Hunted (Reeve Leclaire 2) (20 page)

Fifty thousand dollars.

That’s a fat sum, though god knows Terry’s parents can afford it. She sighs. Tempting as it sounds, it’s hardly worth the risk. . . . Is it?

She sips her tea and, pinching the edge of the paper, rereads the article, wondering if there’s a way she can get more out of this yet.

M
ilo Bender accelerates onto the freeway and asks, “Are you sure about this?”

Reeve gives him a sharp look. “The arrangements are made, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“When you can’t move forward, look behind, right?”

He gives her a sideways glance. “Okay, you’ve got me there.”

“Tell me about the new owners.”

“They’re a gay couple, seemed very nice on the phone. Educated, respectful. They know what happened. They’ve only been in the house about a year.”

“I was kind of hoping it would be vacant.”

“It was vacant for a while, but it’s a big place in a nice area. High demand, you know.” He gives a shrug. “The house has changed hands a few times since Flint lived there, apparently.”

She doesn’t say another word during the drive. She grips her hands in her lap. As they get closer, she begins massaging the numbness that runs from her wrist to the little finger of her left hand.

They exit the freeway and turn onto Twenty-third Avenue. She cringes when they pass the spot where the drunk driver smashed into her captor’s car, remembering the crash, the sounds of crunched metal and broken glass as she was flung about in the trunk. Then the night went still, with only the ticking of the hot car. She had filled her lungs and checked for blood, making sure she wasn’t dead, but stayed quiet, listening for her captor’s voice, expecting him to take charge, waiting for the engine to start up and the car to drive off. Instead, she heard a growing wave of strange voices, followed by sirens. And though it has been more than seven years, she recalls cowering in the trunk, afraid to shout for help.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly as Bender turns onto the road that winds through the arboretum, past the Japanese garden. Soon they’re cruising past houses with cartoonish black cats in the windows and ghosts haunting the trees.

“When is Halloween?” she asks.

“The day after tomorrow.”

“Crap. That’s not good.”

“Why?”

“With Flint out there? I hate to think about all those kids walking the streets after dark.”

Bender makes a
tsking
sound.

As he parks the car, she sits rigidly, staring out the window at the house. She has never seen it from the front other than in photographs and is surprised that the new owners have managed to make it appear attractive. It’s painted a sunny yellow. The massive hedges are gone, the gloomy trees have been cut back.

Bender puts a hand on hers. “You don’t have to do this, you know. No one expects this of you.”

“But I’ve got to,” she says without moving.

“No rush. Take your time.”

She rallies her courage, removes her jacket, and puts it on the backseat. “I won’t be needing this.”

A long walkway leads to a porch decorated with several pumpkins and bright pots of mums. The doorbell chimes and an Asian man opens the door to greet them. She studies him while introductions are made. He’s a pleasant-looking man, dressed in black jeans and a black sweater, just as she is. His name is Yoshi, so he’s clearly Japanese. She takes this as a good sign, given her study of the language and love of the culture.

He shows them inside to where he introduces his partner, Yev, a sharp-featured man sitting at a table covered in blueprints. Yev removes his reading glasses, stands, shakes hands, and is making genial remarks when his cell phone rings. He excuses himself, carrying his phone toward the back porch.

Reeve pictures rushing after him, fleeing the house out the back.

Be still,
she tells herself.

A delicious aroma fills the air as Yoshi leads them into a bright kitchen with shiny appliances. “Could I offer you something? Coffee or tea? A slice of homemade pumpkin pie?”

When they decline, Yoshi’s smile falters. He stands in awkward silence. Then, in a voice low as a whisper, he says to Reeve, “Mr. Bender explained to us that you’d like to look around. We are so, so sorry for what happened to you. Of course we saw it on the news. And we know the history of this house, which is why we’ve done so much remodeling. Anyway, we’re happy to help in any way we can.”

Reeve’s field of vision narrows on the door across the room. “I’m just here to see the basement.”

“Oh!” He looks from Reeve to Bender, who gives him a nod.

Yoshi hurriedly opens the door. “We almost never go down here.”

