Under Abduction

by Andrew Neiderman

  He was about to get out and reconnoiter when a shaft of light came down the road, indicating an approaching vehicle. He slid down in his seat as far as he could and waited, expecting it to pass.

  But the car appeared and then turned into the driveway. A man stepped out and hurried to the front door, apparently not noticing him or his car across the way. It was hard to read details about the driver, but he appeared tall, lean, and well dressed. He went inside quickly and all was quiet again. McShane waited, watched the lit windows, and decided he had to risk getting closer. Anna Gold could very well be held prisoner in this house.

  But just as he opened the door to step out, his beeper went off. He shut it quickly and backed in again. Then he reached for his radio phone and called the station.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner,” Marta said. “But…”

  “What’s up?”

  “Sheriff wanted me to call you and get you on an unattended death. Medical examiner is already there.”

  “What do we have?”

  “Twenty-five-year-old woman discovered by her mother.”

  “Where?”

  “Just inside the front door, expired on the floor.”

  “What’s the address?” She told him and he felt the heat come into his face with the recognition. “What’s the name of the dead woman?”

  “Lidia Ambrook,” Marta said.

  He blew out the air that had been heated in his lungs and started the car. As he pulled away he gazed at the house again, frustrated, but shot with a new rush of adrenaline. As soon as he got back on the main highway, he slapped on his bubble light and punched the accelerator.

  When he arrived at Lidia Ambrook’s apartment complex, he saw the coroner’s car parked beside Leo Hallmark’s patrol vehicle. Leo stood just outside the doorway with a small crowd of curious area residents nearby.

  “What do we have, Leo?” he asked, approaching.

  “I don’t know. Ted Davis is in there trying to figure that out. I had Gerry take the mother over to some friends.”

  “Stabbed, shot, what?”

  “Nothing violent as far as I could see from the door,” Hallmark said.

  McShane looked into the apartment. Teddy Davis, the medical examiner, was bagging Lidia Ambrook’s hands. The forty-year-old pathologist looked up, his bushy eyebrows lifting as he shook his head with a wry smile.

  “What d’ya have?”

  “Twenty-five-year-old Caucasian female, deceased.”

  “I know that. I know her.”

  “Really? Know her well?”

  “No. I interviewed her yesterday concerning a friend of hers who’s missing.”

  “I see.”

  “What did it? Anything obvious?”

  “No,” he said, still with that wry smile. “Nothing obvious.”

  “So why are you bagging her hands?”

  Teddy Davis stopped smiling.

  “See that?” He pointed to the Taser.

  “Yeah, it’s a Taser. She was a little paranoid and had it with her whenever she came to her door. As I said, I interviewed this woman yesterday, so I know,” McShane told him.

  “Oh, you know?” Davis grinned again. “Come on down,” he said, and McShane stepped over Lidia’s legs and knelt beside him. It was hard looking into the dead face of a young woman he had just met. The death of someone this young was especially difficult to accept. Oddly, it was always easier to confront it when it was murder. That was explainable.

  Teddy put his forceps into Lidia Ambrook’s gaping mouth. Her eyes were bulged, her lips were blue, and her swollen tongue was a sickly pink. He lifted the tongue.

  “See the trauma under here? Sometimes heart attack victims bite down on their own tongues, but this is different.”

  “I don’t understand,” McShane said. He was glad he hadn’t eaten yet.

  “No trauma on top of the tongue. She didn’t bite down. This tongue was pressed down on the lower teeth very hard. See?” Teddy pointed out the trauma with his gloved finger.

  McShane nodded.

  “That got me wondering. I spoke to her mother before she was taken off. She said the girl has no history of heart disease. No problem with any vital organs.”

  “Any other sign of violence?” McShane asked impatiently.

  “Yeah, I think so. Look up here,” Davis replied, standing. He stepped carefully over Lidia Ambrook’s corpse and pointed to the door. “She died right here, so I checked around a bit after I found that tongue trauma.”

  He pulled a small magnifying glass from his top pocket and handed it to McShane. Then he pointed to a spot on the door. “What d’ya see?”

  McShane looked.

  “Nothing?”

  “Look closely, Detective. See the strand of hair embedded?”

  “Yeah,” McShane said. “I do.”

  “It looks like it matches hers. Someone held this woman’s head against this door hard enough while she struggled against him to leave a strand embedded in the paint.” Davis circled the spot and then carefully extracted the strand and placed it in a plastic bag. “I checked her scalp. It’s red over here,” he said, indicating the right side of Lidia Ambrook’s cranium.

  “You think she might have been strangled?”

  “No trauma around her throat.”

  “Something could have been thrown over her head—a plastic bag.”

  “Yeah, but then how do you explain the hair on the door?”

  “Right,” McShane said.

  “There’s no trauma I could find with a precursory examination indicating she was beaten. We’ll have to wait for a full autopsy, but I have no doubt the struggle was right here and it was quick and efficient. Something was put in her mouth to keep her from screaming.”

  “So how was she killed? No knife wound, no gun wound, no trauma around her neck. She wasn’t strangled. Poison?” McShane asked.

