Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

Ruby’s arms folded, a look of indignation crossing her face. “You can’t know that for sure.”

  I thought. “We’re too much fun for him,” I said. “I just know that he wants to keep playing with us, not hurt us. But if we take a chance and bring the police along, I don’t think Tinesha is going to live to see morning.”

  Instead of responding, Ruby reached for her sun hat and put her jacket on.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  It was close to five o’clock in the afternoon by the time we pulled into a parking area just off South Border Road. We locked the car and walked across the street. That’s when we stood at the edge of a forest and gazed numbly into the trees. I held in my hand a pocket GPS from Garmin, procured back in my climbing days. Once I had a good satellite signal, I brought up the Mark Waypoint screen and scrolled up to select CURRENT COORDINATES. This produced an entry field that allowed me to key in the exact coordinates cryptically relayed to us through Uretsky:

  N42 26 12 W71 06 57.

  I showed Ruby the route we had to take. There was no path to follow.

  “Do we just start trekking through the woods?” she asked.

  “It is called an eTrek,” I said, flashing her the GPS.

  “I didn’t bring bug repellent.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll check you over for ticks,” I said.

  Ruby gave me a look—that look—and started off ahead of me.

  Something made her stop. She turned to face me. “What’s out here? What the hell are we going to find?” She knew I couldn’t answer the question, but she did look a little less bothered.

  Initially, bushwhacking through the forest was easy enough, but the underbrush quickly grew thicker, and the mass of vegetation underfoot tripped one of us up every few steps. I used a stick to clear away some branches, but our trek was like a boxing match; we’d duck one tree, only to get thwacked in the face, neck, and arms by another. Every hundred yards or so, I checked my GPS for course corrections.

  The route took us through one steep trough that required us to inch our way down. I could hear Ruby’s labored breathing behind me. The hike would have been moderately challenging without her cancer. At some point she stopped and, resting against a tree, took a long drink of water from the camel pack. The scrub provided excellent shelter for chipmunks and other woodland critters seeking a hideout. I wondered what else the land could be hiding. Had Uretsky put something here that he wanted us to find? If so, what could it be? How would it give us an advantage?

  Ruby slumped to the forest floor, breathing hard. “I need to rest a bit,” she said.

  I looked up. We still had plenty of sunlight.

  After a few minutes we continued, walking west, swatting flies and branches in equal measure until we came to a sudden stop at a steep cliff face. My breath caught when I looked down at the jagged rocks jutting out from the clay-colored surface. As my eyes focused on the depth, the ground below began to swirl, the brown of dead leaves revolving until all color slipped into black. I felt the horizon pitch and roll, as if it had come unfurled from the earth.

  I staggered backward and felt Ruby’s hands grip my shoulder to steady me. Seeing the height of the cliff, without any warning, with no time to prepare, hit me hard—instantaneously, I became light-headed, dizzy, and nauseated. I took ten steps in retreat before I found my bearings once again.

  “We’ll take . . . the long . . . way down,” I said to Ruby between breaths.

  The unsettling sensations lingered but eventually quieted down.

  Ruby looked very troubled. “Is it getting worse, John?”

  “You mean my acrophobia?”

  A branch I had cleared catapulted backward and nearly knocked Ruby off of her feet. “Hey!” she said, surprised. “I’m your wife, remember!”

  “You’re my everything,” I said, apologizing with a kiss on her cheek. “And to answer your question, yes, I think it’s getting worse, but hasn’t Uretsky made every facet of our lives worse?”

  We marched on, with Ruby keeping close behind me. On my GPS display, the little triangle that represented “us” continued to close in on the x that represented our destination. A hundred yards to go . . .

  What would we find?

  Fifty yards . . .

  I looked back and saw Ruby valiantly battle through a thicket of branches. Was her heart beating as fast as mine? Was her pulse racing, too? She knew we were getting closer.

  Twenty yards . . .

  I pushed my way between two pine trees—the forest version of a car wash. That’s when I had this thought about paths, the ones we take and the ones we don’t. I’d tried my best to live free from regret, but at that moment, I regretted becoming Elliot Uretsky so profoundly that I knew I’d never forgive myself. No matter what the outcome, I had an incurable disease called regret. Life, I thought, was full of paths, like the one Ruby and I were forging through this forest. There are paths made for us, and paths that we make. Sometimes we stumble upon a route we think about taking but, for some reason, don’t. Or worse, we walk one way and look back wistfully at the way we had left behind.

