The Vanishing Season

by Joanna Schaffhausen

  Reed looked to Ellie, and she looked at the floor.

  “Well, come on, tell me!” Sam demanded. “I know the two of you have been working on your own theories about these disappearances. You must have something you’re not sharing!”

  There was a tense moment of silence, and then Ellery cleared her throat. “We think it’s possible that the kidnapper is repeating a pattern of sorts.” She explained her observation that each subsequent victim appeared to be the last living witness to the previous year’s disappearance. “If that’s true, and if Julia is part of that pattern,” she continued, “then her abduction had been planned for a while.”

  “For a year,” Sam said, both horrified and amazed. “You knew this was coming and you never said anything?”

  He advanced on Ellie, who stiffened and took a step back. Reed put himself bodily between them. “It’s just a theory,” he said. “And one we only determined a few hours ago.”

  Sam’s nostrils flared, his face flushed with fury, and for a second, Reed thought he might take a fist to the teeth. “Well, screw your theory,” Sam spat out. “He’s not going to get away with it this time, you understand me? I’ll call in the damn National Guard if I have to, but I’m going house to house until I find her.”

  Sam stalked off to use the phone, leaving Reed and Ellery standing in his wife’s living room, with her carefully chosen paisley sofa and coordinated forest green armchairs. There was a floral arrangement on the coffee table, roses and lilies that were just beginning to fade around the edges. Reed picked up a book sitting on the end table next to a delicate porcelain lamp. It was not a title he recognized, but the stamp on the front said it had been endorsed by Oprah once upon a time. Reed fingered the bookmark stuck roughly one-third from the end, the place where Julia had stopped. “What do you think happened?” Ellery asked him softly.

  In the other room, Sam was hollering into the phone. Reed set Julia’s book down where she had left it and drifted toward the windows, where the panes only reflected his image back to him. “They don’t see him coming,” he said, because he felt sure now their offender was a male. “He doesn’t seem dangerous at first, possibly because they know him, possibly because he has created a situation that feels normal to them—maybe he’s a deliveryman or a repairman, or, as we were theorizing earlier, someone in law enforcement.” He turned to look at her, and she was listening, wide-eyed. “They let him in, and now he has the element of surprise on his side. They’re relaxed, on their own turf. They don’t suspect he is there to do them harm.”

  He began walking toward the front door, and Ellie followed.

  “Maybe he overpowers and incapacitates them, but I tend not to think so.”

  “Why?”

  Reed kept walking, retracing the path Julia and her captor likely took. “He’s abducted several people during daylight hours. Even if he has the physical strength to carry them away from the scene, he risks calling attention to himself. More likely he convinces them to leave under their own power, either by forcing them to cooperate by use of a weapon or some other direct threat, or by creating a ruse to get them to come quickly.” At these words, Reed opened the front door and stepped out into the thick humid air. He stood where Julia had watched them from the porch and surveyed the shadowed lawn. Frogs and bugs chattered back and forth at each other in the trees.

  “Eventually, though, they’re going to realize something isn’t right,” Reed said as he started down the driveway. “They’ll see through the trick. But by then it’s too late and they’ve progressed too far into the trap to be able to work free—it’s his turf now, his fantasy. He’s had a year to plan out all the details.”

  They walked down the rain-slicked driveway to the edge of the street, which was dark and quiet in both directions. Ellery shone her flashlight first one way and then the other. “And we have no idea where he’s taking them,” she said.

  “Someplace where they can be alone. Somewhere no one is watching or listening.”

  Ellery shivered and switched off her flashlight, enveloping them in darkness once more. “It’s been three years so far, and we haven’t found him yet.”

  “True.” Reed cast a look back at the house, where Sam was visible through the windows, pacing in the kitchen as he talked on the phone. “But at least this time, you aren’t the only one looking.”

