Once Taken

by Blake Pierce

  The boy was struggling now to remember more.

  “What about the shape of his face?” Riley said.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember. He had a pretty big square chin.”

  Riley remembered the man’s jutting chin, how it protruded in the light from the propane torch. The same chin was clearly visible in the photo on her cell phone.

  She thought fleetingly of showing Brian the photo to see if he recognized the man. She quickly decided against it. She no longer harbored the faintest doubt that the driver had been Peterson. But she also knew that she still had to persuade her colleagues at the BAU. For that, it would be best for Brian to describe the driver solely from memory. It mustn’t look as though Riley had influenced him.

  Riley turned toward the boy’s mother.

  “Carol, I need for you and Brian to come with me to the police station,” she said.

  The woman’s lips were trembling and her voice was shaky.

  “Do I need to call our lawyer?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing like that,” Riley said. “Brian’s not in any trouble. I just need him to give a description to a sketch artist. He’s a very good observer and it will be helpful.”

  Carol looked relieved.

  “Let’s go, then,” she said. “We’d be glad to help out however we can.”

  Riley was grateful for their willingness to help. She would get the boy started with a police artist and leave them there.

  Then she would go to BAU and get what she needed to track Peterson down—and kill him.

  Chapter 17

  The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit buzzed with activity as agents went about trying to locate April. Now they all knew that Riley had been right all along. Peterson was still alive, and as much of a threat as ever. The flyer had put any remaining skepticism to rest, and some of the agents looked as embarrassed as she thought they should be.

  The mug shot of Peterson and the sketch that had been made from Brian’s description were side by side on the flyer. Both showed an ordinary-looking man who might not stand out in a crowd except for his large size and prominent jaw. The resemblance between the sketch and the photo was unmistakable.

  Riley wished she could feel vindicated. Instead, she felt utterly wretched.

  Meredith stepped into her doorway, his craggy features knotted with sympathetic concern.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked Riley.

  Riley swallowed hard. She couldn’t let herself cry. She had to hold herself together.

  “I feel so guilty,” she said. “Does that make sense?”

  “No,” Meredith replied. “But nothing does at a time like this.”

  Riley nodded. Meredith was absolutely right. She ought to know that as well as anybody. But after all her years as a field agent, she’d never been in this position. She’d been threatened, but she’d only observed this kind of terror from the outside. These emotions were new to her.

  “Have you got any news?” Riley asked.

  Meredith sighed wearily. “Not much,” he said. “We’ve got cops going door to door in your husband’s neighborhood with the flyer. Nobody recognizes Peterson so far.”

  “What about the car?” Riley asked.

  “The Fredericksburg cops located the car the boy described. Peterson had stolen it. It was found abandoned not long after he gave the kids a ride. A neighbor across the street said that she noticed a black Cadillac backed up in your ex-husband’s driveway. It was probably stolen too, and we’re trying to find out about it. But the neighbor didn’t see anything that happened.”

  Riley’s heart hung on Meredith’s every word, listening for some reason to hope. She didn’t hear much to encourage her.

  Meredith gazed at Riley for a moment. Then he said, “There’s nothing you can do here right now. I don’t suppose I could talk you into going home and getting some sleep.”

  Riley shook her head.

  “It’s still early,” she said.

  Besides, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until April was found. She doubted that much of the BAU would sleep until then either.

  “Okay,” Meredith said. “I’ll let you know when we know more.”

  He left her office. Riley stared at the flyer again. She picked apart Meredith’s choice of words just now. He’d said “when we know more.” He hadn’t said if. Riley tried to take comfort in that. Of course she knew that Meredith had chosen his words carefully. Did he really hold out any hope that April would be found alive?

  Right then she heard a familiar voice from her doorway.

  “Riley.”

  She turned around and saw Bill standing there.

  “I heard,” he said.

  His eyes were full of concern. They showed no trace of anger or resentment. Whatever bad blood had been between them recently, Riley knew that it had evaporated in the face of this tragedy.

  Riley made one last vain attempt to keep her emotions under control. But then it hit her that she didn’t need to. Her friend was back—a friend who understood her better than anybody in the world.

  Tears burst from her eyes and she leaped to her feet. She threw herself into Bill’s arms.

  “Oh, Bill, you’re here, you’re here.”

  She sobbed uncontrollably as Bill rocked her gently in his arms.

  *

  Bill was driving the SUV they’d taken out at Quantico. In the passenger seat beside him Riley was loading four three-inch shells into a Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun that she cradled in her lap. She’d requested the gun at the BAU before they left for D.C.

  “Remember, that thing’s a SWAT weapon,” Bill said. “We’re just likely to be interviewing civilians for a while.”

  “I’ll leave it in the SUV for now,” Riley replied.

  Bill knew that he’d been right to come with her. His best friend was emotionally raw and in need of his presence. Abandoning their partnership when she was in such dire straights would have been all wrong. He was aware that his taking off tonight could mark the end of his shaky marriage, but he couldn’t let Riley go without him.

  She was brilliant but she could be foolhardy. She had come so close to being killed when she’d struck out alone on their last case, and he couldn’t let that happen again.

