She lived just south of the city. Taking Phillips Highway, eventually she drove into what was known as Old Mandarin, with its stately homes on the river and ancient, moss-draped live oaks. Karen loved the old-world, Southern elegance, although she herself lived in one of the area’s newer suburbs comprised of much smaller, cookie-cutter tract homes. Traveling on a side street, deep in thought, she realized with a start the traffic light in front of her had turned yellow. She braked abruptly to avoid running a red light. Her head bobbed forward as she both heard and felt the crunch as another car bumped her from behind.
Great. Karen looked in the rearview mirror and saw a man getting out of a new-looking Infiniti SUV. In her mind she heard her husband’s voice—now her ex—reminding her to take safety precautions. Stay inside and roll your window down just a crack. Keep your cell phone in hand. Her stomach somersaulted in surprise as she recognized the approaching male. She opened the door and got out.
“Karen?” Allan shook his head in surprise. “I’m so sorry. I don’t believe this.”
“You were following me?”
He appeared perplexed. “What? No! I was just on my way home. What a coincidence and an unfortunate one, I’m afraid. Do you live around here, too?”
She walked around the back of her car to assess the damage. The rear bumper had a large dent and hung slightly askew. The SUV was less impacted. A few cars passed around them on the dark, quiet street.
“This is all my fault,” he fretted. “I have insurance.”
“Maybe we should exchange information?”
He nodded. “Let’s get our cars out of the way first before we cause another accident.”
Looking around, he pointed to a nearby waterside recreation area with a playground and basketball courts. It had a parking lot that was dimly lit and shrouded by trees. “We could go over there.”
The suggestion made Karen a little uncomfortable. She’d really just met this man, and she still wasn’t certain she believed him about not following her from the store. They were miles away from the shopping plaza now.
“What street do you live on?” she asked.
“Morning Dove Lane.”
She recognized the name. It was two streets over from the school her son attended. He did seem to know the area.
“I really am embarrassed about this.” Hesitating, he made a small, helpless gesture with his hands. “To be honest I’ve got a lot on my mind and wasn’t paying attention. I’m recently divorced and I’m still having some trouble adjusting. My wife…she left me for someone else.”
“I’m sorry.” Karen felt a rush of empathy, thinking of her ex-husband’s twenty-four-year-old secretary. The new Mrs. Diambro. Absently, she touched the faint indentation on the ring finger of her left hand where her wedding ring used to be. Even after the divorce was final, it had taken her months to stop wearing it. She stepped back as another car careened around them on the street.
“Maybe we really should get out of the way.” He indicated the nearby lot again.
Consenting, Karen returned to her car and drove it into the empty recreation area with the SUV trailing behind her. Maybe their fender bender really was fate. With a nervous release of breath, she turned off the engine and took a quick glance at her reflection in the rearview mirror, wishing she had on some lipstick, before getting back out. Allan was already walking toward the car. The lazy croak of bullfrogs came from the nearby water, and several large moths circled the streetlamp in front of the public restrooms.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
“A son. He’s with his mother this week.”
“Does he go to Jason Creek Elementary?”
He shook his head. “He’s in private school.”
She felt another fleeting wave of apprehension, aware their cars were blocked from street view by the trees. Ducking back into her car for her purse, she pulled out her wallet to retrieve her ID and insurance card. Straightening, she turned and met Allan’s gaze. He’d moved a little closer, and her eyes flicked to his right hand. He was casually trying to hide something. Karen was a pediatrics nurse. She approached small, frightened patients in the exact same way. She saw it then. He was holding a syringe, and in the faint glow of light she suddenly realized his hand was encased in a latex glove.
“What…?”
Dropping her wallet, she stumbled backward and threw herself into her car, but he wedged his body in the door, keeping her from closing it. Karen screamed and lunged for her cell phone inside her purse. She felt the sharp sting of the needle as he plunged it into her thigh. She kicked at him as he dragged her out, his hand covering her mouth and muffling her cries. Karen elbowed him hard, heard his oomph of surprise. Breaking free, she tried to run but her legs felt suddenly heavy and uncoordinated and she ended up sprawled face-first on the asphalt. Whatever he’d injected her with was strong. Her frantic pulse pounded in her ears.
He flipped her over and towed her by her upper arms to the waiting SUV. She felt little flares of pain as loose gravel on the lot cut into her bare calves. She tried screaming again, tried wriggling loose of his tight hold, but her body no longer responded beyond a few weak mewls and flails.
Last night’s evening news…the FBI sketch of the man who’d been abducting women…it all came together in her increasingly muddled head. Terror turned her lungs to stone. He hoisted her into the front passenger seat of the SUV with a hard grunt. Karen’s head lolled on her shoulders. He used the seat belt to keep her in place.
“You’re a nice woman, Karen,” he purred, brushing her dark hair back from her clammy cheek. “But if you don’t mind me saying so, you seem a little desperate.”
He took her hand and studied her fingers, frowning. The last thing she saw before blacking out was Allan heading to her car and removing the boxed laptop from the backseat.
