Keep Her Safe

by Sophie Hannah

  No, Cara. You’re the one to blame.

  How could I have left the country and put an ocean between me and all the people I love? Space to think, time for myself . . . the idea of claiming now that I need these things makes me want to howl. All I need is my family. That’s it. That’s all I’ll ever need—for the five of us to be together and safe.

  I don’t believe in God or karma or anything like that, but I know with absolute certainty that if I’m being punished, it’s not for walking into an already-occupied hotel room. That was Riyonna’s mistake, not mine. Mine was trying to pretend a two-week luxury holiday was some kind of amazing marriage-enhancing rescue plan.

  How could I be so selfish? All the things Patrick, Jess and Olly said and did, or didn’t say and didn’t do, all the things I thought mattered so much and wounded me so deeply . . . I don’t care about any of them anymore. I just want to be at home with my family.

  Somehow, this will happen. The man won’t harm me.

  But he might take the easy way out and leave you to die like this: tied up on a sofa in a trailer.

  My stomach turns over at the idea, but I have to think through all the possibilities. That’s the best strategy if I want to get out of here. I have to face it: if he can kidnap, he can kill.

  I hear the scrape of the key in the lock and a big “No” fills my mind. I so desperately wanted him to come back, and now all I can think is that I’m not ready. I don’t have a plan. I can’t outmaneuver him. All I can do is beg, hope, pray.

  Anything. Whatever I have to do to get out of here, to get free.

  Heidi Casafina hated New York. Loathed the place. It wasn’t the city’s fault—she was aware of that—but, hard as she tried, she couldn’t arrange for logic to affect the way she felt. Still, her time here was about to end and she figured she ought to be grateful for that. It turned out that New York wasn’t, after all, a trap she could never escape.

  All her bags were packed. As soon as today’s ordeal was over, she’d head straight to the airport and be on her way back home to her parents in Indiana—not particularly exciting, but it would do for now.

  Heidi had loved New York City from afar for most of her life, then made the move from Bloomington three years ago. Almost immediately upon arrival, she’d landed her dream job in television—or so she’d thought—working on a show that was as important as it was famous: Justice with Bonnie.

  Heidi had started at the bottom—low-status, low-paid drudge work—and she hadn’t minded a bit. Bonnie had made it all feel so worthwhile. She’d taken Heidi out for drinks after her first day at work, just the two of them, and said how thrilled she was to add Heidi to her loyal team. Heidi had been flattered by the attention. At the end of the evening, Bonnie had leaned over, looked her in the eye and said, “You, Heidi Casafina, are destined for great things. You might look like a Disney princess, and you may be only twenty-three, but you’re shrewd. And passionate. You remind me of the young me. Stick around and you’ll rise through the ranks fast.”

  Soon enough, she made good on her promise. Heidi was an executive producer on the show within six months, and when a handful of her colleagues started to make their resentment apparent, Bonnie introduced a new rule: anyone who so much as looked at Heidi the wrong way would be fired before they could open their mouths to defend themselves.

  Almost from day one, it was clear that Bonnie’s wish and expectation was that she and Heidi would have regular girls’ nights out—drinks and dinner after work, always Bonnie’s treat. “Regular” meant three or four nights a week—whenever Bonnie’s husband Will (“my second husband—the first was a monster,” she would add to every mention of him) was out of town on business.

  Bonnie was fascinating and super smart. She came out with things no one else would dare say, or have the imagination to think in the first place. Like her very own theory: PSAS, also known as First Find Theory.

  PSAS stood for Police-Suspect Attachment Syndrome. Bonnie believed that when a serious crime was committed, instead of waiting however long it took for all the available evidence to be gathered before developing a theory, detectives tended to fixate on the first significant item of evidence, see who it pointed to, then form an obsessive attachment to the idea of that person as the perpetrator. It didn’t matter if that was the only thing in the whole case pointing to that person, or if three weeks later there were seventeen pieces of hard evidence indicating that someone else was guilty; all that mattered to some detectives—“too many, way too many,” said Bonnie—was the narrative they’d created around that first significant find, to which they then clung desperately, sometimes fabricating or destroying evidence that contradicted their theory.

