by John Scanlan
He had always been perceived to be a very nice man, charming, too. He was thought by most to be very handsome and clean cut; an image he enjoyed and worked to maintain.
Tom and Lisa had been together since their freshmen year at Florida Atlantic University. They married shortly after graduation but did not have Ashley until some time after that. After college, Lisa took a job at a local dentist’s office as a hygienist; a position she still occupied thirteen years later. She made good money working there and enjoyed her job. It was not as much as Tom brought in, but it was enough to contribute to the Wootens’ lifestyle of living comfortably in a beautiful home and a nice community.
Like Tom, Lisa had also aged gracefully throughout the years. Her blonde hair was always done as if she had just walked out of a salon. Her deep blue eyes still sparkled and her smile, which she flashed quite a bit, lit up her face.
And then there was Ashley. Ashley was an only child by choice. They had discussed having another child, possibly more than just one other. But, ultimately they decided one was all they needed to make their family complete.
To those who knew them, the Wootens were the picture of the All-American Family. But now it seemed that picture had been torn to shreds. The portrait of who they were just a short time ago—successful, picturesque, happy, complete—was now gone. They just hoped, as they continued searching down street after street, it wasn’t too late to get it back.
CHAPTER 5
Louis was halfway home from his trip to Boca Raton, meandering down back road after back road, going exactly the speed limit. Louis had learned a lot of things while in prison, the utmost prevailing lesson being to limit his interactions with the police. He knew people were after him now: people he had never met or would meet. People he had never wronged or would wrong. He was sure they would look for ways to hurt him, rather than help him, because of what he stood for, because of the title he carried due to his conviction. Sexual Offender. And so he did everything cautiously—including driving.
Prison life was very difficult on Louis. Aside from being an introvert all his life, Louis was branded a pedophile and thus had a target on his back from day one. He was beaten regularly; each time he offered no resistance, just tried to cover his face. He was preyed upon time and time again, just as he had preyed upon his victim. No one had sympathy for him, no one intervened. The only people he could talk to or associate with were other inmates who had been incarcerated for the very same sort of crimes. Never having friends, or even desiring them in his entire life, even that was difficult at first.
When he first went to prison, Louis wasn’t sure which way his life would go. He was at a crossroads of sorts. He thought he would eventually get out, although being murdered while serving his time was a real possibility, and at times he thought for sure it was imminent. But still, he wondered what type of life he would have if he did make it through his incarceration. He did not desire the “American Dream” of a wife, kids, or the house with the picket fence. It didn’t appeal to him in the least. He had no desire to even leave the safety of his garage apartment he longed so desperately for. What he didn’t know was if he would continue down the destructive path that had landed him in his current predicament or if he would work to get past his urges and desires by any means possible. He struggled with this decision for months, until finally he succumbed to the realization that this was who he was. Who he would always be. His urges were a part of him. He wouldn’t fight them.
He never felt remorse for what he had done; to the contrary, he felt even stronger now about preying on those who could not defend themselves. He realized that prison would not serve to rehabilitate him as he had been told it would. Prison would serve to sharpen his predatory skills by learning from the mistakes and advice of others.
So over the course of his two years in prison Louis crafted his criminal blueprint. The abuse he took at the hands of those stronger than him only served to make his desire for control more insatiable. When he got out of prison he bided his time. One of the many lessons he learned, and probably the most important, was to be patient. A year passed as he scanned gathering places, learned exit strategies, tested stalking techniques, and honed his chameleon-like appearance. Finally, it was time for him to put his plan into action, and to his surprise it worked perfectly. He would orchestrate it time and again, tweaking it just slightly each time, but never deviating from its core. He was methodical in the completion of his schemes, at times it seemed he was almost on cruise control, but he savored every moment.
Finally, he was back at home from his trip to the mall, having been gone about five hours. He parked the blue Le Sabre as close as he could get to the garage while still being able to swing the door open. He discretely glanced down the driveway to see if anyone was on the street, but noticed no one. He opened the passenger side door, reached inside and scooped up a large quilt from the floorboard. He began to perspire from this brief but strenuous physical activity. He held it in both arms directly in front of his body and leaned his face downward toward the bundle he held tight, his eyes still peering out toward the street. “Don’t you say a word,” he whispered.
He left the car door ajar as he quickly but calmly entered the garage. Two small white patent leather shoes peeked out from under one end of the quilt and in a flash Louis placed his cargo, still covered with the quilt, upright and standing behind a stack of boxes. Heavy breathing and whimpers of fear came from under the quilt but Louis paid them no attention.
With his package concealed to any passersby, he calmly walked back to the open car door, reached in and grabbed his police scanner radio off the passenger seat, then shut the door. As he listened during the course of his ride, he was relieved at a noticeable absence in the conversations between police officers and dispatchers. No reference to him, the blue Le Sabre, or his victim had been made once during his trip. However, he knew it had only been forty minutes since he had made his pickup and he needed to get into his apartment quickly to plug the radio back in and ensure the transmission of utmost importance to him was not missed. He pulled the door to the garage shut from the inside and was instantly closed off from the outside world, his captive secured. Just like that.
