by Lisa Gardner
The whisper again, closer to the phone: “Shhhh …”
Banging now. Hard, metallic. Handcuffs, pounding brutally against a metal headboard, as someone struggled to escape. Then, a low, unmistakable rasp. The sound of a blade, slowly sliding across a sharpening stone.
All of a sudden, Kimberly understood this call was going to get much worse.
Frantically, her shaking hand trying to scrawl the words across the page: TRACE IT!!!
Mac throwing back the covers, leaping out of bed, grabbing for their landline.
“You know what I want.”
“Mmm, mmm, mmm.”
“A name. Is one name really so hard? You just have to love her, that’s all. Give me someone you trust, call a friend, adore. That’s all I require of you. One single name. Then I promise your death will be quick.”
“This is Special Agent Michael McCormack, requesting Special Agent Lynn Stoudt. I require immediate assistance—”
A quick, short rip. Duct tape torn from the mouth.
A wail. A long, thin, horrified scream that went on and on until Kimberly had her hand stuffed into her mouth and even then could feel that poor, exhausted cry reverberating down her spine.
The voice, even closer now: “Shhhh …”
“Tell me!”
“Please …”
The wick wick of metal slicing. A fresh, throaty scream.
“I can skin you alive. Do you want to watch?”
“Dear God, dear God, dear God …”
“Darling, didn’t your mama ever tell you? There is no God! Just me. I am your savior and I am your damnation and you had better make me happy or I will flay the cheeks from your skinny white face. GIVE ME A NAME!”
“I don’t kno—AAAGGH!”
“ONE NAME!”
“Please no, dear God no, please, please …”
The girl was screaming. Wailing hysterically, and now the man was yelling, too, demanding a name over and over again while in between came terrible wet noises and a violent banging.
Kimberly could feel herself start to disconnect. To disappear inside her skin, to spiral away from this moment, where a young girl begged for her life and a madman worked his knife.
The voice in her ear: “Shhh …”
Mac across the room: “Lynn, I need to be able to trace a phone call immediately. On my wife’s cell. Number—”
“How does that feel? How does that fucking feel? It’s gonna get worse. I’m just going on and on and on, until you tell me a name.…”
“God, God, God.”
“Didn’t you hear me? There is no GOD!”
“AAAAAGH.”
“Name, name, name. Tell me a—”
“Karen. K-K-K-Karen.”
“Karen who? What is her last name? How do you know her?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
A fresh sharp scream as he did something terrible.
“Liar! If you cared about her, you would know her full name. If she mattered, you could remember her fucking details.”
“Please, please, please …”
“One last chance. Make me happy. Or I swear to you, next cut will be someplace you really value. I’m counting. One … two …”
“Virginia!” the female gasped. “Her name is Virginia. Ginny Jones.”
“And why do you love her?!”
“She is my daughter.”
A pause.
“Excellent,” the man said.
And the next sound needed no explanation at all.
Mac was shaking her. Had she blacked out? Kimberly didn’t want to think so. She had never fainted before in her life. She glanced down in bewilderment at the bed. Her cell phone was there, the screen blank.
Had it all been a bad dream?
And then she looked up, saw the somber expression on Mac’s face, the worry bracketing his eyes.
“The caller hung up,” he said quietly. “It’s over now.”
But she shook her head. “No, Mac. It’s just begun.”
TEN
“Most [spider] species are not particular as to the insects eaten but will take whatever happens to come their way.”
FROM How to Know the Spiders,
THIRD EDITION, BY B. J. KASTON, 1978
In preparation for her morning guest, Rita was fixin’ to buy some food. It was a slow process. First she climbed into the old, claw-foot tub. Ran a trickle of lukewarm water—waste not, want not—scrubbing what needed to be scrubbed with an emaciated bar of Ivory soap.
She used to have a nice young girl in town set her hair. The cost had become a bit much. The drive into town as well. So she’d been letting her hair grow, a long, thin veil that shadowed her shoulders like brittle lace.
She rolled on long johns. Flannel pajamas. One of her mother’s old pairs of black pants, belted tight at the bunched-up waist. Her father’s red plaid shirt nearly fell to her knees, but it was warm, in good shape. Still smelled faintly of his tobacco pipe even after all these years.
She wore his socks, too, the woolen ones that could make your toes feel nice and warm even when it was thirty out and the wind blew like a son of a bitch.
Then came the heavy peacoat, a hat, a scarf, a pair of her brother’s gloves. She nearly staggered under the weight of the clothing by the time she made it to the kitchen, finding the cookie jar and counting out its precious contents. Social Security paid her $114.52 every month, not bad in the summer when she grew her own vegetables and picked berries in the brambles along the road. Winter, however, was tough. She bought the day-old pastries, the expired meat, the long-gone vegetables. She figured if you cooked anything long enough in a stewpot, then it was safe enough to eat.
She allowed eleven dollars and forty-five cents. That oughtta get the job done.
More shuffling, then she was at the front door.
“Now, Joseph,” she said before departing. “No funny stuff just because I went out. I know exactly where I left my hairbrushes and the silverware. You want trouble, go play next door. Mrs. Bradford was always colder than a witch’s tit, anyway.”
