The Doll (47 page)

She dropped the .45. Scooped the Jericho. His gun leveled at the same time hers did. He knew she wouldn’t fire—not as long as he held the hostage as a shield—and she knew his aim and control would be off because he was forced to shoot one-handed to maintain his hold on a moving body.

Munroe braced for the hits. Hoped to be lucky enough to take the bullets in her torso where the jacket could still protect, where the odds of him connecting to the same spot another bullet had already struck were slim; and in that breath of resignation came another spray of red mist, from the man’s head, death that had not come from her.

Time, which had until now been held taut and captive, cut loose, unspooling like the snap of an overstrained cable. The thug collapsed, leaving the hostage standing alone, screaming, trying to escape from liquid and death, as if she might, by crawling out of her own skin, be let free of the moment. Her shock and terror chorused with that of the girl on the ground, all of this a deafening noise that penetrated Munroe’s senses for the first time.

Like a runner off the starting block, Munroe bolted through the maze of desks and passageways, catty-corner across the room to where she’d spotted that shadow of movement.

The space was empty.

She turned a slow circle. Scanning, searching, while the cries and wails of the teenagers filled the cavernous room in an echoed bounce-back.

By the foot of a chair she found a single ejected shell.

She reached for the metal piece, anger coursing.

He’d found his way from Milan. Had been here. Could have ended it all by killing the man who’d caused so much suffering but had instead allowed Neeva to die and, in what he would have seen as a noble gesture, saved Munroe’s life, taking from her any chance of peace. He could have killed his uncle. Put an end to the suffering. He’d had the power to let Neeva live and had not used it, and Munroe hated him for it.

She’d allowed him life, had given him a chance, but not for this.

Not for this
.

Munroe pocketed the casing as a memento, and before recrossing the room she peered into the gold shop. The woman behind the counter was dead, slumped against the wall with a single hole in her head.

A
T THE METAL
door to the dungeon, Munroe bypassed the teenagers, who, with the glassy-eyed daze of shock, attempted to wipe blood and body fluids off their hands and faces but only smeared and streaked them, making matters worse.

She motioned for them to follow her down to where she could hose them off, but they refused, and she didn’t force the issue.

The Doll Maker was dead. Four more of his thugs were dead. The lady in the gold shop was dead, but the gold workers would still come and there could be more of the Doll Maker’s army on the way. She wanted to get away before they arrived.

Downstairs, the child had stepped out of the cell and into the hall and Munroe found her staring at the dead guard. She flinched when Munroe approached, and so Munroe kept still, held out her hand, and gradually the child turned and reached for her fingers.

She led the little girl upstairs to the office with the dolls, where the child’s eyes lit up in response to the multitude of toys upon the shelves. Munroe picked up a life-size replica and handed it to her. Motioned for her to sit, and while the child stroked the hair and
dress with nearly the same reverence as the Doll Maker had once shown, Munroe tore through the drawers, searching for papers, for electronics, anything that might provide information on who the Doll Maker was or how he ran the operation.

She found nothing.

The teenagers came to the room and paused in the doorway.

Munroe hesitated. Stopped searching and stood upright, stepped around the desk and stretched out her hand for the child in the seat. When the girl scooted off and her feet met the ground, Munroe led her to the doorway, placed her hand in the hand of one of the older ones, and then took money from her pocket. Handed them each nearly a thousand euros and escorted them to the outside door, where they stood, a macabre sight, blinking in the early sunlight: the entire exchange and all intent communicated without words, without language.

Munroe waited until the girls had walked half the block and then shut the door, burdened with wanting to see their fate through, but that was beyond her. They would have to find their own way, would hopefully find the police, find someone who spoke their language, someone to whom they could tell their story and eventually lead truthseekers back to this place of evil. Barring that, and perhaps on top of that, she’d track down a local AP or Reuters correspondent and feed enough information for someone who truly wanted a story to find one.

Munroe returned slowly, cautiously to where Neeva lay.

Stood over her.

Knelt.

The girl’s eyes were closed, her face, untouched by the carnage, was placid. If Munroe searched for it, a smile lay beneath the calm, and in death, even without any hair, Neeva looked every inch the doll that this insanity had tried to make her. Her near-final words tumbled over and over inside Munroe’s head until she finally spit them out in a whisper to purge them:
I never wanted anything so badly as I want to finally be able to do something to someone who’s hurt me
.

With the floor hard against her knees, Munroe leaned forward to untangle Neeva from the Doll Maker’s arms and then she stopped. It felt a violation of everything sacred to leave her there, enmeshed
in this travesty, but it was the way things had to be. Without disturbing the scene, Munroe stretched out farther and pressed her lips to Neeva’s forehead.

By the strength of my hand I have done it
.

“In death, maybe peace,” she whispered, and stood.

Turned her back on the scene and headed to the front, to the gold shop door, dialing Bradford as she walked away.

Munroe stepped from carpeted Jetway into carpeted terminal with nothing for luggage but the satchel filled with the few items she’d accumulated in the week since Neeva’s death.

She’d been in the United States for two days and was only now returning to Dallas, to the closest thing she had to home. Hadn’t spoken to or heard from Bradford in the several hours since she’d texted the information for her connecting flight out of Denver, but he’d be waiting, she knew, on the other side of the revolving doors.

After leaving Neeva, after calling Bradford and letting him know she was alive and coming home, she’d placed a call to the Reuters office in Zagreb, allowed twenty minutes, then followed with a second to the American embassy.

