Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

  Clegg disappeared up those rickety stairs, the slanted ladder bending with his weight. Moments later I heard him shout, “Get facedown! Facedown, now!” He sounded just like a cop making an arrest. Then I heard some shuffling, followed by a bit of grunting, footsteps overhead, and then a door slamming shut. “Okay, come up!” Clegg yelled down.

  When I got upstairs, I saw Clegg standing by the door to the small room that contained the bondage bed. The muffled sobs of Swain’s mother filtered out into the larger room.

  “She’s in there,” Clegg said, pointing to the shuttered door behind him. “I’ll watch her. You do your thing.”

  “You had to lock her up?” I asked.

  “You want to wear a hood?”

  I turned on Swain’s computer, grateful he didn’t password-protect his machine. All his computers came with built-in cameras, which would be necessary to communicate with the Fiend—and to see Ruby.

  Working quickly, I typed the URL from my iPhone into a Web browser. A password prompt came up, asking only for a first and last name. I typed “John Bodine” and got an access denied message. Then I typed “Elliot Uretsky.” A live video stream came up, showing me that well-worn oak chair, the dangling naked bulb on a brown extension cord, the corded pipes dripping filthy rust-colored water. My whole body became weightless and heavy in the same instant.

  However, instead of seeing Ruby seated on that chair as I had expected, there was a note penned with a black marker in neat all-caps handwriting on a piece of white rectangular cardboard. The note read: Be back soon. Hang tight! The scene, unchanging, could have been a photograph.

  “What’s going on?” Clegg asked.

  “She’s not there,” I said. “Come look.”

  Clegg grabbed a bondage chair, yet another piece of disturbing furniture with straps and hooks and ways of holding people down, and jammed it underneath the doorknob of the room where we were holding Swain’s mom captive.

  “Is she still tied up?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I’ve learned over the years that people can be crafty. Better to play it safe.”

  He found the bondage hood with the eye slits cut out on the floor and slipped it over his head.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked.

  “Taking precautions,” he said. “SHS knows your face, but he doesn’t know mine.”

  Clegg read the note on the video feed while I paced in a tight circle and tried to keep from throwing up.

  “What do we do?” I asked. I found it impossible to maintain eye contact with Clegg while he wore that hood.

  “We wait,” Clegg said, his voice muffled by the fabric covering his mouth. “Just like the note tells us to do.”

  CHAPTER 52

  I slumped to the floor, legs useless, arms hanging limply by my sides. Clegg came over and knelt down beside me.

  “Take off that hood,” I said. “I can’t look at you with that thing on.”

  Clegg shook his head. “Precautions,” he said again. “I don’t know when our guy is going to show up on the video feed.”

  “You’re crazy. But you know that already, don’t you?”

  “If you want to save Ruby, I’m thinking we’re going to both have to be a little bit on the crazy side,” Clegg said.

  I felt separated from my body, afloat and shapeless. “I can’t live with myself if anything happens to her.”

  I wished I hadn’t voiced that possibility, worried it might somehow make it all come true. Clegg didn’t answer me. I could see his eyes through those slits in the black fabric of his hood but failed to pick up even a trace of worry.

  “How can you be so calm?” I asked him. “I feel sick inside. I can’t stop shaking.”

  “Same way you were calm when you decided which rope you were going to cut,” he said. “When somebody’s life is on the line, you act first, panic later.”

  I looked up at the computer, blinking, as if that would make Ruby appear. Between blinks the video feed went completely black. I rushed over to the computer, started moving the mouse around, manically pressing keys on the keyboard, doing everything I could think to do to make the black screen refresh and show me the room again. As much as I loathed reconnecting with that horrible setting, I didn’t want a second to go by where I wouldn’t be able to see Ruby.

  A minute passed. Then two. Then five. The computer screen flickered as I fiddled with the keyboard and mouse, and when it refreshed, she was there: Ruby tied to that oak chair, her arms and wrists secured by thick ropes, a ball gag shoved into her mouth, her strawberry hair matted down by sweat. A jagged tear in Ruby’s pink pajamas left one of her bony shoulders completely exposed. I could see red marks on her face and neck, along with other welts and bruises, too.

