Helpless (40 page)

Still sensitive to light, Tom lowered the shades in the living room. Teacup in hand, he settled himself onto the couch. Two sips and already his eyelids were shutting. He set the cup and saucer carefully on the floor and laid his body lengthwise on the couch. The quiet was blissful. There was a distinct smell that the late morning sun had baked into the cushions—an odor of sleepiness.

And so the darkness came to him.

“Dad!”

Tom stirred.

“Dad!” Jill’s voice cried again.

Tom opened his eyes and saw his daughter’s tear-streaked face staring down at him. He sat upright and knocked over the teacup with a loud clank when his feet found the floor.

“Jill ... what are you doing home?” he asked, while his hands vigorously rubbed his face awake. “What time is it?” Tom peeked at the gap between the window and shade and saw bright light seeping through.

“Lindsey is missing,” Jill managed to say before her tears said the rest.

“Missing? What are you talking about?” Tom stood and gripped his daughter by the shoulder.

Jill regained some composure after taking a few deep breaths. “She wasn’t at school. Hasn’t been answering her cell phone, either. I figured she was home sick. Then her mother called me. She wanted to know if I’d seen Lindsey at school.”

“Didn’t her mother know if she went to school?”

Jill shook her head no. “She says she was asleep and didn’t hear Lin leave. But I know that means she was passed out in the living room. Lindsey could be missing for hours. What are we going to do? Her mom is totally freaking out, and so am I.”

Tom encouraged Jill to take a seat on the couch. “Wait here,” he said to her. He gathered up the teacup and saucer, then returned them to the kitchen. He came back holding a tall glass of water. “Drink this slowly,” he instructed. Jill did as she was told, and it seemed to help. “Now, tell me why you think she’s missing and didn’t run away or something. She’s under a lot of pressure.”

“No. Lindsey wouldn’t do that. I know her. She’d have called me.”

“How can you be so sure of that?” Tom asked. “You don’t always know what your friends will do.”

“No, there’s more. I didn’t tell you the truth about that night at Mitchell’s. I think something’s happened to Lindsey because of it, and it’s my fault.”

Tom felt his chest tightening. “What did you hide from me, Jill?” Tom said as he braced himself to hear the word
rape
.

“Mitchell didn’t try to have sex with me,” Jill confessed. “I found images on his computer. Naked pictures of me. There were pictures of Lindsey, too. And other girls from school. Girls I didn’t even know.”

Tom gave his daughter a fractured look. He could not have misheard her, but what she said didn’t make any sense. “Pictures? What do you mean?”

Again Jill took in a breath. She told her father about the party she’d attended last June. About getting drunk and passing out. She confessed to having no memory of her top coming off—whether she’d done it herself or someone had done it for her. Then she told him why she’d gone to Mitchell’s in the first place.

“Lindsey and I wanted to know if Mr. Boyd was paying Mitchell to get you in trouble.”

“Jill, this is very serious,” Tom said. “The police found pictures of Lindsey on my computer. Other girls from Shilo High School, too. They might be the same images you found on Mitchell’s computer.”

“You didn’t tell me what they found,” Jill said. “All I knew was that they were illegal. I couldn’t think about what that really meant.”

Tom nodded. He’d shielded Jill from those pictures. He couldn’t face telling her that one set of images was of her best friend naked.

“Why would you think Roland Boyd was involved?” Tom asked, more forcefully than he intended.

“You were so freaked out about my hanging around with Mitchell,” Jill said somewhat sheepishly. “You told me that Roland Boyd was dangerous, and I’d seen Mitchell’s computer room.”

Tom grimaced, but at least it explained her thinking. “Okay, so you go to Mitchell’s house to spy on him and you find these pictures.”

Jill nodded.

“How many pictures are we talking about here?”

Jill shrugged. “I took what I could get. Mitchell found me looking at them.”

“You took them?”

“I copied the images to a storage key he had.”

“And then he attacked you?”

Jill nodded. “He didn’t see me call you. Then, for the longest time, he just paced around in his bedroom with me there on his bed. He kept saying, ‘What am I going to do?’ over and over again. He didn’t hit me or anything. He just kept walking back and forth. Making me swear that I wouldn’t say anything, and whenever I thought he was going to let me go, he’d make me sit back down on the bed and swear to him again.”

