by Leslie Wolfe
No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t find her anywhere else, on any other video feed. They even watched the entrance feed, where patrons were seen from behind, leaving the club. She wasn’t anywhere among them, not by herself, nor in a group.
At precisely 10:16:44PM the night before, Julie Reynolds had vanished from the middle of a dance club full of people.
29
Initiative
The elevator in Tiffany’s high rise descended just as fast and as silently as it had gone up, almost making Tess a little lightheaded. She pondered over the results of their visit with Tiffany. She now had a better understanding of how the unsub operated. A terrible predator, hunting at the center of the herd, not at the periphery, which proved boldness, a boldness beyond anything she’d even encountered before. This unsub went for specific victims, not for victims of opportunity, and he had a way to snatch them without a sound, without anyone noticing, without leaving the tiniest trace.
Why didn’t he snatch Julie at the car? Probably because he had no idea she was going to her car. He must have thought she was going to the restrooms. Or maybe he was so confident, so skilled and experienced in his manner of abduction, that he was more comfortable hidden in the noisy, agitated crowd than outside in the quiet parking lot.
“Where do you want to go next?” Michowsky asked. “Parents?”
“No,” Tess replied thoughtfully. “Let’s see Drew DeVos first. He’s a few minutes away, on Indian Creek.”
They rode quietly in the car for a few minutes, while Tess mulled over a question she couldn’t answer yet. Was the unsub stalking the girls? Or was he an impulse abductor, who saw someone he liked and just went for it? Then how would victimology work? Julie fit the profile: young, rich, overachiever college graduate. He’d have to know all this about his victims before snatching them, which meant he stalked, he researched, he prepared for the hunt. Or did he? What if he got all that information some other way?
“Do you think we’re going to get her in time?” Michowsky asked. “We got nothing, a big, fat, goddamned nothing.”
“We got something,” she replied. “We got the creep.”
“What? And when were you going to fill me in on that?”
“I just did,” Tess replied. “Fradella’s running his ID. Sonya’s friends picked him out of a photo on our board, a photo with May Lin.”
Michowsky whistled. “That’s two out of four.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
She stopped her Suburban in front of the entrance to Drew’s condo building and flashed her badge at the doorman. “Leave it here, all right? We won’t be long.”
Another elevator, this one a little more mundane. Then suite 512, where they rang and banged on the door, but no one answered.
“Want to kick it down?” Michowsky offered.
“What the hell for?” Tess replied, then pulled out her phone and dialed Drew’s mobile number. He picked up almost immediately.
“Yes, hello.”
“Is this Drew DeVos?” Tess asked, shifting the phone to speaker mode.
“Yes, that’s me, who is this?”
“This is Special Agent Winnett, FBI. We need to speak to you immediately regarding the disappearance of—”
“Julie, yes. Sure.”
“Where are you?”
“Out there, looking for her,” he replied with frustration in his voice, “because no one else is.”
“We need a specific address to meet you.”
“I’m at the Exhale, talking to employees as they show up for work. Showing her picture around.”
“Stay put, Drew. We’ll meet you there in 10 minutes.”
She ended the call and hopped in the elevator.
“Got to give it to them,” Michowsky said, “Drew and Tiffany, they’re sharp and willing to go the distance for this girl.”
“Yeah, they are. Why aren’t the police, though? And don’t tell me caseloads, resources, and all that bullshit.”
Michowsky shook his head, but remained quiet, probably unwilling to start an argument that wasn’t going to end well.
“There he is,” Michowsky pointed him out. A tall, skinny, young man leaning against the hood of a yellow Mustang, parked right next to the club’s entrance.
“Drew?” Tess asked. “Agent Winnett, we spoke on the phone. This is Detective Michowsky.”
They shook hands briefly. She studied him a little. Seeing his pallor and the dark circles under his eyes, he hadn’t slept a wink the night before. She checked the time and repressed a groan. Eighteen hours since Julie had vanished. Time flies.
“Good to see you’re here,” Drew said. “What do you need to know?”
“What happened last night?”
“After we realized Julie was missing, Tiffany and I started looking everywhere for her. We spoke to the bouncers, to club security, no one had seen her and no one took us seriously for a while.”
“Then?”
“Then the club closed at 3:00AM, and people started leaving. When they saw her car left behind in the parking lot, they finally listened. They searched everywhere, and at 5:00AM I called the cops again.”
“Again? You called before?”
“Yeah, as soon as we searched everywhere and couldn’t find her. At about 1:30 or so.”
“And?”
“Someone came, a cop, and asked me if she’d left me for some other guy. Yeah… unbelievable, right? He told me there was nothing he could do for 24 hours; he quoted some procedure.”
“Then later, at five?”
“The same story, and actually the same cop, but this time he was pissed off because I’d called again. He did look at her car though and took down some information, car plates, stuff like that. But he still didn’t take us seriously. He didn’t want to open a case.”
Tess and Gary exchanged a quick glance.
“That’s when we went to her house, to speak with her dad. He pulled some strings, made some calls, and finally got the cops to open a formal case. But that’s where it all stops. No one did anything since then, since this morning.”