  “Ruby! Baby!” I felt gutted by an invisible knife that sliced me from belly to chest. “Let her go. . . . Let her go . . . please,” I begged. “Whoever you are. Come take me. I’ll do anything.”

  A masked figure rose from below the camera’s lens, slowly and purposefully, as if wanting to delay the reveal in dramatic fashion. I believed it was Carl Swain who appeared from below the camera’s scope, but until I saw his face, he’d remain the Fiend. It took a moment to make sense of the grotesque disguise he wore, but soon enough I had it figured out. The blue police cap adorning the zombie policeman mask was ripped and faded, as if long buried in the ground. The gray crinkled face of the mask featured a twisted mouth and two rows of pointed teeth set askew into decaying black gums, all below white pupils encased in yellow eyes. The rubbery skin, pinched in places and made to look flayed in others, did a good job portraying rot and decay.

  “Hey, John,” the Fiend said, his voice muffled within that mask. “Long time no see. Miss me?”

  “Let her go!” I screamed.

  The Fiend cocked his masked head to one side in a calm manner. “Where are you?” he asked, lowering the level of his gaze to get a better look at the scenery behind me. “I see lots of interesting things tacked on the wall.”

  “You know where I am, Swain,” I said.

  Do I have it right . . . ? Are you Swain? The Fiend?

  “Oh, you’ve figured me out, have you?” he said. “Actually, I do know where you are. I have a GPS tracker fixed to the bottom of your car. How’d you think I knew I could go and get me some Ruby?”

  “Why don’t you take off your mask and show your face, you coward?”

  “No can do,” he said. “See, I like our game, our little mystery. Do you know who I am? Can you be certain?”

  A thick clump of Ruby’s hair fell in front of her eyes. She rolled her head from side to side to shake away the irritation, but the hair, heavy with sweat, wouldn’t budge. Her chest heaved and fell with each uneven breath.

  Without thinking, I reached out and put a gloved hand on the computer monitor, touching the pixels of her hair, and imagined I could do for her what her own hands could not.

  From behind me I heard a door open and turned my head to see Clegg dragging Swain’s mother out of the BDSM bedroom. She was blindfolded. No problem finding one of those around here. The ball gag stayed in her mouth, and with her arms and legs still tied, the only way to move her was to drag her. Clegg, his face still obscured underneath the fetish hood, pushed Swain’s mother in front of the computer’s built-in camera.

  “So if you know where we are,” Clegg said, “then you know who this is. You let Ruby go, and nothing will happen to her.” Clegg held Swain’s limp and listless mother up to the camera like she was a puppet in a puppet show.

  A dreadful feeling overcame me. “What are you doing?” I said through clenched teeth. “Ruby’s life is at stake! Don’t mess with him!”

  “Trust me,” Clegg said, his voice sharpened to a harsh whisper.

  “I heard that,” the Fiend said. “So now this is really fun. We’ve got two men in masks, two women with ball gags stuffed in their mouths, and you, John, the odd man out. I love it! Who’s your pal under the hood? Look, I won’t blow his cover, bu
t is that your friend repaying a debt? A little police work outside the lines of the law? Oh boy, you guys inspire me.”

  “Please, my friend means what he says,” I told him. “He’ll hurt your mother, and I won’t be able to stop him.”

  Swain’s mother squirmed and squealed, trying to break free from Clegg, but her efforts were weak and futile.

  “You know something? That’s so unbelievably convenient,” the Fiend said, sounding exuberant. “You can commit your next crime, right here and right now.”

  I stammered before I could speak. My body tingled. “What do you want me to do? Tell me.”

  “The SHS Killer—that’s what they’re calling me,” the Fiend said in his distinctive rasp. “I’m becoming something of a cult figure around town, a real media super whore, and I want you to broaden that legacy.”

  “What?” I was unsure of what I heard, unable to make sense of it all.

