by Lisa Gardner
Flat affect, D.D. noted. An expression most often found in homicide cops or victims of chronic abuse.
Standing outside the patrol car, D.D. leaned down until her face was even with the woman’s. “Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren,” she said by way of introduction. “And you are?”
The girl finally turned her head. She stared at D.D. Seemed to study her as if looking for something. Then, she resumed her examination of the back of the driver’s seat.
D.D. gave it some thought. “Quite the scene in the garage. Chemical fire, I’m told. Basically, you burned a man alive with some kind of preservative mixed with antifreeze. You learn that as a Girl Scout?”
Nothing.
“Let me guess. Devon seemed nice enough when you first met. Good-looking guy, hardworking. You decided to give love a chance.”
“Devon?” The woman finally spoke, gaze still locked straight ahead. Her voice sounded husky. As if she’d smoked too much. Or screamed too loud.
“Victim’s name. Devon Goulding. What, you never got around to asking?”
Cool blue eyes. Gray, D.D. thought as the girl glanced over.
“Didn’t know him,” the girl said. “We’d never met.”
“And yet here we are.”
“He’s a bartender,” the girl offered, as if that should mean something to D.D. Then, it did.
“You went out tonight. To the bar where Devon worked. That’s how you met.”
“We didn’t meet,” the girl insisted. “I was there with someone else. The bartender . . . he followed us out.” She stared at D.D. again. “He’s done this before,” she stated matter-of-factly. “August. That girl who went missing, Stacey Summers. The way he grabbed me, tucked his head to hide his face from view as he pulled me down the back streets . . . He matches the man in the abduction video. I would search his property thoroughly.”
Stacey Summers was a Boston College student who’d disappeared in August. Young, beautiful, blond, she had the kind of beaming smile and gorgeous head shots guaranteed to grab nationwide headlines. Which the case had. Unfortunately, three months later, the police possessed only a single grainy video image of her being dragged away from a local bar by a large, shadowy brute. That was it. No witnesses. No suspects. No leads. The case had grown cold, even if the media attention had not.
“Do you know Stacey Summers?” D.D. asked.
The girl shook her head.
“Friend of the family? Fellow college student? Someone who once met her at a bar?”
“No.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No.”
“FBI?”
Another shake.
“So your interest in the Stacey Summers case . . .”
“I read the news.”
“Of course.” D.D. tilted her head sideways, contemplated her subject. “You know federal agents,” she stated. “Family friend? Neighbor? But you know someone well enough to dial direct.”
“He’s not a friend.”
“Then who is he?”
A faint smile. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
“What’s your name?” D.D. straightened up. Her left shoulder was starting to bother her now. Not to mention this conversation’s strain on her patience.
“He didn’t know my name,” the girl said. “The bartender, this Devon? He didn’t care who I was. I arrived at the bar alone. According to him, that’s all it took to make me a victim.”
“You were at the bar alone? Drank alone?”
“Only the first drink. That’s generally how it works.”
“How many drinks did you have?”
“Why? Because if I’m drunk, I deserved it?”
“No, because if you’re drunk, you’re not as reliable a witness.”
“I danced with one guy most of the night. Others saw us. Others can corroborate.”
D.D. frowned, still not liking the woman’s answers, nor her use of the word corroborate, a term generally favored by law enforcement, not laypeople. “Dancer’s name?”
“Mr. Haven’t I Seen You Around Here Before?” the girl murmured.
On the other side of the girl, the district detective rolled her eyes. Apparently D.D. wasn’t the first person to be asking these questions, or getting these answers.
“Can he corroborate?” D.D. stressed the legal term.
“Assuming he’s regained consciousness.”
“Honey—”
“You should search the garage. There’s blood in the far left corner. I could smell it when I was digging through the trash, trying to find a weapon.”
“Is that when you discovered the potassium permanganate?”
“He’s the one who threw away the bouquet, probably after using it to lure in some other victim. I’m not his first. I can tell you. He was much too confident, too well prepared. If this is his house, check his room. He’ll have trophies. Predator like him enjoys the private thrill of revisiting past conquests.”
D.D. stared at the woman. In her years in homicide, she’d interviewed victims who were hysterical. She’d dealt with victims who were in shock. When it came to crime, there was no such thing as an emotional norm. And yet she’d never met a victim like this one. The woman’s responses were well beyond the bell curve. Hell, outside the land of sanity.
“Did you know what Devon—”
“The bartender.”
“The bartender had done to these other women? Maybe a friend of yours told you something. Her own scary experience. Or rumors of something that may have happened to a friend of a friend?”
“No.”
“But you suspected something?” D.D. continued, voice hard. “At the very least, you think he was involved with the disappearance of another girl, a case plastered all over the news. So what? You decided to take matters into your own hands, turn yourself into some kind of hero and make your own headlines?”
“I’d never met the bartender before tonight. I left with a different loser. He was the one I was trying to set up.” The girl shrugged, gaze once more locked on the back of the driver’s seat. “The evening’s been filled with surprises. Even for someone like me, these things can happen.”
