by Ted Dekker
The root cellar used for punishment
The car they successfully pulled themselves onto was a flatbed, and the night was cold, forcing them to huddle up at the front, behind a large container that blocked most of the wind. They crouched in the dark for a long time, watching trees rush by.
The train began to slow. Fearing that they might be seen, Alex became frantic. He insisted that they had to find a way into one of the other cars. They managed to crawl through a ventilation window in a wheat car that was only half full. They buried themselves up to their arms for warmth and stared at the night sky, which they could see through the window.
To say that Alex and Jessica had stumbled upon their first bit of luck in thirteen years would be an understatement. The number of things that could have gone wrong that night is strikingly obvious.
Alice or Cyril could have heard them opening the window and stopped them before they made it past the backyard. Either one of them could have been hurt as they ran through the forest in the dark, or been killed as they made a grab for the train. They could have failed to find such a rare wheat car, only half full, and with the ventilation window left open so that toxic gases would not fill the open space. They might have been seen, thrown off the train at the next stop, and returned to the Browns.
We can only wonder how events might have changed the world for better or for worse had the children failed in their escape. Some have argued that the only tragedy greater than Alex and Jessica’s abduction was their escape. But watching Jessica weep years later as she haltingly recounted what she could remember of her captivity suggests otherwise.
Alex and Jessica did escape. And when they finally climbed out of the train three nights later, they found themselves in a world as alien to them as Mars might be to the average American.
IF NOT FOR the Salvation Army, soup kitchens, and the few homeless shelters scattered throughout greater Los Angeles in 1981, Alex and Jessica might not have survived the sudden and drastic change forced upon them as they moved from rural captivity to bustling city.
“There is no greater crisis facing humanity than atheism. One hour in the dead of the night with a man who is possessed will shatter the defiance of the staunchest atheist.”
—Father Robert Seymour Dance of the Dead
A transcript from Jessica’s interview with authorities best captures that first month: “We didn’t know what we were doing. You know. We just stumbled around, ’fraid to talk to anyone, lookin’ stupid in these clothes that everyone kept staring at. We ate out of garbage cans at first, until someone told us about the soup places. We were happy with that. You know. Alex was like, you know, a new person.”
And a new person he was, complete with a last name that he insisted they both take since they didn’t know Alice’s. They would now be Alex and Jessica Trane.
The train that had delivered them to Los Angeles dumped them on the outskirts of Union Station on Vignes Street in old Chinatown. The trail of alleys where they would sleep and soup kitchens they sought steadily led them north toward Pasadena. A homeless man who said his name was Elvis told them about the Union Station Foundation on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, claiming it was the best place for a couple of lost bums like them. He stayed with them a week before disappearing.
Nancy Richardson, who volunteered at the USF from 1975 through 1983, remembers Alex and Jessica Trane clearly. “They were just wide-eyed kids, just eighteen if you believed them. At first we were sure they were runaways, but all of our efforts to dig into their pasts or find relatives failed. We had no choice but to take them at their word.”
Nancy recalls that Alex was the perfect gentleman, unnervingly quiet most of the time, handsome when he cleaned up. He was always staring, fascinated with the simplest things, like a boy half his age.
At first the workers at the foundation thought he might be retarded, because he preferred to look at people rather than talk to them. But once they got him to open up a bit, they realized Alex suffered only from naïveté, not any lack of intelligence. Both Alex and Jessica were socially inept, especially around members of the opposite sex. Alex in particular seemed to have no interest in women.
“I remember stepping into the washroom once when Alex was cleaning up, about a week after he first came to us,” Nancy recalled. “He had his shirt pulled down past his shoulders, and I saw that his upper back was covered in thick scars. The sight was so shocking that I gasped. He jerked his shirt up and spun around. Before he could button up I saw more scars on his chest. Without my asking he said he’d been in a bad car accident, then he left quickly. It could have been, but I wasn’t convinced.”
Horrified by what she’d seen, and wondering if the scars had anything to do with Alex’s disinterest in women, Nancy questioned Jessica, but the girl refused to discuss the matter. “It’s none of your business,” she said.
They both refused to talk about their pasts, except to say that their parents, Bob and Sue Trane, had been killed when a train ran over them in Los Angeles.
When confronted with the fact that no such incident had been recorded by the authorities, Alex said their parents were also homeless and the accident happened at night. They’d been told about the accident by someone else and had never actually seen the bodies. Neither the story of their parents’ deaths nor Alex’s car accident could be corroborated. Left without a choice, Nancy and the director of the USF did the only thing they could for Alex and Jessica: feed them, give them a bed when they needed one, and steer them toward a normal life.
The next year was filled with so many firsts for both Alex and Jessica that they were effectively able to set aside most of the influence their captivity had burdened them with. Like two butterflies who’d escaped their cocoons, they fluttered from one discovery to another, embracing freedom with a newfound passion for life.
They drifted in and out of the USF, disappearing for days at a time, always quiet about where they’d gone or what they’d done. Nancy knew she had to get them into a more stable living environment, but her concern was eased by the eagerness with which Alex and Jessica took on the challenges of life.
