The Girl Who Was Taken

by Charlie Donlea

  One o’clock came in a hurry. The bartenders hollered last call and a rush of students lined the bar to order one final drink before they spilled into the streets and headed to after-hours. There was talk of a Theta Chi late night. Diana laughed as the crowd squashed her and Casey into the bar to place their orders.

  “We’re gonna get trampled,” Casey said. He took her hand and pulled her away from the bar, off her stool and toward the door. Diana felt his fingers intertwine with her own, the way she always saw couples on campus hold hands. She allowed him to pull her out the front door. The summer air was thick and sticky. Buzzed and dizzy from the shots, she felt herself walk the sidewalk with heavy, wobbly steps toward the end of the building and into the walkway that separated the bar from the dry cleaners next door.

  Casey pulled her into the narrow space. “Sorry,” he said. “I had to get outta there.”

  “Yeah,” Diana said. “I needed some air.”

  “You thinking about going to the frat party?”

  Diana shrugged. “I don’t know. You want to?”

  Casey came close to her, until her back was against the bricks. “Not really.”

  His face was close enough to smell the beer on his breath. Cigarettes, too. As if he could read her mind he said, “You smell like fuzzy navels.”

  This made her laugh. “That’s ’cause you bought me, like, four of them.”

  Casey moved closer. “Smells good.”

  Diana stared at him until she closed her eyes and felt his lips on hers. She opened her mouth and their tongues explored in a sloppy, drunk kiss. She grabbed his head, ran fingers through his hair the way she always thought she would when she found a guy she really liked. They kissed on and off for fifteen minutes until the bar started to empty.

  Diana rubbed her nose back and forth on his. Stared like a puppy dog into his eyes. “Wanna go to that party?”

  “Not really,” Casey said, giving her a quick kiss. “We could go back to my place. My roommates already headed home.”

  “Those were your roommates?”

  “Yeah. Three of us live in a house on Park Street. They’ll probably have people over, so we could hang for a while. Unless you wanna do something else.”

  Diana kissed him. “No. Let’s go back to your place.”

  He grabbed her hand again and they found his car. Casey opened the passenger-side door and Diana climbed in and fastened her seat belt. Through her buzz she knew she shouldn’t be in a car after so much to drink.

  “You sure you’re okay to drive?” she asked when Casey climbed in.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s not far.”

  They pulled from the curb and headed to Casey’s apartment. They stopped at a light and he again took her hand, held it while it rested on the console between them. The light turned green and he took off, then slowed and squinted his eyes.

  “My roommates,” Casey said, lifting his chin toward the windshield.

  Diana saw them strolling on the sidewalk. “Oh, yeah.”

  He pulled to the curb and Diana rolled down her window. Casey leaned over, placed his hand on Diana’s knee. “Hey, drunkos. Wanna ride?”

  “Thought you were headed to the frat party?” the girl named Nicole said.

  “We decided to go back to the apartment instead. Get in.”

  Casey’s friends climbed into the backseat and Casey took off.

  “Diana,” Nicole said from the backseat. “Did this guy really convince you to come home with him? He’s a total pervert who likes really strange things.”

  “My best friends,” Casey said. “Throwing me under the bus.”

  “Ah,” Diana said. “He seems trustworthy.”

  “If you believe that, then you’re a very stupid person,” Nicole said in a sullen voice. Serious. The drunkenness gone like it never existed.

  Diana looked at Casey with a furrowed brow. Casey stared back with dead eyes and a solemn face. It was last thing Diana saw before the bag came over her head.

  She cried uncontrollably until the duct tape covered her mouth and muted her whimpering. During the brief scuffle in the front seat, they managed to secure her hands with zip ties, pulling them behind her back and clicking them tight. The car ride was fast and nauseating as Diana rocked back and forth under the momentum of sharp turns and sudden acceleration. Without her seat belt, and with her hands behind her back, she had no control over her body and she heard them laugh when she banged her head on the passenger-side window during a hard left turn.

  Finally, the car screeched to a stop, skidding on gravel.

