovely picture of his missing wife.
“You think this child is this other man’s baby?” I kept my tone neutral, which was more than a little difficult, because what I really wanted to do was to tell this asshole to get real. How stupid did he think we were? It was clearly a ploy to sully his wife while making him seem just lovely.
“Wow,” Jack said. I could tell by his deliberately blank expression that he was having as much trouble wrapping his mind around Dr. Clemmons as I was. “That’s incredible.”
“You’re telling me. Unfortunately, I haven’t exactly been a saint myself, of late.”
“Oh no?” Jack asked him, his eyebrows lifted. His gaze flicked to me. Here it comes, it said.
I grinned. The covering of the guilty party’s tracks.
“No,” the doctor placed a contrite look on his face. “Sadly, I’ve found myself turning to another woman as a result of the trouble in my marriage to Alexia.”
“Ah,” Jack said, nodding.
“I’m not proud of this fact, but I have to say that I don’t know what I would’ve done without Vicky’s constant, unwavering friendship.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Friendship is important.”
“Yes,” Dr. Clemmons said, his face brightening a little. “It’s an element that is crucial in a marriage, and it’s been missing with Alexia and I for a long time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
He lifted his hands a little, palms up. “Well, it happens, sadly.”
“You’ll call us if you do hear from Alexia,” I said.
“Oh, absolutely.” He stood, leading us rather quickly to the door. “You know, I still hold some hope that Alexia and I can mend our marriage. I’d raise the child as if it were my own. We could work it out.”
My mouth dropped open. I felt like I might throw up all over the shiny hardwood floor.
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Jack said.
“It would, if we could just put everything behind us and start from scratch. I’d give the world.” He looked at me, his gaze intense. “I still love her. More than I could ever express.”
“I understand.” I stood and met his gaze with my own. Perfectly. You disgusting waste of oxygen.
His lips opened and he took a short breath before saying, “You don’t think the same person who took the other pregnant women took Alexia, do you?
That would be convenient for you, wouldn’t it? I thought. “We will find her, Dr. Clemmons. I promise you that.”
Something flickered across his face that I couldn’t quite name, something that made the small hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
“I trust you will.” He closed the door to our retreating backs.
I lifted my face to the frigid air. It felt like snow.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack said. “I think he had something to do with her vanishing.”
“If he didn’t,” I turned and faced Jack. “He isn’t at all losing sleep over it.”
Chapter Three
“I’ve got a little something for you that you might find useful, Leah.” Lucas’s voice sounded like deep, velvety chocolate over the phone. “I’ve got some time between two and four o’clock if you want to come down to the firm. I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”
A thrill swept through me. My heart beat double time. I knew I shouldn’t be feeling this way about Lucas. But try telling my body that. He did something to me that I couldn’t explain. “Great. I’ll be there at around two then.”
“I’ll see you then.”
I ended the call and looked at my laptop clock, a grin on my face. I had about fifty minutes. I swiveled in my chair and faced Jack, who was staring at the giant white board we had set up on the wall. The timeline of Alexia’s last known whereabouts were scrawled across its surface. Points with asterisks were written here and there. Anything we knew, including Garrett Clemmons behaviors and story.
And the other pregnant women who had gone missing, looking at their names sent a shiver down my spine. I hugged myself, feeling cold. My grin was gone.
“That was Lucas.” Jack continued gazing at the board, his eyes moving slowly across it.
I stared at his back. “How did you know that?”
“The tone of your voice, you get a kind of lilt talking to him. Your voice takes on a different quality.”
Most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Jack was a master when it came to noticing details like that, body language, tone of voice. All the little non-verbal forms of communication. So was I. I’d learned watching my parents’ marriage fall apart after the abduction of my little sister. We were just kids, riding our bikes. She was taken and shoved into a car right in front of me.
When I close my eyes I can still see the scene as clear as the day it happened.
With Jack, it was as a result of living in so many foster homes. Not all of them had been kind to him. He learned about human behavior as a matter of survival. Learning the signals people gave off and being able to predict their behavior had saved his skin many times; a skill he’d honed in me.
“Your silence speaks volumes,” he said, then glanced at me. “With you, it’s what you don’t say that gives you away, Kicks.”
“Okay, okay. Whatever, anyway, he says he has something for us. Something, that might help.”
“He asked you to go down and meet him.” He looked back at the white board.
“Yeah, but he meant us.”
He laughed softly. “No, Kicks. He meant you.”
“Jack, we’re both working this case, and you should come with me. Whether he meant me or us.”
He let out a sigh. “Yeah.”
“So are you coming?”
“Yeah,” he said again, but didn’t move.
“Jack.”
“Look, Leah.” He turned to look at him me. “We can’t afford your sense of judgment and awareness to be clouded because you and Lucas have the hots for each other, okay? Alexia deserves more.”