To anyone who had observed this it would appear as if a man was simply carrying a bundle of clothing. It was so casual. There was no sense of urgency or panic on Louis’s part. No sounds were coming from under the patchwork quilt that would have been audible to anyone outside the garage. And now it was over. If anyone had seen it they had already gone on their way not giving it a second thought.
Louis certainly didn’t think twice. He never considered his victims’ feelings or emotions, and even if he had it wouldn’t have mattered much. He had crossed over long ago from simply being numb to being pure evil, with no sense of compassion, only a sense of self. He had blocked out the muffled cries on the trip from Boca Raton to his driveway. They made him feel nothing anyway; transporting was a part of the process, but the end game was the control he felt when he had his victim in his apartment, trapped and looking at him with scared, pleading eyes. As Ashley, no longer cloaked in the patchwork quilt, climbed the ladder to the apartment above with Louis close behind, that feeling finally started building. He was no longer on cruise control.
The transporting, of course, wasn’t just a meaningless necessity to Louis. Far from it. It was part of the overall plan, it was a ritual. There was the initial adrenaline rush he got from the actual kidnap itself. That rush came whether or not he was able to obtain his mark, which on many occasions he could not. The patience he learned in prison had been key to his survival thus far, and many times he had to abort his missions because the chance of getting caught was too great. An adrenaline rush with no payoff was very hard for Louis to come down from. Once he crossed over into madness it took a long time for him to come back. Sometimes the rush to abduct his mark was so great that he struggled with the decision to call it off. It was rare that he would be so overcome with his impulses that he
acted recklessly and forgot the lessons he learned and rules he had set for himself. Fortunately for Louis, the mistakes he made since his release from prison hadn’t been blatant enough to send him back.
Indeed, he had caught a lot of breaks throughout his crime spree; even thinking back to his one and only arrest he had been lucky. He knew he could have served twenty years or more for what he had originally been arrested on, and had his victim and her family not absconded out of fear they would be discovered as illegals and deported, he would have. Of course he didn’t know they had fled Davie when he took the plea deal, but he still realized he was fortunate to get such a minimal sentence. He knew that longevity as a criminal of that magnitude didn’t come without some luck. He had heard his fellow inmates brag about their successes as well as condemn their failures. Not every crime they committed had been discovered. He knew the tales of Dahmer and Gacy and how they flirted with being uncovered for years prior to their actual arrests. And he also knew some day his luck would run out, just as theirs had.
To keep that from happening any time soon, Louis quite regularly instituted new restrictions upon himself when he felt he was being too careless. He had decided after either a successful or unsuccessful abduction attempt he would not return to the area from which the attempt was made for at least one year, under any circumstances. He also decided that once he was successful and carried out his plan, he would lay low for as long as he could hold out, which at first was extremely difficult. Holding back on acting out was hard for Louis, but over time he disciplined himself and could go six months or more before his demons took over. Thus, in the ten years since his prison release his victims only numbered seven.
But now he had his eighth victim, and she was already in his apartment. The hard part was over. Louis reflected for a moment on how the actual kidnapping wasn’t really that hard this time. Things just seemed to play out and open up in his favor. After he pulled out of his parking space at the mall he was able to follow his target with only two cars in between them, and to his good fortune, he was able to remain that way right to the main gate of the complex in which she lived. Again, as luck would have it, there was no security guard at the front gate, and he was able to piggyback his way into the complex.
Once inside, he saw his target make a quick right turn, while the cars between them kept going straight. Louis turned right just as his target was pulling into a driveway on his right hand side. He slowly crept past the house and watched as the car pulled into the garage. He made a U-turn and parked on the opposite side of the street, about four houses down, and watched. He wasn’t sure if the opportunity would arise, and he had already accepted the fact that this mission may have to be aborted, when he saw the little girl skip out to the mailbox in front of the house.
When he drove past the house he had seen an empty space in the garage next to where the SUV had pulled in. He made the assumption that another vehicle was generally parked there and was now gone; possibly the girl’s father was the driver of the missing vehicle, which would render him absent from the home. As the little girl reached the mailbox the garage door shut. His pulse quickened, his eyes sharpened. He watched the little girl open the mailbox and reach inside and still did not observe her chaperone from the mall anywhere. He also did not see anyone else on the street, though he knew he would have no way of knowing if anyone was watching through a window. He made his move, pulling up next her, where the family’s property and the road met.
“Hi, do you remember me?” He said with a smile in a pleasant tone. The little girl turned from the mailbox leaving the small stack of flyers and envelopes inside it. She looked startled, but then she smiled back and nodded her head. “I was wondering if you could help me, I am so lost. What street is this?”
“Palmetto Avenue,” Ashley replied in her soft, innocent voice.
“I’m sorry, honey, I can’t hear you, I’m an old man. Can you come up to the car and tell me again?” He knew he needed to hurry. Like a viper he was poised, ready to strike.
