by Lisa Gardner
“Gotta love the job,” Alex said.
She made a face at him.
“Anything found at the apartment?” he asked.
“No. Except for her unmade bed, it’s pristine. Mom apparently is a neat freak, and had tidied up hours before. Given Flora’s training, we suspect it had to be an ambush. Maybe he even drugged her. Otherwise there should be signs of a struggle.”
“I could take a look at it,” Alex offered. “I have some time before I have to head to the academy tomorrow, if you want a second set of eyes.”
“Given how much we don’t know at this time, I’d welcome a second set of eyes, or a third, or a fourth.” She shifted restlessly, adjusting the ice on her shoulder. “Strangest aspect of the scene: The front door as well as all the windows were unlocked. I mean, I get the front door. Guy thoughtfully prepared himself a master key ahead of time, then used it to access Flora’s apartment. But why unlock all the windows? Why even take the time for such a subtle piece of theatrics?”
“To prove he could? To emphasize no one is safe?”
“Arrogant,” D.D. muttered.
Alex shrugged, topped off his wine. “Not the first time. But sounds like your missing girl, Flora, has some skills as well. She might have been abducted, but she’s hardly a helpless victim.”
“True. I think I’m gonna make a call in the morning. Talk to an FBI agent out of Atlanta, Kimberly Quincy.”
“Name sounds familiar.”
“I spoke with her once before, couple of years ago for the Charlene Grant case. Quincy was apparently the agent who finally located Jacob Ness. She led the raid to rescue Flora.”
Alex gave her a look. “And you want to talk to Quincy why?”
“I don’t know,” D.D. said honestly. “But somehow . . . Whatever happened five years ago, Flora’s never gotten over it.”
“How could she?”
“Sure. But most victims of these long-term kidnappings, they retreat. They work on their recovery, focus on appreciating everyday life, write a book, sell movie rights, whatever. According to Flora’s mother, however, Flora never talks about her time with Jacob Ness. And yet . . . the self-defense classes. The bedroom wall lined with missing persons cases. Her obsession with Stacey Summers. Flora’s absolutely, positively still driven by what happened to her. My guess: If I’m going to anticipate what she did leading up to Saturday afternoon and what she’s capable of doing next, I need to learn about her own experience. She survived the unthinkable once before. So what compels her back to that same set of circumstances? Is there some wound she’s trying to heal? Or a lesson she still hasn’t learned?”
“Survivor’s guilt.”
“Maybe.” D.D. adjusted the ice pack on her shoulder. “I’ll tell you what she should feel guilty about, though. Her mom. Her poor mother. Having to go through this all over again.”
* * *
D.D. DIDN’T SLEEP WELL. Not unusual when working a major case. Her mind swirled with investigative details, leading to dreams of faceless girls running down endless black corridors. Then D.D. was racing breathlessly through a shadowed house . . . basement . . . house again . . . heart thundering against her chest.
She rounded a corner and there she was: Flora Dane. Or Stacey Summers? No, definitely Flora Dane, holding a gun leveled at D.D.’s head.
“Bang,” dream Flora said. “You’re dead.”
D.D. woke up. D.D. got out of bed.
She crept into her son’s room. Soothed herself with the sight of him sleeping peacefully. Then, she headed to the kitchen and got serious about her day.
* * *
FBI AGENTS HAD A TENDENCY to work civilian hours. Sure, they bragged about their “go bags,” ready to fly out the door at a moment’s notice. But compared to the demands of urban policing, say, a Boston detective’s job, fed hours were pretty sedate.
D.D. decided to play an educated guess. If memory served, SAC Kimberly Quincy had two daughters, meaning, like most parents, she was up early. Combine that with the horrendous traffic in Atlanta—what with that Spaghetti Junction, whatever—any commuter had an incentive to head to the office sooner versus later. Meaning D.D.’s best bet for contacting the federal agent would be first thing in the morning.
