Little Girls Lost

by Jonah Paine

  Pamela Wilson was the center of attention. An IV dripped fluid into a vein, and her parents sat to her side. Her mother clung to her hand as if she never intended to let go. Her father was trying his best to look strong and stoic, but to Sam's eyes he mostly looked exhausted.

  Sam's work here was mostly done. Pamela Wilson had already answered the questions that she was able to answer. She confirmed that she had been abducted and imprisoned by two men working in concert. She had been locked in the dark and was clearly still in shock, but her description of one of the men sounded a lot like Tyrone Pasco. The other man had left less of an impression on her, but it was still sounded a lot like Warren Sundquist.

  Sam knew that he should feel vindicated. He had been proven right when no one was interested in listening to him, and his stubbornness had saved a young woman's life and would most likely result in the capture of a killer. Still, he felt restless. Warren Sundquist was still out there. The job remained undone.

  He turned on his heels and headed for the elevator. Where do you start looking when you have no leads at all?

  Outside the hospital a mob was forming. Reporters and their cameras were crowded around the entrance, where a mixed team of cops and hospital security were holding them at bay.

  When Sam came into view, a dull murmur broke into a chorus of shouting. Sam heard his name shouted by men and women he'd never seen before. Today they cared who he was. Tomorrow they'd have forgotten, and that was fine with him.

  A flash of blonde hair and blue eyes caught his gaze. Celeste stood with the others, a microphone in her hand. She was just one more face in the crowd now. Sam was only beginning to accept that she had never been more than that.

  Celeste smiled at him tentatively. She opened her mouth to say something. He turned and walked away without waiting to hear what it was.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Warren Sundquist contemplated the pieces on the chess board in his mind.

  Life, he had always thought, was much like a chess game. The pieces—the king, the queen, the bishops rooks and pawns—represented the forces at your disposal and those arrayed against you. At any given moment the pieces might represent people or things, but it didn't really matter. Ultimately every piece was expendable.

  Except for the king, of course. Sundquist knew that he was the king on the board, and everything he did, every move he made, was to protect himself.

  The metaphor was a little fluid. Sometimes the opposing king was a person, someone who stood in Sundquist's way and needed to be cleared from the board. Other times the king represented something that he wanted. Either way, the game followed the same rules. Sundquist advanced his pieces, sacrificing when it gave him an advantage, and making sure not to expose his king to danger.

  Sundquist had found that the best way of protecting his king was to attack, but carefully. Plan every move. Look forward through time to the moves that his opponent might make, and be sure to protect against that. There was no way you could remove all the risk from the game. That's what made it fun. But the best players—and Sundquist considered himself a very good player—found ways to minimize the risk to their own king while making the board a very dangerous place for the opposing king.

  It was time for his next move. Sundquist surveyed the board and surveyed the ways in which his king was in danger. The opposing king, which wore Sam's face, was very close to checkmate. Sundquist had never been so close to losing the game.

  It was not over yet, though. He had another move to make, and he thought that it might be checkmate.

  Sundquist picked up his glass and walked up to the bar, taking a stool next to the woman he had been watching for the last thirty minutes.

  "Are you here alone?" he asked.

  "Not anymore," she slurred with a crooked smile. Sundquist judged that she was one or two drinks away from a blackout.

  "Another round on me?" he asked with a suggestive smile.

  "I like you already," Patty replied, and put her hand on his knee.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Sam had never felt more exhausted. He climbed the steps to his house and mentally reviewed a day of tremendous highs and lows.

  He had seen Pamela Wilson reunited with her parents. He had seen himself vindicated on the point that Tyrone Pasco had an accomplice—and tried not to take too much satisfaction in that fact. On those points alone, it was a good day, one of the best he had ever experienced on the force.

  Then came what followed. First there was the sight of Celeste's face in the crowd of reporters, a brief glimpse that had affected Sam a lot more than he wanted to admit. In truth he had walked around with a sick feeling in his stomach for nearly an hour afterwards. Sam would have liked to be the sort of man who could put a woman like that behind him without a second thought, but he was not. He knew that he would mope for days or even weeks, and he would hate himself a little bit for doing so.

  After escaping the hospital he had spent hours in the station, working through the files and wracking his mind for anything that might point in the direction that Warren Sundquist would run. A more patient man would be content to wait, knowing that a man like Sundquist who was accustomed to comfort and status would inevitably turn up again. Either he would be careless enough to use a credit card at a gas station or a convenience store, or he would be arrogant enough to confess his identity to someone along the way. All Sam had to do was wait.