  “Get her out,” she heard Casey say in his new voice. The sweetness was gone. “Bring her around back.”

  Doors opened, hands grabbed her under the arms and pulled her from the car.

  “Come on, stupid,” Diana heard the girl say. What was her name, she couldn’t remember now. “This is gonna be fun.”

  Still buzzed, if not outright drunk, Diana felt them drag her. She tried to keep up, tried to get her feet underneath her, but they were pulling too fast. She recognized the terrain as rock or pea gravel. They roughly sat her in a chair and quickly wrapped her with something, securing her to the chair. The material spun around her calves and arms and chest. Then the bag came off her head and she took a second to gather her setting. Maybe a warehouse, or an old building. She wasn’t sure. The bricks were crumbling and there was a hole in the roof.

  Casey stood in front of her. He stared with those dead eyes, his head tilting to the side. “You said you wanted to come home with me. Welcome home.”

  Diana tried to talk through the duct tape, tears spilling from her eyes.

  Casey shook his head. “I don’t want to hear you talk. It might ruin it for me. I want to keep the sweet voice in my head from back when you were digging me. It helps me through the difficult time you and I are about to have.”

  Diana looked around. The other two were out of view but she could feel their presence behind her. She noticed a ratty mattress on the ground.

  Casey’s face took on a devilish look. “But one thing I can’t tolerate is snot and tears. So I’ll give you ten minutes to get yourself together. When I come back, I want my sweet girl back, you understand?”

  He turned and walked through a door at the far end of the room. When he was gone, Diana looked down at her body and realized the material they had secured her with was plastic wrap—clear cooking plastic wound tightly around her torso and legs. It looked eerie and disgusting and suffocating.

  PART III

  “Have you any idea how much it pains me when you be-

  have like this?”

  —The Monster

  CHAPTER 18

  October 2017

  Thirteen Months Since Megan’s Escape

  Early Monday morning, after a long weekend visiting her parents Friday night and driving to Georgia to see Casey Delevan’s mother, Livia drank coffee and paged through her forensics textbook while the office was still dark and quiet. Her terrible performance Friday afternoon, both in the autopsy suite and the cage, still weighed heavily on her mind. She was determined to prevent it from happening again.

  She read and reread postmortem findings in head injury victims. Reviewed anatomy she had long ago memorized, and studied the different effects of bleeding on the brain and midline shifts. She outlined the requirements of a thorough neurological postmortem, the types of tissue samples taken and the techniques used to sequester these specimens. She reviewed skull fractures, and the different patterns of bone disruption that allowed a medical examiner to make educated guesses about the weapons used to cause the damage. Then she picked up a giant book titled Clinical Therapeutics and painstakingly reviewed pharmacology, specifically covering drug-to-drug interactions in the geriatric population. She rediscovered scores of medications with long, rambling names she vaguely remembered from medical school and committed them to memory. Finally, she studied cerebrovascular accidents—strokes— and the examination techniques that best uncover them
when they are not as obvious as a large vessel bursting the middle of the brain.

  When she finished, Livia still had thirty minutes before the office would fill with staff. She topped off her coffee and pulled Megan McDonald’s book from her bag. Sitting at her desk in the fellows’ office, she skimmed through the final chapters. She imagined her mother and father lying in bed, fingers tracing along the same book looking for clues that might tell them what had happened to their daughter. There too, in Livia’s mind, was Barb Delevan’s house with drawn curtains and the smoky haze and a half-spent vodka bottle. Her parents’ picture-still house Friday night bore a striking resemblance to Barb Delevan’s home—a place and its residents stuck in the past, unable to partake in the present.

  The thing that prevented her parents and Barb Delevan from moving forward was the same relentless undercurrent of energy that prevented Livia from clear-minded thinking. It was the need for answers. The absence of closure was a tether anchored soundly to the past that caused an anachronism as time slowly chugged by—days and weeks and years—incarcerating a sliver of the soul while life continued on.

  Livia turned the last page of Megan’s book when she heard her name being called.

  “Paging Dr. Cutty,” Kent Chapple said from the hallway. “We are officially ready to roll.”

