Girl Last Seen

by Nina Laurin

  To my surprise, he lets go. I get up, pushing the asphalt away with my palms. My arms strain, threatening to snap like a couple of matchsticks. He clears his throat, and I realize he’s holding out his hand. I look at my own palm, cold and clammy and coated in mud, and scramble to my feet by myself. My dress is a Rorschach pattern of mud splashes where I rolled on the asphalt, and snagged threads crisscross the fabric—fit for the garbage can.

  “Why did you run?” He doesn’t flinch from my gaze. He’s gotten older, I realize with confusion. Of course he has. He’s not some immortal angel. He’s a human being of flesh and blood. Except to me, he was always so much more than that.

  His hair—there are hints of gray around his temples. Maybe they were there ten years ago, and I was just too out of it to notice. His skin looks different, and there’s scruff on his chin and jaw that I don’t remember from last time. But his eyes are exactly as they were on the day he found me. I still have to tilt my head up to look into them.

  “I’m a cop, Lainey. You shouldn’t have run.”

  “I know who you are,” I say.

  “You do?”

  It’s a struggle not to let my emotions seep into my voice. “I remember you.” I gulp. “Am I under arrest?”

  “I don’t know. Why did you run?”

  I lower my head. My hair tumbles into my face.

  “Do you know what this is about?”

  “No,” I lie.

  “Look at me, Lainey.”

  “Laine,” I say curtly.

  “What?”

  “Laine. No one calls me Lainey except my shrink.”

  I have no idea why I told him that. He’s not the person I remember, not the person I imagined, and he’s not here for me—this much I know. But he nods, like he gets it.

  “Laine.” Somehow it sounds better on his lips, softer. “Can you talk to me like a normal person now? I don’t want to have to handcuff you.”

  His gaze drops to my hands before he can stop himself. I stare down at them too, twisting one of the bracelets around my right wrist. We look up at the same time, and his gaze locks on mine. I can’t read it no matter how much I try; it’s like staring into opaque, murky water.

  “Depends,” I say.

  “Promise me you’re not going to bolt.”

  I swallow the lump in my throat so I can speak. “If I get arrested, I could be in trouble. But you already knew that.”

  He exhales noisily. “I’m not going to arrest you. If, and only if, you talk to me. Hear me out and answer all my questions. For now, it’s off the record. Let’s keep it that way.”

  I let him assume my silence is a yes.

  “Laine—” He catches himself at the last second. “This is about a missing-girl case.”

  I give a curt nod.

  He says Olivia’s name, slowly, his heavy, wary gaze not leaving my face. He’s waiting for me to give myself away somehow.

  “What about her?” My voice is thin and brittle.

  “She’s been missing for a week now. She’s ten years old.” He keeps watching me for a reaction, and I’m not about to give him one.

  “Don’t you care?”

  “It has nothing to do with me,” I choke out.

  “Olivia Shaw was adopted.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. My breathing is ragged, too fast, and the thundering of my own heartbeat fills my ears. I barely realize I’m grinding my jaw. “You’re wasting your time. Why should I know anything?”

  “Laine—she’s your daughter.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “She’s not my daughter. She’s Jacqueline Shaw’s daughter.”

  I realize my slipup, too late to bite it back. Now he knows that I know. He knows I looked her up.

  “You feel nothing for her? No sense of—”

  Tears burn my eyes. I don’t know how much time passes before I can speak again.

  “What the fuck do you think I’m supposed to feel for her?”

  The words are ugly, violent, and cruel. He winces, and I wish I could take them back, but at the same time, anger brims in my chest, suffocating. Crowding out the pain. What am I supposed to feel for the girl? For the child whose father kept me in a basement for three years, who—

  A girl I haven’t even held, not for a minute. I was out, floating on a sea of anesthetic drugs, and when I woke up, she was already gone. She could have been adopted by the people next door or shipped away across the country or stillborn—I never would have known.

  “I had nothing to do with it,” I snarl. “So stop wasting your time.”

