Abandoned: A Thriller (5 page)

I point this out to Marilyn. “Look at all the guys. They should start a basketball team.”

She fights back another giggle, which gets me going again and earns me another stare-down from my adopted daughter. Then the music starts up, forcing us to stifle it. I watch Kirby hurry down the aisle to her spot in the front. She seems angry.

“That’s not the song Kirby chose,” Bonnie whispers.

What’s playing is “Let It Be,” by the Beatles, the original version, just Paul and his piano. I think it sounds great.

“What did Kirby want?” I ask.

“‘Here Comes the Bride.’”

Well, no wonder, I think. Conformity isn’t exactly Callie’s style.

The woman of the hour appears, and my mental chatter dies away. I stop worrying about the mysterious cell phone message and the sweat sliding down the small of my back. Callie is too beautiful.

She’s wearing a simple long white satin dress. Her red hair is down and wreathed in flowers. It looks like horses made of fire galloping down her back in the afternoon sunlight. She sees me gawping, gives me a wink. My heart squeezes in my chest.

I was always afraid that Callie would end up alone. I’m forty-one now, and Callie is about the same age. We are at our prime, but I’ve seen the future, the coming cusp, the place where the dust begins to settle and the lines begin to deepen. A time will arrive when this thing we’ve devoted our lives to, this chasing of the insane, will reach its end. We’ll lay down our rifles, too old for the hunt. Maybe we’ll teach the newer, younger hunters. Maybe we’ll grow old at home, bouncing grandchildren on our knees, but whatever happens, old age is coming. I can hear the hoofbeats clearer now than when I was a fresh-scrubbed twenty-one.

So I worried about my best friend growing old and alone, and I find myself relieved and happy. She loves a man. He loves her back. They’ll be together now, whatever happens.

The joy I feel is tempered by another, sudden vision. I see Matt and me on our wedding day. I wore white satin too. Matt and I were both incredibly young, a youth I can barely remember. Most of that day is a blur, but three things stand out in clear relief: our love, our laughter, our joy. Who knew that it would end the way it did?

Callie arrives next to Samuel, and he grins at her. It’s the grin of a boy, beautiful on this normally taciturn man. It strips ten years off his age. Callie’s smile in return is shy, which is almost as strange and at least as wonderful. Father Yates begins the ceremony, written by Callie herself. It is a mix of religion and promises, with no trace of humor. This surprises me on some level.

I think about my life now, about the divisions I’ve placed between myself and aspects of the truth. There is the secret I’ve sworn Tommy to keep. Then, of course, there’s the one big secret, the new and devastating one. Who knows what I’m going to do about that? I hide some of these things not out of fear, some of them out of love. This is my life, for better or worse. I feel the sun on my neck and watch my friend fall into happiness.

“You may kiss the bride,” Yates says, smiling, and Samuel does. The breeze finally blows a little, chilly but happy, and the sun shines hard, doing its best to bless the day.

I catch Tommy’s eye, and we grin at each other.

“May I present Mr. and Mrs.—”

Father Yates is cut off by the black Mustang with the tinted windows that roars up in the parking lot about fifteen yards away. It stops, engine rumbling. The door opens and a woman is tossed out onto the asphalt. The door slams shut and the car speeds off. The car has no license plates.

The woman stands up. She’s shaved bald and is wearing a white nightgown. She stumbles toward us. When she’s about five yards away, she puts her hands to her head, turns her face to the sky, and begins to scream.

We’re a strange group for the hospital. Callie is still wearing her wedding dress, though she slipped on a pair of tennis shoes. I’m still in my maid of honor gear, and Tommy and Samuel and Alan and James are in their tuxedos.

The woman collapsed after screaming, and we sprang into motion. Callie and I ran over to administer first aid. Tommy and Samuel raced to see who could call 911 first. Kirby went racing after the black Mustang, heels and all, with a gun that had somehow been secreted underneath her bridesmaid’s dress.

Until the ambulance arrived, the woman remained essentially unconscious, her eyelids fluttering and the occasional moan escaping from between her lips.

Her appearance had been shocking. She was gaunt, though not emaciated. Her lips were cracked and she appeared to be dehydrated. The skin under her eyes was almost black, but not from physical abuse. They were the eyes of someone who hadn’t slept in days, or maybe weeks.

Her skin was the whitest I’d ever seen, pasty, almost paper white. She reminded me of those blind albino rats you hear about sometimes, born in the dark and raised without ever seeing the light.

“Marks on her wrists, ankles, and neck,” Callie had noted with a nod of her head.

I’d checked, and she was right. They were scars, though, not just marks. The signs of someone who’d spent years in shackles.

“What happened to you?” I murmured, as the ambulance pulled up. The paramedics jumped out and rushed over, all business. “I’m going with her,” I said.

“I’ll take Bonnie home,” Elaina offered.

Bonnie protested. “I want to go to the hospital.”

“No, honey.” I guess there was something in my voice that told her not to argue; she wasn’t happy about it, but she left with Elaina and no further protest.

“We’ll meet you there,” Alan said. “Hell of a way to end a wedding.”

“I guess we’ll see you guys later?” I asked Callie and Sam. “You have a honeymoon in Bora-Bora. You’re hitched, so head out.”

“Tsk-tsk,” Callie said to me, shaking her head. “You should know me better than that.”

There was nothing after that, because the paramedics had hustled the woman into the back of the ambulance and were eager to get rolling. They’d already placed an IV by the time the doors closed behind me.

“She’s severely dehydrated,” one of them said to me, shouting to be heard over the sirens. “Heart rate is way too fast.”

He didn’t have any other wisdom to impart, and we fell silent. I studied the woman as we barreled down the highway.