“Did he hurt you?” asked Tom.

Jill touched her neck. “He put his hands on me,” she said. “I swear, I thought he was going to kill me. He looked totally insane. But then he’d calm down. I think I had him convinced I’d stay quiet. That’s when you showed up.”

“So he wanted you to stay quiet about the pictures. Is that it?”

“He said if I didn’t, he’d ruin me,” Jill explained. “He threatened to publish the pictures all over the Internet and send them to everybody in school.”

“You could have told me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to be ashamed of me,” she said in a low voice.

“Jilly, I’m your father. I’ll never be ashamed of you. But I can’t promise I’ll always be proud of your decisions, either. What you did at that party was a stupid mistake. Dangerous, too, and you know it.”

Jill frowned. “I told Lindsey about it,” said Jill. “And I gave her the images I copied.”

“Do you think Lindsey confronted Mitchell?”

Jill shrugged. “I don’t know. She might have. We need to call the police,” Jill said. “Something bad has happened. I can feel it.”

The police,
Tom thought.
Oh ... no.
“Jill, think about this for a second. Why did I get arrested?”

“But none of that’s true. We talked about that.”

“Sergeant Murphy isn’t going to see it that way. I’ve got a feeling, if Lindsey really is missing, I’m about to become a prime suspect in her disappearance.”

“No. I was here with you all last night. I’m an alibi.”

“That’s not how it works. Did you fall asleep?”

Jill nodded weakly.

“There goes your alibi. I better let Marvin know what’s going on. I’ve got a feeling I might not be out on bail much longer.”

Tom moved to get the phone in the kitchen, but Jill caught him by the arm and turned him around. “If the police focus on you, they won’t be looking for Lindsey,” Jill said. “They’ll just keep asking you what happened to her.”

“Honey, that’s their job. You’ve got to trust that they know how to do it.”

“But you just said they won’t do it right.”

Tom fixed Jill with the look he typically reserved for her best plays on the soccer field. Jill was always quick thinking, but her logic impressed him nonetheless. Tom studied Jill’s pained expression. She was smart enough to know they had no easy way out of the conundrum. “You’ll need to tell the police about Mitchell and the pictures. If something happened to Lindsey, it would give them another motive to explore.”

Jill seemed to disappear into thought, and when she returned, she did so with a worried look on her face. “The evidence is gone. I’m sure of it,” Jill said. “Mitchell wouldn’t leave stuff lying around. It’ll be my word against his.”

“And being that you’re the daughter of the guy with a motive, your word isn’t going to be all that credible.”

“Not very credible at all,” Jill agreed.

“I’ll call Marvin and brace him. Lindsey’s mother should call the police.”

“What about Mitchell?” Jill protested. “If they keep looking at you, they’re going to miss something that will lead them to Lin. I just know it.”

“I don’t know anything about computers, Jill. I can work high-tech weapons blindfolded, but I can’t even get on the Internet without your help.”

“Wait here,” Jill said.

Tom watched her storm down the hallway and disappear into her bedroom. She emerged holding something white in her hand. Only when she got closer could Tom see that it was a business card.

Jill handed the card to Tom, then took a step back to wait for a reaction.

“The FBI?” Tom said. “I know this lady. How do you know her?”

“She gave a talk at our school about sexting and stuff.”

“Why’d she give you a card?”

“Lindsey and I went to see her after. We wanted to find out how somebody could have made it look like Lindsey was the one who wrote those blog posts.”

“And?”

Jill gave a quick, nearly imperceptible shrug. “She’s just really smart about this stuff. If there’s anybody who’d know how to recover evidence that Mitchell destroyed, it’s Special Agent Loraine Miles.”

Chapter 62

T
he room smelled of wet earth.