“Who are you?”
That smile again, the one that was not a smile but something far more troubling rippling across the girl’s face. “I didn’t know the bartender. I’ve read about the Stacey Summers case, who hasn’t? But I never thought . . . Let’s just say, I didn’t plan on some overpumped nightclub employee knocking me unconscious or carting me off as his personal plaything. Once it happened, though . . . I know survival skills. I know self-defense. I utilized the resources I found on hand—”
“You went through his trash.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
The girl stared at her. For once, D.D. was the one who looked away.
“He started the war,” the girl stated clearly. “I simply ended it.”
“Then called the FBI.”
“I didn’t have any choice in that matter.”
D.D. suddenly had an inkling. It wasn’t a good feeling. She studied her victim, a midtwenties female obviously experienced with law enforcement and personal defense. “The special agent? Is he your father?”
The girl finally took her seriously.
She said: “Worse.”
Chapter 4
IN THE BEGINNING, I CRIED. Which in time led to a sort of mindless humming, making noise for the sake of making noise, because it’s hard to be alone in a dark wooden box. Sensory deprivation. The kind of torture used to break hardened assassins and radicalized terrorists. Because it works.
The pain was the worst. The relentless hard surface denting the soft spot on the back of my skull, straining my lower back, bruising my bony heels. I would feel the ache like a fire across my skin, until my entire nervous system ro
ared its outrage. But there was nothing I could do. No new position I could adopt. Not a twist here or a bend there to relieve the pressure. To be trapped, pinned really, flat on your back on a hard pine plank, minute after minute after minute.
I think there were times, especially in the beginning, when I wasn’t sane.
Humans are interesting, however. Our ability to adapt is truly impressive. Our rage against our own suffering. Our relentless need to find a way out, to do something, anything, to advance our lot in life.
I made the first improvement in my living conditions by accident. In a fit of fury against the pain in the back of my skull, I lifted my head and smacked my forehead against the wooden lid. Maybe I hoped to knock myself unconscious. Wouldn’t have surprised me.
What I received was a sharp sting to my front right temple, which did, at least temporarily, alleviate the ache in the back of my head. Which led to more discoveries. Your back throbs? Smack a knee. Your knee hurts? Stub a toe. Your toe hurts? Jam a finger.
Pain is a symphony. A song of varying intensities and many, many notes. I learned to play them. No longer a helpless victim in a sea of suffering but a mad orchestral genius directing the music of my own life.
Alone, trapped inside a coffin-size box, I sought out each tiny register of discomfort and mastered it.
Which led in turn to leg lifts and shoulder shrugs and the world’s most abbreviated biceps curls.
He came. He worked the padlock. He removed the lid. He lifted me out of the depths and reveled in his godlike powers. Afterward, a small offering of liquid, perhaps even a scrap of food as he tossed the dog the proverbial bone. He’d stay to watch, laughing as I cracked open the dried-up chicken wing and greedily sucked out the marrow.
Then, back to the box. He would leave. And I belonged to myself again.
Alone in the dark.
Master of my pain.
I cried. I railed against God. I begged for someone, anyone, to save me.
But only in the beginning.
Slowly but surely, dimly, then with greater clarity, I began to think, plot, scheme.
One way or another, I was getting out of this. I’d do whatever it took to survive.
And then . . .
I was going home.
Chapter 5
D.D. DISCOVERED NEIL in the upstairs rear bedroom of the two-story house. The youngest member of the three-man squad, Neil was famous for his shock of red hair and perpetually youthful face. Most suspects dismissed him as a new recruit, which D.D. and Phil had never stopped using to their advantage.
These days, Neil carried himself with more poise. In the past couple of years, D.D. and Phil had been pushing him to step up, take the lead. It had resulted in a few battles, given Neil remained most at home overseeing autopsies in the morgue. But D.D. liked to think she’d raised him right. Certainly, with her gone and Phil now serving as lead detective of the squad, Neil had better be lording over Carol, D.D. thought. It was the least he could do for her.
Neil glanced up as she walked in. He was kneeling on the floor beside a rumpled queen-size bed, holding a shoe box pulled from beneath the mattress. D.D. made it three feet into the cramped, dank space and wrinkled her nose. It smelled like unwashed sheets, cheap cologne, and gym socks. In other words, like the home of a bachelor male.
“Devon Goulding’s room?” she asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Arrested development,” she muttered.
Neil arched a brow. “We can’t all be Alex,” he observed.
Alex was D.D.’s husband. Crime scene reconstruction specialist and instructor at the police academy. One of the more refined members of the species, D.D. liked to think, he had impeccable taste in clothing, food, and, of course, his wife. He also looked pretty good with mushy Cheerios glued to his cheek, which is how most breakfasts with their four-year-old son ended. Alex actually enjoyed doing laundry. Devon Goulding, on the other hand . . .
