The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  AT THE METAL door to the dungeon, Munroe bypassed the teenagers, who, with the glassy-eyed daze of shock, attempted to wipe blood and body fluids off their hands and faces but only smeared and streaked them, making matters worse.

  She motioned for them to follow her down to where she could hose them off, but they refused, and she didn’t force the issue.

  The Doll Maker was dead. Four more of his thugs were dead. The lady in the gold shop was dead, but the gold workers would still come and there could be more of the Doll Maker’s army on the way. She wanted to get away before they arrived.

  Downstairs, the child had stepped out of the cell and into the hall and Munroe found her staring at the dead guard. She flinched when Munroe approached, and so Munroe kept still, held out her hand, and gradually the child turned and reached for her fingers.

  She led the little girl upstairs to the office with the dolls, where the child’s eyes lit up in response to the multitude of toys upon the shelves. Munroe picked up a life-size replica and handed it to her. Motioned for her to sit, and while the child stroked the hair and dress with nearly the same reverence as the Doll Maker had once shown, Munroe tore through the drawers, searching for papers, for electronics, anything that might provide information on who the Doll Maker was or how he ran the operation.

  She found nothing.

  The teenagers came to the room and paused in the doorway.

  Munroe hesitated. Stopped searching and stood upright, stepped around the desk and stretched out her hand for the child in the seat. When the girl scooted off and her feet met the ground, Munroe led her to the doorway, placed her hand in the hand of one of the older ones, and then took money from her pocket. Handed them each nearly a thousand euros and escorted them to the outside door, where they stood, a macabre sight, blinking in the early sunlight: the entire exchange and all intent communicated without words, without language.

  Munroe waited until the girls had walked half the block and then shut the door, burdened with wanting to see their fate through, but that was beyond her. They would have to find their own way, would hopefully find the police, find someone who spoke their language, someone to whom they could tell their story and eventually lead truthseekers back to this place of evil. Barring that, and perhaps on top of that, she’d track down a local AP or Reuters correspondent and feed enough information for someone who truly wanted a story to find one.

  Munroe returned slowly, cautiously to where Neeva lay.

  Stood over her.

  Knelt.

  The girl’s eyes were closed, her face, untouched by the carnage, was placid. If Munroe searched for it, a smile lay beneath the calm, and in death, even without any hair, Neeva looked every inch the doll that this insanity had tried to make her. Her near-final words tumbled over and over inside Munroe’s head until she finally spit them out in a whisper to purge them: I never wanted anything so badly as I want to finally be able to do something to someone who’s hurt me.

  With the floor hard against her knees, Munroe leaned forward to untangle Neeva from the Doll Maker’s arms and then she stopped. It felt a violation of everything sacred to leave her there, enmeshed in this travesty, but it was the way things had to be. Without disturbing the scene, Munroe stretched out farther and pressed her lips to Neeva’s forehead.

  By the strength of my hand I have done it.

  “In death, maybe peace,” she whispered, and stood.

  Turned her back on the scene and headed to the front, to the gold shop door, dialing Bradford as she walked away.

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  Munroe stepped from carpeted Jetway into carpeted terminal with nothing for luggage but the satchel filled with the few items she’d accumulated in the week since Neeva’s death.

  She’d been in the United States for two days and was only now returning to Dallas, to the closest thing she had to home. Hadn’t spoken to or heard from Bradford in the several hours since she’d texted the information for her connecting flight out of Denver, but he’d be waiting, she knew, on the other side of the revolving doors.

  After leaving Neeva, after calling Bradford and letting him know she was alive and coming home, she’d placed a call to the Reuters office in Zagreb, allowed twenty minutes, then followed with a second to the American embassy.

  The news of the bloody scene spread quickly along the wires, and before long, visuals made it to televisions across the globe. In the absence of detail, speculation ran high, and with the graphic images accompanying Neeva’s discovery, it would be several weeks at least before the frenzy died.

  With the death of the Doll Maker and so many of his lieutenants, his right-hand man vanished, and the dismantling of the U.S.-based side of operations, it would be a while, if ever, before the organization got back into the business—although, in a world that funneled billions of dollars into the war on drugs and only a pittance to combat the invisible, safer, and more profitable business of moving human chattel, with traffickers and slave owners risking so little in providing women to feed rapacious appetites, there would be others—there would always be others—to take up the slack.

  Munroe had taken the first train to Ljubljana, and there waited out the tedious and time-consuming aspects of reporting a stolen passport and gathering documentation to acquire a new one—a real one. And once she had it, had caught the first flight back to the United States.

  She’d bypassed Dallas for Aspen, where the Tisdale parents were staying; had arrived unannounced. Cautious, guarded, they’d welcomed her into their home, and in their formal living room, separated by an oversize coffee table, she had laid out the details of what had happened after Neeva skipped from the consulate in Nice; told them of the trafficking network and why Neeva had been kidnapped; detailed the reasons their daughter had chosen the path she had. What she offered was a small consolation, if any, for the loss of a child, but the details of Neeva’s revenge, details the media and the world would never have, were all she’d had to give.