His words took the wind out of me for a moment. He was right, of course. But still it stung. He was acting like I didn’t know that. No, that wasn’t it. He knew I did know it, but that my hormones were speaking louder.
“It’s a crush. I’ll get over it.”
He nodded once. “Okay then. Let’s go.
* * *
Lucas was in his office when we got there. He was a partner in the firm, and had several associates under him who were highly trained in violence assessment and security management. Lucas was a licensed investigator, as well as an expert in threat and violence assessment. His firm worked with government, celebrities, police departments and anyone else who needed security or risk assessment. Lucas had seen a lot. He had a degree in Criminal Justice and a Masters degree in Criminology.
In short, the guy knew his shit.
So when he said he had something for us, I believed him.
He stood when we entered his office. “Hey guys. Anything new come up?”
He gestured to the leather couch in his office and closed the door.
“Well, we did meet Alexia’s husband,” I said. “Doctor Clemmons, brain surgeon at your service. His hobbies include tagging his medical assistants, although I’m sure he doesn’t discriminate based on profession, and verbally bashing his missing, pregnant wife.”
“Oh, that’s interesting.” Lucas took a seat in his leather chair, leaning back and rocking a little.
“That’s one word for it,” Jack said. “The guy’s got a serious God complex, to the nth power.”
“I’m not surprised, if he’s bashing his missing, pregnant wife,” Lucas said. “Is he accusing her of having affairs?”
“Why, yes he is,” Jack said. “He’s a real sweetheart of a guy. You’d love him.”
“Either he has something to do with her disappearance, or he’s covering his ass by deflecting the focus on her allegedly bad behavior while she isn’t around to defend herself. Guilty people often do that. He’s concerned about his image, what people think of him. He has a reputation to uphold.”
“Oh he has quite the reputation all right,” I said. “Several hospital workers on his floor had a thing or two to say about his penchant for young women.”
“He probably feels like he deserves whatever he wants, huge sense of entitlement.”
“Yeah, you’ve pretty much pegged him.” Jack said.
Lucas moved a hand across his smooth jaw. “Yeah, I’d give him all the attention he could ever crave, and then some, if I were you two.”
“Oh, we will,” Jack said. I watched him gaze into space for a moment, his eyes squinting just a little. “You said you have something for us. Does it have to do with Doctor Clemmons?”
“Something was tweaking at my brain the other night when they were covering the story of the last pregnant woman to vanish.” His face was grim. “No matter what the outcome of this one, it isn’t going to be good. That’s my fear. It just doesn’t look good.”
Neither Jack nor I replied. That was our feeling too. Alexia wasn’t ever coming home alive, and neither were the other two women.
That reality fell heavily on us, and his office suddenly felt too close and stuffy.
I felt a knot tighten in my stomach and swallowed down rising anger. I bit down on my bottom lip until I felt enough pain to make the anger bearable, if only for a moment.
Lucas leaned forward in his chair, clasping his hands in front of him. “I remembered that last summer a young woman tried to abduct a newborn infant from a hospital. Her license plate was covered in mud to obscure the numbers, and she wore a hat, a blonde wig, and sunglasses.
Security camera film footage shows her car parking in the hospital parking lot for two days. She just sat in her car watching. When a young woman was wheeled out to her car by her mother, this woman got out of her car and offered to help. She offered to hold the baby for the mother while she got into the car. When the mother wouldn’t hand the baby over to her, she tried to snatch the infant from her arms.”
“Jesus,” Jack murmured.
Lucas nodded, continuing. “The new mother screamed at the top of her lungs and her mother hit the woman in the face with her purse.
At that point a man who was visiting his sister at the hospital was driving in and saw what was going on, and approached them. The would-be abductor took off running. She got back into her car and drove away.”
“Christ,” I said. “They haven’t caught her yet?”
Lucas shook his head. “No, she’s still out there. But I can promise you that her desire for an infant isn’t going to let up. I always thought she’d try again.”
“Maybe she has,” Jack said. “Only this time she’s smarter about how she secures a new mother.”
“Or a soon-to-be mother,” the thought was so awful that it made me want to give voice to the high pitched scream welling up inside of me.
“A young pregnant girl reported a strange incident about a month ago,” Lucas said. “She had been looking for baby clothes on an online advertising site. She said she answered an ad, got into an email exchange with the woman and arranged to meet her at the woman’s address. The address turned out to be a flea-bag motel on the outskirts of town. There was one other car in the lot, this young woman said. She immediately got a bad feeling. Something told her not to go into the woman’s hotel room. In fact, she wouldn’t get out of her car. She simply drove away.”
“Good call,” Jack said.