“Got anything?” D.D. gestured to the shoe box in Neil’s hand. “Say, a stash of trophies from previous victims? According to our femme fatale, who apparently had never met Mr. Goulding before this evening, he’s definitely done this before and might even be the perpetrator responsible for the Boston College student who went missing in August.”
Neil blinked. “You mean the Stacey Summers case?”
“So I’m told.”
“By the woman who torched Devon in his own garage with her hands still tied?”
“The one and only.”
“Who is she again?”
“Interestingly enough, she was more forthcoming on Devon’s alleged crimes than her own. But she’s convinced he’s a serial predator, and we should definitely check for trophies.”
“She looks familiar,” Neil said. “I can’t quite place her. But when I first arrived and spotted her . . . I thought I knew her from somewhere.”
“Quantico?” D.D. asked helpfully, as Neil had recently attended a training seminar there for detectives, and it would certainly explain the woman’s knowledge of criminal behavior.
But Neil was shaking his head. “I don’t think so. Then again . . .”
“You ever hear about this chemical-fire thing?” she asked him now, Neil having the most extensive science background on her squad. Former squad.
“Yeah. One of those survival tricks for when lost in the wilderness, that sort of thing. Gotta admit, though, if I woke up trapped in a garage with my hands bound . . . Not sure that’s the first thing that would pop into my head.”
“Seems to indicate higher-than-average self-defense skills.”
“Here’s the thing, though,” Neil continued, rising to his feet. “It shouldn’t have killed Goulding. Incapacitated, maimed, traumatized, sure. But localized burning, relatively low heat . . . You’d be amazed at how much the human body can endure and keep on ticking. I’ve seen victims pulled from fiery wrecks with two-thirds of their skin toasted, and still, with enough time and treatment, they make it.”
D.D. shuddered. She didn’t like burns. She’d once been sent to interview a survivor in a burn unit who was having the dead skin literally scraped from his back. Based on the guy’s screams, she’d assumed he was dying, only to be told the whole treatment was designed to fix him. Not enough morphine in the world, the nurse had offered helpfully, scouring away.
“Now, it’s possible Devon inhaled heat and smoke into his throat,” Neil was saying. “Maybe seared his esophagus, which swelled up, closing his airway. But what the witness described sounded more instantaneous. Which made me think maybe he went into shock and his heart stopped beating.”
“Okay,” D.D. said. She still didn’t know where they were going with this, but Neil had worked as an EMT before he became a cop. He often saw things she and Phil didn’t.
“Of course, the deceased is a young, obviously fit male. Bodybuilder, by the looks of things.”
“You could see that?” D.D. asked incredulously, recalling the curled-up lump of charred remains.
“You couldn’t?”
“Never mind.”
“Which leads to further considerations. Bodybuilders have been known to dabble in anabolic steroids, which in turn can lead to a whole host of symptoms, including high blood pressure and an enlarged heart.”
“And shrunken testicles,” D.D. offered up. “High blood pressure is news to me, but the shrunken testicles, I’m pretty sure about.”
Neil rolled his eyes. “We’ll let the ME measure testicle size. Based on this, however, we’re probably both right.” He jiggled the shoe box, and D.D. could hear the telltale noise of glass vials rattling together. “Devon Goulding was definitely shooting up ’roids. For how long, I couldn’t tell you. But even short-term use could have impacted his heart, and been a contributing factor in his death.”
“What about roid rage?” D.D. asked, considering
the matter. “I always thought that meant flying off the handle, but could it have led him to abduct a girl from a bar?”
“Beyond my pay grade,” Neil said with a shrug. “In theory, long-term steroid abuse leads to diminished sex drive, which begs the question why would he want to kidnap a girl from a bar.”
“Giving in to his darker impulses was the only way he could get interested anymore? Violence his last remaining turn-on?”
Neil shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Based upon this box, I think we can safely assume Devon Goulding used steroids and it probably was a factor in his death. As for evidence of past crimes, additional victims, only one way to find out.” Neil set down the box, took one step toward the narrow dresser that was crammed up against the wall, and started pulling out drawers.
D.D. let him do it. She was on restricted duty after all. Neil could ransack the room. She crossed to the bed and inspected the contents of Goulding’s shoe box. In addition to various colorfully labeled glass jars, there were numerous baggies of unmarked pills, supplements, hormones, God only knew. Could steroid abuse have led to Goulding’s crime spree? Their lone survivor had implied she hadn’t known him at all, had been at the bar with another man until Goulding had knocked out bachelor A and absconded with the girl. Certainly sounded primitive enough. It also sounded impulsive to D.D. Serial predators were more likely to stalk their victims, plan out the abduction. Whereas snatching a girl from outside a bar—
“Hey,” Neil interrupted her thoughts. He’d given up on the drawers and was once more on his hands and knees, feeling beneath the bureau with his gloved hand.
“Got something?”
“Maybe.”
It took him several tugs; then he retrieved a large, plain yellow manila envelope that had been taped to the bottom of the dresser. He shook it, and D.D. saw several small rectangular shapes move against the paper sheath.