The train rocks to a stop at Arlington Station and I get off with everyone else. They head for the parking lot and their cars; I head down the sidewalk. It's four blocks to my floptel and I don't want to waste any time getting there. I need to throw all my stuff into drawers and put what I brought to wear to work in the closet.
Getting home by five-forty-five worked. Five minutes later I'm out of my work clothes and into sweats and a black T-shirt. No bra, no panties, just hiding all the goods while I tear around and dust and clean. Then I stop and look around. Give it up, I think. It's a motel. A room. There's nothing I can do that's going to magically change it into something neat like my own apartment.
For a minute I sit on the bed and try not to cry. But I don't want Feyn to see me with cried-out eyes, so I pull it together for the hundredth time that day. Got to keep my act together.
Then it's off to the shower. By the time I'm dressed it's six-thirty. In one-half hour the man I promised myself I wouldn't meet for a whole year, will actually be here.
With a plant. Of my very own.
Outside my door and down two rooms is the ice machine. I take my ice bucket and fill it. I drop two quarters in the pop machine and make off with two Diet Cokes.
Back in the room I put the Cokes on ice and try to think what else I can do to make Feyn comfortable when he arrives.
Then it occurs to me again: it's a motel room and it ain't going to be glamorous.
So, Diet Coke it is, nothing else.
Then I sit down on the desk chair and begin the long, hard wait. It's quarter of seven and I can feel beads of sweat forming under my arms. Which really pisses me off, but why should it? I'm not going to be showing my bare arms to anyone, much less my pits. What he sees is my new jeans and V-neck sweater. That's what he's going to get. Period. Nobody is coming out of their clothes tonight. Ain't gonna happen, no way, not on my watch.
A knock comes on the door. And I forget all my promises to myself as I get up out of the chair and go to let him in. All promises of chastity and waiting a year are left behind in the air where I was sitting.
The knob turns in my hand.
He holds out a small, potted African Violet. He peeks around it.
"Please come in," I tell him.
And that's how it begins.
17
Danny
25 Years Ago
But what follows isn't at all what I expect. In fact, it puts me in my first hospital. It’s the kind of hospital where the doors are locked and patients don't get to leave until a treating psychiatrist signs them out as cured. Or as impossibly lost, I don't know which. Maybe in my case it was the latter.
Feyn is the puppet of some very bad people. His role with them is to recruit young girls like me. What happens next is beyond description, for he took me to a seedy motel in west Chicago where "a friend of mine is staying." The purpose of our trip there is to meet this friend and maybe have a party.
The friend is nothing like Feyn. The friend is in his forties or maybe fifties, I can't tell, and he opens the door wearing a blue T-shirt that just barely does cover his pot belly. He has sprouted a wispy beard that's getting gray and he is wearing glasses that make his eyes look like goggles from my side. He squints at me and looks me up and down.
"This your new girlfriend?" the friend asks Feyn.
"This is Rudolfo," Feyn says to me. "He's one of the guys who runs a huge business downtown."
Rudolfo holds out his hand and I shake it. His palm is damp and, as I get a closer look, I can see that he has needle tracks on the underside of his arm he's holding out to shake with. Ugh! I turn away toward Feyn and put my head in his chest. "Can we just go?" I ask him.
"Come on inside," Rudolfo says, suddenly friendly and smiling. "We're having a party."
Feyn steps around to where he's behind me and pushes me in the low back. We're going inside, his push says, so I take a deep breath and step through the door.
Young girls are coming and going through the rooms we can see and they all have one thing in common: they are sleepy-eyed and they are unsteady and moving slowly through the living room and into the kitchen and off down the hallway that must lead to bedrooms. They are moving like—what's the word I'm looking for? Zombies? Yes, they look like the zombies you see in movies: slow, almost staggering kind of steps and faces with features that seem to have all run together. I look at them and am horrified, because it has just occurred to me that if I stay here I too could end up looking and moving like them.
"What is going on here?" I ask. I’m about to turn and run out the door.
"We're printing money," says Rudolfo and he winks at Feyn.
I look at Feyn. One of the girls has brought him a glass of clear liquid and a joint. Another girl returns from the kitchen and hands me a glass of the clear liquid.
"What's he mean about printing money?" I ask Feyn. He responds with a laugh and a shrug.
"You need money, don't you?" Feyn says to me. "Well, here you are. You can make more money here in a day than you can make in a month at the insurance company. I promise I wouldn't give you a bum steer," he says and his wonderful eyes don't look quite so wonderful right now. They have clouded up since we came inside Rudolfo's apartment.
"Show her to the room where she'll be staying," Rudolfo says to Feyn. "It's Madeline's old room."
"C'mon," Feyn says to me, holding out his hand.
I let him take my hand in his—I still trust Feyn and maybe even love him a little—and follow him down a hallway. I didn't realize it, but the apartment is actually part of a duplex and we step through a door that has been made through the wall that separates the two units. We turn left, toward the rear of the second apartment, and I see the hallway is lined with doors. Where I can see in, behind the doors are small bedrooms barely large enough to turn around in. Suddenly I get a clear picture of what's really going on in this place and I turn to leave.