  As a result, Bonnie argued, it was more common than anyone realized for the first suspect in a case to be charged and convicted, irrespective of their guilt or innocence. She’d said to Heidi at least twenty times in their years of working together, “I’m a victims’ rights advocate, Heidi. The accused innocent, in danger of losing their liberty forever, are as much victims of crime as the raped, the murdered, the defrauded. Don’t forget that. All too often, detectives and attorneys unintentionally collude with criminals to ensure the safety and prosperity of the guilty. And that has to stop.” The wording varied slightly, but it was pretty much the same speech every time.

  Then came part two of her spiel, also with only minor alterations for each telling: “Look at the Melody Chapa case—perfect example. Suspicion fell immediately on Kristie Reville and as a result, the red-flag psycho-alert behavior of Annette and Naldo Chapa around the disappearance of their daughter was determinedly ignored.”

  Don’t ever forget that, Heidi.

  She’d forgotten nothing her boss had said to her since the day they’d met. Bonnie was fascinating even when spouting propaganda in praise of herself. When Heidi had realized that the regular after-work nights out meant she’d been officially appointed Best Friend as well as Favorite Colleague, she’d been thrilled. The problems had started when an attractive guy had moved into the apartment next door to Heidi’s and they’d started dating. Heidi found herself wanting to spend more of her free time with Seth, but unable to contemplate saying so to Bonnie. Each time she tried to formulate the words in her mind (“We’re going to have to change our routine. I can only see you two nights a week from now on”), she was aware of exactly how impossible it would always be to speak them aloud to the person who needed to hear them.

  Bonnie, she had no doubt, would turn cold in a fraction of a second. Heidi had seen Cold Bonnie eviscerating those who crossed her, and she had no wish to be on the receiving end of that. She’d lose her job for sure and no flattering recommendation letter would be forthcoming. And so instead of taking any steps to cut down her Bonnie time, Heidi had found herself explaining to Seth that hanging out with Bonnie after the show had aired was part of her job.

  He hadn’t stuck around for long. After the breakup, Heidi didn’t bother trying to date anyone else. She understood that she was trapped by the best job in the world and hated herself for not minding more. She couldn’t bear to blame Bonnie for anything, but she allowed her grudge against New York City to grow and grow: the noise, the pollution, the rudeness, the snobbishness . . .

  She told herself she ought to be feeling happier this morning. She was finally going to be able to leave the city behind and start a new life—hopefully a life with some room for life in it, not only work. She was about to be fired, and she ought to be ecstatic. Instead, she was full of self-loathing. Bonnie would never forgive her. That was all she could think about. She’d been told to wait in the reception area like an outsider.

  “Ms. Casafina?” The solemn-faced, not-much-older-than-teenage receptionist approached her cautiously, as if she were a ticking bomb, not coming too close. “Ms. Juno’s ready to see you now.”

  Heidi said nothing as she was ostentatiously shown the way by a girl who knew she knew the route as well as she knew her own name.

  Bonnie w
as standing by her open office door, a broad smile on her face. “C’mon in, Heidi. Sit down.”

  So she hadn’t turned cold. She was going to fire Heidi in the spirit of friendship, was she?

  A strange, restful feeling came over Heidi. She wondered if she could get away with saying nothing at all, just letting Bonnie say whatever she had to say and nodding now and then. She picked the turquoise chair with a fat seat and tiny arms—Bonnie had five designer armchairs in her office for visitors, all in different colors—and sat down.

  Bonnie sat opposite in her maroon leather captain’s chair. “So. A guy from Arizona—a detective, no less—calls three times in an hour to say there’s a resort in Paradise Valley where three separate guests have claimed to have seen Melody Chapa alive, in the last few days—and you don’t think that’s worth mentioning to me? You dismiss him as a crank?”