  Livia looked up from the pages.

  “Time to roll, Doc,” Kent said. “Call came in overnight, we’ve gotta hit the road.”

  Throughout the year of training, each fellow was required to participate in two weeks of ride-alongs with the morgue investigators, formally termed Medicolegal Investigators, where they would observe scene-investigation techniques as well as the process of body sequestration. It was a week away from the morgue, strategically placed throughout fellowship to avoid burnout. During the course of autopsying 250 bodies in twelve months, every fellow needed a break. Livia was up first, and after Friday’s dismal performance in the cage, the timing couldn’t have been better.

  Livia shuffled papers on her desk, gathered them and dumped them—along with Megan’s book—into the bottom drawer as Jen Tilly and Tim Schultz came into the office. She stood up and, wearing jeans and a blouse in lieu of scrubs, grabbed her black windbreaker that held OCME in yellow lettering on the breast and MEDICAL EXAMINER across the back.

  “See you guys,” Livia said.

  “Good luck,” Jen said.

  “Don’t kill anyone,” Tim said.

  “Funny, Tim. Hope your stomach’s okay this week.”

  Livia waved and was gone.

  “Heard Colt opened fire on you in the cage last week,” Kent said as they walked the hallway.

  “Good news travels fast.”

  Kent laughed. “People are calling it a massacre.”

  “You’ve got to be famous for something, I guess,” Livia said.

  “Good timing for ride-alongs. Looks like I’m your savior.”

  “That’s for sure. Get me out of here before Dr. Colt sees me.”

  They walked through the back door of the morgue and out into the sunny fall morning. Kent opened the sliding door to the morgue van and Livia climbed into the backseat. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but the intimate quarters she found inside the van were not it. Although the past three months saw her face-to-face with corpses, she expected some separation from them here, a partition of some sort, but there was none. Directly behind the two captain’s seats, the rear of the van held an empty gurney waiting to be filled with a body that would ride next to her for as long as it took to get back to the office.

  “Good morning, Dr. Cutty,” Sanj Rashi said from the driver’s seat as Livia climbed into the van. Another investigator, Sanj was of Indian decent with dark skin, black hair, thick eyebrows, and a perfectly Brooklyn accent. He was born and raised in New York, and came to the North Carolina OCME after college at Rutgers—New Brunswick.

  “Morning, Sanj,” Livia said as Kent slid closed the door and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “You’re late,” Sanj said to Kent.

  “Yes, I am. And here’s your coffee as my punishment.” Kent placed a Starbucks coffee into the cup holder of the console.

  “Sugar, no cream?”

  Kent gave his partner an ugly look. “It’s not the first time I’m late.”

  “Let me guess. A fight with the wife sent you to Tinder Valley for the night?”

  “Traffic sucks when you’re coming from the sticks.”

  “When the shit hits the fan at home, you can always stay at my place.”

  “Thanks, partner. But when I need to get away, I want my solitude.”

  Kent punched information into the GPS and shuffled papers on a metal clipboard. “First stop this week, Anthony Davis. Fifty-five-year-old male found dead by his landlord after NCFO.”

  Sanj started the van and the investigators buckled their seat belts.

  Livia pulled the belt across her chest. “NCFO?” she asked.

  Sanj put the van into gear and turned to Livia. “Neighbors Complained of Foul Odor. You didn’t think we’d break you in with anything fresh, did you?”

  The van lurched forward as Sanj and Kent laughed. It was going to be an interesting week, but at least she’d be away from Dr. Colt and the cage.

  * * *

  The apartment complex was on the border of Montgomery County. They parked in the lot and surveyed the three-story brown brick building that held twelve units. A small crowd had gathered near the front entrance and all eyes were trained on the morgue van as they pulled up. Kent and Sanj climbed out and opened the back doors to retrieve the gurney, on top of which rested a canvas bag containing everything they might need once inside. Livia followed them as they pushed the gurney past the police cars, whose lights were flashing, and climbed the stairs to enter the building.

  An officer from the sheriff’s department met them just inside the doors.

