Look for Me

by Lisa Gardner

  He was right. D.D. didn’t like it either.

  “Dogs could’ve run off,” Neil suggested. “Spooked by the shooting. Being blind and all, maybe they’re hunkered down under someone’s front porch, hiding.”

  “And the sixteen-year-old?” D.D. asked.

  Once again, no one had an answer.

  “All right.” D.D. looked around the space. Still assessing. Still trying to understand. “Eight times out of ten in a case like this, it’s a domestic situation gone wrong. The father-figure murders the wife and kids, then shoots himself. Given the three shots to the chest, however, I think we can safely rule out Charlie Boyd as a suicide.”

  The detectives nodded.

  “In the ninth instance, it’s a stranger crime. Say, a perpetrator caught breaking and entering, shoots the family to cover his tracks. But nothing appears missing.”

  “Plus, no sign of forced entry,” Phil added. “Responding officers discovered the front door unlocked, same with the rear entrance. Though the neighbors claim they never saw anyone exiting the property after the sound of gunshots. So it’s a good bet that even if the shooter entered through the front, he exited through the back.”

  “Drugs?” D.D. asked. “Any rumors, evidence that Charlie Boyd or Juanita Baez were into illegal activities?”

  “Juanita has a history of DUIs, and court-mandated rehab five years back. Alcohol,” Neil said. “Charlie Boyd’s record is clean.”

  “No hidden stash of drugs or cash,” Carol added. “Also, no alcohol in the kitchen, which would indicate Juanita was still on the wagon.”

  D.D. sighed, glanced at her watch again. Time to make a decision.

  “There is another scenario,” she said. “Not as common, but it happens. Whole family is murdered; teenage daughter goes missing. Sometimes, that means the daughter is the target—the perpetrator murders the family so he can kidnap the girl.”

  “And other times?” Neil asked.

  “The daughter is the perpetrator,” D.D. said bluntly. “Abused, pissed off, doesn’t really matter. But the girl decides the only solution is to kill them all and run away.”

  Unbidden, their gazes turned to the sad remains of Lola and Manny Baez, the older girl still cradling her younger brother’s lifeless form.

  Phil, father of four, cleared his throat roughly. D.D. understood.

  “Either way,” she stated quietly, “the key to this puzzle is Roxanna Baez. We find her, we get our answers. Issue the Amber Alert. Then prepare for the madness. Case like this, the media is gonna go insane!”

  Chapter 2

  BRIGHT SUNNY MORNING, BEAUTIFUL FALL day. One of those days in Boston, where people sat at outdoor cafés, or lounged along the Charles, or gazed adoringly at their kids playing in the park.

  I never mastered the art of lounging, even before what happened to me . . . happened. So I ran. Down streets, side alleys, until I hit the Charles River and the dedicated trails. Unlike my fellow joggers, I never wore earbuds or listened to music. Sound is one of your first lines of defense. The sound of a car careening out of control as you step off the curb at an intersection. The sound of heavy footsteps closing in too fast, too focused behind you.

  That night, I hadn’t been wearing headphones. Instead, I’d been lost to the drunken ramblings of my mind.

  I always wore a fanny pack when I exercised. Water bottle. Sunscreen. Pocketknife. PowerBar. Handcuff picks. And, finally, a palm-sized spray bottle of my own pepper spray concoction—Massachusetts regulated the purchase of Mace and I’m the kind of girl who appreciates her privacy, so instead, I’d invented my own high-test concoction. No, Officer, I’m not carrying Mace. What do you mean my attacker just went blind? Huh. Then I hope his publicly appointed defender knows how to prepare his reports in braille.

  It’s possible my sense of humor was darker than most.

  Back to running. Back to thinking while nonthinking, focusing on the impact of my feet, slap-slap-slapping against the running trail. The strong pump of my arms moving in rhythm with my legs. My breathing slow, efficient, ready for the next hill, next mile, next anything.

  Running was one of the only activities that soothed my squirrel brain and dimmed my hypervigilance enough to give me any hope of general introspection. Four hundred and seventy-two days, plus six years later, who was I?