  Ten yards . . .

  I looked back at Ruby—pale, her pert nose blackened by dirt. A herd of flies roamed about her head like a haphazard halo. I wondered what path I took that led me to her. What made her apply to the same school as me? Why did we take the same class? Was it a series of choices, or was it all somehow predestined?

  Ruby came toward me, her body trembling with exhaustion. Behind me was one final coppice to clear before we’d reach our destination.

  “I love you,” I said, holding her tight. “No matter what we find. I love you.”

  I pushed my way through the trees, with Ruby following.

  We emerged into a small clearing with trees all around us. In the center of the clearing I saw loose-packed dirt, as though it had been dug up recently. No plants were growing in that patch of dirt, but set upon the barren oval was a large X composed entirely of stones. X marks the spot.

  Ruby shrieked when she looked to her left. I cried out, too, after I looked. Leaning up against a nearby tree, I saw two shovels. Long wood handles, hard steel spades. I went over to the shovels, and I saw that each had a tag on it with a note written in neat printed lettering.

  One tag read Ruby’s.

  The other tag read John ’s.

  CHAPTER 44

  When the shovel blade hit the dirt, it made an eerie scraping sound. Still, it slid easily enough into the loose-packed soil and went right up to the handle. I pulled out my first scoopful of richly dark earth and tossed it to my left, partially covering the pile of stones that had been used to mark the spot with an X. Ruby drove her shovel into the ground as well, but with a little less force. She applied pressure to the footrest to bury the blade and afterward pulled out a shovel full of dirt to add to the growing pile. It took ten scoopfuls of dirt to put sweat on my brow. Four more and I needed to wipe the sweat away with the back of my hand.

  “John, I hate that we’re doing this,” Ruby said, extracting another shovelful of soil. “What’s buried down here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to keep digging.”

  And so we dug. Our blades sinking into the earth the way a knife might vanish inside flesh. We moved shovelful after shovelful of dirt. After a while we’d dug a wide, round hole in the ground at least a foot deep. Thick earthworms moved about in our growing mound of excavated soil, waving for our attention. Our hands swatted away a persistent horde of black flies. The sun, still visible overhead, cast a weak light that barely scraped its way through the canopy of trees.

  Ruby slouched to the ground, her breathing uneven and tired. She wiped clear some sweat, leaving behind a belt of dirt that traveled across one flushed cheek to the other. She sat while I dug. Scrape. Lift. Toss. Scrape. Lift. Toss. Two feet down now, still nothing but dirt.

  “Maybe he’s just toying with us,” Ruby suggested. “You said he likes to do that. Maybe there’s nothing
down here.”

  My shovel sunk up to the handle with another thrusting plunge of the blade.

  “There are no roots, no rocks,” I said, breathing heavily from exertion. “This ground has been dug up before. The soil is still loose, not at all compacted. He wants us to keep digging until we can’t dig anymore, or we find whatever he’s buried down here.”

  “He didn’t tell us we had to dig,” Ruby reminded me. “His text just said to go there and see for ourselves. Not dig. We don’t have to dig.”

  “I want to see,” I said. “I have to see.”

  “Why?”

  I had to think about this. Why was I digging? What was I after?

  “Because I have to finish what he started,” I said.

  “This isn’t one of your climbs, John,” Ruby said.

  My shovel went back into the earth. I tossed the dirt aside as the mound to my right grew to the size of a mini-mountain. Two feet down soon became three. Before I knew it, I was waist deep inside a four-foot hole. Ruby couldn’t help out anymore, but only because there wasn’t enough room in the hole for both of us to dig. I worked alone, pulling the shovel back to ready for the strike, driving the blade into the ground, time and time again. Each thrust I expected more of the same—easy entry, easy exit, more dirt to move. But that didn’t happen this last time. No, this last time my shovel blade hit something hard. It made a clanging sound, as though I’d struck a rock.

  I pushed the shovel in once again, looking for the edge of the hidden object, and eventually found it. I slid the blade underneath the blockage and lifted the shovel, using the handle for leverage to dislodge the item. Up came the side of a green plastic garbage bag with something inside. Something I hit. Something that made a clanging sound.