  I half expect him to do something, to say something. Or to slap me, maybe—I deserve it. But to my frustration and fury, he just patiently waits for me to finish.

  “Well, I hate to disappoint you but the one and only time I ever saw her was on a missing-girl poster. Now will you please let me go?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “But I can’t do that.”

  “I didn’t try to steal her back,” I say hoarsely. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I never said any such thing.”

  “What is it you think, then? Why are you here?” A part of me must already know the answer or at least guess at it, deep down. “What do you really want from me? Why did you show up, when it could have been anyone else? Why am I so important?”

  “First, I’m the detective on this case. I wasn’t going to send anyone else. Second…I wanted to talk to you off the record. I know about your situation. I didn’t want to cause you trouble.”

  “Well, you already did. I’m probably going to lose my job now.”

  The silence in the alley is so intense that it crackles and hums like electricity. Even the soft thud of bass inside the club, separated from us only by a graffiti-covered brick wall, is nothing but white noise.

  “I’m trying to tell you that the man who did this to you might have your biological daughter. And you don’t care?”

  Everything reels before my eyes. Shiny asphalt, brick, deep slate-gray sky almost indistinguishable from the rooftops. Blurry lights.

  “How dare you say that to me.” My tinny voice betrays the tears before they have a chance to spill out.

  “I just want to know. Genuine curiosity.”

  I don’t know what comes over me. My fist flies up, racing toward his face. In the back of my mind, I already know how badly I fucked up, but it’s too late to stop.

  Instead of blocking my arm or catching my wrist, he barely tilts his head. My knuckles just graze his jaw before my arm falls limply back at my side.

  We stare at each other, me with terror and him with a strange glint in his dark eyes—almost like interest. The thin skin on my knuckles still burns from scraping against his stubble, the only sign that this really just happened. I don’t try to run, just lower my head and hold out my hands, wrists up.

  “Arrest me if you want to,” I whisper.

  “I’m not going to arrest you, Laine.”

  “Why not? I attacked you. I was uncooperative.” The tears dry on my cheeks.

  “I’m not here to screw up your life. All I want is to save Olivia’s.”

  Something in my chest clenches as he holds out a card with something printed on it, an address, a phone number. Another number is written in blue ink below it.

  “Come to the station tomorrow. We’ll need you to make a statement about where you were the day she went missing.” He must see me tense with mistrust, because he adds, “You’re not under arrest, and no one’s accusing you of anything. It’s just routine stuff.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  Only a puff of steam betrays his patient sigh. “You can reach me off the record on my cell,” he says. “If you think of anything. Or if you just need to talk.”

  I take the card with my fingertips. “I will.”

  He walks away, never once looking back, and I realize he’s absolutely certain I’ll show up.

  And, I suppose, so am I.

  CHAPTER FIVE


  Here’s the thing about Sean Ortiz.

  He was the first person I saw after three years in captivity. That was the first and last time I saw him until ten minutes ago. Sean Ortiz was a traffic cop back then. I wasn’t his problem. It was sheer chance that he decided to pull over when he saw something strange through Seattle’s eternal curtain of rain. All he had to do was call someone else, someone who could take me off his hands and deal with me.

  He did, and they did. Some strange people in pale-green masks put me on a gurney, and the last thing I remember is an ambulance technician sticking a needle in my arm, cooing something reassuring like I was a dog he was putting to sleep.

  I never saw Sean Ortiz after that. Not that I was surprised. I was certain he never even thought about me much.

  But, boy, did I think about him.

  I guess this is what my well-meaning shrink calls a coping mechanism—displaced affection, as she’d put it. But what I know is, when other girls my age were crushing on sparkly vampires and shaggy-haired musicians, I crushed on Sean Ortiz. Or at least the mental photograph I had of him, those few brief moments of pouring rain and flashing lights, the photograph that grew blurrier every year, like fading newsprint, until what I had left was closer to fantasy than reality.

  It mattered little to me. Where my memory failed, my imagination filled in.

