The Stolen Hours

by Allen Eskens

  When Gavin stepped forward, Niki watched Sadie’s face in the glass, looking for any sign of recognition and seeing none. Sadie closed her eyes as though trying to conjure up the memory of the man in the salon chair. When she opened them again, she shook her head no and said, “Okay.”

  Number six took his turn and obviously struck no chord with Sadie.

  “I’m not sure,” she said when he stepped back. “I didn’t look at the man straight on. He was sitting in the chair. I saw him in the mirror and from the side. Can I have them…maybe turn to the side?”

  “Absolutely,” Niki said, relieved.

  The jailer had each one step forward and turn to the left and then to the right. Again, Sadie paused on number two and number four. When they were finished, her gaze bounced back and forth between those two men.

  Niki handed a piece of paper to the jailer. “Ask them each to say these words.”

  The jailer read the sentence on the paper, and then cued the intercom. “Number one, please step forward and repeat the following phrase: ‘All you had to do was be nice.’”

  Niki watched Gavin’s eyes and saw fear flash in them. He’d replaced his practiced expression of boredom with what looked to be concentration.

  The men, one by one, followed the jailer’s instructions, repeating the phrase that the man who had called himself Kevin had said to Sadie. When number two and number four said the words, Niki saw, in Sadie’s reflection in the glass, a hint of disappointment.

  “Number five?”

  Gavin Spencer stared at the wall ahead of him, intensely focused. Niki could almost read his mind. He’s trying to cure his lisp.

  Gavin hesitated just enough to expose his struggle. Then he spoke. “All you had to do…wasch be nische.” His words fell thick and wet to the floor.

  Sadie inhaled sharply, her eyes wide with fear. She put her hands on the glass, her face only an inch away as she studied Gavin Spencer. Then she stepped back, almost stumbling, to put distance between herself and the man on the other side of the glass.

  “That’s him! That’s the man,” she said in sharp, breathless shots. “I’m sure of it. But…his hair—he had hair.”

  “You’re telling me that number five is the man who came to your salon yesterday evening?”

  “Yes.” Sadie trembled as she spoke.

  “The man who told you his name was Kevin?”

  “Yes, that’s him.” Sadie began to hyperventilate, and Niki eased her into a chair in the corner. “Just breathe, Sadie. You’re okay.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t…”

  “I’ll get you some water. I’ll be right back.”

  Niki stepped out of the viewing room, into the hall where Matty waited. She looked at him, smiled, and said, “He’s our guy.”

  Chapter 21

  Two days later, on Thursday morning, Lila began her day in Andi Fitch’s office, sitting with her back straight and knees together, a stack of files on her lap. She took notes on a legal pad, trying her best to write as fast as Andi spoke. Lila looked the part of a professional, but inside she felt like a child running to keep up with the long strides of a parent.

  “They have a guy named Gavin Spencer in custody. His first appearance is set for eleven. Put a rush on this.” Andi handed the file to Lila. “There’s not much to work with. I’m meeting with the detectives in an hour, and I want you there.”

  Gavin Spencer’s file was the last case that they discussed that morning, but with the clock ticking toward his first appearance in court, it would be the one that Lila would start on. She went to her office and gave the file a quick read-through and saw that Andi was right—there wasn’t much there. A woman named Sadie Vauk had been pulled from the Mississippi River unable to stand or talk. Although she had no memory of the attack itself, she identified Spencer as the man she had been with prior to blacking out.

  Then Lila read that investigators were testing Ms. Vauk’s blood because they believed she had been given a date-rape drug. A shiver ran through Lila’s body. She knew in that second that this would not be just another file. She took in every word of the police report, letting her mind paint the picture of what happened to Sadie Vauk. She read between the lines, searching for the smallest detail, anything that might pull her into the mind of Gavin Spencer and offer up a clue about the monster beyond the page.