Tess and Gary exchanged a second glance. This time, Michowsky quickly averted his eyes and looked at the pavement.
“I followed up at around noon; no one’s really working this case at Miami Dade.”
“Well, we’re not Miami Dade,” Tess said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“How do you know?” Michowsky asked, his eyebrows raised with curiosity.
“Because you’re actually working the case, that’s how I know,” Drew replied coldly. “But why the FBI? Has anyone made any ransom demands?”
“Um, no, nothing like that,” Tess replied. She and Michowsky looked at each other again, and Tess decided to lie. There was no point putting nightmare images in the young man’s mind. “I’m here as part of an interagency best practices exchange program. Look at it this way: nothing to worry about, just upside. More help on your girlfriend’s case.”
“Uh-huh, I see,” he replied, and Tess saw in his eyes he didn’t believe her for a second. He turned grim, and his frown deepened.
“How was your relationship?” she asked.
“Great,” he replied, still grim. “We’re planning to get married, as soon as she passes her bar exam.”
Tess bit her lip, pushing away bad memories. Even if Julie survived, their relationship would never be the same. Not ever. Not after what the unsub did to his victims. She took in a deep breath of torrid, humid air.
“Why didn’t you meet them last night? What happened?”
“A flat,” he replied angrily. “A stupid flat tire… and now she’s missing. I should’ve taken a damn cab.”
“Did you notice anything that could mean someone messed with your tire on purpose?”
“What? No… I didn’t. Why?”
“We don’t know, just asking anything we can think of,” Michowsky replied. “Testing all scenarios.”
“No, it was just a flat. It took me a long ti
me, because my jack wasn’t there; I don’t know why. I had to borrow one. That’s why I told them to go inside on their own. Oh, my God…”
He grabbed at his dark hair with both his hands, in a gesture of desperation. He was blaming himself; that was obvious. Tess wondered what had really happened to the jack. A young engineer like Drew wouldn’t consider driving around without one.
But was the missing jack a lead worth following up on? Or just one of those coincidences, one of life’s curveballs, meant to distract, disorient, and delay?
Whether the unsub stalked his prey and set up elaborate traps, or he just snatched on impulse, he still had Julie. They needed to find her, and for that, they needed to find him, Dawn Girl’s killer.
30
Darkness
She awoke slowly, like emerging from a bottomless pit of silent, petrifying darkness. The first rational, crystallized thought in her groggy brain was that she’d been drugged. She realized that with more and more certainty, feeling a strange numbness controlling her mind, slowing it down, willing her back to sleep.
She resisted the urge to sink back into oblivion and fought to open her eyes. She felt them painfully dry, eyelids stuck to eyeballs. It took effort to get them to open, but once she did, all she could see was still darkness. She felt the same dryness in her mouth, and she went through the motions of swallowing, to ease the feeling of desiccated parchment in her throat.
She tried to rub her eyes, but her hands wouldn’t listen. They moved a little, but not enough to touch her face. Dizzy and lightheaded, she tried to get her bearings, but the almost complete darkness wasn’t helping. What little light she saw came from the dial pad of an alarm system, mounted on a wall somewhere to her left. The bluish backlight of its screen, a green LED, and a couple of red ones was all she had to work with.
She forced her dry eyes to see, then squeezed them tightly, to get tears to lubricate them. She’d been drugged, and heavily; there was no doubt. Most sedatives dry all mucosae as a side effect, so that explained that. She felt a little better, putting some shred of reasonable explanation to what she felt. But it wasn’t nearly enough. She swallowed again, hard, feeling tension clutch her scorched throat. She felt weightless somehow, as if floating in space, and that only made her feel worse, queasy, unable to get her bearings.
She forced herself to flex her arm, at first blaming her inability on the numbness she felt in all her muscles. She focused on her left arm, yearning for her left hand to touch her face. She was able to move it, but only partially, and every move she made got her dizzier, shakier somehow, as if she flew through space, out of control. The sedative she’d been dosed with was still in her system, making it hard for her to figure out what was happening.
She willed her brain into functioning and tensed her arm muscles again, only to fail again. This time, she understood why. Her wrist was bound with soft restraints, so soft she almost didn’t feel them, but unyielding nevertheless. She tugged more and more forcefully, gaining nothing more than a rattling noise and increased dizziness.
She tried to move a leg, and the same happened. She could flex her knee a little, even stretch her leg completely, but every move she made shifted her entire body somehow and made her nauseous. Her ankles were bound too, and that realization sent a wave of adrenaline through her entire being, dissipating the remnants of the heavy sedative. She felt her head clear up, her judgment return, and her muscles coming to life. As she regained her bearings, she realized she was hanging from the ceiling in a complicated harness, positioned almost horizontally, face down. Like a puppet dangling on strings, powerless, captive.
She gasped, and, fighting a wave of blinding panic, she focused on what she felt in her body. Her wrists and ankles were cuffed and suspended, yet they still had a little mobility. A wide belt supported her abdomen, and another supported her shoulders. Her head moved freely, and by the stiffness she felt in her neck, it must have been hanging loose while she’d been out, unconscious.
