And the man said, “Tell me more.”
Under the blindfold, tears of fear and anger pricked her eyes. “What do you want from me?” she snapped.
“I just told you what I want.”
“Why am I here? Why did you take me?”
The man sighed. “Because,” he said, as if explaining to a child, “I want you to tell me about you.”
“Why? What . . . what is this? Who . . . ?”
“Take a breath and start again, from the beginning.”
Kate Duncan lost track of time. From the moment she had first woken up tied to the chair it felt like years. She had talked so much and yet it was never enough. She was hungry, freezing, and her throat was raw.
“Would you like some water?” the man said.
“No,” Kate Duncan replied.
“You need to drink. Take a sip and check that it’s real water.”
At first she shook her head, but then other thoughts, long forgotten memories of television shows, intruded into her fear. He had blindfolded her. Why? Because he did not want to be recognized. Maybe because he meant to let her go. Why was he giving her water? Because he wanted to keep her alive.
He had not harmed her so far, he had not hurt her yet. You have been kidnapped, you are being held against your will, and you are blindfolded. Is this not harm?
“I’ll try the water,” she murmured.
Kate took a sip and found it was plain water. She drank as much of it as she needed.
In some obscure way it seemed to please him. “Here,” he said, “you should have some of this energy bar.”
This time she accepted the food. She took a small nibble first, recognized the taste, and ate the bar. It was sweet and nutty and reminded her of long runs in Lincoln Park and hikes up Mount Rainier. Hot tears—weak, cowardly tears, she thought—spilled out from under the blindfold and she swallowed with difficulty.
The night was coming; the night must be coming. Where were they?
As if he had read her mind, Kate felt the comforting weight of a heavy blanket being wrapped around her.
“Please let me go.” The words escaped her lips before she could stop herself.
Chapter 43
Alice Madison turned the key in the door and let herself in. It was just before midnight and she was exhausted. Aaron had left the light on in the kitchen and she surveyed her bounty: the table was covered in plastic containers from Rachel’s Thanksgiving dinner. She noticed a small one with a piece of paper inside and opened it. It was the crayon drawing of a dinosaur—green—next to a small robot—red—and it was signed with a heart and a T.
Tommy, Madison thought. The drawing had been wrapped around a handful of misshapen homemade chocolate chip cookies. She ate one then found the box with the latkes, opened it, broke a piece off, and replaced the lid. Too good to waste while she was asleep on her feet.
Madison showered in the guest bathroom, so as not to wake Aaron, and then—warm and still a little damp—she slipped under the duvet. He turned toward her and put one arm around her.
“You’re home,” he mumbled.
“Yes,” she whispered, though he had already dropped off.
Madison couldn’t stop thinking of Travis and his dog and Father O’Reilly’s warning. She couldn’t stop thinking of that one name. After a while fatigue won over her rambling mind and she began to fall asleep.
Joe.
Kate Duncan woke up with a start. She must have dozed off for a few minutes and a peculiar rasping sound had startled her. There had been more water, more food, and the blanket was still wrapped around her, but the man had not answered her questions. He had wandered across the darkness of her blindfold and listened to her giving him a stilted version of her life with ever increasing details. Nothing made sense to her anymore.
“Good, you’re awake,” he said. “One more time, tell me about you, dear.” The words were courteous, but the tone demanded her compliance.
Was this going to be her private hell? Built and staffed specifically for her?
The man was doing something: she could hear the rustling, scraping, splashing of something. There was purpose in what he was doing and that simple notion filled her with dumb, animal terror. She thought of Matthew and how he had died.
“My name is Katherine Angela Duncan. Everyone calls me Kate. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. I went to college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and at UW, where I met my husband. I . . . I work in the legal department of a pharmaceutical company. I enjoy running, spending time with friends; I enjoy cooking. When I was little, I had a dog named Jimbo—a golden Lab. My parents are Douglas and Lisa, they live in Nashville and I’m their only child.
“When I was five, I spilled strawberry soda on my father’s favorite chair and I cried about it. I used to play the violin in school and I was a cheerleader. I b-broke my left arm once during cheerleading practice and everybody in the class signed the cast. I kept it for years and I only lost it when I moved to my college dorm.
“My favorite film is Toy Story; my favorite color is blue. I tell people I’m allergic to dairy, but it’s not true; I just don’t like it. When I first moved to Seattle I hated it, but then I met Matthew and everything changed. He . . . he . . . was killed last week. He was m-murdered in our home—” Kate stopped.
Suddenly it was impossible to speak because her teeth were chattering, and she trembled against the ties that bound her to the chair. She felt him come close and when the blindfold came off, the chilly air was harsh against her face and she yearned for the warmth and the protection of the fabric.
Kate Duncan blinked.
