“Did you fight him?”
She leans back and sighs. “It didn’t do any good. That was my plan, you see?” She nods, answering herself. “Yes, that was my plan. It was a good plan. I’d go along with him and watch for my opportunity.” She chews on her lip. It would look pensive on someone else, and perhaps the same instinct is behind it here, but Heather continues until her lip begins to bleed. A thin line of blood runs down her chin.
“Heather,” I say, reaching out to touch her.
She doesn’t look at me, but it startles her out of the behavior. “What?” she asks.
“You were talking about fighting back.”
She shakes her head. “It didn’t work.”
“What didn’t work?”
“Fighting back. He put me in the trunk of his car, but he didn’t tie me up or anything. When it stopped, I was ready. The trunk opened, and I was like, ‘hi-yaaaah,’ ready to go all kung fu on his ass, but …” She shakes her head again. Sighs. “He was ready. He sprayed pepper spray in my face and then he used a stun gun on me.” The little-girl wonder stamps on her features again and the baldness adds to it, making her seem even more vulnerable. “You know what the scariest part was? He never said anything. He sprayed me and he shocked me and then he dragged me into that place and”—she swallows hugely, whispers—“threw me into the dark.”
I go to ask another question, but she’s been fully captured by the moment. She’s not here, she’s there. I stay quiet and wait for her to continue on her own.
“Have you ever experienced perfect darkness?” she asks. “It’s hard to find. Douglas and I went on a trip to Carlsbad Caverns one time. They take you waaaay underground. At one point in the tour they talk about that, about perfect darkness, and then they turn out all the lights. It’s incredible.” She marvels at the memory. “You can’t see anything. There’s no ambient light of any kind. There’s nothing for your eyes to adjust to. Just blackness.” Another huge swallow. “The darkness in my cell was like that. Heavy. It has a weight, did you know that?” She nods, more in a conversation with herself than with me. “Yes, it does. You can feel the dark when it’s complete like that. It slides against your skin. It gets into your mouth. You try not to let it, but if you close your mouth it just crawls in through your nose or your ears. You choke on it at first while you resist it, but it’s just too much. One big gulp, and you drown.” She twitches, twitches, twitches. “Except this drowning doesn’t kill you. It goes on forever and ever and ever. It’s like falling off a cliff for years.
“He didn’t do anything for about a day. Just left me there in the dark. Then he turned on the lights. So bright. Yes, they were. So bright. I couldn’t see anything, and I banged into a wall. Three blind mice, see how she runs.” She giggles. Picks at her arm. “I was staggering around and heard the door open and then he used the stun gun again. I felt a prick in my arm and I went to sleep.
“When I woke up, I was naked and shackled and in the dark. The shackle was attached to a chain, which was attached to a wall. I had ones on my ankles and ones on my wrists, four of them, one two three four, so I could move around about half of the length of the cell.
“There was a speaker—something—built into the room. Sometimes his voice would come out of the dark. ‘There are rules,’ he told me on the first day. ‘You eat every meal given unless you’re sick. You exercise every day, without exception. Start with push-ups and running in place. Failure to comply with any of these rules will result in punishment.’”
She glances at me, a sly, knowing glance. “I didn’t listen at first, of course. He brought some food and shoved it through a small opening in the bottom of the door, just like in one of those prison movies.” She stops talking and stares. Moments pass.
“Heather?”
She jolts and begins talking again, as though nothing had happened. It reminds me of a needle jumping the groove on a record. “The only time I’d see light was when he brought the food. He’d unlatch the opening and place the tray inside. I’d have to get down on my stomach to eat. I loved the light so so much. It was kind of him to give me that, don’t you think?”
My stomach rolls. She continues.
“I threw the food and he closed the opening. I sat there in the dark for a long time. Sometime later, I don’t know how long, the blinding lights came on again. I couldn’t see anything but white. He did the same thing as before, the stun gun and the needle. I woke up on my stomach, strapped to a table.” She scrunches into herself like an abused child, trying to present as little body surface as possible.