  Surveillance footage showed an older black SUV near the scene where Vauk had been abducted and also near where they believe she was put into the river. Spencer owned a black Ford Bronco, but detectives had not yet been able to locate it. One neighbor thought she saw Spencer drive by in his Bronco around seven o’clock the night of the abduction, but she wasn’t sure.

  They had searched his home but found nothing to link him to the crime. Lila read the reports again, hoping that she may have missed something: some tiny drop of semen on the girl, or maybe a strand of her hair at Spencer’s house, but other than Vauk picking Spencer out of a lineup, the investigators had come up empty. And after his arrest, Spencer invoked his right to remain silent.

  Lila typed up a skeletal outline of the complaint and headed to the meeting—hoping the detectives might bring something to bolster the case.

  The conference room in the County Attorney’s Office had two walls lined with old law books, decorations from an era when you needed more than fingers on a mouse to find a statute, but it gave the room character. A long oval table took up the majority of the room, and in the corner, a single plant—a dusty silk ficus—stood as a sad witness to the many serious conversations that room had held.

  In the months that she had worked under Oscar Hernandez, Lila had never once been asked to sit in on a meeting in the conference room. Her eagerness caused her to be the first to arrive, so she took a seat and waited.

  A few minutes later, she heard two voices approaching, a man and a woman, chatting about where to buy the better coffee. When they walked in, Lila recognized the woman and held out a hand. “Lila Nash, I’m working with Andi on this case.”

  “Niki Vang.” The detective shook hands with Lila. “And this is Detective Mateo Lopez.”

  “Matty.” The detective gave Lila a kind smile as they shook.

  Lila turned her attention back to Niki. “I believe we’ve met before—kind of. The Ben Pruitt case?”

  Lila watched as recognition slowly took hold, although Lila didn’t know whether this was a good thing or bad. Niki Vang and her then-partner, Max Rupert, had been the investigators on the Pruitt case, and Lila had been at counsel table with Boady Sanden as he picked their case apart.

  To Lila’s great relief, Niki’s face lit up. “Lila Nash. Of course. I thought the name sounded familiar.” They took seats, leaving an empty chair for Andi. “I haven’t seen you around here before,” Niki said. “You just start?”

  “They had me in White Collar since March. I just started with Andi this week.”

  Niki looked at Gavin Spencer’s file in front of Lila. “What do you think of this one?”

  Lila almost answered honestly but thought better of it and said, “The lineup is strong?”

  “I think so,” Niki said. “The victim had a visceral reaction once she recognized him.”

  Lila thought about asking Niki to clarify what she meant by “once she recognized him,” but Andi entered before she could, nodding to Niki and Matty as she joined them at the table.

  “What have you got for me?” Andi said.

  The detectives shared a glance before Niki spoke. “I wish we could say we have a lot more than what we had yesterday, but…” Niki slid a piece of paper to Andi. “We had them rush the tox report and they confirmed the presence of GHB—enough to incapacitate a person.”

  “Any GHB in the house?” Andi asked.

  Matty said, “Crime scene techs covered every inch. Didn’t find a thing.”

  Andi laced her fingers into a church and steeple and touched them to her chin, her gaze fixed on the middle of the table as she concentrated. “Maybe the house
isn’t the crime scene.”

  “We’re pretty sure it is,” Niki said. “Gavin went to the salon at six o’clock on Monday. Add up how long it might take to slip the victim the drug and get her home and we’re looking at about an hour. We have a neighbor saying that she thought she saw the black Bronco drive by around seven. It fits.”

  “Did he take his phone to the salon? Can we trace his whereabouts?”

  Niki shook her head. “As far as we can tell, the phone never left the house.”

  Andi leaned in, keeping her focus on that same spot. “What about computer forensics?”

  “Odd thing there,” Matty said. “Preliminary forensics show that the guy used his home computer that day—looking up email and stuff, nothing that helps us—but we couldn’t find a router. He used the internet but had no connection. We think he threw the router away as part of the cleanup. If nothing else, it suggests he had something to hide—that he knew we were coming.”