  Sam hated waiting. He wanted Sundquist, and he wanted him now. He wanted to feel what it would be like to snap a pair of handcuffs on that smug psychopath. As tired as he was, he knew he wouldn't sleep well until that happened.

  It was dark inside the house. Sam presumed that Patty was upstairs asleep, or maybe hadn't come home yet. He didn't bother turning on the lights in the living room. Someone had left the light on in the kitchen, and he headed towards the glow of illumination. He wanted a beer, but he was willing to settle for a cup of tea.

  When he saw Patty slumped in a chair, he came up short. It looked like she had passed out there, but he felt a flash of concern. He moved forward to check on her.

  Sam flinched. Afterwards, he wouldn't be able to say what he was reacting to, the bang of the gun or the impact of the slug when it took him in the chest. He looked down at the bloom of blood on his shirt, his mind a blank. He stumbled back against the wall, then slid slowly down to the floor.

  Warren Sundquist slipped out of the shadows, watching him carefully. Sam could see him examining his work and finding it satisfactory. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped the gun down, then placed it in Patty's right hand. Only then did he smile.

  "Hello, Sam," he said.

  Sam didn't answer. He was too busy bleeding. His thoughts were becoming sluggish. He knew he was going into shock.

  "You're in shock," Warren confirmed, standing over him. "You're also losing a lot of blood. You'll be dead soon, and when they find you they'll blame your alcoholic wife. You and she have been quarreling for some time, ever since the death of your daughter. She told me all about it, right before she brought me to your home so she could fuck me in your bed."

  Sam wasn't really listening anymore. His mind was slipping into a dreamlike state, where the things that were happening seemed both real and unreal at the same time.

  "I have to give you credit. You came a lot closer to catching me than anyone else. That was more my fault than it was to your credit, but still—congratulations. You were close. I won in the end, but you gave me a few scares."

  Sam's eyes focused on a corner of the kitchen. A red rubber ball lay there. Sam knew that ball. Missy had played jacks with it. Sam could remember her sitting on the floor, her little legs splayed out, bouncing the ball and sweeping up as many jacks as she could between bounces. The girl was gone but the ball was still there. Sam felt like there was something profound in that, something that was just beyond his grasp. He reached for it.

  "Sam, there's one last thing you can give me. I hope you don't mind. I b
elieve that, when a person slips over the edge, in that last moment of life they see something real. Something that's more true than any of the lies that fill their heads during their lives. I've dedicated my life to the study of that truth. When you die, Sam, I'll be watching. I'll see a bit of what you see in that moment. And then you'll be of no further use."

  The ball. She had held it in her hand. She had set it in motion. Now it was still, but it was where it lay because of a chain of actions that had begun with the motion of her hand. The ball still carried a little of the energy that had been in her body. She was in the ball.

  Sam barely noticed the second shot. He did notice when Warren Sundquist collapsed over his legs, and he resented the distraction. He wanted to focus on the ball. He wanted to learn its truth.

  Patty was over him now, her cheeks wet with tears. Her hands were on him, pressing hard against the hole in his chest. Sam could hear her voice. She was shouting something. He didn't catch what it was. He was happy, though. He saw something in her eyes that he hadn't seen in a long time, and he was happy that he had seen it before the end.

  He saw love.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Sam woke to the sound of beeping, and pain. The pain was the more reassuring of the two. If there was a heaven, he figured, it might feature beeping. Pain, though, meant that he was still alive.

  Sam didn't believe in Hell. He'd never seen the point, not when there was so much suffering to be had here on earth.

  He opened his eyes. He was in a hospital bed. There was a chair beside the bed, and Patty was in the chair. Reflexively, Sam sniffed the air for the stink of alcohol. Almost immediately, he regretted it. If Patty needed a drink or two to get through the day, he wouldn't begrudge it. Sam didn't see the point any longer. He was alive and she was here. That was enough.

  He turned his head in her direction. Patty noticed the motion and sat up, taking his hand in hers.

  "Hey, you," she said. She smiled at him, and Sam's chest twisted with a new kind of pain. This was one was sweeter than the other. He hadn't seen that smile in a long time.

  "Hey," he answered. He coughed, and put a hand to the bandages on his chest. "I thought I'd checked out."

  "Nearly did," Patty replied. "It was too close."

  "You saved me," Sam said, squeezing her hand.

  "Yeah," Patty said. "Maybe I did. Who would have figured?"