But Feyn touches me on the shoulder and then grips me like a vise.
"No, please check it out," he says.
Which is the moment where I first feel the date rape drug they've put into my drink. I've only had a couple of sips and that was mostly out of anxiety as I was hoping I could calm down and please Feyn. With the feeling that I'm falling asleep on my feet I suddenly only want to lie down. Feyn helps me down the hallway beyond two more doors and then we open the last door on our right. Like I said, the rooms are barely large enough to turn around, but that is truly the least of my worries as I feel myself in free fall, falling toward a kind of sleep I haven't known since I was a child. Deep, dreamless sleep where you awake hours later and don't know where you are.
Which is how it is for me. When I open my eyes it is dark outside and I am nude, lying on top of a chenille bedspread with dark stains. Instinctively I move away from the stains—or try to—only to find my hands are shackled to the head of the bed and my ankles are shackled to the bottom. Two young men I don't know are staring down at me, wicked smiles on their faces and glee playing through their eyes. The shorter one reaches over and flicks his cigarette ash on my bare chest.
"That was nice, sugar," he says to me. "Worth every dollar."
I am so groggy and I have no idea what he's talking about. But then he flicks his cigarette on me again and hot ash sizzles on my left breast. I jerk and lurch so hard that it causes me to vomit on myself. The stomach contents bubble up out of my mouth and run down both cheeks as I'm lying on my back, unable to turn or move away from the bile because of my shackles.
The other young man then says to the first one, "Here, hold this." He passes a lit joint to cigarette man and strips off his jeans and T-shirt. I find myself thinking, My, he's got a nice body, when I suddenly realize I shouldn't be seeing his body at all. I don't know him and when he lies down on top of me and inserts his penis into my vagina I try to scream but nothing comes out. I try again and this time I let loose with a long, blood curdling scream. Cigarette man turns around to the door to my room and closes it.
"Soundproof," cigarette man says to me, leering. "Now scream your fucking head off. We've got you until midnight and we're just getting started."
They sodomize me, force me to have oral sex, and rape me repeatedly over the next several hours. When they are done they burn me with cigarettes across my breasts and pubic bone. I am in agony and I pass out and come to, pass out and come to over and over.
Then they are gone and I am weeping. Which is when Rudolfo comes into my room. Feyn is not with him. He is alone and he has sex with me. When he is done he opens a small black case that looks like an eyeglass case but this one holds a syringe with a needle. He screws the needle onto the syringe and produces a small vial with a rubber cover. The needle penetrates the rubber and sucks out maybe an inch of a yellowish liquid. Which he injects into the large vein just above my inside right wrist.
The drug roars into me like a freight train and my mind is burning with harsh bright lights and screaming voices that are hammering at me with insane words and accusing me of all kinds of sick things I would never do.
This goes on for a week. Always a different man or men, always the same kind of sick sexual abuse and physical torture. Never enough torture to permanently disable me, but all kinds of rough stuff with cigarettes and small pliers. I am dying and don't care. I can no longer stand to be alone with my thoughts and I have cried and cried until my pillow is soaked all day and all night and until the next noontime when I come to again after another of Rudolfo's injections.
I finally give in and let go and accept that I am going to die on that bed, shackled and dirty and hungry and sore. And at that moment, when death is my wish for myself, I unexpectedly am greeted with a new voice. A peaceful voice, calm and strong and comforting. And it—he—says, "Relax, Danny, I've got this."
"Who are you?" I ask.
"Gunnar, and I'm here to save you."
"Then take over, Gunnar. I cannot do this anymore and I have to go to sleep."
"I've got this. You can sleep now."
Gunnar has introduced himself and has taken over for me.
He wakes me up in the middle of the night, speaking calmly and lovingly to me.
I reply that yes, I would like something to eat and my eyes adjust to the darkness of the room and I search for Gunnar but then it comes to me again, what I knew when I drifted off to sleep.
There is no one else in the room.
"I'll get food," he says. "I'll make them feed you."
"And let me take a bath."
"We can do that too. Or my name isn't Gunnar."
"Thank God you came to help me."
"Yes, thank God I did."
18
Michael
Chicago - Present Day - First Week of Danny’s Disappearance
The FBI set up a command HQ in my home office—new phone lines, computer hookups, printers, fax machines—the whole nine yards. Then they went to work, setting up my home phone lines and my smartphone so that they could listen in on all calls if a ransom demand made its way to me. We co-existed thereafter, me working up my notions of what might have happened and them systematically taking my life apart and looking at all the possible pieces that might add up to Danny’s disappearance.
Looking back, that first week after she was gone felt like a dream. That slow, confined feeling of trying to run from monsters when your legs don't work right. That muddled sleeping state as when you've found an old love and she just as quickly disappears again. That describes me pretty well.