Five thirty A.M. seemed a tad early, so D.D. worked on her shoulder and arm PT. She showered, changed, then heard Jack calling. Scooping him out of his race car bed with her good arm, she remembered the mandatory vroom, vroom noises; then they were zigzagging down the hall, careening downstairs, before a pedal-to-the-metal sprint for dinosaur-shaped pancakes in the kitchen. The dino shapes were courtesy of molds purchased by Alex, an impulse buy that had caused D.D. to roll her eyes, but God knows Jack adored them. Pancakes were definitely twice as good when shaped as a brontosaurus.
Jack took breakfast in his footy pajamas, as pancakes were a messy, mapley affair guaranteed to wreck any hope of clean clothes, let alone the amount of syrup he managed to get in his fine hair. The pajamas would go in the wash. As for the maple syrup do . . . D.D. thought he could carry the spiky-haired look. Syrup, hair gel. In the world of toddlers, what did it matter?
Having missed so much time with her son, she did the honors of dressing him for preschool. Then she produced Candy Land, and with a stack of color-coded cards, not to mention Jolly the gumdrop, to keep Jack entertained in the family room, D.D. retreated to the kitchen to dial Atlanta.
She got lucky on her first try.
“Quincy,” the FBI agent answered.
“Morning. Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren from Boston PD. We spoke once before. Couple of years ago. Charlene Grant. You handled her friend’s murder in Atlanta.”
“Oh yeah. Hey, good job on that one. Honestly didn’t think Charlie would survive the twenty-first.”
“Well, every now and then this job is actually gratifying. So, I’m working a new case and your name has come up.” D.D. filled in the agent on Flora Dane’s recent activities leading up to her disappearance. “I understand you’re the agent who finally located Jacob Ness.”
“True.” The agent’s voice had grown quieter, somber. Some cases left a mark. D.D. already suspected Flora’s case, the raid to rescue her, was one of them. “What do you know of Flora’s kidnapping seven years ago?”
“Not much. Boston wasn’t involved, as she disappeared down in Florida.”
“Yes. Pretty typical setup. College girl on spring break out drinking with friends. She needed to use the restrooms, they let her go alone, and just like that, she was gone.”
“I’m working something similar right now,” D.D. said, wondering already if that’s why Flora had responded so strongly to Stacey Summers’s abduction.
“Unfortunately, the case was a slow starter. Drunk friends don’t make the best reporters. Not to mention they got it in their heads that Flora had headed home—and I don’t mean their hotel room. I mean sometime in the middle of the rum-soaked club scene, she’d decided to return up North, so they didn’t exactly comb the beaches looking for her.”
“Oh jeez.”
“Eventually one of the girls thought to call Flora’s mom up in Maine. Now, the mom’s a smart, tough woman. Ruth? Rachel?”
“Rosa.”
“Rosa. That’s it. She filed the missing persons report and got the ball rolling, but at that point the trail was already forty-eight, fifty-six hours old. Local PD did a little digging, came up with nothing.”
D.D. nodded her head, not surprised. Missing persons was always a race against the clock. In this case, Flora had never stood a chance.
“How’d the FBI get involved?” D.D. asked.
“Postcard. I can’t remember all the particulars, but a matter of weeks, maybe a month later, Rosa received a postcard from her daughter. It was postmarked Jacksonville. Looked like her daughter’s handwriting. But the content raised some red flags.”
“H
ow so?”
“I can e-mail you a copy, but . . . the tone was almost manic. Having the best time, Mom! Met the cutest guy! You should see where I’m staying. Perfect room! Couldn’t be happier. And the sex is fantastic. Give Chili my love.”
“What?” D.D. asked, genuinely startled.
“Yeah. Not exactly the kind of note most girls send home to their moms. Rosa Dane got a little upset, to say the least. Now, the reference to Chili—that was Flora’s first dog, long deceased. The BAU profiler who assisted with the case believed Jacob made her include that detail to authenticate the note—it couldn’t have been sent by a random stranger who read about her disappearance in the paper. The UNSUB wanted Rosa, all of us, to know this was the real deal.”