  Once, I’d been a girl who’d loved foxes. I’d grown up on my mom’s organic farm in the wilds of Maine, running along deer paths in the woods, picking sun-warmed blueberries straight from the bush, and heckling my older brother, Darwin, who even back then had hated everything about small-town life other than my mother and me.

  Except then I’d gone off to college in Boston. Young, naïve, all big-city dreams and not a single tangible goal. Had I even picked a major? College had been about getting out and getting away, not because I hadn’t loved my mom or her farm or the fox kits born each spring, but because I’d been eighteen, and when you’re eighteen, clearly you can’t want what you already have. Definitely, you gotta try for whatever is behind that other door over there.

  Foolish.

  I’d been beautiful. My mom still has photos from those days. In each image, I radiate that sort of outdoorsy L.L.Bean wholesomeness people associate with Maine. Long, straight blond hair. Clear gray eyes fixed directly ahead, the corners of my mouth just curving up, like I’m laughing at some joke only I can hear. I didn’t have a problem making friends or getting a date to the prom or surviving any of those high school rituals that left less-beautiful girls poring over copies of Carrie.

  I was happy.

  That’s what I noticed most when I looked at those pictures now. I saw a girl who really did believe she could be whatever she wanted to be, have whatever she wanted to have. I saw a person who was naturally, abundantly happy.

  I didn’t know how my mom could bear to keep such reminders now.

  Because that girl disappeared seven and a half years ago. Dancing drunk on a beach in Florida during spring break. Four hundred and seventy-two days later, what my family got back was me.

  One of the most surreal aspects of returning home was the ensuing media frenzy. The real world was disorienting enough without having TV producers, Hollywood agents, and entertainment lawyers camped out on my mom’s front step. Each demanding immediate and exclusive rights. Each swearing he or she was the only one who could do my story justice.

  Then there were the promises of money. Life-changing sums, millions of dollars that could all be mine. I just had to share every nitty-gritty detail of my abduction at the hands of Jacob Ness, the more lurid, the better.

  I honestly couldn’t fathom it. People wanted to read all the gory descriptions of my victimization at the hands of a serial rapist and murderer? They wanted to know exactly what it was like to live in a coffin-sized box, only to be pulled out to discover what waited for you on the other side was even worse?

  “Don’t think of it that way,” the first TV producer had told me. “It’s not the victimization that’s the selling point. It’s your story. You, the survivor. How you did it. That’s what viewers want to understand.”

  I wasn’t convinced back then, and I remained unconvinced now. Seemed to me, for everyone who showed up at the Colosseum to see the gladiator win so many centuries ago, equal numbers came to watch him lose. It’s simply human nature.

  I was offered TV interviews. Book deals. Movie rights. Maybe I should have grabbed the money and run. But I didn’t. I just . . . couldn’t. My family had lost enough of their privacy during their own desperate efforts to help find me. I couldn’t take more from them. Plus, it turned out, I was one of those survivors who assumed that now I was safely home, I could put it all behind me. Never look back. Never utter Jacob’s name again.

  All those moments, hours, days I’d promised myself, if I could just get out of here, I’d never complain again. I’d always be happy. I’d
never forget the feel of the sunlight on my face. I’d be the perfect daughter, the most loving sister. I’d never take life for granted again.

  If I could just get out of here . . .

  Return home.

  Survive.

  Four hundred and seventy-two days, plus six years, who was I?

  • • •

  MY BROTHER LEFT. HE’D RUN the Facebook page, Find Flora, when I first went missing. One of his jobs had been to post daily photos, family tidbits to remind my yet-unidentified abductor that I was a sister, daughter, friend, dearly missed. We never spoke of it when I returned. Me trying not to traumatize him. Him trying not to traumatize me.

  But even sooner than my mother, Darwin realized the truth: His efforts had saved a girl, just not the sister he’d once loved. He went off to Europe on a voyage of self-discovery. I wondered sometimes if he ran daily along the Thames. If those were the only times he could think, if the question he still asked himself the most was who am I, who am I, who am I?

