Abandoned: A Thriller (25 page)

“You can hear me, can’t you? Come on, Heather. I know you’ve been through enough, God knows it’s more than anyone could handle, but you can’t stay locked away like this. We need you to help us get the man who did this to you.” He’s squeezing her hand, stroking it, and he looks more like a father to me than ever. “We need to get the bastard who cut off your beautiful hair, honey. Remember how you told me you had your dad’s hair?” His voice cracks. I think that Burns is an old-school man, raised in the tradition of hiding your tears, but he doesn’t even bother with an embarrassed glance back at us. He’s too humbled by his own pain to care.

The tremor passes over her now without stopping, like a pile of windblown leaves dancing in circles, aimless but vital and sometimes even beautiful. It’s a sign of life, however distorted, and Burns seizes on it as we watch.

“Heather? That’s it, honey. Come on back. I’m right here. It’s safe.”

She blinks a few times, then faster. Her cheek twitches. She turns to look at Burns, and it’s the motion of a skeleton turning on its own bones, like a creaky door. She opens her mouth and she laughs, a high, horrible cackle. It sends shivers down my spine. If birds were around to hear it, they’d fly off in terror.

“Saaaaafe …?” she croaks. Then the laughter again, but tears follow as well, cascading down her cheeks. Her face glitters in its pain, contorted by laughter that’s really just another form of screaming.

Burns gapes at it all, taken aback. He seems at a loss for what to do. He recovers quickly. His face sets into grim lines, but it’s contrived, a man pulling on a mask.

“Knock that shit off right now, Officer Hollister!” he barks. “Wherever you were, you’re not there now, and we need your help to catch the man who did this to you. Pull yourself together!”

It achieves the desired effect. The awful laughing stops. The tears roll
on, staining the white bedsheets with water fingerprints. “D-Daryl …” she chokes. “I’m so so so fucked up. I’m sososososososo fucked up.” She grips his wrists with clutching, desperate hands. “Can you help me? I can’t get out of my head. Can you help me? Please?”

His true face again, a gelid, flash-frozen grimace of sorrow. He gets up onto the bed and gathers Heather into his arms. She writhes against him, alternately boneless and spastic.

Heather’s moans of despair draw the nurse into the room. She turns white at the quality of the shrieks and leaves. I guess she’s more comfortable with physical pain than spiritual.

Alan and I say nothing. We wait, watching without watching, a trick of respectful distance you learn after the third or fourth or fifth time you deliver the news of death to a loved one in their own home. They collapse into the reality and you become an intruder. You can’t leave, so you become a ghost instead. It’s a terrible talent.

Heather’s moans die down after a while. Burns continues to hold her as she quiets, patient with the gusts of grief that whip back up without warning. These become less and less frequent, turning into tremors, which crumble into sighs and, finally, silence.

We wait out the silence too. Comfort comes best in silence, in that wordless closeness only another human being can provide.

Eventually she lies back, and Burns takes his seat in the chair again.

“Better?” he asks.

She nods, then shrugs, then scratches her arm and her head. She’s a mess of constant motion. “I guess. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, you’re talking again. That’s a start. Are you ready to talk about what happened?”

Her eyes widen. “I think so,” she says. Her right cheek twitches three times. “I’m scared, Daryl. Maybe it will help, though. I don’t know. I guess so.”

Listening to her reminds me of a conversation with a methamphetamine addict, except that Heather has been overdosed on terror. Her fight-or-flight mechanism is set in the “on” position, and the switch is out of reach.

I know all about this feeling. About its constancy. After my rape, when I got home from the hospital, I couldn’t sleep for a week. It wasn’t just the pain of losing Matt and Alexa, I was also terrified. Every creak or wind moan got my heart racing. Adrenaline would
spike through me at the sound of a car alarm. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin because it was on fire, but of course I couldn’t, I could only scream inside the burning house of me.

I walk forward, putting a hand on Burns’s shoulder. I make sure to face Heather, so she can see my scars.

“Hi, Heather. I’m Special Agent Smoky Barrett, with the FBI.”

Her eyes jitter over me, widening a little as they grope past the scars.

“What happened to you?” she asks. There’s a desperateness to the question that I understand:
Tell me something worse than what happened to me. Please.