As they descend, the temperature drops. A step groans. Her throat constricts.

The three stand in a pool of cold air at the foot of the stairs. She turns away from them, studying the rows of neat crates that line the wall. “It feels smaller than before, with those shelves.”

“We put those in for storage.”

She looks at their expectant faces and says, “I’m going to need some privacy.”

“Of course. We’ll give you a minute,” Bender says.

“Uh, better make it thirty.”

“Oh.” Yoshi looks stricken. “Are you sure?”

Her mouth is dry. Her palms are wet. “I’m sure.” Turning her back, she closes her eyes and listens to their shoes ascend the stairs. As they reach the top, she calls, “Could you please shut off the light?”

“Oh! Really?”

The light goes out and the door closes. She braces herself, waiting for the
clink
of the keys and the sound of the lock. When it doesn’t come, she recreates it in her mind. And when she starts breathing again, she realizes she’s been holding her breath. She sniffs the air. The basement no longer carries her scent. Or his.

Not a basement, she corrects herself.
Torture chamber.

She turns in a slow circle, waving her hands in the air, seeing nothing. It feels so different. Wrong, somehow. . . . Too comfortable. She peels her sweater off over her head. Her skin chills, but it’s still not right, so she sits on the hard concrete floor and removes her boots, her socks, then stands again, feeling the shock of cold on the bare soles of her feet. She paces back and forth, her toes losing heat.

She hears the scrape of a chair overhead, then footsteps that are different from her kidnapper’s tread. She recalls the
thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk
of his pacing, the heavy way he walked on his heels. Each time his steps approached the basement door, she would freeze with dread, wondering whether he was bringing food or some new torment.

As the familiar darkness closes in, the pounding of her heart grows loud, and images flash behind her eyes—the tray of tools, the hooks in the ceiling— and she starts to hyperventilate. If she resisted, he would press the cruel prongs of the stun gun into her thigh and set her skin on fire.

His voice rasps in her ear: “Don’t you dare move. Not one chirp.”

She nearly swoons and reaches out to steady herself, locating the stairs without thinking. The second her fingertips touch the wood, her breath stops and her eyes go wide in the darkness.

Quickly, she steps around to the back of the stairs, where she gets down on her hands and knees. She feels along the underside of the third step from the bottom, and her fingertips touch the tiny gouges—still there—which she made years ago.

After her capture, she’d wanted to keep track of time, but when she first asked for pens and paper, Flint had refused. Eventually, he allowed her one pen, but he required her to always return the pen to its place at the top of the stairs, so that she would never have an opportunity to stab him.

Using the pen, she secretly started keeping this calendar. The first marks were sporadic and uneven. Over time, they became ordered into neat blocks of seven. She’d recalled her mother’s voice, reciting, “Thirty days hath September, April, May, and November. All the rest have thirty-one, save February, which has twenty-eight.”

Time shaped into weeks, months, and seasons as the basement warmed and cooled. On rare occasions, she latched onto clues to actual dates. He might bring down leftover turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving, or ham and cold mashed potatoes on Christmas. She faintly heard firecrackers popping on the Fourth of July.

But Flint never found her calendar. The underside of the stairs was her private territory.

Now her fingertips trace the little marks in the wood. The careful “X” on each day identified. “X-C” for Christmas. “X-TH” for Thanksgiving. “X-H” for Halloween, with long dashes indicating each day that Flint left her alone.

He was always gone for a few days around Halloween, leaving her with protein bars and a sack of fruit, returning with a bag of cheap candy. It was hard to gauge time without a clock, but she’d come to figure two bottles of water per day, and always felt a small rush of victory when Thanksgiving or Christmas arrived on the days expected.

Where did Flint go every year at Halloween? And what did he call it?

The pads of her fingers trace the markings made during those long, dreadful days, and she says the words out loud: “Halloween, Hallo-week . . .”

Her skin crawls.

She scoots out from beneath the stair, puts on her sweater, and climbs the staircase in the dark. Opening the door, she calls, “Agent Bender? Could you come down here, please? There’s something you need to see.”

Two minutes later, Bender is flat on his back, playing a flashlight beam across the underside of the stair.