Lindsey cowered in the corner of a square, windowless space, twelve by twelve, if her measurements were right, with walls made of concrete bricks. She could stand if she wanted; only her wrists were bound. But she preferred to keep huddled in her makeshift nest. The smooth concrete floor slanted toward a drain in her corner of the room. Lindsey sat on top of that drain, imagining it could suck her through its tiny holes and spit her back outside. She could hear the trickle of a fast-moving stream beyond her prison walls, but only from that corner of the room. The darkness around her, enveloping and impenetrable, clung to her body and weighed her down with fear. The only door in, she knew, stayed locked from the outside.

She’d tried opening it with her feet but ended up scraping her back.

The cold earth seeped through the thin fabric of her clothes and chilled her skin. To keep warm, Lindsey sat on a nappy gray wool blanket that strangely reeked of fried grease.

She felt better now than before. She no longer believed her heart would keep beating faster and faster until it burst. She could breathe without hyperventilating. But she couldn’t speak or scream, not with the thick cloth gag in her mouth. Her throat still ached where she’d been choked. Her hips and knees were sore now, too, probably because she’d slept with her body all folded up. Her headache, throbbing and persistent before, had finally subsided some. But she could feel it starting to return. Her stomach rumbled, and the first pang of real hunger forced her onto her side.

Sounds came from outside the room, or was that her ears playing tricks?

Lindsey worked herself into a kneeling position, using her lateral muscles to lift herself off the floor. She listened, wondering now if the sound had just been her racing heart. She became disoriented, no longer sure of the location of the door. In the dark, the room became a seamless black void.

She heard the distinct sound of a padlock’s shackle being released. She shivered and turned her head in that direction, flinching when the latch was lifted.

A crack of sunlight soon appeared, painting the outline of a door. She stood, though worried her shaky legs would give out beneath her, and took a few steps toward the open door. In her mind this was a rescue. Her father would be standing in the doorway, arms outstretched, feeling about the darkness for his missing daughter. A lump formed in her throat. But the door opened slowly, without any urgency, allowing the rusted hinges to creak and groan. A fresh grip of fear kept Lindsey frozen to her spot on the floor.

The door opened some more.

Please be Daddy ... please....

Bright light flooded the room and shone on Lindsey’s face, blinding her completely. She heard the door slam shut and the fast shuffle of footsteps come toward her. Rough hands (a man’s, Lindsey thought) grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back to the floor. She felt a cloth being wrapped around her head, covering her eyes, secured in place by a tight knot tied by capable hands.

Something sharp, pointed, pressed against her neck.

A knife
.

Instinctively, she knew the blindfold was a good sign. It meant her captor didn’t want to be seen. Maybe because he planned to let her live.

“If you scream, I’ll cut your throat,” said a man. He spoke in a deep voice that would have been threatening even without the knife. She didn’t recognize his voice. The man undid her gag.

Lindsey sucked down her fear, working it into her stomach like something unpleasant she’d been forced to swallow. She managed to speak despite her quivering lips and fast-fluttering heart. “Please ... please just let me go.... I won’t say anything about the pictures.... Please ...”

“Are you hungry?”

Lindsey’s empty stomach grumbled and churned, as though answering for her. “How long have I been here? Why are you doing this to me?”

“I brought you some food.”

“Please, I just want to go home.”

“Do you have to use the bathroom?”

“What?”

“Do you have to use the bathroom?” the man repeated.

Lindsey realized that she did, the intense pressure building up. It would only get worse, until eventually she’d soil herself. “Yes,” Lindsey said in a shaky voice.

She heard the man set something down beside her. He grabbed her bound wrists and pulled her down, forcing her fingers to feel around the edges of the object he placed by her feet. Lindsey could tell by touch alone that it was a plastic bucket, the kind she once used to make sand castles at the beach.

“You can pee in this bucket. I’ll help you.”

Lindsey’s mind started to race. In a panic, she tried to back away, but the man grabbed hold and pressed the knife harder to her throat.

“Please. My parents will pay you money. They’ll pay to have me back. Please, mister, I just want to go home.”

Lindsey sensed something pulling on the front of her denim jeans, a single hand working to free the button from its hole. She shook with fear, hearing every single tooth of her zipper as they pulled apart. She felt the man’s hand exploring the contours of her slender waist. He maneuvered himself behind her. That same hand pulled the fabric down, moving from one side of her waist to the other, until he shimmied her jeans down around her ankles.