“Very. Didn’t report the incident until the first woman, Susan Wilson, disappeared. She said she got a creepy feeling, thinking about that woman. When the police tried the email, the account was closed down. It was just a web based email account under a bogus name that couldn’t be traced. The ip address was the motel. But there was no longer anyone staying in that hotel room, and only one other occupant. An older man. A travelling salesman. You might want to get on the local online advertising sites and keep an eye out. Check out the people advertising to sell baby clothes and other baby items. Whoever this abductor is, she’s gotten a hit from this method before. She will again, perhaps already has.”
I nodded. “We’ll do that.”
Lucas nodded slowly and moved a hand over his jaw. He was bothered by something.
“What?” I asked him. “What else?”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “This, you’re really not going to like.”
“How could it get much worse?” Jack said. “Lay it on us.”
Lucas sat forward in his chair. “There’s a young woman you should talk to. She’s at St. Clare’s hospital.”
“Okay,” Jack said.
“She’s been there for two days, wouldn’t speak a word. She started talking this morning. She escaped what sounds an awful lot like a cult. A religious sect out in Hornsby, apparently on several acres of land and run by a guy who goes by the name Gabriel Messiah.”
“Sounds original,” I said. “Jesus, how do these fruit loops end up with a following? How does that happen? Just that name alone tells you what a nut-job he is.”
“You’d be surprised. You take the troubled, grieving, poor who have a chip on their shoulder about the socioeconomic gap in society. People who come from money, that have a bone to pick about wealth for whatever reason. People who are looking for someone to believe in, and here comes a charismatic guy promising the moon. He understands them, shares their rage. He’s going to change the world and make it a fair place, a better place.” Lucas spread his hands. “Utopia.”
“And people buy what he’s selling,” I said. “You’re kidding.”
“They do,” Lucas said. “Ever hear of a guy named Hitler? How about David Koresh? Jim Jones? The list goes on.”
“Oh I’ve heard of them. I just have a hard time grasping that people will follow these guys who are obviously off their nut,” I said.
Lucas tilted his head a fraction. “Maybe you’ve never been desperate or down enough to be susceptible to the charms of somebody like this.”
He had no clue how down and desperate I’d been, not so long ago. I held his gaze. “I guess not.”
“Well, this girl was,” Lucas said. “And she has a story to tell.”
* * *
Her name was Noel Rogerson, but Gabriel had decided that within the “family” she would be known as number five.
“What would you like to be called?” I asked her.
She was sitting up in bed, her arms wrapped around her knees. I could tell she was a pretty girl with delicate features, but they were obscured by the two shiners and broken nose she was sporting. The middle finger of her left hand was splinted, and those were only the injuries we could actually see. “Noel, that’s my name.”
“Would you tell us what happened?” I asked her, keeping my voice soft.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and moved a lock of sandy blonde hair from her eyes. “I wasn’t acting like a proper, obeying wife.”
“Really,” Jack said. “And so you think you deserved a beating to correct your behavior?”
“Gabriel did, some of the others, too. They said I wasn’t acting properly. That I should feel honored that I was one of the lucky ones who Gabriel chose to be one of his wives.”
“Ah. Yeah. We can see how lucky you are.” Jack leaned forward in his chair.
“Is the beating
the reason you escaped?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “No.”
Jack and I waited for her to continue, but she said nothing for a long time.
Finally her eyes misted over and her chin trembled. “Lina is the reason I left.”
“Who is Lina, Noel?” It was my turn to lean forward.
“My daughter.”
I blinked. “Where is Lina?”
“Dead,” she said her voice high and tight.
Jack and I were silent. The seconds ticked by as the horror of a dead baby girl sank in and paralyzed us. Finally I spoke, “Noel. What happened to her?”
“She was dead when within moments of being born. That’s what Gabriel said. But I felt her moving that day. How could she have died? She was fine.” She looked at us with shining green eyes. She gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. “She was fine.”
“The hospital said she’d died within minutes?” I asked her.
She looked at me, confusion in her eyes. Then she shook her head quickly. “I wasn’t at a hospital.”
“Where was your baby delivered?” I knew where this was going, and I didn’t like it. My chest grew tight and I tried to slow my breathing.
“At the compound,” her voice was flat, her face devoid of emotion.
“The compound,” Jack repeated. “Is that what they call the place you called home?
“Yes. We have a few midwives there. Holly, number seventeen, delivered the baby. Gabriel was there. A few others were there to help.”
“Did you hear your baby crying?” Jack asked. “Did you see her moving?”
“Yes. But they took her away. Said they needed to do something to take care of her, that she didn’t look good.”
“They took her out of the room then and never brought her back?” I felt a dark sadness fall over me, and a rage that boiled white hot began to bubble in my blood.
She wiped away tears with both hands, the splinted finger standing straight up as her other fingers bent. “I never even got to hold her.”
“Noel,” I said. “What do you think happened to your baby?”
She stared into space for a few moments. “I don’t know. But I’m not the only one this happened to.”