“A serial killer broke into my house. He raped me and tortured me with a knife. He tortured and murdered my husband and daughter in front of me.”

I don’t know if it’s worse than what she experienced or not. I don’t think you can qualify mental agony that way.

“What happened to the guy who did it?” A different kind of wanting laces her tone now.

“I shot him dead.”

She hoots in laughter. “Good!” She licks her lips and repeats this in a firmer voice. “Good.” Her eyes widen again. “Avery. Dylan. What about my boys? Can I see them?”

“We’ll deal with Avery and Dylan soon, I promise,” I answer, keeping my voice soothing, feeling traitorous and awful. “First, if you’re up for it, I’d like to talk about what happened to you, and especially anything you can tell us about the man who did it to you. Do you think you can do that?”

The twitching again, one, two, three. “I think so. Yes, I can do it. Where do you want me to start?” She scratches her skull a little too hard, leaving a livid red mark.

“How about the night you were abducted? What do you remember about that?”

She squints. “That was so long ago … lifetimes ago. Crazy times ago. I tried to keep track of time, I really did. But it was so hard, because he never gave me any light.” She says it again, emphasizing what he’d denied her. “Any
light.”

“The lights were out in the area of the parking light you were taken from, right?” I ask, pulling a thread from her free association and connecting it to a real memory.

She frowns. “Were they? Yes, yes, I guess they were. He did it. He’s smart. Very, very, very, very smart. And cold.” She shivers, picks at her left arm until it bleeds a little. “Too cold.”

“You’d just come out of your cardio class,” I remind her, keeping my voice low and soothing. I want to put her into that moment of her past while keeping the now as unthreatening as possible. “The police found your keys on the ground near your car. What happened?”

She cackles again. “That was smart of
me.
Most times he’s the smart one, but that was smart of
me.
I dropped the keys so everyone would know I’d been taken and hadn’t just run off.” She says it with a childlike pride.

“That was smart, Heather,” I agree. “You were smarter than he was at that moment, and it worked out just like you planned. Everyone knew you’d been kidnapped.”

She nods, back and forth. “Yep. Yep. I was smart. He took me, but I was smart. He took me …” Her words trail off, and the twitching returns.

“How did he take you, Heather?” I ask. “Do you remember? Can you tell me?”

She turns her head to look at me. Her eyes and mouth are wide, making her look exactly like a scared little girl. “It was the whispers,” she says, whispering herself. “What he whispered. He put a gun in my back and he whispered into my ear.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I had to come with him right then and there or he’d kill me and then he’d go and kill Douglas and Avery and Dylan. He told me things about them, about where Douglas worked and about what doctor the boys saw. I believed him.”

“Did you fight him?”

She leans back and sighs. “It didn’t do any good. That was my plan, you see?” She nods, answering herself. “Yes, that was my plan. It was a
good
plan. I’d go along with him and watch for my opportunity.” She chews on her lip. It would look pensive on someone else, and perhaps the same instinct is behind it here, but Heather continues until her lip begins to bleed. A thin line of blood runs down her chin.

“Heather,” I say, reaching out to touch her.

She doesn’t look at me, but it startles her out of the behavior. “What?” she asks.

“You were talking about fighting back.”

She shakes her head. “It didn’t work.”

“What didn’t work?”

“Fighting back. He put me in the trunk of his car, but he didn’t tie me up or anything. When it stopped, I was ready. The trunk opened, and I was like, ‘hi-yaaaah,’ ready to go all kung fu on his ass, but …” She shakes her head again. Sighs. “He was ready. He sprayed pepper spray in my face and then he used a stun gun on me.” The little-girl wonder stamps on her features again and the baldness adds to it, making her seem even more vulnerable. “You know what the scariest part was? He never said anything. He sprayed me and he shocked me and then he dragged me into that place and”—she swallows hugely, whispers—“threw me into the dark.”

I go to ask another question, but she’s been fully captured by the moment. She’s not here, she’s there. I stay quiet and wait for her to continue on her own.