  “I’m sorry, Bonnie. I should have told you. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Detective Bryce Sanders is no crank, Heidi. I’ve checked. His colleagues, his superior officers, they all love him. Wanna know the word I kept hearing? ‘Initiative.’ Like calling me. Luckily he called back a fourth time and got Steve instead of you, or I wouldn’t know about any of this.”

  “I don’t blame you for being furious,” Heidi said.

  “Not that, but a word that rhymes with it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Curious. That’s what I am. Why didn’t you tell me about Sanders, Heidi?”

  Oh, God. Couldn’t Bonnie just fire her and get it over with?

  “Okay, let me make this easy for you,” said Bonnie. “It has to be one of two reasons. Either you thought Sanders was a time-wasting nutjob, or . . . you thought he could be right, and maybe Melody’s not dead after all, and you didn’t want that news to get out.”

  “I was trying to protect you.” Heidi fought back tears. “Since your interview with Mallory Tondini, there’s been a lot of respect out there for your judgment. Some of it grudging, sure, but still . . . respect. I feared that if Melody were to turn out to be still alive . . .” She broke off with a shrug. “Her body wasn’t found. It seemed unlikely but not impossible that she might not have been murdered after all. Naïvely, crazily, I hoped that if I blocked Bryce Sanders’s attempts to contact you about it, he might give up and take the easiest course: tell himself these three spa resort guests are full of garbage, and move on.”

  “So let me get this straight: Because you feared the damage to my reputation if Melody turned out to be alive, you hoped you could make it all go away?”

  Heidi nodded.

  “And where would that leave Annette and Naldo Chapa?”

  “Wrongfully convicted. Left to rot in jail thanks to me.”

  “I see. And did you care about that at all?”

  “A little bit, but I could have lived with it. Bonnie, I thought you might fall apart if you were proved wrong over Melody—have a breakdown, or . . . I don’t know. If I’m honest, I suppose, also, there was an element of fear for my own reputation. I work for the show, too. Not for much longer, maybe, but—”

  “You think I’ve asked you in here to fire you?”

  “Well, haven’t you?”

  “Okay, two things. First: I’m grateful for your loyalty. Truly. That you’d happily see two innocent people rot in jail to protect my good name . . .” Bonnie laughed. “That’s impressive, girl. I’m not sure my husband—my second, I mean, the first was a monster—I’m not sure even he’d go that far for my sake.”

  Heidi felt a new kind of fear: that Bonnie wasn’t about to banish her. Her bags were packed and lined up by the door of her apartment, ready for that new life . . .

  “But Heidi, if I was wrong, if I was part of an effort to put Annette and Naldo Chapa behind bars for a murder they didn’t commit, that maybe no one committed . . . well, that can’t be allowed to stand.”

  “You’re right, Bonnie. I . . . I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Lose no sleep, honey. We all make mistakes. I know that better than anyone. Remember, my monster of an ex-husband lined his filthy pockets selling the story of all the mistakes I’d ever made. It’s okay—you don’t have to pretend you haven’t read it. Everyone’s read it. Thanks to Raoul Juno, there’s a whole lot of people out there who still think of me as a violent, incontinent, perverted drunk with an eating disorder. And—not that it matters—it wasn’t twenty s’mores, it was six. Only six.” Bonnie tutted to herself. “See, I’m getting all defensive again. Point is, I know all about making mistakes . . . but, Heidi, you don’t ever need to protect me in that way. I’m not scared of being wrong. I’ve been wrong a hundred times, and no doubt I’ll be wrong a hundred more. That’s life. I can handle it.”

  Heidi nodded.

  “Now we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s move on to the interesting part: these alleged sightings of Melody. Three of them, in the space of less than a week.” Bonnie smiled. “I’ve been waiting for something like this. Something big and noticeable. Something designed to cause a stir.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Annette and Naldo Chapa are resourceful people—intellectually and economically. When all their appeals failed, I thought to myself, ‘They won’t give up. They’ll try something else, and whatever they decide on, no one’ll see it coming.’ Well . . . here we are. This is it. Never underestimate the resilience of evil, Heidi.”

  “You think Annette and Naldo Chapa are behind these sightings of Melody?”