  “This is the owner of the building,” the officer said. “He’ll escort you.”

  The man introduced himself. Sanj shook hands.

  “Sanj Rashi.” He pointed at Kent and Livia. “Kent Chapple, investigator with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. And Dr. Livia Cutty, Medical Examiner.” He pointed down the hallway. “Where’re we at?”

  “Second floor,” the owner said, and everyone packed into the elevator with the ominously empty stretcher.

  When the elevator doors opened a moment later, Sanj inhaled deeply as if walking into a fresh spring morning. “And, there it is,” he said.

  The owner pulled out his handkerchief and put it over his nose. “Yeah. Neighbors called two days ago to report the smell. I was finally able to get over here this morning. Opened the door and nearly lost it. Entire complex stinks now.”

  The owner led them down the hallway to unit 204, pushed open the door, and shook his head. “You need me for anything? Otherwise, I’m outta here.”

  “Go,” Sanj said. “If we need anything, we’ll come down.”

  “That smell ever go away?”

  “So goes the body, so goes the smell. When we’re gone, boil some coffee and a pot of vinegar. That’ll eat it up pretty good.”

  The landlord hustled down the hall and into the elevator. Sanj looked at Livia, whose eyes were watering. “Welcome to ride-along week.”

  The apartment was a one-bedroom with a living room and a kitchen. Sitting on the couch was a very overweight and very dead Anthony Davis, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, no socks, no shoes. Livia walked around the couch to get a better view while Sanj and Kent gathered what they needed from their canvas bag and took preliminary scene photos.

  When Sanj stopped clicking his camera, Livia snapped on a pair of gloves and approached Anthony Davis. His skin was a pallid gray, his lips nearly white, and his eyelids slivered open to expose a hint of blue iris, the corneas long since dried and desiccated. Getting closer to the body, Livia greatly appreciated the overhead ventilation system at the morgue. It pulled more foul air than she understood unti
l she found herself in a closed apartment with a rotting body. She put her hand to her mouth momentarily as if she might vomit.

  “Here,” Kent said, handing her a tub of Vicks VapoRub. “I can’t stand to watch you anymore. Schultz? We’ll let him suffer all week. For you, Dr. Cutty, we’ll help you out. Smear some under your nose.”

  Livia took the jar and stuck her gloved finger into the petroleum, placed a small amount on her upper lip and inside her nostrils. The lemony-menthol odor immediately overwhelmed her, which was a much better alternative to the wet rot of Anthony Davis.

  Sanj and Kent, donned now in gloves and protective eyewear, approached the body and began their investigation. Livia stood back and observed, which was how this week was meant to go.

  “Moderate stage of putrefaction,” Kent said. “I’d say five to seven days. Rigor is spent and the body is in a state of secondary laxity.” He felt Anthony Davis’s swollen legs. “Blood is fixed. Definitely a week.”

  Sanj took notes and more pictures, snapping shots of the body and the apartment from every angle as Kent moved around the body. “Definitely a heart attack risk.”

  “Or stroke,” Kent said. “He died on the couch and never moved. Lividity in the butt and legs.”

  After they gathered everything of relevance and found nothing else to photograph, they managed Anthony Davis carefully into a black vinyl body bag and placed him onto the gurney. As they were securing the body, Livia took note of the couch and coffee table. A half-eaten pizza remained on the grease-stained box it was delivered in, and a Styrofoam container next to it sat suspiciously undisturbed. Livia carefully lifted the lid with her pen to find the dried, brittle bones of eaten chicken wings. A soda can was on its side on the floor, having stained the carpeting from where the syrupy liquid spilled.

  She looked back to the gurney. “Can I check him?”

  Sanj looked up from his clipboard. “The body? Be my guest.”

  Livia unzipped the bag to expose Anthony Davis’s face, then used her penlight to illuminate his mouth. Sticking her gloved fingers between his lips, she pressed down on his lower teeth and caused Anthony Davis’s mouth to gape open. She put the penlight closer to his mouth to get a better look, the VapoRub losing some of its effectiveness this close to the rot.