Both had discovered books and were rarely seen without a bag that contained at least two or three volumes— anything from novels, which Jessica favored, to history books, and without fail, an old Bible from which sections had been torn out.
One hot day in August 1982, Nancy Richardson introduced Alex and Jessica to Father Robert Seymour, a priest from Our Lady of the Covenant, a Catholic church on the south side of Pasadena. Father Seymour had seen the couple hanging around the shelter and took an interest in them when Nancy spoke of Alex’s thirst for learning.
Father Seymour made the Tranes a simple offer: if they would take jobs arranged by him, and agree to stay in the low-income apartments on Holly Street, he would make a curriculum available to both Alex and Jessica and help them attain a GED.
What was a GED? Alex wanted to know. Father Seymour explained that it stood for general equivalency diploma, roughly the same thing as a high school diploma.
Alex’s eyes lit up at the suggestion, and after a hasty consultation with Jessica, he enthusiastically agreed. With a passing glance at Nancy, Alex headed down the street with Jessica to “do some stuff,” promising to be at the church at nine o’clock sharp the following morning. It was the last time Nancy would ever see Alex. Her mother would soon fall ill, and she would be forced to leave the shelter in the summer of 1983 to take care of her.
“I can still see the look in his eyes,” Nancy said years later. “Those same brown, haunting eyes that seemed to swallow the world.”
Neither Father Seymour nor Nancy Richardson nor any of the staff at the USF on Colorado Boulevard could have realized the extent of the rage and pain that hid behind those haunting eyes, beneath the scars that had shaped Alex Price, known during the eighties as Alex Trane.
SEVEN
2008
HEATHER CLARK PACED the living room carpet, one trembling hand at her chin
. The pain that pounded her chest refused to wane. She glanced at the clock. 1:55 a.m. Where was Raquel? The prospect of even another minute alone sent shafts of fear through her heart.
Daniel was dead.
The bell rang and Heather started. Raquel.
She raced to the front door, peered through the eyehole, and seeing her friend’s long dark hair, fumbled to open the latch. Raquel stepped inside, took one look at Heather’s teary face, and pulled her tight.
“I’m so sorry, honey.”
The door swung shut behind them, and with the soft thud, Heather felt her restraint fall away again. She leaned her forehead against Raquel’s shoulder and began to sob softly. There’s no end to it, she thought. I can’t find the bottom of this pain.
For a few minutes Raquel just held her, whispering her sympathy. Demonstrating the same strong character that Heather had always relied on, Raquel gently led her into the living room and announced that they could both use a cup of coffee.
Several minutes later Heather thanked her, took one sip of the hot beverage, and set it on the coffee table. There was so much to say but no reason to say it.
“You really did love him,” Raquel finally said, looking at a large portrait above the fireplace. An artist’s rendering of Daniel and Heather at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. “I mean really.”
Heather started to cry. She hated herself for crying, but she seemed powerless to stop the tears. She took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and clasped her hands together.
“Unfortunately. You’d think I’d be over it by now.” She tried to force a grin, but her lips twisted wrong. “I left him. I told him this thing would kill him . . .”
Raquel put her hand on Heather’s knee. “It’s not your fault. You start thinking like that, I will personally haul you in, you hear me? This was Daniel all the way. As much as we all love him for his confidence, he was completely blinded on this one.”
“No! He wasn’t the one who wanted the divorce! He begged me back then not to file the papers. He asked me to reconsider two months ago, the last time we talked. But not me, no. Not unless he chose me over all that other . . .” Her throat knotted, cutting her short.
“And you were right,” Raquel soothed. “Dear, you were more right than you can possibly know. You have to let this go and stop blaming yourself. I’ve never seen a woman love a man the way you’ve loved Daniel. But he never could let go.”
Heather sat back and struggled to maintain at least a semblance of control. “I pushed him away, Raquel.”
“He abandoned you. How many times did you call me, alone, while he was out lecturing on the sins of religion?”
That stalled them both.
“None of that matters now,” Raquel said. “What matters is that you’ve lost him. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. In the end the pain will pass, you know that. Right?”
Heather stared up at the portrait and decided then that Raquel had to know everything. Hiding her own obsession now felt like hypocrisy.
“I have something I need to show you,” she said. “Something I . . . I don’t know, it’s a bit crazy.”
“This is me, Heather,” Raquel chided.
She stood and walked to the stairwell. Raquel followed without comment. Down the stairs, across the basement. Approaching the door, Heather nearly turned back. No one had seen this side of her relationship with Daniel. The Eve room was more a shrine than the efforts of a good citizen trying to help out the authorities.
She pushed the door open. Turned on the lights. Stepped in.
The fifteen cases were posted in order from left to right, with the date of each woman’s death posted above the respective photographs and newspaper clippings.
“You’re kidding . . .” Raquel walked past her and slowly looked around the room, eyes pinned on the photographs. All of the victims were positioned the same: face up, hands resting delicately on the ground, legs spread less than a foot, dirtied dresses pulled straight. Pale skin. Fragile. Apart from the pervasive bruising, no sign of trauma.