  Andi looked up from the table. “So, what we have so far is a missing router, a woman with GHB in her system who claims to have been with Spencer just before she lost her memory, and a black truck that we can’t find.”

  Niki leaned in as if to match Andi’s posture. “Sadie Vauk didn’t knowingly take GHB—we are sure of that. It causes amnesia going forward in time, not back, so we can get an expert to testify that the gap in her memory would have started shortly after she ingested the drug. Gavin Spencer was the only person around.”

  Andi looked at Niki. “It’s circumstantial.”

  “We have evidence of sexual trauma,” Niki said. “And she sure as hell didn’t jump in the river of her own volition.”

  Andi shook her head slowly. “You have enough to get past probable cause, but proving it beyond a reasonable doubt is going to be tough.”

  “There’s something else,” Niki said. “We think he’s done this before.”

  As Lila listened to the conversation about GHB, her throat had grown tight, and she gave her head an almost imperceptible shake as if to push the feeling away.

  Niki opened a folder and slid a picture of a young woman across the table to Andi. “This is Eleanora Abrams. Her body was found in the Mississippi River six years ago in St. Paul. They found signs of sexual assault, although her body was pretty beat up—postmortem. She likely went into the river above the falls, just like Sadie Vauk.”

  Matty picked it up from there. “She had GHB in her system, but the ME couldn’t say definitively if it was produced by her body or if it came from an outside source.”

  Niki pulled a second photo out and gave it to Andi. “This is Virginia Mercotti. She was pulled out of the river at Gorge Park four years ago. Same MO: sexual trauma, fully clothed, and elevated levels of GHB, source undetermined.”

  Andi put the two pictures beside one another on the table, “before” pictures of the two young women smiling at the camera, oblivious to the horrific turn their lives were about to take.

  Niki slid a third picture across the table. “Two years ago. Her name is Chloe Ludlow. Found her floating in Ford Parkway. We believe all three were put into the river upstream of the falls. None of them had defensive wounds or ligature marks. All three had elevated levels of GHB, and we can prove that Ms. Ludlow’s GHB came from an external source.”

  Andi laid the picture of the third victim next to the others. “Do we have a connection between these women and Spencer?”

  “Not yet,” Niki said. “We focused on getting him off the streets. The guy has money—well, his mother has money. Either way, he’s a flight risk. We didn’t want to give him a chance to run.”

  Andi tapped a finger lightly on the picture of Virginia Mercotti as she considered what to do. “Will you be able to shore up the case for Vauk? I can get a judge to sign the complaint, but in front of a jury…”

  Matty said, “We’re waiting for the forensics on some hair and fingerprints from the salon, but to be honest, we don’t hold out much hope for a match. This guy was pretty thorough.”

  “We’re looking for his Bronco,” Niki said. “They found a tire print on Nicollet Island, so we may get something there.”

  Andi looked at Lila. “Arrange a meeting with Ms. Vauk. I want to see what kind of a witness she’ll be. I’ll charge this out, but I’m telling you now, if this is all we have to give a jury, he may walk.”

  Chapter 22

  The jail smelled of old sweat and dust, and it clattered with the voices of unbathed men socializing in the common area as if it were just another Thursday morning. Gavin awoke from sleeping on a concrete bed for a second night, although to call it sleep would be overstating it. The grind of his thoughts kept him awake through most of the night, as did the tormented howls of one of his neighbors down the row.

  It angered Gavin to be in jail, not so much for the loss of his freedoms but because Detective Vang had slipped one past him. Summoning his lisp to clench the lineup had been a smart move, and in doing so, Niki had proved herself a worthy opponent. Finding a way to put Vang in the river would become a special project for Gavin once he got out.

  He was also angry to be there because of someone as common as Sadie Vauk. He should have kept his mouth shut that night. Exposing his lisp to her, even if what he said had been a truth she needed to hear, had been a lapse in judgment, and he could not afford such mistakes.