  “Alleged sightings. I’d bet my life on it.” Bonnie raised an eyebrow. “Did I forget to mention I’ve been right a hundred and one times?”

  “So, what, they found some other girl who . . . or someone acting on their behalf found . . .”

  “We don’t know there was another girl, do we? Not yet. All we know is what three people have said, and they haven’t even said it to us firsthand. They could all be lying.”

  “Bonnie, can I just clarify . . . so I’m not fired?”

  Bonnie looked impatient. “Can you stop feeling sorry for yourself and book us and a film crew onto the next flight to Phoenix? If the answer’s yes, then no, you’re not fired. Now scoot. I’ve got calls to make.”

  He walks in. Doesn’t look at me. Jeans, blue-and-gray-checked shirt, dark sweat patches under the arms. He’s carrying something that looks like wrinkled plastic. As soon as he’s closed the trailer door he starts to unwrap it. I smell food and my stomach growls in response.

  “Got you lunch: a sausage and bacon sandwich,” he says, putting it down on the worktop in the little kitchen.

  From where? I wonder. Are we near a café? Shops?

  “And a can of Coke.” He’s moved out of my line of sight, but I hear the thud as he puts it down. “Not diet, just normal. Hope that’s okay.”

  “Lunch?”

  “Yeah, it’s nearly two o’clock in the afternoon. You must be starved.”

  “How long are you going to keep me here? If you let me go, I swear I won’t say anything. I don’t want to cause you any trouble, and I don’t care what you’ve done, but you need to let me go. I’m pregnant. I have a family. You can’t do this.” I’m talking too fast, going at it too heavy-handedly, but I can’t stop myself. “If you hurt me, people will find out. My husband’ll be looking for me by now, the police—”

  “Be quiet, Cara. You’ll get your chance to talk, but for now I need you to listen.”

  Get my chance? Because it’s only fair that we take turns. His turn first. My turn to lie here tied up.

  You fucking, fucking monster.

  Staying silent is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

  “Good. That’s better,” he says. “Okay, you need to eat and drink something. I’m guessing you also need to use the bathroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I’m going to untie your arms and legs, but in order to do that—in order to make sure it’s safe for you to eat, drink, pee without posing any risk to securit
y, I’m going to need to get out my gun from this drawer right here and keep it pointed at you the whole time. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I say. The word “gun” lands in my mind and keeps sinking, like a heavy stone moving through water. He has a gun. In the drawer. He put it there beforehand, knowing he’d need it.

  “I don’t want to scare you, okay? The gun is the only way for me to not need to keep you tied up the whole time. You understand, right?”

  “No.”

  “No?” He sounds surprised.

  I hear the sound of a drawer opening and shutting. “You can let me go and nothing will happen to you,” I sob. “I won’t tell anyone, ever. I won’t say anyone took me anywhere. I’ll say I was wrong about seeing Melody Chapa. I swear on my baby’s life! All you need to do is—”

  “Cara, I can’t. Not today. Stop, okay?”

  “Why can’t you? Why? Why would I lie to you? You think I’d swear on my baby’s life if I didn’t mean it?”

  “Cara, I—”

  “If you won’t trust me and let me go now, how will you ever? Are you going to kill me? Why, when you don’t have to? Can’t you see it’s better for you if you just—”

  “Shut up!”

  I stare at the gun that’s pointing at my face. Feel all my furious energy drain away. Was that me yelling a few seconds ago?

  “You’re going to kill me,” I whisper.

  “No. I’m not. I’m going to take you to the bathroom and give you some lunch. That’s all I came in here to do today. As soon as you’re calm, I’ll untie you and—”

  “That’s all you came to do today, but what about tomorrow? Next week? Are you going to kill me then, or let me go? Because if you’re going to let me go, it’s better to do it now. You must be able to see that. And if you’re going to kill me, why haven’t you already?”

  He sighs and runs his free hand over his face. “Cara, believe me, if I could change our situation, I would.”

  “Do you think I have some information you need or something? I don’t! I don’t know anything! I don’t even know if the girl in the hotel room with you was her or not—Melody.”