  “Talk to me,” Bill said. “About Peterson. Have you found out anything since we last hunted him down?”

  “He’s changing, Bill,” Riley said.

  “How?”

  “It’s hard to pin it down exactly.”

  After a brief silence, Bill nudged her thoughts again. “Riley, I hate to ask you to remember it all. But think back to things that he said to you when he was holding you. Does anything stick out in your mind?”

  “He told me once, ‘You’re not my type,’” she said.

  “Hmm, okay, you weren’t his type,” Bill mused. “Did he say anything else?”

  “Yeah, he went on to say something like, ‘But I like you anyway. You’re opening my horizons.’”

  “What do you think he meant?”

  “There’s so much we don’t know about him,” Riley said. “Nobody is sure just how many women he’s tortured and killed. The only ones we know of are the four that were found in shallow graves. There are probably more out there that nobody has found.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “And the women we found were all markedly well-off. The first was married to a psychiatrist. The second was a newspaper editor. The third was married to a real estate developer. The fourth was high up in the food chain of a big corporation. Finally, there was Marie, a Georgetown lawyer. Obviously, this started off as a class thing. He probably grew up poor. He resented it. He especially resented women who had money.”

  Riley nodded in agreement. “It made him feel emasculated,” she said. “So he went on a spree of revenge, targeting women who represented everything he hated. They also happened to be women who weren’t available to a guy of his social standing. Maybe his first victim was a wealthy woman who rejected his advances. He probabl
y fantasized that he was some sort of one-man revolution. So his anger had a sexual component, even though rape was never part of his MO.”

  “You’re getting at things we hadn’t worked out before,” Bill said. “Keep going.”

  “And he got to be very good at it,” Riley continued. “Judging from the pictures we’ve got of him, he’s probably the kind of guy who can blend in anywhere. And the last car he stole was a Cadillac. Just by taking the right clothes and props, he can probably pass himself off as rich. He might have socialized with the women, even dated or slept with some of them. What mattered was what they represented—the kind of wealth and privilege that he felt cheated out of.”

  Bill grunted—the sort of noise he made whenever an insight came to him.

  “Riley, that’s it,” he said. “You’re not his type—not a wealthy professional, not some society housewife, not the kind of trophy he’d been looking for till then. But he liked you anyway. That surprised him. He realized that the whole class thing didn’t matter to him anymore. He wasn’t some lone fighter for the oppressed. He was in it for the sheer sadism—the joy of inflicting pain and terror.”

  “You’ve nailed it perfectly, Bill,” she said. “He’s no ordinary serial. He can change. He’s adaptable. That’s why he’s been so hard to catch.”

  “Let’s hope that’s about to change,” Bill said.

  Right then, they arrived at their destination—a desolate block of condemned row houses. It was dark in the ramshackle neighborhood, all the more so because some streetlights were out. All that was left of the house where Peterson had held Riley was an empty lot. The explosion had destroyed the house where Peterson had been squatting. The two empty houses on either side had been damaged so badly that they were promptly torn down.

  Bill pulled the SUV to the curb and parked. He said. “Do you want to call in the D.C. police? They could cover a lot more ground, questioning people.”

  “No, Riley replied. “If the search becomes that obvious, he’ll get spooked and disappear. Let’s just go it on our own for a little while. We’ve got two car keys, so we can split up. You go east, and I’ll go west.”

  “Okay,” Bill said. “But you call me if anything happens—anything at all.”

  He watched as Riley walked onto the vacant lot where she had encountered Peterson before. He knew that she needed to confront her demons there.

  Bill headed down the street, determined to find some lead, some answer to where Peterson was holding Riley’s daughter. He knew that if he found the man first, he’d probably kill the monster himself.

  Chapter 18

  Riley watched Bill walk away. She looked back at the SUV longingly, feeling reluctant to leave the Remington behind. But carrying a shotgun around at this time of night would draw the wrong sort of attention. The plan for now was to search, not to destroy.

  At least not yet, Riley thought.

  Right now, she felt the need to reach back into a dark recess of her memory—a place where she’d come to know what little she knew about Peterson.

  She walked out onto the barren lot. She’d returned here just once since her captivity and escape. It had been broad daylight then. But she had felt certain then that she’d found the place she’d been looking for. Now she retraced her steps the same way. Soon her instincts told her that she was there—standing in the very spot.

  She breathed the night air deeply. Yes, this was it. There was no doubt about it. Below her feet was exactly where she’d found Marie in that dark and dismal crawlspace. It was where she’d been captured in the very act of setting Marie free. It was where she’d suffered days of pain, torture, and humiliation.

  A feeling of rage rose up in her. It seemed to seep up from the ground, into her toes and feet, up her ankles and legs, all through her abdomen and arms, until her chest and head felt ready to burst with it. For a moment, the house itself seemed to be a real presence all around her.

  If only it really was still here, she thought. If only he were here.

  How gladly she’d do what she’d done before—beat the man nearly unconscious, open his propane tanks, throw a match inside, and watch the whole place erupt into a fiery explosion.

