by a b
She heard the second door open, but not a sound of Blue approaching, before his arms were wrapped around her picking her up. “We don’t want you laying cold on the floor dear.”
Laura hadn’t noticed any change in the ambient light of the room as he’d entered. She concluded that it must be nighttime. All she needed was ten more minutes alone. Blue hadn’t checked her restraints and he headed for the door. Laura breathed a sigh of relief. It was the kind of sound that a predator’s ears drank in like nectar. Blue turned at the door to enjoy one last look at the captive. He was about to leave when he stopped focusing on the area that Laura had been laying. It was impossible that he could see the sharp splinter of imperfection on the floor between them.
But Laura saw him process the new information, like inside of his head the connections clicked like tumblers on a lock. His expression seemed locked in a battle between anger and pleasure. Then he relaxed, deciding on a neutral expression that was more ominous in its omission of his intentions than any snarl could have been. “My precious little darling, I’ve just been told a story of a naughty, naughty girl who wouldn’t go to bed.” His steps were heavy on the floor as he charged across the room.
A thought flashed across Laura’s mind, “This can only work two ways,” and she curled up protectively.
“Busy, busy, busy.” Blue’s voice grew excited. He grabbed her arms wrenching them farther behind her back rubbing them against the ropes that had relaxed, but still held her arms. The pressure from his grip was intense, and her tendons strained.
Her legs were coiled into her stomach ready to strike. She wanted to wait until he turned to get a shot at a tear of his ACL, but the relentless pain of his grip pushed her to act. Her heel separated the cartilage in Blue’s left knee. He let loose with a cry of savage and somewhat gratifying pain. “Sick bastard, so far so good.” She rolled off the bed and balanced momentarily on one leg, ready to strike another blow. “Now do I take the extra time to stomp on his throat until he’s dead, or just run?” she thought, regaining her balance. Laura saw Blue rolling on the ground and recoiled. She decided that since killing him would require touching him again, it wasn’t worth it.
Laura crouched low and with a burst of speed she was out the door. Her shoulders bumped the walls, coming to an abrupt stop. Laura found herself in a box corridor, the size of an outhouse with another locked door staring her in the face. She heard Blue gain his feet in the room behind her. He was getting up a lethal head of steam hobbling for the door. Laura had never been a fan of bullfighting, but the principle lent itself to so many real world applications. Blue burst through the doorway. A puff of air crossed her face and she slipped into his outstretched arms surprising him with no resistance. She planted her left leg as a pivot and Blue spun around. Now she could use all that extra momentum, her shoulder pushed into his chest and they both went flying into the locked outer door.
Light washed over them in a flash. It wasn’t night. Bright sunlight bathed her face. Her eyes blinked in the midday sun for a moment cut into geometric patterns falling over her body by fast moving shadows of bodies standing over her. She realized that several men surrounded her. A hood dropped over her head. Multiple sets of hands held her down. Blue’s voice had a raspy echo of recent pain.
“I told you to be ready for this. This one is a wildcat.” They picked her up by her bound arms and grappled with her free legs. Laura struggled fiercely. She landed another kick into soft muscle, probably thigh or stomach and heard a satisfying grunt accompany the concussion. She thought for a second and realized that this crew wanted her looking pretty. No bruises, no cuts or scrapes, and they all had on their soft hands because of it. If she’d had use of her hands, she knew this would be a different fight.
Laura had been trained to fight. She freed her left leg, faked a thrust with the foot and then brought her knee squarely crashing into a very square jaw. She felt saliva and with a little luck maybe even blood spatter her stomach. This was turning out better than she’d thought. A totally different voice whispered in her ear as her pants were stripped from her. “I’ll shove this up you and carry you like a Popsicle back to bed if you don’t stop struggling.” She felt the threat of a long cold metallic shaft, a baseball bat, against her thigh. Something in the tone told her that his threat was mixed with sick fantasy. He desperately wanted to make good on it. She relaxed.
“Fucking bitch,” was a mainstay of the conversation between the men as they tucked her back into her bed. It was like the personal pronoun “she” had been replaced with “Fucking bitch,” like a sentence couldn’t be made without it. Surgical straps of woven Kevlar now secured her every limb. “Make it tighter.” The voice was shushed, but he kept going “I lost a tooth.” Laura smiled under the hood. It was the last honest smile she’d manage for some time.
Chapter 12 Brief
Legacy watched Wagner put down the brief and look across the table. Legacy kept himself detached from the emotions building behind Wagner’s eyes. He had a knack for acting like he truly didn’t care what anyone thought of him. It was Oscar worthy if it was an act. He could see that Wagner clearly was not impressed with what she’d read.
“What dartboard did you throw at to put together this - ?” She waited for a sign that Legacy was even listening.
“Report?” “Crap.” Legacy sighed with disappointment. They’d given him a knife with a sharp edge on one side and a dull one on the other. He needed her to see the other side of the criminal and she simply didn’t see it. It was a waste of time to explain, but the young agent demanded it.