“I’m sure you also analyzed the handwriting?”
“Yes. But that analysis was actually less than a slam dunk. Certain letters were deemed a match. But the letters were smaller, crunched, and shaky, which muddled the findings.”
D.D. had to think about it. “Because Flora was writing it under duress? Or because she herself had changed? Terrified? Abused? Starving?”
“All possibilities considered at the time. The most important takeaway was the overall message. Flora was having the best time ever. With some cute guy, having fantastic sex. No hey, Mom, sorry I took off while on spring break, but you don’t need to worry, I’m with some friends. In other words, the UNSUB wasn’t interested in covering up Flora’s disappearance. He solely wanted to taunt the mom with the obvious message that Flora had been kidnapped.”
“Is this the part where the profiler claims the evil UNSUB was potty trained at gunpoint?”
“Oh, our profiler had even more opinions than that. But we were still assembling information back then. We had a first message and a postmark. The Jacksonville police traced the postcard to a single post office located off a busy interstate. No video cameras on the outside boxes, however, so that became a dead end.”
“But there was more.”
“Yes. Three months later a second card arrived. The first had been of a beach sunset. This one was a Georgia peach, and postmarked Atlanta.”
“Ah, and now you join the hunt,” D.D. filled in.
“And now I join the hunt,” Kimberly agreed. “Contents of this postcard were similar. Amazing time. Best guy ever. The sex is even more incredible, and good news, I’ve finally lost those last ten pounds.”
“She’d lost weight?” D.D. had to think about it. “Did Flora Dane need to lose ten pounds?”
“No. She was an active outdoorsy girl. According to her mom, she didn’t have ten pounds to spare.”
“Oh my God.” For the first time, D.D. got the pattern behind the messages. It left her feeling queasy. “He was starving her. That’s the taunt. Everything he says . . . The cute guy, that’s her ugly-ass kidnapper. The amazing sex, that’s the endless nights of sexual assault. And losing ten pounds . . . What a . . .” D.D. didn’t have a strong enough word for Jacob Ness. It was a good thing he was already dead, or she would’ve felt a need to track him down and kill him all over again.
“At this stage, Flora had been missing approximately four months. With evidence that she’s still alive and has crossed state lines, now it’s full-on federal mobilization. Except . . . we couldn’t gain any traction. There was no video, no witnesses to her abduction. Did she walk out with a guy? Was she ambushed? We couldn’t find anyone who saw anything.”
“I have video of an abduction,” D.D. offered, “and we still can’t find anyone who knows anything. What about the postcards?”
“We traced the second note to the originating post office, but again, no video, no witnesses. All we got was that both post offices were near major interstates. Easy on and off for someone who’s traveling.”
“Does the second postcard include anything personal?”
“Please feed the foxes. Apparently, when Flora was growing up, she liked to tame the wild foxes on her mother’s farm.”
“Rosa’s necklace,” D.D. said. “It has a fox charm.”
“Exactly. Handwriting on the second postcard shows further deterioration. It’s spidery, shaky, lacks strength. If you’re into graphology—predicting personality based on, say, the slant of your handwriting—Flora’s breaking down.”
“I’m familiar with graphology,” D.D. supplied. “Not sure what I think, but in a case where you don’t have much else to go on . . .”
“You take whatever you can get,” Kimberly agreed. “Given our lack of leads, and the UNSUB’s clear interest in Flora’s mom, the profiler advised a press conference with Rosa front and center. The UNSUB was communicating with her. Now it would be her turn to communicate directly with him. And, frankly, see if we could elicit some kind of response.”
“Did it work?”
“Not that we could figure out at the time. The profiler drafted a media message designed to humanize Flora, focus on her loving family, unique upbringing in the wilds of Maine, her kindness to others, et cetera. Rosa was dressed up to appear as all-American mom as possible. Basically, the kidnapper was crafting one storyline—an overly sexualized college girl obsessed with guys. We went to the other extreme, a nature-loving good girl adored by everyone who knew her.”