  I wander back to the club, barely feeling my legs. It’s like I’m floating aboveground. I don’t feel much of anything, not the cold, not the pitter-patter of icy raindrops on my bare arms. I’m a shell of skin filled with heartbeat as I make my way to the storage area and slide down to a crouch behind a stack of boxes.

  Rusted hinges screech, the door clatters open, and thundering steps grow closer. It’s Dom, my boss. His giant shadow falls over me, but when I look up, he seems more concerned than angry. Although he has every right to be angry.

  I bleat a useless apology.

  “Forget it,” he says, waving his tattooed arm. “Just tell me, honestly, are we about to get raided?”

  I manage to make my head swivel on my neck, side to side, feeling like one of those dashboard dogs. He slumps with a sigh of relief.

  “Well then, what the fuck was that all about?”

  “Nothing.” I make a weak attempt at a smile but he doesn’t look convinced. “Just tell me Sugar is around.”

  He scoffs. “Yeah, right. Sugar hauled ass as soon as he so much as heard the word police.”

  I curse under my breath. My teeth are starting to clatter.

  “Go back to the bar,” Dom says, frowning.

  “In a minute.”

  He shrugs but leaves me alone.

  Huddled between two cases of empty bottles in the freezing storage room, I reopen the tabs on my phone, every scrap of information on Olivia Shaw that I painstakingly bookmarked, every news article on every major news website. My hands shake so much I can barely manage the tiny touch-screen buttons.

  This is what I already knew: Olivia Shaw, ten years old, vanished on her way home from school. Her parents are a rich couple, Tom and Jacqueline Shaw, nee Velasquez. They have a house in the chic neighborhood of Hunts Point, and Olivia went—goes, Olivia goes; don’t think about her in the past tense—to the local school. No one knows how she could have slipped away.

  It doesn’t mention anywhere that she was adopted.

  But the moment I saw Sean Ortiz at the bar…I just knew.

  I knew it was her. She was mine.

  That’s bullshit—she was never mine. She has nothing to do with me. We belong to different worlds; our paths never crossed and never will.

  Unless.

  I squeeze my temples with the heels of my hands. I want to scream but can’t find the sound within me. I think of Sean Ortiz, the first face I saw after years in captivity. The first person to speak to me. The first person to show me kindness in my whole miserable life.

  The look in his eyes, back in the alley—I can’t get it out of my head. The pity and dismay. The disappointment. He saw what a fucking mess I’ve become. He saw how broken I am.

  I bite down on the inside of my lip and taste copper. Lots of copper, a handful of pennies, and I never felt a thing.

  Shit. Tonguing the jagged tear in the lining of my mouth, I race to the employees’ bathroom, a tiny cubicle of a room where I can barely stand up to my full height. The door is locked. I pull on the handle in disbelief, pound on the door, and give it a kick for good measure. Finally, Natalia’s muffled voice curses and yells out for me to cool my fucking jets in that familiar accent. It’s not the first time I see this happen; she didn’t just get a sudden urge to pee the moment the police showed up, I’m sure. The toilet flushes, and Natalia emerges, pupils like inky saucers that become even bigger when she sees my face. She gets out of my way without a word.

  I close the door behind me. My soles stick to the floor, and the stink of sewer mixed with industrial-strength cleaner fills my head. Leaning over the rusty sink, I run the tap, gargle with cold water, and then dab at my lip with some rolled-up toilet paper.

  My hands shoot to my stomach, under the waist of my skirt and my underwear, and settle over the horizontal scar on my belly where they cut her out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  What do kidnappers, child molesters, serial killers, and other scum of the earth have in common?

  I have many saved links on my phone, but it all boils down to this: they’re like a puzzle missing a crucial piece. They may not all be psychopaths in the proper sense of the word, but there’s some kind of glitch in their minds. It allows them to view their victims as something other than human, incapable of feeling and suffering. That, and they were usually abused as children as well—like some sick game of tag. Another thing my shrink would call a coping mechanism: one surefire way to get rid of pent-up anger and pain and torment is to inflict it on someone else.