“Let’s start with vague.” She rustled to the front page of the document. Wagner read Legacy’s break down of the Vinyl Men.
They were rebels, but now they’re on a tight schedule. The clock plays a very important role in their apparatus. There are no glitches, nothing is ever late. The organization is precise, no exceptions.
“So we look for people who shouldn’t have a schedule, who adhere to a very tight schedule now.” Wagner’s tone told him she saw nothing of value in the point. “Why not say they’re a highly efficient drill team who have relaxed into the porn industry.”
“This group is on a tight leash, and nothing about their behavior in front of the camera strikes me as professional training. They are being forced into a very tight mold.” Legacy looked at Wagner’s eyes, they were not receiving. The savant string quartet that Legacy played behind their conversation left a metallic, tortured feeling in the air.
“So we want to find a guy that looks at his watch all the time? I must admit, I had been expecting brilliant.”
“We want to find a group of guys that look at their watches all the time.” Legacy turned up a screeching violin solo performed by a person who seemed to think that the bow and a band sander carried the same subtle musical nuances.
“Now we go from general to ridiculously specific in the span of two paragraphs.”
“I like those two paragraphs.”
“Blue is impotent?”
“Most likely.”
“Do you have a personal relationship with him that I don’t know about?”
“And he’s had treatment for it. He’s far too angry at others for this to be a private matter.” His mind jumped forward as he heard his own words, what was he like privately? There was so much public about his persona, what was it like when he was not presenting himself to others? Legacy thought it was much different from what he was showing the world.
“Legacy?” Legacy snapped out of his trance, Wagner wore annoyed crease on her forehead. A photographer would have loved to capture her face in that moment, he thought. But before he could go off on another tangent Wagner poured out a frustrated bluster of mumble and murmur “that’s five minutes of my life you’ve been wasting staring at the table. I keep thinking that you’ll speak soon. That it’s just a skip in the record, then you sit there longer. I really should bring some kind of senseless time consuming hobby for times like these.”
&n
bsp; “Like scrap booking?”
“It works for millions.”
“Blue’s behavior parallels the point brought up by the – adult actress we interviewed. He’s the one controlling the camera, and he puts it down when he enters the action. Blue has too many control issues for me to believe that this is his first solution for his lifetime of embarrassment in front of women. He has tried everything violent to make himself feel like more of a man. He must have tried other things.”
“And he found this? None of this is in your report, none of the justifications or explanations. Why don’t you put any of your reasons in the report?”
He shifted in his seat looking at the pictures on the wall. The collage of images formed a clear picture somehow, like a Mazaika photo mosaic in which a larger image is comprised of thousands of complete smaller images. It seemed like the more he explained the details of his view, the less people understood the larger image he had in his mind. The picture Legacy could see had some solid certainties, that were like the lines of greatest contrast in a developing photo. They might be incomplete, they might be misleading, but the full picture would come in time.
Legacy’s mind in this analogy worked like an old fashion flashbulb, a tangled course of razor thin distinctions and he couldn’t believe anyone could sort them out other than himself. Thus putting details of his thought process in the report merely prolonged misunderstanding. Legacy knew the people reading this initial document would not trust his conclusions anyway.
“I shouldn’t have to, I am not here to convince you, agent.” That could have come out better, Legacy admitted to himself. The veteran of over a thousand arguments with Chess, he should have recognized the warning signs. It was not the right thing to say, however, especially because he knew how authority affected Wagner, and the mood of the room changed sharply.
Wagner steadied herself then asked, “Can you explain the location section?”
“I can.” The violins were screeching over Wagner’s shoulder.
‘Thank God.”
“How about if we save those thanks for Laura’s homecoming.” Legacy spoke in the tone of a psychologist for the rest of their conversation. He connected the impossibly obscured dots of his Rorschach test report for Wagner. Her mood brightened considerably as Legacy explained that the contents of the paper were bold assertions without basis, rather they were well thought out assertions that obeyed the questionable physics of Legacy’s insight. By the time Legacy dismissed her, she wore a look of relief on her face. She said she was going home, but Legacy knew she would pass his report up the chain of command the second she cleared the doorframe.
Chapter 13 The Location Section
Director Robert Doorner sat in a dark briefing room. The shadow from a desk lamp cut across his face so that only his mouth and chin were visible to the other members of the committee that he was addressing. Director Doorner was all about straight lines. His suit was pressed at right angles on his strict instructions. His hair stood at attention in a short military cut, even the surface of his coffee was not disturbed at all as he picked it up with a rock steady hand.