The news of the bloody scene spread quickly along the wires, and before long, visuals made it to televisions across the globe. In the absence of detail, speculation ran high, and with the graphic images accompanying Neeva’s discovery, it would be several weeks at least before the frenzy died.

With the death of the Doll Maker and so many of his lieutenants, his right-hand man vanished, and the dismantling of the U.S.-based side of operations, it would be a while, if ever, before the organization got back into the business—although, in a world that
funneled billions of dollars into the war on drugs and only a pittance to combat the invisible, safer, and more profitable business of moving human chattel, with traffickers and slave owners risking so little in providing women to feed rapacious appetites, there would be others—there would always be others—to take up the slack.

Munroe had taken the first train to Ljubljana, and there waited out the tedious and time-consuming aspects of reporting a stolen passport and gathering documentation to acquire a new one—a real one. And once she had it, had caught the first flight back to the United States.

She’d bypassed Dallas for Aspen, where the Tisdale parents were staying; had arrived unannounced. Cautious, guarded, they’d welcomed her into their home, and in their formal living room, separated by an oversize coffee table, she had laid out the details of what had happened after Neeva skipped from the consulate in Nice; told them of the trafficking network and why Neeva had been kidnapped; detailed the reasons their daughter had chosen the path she had. What she offered was a small consolation, if any, for the loss of a child, but the details of Neeva’s revenge, details the media and the world would never have, were all she’d had to give.

The Tisdale parents, seated together on the sofa, leaned into each other with as much poise as circumstances allowed. Judith had done much of the talking, perhaps not so much an exchange of truth but an unburdening in the way a patient might to a therapist. Filled in the gaps, the specifics Neeva had dodged around, the horrors of the brutal attack that had taken place when the girl was fourteen, and the ways in which this had transformed her life and logic.

Having delivered what she’d come to offer, having listened to a mother’s tears, Munroe made the return to Dallas. She spotted Bradford through the glass before she reached the door: leaning back against a near wall, arms crossed and body relaxed, with only the movement of his eyes to reveal how focused he was on what went on around him—so typically Bradford that she wanted to laugh for nothing more than the relief that she was here again and weep, knowing the relief wouldn’t last.

She pushed through the door and he smiled. Studied her, watched her. After she took several long strides he straightened off
the wall to meet her halfway. The world continued on—suitcases and shoes, announcements and baggage carousel alarms, a congestion of people—while he wrapped his arms around her, put her head to his shoulder, and held her there for a long, long time.

At last she raised her head, drew in a breath, and said, “Let’s go.”

That’s when she first noticed the stricken look on Bradford’s face, the one he’d masked so well in his smile of greeting.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Logan? Samantha? Alexis?”

He shook his head. “Nothing like that. It can wait.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, but in response, he put his hand to the small of her back and guided her toward the exit and the parking garage.

“Please tell me,” she said.

“I will, but I want to take you home first.”

Home
.

Munroe didn’t press Bradford for more details. If for just this one day she could have peace in place of the anxiety, if just for today she had a home, she’d wait for whatever he had to say. Side by side, steps in sync, they walked in silence to Bradford’s truck.

H
OME WAS NORTH
,
outside the metro area, where land was still plentiful and towns were still towns and the urban sprawl hadn’t yet overrun the miles, although the sprawl was definitely creeping in. Home was a five-bedroom ranch-style house, recently built to Bradford’s specs, set on fifteen acres. And because Bradford spent more time away from home than in it, home was cared for by a full-time housekeeper and her husband, both of whom had been with Bradford for years and who now lived in a smaller place of their own at the back of the property.

Bradford pulled into the half-circle drive that fronted the house, and Felecia opened the front door before they’d reached it. She smiled at Munroe and welcomed her back, and Bradford waited only long enough for the niceties before playfully nudging Munroe along toward the bedroom. Once across the threshold, he picked her up, shut the door with his foot, and tossed her onto the bed.

Munroe laughed, and he smiled and stood, studying her.

“What?” she said.

“It’s good to see you laughing.”

“You worry too much,” she said.

He knelt on the bed. Leaned over her. “I don’t think I worry enough,” he said. “And, God, I missed you.”

I
N THE ROOM
,
time lost meaning, and all the words left unspoken, all the fears pushed down, and the anguish and the heartache, the losses and the pain, faded away for those hours that the outside world ceased to exist.

T
HEY STOOD IN
the kitchen, the island between them, sipping wine and picking at the food on a tray that Felecia had prepared.

Munroe said, “So are you going to tell me?”

Bradford poured another glass. Didn’t ask for clarification; they both knew what she meant. He said, “I’ve lost track of Kate.”

Munroe stopped with a cracker halfway into her mouth. “She’s out of prison?”

“After the explosion at the office I had to call on my guys for help in running things so I could get to Alexis …” He paused and let the rest of the explanation falter.

She put fingers to his cheek. “Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

“I hate knowing she’s the only one who’s walked away from this a winner.”

With a glass of wine in one hand and his hand in the other, Munroe tugged Bradford back toward the bedroom. “She hasn’t won yet, and if she does win at all, it’ll be a Pyrrhic victory.”

Bradford paused and his expression shadowed. He pulled her back and held her tight. Whispered, “Don’t say it, okay? I know what’s coming and I don’t want to hear it. Not tonight. Tomorrow maybe, but not tonight.”