  “Have to wait for the autopsy for a full report, but…”

  “But?”

  “Ingested poison takes a while, and you got to force her to swallow. So…”

  “So?”

  Davis raised his eyebrows again. The intensity with which the man enjoyed his ghoulish work disturbed McShane, but he didn’t want to appear queasy or unappreciative. Obviously, Davis saw himself as an artist of some sort.

  “Injection,” he said. “Recently, I had that elderly lady over in Mountaindale, remember? Her stepson injected her with nitro to bring on the heart attack, but I didn’t find that until we were in the lab. I was luckier here because this woman does have one tiny little health problem.”

  “Really? What?”

  “Whoever did this didn’t know the woman suffered from a rare form of hemophilia. I checked with the mother. It was under control, but she had episodes, and apparently, after the killer cleaned the wound, he didn’t hang around to check it.”

  He turned her head slightly and showed McShane the small trauma on the back of her neck.

  “If you hold my magnifying glass over this, you’ll see the pinprick.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We’ll do a toxicology immediately. My guess, it’s some kind of neural anesthetic, which would explain why she appears to have suffocated. We’ll see.

  “In any case,” Davis concluded, “this is a murder scene and we had better start treating it as such.”

  “Right,” McShane said. He gazed at Lidia Ambrook’s corpse again and recalled her fear about going out alone, and her belief in astrology. Apparently her paranoia was justified and her ability to predict for herself was very limited.

  After McShane made sure the area was taped off, he questioned some of the residents, hoping one might have seen something. No one had.

  “I just heard her mother screaming,” a brunette no more than twenty-five herself told him. “That’s when I came out. Was it another attack? Someone was nearly raped here two weeks ago.”

  “We haven’t fully investigated yet, but it doesn’t appear to be a sex thing. Did
you know her well?”

  “No,” she said backing away as if he were going to ask her to do something more. “We just said hello.”

  The obvious question in his mind was: Was this murder unrelated or in some way connected to Anna Gold’s abduction? He went to where Lidia Ambrook’s mother had gone, a friend’s home about two miles away, but her doctor had already put her under sedation. His questions would have to wait until morning, so he returned to the station to report to Ralph Cutler, who sat calmly listening to McShane’s summary of what Teddy Davis had told him. The state bureau of criminal investigation had already dispatched a forensic man to the scene.

  “A doctor is killed in the middle of an antiabortion protest, a young woman is abducted, and another young woman is murdered? All in this county and all within forty-eight hours? When I first started here, violent death was something you saw only during big-game season.” He shook his head. “All right. Give those forgeries to Billy to handle and dig into this new situation.”

  “They may be related,” McShane said.

  Cutler’s eyes widened. “What may be related?”

  “The abduction and this murder.”

  McShane reminded him who Lidia Ambrook was.

  Cutler brightened. “Maybe we can get the FBI to take this on too, then.”

  “Doesn’t fit into their MO, does it?”

  “That’s for them to decide. I’ll pass it on to Reynolds and see what he says.”

  “In the meantime I’d better stay on it in case they conclude it’s got nothing to do with their conspiracy theory, huh?” McShane fished.

  “Absolutely. Keep me informed, Jimmy. Don’t forget to give Billy the material on the forgeries.”

  “Oh, I won’t forget that, Sheriff,” McShane said.

  Cutler laughed. “Whatever happened to the guy always looking for the easy way out?”

  McShane thought a moment and then smiled. “I don’t know, Sheriff, but next time I see him, I’ll tell him you asked for him.”

  Ralph Cutler’s laughter resounded behind him as he left the office and headed back to Lidia Ambrook’s to see if the state’s forensic man had come up with anything new. Because of the lateness of the hour, the curious neighbors had gone to the safety and security of their own apartments, most not yet knowing this was a murder in their midst. Lidia’s body had been removed and a chalk circle drawn around the area in which she had lain.

  The forensic detective, a young Vietnamese man, was dusting the door for prints when McShane arrived. He was wearing gloves and booties. McShane introduced himself quickly.

  “You walked in here before?” the criminalist asked quickly.

  “Yeah, I came in when Ted Davis, the medical examiner, was checking her out and—”

  “Those the shoes you wore?” he said, nodding at McShane’s feet.

  “Huh? Yeah, why?”

  “Take them off, please,” he ordered. “You shouldn’t have walked in here.”

  McShane slipped off his shoes and the forensic detective took them and turned them over. He studied the soles and then he went to his case and took out some high-powered magnifying lenses. After he gazed through them a moment, he shook his head.

  “Can’t be sure you didn’t bring it in, but I found shale in the carpet right here,” he said, indicating the area near the circle. “Can’t find any anywhere else in the place. Good chance the killer had shale on his shoes.”

  “Shale?”

  “Yeah, it’s used a lot in driveways around here where people don’t blacktop.”

  “Oh. Anything else?”

  “Nothing earthshaking,” he said, and handed McShane his shoes. “Don’t you guys review what to do and what not to do at a crime scene?” he asked.

  “Sure, but—”

  “You’d think, after watching the O.J. hearings, every cop would be on his toes.”