16
The doll dangled from the driver’s-side window, its gold hair shimmering in sunlight. Mia stayed on the curb while the other child approached the hatchback. The male voice coming from inside the car was barely audible, wrapped in the radio’s pulsating beat.
“Hey, sweetheart, look what I have. Don’t you want it?”
The doll waggled enticingly in the hot, sluggish air. Sweat beaded on Mia’s brow and her heart began to beat harder. This wasn’t…right. She watched as the little red-haired girl inched shyly closer.
“Tell your friend it’s okay. She can come, too.”
Cuddling the doll now, the child grinned and looked back, motioning excitedly to Mia as the door creaked open behind her. Within the space of a breath she was snatched up in hard, corded arms, her skinny legs kicking in midair. A hand clapped over her mouth, stifling her cry. The eyes that met Mia’s were clear and cold…and hungry. Her knees felt shaky. She took several steps back, nearly tripping on the curb. The girl was stuffed inside, the door slammed closed and the hatchback peeled away, tires screeching on the sleepy neighborhood street.
Mia stared at the bedroom’s white ceiling as she waited for the frantic pace of her breathing to slow. She had seen the car’s driver in her nightmare this time, but he hadn’t really been a man at all. More of a rangy teenager, with a shock of dark hair and wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. But his face…
It was a much younger version of the man in the sketch.
Although the night-light cast a soft glow, Mia sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. The alarm clock indicated it was after two in the morning. Shoving away the sheets, she got up and paced the room, arms wrapped around herself. She once again contemplated Dr. Wilhelm’s theory that the dreams were merely symbolic of her recent trauma. That premise made even more sense now, since in this latest version the face of her abductor had been transposed onto the man in her nightmare.
Still, something kept stubbornly whispering to her the dream could be real.
She hadn’t found anything to support such an idea, however. No articles about children abducted from foster homes in Jacksonville, either recently or twenty
-five years ago. But there was one additional place she could check, she now realized—the newspaper’s microfiche archives, stored in a basement room known as “the morgue” since it was a burial ground for old news clippings, most from decades back. She had forgotten about it until now, since pretty much all research these days was done online. The problem was, she wasn’t sure if the film even still existed. Much of it had been disposed of several years earlier and the archive manager laid off. Newspapers, even the larger ones, were all undergoing hard times.
When she went into work in another few hours, she would find out if the archives were still intact. Or she could go now. Mia felt restless and couldn’t sleep anyway, the troubling dream nagging at her like a sore tooth. Making a decision, she showered and dressed, then took off for the paper in the early-morning hours.
Pulling her Volvo into the building’s parking garage, she felt a trickle of nerves. She’d braved the decks several times since her abduction, but this was the first time she had navigated them with no one around—no other cars or people walking through, and in an eerie blanket of darkness. Mia prayed it wouldn’t set off some terrifying flashback.
She parked close to the glass-door entry that led to the building’s lobby, her heels echoing off the concrete walls and her skin prickling as she hurried through the shadows. Sliding her employee ID card through the after-hours entry system, she let herself inside.
The newspaper offices were empty; the lights lowered at the chrome-and-glass reception desk. Mia walked past it, down the corridor and into the newsroom, flipping on the harsh overhead fluorescent panels. She placed her purse inside her desk drawer and locked it, then headed to the elevators.
Getting off on the windowless basement floor, she gasped as she nearly collided with Ronnie, one of the evening janitors, who seemed just as surprised to see her.
“What’re you doin’ here, Miss Hale?” The African-American man with graying hair frowned as he checked his watch. “It’s the middle of the night. You got some kind of breakin’ news story?”
“I’m just looking for something. An old article, actually.”
“You’re here all by yourself?” He shook his head. “You think that’s a good idea, after what happened?”
“Probably not.” Mia felt sheepish, aware of his wisdom. “Ronnie, is the morgue still down here?”
“Uh-huh. What’s left of it, anyway. Door’s locked, though. I don’t think anyone’s been in there in a long time.”
“Can you let me in?”
He fished into his trouser pockets, withdrawing a massive key ring. Mia waited as he rifled through it before finding the right one. “C’mon.”
She followed him to the end of the hall. He unlocked a metal door. “I was just leavin’, but you want me to stay down here with you? This ain’t a real morgue, but it still gives me the creeps.”
“Thanks, but I may be down here awhile. I’ll be fine.”
Ronnie gave a polite nod and departed. Mia turned on the light. Tall filing cabinets lined the walls, and there were several antiquated microfiche viewers sitting on desks in the middle of the room. She went to the cabinets and began looking. Multiple decades were missing, but to her relief the year she was interested in was still among the remaining film. She pulled out the entire section, which consisted of a stack of acetate sheets upon which the newspapers were imaged, page-by-page and reduced to thumbnail size. With no searchable index, it could take hours or even a full day to scan through all the headlines, she realized dejectedly. She figured she could at least eliminate the ones from the winter months, since in her dreams the heat had been sweltering.
Mia took the film over to the closest viewer, plugging the cord into the electrical outlet and wiping dust from its acrylic screen. Beginning with the microfiche marked April 1987-week one, she inserted the first sheet into the slot and focused it. She began scanning the headlines, turning the viewer’s knob to see each page.