“Have you ever experienced perfect darkness?” she asks. “It’s hard to find. Douglas and I went on a trip to Carlsbad Caverns one time. They take you waaaay underground. At one point in the tour they talk about that, about perfect darkness, and then they turn out all the lights. It’s incredible.” She marvels at the memory. “You can’t see anything. There’s no ambient light of any kind. There’s nothing for your eyes to adjust to. Just blackness.” Another huge swallow. “The darkness in my cell was like that. Heavy. It has a weight, did you know that?” She nods, more in a conversation with herself than with me. “Yes, it does. You can feel the dark when it’s complete like that. It slides against your skin. It gets into your mouth. You try not to let it, but if you close your mouth it just crawls in through your nose or your ears. You choke on it at first while you resist it, but it’s just too much. One big gulp, and you drown.” She twitches, twitches, twitches. “Except this drowning doesn’t kill you. It goes on forever and ever and ever. It’s like falling off a cliff for years.

“He didn’t do anything for about a day. Just left me there in the dark. Then he turned on the lights. So bright. Yes, they were. So bright. I couldn’t see anything, and I banged into a wall. Three blind mice, see how she runs.” She giggles. Picks at her arm. “I was staggering around and heard the door open and then he used the stun gun again. I felt a prick in my arm and I went to sleep.

“When I woke up, I was naked and shackled and in the dark. The shackle was attached to a chain, which was attached to a wall. I had ones on my ankles and ones on my wrists, four of them, one two three four, so I could move around about half of the length of the cell.

“There was a speaker—something—built into the room. Sometimes his voice would come out of the dark. ‘There are rules,’ he told me on the first day. ‘You eat every meal given unless you’re sick. You exercise every day, without exception. Start with push-ups and running in place. Failure to comply with any of these rules will result in punishment.’”

She glances at me, a sly, knowing glance. “I didn’t listen at first, of course. He brought some food and shoved it through a small opening in the bottom of the door, just like in one of those prison movies.” She stops talking and stares. Moments pass.

“Heather?”

She jolts and begins talking again, as though nothing had happened. It reminds me of a needle jumping the groove on a record. “The only time I’d see light was when he brought the food. He’d unlatch the opening and place the tray inside. I’d have to get down on my stomach to eat. I loved the light so so much. It was kind of him to give me that, don’t you think?”

My stomach rolls. She continues.

“I threw the food and he closed the opening. I sat there in the dark for a long time. Sometime later, I don’t know how long, the blinding lights came on again. I couldn’t see anything but white. He did the same thing as before, the stun gun and the needle. I woke up on my stomach, strapped to a table.” She scrunches into herself like an abused child, trying to present as little body surface as possible.

“‘You broke the rules,’ he said. ‘Now you have to be punished.’ He didn’t sound angry or anything. I really didn’t get that feeling at all. He sounded like someone who had a job to do. Yes.” Big nod, back and forth, happy to have put the right words to it. “He had a job to do.” She pauses. “He used a whip on me. It felt like white fire, like someone was pouring lines of gasoline across my back and lighting them up. I screamed right from the beginning.

“Once he was done, he put some greasy stuff on my back, over the cuts. ‘Next time you break the rules, the punishment will increase in duration by a third. And again the next time after that. And before you get any ideas—it’ll never get bad enough to kill you.’

“I tried to ask him a bunch of questions. ‘Why me? Why are you doing this?’ Things like that.” She pouts, picking at a forearm. “He wouldn’t answer me, no, he wouldn’t. He just threw me right back in that room in the dark.”

Again her eyes slide over to me, and again that sly smile intrudes. “I took another five punishments before I believed him.” The smile evaporates, replaced by wide-eyed wonder. “After that, I was a good girl. He never, ever hurt me when I was a good girl.”

She seems to have wound down. I give her a gentle push. “Were you in the dark all the time, Heather?”

She’s staring again.

“Heather?”

She jolts. “What? Oh yeah. Pretty much all the time. There was a toilet there; I had to find it in the dark and use it in the dark. The only way of marking time was meals. That’s how I counted the days. Three meals was a day, and I’d count that. The problem was, there were times he’d be gone for a long time. Then he’d leave me dried food to eat, divided up into meal portions.” She frowns. “I’d try and count the portions and divide by three and keep track of the days, but …” She sighs, her head falling forward in a gesture of futility. “I just lost track. Especially when I started talking to myself a lot and even more when I started talking to them.”