  Clegg must have squeezed or pinched Swain’s mother. She cried out in pain. “We’ll make an exchange,” Clegg said, his voice a growl beneath that hood. “Mom for Ruby.”

  “No exchanges,” the Fiend said. “It’s time for John to step up to the plate in his criminal career and swing for the fences. Look at his progression. I admire you, John. Honestly, I do. You’ve put in a lot of hard work into all of this, but now it’s time to take things to a completely new level. It’s time for you to become a murderer like me. I want you to kill another person just the way I would do it. Choke the life out of someone. Then cut off the fingers and leave ’em . . . well, you know where.

  “So if you want to kill Mommy Dearest, go right ahead and do it. But make sure you tell your police buddies where to find the body. Because if there isn’t a new victim of the SHS Killer reported on the news within thirty-six hours, I’m going to give them one, and it will be your lovely wife, John. I’ll cut off her fingers, one by one, and smile as she bleeds until I get bored with her misery. Then I’ll choke her until she sees nothing, hears nothing, and speaks nothing ever again.”

  Before I could say another word, the live chat went dark, and my Ruby was gone.

  CHAPTER 53

  Clegg took off his hood, I guess because Lucille still had her blindfold on. She couldn’t see the barrel of his gun pressed up against the back of her skull, but I’m sure she could feel the biting cold of its steel. Her body trembled, while these awful whimpering noises leapt from her throat.

  “Did you recognize your son’s voice? Shake your head yes or no!” Clegg kept her pinned to the floor by straddling her thin frame, holding the gun steady, finger cocked on the trigger.

  Swain’s mother rolled her head violently from side to side.

  “He’s disguising his voice,” I said.

  “What? Like Batman in those movies?”

  “Yeah, just like Batman.”

  I couldn’t believe that in my most desperate hour the Dark Knight had somehow become part of this conversation.

  “Crap,” Clegg said.

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  Clegg undid the ropes securing Swain’s mom’s wrists and made a careful examination of the skin. He undid her leg restraints as well. “Good thing these ropes don’t leave a mark,” he said.

  My jaw fell open when Clegg removed a pair of handcuffs from the equivalent of his utility belt and secured those around her wrists. Afterward, Clegg removed her blindfold.

  “What are you doing? I thought we couldn’t let her see our faces.”

  Almost immediately, those sickly, yellowing eyes fell to me and widened with recognition. “You have the right to remain silent,” Clegg said, removing the ball gag from her crinkled mouth.

  Soon as the gag came free, she howled, “You!”

  Clegg continued with her Miranda rights.

  “You’re cops?” she said.

  “I’m a cop,” Clegg said. “He’s my friend. And she,” Clegg said, looking at me while pointing at Lucille, “pulled a gun on us.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “We came here looking for Carl,” Clegg explained. “Mom apparently didn’t like us coming around, so she pulled a gun on us. There’s a gun here, right?” he asked Lucille. She didn’t answer, but Clegg didn’t seem to care. “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll find it.”

  “That’s a lie!” Lucille barked. Her mouth looked as snarled as the Fiend’s zombie policeman mask. “You’re both liars.”

  “No, I’m a police officer with the BPD,” Clegg said. “And you’re the mother of a level three sex offender who probably knew all about your boy’s weird little BDSM hangout. So nobody is going to believe your story. Not even your lawyer. Say, how much kiddie porn does Carl boy have on these computers? Any idea? Well, we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “So we just take her into custody?” I asked.

  “That’s what we do,” Clegg said. “And then you and I need to go and have a little powwow about how we’re going to get your wife back.”

  I sat alone at a Formica table in a waiting room at police headquarters in downtown Boston, vaguely aware of a CNN news report blaring from a wall-mounted TV. Even though the Medford police had taken Lucille into custody, Clegg still had to process paperwork for the booking, which left me alone with my dark thoughts.

  Despair washed over me in great waves. Ruby. My Ruby. Where was Ruby? Carl Swain, meanwhile, had become the prime suspect in the SHS killings, finally. Bringing in Mama Swain added fresh urgency to an already frenetic investigation. Ruby became media fodder, her picture broadcast across every news outlet. Search warrants and APBs were being issued. Carl Swain was considered armed and dangerous and not to be approached.