  “I didn’t watch them,” McShane said dryly. “They conflicted with One Life to Live.”

  The criminalist raised his left eyebrow.

  “If you want to come back in here, put on those booties for now,” he said, indicating another pair near the door. He resumed dusting for prints.

  McShane slipped the booties over his feet and entered the apartment. He recalled that it was a neatly arranged apartment, clean and orderly yet much warmer than Anna Gold’s. This had the feel of someone living here. He searched the drawers in the kitchen, checked every slip of paper he found, every note on the counter. Most were reminders of one sort or another. There were some recipes, titles of books or records she was supposed to get, but nothing with Anna’s name on it.

  He went into the bedroom.

  The bed was still made and, like the rest of the apartment, not a thing was out of place. The chances were great that she hadn’t been entertaining her assailant. The attack had to have been immediate, probably as soon as he had come through that front door.

  But why did she let him in? he wondered as he gazed at a silver-framed college graduation picture of Lidia Ambrook and an older couple who were surely her parents. Knowing how fearful she was, he assumed she either had known the assailant or he had said something to keep her from hitting him with the Taser the moment he came into the apartment.

  He went through her night tables, checked the closet, even explored the pockets of some jackets, but found nothing interesting. He was hoping for a note, a letter, something that might lead him to Anna Gold’s lover. He felt confident now that Lidia Ambrook had known who he was.

  Frustrated, he left the bedroom and returned to the kitchen. Then he paused in the doorway of the dining room. There was something on the table, some papers. Sifting through them, he realized that Lidia Ambrook had been doing astrological charts for people. There was one for Anna Gold. The conclusions Lidia had described the day before were scribbled on the page. But under Anna Gold’s chart was another that simply read Anna’s with three dots following. One of the conclusions at the bottom put a chill in him, for whomever this chart belonged to was, like him, a Scorpio. This person’s birthday was October 29. The conclusion read: Be careful about radical decisions. Most will have long-term negative effects.

  He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

  A fortune-teller who could predict for everyone but herself, he thought.

  Ironies were raining down and bouncing around him like hail.

  He left to ponder what he knew.

  22

  Even though she believed she had regurgitated most of what she thought to be a sedative, Anna had trouble staying awake. So confined in this small room, she had done very little that required physical effort, but the emotional and mental strain was great. Operating continuously at the height of tension, her nerves were frayed and her heart pounded with trepidation over what would occur next. As a result, she experienced a fatigue that seemed to emanate from deep within her and radiate out through her arms and legs, up her neck, and into her very brain. It got so she couldn’t think.

  The metal square that had been locked around her head and her face intimidated her anyway. She kept her eyes closed most of the time so she wouldn’t confront the encasement. It put an ache in her throat and made it difficult for her to swallow, even to breathe. It was better to sleep and wait for her opportunity to get free, an opportunity she knew she must have soon in order to survive mentally.

  The constant whirring and grinding from the other side of the wall worked as an anesthetic again. She drifted and fell into a shallow repose—shallow because the moment she heard the sound of the key being inserted into the door lock, her eyes snapped open. She listened keenly and heard what she recognized as the woman’s footsteps, for the woman walked with an almost military sharpness.

  From the sound of it, the woman went directly to the tray and dishes to inspect how Anna had eaten. She stood there for a few moments. Anna didn’t move a muscle. She even controlled her breathing so she would appear to be asleep. If the woman saw that she was awake, she might suspect that Anna had dumpe
d the food, which included the sedative, down the toilet. Then there might be more hell to pay.

  Minutes seemed to roll by without a sound, without the woman taking another step. Anna had the sensation she was being studied. She kept her eyes closed and she prayed. Finally the woman stepped up to the bed. Anna could hear her quickened breathing, the inhaling and exhaling through her open mouth. She braced herself for whatever the woman might do.

  I must not move, she told herself. I must not jump, even reflexively.

  It was a wise strategy, for moments later she felt the woman’s hand on her stomach. She stood there with her palm over Anna’s belly for what seemed, again, like minutes but was probably only seconds. Then Anna heard a deep sigh and felt the woman seat herself on the mattress. She thought she heard her whimper.

  The woman’s hand moved gently over Anna’s belly and down her thigh, where it took hold of the nightgown and began to lift it up until most of Anna’s abdomen was uncovered. The woman put her palm there again.

  Suddenly she began to hum what sounded like an old lullaby. Anna felt her rocking on the bed, but she kept her eyes tightly shut, her breathing as regular as she could, even though her heart had begun to pound. She perceived the woman moving on the bed, lowering herself until the woman’s lips touched her stomach.

  “My little one,” she said, kissing Anna’s stomach softly. “My poor little one. I know you just hate it in there, hate being locked up in a place you’re not wanted, but it won’t be long before you’re out and with me and never again where you are not wanted.

  “I hope you’re a girl,” she continued. She kept her mouth only an inch or so from Anna’s belly while she spoke. “As soon as you’re old enough, you’ll work beside me in the kitchen and we’ll take walks together and talk about nature. There’s a lot I have to tell you and show you.