She breathed heavily. Waves of panic rolled in, shooting fresh adrenaline through her body and sharpening her senses. She tried to free herself, tugging desperately against the restraints, no longer feeling the nausea. Nothing budged, and the noise of the rattling restraints was covered by the thumping of heartbeats in her chest, and by the sound of sharp, shattered gasps for air.
As the last remnants of sedative wore off, defeated by adrenaline, panic set in. Fear rose and strangled her mercilessly. It built inside her chest, then came out in an endless shriek that no one heard.
31
Family Life
The Suburban’s dashboard clock indicated 6:12PM, a little over 19 hours since Julie had vanished. Nineteen hours. Tess didn’t want to think what that must have been like for her. Time went by lightning fast for her and Michowsky, but she knew how long each minute lasted for Julie.
She shifted in her seat without taking her foot off the gas pedal. She was restless, second-guessing herself. She believed with all her being that Sonya’s killer had taken Julie, but what evidence did she have? The location, Club Exhale, was the same as Sonya’s last-seen whereabouts. Maybe a coincidence; could be nothing more than that. There was also the fact that Julie matched the victimology; young, wealthy, overachieving college grad. Probably half the high-end club’s female patrons matched that profile. So how was that enough? Was she about to make a huge mistake, one that could cost Julie her life? If Sonya’s killer hadn’t taken Julie, if she’d been abducted by someone else, she had nothing, absolutely nothing to go on. But that didn’t make the scenario more possible; it only made it a last resort, a desperate alternative validated by a lack of options. Something to pursue when nothing else was there.
And yet, in her gut, she knew she was right. She knew she was chasing the right man.
She let her mind wander freely for a while, after giving up the self-doubt and deciding to go with her gut. She found herself reflecting on how silent they were, Michowsky and her, how they avoided talking with each other when they had a choice. It was becoming the norm, their silent drives around town. Little was left to be said between the two of them, each engulfed in thoughts, theories, and their own personal hells. What was Michowsky’s hell? She wondered if his back still hurt.
“How’s your back?”
“Don’t ask,” he replied morosely.
That was it for her attempt at small talk. She almost shrugged; at least she’d tried. She checked the GPS; only three minutes left to their destination, the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, Julie’s family.
Tess took the highway exit and immediately turned into a subdivision of elegant acreage properties. Julie’s father, Douglas Reynolds, was one of the wealthiest lawyers in the city, cofounder of Miami’s second-largest law firm. He was a divorce lawyer, and apparently marriages didn’t last long under the hot Miami sun, especially the ones in the upper-income bracket.
She checked the house numbers and pulled into the Reynolds’ curved driveway. She waited patiently for Michowsky to catch up and rang the bell as soon as he’d climbed the last of the five steps to the entrance.
A man opened the door almost immediately. He wore one of those old-style, cardigan sweaters, an undecided shade of brown. His eyes were hollow, and he was pale, a sickly shade of yellowish-gray. His shoulders were hunched forward, and his head bowed. Two deep, vertical ridges marked his forehead, as his eyebrows were glued together in a permanent frown. Not much of the hotshot lawyer’s powerful demeanor was left in Reynolds. He was just a desperate father, fearing for the life of his child.
“I’ve been expecting you for a while,” he said, “you sure took your time. Come in.”
He led the way to the dining area, where a woman in a white terrycloth bathrobe stood at the table. Her head leaned into her left hand supporting her jaw, manicured fingers fanned on her cheek. In front of her, a glass of white wine had about an inch of liquid left, and the bottle next to it was three-quarters empty.
“This is my wife, Dian
e,” the man made the introductions.
“Special Agent Winnett,” Tess said, then pointed at Gary, “and this is Detective Michowsky. Mr. Reynolds, we have a few—”
“Sit,” Mr. Reynolds invited them. “Questions?”
Before Tess could answer, a young girl entered the dining area, sauntering about with a defying look on her face.
“Look, the show’s on,” she said, her amusement genuine as she sized them up.
“Chloe,” Mr. Reynolds said, but the girl scoffed loudly and he didn’t continue. He seemed resigned, or maybe too tired and sad to put the teenager in her place.
A second of uncomfortable silence filled the room, interrupted by Mrs. Reynolds’ glass hitting the table, then it being filled with whatever wine was left in the bottle.
“Um, Mr. Reynolds, what can you tell us about Julie? What w—is she like?” Tess asked, catching herself just in time, before making a horrible mistake. Julie was still alive, and she was going to make sure she stayed that way.
“She’s smart and kind, hardworking, everyone loves her,” Reynolds replied, his eyes wandering aimlessly.
“Not everyone,” Chloe added. A glare from Diane silenced her.
“Do you know of anyone who might have taken her? Does she have any enemies?”
Reynolds glanced quickly toward Chloe, then back to Tess.
Interesting, Tess thought. She wished she’d done better homework. What was the deal with Chloe?
“No, no one. Everyone loved her,” he said, emphasizing the word, in a preemptive measure to stifle any opposing opinion coming from Chloe.
“How about you, sir?” Michowsky asked. “I’m sure you made quite a few enemies throughout your career. Any clients who lost in court, or husbands who thought the settlement was too high?”