Some two hours later, she stopped to rest her strained eyes. Frustrated and feeling foolish, she wondered again if the whole thing was a waste of time. Dr. Wilhelm believes the dreams are just that…dreams.
Another half hour had passed when she placed the film marked June 1987-week two into the viewer. She began scanning the pages of the daily editions. When she reached page two of the paper dated Tuesday, June 11, she felt her heart drop into her stomach:
Child Missing from Foster Care Group Home.
A little girl named Joy Rourke had vanished without a trace.
It hadn’t even made the front-page news.
Mia sat at her desk as Eric read the printout from the newspaper archives. She had called him a short time earlier, waking him to tell him what she’d found. Outside the newsroom windows, the morning sky was still dark and only one or two other early birds had made it into work.
“Why wouldn’t I tell someone?” she asked, confused and unable to hide her upset. “A little girl was taken right in front of me, the article proves it. It happened at the same group home where I stayed until I was placed with a foster family. I never said a word. I never even remembered it until—”
“Until you started the memory-retrieval therapy.” He finished her statement, his voice still a little husky and sleep-roughened. His eyes were sympathetic. “You were a six-year-old child yourself, Mia. Torn from your mother and home just days earlier. And the only friend you’d made was abducted off the street. You were traumatized. Your mind couldn’t process anything else, so it shut down and repressed what you saw.”
She rubbed a hand over her tired eyes. Eric’s rationale failed to lessen her guilt. If she had given a description of the hatchback and teenage boy she’d witnessed taking Joy Rourke all those years ago, she might have been able to help her. She shook her head, still in disbelief that she’d somehow shut out the terrible event. While she had awaited Eric’s arrival, she’d gone through later issues of the archived newspaper, but so far had found no additional articles. “I wonder what happened to her. Whether she was ever found.”
“Now that we have a name, I’ll contact the Sheriff’s Office and see if they can come up with any files. It was a long time ago, though.” Eric dragged his fingers through his short hair. He’d taken only enough time to put on jeans and a T-shirt, and his jaw held a bluish hint of stubble. Even in the current situation, Mia realized she felt the same hard attraction to him.
“Dr. Wilhelm was wrong about the dreams,” she said quietly. “They weren’t symbolic at all. They were real.”
“They could mean a lot more than that, Mia.”
She didn’t respond. Eric lowered his words. “It means there’s a possibility this guy’s connection to you is deeper than we thought.”
Mia rose from her desk, fidgety and nervous. She’d told him that in her latest dream, Joy Rourke’s kidnapper appeared to be a younger version of the man who had abducted her in present day. Until now, the assumption was that Mia had been taken because she’d gained The Collector’s attention by writing about the recent kidnappings. But what if he’d also known her to be the same little girl who had witnessed him taking another child off the street all those years ago? The possibility put goose bumps on her skin.
“I need coffee,” she murmured, seeking an escape.
She went into the staff kitchen. No one had started the coffeemaker yet, so she busied herself with filling the carafe with water and placing a packet of grounds into the filter. She didn’t have to turn around to know Eric had followed her.
“Look at me,” he ordered softly. When she finally turned to face him, he asked, “What time did you get here this morning?”
“I don’t know, three-thirty, maybe. I couldn’t sleep and I remembered the clippings archive in the basement.”
“So you came here alone, in the middle of the night.”
She stiffened at the censure in his voice. Mia gave a small nod.
“That can’t happen again. You were already taken once, right out of this building’s parking garage
.”
“I’m not going to live in fear, Eric. And you said yourself it’s rare for someone like this to go after the same person twice—”
“Will Dvorak told me a car might’ve followed you last week. Did it?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know.” Mia sighed, realizing she wasn’t sure what she thought anymore. “I think I probably just spooked myself. Seeing Pauline Berger’s body had me rattled.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I wasn’t sure…and I didn’t want you to think I was some panicky—”
“Mia.” He whispered her name. When she tried to pull her gaze from his, Eric’s fingers caught hers. Something in the air shifted around them, and she felt her heart beat a little harder as he bent his head closer to hers. His intense eyes held a seriousness that made her throat ache.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you. We need to start taking some precautions. Especially if your dreams were really repressed memories and the unsub knows you from before. We also need to alert Dr. Wilhelm about this.”
Mia chewed her lip. She just wanted all of it to go away.
“Is there anything else you remember about Joy’s abduction?”
“Just that he used a doll to lure us—”
“Us?”
“He tried to get me to come to the car, too.”
The shrill of his cell phone pierced the air. Eric looked annoyed. He dug the device from his jeans pocket and answered, pacing a few steps away as he talked. Mia tried to concentrate on the hiss and glug of the coffeemaker behind her, but she heard enough of the conversation to fill her with dread. After a few moments, he closed the phone.
“I’ve got to go meet Agent Vartran. A car was found south of the city at a waterside recreation area in Mandarin. A woman’s wallet was on the ground underneath it with an ID inside, her purse still in the car. Deputies were sent to the home but no one’s answering.”
Edge of Midnight Page 13