  Stairs. Up, up, up to the bridge spanning the Charles. I loved the quick rat-a-tat of my tennis shoes against the metal steps. Moving so fast nothing could catch me. Not even my own spinning thoughts.

  Last year, I’d done something I hadn’t expected to do: I’d saved a girl. Another abducted college student. Just like that, the media returned. Except now, they didn’t just want the story of Jacob Ness and the four hundred and seventy-two days I’d never spoken of; they wanted the story of me. Flora the fighter. Flora who’d gone from victim to vigilante.

  They asked and bullied and demanded and begged.

  I still didn’t answer. Maybe I just didn’t like to talk. Or, more likely, I still hated the press.

  But what to do?

  Once upon a time, I’d thought about trying to return to school. Find a career, get a real job, become a normal person again. But thanks to my PTSD, I still had problems with crowds, rooms with limited exits, and, oh yeah, focus of any kind.

  Not to mention, most days, I simply didn’t feel normal.

  Some can do it. I’ve read their stories. Examined, reexamined, hyperanalyzed.

  You can be traumatized and still pick up the pieces of your life.

  Except then there are the others, the survivors like me. Who waited too long to be saved and gave up too much along the way.

  My strengths? Lock picking, self-defense, threat assessment, and really fun weapons you can make with items found in the trash. Not to mention homemade Mace-like concoctions. And running. I loved to run. Morning, noon, and night. Anything to quiet the thoughts in my head, but also to feel the wind, rain, snow in my face.

  Not in a box, not in a box, not in a box. That’s how my footsteps sounded as I pounded across the bridge into Cambridge. Not in a box.

  Who was I?

  A survivor.

  My victim advocate, Samuel Keynes, called me that the first day we met. At the time the word sounded good. Strong. Definite. Once I was a victim. Now I was a survivor. One who ran like a cheetah, and had a fanny pack stuffed with enough items to ensure she was never a victim again.

  But even now, edging up my pace, nearing the end of the bridge, my final sprint, I could still hear the other thoughts that come with that.

  Being a survivor didn’t just mean being strong. It meant being lonely. Honestly, truly lonely. Knowing things other people weren’t supposed to know. Carrying memories I was desperate to forget and yet still couldn’t blank out of my head.

  And guilt. For so many things. The coulda, woulda, shouldas.

  Once there was this pretty girl dancing on a beach . . .

  And I can never go back there again.

  End of bridge. Faster, faster, faster. Till now my chest was heaving, heart thundering, faster still . . .

  Who am I, who am I, who am I?

  I thundered across my self-designated finishing line, breaking across the end of the bridge into Cambridge. Stopped. Bent over. Drew three quick deep gulps of air, then resumed moving before I cramped up. I had a mile to walk now to return to my one-bedroom, covered-in-deadbolts apartment, which my elderly landlords graciously granted to me at well-below-market rent. They’d followed my case in the news, they’d told me when I first met them. And not with a voyeuristic gleam in their eyes, but with genuine compassion. I still didn’t trust many people, but I learned I could definitely believe in them.

  Now, I worked on turning my attention to the day ahead. Despite my best efforts, I had managed to scrounge out a semblance of a life. I worked at a pizza parlor. I’d even made friends, of sorts. A budding group of other survivors, some who’d found me in the days after the Stacey Summers rescue, others whom I’d found on my own. All of us had one thing in common: We’d survived once. Now, we wanted to live again.

  Which maybe was a piece of the answer I still sought.

  I wasn’t a perfect daughter. Apparently, I was only a shadow of a sister. I still didn’t know how to relax when my mother gave me a hug, or sleep through the night, or go anyplace without at least half a dozen tools for self-defense.

  But for some people out there . . .

  If everything in your life had gone wrong. If the worst had just happened, and a predator now had you in his sights . . .

  Well, then, I was the girl you wanted to have on your side.

  I was the person who knew exactly what you were going through, and would never give up till you came home again.