  * * *

  True to his word, Sam Parker pulled out all the stops in his search for his wife. Law enforcement officers from neighboring communities poured into Woodbury, swarming the streets and overwhelming the local coffee shop. Paper cups piled up around the station, stacked three deep on desks and ledges, and flowing like a waterfall out of every wastebasket. Reed had switched to bottled water an hour ago because he feared his blood was now fifty percent caffeine. He punched a few keys in his laptop and brought up another blank-faced mug shot of a guy busted six years ago for sexual assault in Springfield, Massachusetts. The victim said she had met the offender at a local bar, where they spent a few hours together, after which she agreed to go back to his apartment for another round. Once there, he pulled out a switchblade and threatened to rape her, but a neighbor heard her screaming and called 911. The reason Reed was looking at the case at all had to do with a single line in the woman’s statement: He threatened to cut off my hands if I didn’t cooperate.

  Across the room, Ellery was on the phone, fielding tips from the general public. She had chewed off the end of her pen in the process, and Reed knew she wasn’t pleased with the assignment or his role in suggesting it for her, but the truth was they had a killer out there somewhere who was eager for her attention. If the guy wanted to make contact with her, Reed would prefer that he have to come down to the police station to do it. Ellery had reluctantly agreed with this logic, but she did not look happy about it. “You don’t know how this looks,” she told him earlier, as the rest of her unit trooped in and out, reporting back on their futile searches. “Everyone else is out there looking for Julia, and I’m stuck behind my desk.”

  “I’m not really concerned with the optics,” he’d told her. “The rest of them didn’t have a human hand special delivered to their doorstep. Besides, we practically have front-row seats right here.” He gestured up at the television, which was on mute but playing what looked like live footage of the ongoing helicopter search. The press had doubled seemingly overnight, as the New York reporters rolled in with their bigger budgets and wider audiences. The story was now national news.

  Midafternoon, the door swept open with a burst of noise from the reporters outside, all of them clamoring after Chief Parker himself. Parker looked grim and haggard, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, skin sagging on his face. “Anything?” he asked Ellery.

  She blinked twice and shook her head. “We’ve sent out units on a couple of leads—your neighbor Barbara Winter said she heard a prowler last night—but nothing has panned out. Chuck says it looks like a raccoon was after her garbage.”

  Parker nodded dumbly and shuffled over to where Reed was sitting with his notepad and laptop. “I thought you FBI types could read these guys’ minds by now. Don’t they make whole television shows about that? You should be able to whip up a personality profile and think like him long enough to figure out where he took Julia.”

  “I wish it worked like that.”

  Parker rubbed his face with both hands. “I keep thinking—what’s he doing to her? What’s happening to her right now?”

  Reed saw Ellie look away, as if removing herself from the conversation. He wished he could do the same. “We’re going to keep looking,” he told the chief, because it was the one thing he could promise. “Don’t give up.”

  “’Course not.” Parker scoffed as he looked down at him. He rapped his hand on the edge of Reed’s desk. “Ellie had been gone for three days when you found her, right? We’ve still got time.”

  He stalked away, and Reed risked a glance at Ellery. Her gaze remained trained on the wall, but he saw her shake her head, almos
t imperceptibly, because she could have told Parker the truth: if they were counting on her eleventh-hour rescue for their salvation, then they were already damned.

  * * *

  As the day wore on, amber light shafting in from the high narrow windows of the station was the only sign of the passing hours, as inside, the atmosphere remained unchanged. Phones rang. Men and women from law enforcement came and went. Jimmy Tipton was coordinating a new search team to investigate the nearby Wendell Forest. Crime scene investigators scoured the Parkers’ home for a second time. The only thing they found was Julia’s cell phone, steeped in a dirty puddle halfway down the street—a clue that led precisely nowhere.

  Reed’s face was so tight from fatigue he felt like it might crack in half if he yawned. He turned bleary eyes to Ellery and saw she had her head down on her desk next to the phone. They had been awake for more than twenty-four hours straight. He was about to suggest they go back to her place to get a few hours of rest, a possibly foolish plan in some senses, seeing as how her property was one of the few places that they could be sure the killer had visited, but between the horde of reporters now following their every move and the throng of men and women in blue spread out around the town, Reed felt reasonably sure it would be safe. He powered down his computer and was about to gather his notes when the station house door opened again, and Russ McGreevy stepped inside.