“What is that?” Yoshi asks, bending for a closer look.

“A calendar”

Yoshi gasps and looks at Reeve with alarm.

“I’m sorry to tell you this,” Bender says to him, shimmying out from beneath the stairs, “but we’re going to need some tools. I’ve got to confiscate this board.”

M
ilo Bender places the board on the car’s backseat, reminds Reeve to buckle up, and speeds directly to the FBI Field Office, where he raps on Stuart Cox’s door, tips his head inside, and says, “You’re going to want to see this.”

Bender has wondered for years what more he could have done as an agent, how he might have connected Flint to any number of missing girls, and now he feels as though he’s holding the answer in his hands. This simple plank of wood holds something significant. He’s certain. It’s as unmistakable as the smell of death.

It doesn’t take long for Cox to assemble a group of agents, including Pete Blankenship, Nikki Keswick, and a few other faces that Bender recognizes. They take their seats in the conference room, casting questioning glances at the board and at Reeve.

“Quiet down,” Cox says, holding up his hands. He introduces Reeve, then holds up the board and sets it on the table in front of her, asking her to explain.

She speaks clearly as she describes where the board was located in the basement and how she kept track of her days of captivity. Meanwhile, someone arranges for the photos she has taken with her camera phone to appear on a large screen behind her. The scratches in the wood appear like hieroglyphs, and a buzz of interest rises while the board gets passed around the table.

“Reeve, tell them about the horizontal lines,” Bender says, pointing to the small, secret marks. “They seem especially significant.”

Reeve explains that the horizontal dashes designate prolonged periods of isolation. “He left behind food and water, but for two or three or four days at a stretch, Flint would simply disappear.”

Blankenship picks up the board and frowns. “Why wasn’t this brought to our attention before?”

“It was my case,” Bender says, rubbing his forehead and remembering how damaged and frail Reeve had seemed when they’d pulled her from the trunk of Flint’s car. Had he let her safe return overshadow everything else? “It’s my fault,” he says, “because I should have—”

“Milo, you didn’t prosecute the case or run the crime scene,” Cox says.

“Hey, I remember working that scene,” a man says with a note of defensiveness. “We searched that basement and recovered all kinds of weird stuff. Implements of torture, evidence of deprivation. We lifted fibers, prints, and DNA. It was a slam-dunk. No one ever said we needed to dismantle the friggin’ stairs.”

“I must have talked about it,” Reeve says, “but I’m not sure. There was so much going on during the trial, it’s kind of a blur.”

“Not the best prosecutor, either,” someone mutters.

“All right, people. We all know it takes a big team to handle a major crime scene,” Cox says, holding up his palms. “Let’s not waste time assigning blame. The point is, we’ve got something new here. Let’s examine what we’ve got.”

Reeve clears her throat. “If you want, I can reconstruct all the dates.”

T
he walls are lined with photographs. Reeve looks around, aghast. “All of these people are missing?”

Faces stare back at her from all sides. Cherubic toddlers. Wholesome, scrubbed schoolkids. Teens with bright, hopeful smiles. A few elderly people. There are individuals of all ages, some clearly loved and happy, others unkempt and discarded, with sad eyes and chipped teeth. “All of these people were kidnapped?”

“All missing,” Keswick corrects. “Some were kidnapped, no doubt. But the senior citizens are often Alzheimer’s patients who’ve wandered away, and they usually show up within a few days. Still”—she sighs—“some of these individuals have been missing for more than a decade, some longer than that.”

Reeve tries to speak but the words lodge in her throat.

Keswick waves broadly. “We’ve got parental kidnappings on this wall— custody issues, you know. And over here are the violent abductions.”

Reeve approaches that wall and leans in close, kneading her hands together, wondering how many of these people might still be alive. She searches their eyes, as though hoping to find some secret message. Each person seems so precious, caught in midbreath long ago. Laughing, smiling, unconcerned, wistful. There are snapshots of birthdays, and celebrations, and special events. Emotional, candid shots. Stiff portraits. A few are professional photographs, the subjects posing like models. But most are simply school pictures, taken for yearbooks and then shared like precious currency.