by T. R. Ragan
“Who did he take?” Jessie wanted to know.
“My youngest child, Emily.”
Her heart plummeted.
“Was there a postmark on the envelope?” Ben asked.
“No.”
“What about a security camera outside your home?” Jessie asked.
Owen nodded. “Authorities are looking into it.”
“Was there a video included with the letter?” she asked next.
“Yes,” Owen said as he pulled a laptop from his briefcase. “The police took everything, but I had already saved it to my computer. I also took copies of the letter.”
Owen Shepard, Jessie realized, looked as if he’d aged a decade since she’d seen him last. His face was pale and drawn as he set up his laptop. Dark circles framed his eyes.
Outside, Jessie saw Zee drive up and park at the curb. “Excuse me for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
Jessie and Zee had a lot to discuss, but now wasn’t the time.
When Zee spotted her walking toward her, Jessie noticed that she lacked her usual confidence. Instead she looked sheepish. Her left eye was still swollen, and she had scratches down the front of her neck that Jessie didn’t recall seeing at the police station yesterday.
“Hello, Zee,” Jessie said. “How are you feeling?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been worse.” Zee shifted her weight. “I wanted to let you know I e-mailed you the video I took of Lindsay Norton doing calisthenics.”
“Thanks. I’m sure the insurance company will be pleased.”
“I’ve known for a while that Lindsay Norton was faking her injuries.”
“How so?”
“I slipped a fifty-dollar bill under a good-size boulder, and when she saw the money, she picked up the rock and took the money and ran.” Zee exhaled. “Unfortunately, the video wasn’t turned on.”
Jessie frowned. “For future reference, that wouldn’t hold up in court.”
“Really? Why not?”
“It’s sort of like planting a bribe or evidence to ensnare someone. It’s not legal.”
“That’s stupid. Hey! Did you just say, ‘For future reference, that wouldn’t hold up in court’?”
Jessie nodded. “Why?”
“The word future sort of hints at the possibility that you and I might still be working together for a while.”
“Is that a problem?” Jessie asked.
“You’re not going to fire me?”
“No. In fact, I need you to go to the house and get working on the DHI list.”
“Wow. Okay. That’s awesome.”
Jessie reached into her pocket for her key to the house, then handed it to Zee. “Here, take this. I’ll be there to help once I’m finished talking to some people in my office.” She didn’t have time to explain any more than that. She also didn’t have time to let Zee know that she was proud of her. Although many might see Zee’s actions as foolish, she had proved herself once again to be a very brave young woman. Who knew what would have happened to the man tied to the bed or others down the road if Zee hadn’t intervened?
Zee held up the key. “I’ll get to work.” She headed off.
Jessie watched her go and found herself wishing that life wasn’t filled with so much madness. And then she thought about Owen Shepard and his daughter, and she pivoted on her heels and rushed back to her office.
Ben handed her a copy of the letter as soon as she swept through the door. “Read the letter, and then we’ll watch the video.”
Dearest Mr. Shepard,
If this doesn’t get your attention, nothing will. After my daughter needlessly suffered only to die a horrible death, my objective was to see that DHI, and other insurance companies like it, made changes to their policies. But after the death of not just one but two of your employees failed to get an apology from you or anyone else at DHI, it became personal. I realized the only way to make you pay attention was to take your daughter. Emily will be with me for a while. She doesn’t realize it, but her journey toward the end of her life has already begun. Her death will be slow and often agonizing, but nothing close to the torturous pain my own daughter endured.
I will be satisfied only in knowing that you will finally understand my pain.
I have no requests since there is nothing you can do to save Emily.
Final recordings will be sent to local news outlets for public viewing so the world will know what you and DHI stand for.
MAH
“Are you ready to watch the video?” Ben asked.
Sickened by what she’d read, Jessie nodded.
Owen was staring mindlessly out the window.
Ben hit “Play.” The image on the computer screen showed a young woman she assumed was Emily lying on the ground.
Jessie kept her eyes on the screen. Emily wasn’t moving, and Jessie thought it was a still shot until Emily groaned as she rolled from her side to her back. She rubbed her eyes and then looked around before her gaze connected with the camera. After pushing herself to her feet, Emily took wobbly steps until she was closer to the lens, and all Jessie could see were two green eyes. Emily took a step back. “If anyone is watching this,” she said, “my captor has sparse, stringy hair, brown eyes, and a large mo—”
The screen went black.
“The footage has been edited like that throughout,” Owen said, looking at the screen now. “Emily is twenty-one years old. She’s feisty and stubborn, too. She and I don’t often see eye to eye, but she’s always been m-my little girl.” His voice cracked.
Jessie and Ben said nothing.
When the video resumed, Emily was sitting on a wooden bench inside a dingy, eerie-looking space with cement floors and gray cinder-block walls—just as Jessie had seen in the video featuring Tyler McDonald.
“Dad,” Emily said, looking into the camera again. “This guy lost his daughter. She was my age at the time she was diagnosed. There was medicine that could have saved her life, but because it was experimental, DHI refused to pay. The doctors and nurses at—”
Cut off again. They waited.