“Deputy Wilkes, I see one or two points of interest in this report, but I certainly do not understand why this warrants a top level meeting. There is nothing in these pages is that I would call a solid lead.” The frustration of a father crept into his voice as he addressed the assembly. ‘That goes for everyone at this table. If you are all presenting your best men’s best work, you’d better think about a career change, gentlemen. This matter is not about my daughter, it is about the security of the greatest nation on this planet and if that is compromised-”
Deputy Wilkes cleared his throat. “It is Legacy’s contention that they are in a remote location.”
“How the hell does that help us?”
“It speaks to the frame of reference of their leader. He feels comfortable in outlying areas.” Wilkes took a drink of water. “It is also postulated that there is another victim out there, the first victim of this crime. If we can find her, we may have better information to follow. Legacy is convinced that they made their biggest mistakes with her.”
“And will any of this find my daughter in 10 hours or less?”
All the people in the room understood the time reference. The sites from which the Vinyl Men were broadcasting had posted that Tracy’s ransom had been met ahead of time, and they announced the day and time of the next “initiation”. It was the point in the “show” when the two girls met for a short time. It was a personal and psychological touch that blurred the line between victim and captor. It was the last chance for the outgoing victim to make the money for her ransom and, as such, had a truly disturbing quality.
The previous initiations had been the worst combination of one of the girls at her most innocent and the other at her most desperate. There were so many ugly moments with this case but initiation was the only act of pure betrayal. It was the only sex act that all of the previous victims singled out in their reports. It tore them apart to do to another unsuspecting person what had been done to them, to take away the dignity that had been taken away from them. Doorner wanted with every fiber of his being to be able to save his daughter from the lifelong curtain that the experience would bring with it.
“I need information that gives results now. You’re wasting my time – this is your guy Wilkes, your brilliant guy. What’s his timetable with – this?” He picked up the report with a sweep of his hand. “How can all of this lead to an arrest in twelve hours?”
Wilkes shifted in his chair. “He’s working in a time window of two weeks. He wants to be there when the next girl is abducted, get everyone home safely.” Wilkes knew that even with the cushion of his daughter’s safety, there were going to be expectations hitting the wall, hard.
Doorner seethed at the news. “Two weeks is acceptable to your man?”
An officer chimed in from along the table. “We’re working on a timetable of hours not days.”
Doorner stood in a quick motion. “That was the message of yesterday’s briefing.” He made a straight line for the door. He paused after he’d crossed the threshold then leaned back into the room. It was a startlingly awkward diagonal for the man.
“Does he believe in his timetable, agent?” he asked.
Walker nodded. “To my best knowledge, he believes he can get them at the next abduction.”
“Agent Legacy’s reports come directly to my office – before they’re proofread – before they’re typed.” A stutter step into the room made him look suddenly older that his years. “I don’t like what he says, but I recognize that he’s telling me what he believes and not what I want to hear.”
It was like the entire briefing room was empty the second he left. He was a man of great substance, and it was only fitting that he left emptiness behind him.
Agent Bailey took a long last draw on a gold tipped cigarette. He crushed it out in the ashtray on his desk, where the remnants of other brands littered the bowl. Every cigarette was a reminder of how unique he was. What a delightful stagnant smell to the room, he thought. His control over his environment was a point of great pride. That reminded him that the phone would be ringing soon. His wife always called him before he left the office to remind him to return the baking pan that he took to work that day. Today it was a honey walnut crème baked into vanilla marble cake. He’d eaten half of the pan before it became part of the secretary’s pool.
He wished he’d saved an extra piece for after his last cigarette of the day. The cream would have captured and clotted the nicotine in his throat, and that sounded luxurious, toxic and delicious.
The phone rang. Agent Bailey picked up the phone and cradled it against his ear. He spoke in a lazy tone.
“Deputy Bailey.” He said.
An official voice greeted him. “This is the special assistant to Director Doorner.”
Bailey forced down a gulp of saliva, and then steadied himself in his reply. “You talk like I should know you, s
on.”
“The director has an unorthodox request.” The tremor of his voice had no extra breath for distraction. The cadence was stiff, and unquestioning. “He wants to set up an internal surveillance.”
“On who?” Bailey played the information gap game; he liked forcing people to fill in all the blanks. Especially when they were reluctant to do so.
“Agent Legacy.”
“Your office sets him on its top case and yet you simply don’t trust him. That’s an odd dichotomy wouldn’t you say so special assistant?” He waited for the name.
“Ford.” Bailey could practically hear the release valves strain as the pressure built between the man’s ears “He doesn’t want to disturb the agent’s techniques but he wants information updates on a daily basis.”
“Do you know why we don’t do this kind of thing to our agents?” A silence on the other end of the phone, the assistant was certainly expecting a short conversation with blind compliance. Bailey didn’t like matching expectations. ‘They know all of our methods. And the smart ones have them embedded in their subconscious – way below the radar of the average agent’s ability to deceive it. I am one of the most undeniably average directors in this country and I’m telling you that this tactic will not work on Legacy unless you find someone smarter than him to carry it out.”