  I fought to hold myself together. I thought about survivalists, the people whose stories inspired my own adventuring—Shackleton; the sailors from the sailing ship Essex; Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, whose nearly fatal climb of Siula Grande was turned into the movie Touching the Void; the Uruguayan rugby team who survived ten weeks in the Argentine Andes. Their stories, their trials and tribulations gave me a shot of strength, a glimmer of hope that I would see and hold Ruby once again. Not knowing what else to do, I got down on my knees in that lonely waiting room and looked past the drop ceiling and fluorescent lights. I envisioned my affirmation. It was how Ruby had taught me to make things happen. Ask of the universe, and the universe shall provide.

  I will find you, Ruby.

  I will bring you home.

  I will set right what I have made wrong.

  Clegg entered the waiting room some time later and found me asleep on the same Formica table.

  “John, let’s talk,” he said, shaking me alert.

  I looked up at him, my eyes raw and red for sure. Clegg offered me an oil slick in a Styrofoam cup, which I declined. He took a long sip, evidently accustomed to the drink, and fixed me with a hard stare.

  “We’ve got to face the reality here,” Clegg said.

  “How long have I been out?” I asked, my voice scratchy and hoarse.

  “A few hours,” he said. “You need it. For Ruby. You need to rest when you can rest.”

  “What are we going to do? How do we find her?”

  “Our computer forensic guys might not be able to trace the location of the chat.”

  “But they’re looking at Swain’s computer?”

  “Yeah, they’re looking,” Clegg said. “All the computers, the Uretskys’, too.”

  Something Clegg had said triggered a thought—a clouded, still developing thought, but a thought nonetheless.

  “Games,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I found Elliot through my game, but how did he find Elliot?”

  “What do you mean?” Clegg asked.

  Shaking my head, I tried to dislodge the sleepiness that seemed to block my thinking.

  “Elliot is the only male murder victim of the Fiend that we know of. We’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think I’ve come up with something.”

  “Go on.”

 
“We need to find out if the Fiend and Elliot knew each other through my game. I mean, how did he come to know Elliot? Does he play my game, One World, or were they playing a different game? I know it’s a game that brought us three together, but I don’t know if it’s the same game. We should look. We need to find the game linking Elliot to the Fiend. Can you tell the forensics guys to look at the games Elliot was playing, Swain too? There’s a link there. I know it.”

  Clegg nodded. “Of course, John. Look, every cop is working on this. Everybody wants to find Ruby alive, but, John, I wouldn’t expect a miracle here. This guy knows how to stay in the shadows, right?”

  “He does,” I said.

  “Like I said, we’ve got to face the reality of this situation.”

  “By reality, you mean that we might not be able to find her in thirty-six hours?” I said.

  Clegg looked at his watch. “More like thirty,” he said.

  “So what do we do?”

  “Maybe . . . maybe we do what has to be done,” Clegg said, his eyes murky.

  “I don’t understand.”

  A shroud of secrecy seemed to cover us both. “I know people,” Clegg continued, his voice dropping in volume. “People who are not good people. These people that I’m speaking of have somehow managed to slip through the knot of justice. A search warrant issue. Some freakin’ technicality. Some reason they managed to escape what should have been a slam-dunk conviction. Escape their punishment.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I said.

  “Maybe we do what has to be done,” Clegg said, repeating what he had said, but speaking each word slowly and emphatically.

  I shook my head as though I’d been slapped.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Are you nuts?”

  “No, I’m a cop. Look, it may be our only hope,” he said, delivering this edict with all the feeling of a guy ordering an omelet.

  “How could you even suggest such a thing?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for you,” Clegg said. “My life may not be perfect, but I’m damn glad to be living it. No way I’m going to watch yours go down the toilet without doing everything I can to save it. End of story. Listen, I’ve read over the FBI’s latest profile on the SHS. He plays by rules. He doesn’t break them. He’ll free Ruby if you comply because he wants to keep playing this game of his.