  Reed sank back in his seat as Russell “Puss” McGreevy approached. “Puss,” he said by way of greeting. “Guess you must have seen the news.”

  Reed had always thought that if Puss McGreevy had been an actual cat, he would be an Abyssinian; he was fastidious, with close-cropped silver hair, an alert, assessing gaze, and above-average intellect. But the nickname did not have to do with McGreevy’s appearance or his attitude; rather, it dated to a story from fifteen years ago, when McGreevy had participated in the rescue of a teenage girl who had been kidnapped by her neighbor. The man had murdered the girl’s parents but for some reason took the family cat with him as he fled with the child toward Mexico. The standoff in a border town had ended in a hail of gunfire that left the abductor dead and two agents wounded. The girl was miraculously unharmed, and when the smoke cleared, legend had it, there was McGreevy, holding the cat. He had taken some friendly ribbing about it over the years, but everyone who knew the whole story understood McGreevy’s critical contribution. The girl had been terrorized and assaulted, and her parents were dead. Puss couldn’t fix a damn bit of that mess, but he could give her back her cat.

  McGreevy’s mouth was a thin line as he took in Reed’s rumpled clothes and day-old stubble. “You’re supposed to be on leave,” he said finally.

  Reed, punch-drunk from exhaustion, spread his hands expansively. “I did leave. I left the whole damn state.”

  “You know, a phone call would have been nice. A simple heads-up.”

  “I was here on my own time.”

  “That’s crap and you know it.” The others in the room, who had not been paying much attention to the latest arrival, snapped to attention at McGreevy’s angry tone. “You come up here and go flashing your federal ID around town, you damn well better let us know what the hell you’re up to—especially if you’re going to invoke a name like Francis Coben.”

  Maybe it was habit by now, but Reed stood up the instant McGreevy said the name, planting himself between his boss and Ellie Hathaway. “Special circumstances in this case,” he said. “It’s rapidly evolving.”

  “So I gather. You know how I found out about it? I found out when Warden Mike Driscoll from Terre Haute called us to say Coben tried to sneak an unauthorized letter into his outgoing mail this morning. Guess where it was addressed? Right here.”

  “What? Coben tried to make contact?”

  Ellie materialized from behind Reed. “What did it say? The letter.”

  McGreevy jerked his attention toward Ellie as if seeing her for the first time. Reed said, “Puss, allow me to introduce Officer Ellery Hathaway. You may remember her as Abigail. Ellie, this is my boss, Agent Russell McGreevy.”

  “Oh, right. Yes, of course.” McGreevy looked surprised, although surely he must have expected her. Maybe he was still seeing that fourteen-year-old girl from the closet. “How do you do, Ms. Hathaway? It’s wonderful to see you looking so well.”

  Ellie ignored his pleasantries. “What did the letter say?”

  McGreevy checked nonverbally with Reed, who kept his gaze neutral. “Maybe we should discuss this privately first,” McGreevy suggested to Reed. “The two of us.”

  “I want to see it,” Ellie insisted.

  “I can appreciate that, but I’m afraid the letter is currently classified.”

  “It’s from Coben? Then I think I’ve got a right to see it.”

  Reed held up a hand. “Ellie, could you excuse us for just one moment? Thank you.” He nudged McGreevy over to the far wall, where the two men turned their backs on the rest of the station. “What is the deal here with this letter?”

  “Probably nothing. You know how these guys operate. Coben saw the news reports and seized any opportunity he could to make himself part of the story.”

  “Looks to me like it worked.” He gestured at the folders McGreevy had in his hands. “What did he have to say?”