A storm lamp had been hooked onto a peg on a bare wall. She turned left and right. All the walls around her were bare brick—old and almost taken over by moss. It was a space no bigger than her walk-in closet at home and it had a dirt floor. She looked up: the ceiling was wooden planks and corrugated iron, ten feet up. The man was behind her, and Kate tried to turn her head to see him. She felt him grab the chair and turn it around one hundred and eighty degrees.
She saw what he had been doing.
The man she knew as Detective Norton still wore the hunter cap, but the glasses had come off and she noticed that he had no eyebrows. He regarded her with a half-smile, the kind you give a friend after a long and challenging ordeal you managed to get through together. Behind the man stood the fourth wall and the narrow door in it had already been more than halfway bricked up. His eyes reflected the light of the lamp in gold flecks.
“See what you made me do?” he said.
Chapter 44
The man was tired. There was no question about it: this had been his most ambitious project to date and it was definitely something that made him proud. Even though each venture had been chosen with enormous care and in the execution he had always paid attention to every exquisite detail—why do anything otherwise?—he knew even now, as he finished bricking up the door, that he would be looking back on this as his favorite adventure. It had paid back his attention and his diligence in ways that he couldn’t even have imagined when he had begun.
The woman was crying out now, but he had stopped listening. In a few seconds he would stop hearing her altogether when the last brick completed the wall. He had left her the lamp and the blanket. Of course, she was still tied to the chair, but that setup should give her some time. He hated the idea of her life being cut short by something as mundane as hypothermia.
The last brick slid in and the man looked around. This place was his very own private miracle.
The man walked back to the van—he had changed vehicles in an underground parking garage after the sedative had taken effect—and cleaned up after himself. Be wary, be ready, be safe. Energy bar wrappers and bottles of water ended up in a plastic bag thrown into the back, together with anything else that might carry his fingerprints.
He had been very careful while he was in the chamber with the woman and he knew it would pay off. She had seen his face, but so wh
at? Not even the birds could hear her and she wouldn’t last long out here.
The man made sure everything had been cleaned up before he extinguished the second storm lamp and climbed into the van. Farther and farther behind him, a voice might have been calling out.
The drive back to Seattle would be fast at that time of night and the man cranked on the heating in the van. It had been interesting to listen to the woman, to the way she had tried to present herself to him—as if it made a difference. A little bio that hopefully would save her life: Jimbo and strawberry soda. As most people did, she had completely missed the point. Her life, he reflected, was lost the second she had stepped into his car.
No, actually, her life was already lost months ago, the first time he had seen her.
The rain had stopped a while earlier and strands of cloud were blowing east. He wound down the window to seek out a scrap of open sky and he didn’t see the elk in the middle of the road. It was a bull and the van caught it straight on, all seven hundred pounds of it.
The van skidded on the wet road as the animal crashed through the windshield. It turned over three times before it stopped upside down in a ditch, tires rolling and steam rising.
After the screech and the grinding of metal against concrete, silence fell again on the empty road.
Chapter 45
Alice Madison was at her desk when her cell started vibrating. It was an unknown number.
“Madison,” she said as she picked up.
“It’s Annie Collins, Kate Duncan’s friend.” The woman’s voice was on the edge of panic.
“Hello, what can I—?”
“Kate left yesterday morning with a detective Norton,” Annie said. “I just called her cell to see what time she was coming back today, and a trooper picked up and he said that Kate’s cell was on the body of a man who died in a car accident late last night. I called Matt’s cousins and she never arrived there. They told me she’d sent them a text message yesterday morning telling them that she felt sick and that she was going to stay here and sleep all day instead. Where is she, Detective? What happened to her?”
Madison had stood up in the middle of the call and her eyes went to the round clock on the wall. “What time did she leave yesterday?” she said.
“About nine thirty in the morning.”
“Did you see the detective who picked her up? Can you describe him to me?”
“Tall, blond hair, late thirties.”
Madison checked the time. Kate Duncan had been kidnapped over twenty-four hours ago. Detective Lorenzo Norton was short, stocky, and dark.
“Do you remember what car the man who picked her up was driving?”
“Oh God . . . Oh God.”
“Annie, I need you to listen to me. Annie?”
Kate Duncan woke up. It didn’t feel possible that she had fallen asleep, and yet she had. Coming back to consciousness was the most awful dream. The man had looked straight at her and said, “See what you made me do.” And then he had left her there.
She turned her head as much as she could, left and right. He had left her there to die. The lamp was still going and the blanket was still around her, but he had left her to die, buried alive. Fuck him and his blanket. Fuck him. Kate Duncan howled with fear and rage. She struggled against the ropes and rocked back and forth, trying to loosen them. She shouted for help. She shouted for anybody. She completely lost it and bounced on the chair, screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Come back here! Come back here, you bastard!”
And yet a part of her knew that she had drunk his water and eaten the food he had given her. Where was her courage then?
Her breathing came in painful rasps and she listened out. Nothing but birds—and only a few of them. She looked up. There were gaps and chinks of light in the ceiling. However, it was too high and she’d never reach it, even if she could stand on the chair.