Rita cackled at her own joke, opening the door and working her way slowly down the front steps, clinging tight to the wooden rail.
She and her brothers had never liked Mrs. Bradford. The neighbor woman had once told on them after discovering them eating apples from her tree. Well, if she hadn’t wanted the kids to eat them, then she should’ve picked ’em herself. Whoever heard of a neighbor who couldn’t spare an apple or two?
Mrs. Bradford had died ten years ago. Maybe Joseph could look her up, dial direct, do whatever it was ghosts do for fun in the hereafter.
Rita found her pace, a steady rocking shuffle, and set out down the road.
She lived on a side street not far from town. Once, this area had been large lots with small but grand summer homes. Her great-great-grandfather had built the quaint Victorian that belonged to her family, looking for a respite from Atlanta’s heat. Times changed. Properties were sold and subdivided. Bit by bit, the old summer homes disappeared. Now she lived amid an odd patchwork quilt of prefab Colonials, double-wides, and low-slung ranches.
She supposed her neighbors were young couples. Folks that worked the restaurants and staffed the hotels for the summer and autumn seasons when the tourists outnumbered the locals ten to one and even buying a loaf of bread became a major inconvenience.
Rita didn’t know. She didn’t leave her house much or socialize with her neighbors. She was too busy with the dead.
She thought she knew where the boy came from, however. The house was tucked farther up the street from her, looking down over the rest. One of the last grand homes, it now featured peeling paint, skewed windows, a cockeyed front porch. Sometimes she saw lights on up in that house, in the middle of the night when God-fearing people should be asleep, not lying wide-eyed in their beds as she so often did. People in that house kept strange hours.
House fit her idea of who would have a half-starved boy
who spent his time catching spiders.
She finally arrived at the store, weaving around the muddy, snow-rimmed trucks, past the gas pumps, into the little shop that always smelled of diesel and cigarettes.
She walked the aisles first, making a careful inventory. Bread, eggs, milk. She eyed bacon, it had been a long time since she’d had bacon. But the price put it out of the picture. Boys liked cereal. Heavens, the number of boxes she used to go through, when she had boys in the house. Not those sugarcoated cereals. She didn’t hold for that. But the other brands, the basics.
She read the shelf label carefully. She had no idea puffed wheat could cost so much. Why, in her day …
In the end, she stuck with her original three choices. It would have to do.
Mel worked the register. She saw him most of the times she came in, which was to say she saw him every two weeks. He nodded at her, smiling at her odd getup.
“Cold walk, Rita?”
“Not once I got movin’.”
“Fixin’ to make some breakfast, I see.”
“Yup.”
“Looks good. All you’re missing is some sausage. I’m running a special, if you’d like. Two for one.”
She paused, contemplating. More protein would be good for the boy. And oh, the smell of hot sausage patties, browning up in her mother’s cast-iron frying pan …
She sighed, counted out her money. “I’m fine, thank you much, Mel.”
“Not a problem, Rita.”
He wrapped up her groceries for her, then looked concerned. “Not sure about that bag, Rita. Especially if you’re afixin’ to walk home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I could give you a ride.”
“Nothin’ wrong with the legs God gave me.”
“Well, if you’re set on it, maybe I can go in the back, get you a box instead. I’d hate for you to drop those eggs.”
“As you wish.”
Mel returned a short time later with a small box, set inside a plastic bag. He fixed it so she could hold the handles, then she was on her way. She gave him one last nod in parting.
Halfway home, having a resting moment, she checked her bag. He’d added two packages of sausage, plus a box of Earl Grey. For a moment, she was almost overwhelmed at the prospect of a brand-new tea bag, instead of a limp, tired one, three or four steepings gone.
One day, she should thank Mel, but thanking him would mean acknowledging what he had done, and so far, both of them had preferred this system.
It took her a long time to get home. She was starting to feel a little unsteady, swaying more and more with each step.
It would be good to get inside, have a cup of Earl Grey, hot, black, and strong. She would put her feet up in the front parlor as her daddy used to do. Maybe take a little nap.
But when she opened her front door, she discovered she had a guest. The boy had already returned, except this time, he was not waiting on the back porch. He was standing in her parlor, holding a framed portrait of her family.
For a long time, they simply regarded each other. Then Rita stepped firmly into her house, closing the door behind her, unwrapping the scarf from her neck.
“Son, the proper way of entering someone’s home is to knock on the door and ask permission. Did you knock on my door, did you ask permission?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then this was not the proper way of entering my home. Do not do it again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
That settled, Rita shrugged out of her coat, discarded her hat. “I was going to have some tea, but I suppose I could make hot cocoa instead.”
His eyes lit up.
“I don’t have marshmallows,” she warned. “Too expensive, that kind of nonsense.”
He nodded his head.
She shuffled past him into the kitchen, pretending not to see the way he watched her through half-slit eyes, nor the slim blade protruding from the back pocket of his jeans.
When your time comes, your time comes, Rita knew. But she was a tough old bird, and she figured the boy would discover soon enough that she had plenty of time left.