  The Tisdale parents, seated together on the sofa, leaned into each other with as much poise as circumstances allowed. Judith had done much of the talking, perhaps not so much an exchange of truth but an unburdening in the way a patient might to a therapist. Filled in the gaps, the specifics Neeva had dodged around, the horrors of the brutal attack that had taken place when the girl was fourteen, and the ways in which this had transformed her life and logic.

  Having delivered what she’d come to offer, having listened to a mother’s tears, Munroe made the return to Dallas. She spotted Bradford through the glass before she reached the door: leaning back against a near wall, arms crossed and body relaxed, with only the movement of his eyes to reveal how focused he was on what went on around him—so typically Bradford that she wanted to laugh for nothing more than the relief that she was here again and weep, knowing the relief wouldn’t last.

  She pushed through the door and he smiled. Studied her, watched her. After she took several long strides he straightened off the wall to meet her halfway. The world continued on—suitcases and shoes, announcements and baggage carousel alarms, a congestion of people—while he wrapped his arms around her, put her head to his shoulder, and held her there for a long, long time.

  At last she raised her head, drew in a breath, and said, “Let’s go.”

  That’s when she first noticed the stricken look on Bradford’s face, the one he’d masked so well in his smile of greeting.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Logan? Samantha? Alexis?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing like that. It can wait.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, but in response, he put his hand to the small of her back and guided her toward the exit and the parking garage.

  “Please tell me,” she said.

  “I will, but I want to take you home first.”

  Home.

  Munroe didn’t press Bradford for more details. If for just this one day she could have peace in place of the anxiety, if just for today she had a home, she�
�d wait for whatever he had to say. Side by side, steps in sync, they walked in silence to Bradford’s truck.

  HOME WAS NORTH, outside the metro area, where land was still plentiful and towns were still towns and the urban sprawl hadn’t yet overrun the miles, although the sprawl was definitely creeping in. Home was a five-bedroom ranch-style house, recently built to Bradford’s specs, set on fifteen acres. And because Bradford spent more time away from home than in it, home was cared for by a full-time housekeeper and her husband, both of whom had been with Bradford for years and who now lived in a smaller place of their own at the back of the property.

  Bradford pulled into the half-circle drive that fronted the house, and Felecia opened the front door before they’d reached it. She smiled at Munroe and welcomed her back, and Bradford waited only long enough for the niceties before playfully nudging Munroe along toward the bedroom. Once across the threshold, he picked her up, shut the door with his foot, and tossed her onto the bed.

  Munroe laughed, and he smiled and stood, studying her.

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s good to see you laughing.”

  “You worry too much,” she said.

  He knelt on the bed. Leaned over her. “I don’t think I worry enough,” he said. “And, God, I missed you.”

  IN THE ROOM, time lost meaning, and all the words left unspoken, all the fears pushed down, and the anguish and the heartache, the losses and the pain, faded away for those hours that the outside world ceased to exist.

  THEY STOOD IN the kitchen, the island between them, sipping wine and picking at the food on a tray that Felecia had prepared.

  Munroe said, “So are you going to tell me?”

  Bradford poured another glass. Didn’t ask for clarification; they both knew what she meant. He said, “I’ve lost track of Kate.”

  Munroe stopped with a cracker halfway into her mouth. “She’s out of prison?”

  “After the explosion at the office I had to call on my guys for help in running things so I could get to Alexis …” He paused and let the rest of the explanation falter.

  She put fingers to his cheek. “Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

  “I hate knowing she’s the only one who’s walked away from this a winner.”

  With a glass of wine in one hand and his hand in the other, Munroe tugged Bradford back toward the bedroom. “She hasn’t won yet, and if she does win at all, it’ll be a Pyrrhic victory.”

  Bradford paused and his expression shadowed. He pulled her back and held her tight. Whispered, “Don’t say it, okay? I know what’s coming and I don’t want to hear it. Not tonight. Tomorrow maybe, but not tonight.”

  He wasn’t talking about Kate Breeden. They both knew that Munroe could only bear so much pain and loss before coming completely undone. She needed time away, time to heal, and she could only do that by returning to who she was: the lone operative, shut down and shut off.

  Munroe set the glass on an end table, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him. She truly loved him; always would. She smiled and fought back the sadness, glad in a way that she was spared from having to say good-bye, from uttering the words she never wanted to speak—although, in truth, there would never really be a good-bye, because if this was where home was, then like a homing pigeon she’d return, and Bradford had to know it, just as he also knew her reasons for leaving.

  It wouldn’t happen tonight, or tomorrow, she still had things to do here. Needed to visit Alexis; should probably make an effort to call on most of her family and would, when she was ready. What she wanted most, needed most, was to see Logan, to look into his eyes and beg forgiveness for all he’d suffered because of her, and because of this she had time—they had time—before the inevitable.

  RICHARDSON, TEXAS

  The midnight air was still, the coolness of night made deeper by the damp of recent rain. The condo, set toward the back of the complex and away from street traffic and the rush of tires against wet pavement, sat in an area that had, over the past three hours, turned eerily quiet.