  If only it could be her own life on the line again and not April’s.

  When she turned back toward the street, she spotted a vagrant who looked like he must be familiar with this part of town. She stopped the man and showed him the flyer.

  “Have you seen this man?” she asked.

  The vagrant answered without even a moment’s hesitation.

  “Yep, I’ve seen him several times. It’s the guy in these pictures, all right—a tall guy with a big chin. He comes here almost every day. Early this morning was the most recent. I was across the street there, sitting on the curb. He came walking right along here, like he always does. He stood on the sidewalk about where we are now, just looking across this lot here. And then he walked over where you were, ma’am. He always does that. He stands there looking down at the ground, just like you did. He always says something too, but I’m never close enough to hear him.”

  Riley could barely contain her excitement.

  “Does he come here in a car?” she asked.

  The vagrant scratched his head. “Not so’s I know about.” He pointed west. “Today he went off that way. I always keep watching as he goes, because he strikes me as odd somehow. He always turns off onto one of the side streets. Maybe he keeps a car parked nearby, or maybe not. I don’t know.”

  “Thank you—oh, thank you,” Riley sputtered. She reached into her purse for her wallet. It was hardly professional procedure to give money to helpful witnesses, but she couldn’t help herself. She handed the man a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Much obliged,” he said. Then he went rattling away with his shopping cart.

  It was all Riley could do to keep from hyperventilating. She took a long, slow breath. He really was here. Maybe he was close by right now. Maybe he even lived near here. Maybe she was getting close to finding April right now.

  *

  After hours of walking, walking, walking, Riley still had found out nothing. Absolutely nothing. She’d prowled every street all the way to Georgetown, talking to everyone she met. Some people had recognized the man on the flyer, and two said they’d seen him recently driving a Cadillac. But nobody she talked to could to pin down where he might be.

  She hoped that Bill was doing better, wherever he was right now. She doubted it.

  Peterson has got me beat, she thought in despair, turning to head back to the SUV. I’m doing everything wrong.

  To make matters worse, a light drizzle started to fall. Within seconds, it turned into a steady rain. She’d be soaked to the skin long before she got back to the vehicle. She was relieved to see that a bar up ahead was still open. She went inside and sat down on a barstool.

  While the bartender was busy helping another customer, Riley wondered what to order. Anything alcoholic was out of the question. She’d stopped drinking altogether after that drunken call to Bill that had nearly destroyed their relationship. Now was no time to start again.

  Or was it?

  Riley’s eyes scanned the rows of bottles lined up against the mirror behind the bar. Her gaze fell upon the bourbon bottles—especially the hundred-proof brands. It was so, so easy to imagine the rough, burning, comforting feeling of gulping down a shot. It was easy, too, to imagine gulping down another, and another, and another …

  And why not, after all? She’d done all she could. The situation was hopeless, at least for now. Some whiskey was just what she needed to relax her, to give her shattered nerves some welcome relief.

  The beefy bartender stepped toward her.

  “What’ll you have, lady?” he asked.

  Riley didn’t answer.

  “Lady, last call is in five minutes,” he said.

  She thought about it. In five minutes, she could put away a lot of whiskey. Still, she struggled. April was out there, in a monster’s clutches. Wha
t did she think she was doing, even thinking about having a drink?

  A tall, rough-looking man leaned on the bar next to her. He was too close to her for her liking.

  “Come on, little lady,” he purred. “What’ll you have? It’s on me.”

  Riley’s jaw clenched. The last thing she needed right now was some jerk coming on to her.

  “I don’t drink,” she said in a tight voice.

  She felt relieved at the sound of her own words. There, it was said, and she felt good about her decision.

  The man chuckled. “Don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it,” he said.

  Riley smirked a little. Who did this guy think she was? Did he really think she’d never had a drink before? Maybe in the dim light of this place he couldn’t see how old she was. Or maybe he was just too damn drunk to see straight.

  “Give me a club soda,” Riley said to the bartender.

  “Naw, we’ll have none of that,” the man next to her said. “I know just the drink you’d like.” Looking up at the bartender, he said, “Clyde, mix this girl a strawberry daiquiri. Put it on my tab.”

  “Bring me a club soda,” Riley insisted grimly.

  The bartender shrugged at the man. “The lady says a club soda,” he said. He opened the stainless steel refrigerator, pulled out a bottle, and snapped it open.

  “Have it your way, bitch,” the man said.

  Riley’s nerves quickened.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  But the man was walking away from her toward the door. He called to a friend who was sitting alone at a table.

  “C’mon, Red. It’s closing time.”

  The friend got up and the two men left the bar.

  Fighting down her anger, Riley paid for the club soda. She quickly drank it straight out of the bottle. She put some change on the bar for a tip.

  “Thanks,” she said to the bartender. The place had emptied out and she was the last to leave. When she walked out the door, she was relieved to see that the rain had stopped for now. The night was still damp and dark, and it would probably rain again soon.

  As the bar door closed behind her, she felt a strong hand grip her arm—and she heard that familiar ugly voice.