  At least that’s the theory.

  Whoever writes these Internet articles must have been lucky never to find themselves in the same room with one of these people. Because I may not have any fancy letters tacked to my name—I may not even have finished high school—but I did spend three years studying one of them up close. And my theory is they do know I feel fear, and pain, and the same range of emotion everyone else does. They know it, or else why bother? Just make some kind of voodoo dummy; buy a blow-up doll if it’s all the same. But no. It has to be a real person who lives, who breathes, who preferably screams and begs for her life.

  And now Sean thinks I did it. Or at least that I had something to do with it, and who can blame him?

  Paranoia fizzing in my veins, I’m distracted and clumsy, and after a drunk trucker nearly starts a fight because he thinks I shorted him on his change on purpose, Dom takes me aside and gives me the rest of the night off.

  The first thing I do when I get home, before I even take off my boots, is grab my laptop and climb onto my bed. I log into a forum where I used to be a regular, ConspiracyTalk. It’s not what you’d call a healthy and sane environment, and a few of the regular members might actually be even more messed up than I am, but I did spend a good five years there, on and off, posting as lostgirl14. The thread about my case—the case of Ella Santos, that is—runs about twenty pages and mostly consists of speculation. There are theories ranging from the disturbing—that I didn’t identify my kidnapper on purpose because of Stockholm syndrome or some such thing—to the downright deranged. Lately, it’s been buried under other, fresher stories with more readily available sordid details, but the first thing I see when I log on is a new thread titled OLIVIA SHAW: Rich Girl Vanishes Without a Trace. The members are posting at alarming rates, speculating their hearts out, but as I feverishly skim through the posts, I don’t see anyone get close to the truly disturbing truth.

  Roswell82: I bet it’s something really simple. Maybe they killed her themselves by accident. Like JonBenet.

  Mike6669: My guess is a ransom thing. Rich parents. Like sickeningly rich. I bet dirty money too, so someone
was understandably pissed off…

  Roswell82: Nah. I bet you anything the parents did it. Did u see that woman’s pic in the Tribune article? Blouse was halfway open. Who puts her tits out when her damn child is missing?

  Mike6669: Yeah I’d tap that.

  It doesn’t take long to find the article in question. The text itself is only two scant paragraphs, but the photo is huge, taking up half the screen. Her blouse isn’t halfway open, of course. It’s a white button-down shirt that barely shows her collarbone—or what could just be a shadow. She’s one of those women who could be anywhere between twenty and forty, although I know it’s closer to the latter. I zoom in on her face, studying it in as much detail as the low-resolution screen of my old laptop will allow. Definitely closer to forty, and no tacky surgery-a-minute like some of the girls from the club. If she’s had work done, it’s all tasteful and discreet. She has the look of, if not a natural beauty, a once reasonably attractive girl polished and preserved by vast amounts of money and never having to do a goddamn thing for a living. As I peer closer, I see the look of resolve on her face, lips pressed together like she’s biting their insides, firm chin and jaw set tight.

  I expected a rush of antipathy toward her, and I’m a little surprised that I feel none. However, I seem to be alone in that sentiment. The comments don’t spare a thing.

  Surgeried rich bitch. That’s what you get for letting nannies raise your children instead of doing your damn job.

  Nowhere in the article does it mention a nanny.

  She doesn’t even look worried. Does she look like she’s been crying?

  Re: She doesn’t even…Must be the Botox. Ha!

  Where is your daughter, Jackie? What did you do with your daughter?

  That’s it. Enough for today. I close the laptop with a click and push it away with such violence that it lands on the floor with a thud. I have to pick it up again and check that it’s working before I take it to the charger. I can’t afford another one.

  Once I crawl into my bed, the nightmares pull me under almost immediately, so intense that my sleeping pills do nothing for them. All the pills accomplish is keeping me under, not letting me escape the sticky grasp of dreams, no matter how bad it gets.