  “Nothing of obvious evidentiary value, but given the circumstances here in Woodbury, the warden felt he had to flag it up for us.” McGreevy hesitated. “The original’s still in Terre Haute,” he said as he pulled out a standard envelope from one of the folders. He handed it to Reed, who opened it to reveal three folded sheets of paper. The top one was a photocopy of the envelope with the Woodbury PD address on the front, and one important additional detail: it was addressed to Ellery Hathaway.

  “It’s got Ellie’s name on it.”

  “Yes, she’s the intended recipient.”

  “Well, then, we’re the ones tampering with her mail, aren’t we? That’s a federal crime, if I recollect correctly.”

  McGreevy scowled. “It never entered the U.S. postal system so there’s no crime being committed here. Jesus Christ, Reed, you’ve talked to Coben how many times? You know him as well as anyone, and you really want her to read this thing?”

  Reed closed his eyes briefly. None of this was anything he ever wanted. “I think,” he said at last, “it isn’t up to me.” He walked back to where Ellery was standing, arms folded and pissed about not being included in the federal tête-à-tête. “This is the letter,” he told her quietly, his eyes locked on hers. “It’s addressed to you and so you’ve a right to read it if you choose to. But before you do, I think you should consider that it’s unlikely to be anything other than Coben looking for any small way he can to get back into your life. Into your head. And you can choose to say no.”

  Ellie searched his face as she digested this information. “Did you read it?” she asked finally.

  “No, not yet.”

  She waited another beat, her gaze shifting to the papers in his hand. “But you will.”

  There was a time when he would have seized upon the letter with intellectual zeal, hoping for a chance to see into Coben’s mind to understand just a bit better where he had come from and how those like him might be discovered in the future. But McGreevy was right: Coben wasn’t using this letter for any kind of deep personal insight or communication. It was a mindfuck, through and through. Still, someone had to read it, and who was more suited than Francis Coben’s unofficial biographer? “Yes,” he allowed finally. “I’ll read it.”

  “Then so will I.”

  Resigned, Reed waved over McGreevy, and the trio sought out the privacy of the small interrogation room. It had white concrete walls and garish fluorescent overhead lighting. No fancy two-way mirror or intercom technology. There was a tripod with a video camera in the corner and a table with four chairs in the center. McGreevy took one side of the table and Ellie took the other. Reed paused only for a moment before siding with Ellery. He put down the sheaf of papers in front of h
er and waited for her next move.

  Ellery looked at the replication of the envelope for a long time. “He knows my name now,” she said eventually. “My new one.”

  McGreevy coughed to clear his throat. “You’ve been on the news,” he explained, as if somehow Ellie might not have noticed the TV playing her face all day long inside the station house.

  She moved the top sheet aside to reveal the letter itself. It was short and written in Coben’s heavy, dark printing:

  Dear Abigail,

  I see you have a new name now but I shall still call you Abigail. That’s how I always think of you, and I think of you always. Imagine how surprised I was to see you on television today, just across the room from where I was sitting. You looked real enough to touch. You certainly touched me, didn’t you? You changed my life. Now I spend my days and nights locked up in a place not much bigger than a closet.

  I see you have a new friend. A mutual admirer of ours. Please remember that he only wants you because I had you first, but he will never be me, no matter how much he believes otherwise. Don’t let him get too close, will you? I’ve always thought we’ll meet again one day, and I would hate for him to ruin that.

  Yours forever, F. M. Coben

  Ellie’s eyes glittered as she finished reading. “Could’ve been worse,” she said, her voice rough with emotion. “The things he’s said before …

  “There’s also something on the back,” McGreevy said with a frown. “It’s copied onto the next page.”

  Reed reached over and tugged the top sheet of paper to the side, revealing the image underneath. Ellie gasped and pushed back from the table. On the page was a handprint, presumably Coben’s, rendered in black ink in exquisite detail. The sicko had even signed his initials in the corner like it was a piece of art. Reed scrambled to gather up all the pages and shove them back in the folder. Ellie was bent over at the waist, one hand braced on the table, looking like she might be sick.