“‘You broke the rules,’ he said. ‘Now you have to be punished.’ He didn’t sound angry or anything. I really didn’t get that feeling at all. He sounded like someone who had a job to do. Yes.” Big nod, back and forth, happy to have put the right words to it. “He had a job to do.” She pauses. “He used a whip on me. It felt like white fire, like someone was pouring lines of gasoline across my back and lighting them up. I screamed right from the beginning.
“Once he was done, he put some greasy stuff on my back, over the cuts. ‘Next time you break the rules, the punishment will increase in duration by a third. And again the next time after that. And before you get any ideas—it’ll never get bad enough to kill you.’
“I tried to ask him a bunch of questions. ‘Why me? Why are you doing this?’ Things like that.” She pouts, picking at a forearm. “He wouldn’t answer me, no, he wouldn’t. He just threw me right back in that room in the dark.”
Again her eyes slide over to me, and again that sly smile intrudes. “I took another five punishments before I believed him.” The smile evaporates, replaced by wide-eyed wonder. “After that, I was a good girl. He never, ever hurt me when I was a good girl.”
She seems to have wound down. I give her a gentle push. “Were you in the dark all the time, Heather?”
She’s staring again.
“Heather?”
She jolts. “What? Oh yeah. Pretty much all the time. There was a toilet there; I had to find it in the dark and use it in the dark. The only way of marking time was meals. That’s how I counted the days. Three meals was a day, and I’d count that. The problem was, there were times he’d be gone for a long time. Then he’d leave me dried food to eat, divided up into meal portions.” She frowns. “I’d try and count the portions and divide by three and keep track of the days, but …” She sighs, her head falling forward in a gesture of futility. “I just lost track. Especially when I started talking to myself a lot and even more when I started talking to them.”
“Who is ‘them,’ Heather?” I ask.
Her smile is beatific. It erases the look of insanity and suffering from her features, replacing it with a kind of peaceful joy. “My boys,” she says. “The voices in the light that would comfort me. Without them … I don’t know.” She picks at her arm until it bleeds. “I might have gone insane.”
I feel my stomach rolling again, not in revulsion but in horror. My greatest fear, since I was a little girl, was exactly this: to go crazy and not know it. I remember seeing that movie about John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, and not being able to sleep afterward.
“Heather,” I ask. “Did you ever see the man who did this to you? Did you see his face or anything else that might help us identify him?”
The twitch in her cheek again, four times. She shakes her head. “Noooooo … all I ever saw was the dark, the dark and my light through the hole in my door.” She grimaces. “You can see the dark, just like you can taste it. Everything gets more acute. I have bat ears now, did you know that?” She startles me by emitting a few high-pitched squeals—her imitation of a bat—which then dissolve into cackles. “And my skin …” She runs her hands over her arms, and I watch goose bumps rise. “It’s all more sensitive.” She squints at me. “But I’m seeing now. Am I really seeing? Or is this a dream?” She picks at the bloody spot on her forearm. “It’s real,” I tell her.
She looks around, peering with care at everything in the roo
m. She shrugs. “It doesn’t seem real.” She sighs, lies back. “I’m tired again. It’s sleep time.” She sits up suddenly, fearful. “Or is it eating time?” She reaches out to me, her hand shaking. “If I missed eating time, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You won’t hit me, will you?”
I fight the welling tears and reach out to take her hand. “No one’s going to hit you anymore, Heather. I promise.”
She calms, but I can see in her eyes that she does not believe me.
“She’s not in any condition right now to give us more than that,” Alan observes.
We’re standing outside Heather’s room. Burns is silent, and he looks stricken. I feel tired already. The day is young, and we’ve only just started foraging through the sticky meat locker this perpetrator left for us. Heather Hollister could easily be the least of it.