I put her in her early forties, about five-five. She had a long face, not unattractive, and a slender frame to go with it. Lips neither full nor thin. There was nothing striking about her—hers could be the face of a hundred middle-aged women—but I could not shake the idea that she was somehow familiar to me.

Her fingernails were a little too long, and they were filthy. So were her toenails and her feet. I’d moved down to examine them more closely and noted that the bottoms of her feet were heavily calloused.

“Almost like she never wears shoes,” I muttered to myself.

The scars on her ankles were thicker than I had first noticed, uneven circular bands, as though they’d been cut open and healed again and again. Which they probably had.

We’re in the hospital now, and I’m watching as the doctors and nurses attend to the woman. She’s started to come awake and is fighting them. She’s screaming. Her eyes are wild.

“Put her in restraints,” the doctor orders, and the woman goes even more insane.

I rush over and put a hand on the doctor’s arm. He glances at me, annoyed at the interruption of his rhythm. I show him my FBI badge and explain to him what I think. Point out the scars on her wrists and ankles.

“Can’t you just sedate her?” I ask.

“We don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he says. “Her heartbeat is erratic; we don’t know if she’s been given any other drug. Restraints are safest.”

“If you put her in restraints, you’re going to send her over the deep end. You’ll be doing more harm than good. Trust me, please. I’ve seen this before.”

I don’t know if it’s my badge or my scars or the certainty in my voice or all three, but I seem to get through to him. He nods once.

“Four milligrams of Ativan, IM,” he barks. “No restraints.”

The team changes gears to accommodate this new order without a hiccup, and I back away to let them do their job. The woman howls as they hold her down and jam the needle into her arm. She continues to struggle for a few moments, and then she starts to relax. Gradually, they let her go. Her breathing slows and her eyes close again.

“Doctor,” I say, getting his attention again. “Sorry, one other thing. I need her checked for signs of sexual abuse. Full kit, please.”

He agrees and turns back to his patient. That’s when I notice something on the floor under her gurney. I insert myself and I bend down and pick it up. It’s a single sheet of white letter-size paper, folded into a square. I open it. Black typed letters say:

I scan the woman’s gown and see a single side pocket. The note must have fallen from there. I refold it and put it inside my jacket. Games. So many of them like games.

I watch them work on the woman and I wonder: What is it about some of these predators that they get off on stealing a life from another person? Isn’t it enough to rape them? Why is such complete destruction necessary?

It’s a silly question, a mix of the rhetorical and wishful thinking. I know all the answers to all the questions. If not intellectually, then in the core of me.

It’s a ratio. A mathematical thing. The greater the degradation, the more intense the sexual high. It’s really no different, in its own way, than a meth-head or a heroin addict. Many rapists and serial killers talk about their first rape or murder as a pinnacle. The first high is the highest; everything after is an attempt to recreate it.

I’m involved in the Behavioral Analysis Unit’s interviews of captured serial murderers. We contact them, try to get them to fill out a questionnaire, and then get them to agree to a taped interview. Some aren’t interested, but most are. They’re malignant narcissists—how could they refuse?

One of the men I interviewed kept recordings of the screams of his victims. Nothing else. He didn’t have photographs, he didn’t video the rapes or murders, and he kept no physical trophies. His fulfillment came from the auditory reliving of his victims’ screams.

He was a small, squat man named Bill. He wore glasses—old-fashioned horn-rims—and was in his early fifties. I’d seen photographs of him before prison, and he was a family man, as some of them are. There was one photo of him with his somewhat-withdrawn wife. His arm was around her, and he was smiling at the camera. They were in their front yard and it was a sunny California day and he was wearing a chambray shirt, a pair of blue jeans, and tennis shoes. A set of suspenders held up the pants.

Three things struck me about the photograph. One was the date: The photo had been taken while Bill was holding his second-to-last victim. He’d abduct them (middle-aged women, always with dark hair and large breasts) and keep them in a soundproofed trunk inside a soundproofed storage shed on the rear of his property. Bill had bought land in Apple Valley some time ago, and he had nearly an acre.

The second was that smile. It was utterly benign. There was nothing about him (other than perhaps the downcast eyes of his wife) that said you should beware. Bill wasn’t the next door neighbor you needed to
keep an eye on. He was a balding, middle-aged man, who looked like his worst fault might be some slightly off-color jokes at the wrong times, for which he’d apologize profusely.

The last was his belly. It wasn’t huge, but it was fat, and it didn’t fit the rest of him. He didn’t have a fat face, or thick arms, or heavy legs. It was the belly of a troll from the fairy stories. The belly made my stomach churn a little, because of all the facts I knew.

His last victim, Mary Booth, had survived her ordeal. It was her testimony, more than anything else, that put Bill away. There were certain things in her testimony that I couldn’t help remembering when I looked at that photograph. Her interviews had been digitally recorded, and I had listened to them the week prior to my meeting with Bill. I could hear her voice in my head as I looked at Bill’s smiling face and fat stomach.

It had been Alan who was called in to interview Mary. We hadn’t been the ones to catch Bill, but Alan was the best at interviewing either victims or criminals, and her testimony was too important.

“Mary,” he’d said, his voice gentle. “I’m going to take you through slowly. There’s no rush here, okay? Anytime you need a break, you tell me, and that’s it. We stop, and we stop for as long as you need us to.”

Some people would assume Alan’s size would work against him in interviewing a rape victim. He had a way of turning it around, though. Instead of being threatening, he became their protector. The hugeness of him became the most comforting thing there was.

“Okay,” she’d agreed, her voice faint but strong. Mary Booth turned out to be a tough cookie, all in all. She’d been rocked hard by what Bill did to her, but she hadn’t been broken.