He could see she had no idea what was in store, she had no way of knowing. She looked at him with familiarity. He knew he had her, if time permitted. She moved up to the car and put her little hands on the open window frame of the driver’s side front door. It was over in an instant. Before she even realized what was happening, Louis reached out the window with both hands, adrenaline pumping, grabbed the little girl under the armpits and pulled her into his car, then rolled up the window.
He threw her into the passenger seat and drove purposefully to the community gate. No squealing tires, no revving of the engine, but no dallying either. While he waited for the gate to open and allow him to make his escape, he reached with his right hand and grabbed the shaking girl’s shoulder and forced her onto the floorboard in front of the passenger seat. He reached into the backseat of the car and grabbed a large quilt and threw it on top of her.
“Stay there, covered up and I will let you go. I have a gun, if you move, if you make a sound, I will shoot you, then I will go back to your house and shoot your mommy and daddy.” His lie subdued the girl and with that the gates opened and he was heading back to Davie.
He reached under his seat and pulled out his old police scanner. The cord had been plugged into an adapter that allowed him to use the car’s cigarette lighter to power it. He listened intently, waiting for something to be broadcast about what he had just done. He knew how it all worked by now. The Amber Alerts, the Be-On-The-Lookouts.
He knew where to abandon State Road 441 and how to navigate the lesser traveled roads. Though the demons in his soul were screaming at him to hurry, he meandered slowly, until he made it back safe.
And now he was home, his victim trembling with fear. They were sealed off from the world; she had no avenue of escape. He just sat without speaking, listening to the police scanner. He worried that during the brief time it took him to move it the alert had come out and he had missed it. He sat patiently waiting for it to come, hoping he hadn’t.
It had now been over an hour since he had taken the girl. He needed to know what the police knew; he needed to prepare the cover up for what he had done and what he planned to do. But he couldn’t wait much longer. His demons wouldn’t allow it. That’s when he heard a female voice chirp over the radio.
“ATTENTION ALL UNITS. COPY AN AMBER ALERT OUT OF BOCA RATON, PALM BEACH COUNTY. WHITE FEMALE, FIVE YEARS OF AGE, APPROXIMATELY THREE FEET SIX INCHES TALL WITH STRAWBERRY BLONDE HAIR. TAKEN FROM HER HOME IN BOCA RATON AT APPROXIMATELY THIRTEEN-THIRTY HOURS. LAST SEEN WEARING BLUE JEANS, WHITE SHORT SLEEVED SHIRT, AND WHITE SHOES. LAST KNOWN DIRECTION OF TRAVEL WITH SUSPECT WAS SOUTHBOUND ON STATE ROAD 441. NO SUSPECT OR VEHICLE INFORMATION AT THIS TIME. END OF TRANSMISSION.”
Louis smiled.
CHAPTER 6
Carlos emerged from his office and proceeded to the living room where Julia sat on a leather couch watching television. “I am off,” he said softly as he leaned down and kissed her forehead. Without looking away from the television, she told him to have a good night, and he, in fact, was off.
Julia knew it would be late when Carlos returned, if he even returned at all, which on occasion he did not. He regularly went for late night check-ins with hospital patients or to review files at his office. At least that’s what he told her and part of her believed that it was true. She knew him to be a perfectionist and to love his work. She had even brought it up at a Christmas party to the doctor who ran the practice where Carlos worked, Dr. Morris. He confirmed that he routinely found Carlos at the office when he arrived in the morning, fast asleep at his desk with files spread out as if he’d been there all night.
But she also assumed he was having an affair, if not several. He was a very handsome man, always well dressed and very charismatic. He was flirtatious in nature, as well as a highly paid doctor, and so she just assumed at least half of the instances in which he left and was gone all night he was cheating. She never asked him about it though, not once. The truth was she was never
really in love with Carlos--only his money and status as a respected surgeon. The more he was gone or secluded in his home office the better. Their sex life was nonexistent, had been that way for years, which was all the more reason she believed him to be having affairs.
Carlos had done well to compartmentalize his life. So had she; she had begun having affairs long ago. It never really mattered to her that she had no solid proof he was doing the same. It never really mattered to her if he was truly having an affair at all, she still would have behaved the same. When he was gone she went out to dance clubs or bars to socialize and have a good time. She would either meet men along the way or, quite often, would go on dates with men she had already met. If, by chance, Carlos came home and she was not there, she would simply say she had been too drunk to drive home and had slept at a girlfriend’s house, which he always accepted.
Over the years she had several steady boyfriends, all of whom knew she was married. The sneaking around became an enjoyable part of it for her. She felt covert and intellectually superior to Carlos by doing it. She marveled at how she could outsmart such a well-educated surgeon.
Unlike Julia, however, Carlos was genuinely in love. The only guilt or remorse he ever felt by his actions was that they caused him to be a nonexistent, inattentive husband. He was fully aware of their lack of sexual activity, and even though he found Julia to be extremely attractive and sexy, he simply had no desire to have sex with her. He had no desire to have sex with anyone for that matter. His new release, the only thing that would satisfy him, was killing.