“I agree,” I say. “Still, she helped. We know now how he took her and how he treated her. It’s going to help us with his profile.”
“Profile?” Burns croaks. “I’ll tell you what his profile is. He’s a dead man.”
Neither Alan nor I respond. We could give him the lecture about death threats in our presence, but we won’t. We empathize. “What’s next?” Alan asks.
“I’m going to call Callie and see if she’s confirmed the ID of Jeremy Abbott. Then we’ll go and check up on both him and Dana.”
“I’m going to pass on that,” Burns says. “I’ll keep Heather company for a while. If you need anything, call me.”
He looks old again, ancient and bent. Burns is one of what I call the old guard, a brand of man that seems to be dying off in the world today. Built not of stereotypes but stone: heavy, strong, enduring like a mountain. Alan has these qualities, as do Tommy and AD Jones. Burns looks cracked, fissured, crumbling at the base.
“Call us if anything changes with her,” I tell him.
He nods and reenters Heather’s room.
“I don’t think her outlook is good,” Alan murmurs. “What happens when she finds out one of her sons is dead?” He shakes his head.
How would I deal with it? Eight years shackled up and locked away in absolute darkness, unable to track the days, without the benefit of human contact?
“It depends on her. You never know, she could bounce back.”
I don’t sound convincing.
“It’s confirmed,” Callie says to me. “The man in the hospital is Jeremy Abbott.”
My heart sinks. More bad news for Heather.
“Good work. Alan and I are going to see Dana Hollister and Jeremy now. What else is happening there?”
“James has almost finished the timeline and collation of the case files. He’s also discovered some interesting things about the car crashes.”
“He can fill us in when we get back. In the meantime, can you get in touch with LAPD CSU and get briefed on what they found in processing the Hollister home? Oh—and get hold of Leo Carnes. We’re going to need his expertise on this case.”
“Anything else you want to add to that laundry list?” she complains. “When I say, ‘I live to serve,’ I’m talking about others serving me.”
Finally, something that makes me smile. “We’ll see you soon.”
The doctor attending to both Dana Hollister and Jeremy Abbott looks like a teenager with old eyes. His blond hair and baby face contribute to the effect; I’m sure he gets plenty of jokes about being able to do surgery before he could shave.
“Both patients have had extreme damage to their prefrontal lobes,” he says, confirming what I already knew.
“A homemade lobotomy.”
“In essence.”
Alan shudders. “Jesus!”
“I’ve seen this once before,” I tell him. “A doctor did it to his wife.”
“Then you’re familiar with the prognosis,” the doctor continues. “The damage is done. Mrs. Hollister got the worst of it, but Mr. Abbott isn’t much better. Mrs. Hollister is in a vegetative state.”
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Alan mutters.
“That’s right. She’ll have to be cared for like a coma patient. She can’t feed herself, she can’t speak, she can’t be responsible for her own continence. It’s unlikely that she has any awareness of the world around her.”
“And Jeremy Abbott?” I ask.
“He’s operating at the level of an infant. He can’t form words, and he wears diapers. He’s able to eat and crawl, though, so his physical prognosis is better than hers. If you can call that better.”
“What do you think he used to do this?”
“I’d imagine he got his hands on a classic orbitoclast—what laymen refer to as an ice pick. The diameter seems right, and I doubt they’d be hard to purchase. The procedure itself is pretty simple, though it would require some practice. The doctor who developed the lobotomy experimented on cadavers, using an actual ice pick from his own kitchen.”
I look down at Dana Hollister’s still form, lying on the bed.
“She’s not aware of anything?”
“Probably not. It’s hard to know for sure. There are accounts of coma patients coming out of long comas who remember snatches of conversations that occurred around them while they were comatose. When it comes to the brain and consciousness, we still have a lot to learn.”
I hope that he’s right, that Dana is living in a world of nothing, that she’s not floating alone in the dark instead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Tell me something I can use,” I say.