“They sold everything they had,” Emily continued, “including their house, to pay for the medication, but by that time she’d gone without for too long and she began having seizures. I feel like I know Ha—”
The screen went black again. Every time the video was cut off and then resumed, Emily was sitting in a new position. At the moment she was cross-legged on the floor.
“Dad,” Emily said when the video came back on. “We argue more than we talk”—she winced, held her stomach—“but I want you to know that I’ll always remember those special times when you would tuck me in at night and read the book I Stink! Those were great memories.” She used the sleeve of her shirt to swipe at a tear. “I’m not scared. No matter what happens, I’ll be—” Again the video was cut off midsentence. Thirty seconds passed. Nothing.
“Is that the end?” Jessie asked.
Owen nodded. “Yes.”
“Ben has already been helping me with the case since he’s covering the story for the Tribune,” Jessie told him. “We’ve been working on narrowing down the list of DHI clients who have filed grievances in the past two years. I should have a final list by tonight.”
“How many names left?” Owen asked, his voice hopeful.
“Hundreds,” she said sadly before sucking in a cleansing breath. “I think we should watch the video again and see if we might have missed something the first time.”
Just as she and Ben and the girls had done with the Tyler McDonald footage, they watched the video over and over again.
“She doesn’t look well,” Owen said, scratching his forehead. “She’s very active, plays soccer, and has been involved in an outdoor type of group that goes hiking . . . things like that.” He shook his head. “My point is, she’s energetic. But you wouldn’t know that by watching the film. She’s definitely not well.”
“He mentioned in the letter that she doesn’t know her journey to the end has beg
un,” Ben added. “He must be drugging her food or drink.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jessie said. “She was off balance when she walked toward the camera.”
“There was something else,” Ben said. “Almost every time the video is cut off, I hear a faint noise, a sort of rumbling.”
“I did hear something at the end,” Owen agreed.
They watched the video again, pausing and adjusting the volume. In one particular section of the video, before Emily was cut off, there was definitely a rumbling sound. They all heard it. At the end of the video, instead of a rumbling, it sounded more like a distant horn, perhaps miles away.
“It sounds like the drilling or blasting I’ve heard on construction sites,” Ben said.
“It could also be a train,” Jessie said. “Maybe Emily is somewhere close to a busy highway.”
Grimacing, Owen tapped a finger on Jessie’s desk. “In the video Emily talked about a book I used to read to her. I wish it were true, but I never read to the kids. That’s something their mother did.”
“You never read her a book titled I Stink!?”
“Never.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Emily Shepard was grateful for the padding and pillow her captor had given her when he’d arrived that morning. The bench and the floor were hard and uncomfortable. Her neck hurt, and her spine was stiff. He came to watch her and record her every morning and usually left around seven at night. She knew this because he’d given her a radio. The radio kept her from going completely bonkers.
Feeling nauseous, she slid her legs off the bench and sat there for a moment, trying to steady herself. She’d been having difficulty walking. Convinced he was spiking the yogurt, she refused to eat it. She’d been surprised when he brought her soda crackers, but so far they weren’t helping. Maybe the confusion and nausea were symptoms of stress.
Last night he had told her his name was Rickey. Why would he tell her his name unless he really did mean to let her die?
He was a tough one to figure out.
Sometimes he wouldn’t stop talking. Other times he would not speak a word. The weird part was that he was getting to know her, and she was getting to know him. He didn’t eat much, at least not in front of her, but he did have a sweet tooth. He’d already gone through an entire plastic jar filled with red licorice.
When he did talk to her, it was usually about his daughter, Hannah. He’d clearly put her on a pedestal.
Most of the time Emily felt sorry for him.
At the moment she hated him. Her knees wobbled as she walked to the toilet, lifted the lid, and threw up. Her life had quickly become a sad routine. Throw up, eat a cracker, drink some Gatorade, lie down, and then start all over again.
When she was sure she’d gotten rid of everything in her system, she sat up. A noise caught her attention. She turned toward one of the windows and saw that Rickey was back with his fucking video camera.
Yes, she hated him. Despised everything about him. He was a family man who had once loved his only daughter so much that after she died he decided everyone must suffer just as she had suffered.
The thought of her own father being overwrought with grief when it came to his children was almost laughable. And for some reason that made her hate Rickey even more. She didn’t have a violent bone in her body, but if she had the opportunity to plunge the blade of a knife into his heart, she would do it.
She used her sleeve to wipe her mouth, then pushed herself to her feet. Her legs wobbled, and for half a second she thought she might not be able to take a step. But she could, and she did as she walked back to the bench to lie down. Her stomach gurgled. “Why are you filming me now?”
“I’d like you to look into the lens and tell my viewers what it’s been like to be trapped with nowhere to go.”
“Your viewers? What are you, some sort of weird-ass blogger?” She snorted. “That’s it, isn’t it? You probably have a million followers.”