“You have got to be kidding,” Raquel said, walking to the files. “This is all Daniel’s?”
It took a moment for Heather to respond. “No.”
“Then what’s it all doing here? This is . . .” Raquel turned back from the file she’d opened.
“It’s me,” Heather said. “My sick, demented way of connecting to Daniel, I suppose.” The tears were leaking quietly now, and she made no attempt to stop them. “He taught me a lot about human behavior. Why people do the things they do. Why killers kill.”
“You thought helping him find Eve would somehow create a bond.”
Heather thought her silence made her agreement clear enough, so she left it at that.
“Have you uncovered anything the FBI isn’t aware of?”
She shrugged. “I was chasing down a few hunches of my own. Nothing concrete.”
“Okay now, you listen to me, Heather.” Raquel glanced at the wall of photographs. “I know you were in love with him. I know this is all just some crazy way to connect with him. But it’s over now. This . . . this can’t be healthy. You can’t . . .”
Her eyes settled on a picture of Eve number twelve, a thin, dark-haired girl whose lips seemed confused between gentle smile and frightful grimace.
“There’s more,” Heather said. “The man I was supposed to meet tonight ended up being a phone call. I think . . . I think it might have been Eve. He knew about this, about Daniel, about the killer. And he told me that Daniel would die because no one could stop Eve.”
“Your informant . . . It was about this?”
Heather nodded. “He told me that if I couldn’t find a way to stop Daniel, he’d die.” She walked up to one of the few newspaper clippings that showed Daniel at a crime scene in San Diego. “Not that it matters now.”
“It does matter now.” Raquel touched her arm. “Honey, it does matter. You have to go to the FBI with this. There’s a serial killer out there, and you met someone who apparently knows his identity!”
“Maybe. Daniel’s dead, Raquel.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“No. No.” Heather faced her friend. “I think he thought Daniel might respond to me.”
“Why do you say that? You’ve tried to talk Daniel down ever since he took this case.”
Silence smothered the room.
Raquel answered her own question. “Because it was a veiled threat against you. He knew that if your life was threatened, Daniel would have responded.”
“He didn’t say that.” Heather walked to the door, snapped the light off, and strode from the room. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Raquel followed her up the stairs silently. The house felt like a tomb, but at least the flood of tears had subsided. Life as Heather knew it had changed tonight. Raquel wasn’t saying it, but she knew Heather would eventually see the bright side to all of this. Without Daniel in the picture, there was no more reason to obsess over him. Time to move on.
“I want you to promise me something,” Raquel said, stepping past her in the living room. She waited for Heather’s full attention. “Promise me that first thing tomorrow you’ll call up Brit Holman or someone else you trust at the bureau and tell him everything. About the phone call, about anything you’ve learned, any of your theories—I don’t care how crazy they seem. Then you drop all of this.”
“Eve’s still out there, Raquel.”
“Exactly.” Her friend glared.
“He killed Daniel.”
“And he’s going to come after you if you don’t drop this! You’re an attorney, not a federal agent.”
Until now, Heather hadn’t processed her options concerning Eve. Raquel made perfect sense, naturally. The thought of dropping her own search for him relieved and frightened her at once.
“Fine.”
Her cell phone rang on the counter, where she’d hooked it up to the charger. The clock read 2:27 a.m.
She walked to the counter, picked up the
phone. Saw it was Brit Holman. “Speaking of . . .”
“Who? That’s him?”
She snapped the phone open. “Hello, Brit.”
“Heather . . . He’s alive.”
His words didn’t immediately compute. He’s alive, meaning Eve was alive. Daniel was dead, and they hadn’t caught Eve.
“I’ve had a bad night, Brit. I really don’t think I can—”
“Daniel’s alive.”
The words sounded foreign, like Chinese characters that meant something to someone, just not her, not at this moment.
“He was resuscitated.” A pause. “Are you getting this, Heather?”
“Alive?” Her voice sounded like an echo.
“They have him at the ICU at Colorado Springs Memorial, but preliminary prognosis is good. They think he’s going to be okay.”
Heather’s head buzzed with mixed, jumbled, crazy upside-down thoughts.
“Heather? I’ve got to go, but I want you to call me in the morning. He’s going to be okay, I just wanted you to know that as soon as possible.”
She slowly closed her phone without acknowledging his request.
“Who’s alive?” Raquel demanded.
“Daniel.” Heather’s arms began to tremble like a track under a train.
EIGHT
DANIEL LAY IN THE hospital bed early the next morning, staring up at the soft hue of indirect lighting that filled his room. Memorial Hospital, Colorado Springs. A dark shadow rimmed the white crown molding that hid what he assumed were flourescent tubes. Darkness encroaching on light.
Death stalking life.
He could remember finding Eve’s sixteenth victim alive in the caves by Manitou Springs. They said the killer had been gone.
Waiting for them, watching his victim. He’d come out of the night and faced down the Suburban, head-on.