  Chapter 3

  D.D. HAD A LOT TO DO, and it all needed to happen fast. First, she got out her cell and phoned her boss, Deputy Superintendent of Homicide Cal Horgan. She ran him through the scene.

  “We need an Amber Alert. It’s been ninety minutes since the sound of shots fired, still no sign of the sixteen-year-old daughter, Roxanna Baez, or the family’s dogs.”

  “Dogs?” Horgan asked.

  “Two Brittany spaniels, both blind. Answer to the names Blaze and Rosie. We should release their details to the press, as well. Some people may not feel like getting involved with a missing teen. But two elderly dogs . . .”

  “Are they chipped?” Horgan wanted to know.

  “Unknown. Detective Manley is searching credit card receipts now, looking for charges to local vets. She’ll follow up with possible docs, see what she can learn about identity chips, temperament, special needs. If the girl ran away, it’s possible she took the dogs with her, which would make all of them easier to track. But it’s also possible the dogs bolted at the sound of gunfire and are currently hunkered down under someone’s porch.”

  “Neighbors?”

  “We have foot patrols walking a one-mile radius, looking for signs of the girl and/or the dogs. Detectives are conducting door-to-door canvasses, requesting immediate access and making note of anyone who warrants follow-up.”

  “Gonna handle the follow-ups yourself?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Contact Laskin yet?” Horgan had switched gears; Chip Laskin was the BPD’s media relations officer, who was about to have a very busy day.

  “My next call,” D.D. assured him. “Phil issued a BOLO upon first arriving at the scene, providing local media with a description of the missing teen. We need Chip to follow up with a photo of the girl and the dogs to state and national channels, while also hitting the internet.”

  In the past few years, the Boston Police Department had joined the rest of the planet and embraced social media. Facebook page, Twitter handle, its own news site, BPDNews.com. Crazier yet, it seemed to be working. Post a grainy black-and-white security video of a break-in, and within thirty minutes the BPD’s page would receive three or four posts with the suspect’s name. Why send detectives knocking on neighbors’ doors when a media relations officer could transmit the same information straight into every single person’s living room with a fraction of the time and effort? D.D. suspected they were one step away
from RoboCop.

  But that day wasn’t today, so she still had her job to do.

  “Inside the residence we have two computers, four cell phones. Phil is working with Facebook now, requesting access to the mother’s account. Next he’ll contact Apple.”

  Facebook allowed police emergency access to a person’s page as long as the company received a signed affidavit promising a warrant within twenty-four hours. Very convenient in this day and age when a motive or even murder suspect was often just one Facebook post away.

  Apple, on the other hand, took longer to crack. While the family’s local phone carrier could release text and voice mail messages from the family’s mobiles, that information didn’t include iMessages—any texts sent between one Apple device and another. Given how many people owned iPhones, that meant a substantial number of the messages could remain missing. Savvy detectives started their paperwork early when they needed information from Apple, especially in a time-sensitive situation such as a missing kid.

  “Relatives, nosy neighbors?” Horgan asked.

  “Working on it. Have asked Detective Manley to contact the girl’s school when she’s done with vets. With any luck, Phil’s search of social media posts and Carol’s outreach with the school will yield some crossover names—Roxanna’s inner circle. That’s who we’ll hit next.”

  “Don’t forget enemies,” Horgan advised. “Friends cover for each other. Whereas the mean girl on Snapchat, she’ll give you the inside dirt. Which is exactly the kind of intel we need.”

  “Yeah, yeah, friends, frenemies, got it.”

  “Cousins,” he continued. “Especially any near her in age. Aunts and uncles might feel like they have to cover for their siblings. Cousins are more mercenary.”

  “Wow, never thought I’d be so happy I don’t have any.”

  “Background on the family?”

  “The mother, Juanita, worked as a nurse, has a history of alcoholism. Boyfriend, Charlie, was a local contractor without so much as a speeding ticket. No evidence of drugs or a high-risk lifestyle. I don’t know. At the moment . . . they look like a family. Her kids, his dogs. Working hard today, hoping for a better time tomorrow.”