“Everyone needs to know what you’re feeling,” he stated firmly. “Tell them what it’s like to feel as if you’re deteriorating and there’s no one to help you.”
“I’d like your viewers to know that you’re an asshole—a lazy, good-for-nothing asshole. If you really wanted to make a change,” Emily told him, “you could have run for office. You could have written letters and started a movement. Instead you took innocent lives and allowed your daughter to die in vain.”
“I think you’ve said enough.”
“I’m just getting started,” she said. “Instead of doing something about what happened to your daughter, you took the easy way out. Feeding your anger. It’s easy to be violent, angry, and mad. It’s a lot harder to fix something.”
“You have no idea what I’ve been through.”
“Are you kidding me? You talk more than all my roommates put together. Your daughter didn’t die because she couldn’t get her ridiculously expensive medicine—she died from listening to your endless chatter.”
He said nothing.
For some stupid reason, she felt bad for being mean. Ridiculous. The man had kidnapped her, was probably going to kill her, and she felt sorry for him.
“My daughter should be alive,” he said. And then his voice softened. “My entire life, I did everything right. I was a good son and a decent person. I never argued with my parents, seldom cursed, and always got good grades.”
She was tempted to do a slow clap, but it probably wouldn’t do any good to provoke him more than she already had.
“I married at a reasonable age,” he droned on. “I bought a house, along with life insurance, health insurance, and car insurance.” He paused long enough to give her a long, hard stare. “I bet your father never knew what it was like to leave a cart full of groceries in the market because he couldn’t make his paycheck stretch far enough to feed his family.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I don’t know my father.”
“I’ve seen pictures of you with your brothers and your parents enjoying the good life. Trips to the Caribbean, horseback riding through the lush mountains of Hawaii.”
“Maybe you should do another Internet search. Those pictures were taken before my parents divorced. I was eleven, maybe twelve. But sure, whatever. I’ve been given everything I needed. I’ve never had to beg, borrow, or steal.”
“What do you mean when you say you don’t know your father?”
Her voice became flat. “Before my parents divorced, he was never home. He didn’t teach me to tie my shoes or show me how to swim. I can’t remember one word of advice. After they divorced, he never called or visited.”
“What about on your birthday?”
She laughed but then began hacking instead. It took a few seconds for her to catch her breath.
“What’s so funny?”
“You sound genuinely concerned.”
“Maybe I am.”
She tilted her head. “You seem too compassionate at times to be a killer. Why did you kill those men?”
“Because I had to.”
Was he going to kill her, too? She thought of the first video he’d made and how she’d tried to send her father clues. She’d mentioned the book, I Stink! because not only had it been her brother’s favorite book but also whenever the warehouse door opened, she got a whiff of an unpleasant odor that smelled exactly like the piles of waste at a dump site.
Her insides rumbled, and she held tightly to her stomach, then jumped up and ran to the toilet.
THIRTY-SIX
Ben knocked on the door to the apartment Emily Shepard shared with three other people. The apartment building was five minutes from the UC Davis campus.
His boss, Ian Savage, had agreed with authorities to hold off on publishing a piece regarding DHI for a day or two. Instead of focusing on DHI right out of the gate, Ben would begin his story with Emily Shepard and then bring it full circle back to DHI, thus revealing Emily’s connection to her captor.
In Ben’s opinion, how he told the
story was more important than what the story was about. He needed to find a way to connect his readers with Emily and make them care. To do that, it was important that the story be comprehensive. The more sources and viewpoints, the better.
The door opened, and a young woman peeked out. Her long T-shirt skimmed knobby brown knees. The messy bun on her head was flattened on the top. Clearly he’d woken her up.
“Hi. I’m Ben Morrison with the Sacramento Tribune. I’m here to talk to you about Emily Shepard.”
“Emily’s dad was here yesterday. So were the police. We told them everything we know.”
“Your friend was abducted. If you were the one taken, would you want your roommates to help in any way they could?”
Her chin fell slightly before she opened the door wide enough to let him inside. “Go ahead and take a seat on the couch. I’ll go get the others.”
Ten minutes later, all three roommates, in varying degrees of alertness, joined him. The apartment was small. The girl who had let him in said, “I’m Karen. And that’s Teri and Brenda.”
“Like I told Emily’s dad, I really didn’t know her that well,” Teri blurted. “I’ve only been living here for a few months.”
“Which one of you saw Emily last?”
Brenda lifted her hand. “It was the day she went missing. Emily was late for class, didn’t even have time to eat anything before running out the door.”
“Does anyone know if she made it to class that day?”
“She never got there,” Teri said. “I know that for a fact because we’re both in that class, and she wasn’t there.”
Ben looked at Brenda. “You saw Emily rush out the door and that was it? You didn’t happen to be outside at the time, did you? See her talking to anyone?”
“She rushed out the door, and that was it. I was over there.” She pointed to the kitchen area. “I haven’t seen her since.”
“Did any of you see her talking to a neighbor or someone you didn’t recognize in the days before she was abducted?”
They all shook their heads.
“Which one of you would be willing to show me the exact route Emily usually took to school?”