She shifted and tried to stand up. If she could break the chair, then at least she would be free to move around. One thing at a time. She had to untie herself first and then she’d figure out how to get out. A reedy voice told her to take a good look around. Those were bricks, it said: they might be old and covered in green slime but they were bricks, all the way up to ten feet, and they were not going to let her out until she was dead. And maybe not even then. She was in a small hut without windows, without doors, and with no way of getting to the roof.
Kate Duncan closed her eyes and started rocking and trying to stand up. The blanket fell off and she pushed hard just as something gave way and one of the chair legs broke. The chair pitched forward and Kate managed to shift to one side and catch most of the blow with her shoulder. Only most of it, though. The side of her head hit the dirt and she passed out.
“Please, Officer, tell me as much as you can about the car accident,” Madison said. Around her the room had exploded into the disciplined chaos of a kidnapping alert. There were procedures and there was training, but a hostage situation was not something that Madison ever wanted to get used to—even if she had had some experience in the past. She cleared her mind and shoved her apprehension to one side. She would be no good to Kate Duncan if she let it scramble her thinking.
“It was called in at about three this morning,” the trooper said. “A driver went past and saw the van in a ditch. Didn’t have to walk far to find the body. Called emergency services and we turned up. Nothing could be done, unfortunately. He was dead a few hours before we ever got there.”
“There might have been another person in the van . . .”
“No, ma’am. We searched the vehicle and all around it and the only other creature there was a bull elk that I believe caused the accident. The driver braked at the very last second—you can see the skid marks all over the road—but it was too late.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not my first car wreck, Detective.”
“Okay, where is the vehicle? Where is the body of the driver and everything he had with him?”
“What is this about?”
“The man who died,” Madison said, “we believe he may have kidnapped a woman early yesterday morning and we don’t know where she is or what he’s done with her. I need you to treat his van like a crime scene—you can’t let anyone touch his body.”
“He’s in the funeral home.”
“That’s very useful, but please just wait for us to come over. We need to process the body.”
“Ma’am, we don’t even know his name.”
“We’re working on that too, Officer, believe me,” Madison said.
By the time Brown left an inch of tire rubber on the cement as he drove out of the precinct parking lot, Lieutenant Fynn was already on a conference call coordinating the search with the King County Sheriff’s Office, the State Patrol, and Search and Rescue. The Hostage Rescue Team were also ready to deploy. But if the man who had died worked alone—and there was every reason to believe that he did—Kate Duncan had been left on her own too, locked up or tied up somewhere, and she needed to be found more than anything else.
There was another possibility, of course: the man who had taken her had already killed her and disposed of her body and the elk met him as he was happily driving home to a cup of cocoa. Madison did not want to think about that. For her, Kate Duncan would be alive until she had seen for herself otherwise.
Lieutenant Fynn had caught his ten minutes of hell from the Chief about why the woman’s security had been so shoddy.
Fynn had replied that there had been no security at all, because at no time had she been considered to be in actual danger. And if she had been, it wouldn’t have been one detective on his day off who was going to escort her, would it? Norton was just doing a favor for one of Fynn’s people because the woman was jumpy. Even the whole incident on the ferry a few nights earlier had turned out to be nothing. If anyone had wanted to take her, then they could have.
The Chief had reluctantly agreed and each had rung off silently berating the other.
“Madison, I don’t know what to say,” Lorenzo Norton said to her. The cell phone was pressed to her ear as they flew east on the Murrow Memorial Bridge on I-90.
“Renzo, what happened?”
“I got a call at home, the night before last, this woman says that she’s Kate Duncan and thanks me very much but she’s decided to stay home because she doesn’t feel like leaving the house. There were, like, kids and television in the background and she sounded okay. Look, the way you told me, it was just a way of making her feel comfortable and she wasn’t really in any danger.”
“I know, I know.”
“So I thought, she’s going to stay home, she’s going to be fine.”
“I’m sorry I got you involved, Renzo, it’s not your fault.”
“Damn, Madison. And this guy is dead?”
“Looks like it.”
“Who called me? Who made the call?”
“We don’t know yet, but this guy was a computer whiz. He could have used voice changer software and the background noise was there to make it blend in.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No way you could have known.”
“Is there anything I can do? Should I come in?”
“My boss has got half the state resources mobilized on it. I’ll keep you posted.” Madison hit a number on speed dial. “Sorensen,” she said, “where are you?”
“Right behind you,” Amy Sorensen replied, and the truck behind Brown and Madison flashed its headlights.
“We need to get ALPR on board,” she said.
The Automatic License Plate Recognition technology was invaluable.
“I know—and I did—but guess what? Today the system is fighting a virus that was downloaded in the last couple of days.”
“Joe?”
“Could be.”
Madison ended the call. “He’s been covering his tracks. What the hell was he doing, anyway, driving back to Seattle in the middle of the night?” she said to Brown. “Where had he been?”
“Fuel gauge can tell us something about that.”
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