D.D. couldn’t help but arch a brow. That didn’t quite jibe with the dark, edgy Flora she knew. Which made her wonder: Maybe Flora’s mom had been right after all. D.D. had never met and would never know the real Flora Dane. She had only encountered Jacob Ness’s twisted creation, four hundred and seventy-two days in the making.
“Rosa did her part,” Kimberly was saying now. “She stood up there, looked right in the cameras, and delivered a message that was empathetic, genuine, and moving. The news teams ate her up. We got full national coverage for a solid week, boosted by her appearances on several major morning shows. Which is not something easy or automatic for a woman who up until then had been happiest driving a tractor.”
D.D. understood. What the media expected of victims in this day and age wasn’t for the faint at heart. Let alone when the lead investigator was standing at a grieving parent’s shoulder saying this must be done—you want your kid back, then this is what it takes, exposing your heart and soul on the national stage.
“What happened next?” D.D. asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Week after week. Month after month. Trail went cold. Rosa talked and talked and talked. Received no postcards or messages in reply. We blasted Flora’s picture all across the world. We got no credible leads. Which, at a certain point, starts to tell you something. Such as Flora’s either locked away so tightly there are no witnesses, or he’s done a bang-up job altering her appearance. And he either doesn’t care about the press conferences—or he didn’t see them.”
“Didn’t see them?”
“Our profiler, Ken McCarthy, didn’t believe it would be possible for the UNSUB, who’d started the conversation, to simply walk away. So if our attempts at communication weren’t eliciting a response, maybe he wasn’t getting the messages. Which brought us to the next phase of our investigation, where we chased down every southern recluse and off-the-grid survivalist with a history of sexual assaults. Now that was a list.”
“Not a bad strategy,” D.D. granted. “Certainly someone like that would fit your profile. Taunting the mother as a proxy for an authority figure, right?”
“Hey, we’re the FBI. We can make anything look good on paper. Unfortunately, we were wrong.”
“So what happened?”
“Jacob. Eventually, he reached out again. Except this time, it wasn’t a postcard. It was an e-mail sent from a dummy account to Rosa’s personal e-mail. It contained an audio of Flora talking.”
D.D. winced. She couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for Rosa. To, after all this time, hear her daughter’s voice and yet the things
, the terrible, twisted words that must’ve come from her daughter’s mouth . . .
“Escalation of communication is not atypical,” Kimberly said quietly. “We assured Rosa this was a good thing. It meant Flora was still alive. It meant, as strange as it sounded, that he still cared. Now, him moving to e-mail helped us. We could trace the IP address back to an Internet café, this time in Alabama. And, like the post offices, located near a major interstate. This led us to our next investigative leap, from looking at survivalists hunkered down in backwoods to looking at someone who was mobile. Say, salespeople, truck drivers. Given the long hours on the road, these people might not catch the morning news shows or the five o’clock wrap-up, hence the UNSUB’s lack of reaction to our TV blitz. We adjusted our communication strategy accordingly, targeting mediums that would be more accessible to someone with a transient lifestyle. We emphasized social media, such as daily Facebook posts that the UNSUB might access during his downtime on a laptop or mobile device. We also targeted local radio stations and independent newspapers, the kind of daily pubs that are easily accessible at diners, gas stations, motels.
“Flora’s brother created a whole Facebook page for this phase, plastered with personal photos of Flora as well as snapshots from her daily life, the farm, the woods around it, a fox playing in the backyard. He also sat with his mom and generated lists of Facebook posts, one for each day, covering everything from Flora’s favorite book to local events, family anniversaries she was now missing. We invited friends and neighbors to contribute as well. Anything to remind the UNSUB over and over again of who Flora truly was, a young woman deeply missed by family and friends.”
“He issued communications to break her down. You built her back up.”
“We needed him to make contact. If countering his message drove him to send more and more postcards, e-mails, videos, all the better for us.”
“He sent videos?”
“Provoking him into further outreach remained our best strategy for catching him.”
“Did you design this strategy?” D.D. asked.