  Sam looked at her a long time, then said something he'd been caring around inside his chest without really knowing it. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice cracking.

  "For what?"

  "For leaving you alone. For giving up on you."

  Patty brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it. "I gave up on myself. I gave up on both of us."

  "You blamed me," he said. He didn't need to say for what.

  "I blamed everyone. I blamed you, and me, and God, and everyone and everything in between. I blamed the world for being the sort of place where that could happen. I blamed ... I blamed Missy for being the sort of girl who would die that way. For no reason. For no reason at all."

  "I agreed with you."

  Patty's eyes began filling with tears. "There's no one to blame. Shit happens, that's all. And that's the worst thing of all, isn't it? For something like that, something as terrible as that to happen, and for it to mean nothing at all?"

  Sam nodded. "It's the worst thing of all."

  "I need help, Sam. The booze makes it better at first but it makes it worse after that, and I can't go back there. I need help."

  He squeezed her hand. "I'll be there. Every step of the way. Because I need help, too. I can't make it without you."

  Patty's cheeks were wet now. "Don't you even try. Don't you dare."

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The prison cell was narrow, barely large enough for the low bed it contained. Sam noted with approval the sickly green and yellow that everything had been painted.

  It could not have been further from the interior design of Warren Sundquist's impeccable office, and that suited Sam just fine.

  The doctor himself was seated at the narrow desk up against one wall, writing in a precise hand on a sheet of paper. Involuntarily Sam put a hand to his chest, where he could feel the bandages that marked the place where that man had nearly killed him. He knew he shouldn't be here. There was no procedural reason, nothing in the case or the investigation that required him to visit the prison and see the man in the cell where they were holding him. Still, something irresistible had drawn Sam here. He needed to see Warren Sundquist locked in a cage. He needed to see that the monster was suffering what he had inflicted on so many girls.

  "Good morning, Detective," Sundquist said, not looking up from his work. "I trust that you are well?"

  "Passably so," Sam answered. "No thanks to you."

  The doctor smiled at him, as if they were two friends sparring with one another. "It was my last, best chance at freedom. Surely you can't fault me for trying?"

  "You are at fault for so many things. Where should I start?"

  Sundquist shrugged. "Be angry if you must. I believe in time you'll see that I do only what I must, as do you."

  "So you had no choice? You were out of control when you abducted and murdered those girls?"

  "I pursue knowledge, wherever that pursuit might lead. I value knowledge above the life of an individual, even mine. That all is true. I have never denied it."

  Sam nodded. "That's what I heard. You've admitted to a lot of things since we caught you. The prosecution is planning to ask for the death penalty."

  "Of course they are."

  "You don't seem frightened."

  "It's their opening move. I have a few moves yet, and the game may still go my way."

  "Your best case scenario is life without parole, in a maximum security facility. The convicts there will eat you alive. You'll be someone's pet within a week."

  Sundquist looked disappointed. "Really, Sam? That's the best you can do—attempting to frighten me with a homophobic horror story? I expected better."

  "I'm not here to play games with you, Doctor, but I don't mind admitting that I'm happy to see you here. Do you like it, now that you're on the other side of the bars?"

  Sundquist smiled. "There you go. Much better. No, I'm not happy to be the one inside the cage. The game has not gone my way. I lost my focus, and now I'm paying the price for my negligence. That's fair. Those are the rules."

  "Is everything a game for you?"

  "No. Just the best things." Sundquist stood up and stretched. He looked decades older than when Sam saw him in his office. "I am glad I met you, Detective. I underestimated you, and that doesn't happen often. Most people are so boring. You're interesting. I look forward to our future interactions."

  Sam was ready to go. He was starting to wonder why he had come in the first place. There was no closure here, Sundquist didn't have a repentant bone in his body. "You won't see me again," he said, and turned to go.

  "Don't be so sure, Detective," Sundquist replied. "The game continues, and I still have a few moves."

  Sam walked away. He had to resist the urge to look over his shoulder, to make sure that somehow Sundquist hadn't managed to slip out of his cell, that he wasn't creeping up behind with a weapon in his hand. The case was closed, the criminals were caught, but something told him that it would be a long time before he could put this one behind him.

  Walking out of the prison into the clear light of morning, Sam felt the warmth of the sun against his face. Patty was waiting in the car, and it was time for them to go home.

  Thank you for reading. If you’d like to hear when my next book comes out, click here and enter your email address. I’ll send you a note when I publish it. You can also email me directly at jonah.paine@gmail.com.

  —JP

 

 

  From.Net