It’s late morning and we’re back at the office, with my team gathered around. We’ve briefed them on our interview with Douglas Hollister, on Heather, on all the rest of it.
I thought, on the way back, about Avery Hollister screaming into the thick shag of the bathroom carpet forever. I thought about Jeremy Abbott screaming like a baby for his next meal. I thought about the possibility of Dana screaming inside her own mind, beating with futile fists against the darkness.
I thought about Heather too, of course. He’d let her go, but she was still trapped. She sat in a hospital room, picking sores into her skin, surrounded by light that wasn’t real to her.
Murder is murder, and it’s always a terrible, inhuman thing, but my monsters are less concerned with that end result than they are with the elevation of suffering. It’s their successes in this regard that haunt me the most. Avery Hollister will bother me less than Jeremy Abbott ten years from now. I will not forget him, but he didn’t suffer enough to earn a place in my personal pantheon.
“I have something on the car crashes,” James says.
“Go ahead.”
“Four cars were involved in accidents. I was able to locate the accident reports on each one. Every case reported catastrophic brake failure, and all were slightly older-model vehicles, ten to fifteen years old.”
“That’s a pretty high percentage for one parking lot,” Alan says.
“It’s an impossible anomaly,” James replies. “Follow-up was done on two of the vehicles. Both were inspected under the auspices of the related insurance carriers and showed signs of deliberate tampering.”
“You think he did it?” I ask. “Why? As some kind of additional diversion?”
“I’m not ready to give my hypothesis yet. Let me finish. We told you the ViCAP search turned up three other similar crimes. Bodies dropped off in bags, suffering from catastrophic prefrontal-lobe damage. I followed up on two of those cases this morning, the one here in Los Angeles and the one in Portland. Both victims were identified, and both victims had been missing for extended periods of time.”
“That confirms his involvement,” I say. “It fits his MO.”
“Both victims in those cases were female, and both were taken at night in parking lots. One at a superstore of some kind, another from a bowling alley.” He looks up. “I did a further search and found that multiple car accidents also occurred in both locations, on the same evening of each abduction. I haven’t tracked down the data on the vehicles involved, but I’
m confident we’ll find they were sabotaged as well.”
“Weird,” I say. “Not exactly a foolproof diversion. How would he know when or if those particular cars would be driven again?”
“He wouldn’t,” James says. “It’s irrational. This is a subject who apparently operates with great care and planning. The accidents are not only unreliable as a diversion, they are unnecessary. Taking the women in the parking lots is similarly risky. Why not take them at home? Illogic is a form of insanity, small or large. Why would he take this kind of risk?”
“Because he needs it,” I say. “Not professionally but personally.”
It’s the only answer that fits, and it’s a behavior we see in serial offenders all the time. Serial killers collect trophies, even though they know, if they get caught, those same trophies will assist in convicting them. They can’t help themselves. They need little Cassie’s Barbie doll (with the blood drops on it) or Grandma Barbara’s wedding ring (kept on a necklace around her neck since her husband died, until the killer ripped it off her body).
“What’s he need?” Alan asks. “Car crashes?”
“It’s called symphorophilia, dear,” Callie says. “Someone who is sexually aroused by accidents or catastrophes.”
“Seriously? That actually gets someone’s motor running?”
“It’s a factual paraphilia,” James confirms. “It’s just a hypothesis, of course, but I think it’s worth exploring. He seems to be a meticulous and careful planner in every other way. Why do something so illogical unless some personal aberration was involved?”
“Fine,” I agree. “We’ll throw it into the mix. So let’s examine this guy further. What do we know?” I count off on my fingers. “One: He’s highly organized and effective. Other than the possible—what did you call it?”
“Symphorophilia,” James says.
“Right. Other than that, he exhibits no signs of being a disorganized offender. Two: His motivations, based on Douglas’s testimony, appear to be financial.”
Abandoned: A Thriller Page 19