ELEVEN
“There are two ways in which spiders ingest food. Those with weak jaws puncture the body of the insect with their fangs and then slowly alternate between injecting digestive fluid through this hole and sucking back the liquefied tissues, until there remains but an empty shell … others with strong jaws mash the insect to a pulp between the jaws, as the digestive fluid is regurgitated over it.”
FROM How to Know the Spiders,
THIRD EDITION, BY B. J. KASTON, 1978
“So to recap, you have met with a potential informant, processed a potential piece of evidence, and received two disturbing phone calls on your cell phone, both of which appear to have originated from our own call desk.”
“According to GBI Special Agent Lynn Stoudt,” Kimberly interjected, “caller ID on a cell phone is meaningless, thanks to ‘spoofing.’ You go to the right website, and for a ten-dollar fee, have access to a toll-free number where you supply the destination phone number and the caller ID number of your choice. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and any seven-year-old with a laptop can do it.”
“Hardly an encouraging thought.”
“Now that we know what’s going on, our own tech services department can probably set up a system for tracing the original call—”
“More resources,” Supervisory Special Agent Larry Baima countered, “for a case that isn’t a case.”
“Well it’s something!”
“Yes. It’s a mess. For God’s sake, Kimberly, how do you manage to get yourself into these situations?”
Baima sighed heavily. Given that it was a rhetorical question, Kimberly did the smart thing and shut up. In truth, she and Baima respected each other enormously. Which was good, because another supe probably would’ve written her up by now.
“One more time,” Baima said. “What precisely do you know?”
“GBI Special Agent Martignetti believes an unknown predator has been picking off high-risk victims—prostitutes, drug addicts, runaways, the like. He has a list of nine girls ‘unaccounted for,’ plus he has received, from an unknown source, the driver’s licenses for six of the girls. Enter Delilah Rose and her story of a fellow hooker, Ginny Jones, last seen three months ago in the company of a john named Dinchara with a fetish for arachnids. Delilah claims to have recovered a ring belonging to Ginny on the floor of Dinchara’s SUV. I have traced the ring to Tommy Mark Evans, who graduated in oh-six from Alpharetta High School. Also listed as a classmate: Virginia Jones.
“Adding to the puzzle, we have two phone calls, both placed to my cell phone from an unknown number. First call, I personally believe, was the caller testing out the system, to ensure it would work for the middle-of-the-night main event. At this time, however, I cannot substantiate that claim.”
“But the caller was a male? Not Delilah Rose?”
She hesitated. “According to Special Agent Stoudt, the same websites that provide caller ID spoofing also provide optional voice scrambling to make the caller sound like a member of the opposite sex. Sort of an upgrade feature. Given that … Hell, I’m not sure what to be sure of anymore.”
Baima pinched the bridge of his nose. “I hate the Internet.”
“Yet it brought us eBay and Amazon.com.”
“I still hate the Internet.”
Kimberly didn’t argue with him. “At the end of the day,” she ventured, “I’m guessing the caller was Delilah Rose simply because I gave her my phone number at our last meeting. Maybe this was her way of trying to prove her case.”
“You could say that.” Baima had listened to the tape of the phone call twice already this morning, when Kimberly had brought it straight to his attention. Needless to say, it wasn’t a great way to start the day.
“So,” Baima said briskly, “we have a man—an unidentified subject—sexually assaulting, then torturing a female until she fulfills the UNSUB’s demand for a na
me, at which point she is killed. The woman provides Ginny Jones’s name, claiming to be Ginny’s mother. Can you substantiate that claim?”
“Just submitted a request to Missing Persons,” Kimberly assured him. She hesitated again, then confessed, “But I didn’t have a first name, just a general description and the last name Jones. That’s going to take some processing.”
Another dubious look from her supervisor. “Moving right along then, your impression of the audio,” he pressed. “Genuine, fake, real-time, taped? There are numerous possibilities. Give it your best shot.”
Kimberly tried to sound more certain this time. “I think it was genuine. Not sure of timeline.”
“Explain.”
“The sounds over the phone … If this is a tape, then whoever made it knew exactly what violence and murder sound like. It’s too real to be a script.”
Baima granted her a short nod of acknowledgment, a supervisory agent’s way of giving a special agent just enough rope to hang herself with.
“Timeline?” he prodded.
“Last night, it felt live. This morning, however … I’m thinking recorded.”
Kimberly leaned forward, trying to explain herself. “The second batch of IDs Sal received belong to three roommates who all disappeared, one by one. Coupled with what I heard on the phone, I think that may be how this subject operates—part of his MO is to have each victim choose the next victim, someone close to her. Given the fact that Ginny Jones disappeared three months ago, then what we heard must have occurred prior to December.”
“Ginny’s mother was abducted first. She gives up her daughter, who is taken second,” Baima stated.
“It’s a theory.”
“Well, theories are fun, Special Agent Quincy, but in case you haven’t noticed, we’re pretty busy these days. To open a case, federal agents require evidence and—here’s a thought—jurisdiction.”
“I have a recording of the phone call—” Kimberly started.
“Not admissible as evidence, as you cannot substantiate the source, nor establish chain of custody if it is a tape, which you believe it may be.”