  In a darkened nook, invisible in the night, Munroe watched and waited. Over the hours and with the deepening evening, neighbors had returned home, and some, as evidenced by the limited lighting, had already gone to bed.

  A hunter in a blind, she’d marked time by cars and open doors, by curtains drawn and lights on and off, shadows that reached the streets, and sometimes by people, unaware of what was so easily seen from the other side of the glass.

  And still, she waited.

  Munroe had asked Bradford for a weapon, searched through the plastic locker he’d offered, and taken what she wanted. Had borrowed his truck with no promise of when she’d return and hadn’t told him where she was going.

  He didn’t ask, but he knew—had to know.

  The ground was cold and Munroe shifted, one uncomfortable position into another. She had no doubt that Breeden would eventually return to this apartment, a little hideaway Munroe had discovered years ago and about which she’d kept silent—although when Breeden would return, and how often, was a mystery.

  During Breeden’s prison tenure, while her house went into foreclosure and her car was repossessed, the mortgage on the condo continued to be paid and the utilities kept on. Something waited here, something Breeden needed or wanted; something called her back. If nothing else, this one-bedroom unit was the only sanctuary Breeden had—a roof over her head, a place out of the cold—a temporary home while she regrouped and moved on to whatever she planned next.

  The midnight quiet drew long and the scent of woodsmoke spoke to the erratic Texas weather that could still bring a solid freeze in early spring. The occasional set of headlights turned down the lane, disappearing into garages or under carports, but the condo remained as it had been: dark and unoccupied; beckoning.

  It was a delightful temptation to enter ahead, to lie in wait in the dark of the rooms, away from the elements and the chance of prying eyes, but she had no idea what was on the other side, what preparations Breeden may have made to give notice of intrusion, and was cautious of warning her off.

  More time passed, damp and quiet, the dangerous kind of quiet with thoughts and memories and the voices running dialogue inside her head, voices that had still not been silenced even after the Doll Maker’s death; had not allowed her a return to the peace she’d had before the madness began.

  It was folly to think that by finishing tonight what should have been finished so many nights ago she’d find quiet once again, but the thought was there, and it phased into others far darker, far needier. Those in turn were replaced by images of a dungeon and children, of Logan and Neeva, of Jack and Sam, of Noah, and her own words of caution to Neeva: Revenge is best left to fantasy.

  There was always a price to pay.

  Another set of lights pulled into the lane and continued into the slot reserved for Breeden’s unit. Half expecting a decoy in Breeden’s place, Munroe was instead taken by the gaunt frame that clipped a rapid pace in her direction. Even in the dark, it was apparent that Breeden had drastically aged since Munroe had last seen her. Gone was the poise, the champagne bubbles, and twenty-five pounds of the good life, replaced by a haggard severity.

  With measured patience and a predator’s instinct, Munroe waited for Breeden to pass, waited for her to fish keys out of her purse, watched as she ran a finger along the upper doorjamb and fiddled with what Munroe could only assume was a wire.

  Munroe stood.

  Death and the loss of these past weeks called for closure.

  The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance.

  Inside her chest the war drum tapped.

  He will wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.

  Moved forward, black against the night, shadow to the stairwell lights, focused entirely on Breeden’s posture, Breeden’s breathing, Breeden’s spine. And then, very nearly at Breeden’s side, Munroe put the muzzle of the gun to Breeden’s head and said, “Hello again, Kate.”

&
nbsp; DALLAS, TEXAS

  FIVE MONTHS LATER

  A quarter of a mile of gravel separated the blacktop county road from Bradford’s front door; a quarter of a mile between foyer and mailbox. For the most part, the distance was meaningless. He wasn’t home often enough to worry about collecting the mail—Felecia did that for him, and anything urgent was sent to Capstone’s office.

  But today he was home, and so Bradford swung the truck off the blacktop, along the shoulder, to collect what lay within the box and spare Felecia the trip. Paper gripped between his fingers, he tossed the stack onto the passenger’s seat, and not until he was around the back of the house, parked in the garage and leaning over to collect the meager bounty of inserts and magazines, flyers and envelopes, did he catch sight of the handwriting that stopped his breath cold.

  One leg already outside the truck, he reversed, sat back down, and stared at the envelope: plain, white, and from both the shape and the stamp clearly not from the U.S. There was no return address, but his own name and address were written in an unmistakable print that quickened his pulse and set his fingers shaking.

  Bradford tore into the side of the envelope with his teeth—enough to get a finger into the crease and slit the edge open.

  Inside was a single sheet of paper. A newspaper clipping in a foreign language, printed in a script he didn’t understand—most probably Cyrillic, although for which country, he wasn’t sure—and he didn’t care, didn’t need to know. Because although the words were meaningless, the accompanying photograph, in all its newspaper-quality graininess, told him everything.

  Charred and gutted, with only enough of the hull left intact to keep from tipping below the waterline, a very large yacht listed off some Mediterranean-looking coastline.

  Bradford stared at the clipping a long while, smile widening the longer he sat, happy in a way that defied words, until finally he laughed out loud.