Marcel and I returned to the hotel and interviewed the key players on duty the night Danny went missing. We talked to the two clerks at the front desk. They saw nothing. So we talked to security—this particular hotel assigned security to every floor during the night and day. Oftentimes the details were women and men dressed to look like room guests and moving around with an empty suitcase or bag. We talked to the person—a young woman—working the twenty-ninth floor that night. She remembered seeing a police officer but couldn't say whether that was before or after the hotel security staff had called the police in themselves. But this much was known: she didn't see Danny—the woman in the picture we were showing around—leaving the floor or getting on the elevator either alone or with someone. We had the CCTV footage and had been over that.
We talked to housekeeping, the two women who made up the room the day I checked us out. They had found nothing unusual left behind. The women had swept and vacuumed but there wasn't anything else they could add about their work in the room.
We viewed the parking garage video. The FBI had already been provided copies but they hadn't given me one. At one point—sometime after two a.m. Saturday night—a black Escalade appeared in the video rolling the entire length of AA level before disappearing up the grade to the exit gate. We reviewed the tape several times in slow motion as well, and we thought we could just make out a woman's face in the front passenger seat as the vehicle swung past. Features were impossible to make out since we were looking through the driver's window but we both agreed it might be Danny on the far side when we had the angle. Not saying it is, Marcel told the security office, but it's a definite maybe.
The driver himself was a different set of images to work with. By the time the FBI was done with enhancements and computerized tweaks, the special agents were fairly confident the man driving the Escalade was named Niles Scoburg. He was a known associate of Jana Emerich—which caused my heart to fall to the floor. It wasn’t good, they told me, as if i didn’t already realize. She was in the grip of the enemy and it was looking like she had gone there voluntarily.
The special agents provided us with a clean file photo of Scoburg. I knew instantly that he was the man who had fought with me at the Art Institute.
Marcel and I drove up Monroe to the Art Institute. Parking was hell, as usual, but we finally found a place and walked inside. Marcel knew the security office's location from before and led me there.
We met with R.L. Johnstine, a relaxed, silver-haired man wearing a dark suit and rimless glasses. He spoke rapidly and to the point.
"We've turned over all video to the FBI,” he chirped. "Nothing new at our end."
"I guess what we were wondering," said Marcel, "was whether the man in the video was a man named Niles Scoburg. Has anyone tried to ID the guy?”
“The FBI, probably.”
"Would you mind if we looked now?"
"Come into our video room. We can't let you view washroom video or business office video, but if you sit down right here you can pick and choose from everything else. This little control selects date and time. You can also search across a preset period of time with this control here."
He left us sitting before four monitors and we began a time search. Marcel watched two monitors; I watched the other two.
We saw lots of people coming and going and the problem quickly became the fact not all faces were exposed directly to the camera. Then there were hats, sunglasses, and people's heads blocking other people's heads as the groups and couples came and went.
So we basically began focusing on singles—individuals coming and going, as I thought Niles Scoburg had followed us there alone. Then I found him on a single camera feed.
An hour later, we had a dozen times reviewed the original feed of the altercation from two angles we hadn't seen before. There was no doubt it was Scoburg. Clearly I was the aggressor and it was lucky for me I wasn't under arrest for assault and battery. I went to Scoburg—he didn't come to me—and I got the discussion going and I got my hands waving around and I threw the first punch.
The FBI had been there before us, of course. But we were doing our own investigation on the premise that either Marcel or I might have a memory or be triggered by a clue that the FBI wouldn't respond to as we might. It was a small hope, but there you were.
It was all we had.
19
Michael
Later that first week, Chicago PD contacted me. A body had been found.
The woman's features
had been largely sanded away by the action of Lake Michigan's waves against the beach. Her body had become lodged face-down in the sand, between a fallen tree that jutted into the water and a boulder just starboard of the tree. Face-down she had shifted up and back, up and back, with each passing wave, such as they are in the lake.
The nose was missing, the eyelids were missing, and the lips were missing. But the height and weight could have been Danny's. No rings, no watch, no jewelry at all. Nude, completely, except for an athletic sock on her left foot that had somehow survived. It was the same brand that Danny wore, I discovered when the detectives called me and asked me to look in her sock drawer.
So Marcel drove me down to the medical examiner's to view the body and possibly make an identification. I was shaking by the time we arrived. Plus, I hate autopsy suites—who doesn't? The smells, the expressionless workers, the dull light—it's always unbearable. I took my Vicks jar out of my pocket and smeared a dab inside both nostrils. It helped only slightly.
The stainless steel table upon which she lay supine was coated with a yellow waxy substance, the source of which was never explained to me. The white sheet was stripped away and I was immediately saddened by the disfigurement, the treatment she had received at the hands of the lake. Dental ID was pending. So I drew up my courage and took a closer look.
She had a fairly engorged hang-mole on the inside of her left breast just like Danny's. The sight of that skin blemish sucked the air right out of me and I gasped. Tooth enamel was abraded and four front teeth broken off and jagged. The expression on what remained of her face was of a hapless jack-o-lantern making a silent O sound at the ceiling.
Voices In The Walls: A Psychological Thriller (Michael Gresham Series) Page 8