  When he’d first arrived in jail, Gavin introduced himself to the inmate residing in the cell next to his, a guy in his forties named Gideon Doss, who had a tattoo of a dragon that snaked up his pale left arm. Doss seemed peaceful enough, even though he had once done a four-year stint in Stillwater for—as he put it—beating the tar out of a spic. His current charge was stabbing his cousin over a girl. He wasn’t one of the chatty ones, which Gavin appreciated, and he came across as a bit of a dullard, which Gavin suspected might come in handy for him.

  Gideon took pride in having been through the system before, and he warned Gavin about going to his bail hearing without an attorney. “It’s not fair,” he said. “They have lawyers talking about why you need to stay in jail, and you ain’t got nobody to talk for you. And once your bail’s set, it’s near impossible to get it changed.”

  But for Gavin, choosing an attorney was the cornerstone of his plan. It had to be a certain type of attorney. Gavin had the resources to hire the best in the Twin Cities, but he didn’t need the best. He didn’t even need competent. What he needed was an attorney who would take orders, one willing to bend a rule here or there. It would take some time to find the right man—and it would be a man. Gavin’s mother had long ago shown him to never trust a woman.

  Around ten-thirty that morning, a jailer came to his cell and handed Gavin some papers. “Be ready for court in ten minutes.”

  The first document was a complaint, charging him with various levels of attempted murder, criminal sexual assault, and kidnapping—eight counts in all. If they thought this might ruin his day, they were wrong. He needed the charges to be heavy for the next phase of the plan. The second document was a bail study recommending that Gavin be held without bail. That too was part of the plan.

  He rolled the papers into a scroll and made his way to the pod entrance, waiting there while the jailer gathered five others. After being cuffed at the wrist and shackled around the ankles, the six men, wearing orange jumpsuits, orange socks, and orange sandals, marched through the underground tunnel that led to the Government Center. On the third floor, they were ushered into a courtroom through a special side entrance and told to sit in the jury box, where they would await their respective hearings.

  Gavin had never been in a courtroom before, although he had imagined it—planned for it—a thousand times. He looked around at the laminate tables, the gray carpeting, and the cheap ceiling tile, and he felt disappointed. Where was the majesty? Remove the judge’s bench and the gallery pews and the room could just as well be cold storage. It was hardly a venue befitting the intrigue he had planned in the coming days.

  People
who he assumed were attorneys walked in and out with the casual gait of shoppers at a farmers’ market. Where was the drama? Shouldn’t these attorneys be under some modicum of stress? They were dealing with people’s lives—their freedoms—and not a one of them seemed to have a worry in the world. But then it occurred to Gavin that for them this is just another day at the office. Convictions and prison sentences were just words when you weren’t the one sitting in the box. And at the end of the day, the lawyers all went home.

  Gavin settled into his chair and watched the goings-on, soon figuring out which table belonged to the prosecutors and which was reserved for defense attorneys. Prosecutors occupied the farther table, sitting like lords of the manor as they received a host of groveling defense attorneys whispering their requests with bowed backs.

  One of the prosecutors, a younger woman who seemed less involved than the others, sat in the gallery just behind the others and held a single file on her lap. She read a document from that file over and over. Something about her held Gavin’s attention—the way her nose curved, or the line of her chin. He couldn’t put his finger on where or when, but he had seen her before.

  The bailiff called for everyone in the room to rise.

  A grim-faced woman with gray hair and a black robe entered and took a seat behind the bench. An administrator to her left handed her a stack of files, and she lifted the top one and called, “State of Minnesota versus Gavin Spencer.”

  The sound of his name announced like that, official and damning, jarred him a bit. He stood, and the jailer pointed for Gavin to walk up to a podium in front of the judge’s bench.

  “Sir, please state your name for the record,” the judge said.

  “My name is Gavin Spencer.” The words slogged through the muck of his slur, causing the judge to pause as though she needed a second to understand—even though the file with his name on it lay right in front of her.