  A horror-stricken look came over Ruby as I pulled the bag out of the hole. It was light to lift, easy to move. Brown rivulets of dirt slid down the sides of the bag after I tossed it out of the hole. I climbed out myself and brushed away dirt that had caked up on my blistered hands. For a quiet moment, Ruby and I stared wide-eyed at the plastic bag. Almost immediately, I noticed a change in the air—a scent, a smell, that I didn’t like one bit.

  “What are you going to do?” Ruby asked.

  “I’m going to open it,” I said.

  “John—”

  I wasn’t listening. I was too busy untying the bag.

  The instant the top came apart just a little bit, I recoiled at the stench. My nostrils burned with the putrid smell of death and decay. Ruby gagged several times before turning her head away in disgust. I gagged, too, retching as I clumsily turned the bag upside down, spilling the contents onto the ground by my feet. I buried my nose in my arm to help block out the smell. At first I couldn’t register what had fallen out with a thump—no, make that two thumps. Slowly, as the initial shock gave way, my brain began to connect the dots and I understood what I was looking at.

  Two severed heads had fallen out of the bag.

  Ruby’s screams pierced the quiet woods loud enough to send resting birds scattering in flight. I didn’t scream, but I think I was moaning as though wounded. The heads didn’t look real. Rather, they looked to be made of wax, or maybe even beaten-up mannequin heads. But the flies that began to swarm around them said they were real. The stench that forced me to cover my nose and mouth did the same.

  One of the heads—the one that rolled a few feet to my right—had long brown hair that was matted down and stringy. I could see molted blue skin on the nape of the neck. The neck itself appeared to have been severed from the body with near-surgical precision. That head had come to a stop facedown, so I couldn’t see the eyes or mouth, but I could see that duct tape had been used to secure two objects to where the ears should have been. Without closer inspection, I couldn’t make out what they were.

  My eyes shifted to the other head, which hadn’t rolled as far. This head belonged to a man. The skin was tight to the skull, but a lot of tissue remained. Like the other head, the hair was matted down, but the color was dark. The skin around the man’s ample nose had browned and peeled at the tip, revealing a pinkish layer underneath. But that was just the start of the horror. The man’s lips were mostly gone, so his teeth looked to be protruding from his mouth in a twisted, wicked grin.

  I could see on this head what I couldn’t see on the other, which was how I lost the voice to scream. My mouth formed the shape of a scream, but the only sound to come out was a whisper of air. I studied the head absently, vacantly, as though all my senses had been overloaded by a profoundly sickening horror. Affixed to the head, with several judicious applications of duct tape, were severed fingers: two planted on the eyes, two dangling down from the ears like decaying earrings, and two adhered to those protruding teeth.

  See no evil.

  Hear no evil.

  Speak no evil.

  CHAPTER 45

  I didn’t know how many hours had passed. Ten? Maybe fifteen? We weren’t in the forest anymore, that’s for certain. We were at Boston police headquarters, or at least I thought we both were there. Ruby and I weren’t together for the first time since becoming vessels for Uretsky and his game. The cops had separated us. They never questioned you in the same room. But our stories would match up perfectly because we had agreed before making the call to 911 that we were going to tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the horrible truth.

  We didn’t stick around the woods very long after the heads came tumbling out of the garbage bag. We didn’t dig anymore, either. Ruby started to run, frantically, back the way we had come. I followed her, calling her name, while branches lashed at my face and roots tripped up my steps.

  When I caught up to her, she was hysterical, tears streaming down her face. But then again, so was I. What we had just seen would have made anybody hysterical. I wasn’t sure we were going to make it back to the car hiking in such a distraught state, but eventually we did. I made the call to 911, and before too long the sounds of chickadees and scampering squirrels were drowned out by a fury of sirens.

  The cops brought in police dogs and GPS equipment. There were fire trucks and ambulances and some sedans driven by guys who looked like they were from the FBI. Thankfully, I didn’t have to show anybody how to get back to those heads. I gave them the coordinates, instead.

  We didn’t stick around to see the crime-scene folks work the area. Instead, we were ushered away, driven to Boston by a cop who promised me that Clegg would be there once we arrived.

  Clegg was there, all right, but he didn’t get a chance to speak with us—not for long, anyway. We had to be interviewed first. Nothing he could do about that. Clegg did ask me if I wanted a lawyer present. I didn’t. I just wanted to tell my story.

  And so I did, to two detectives, a burly, doughy-looking fellow named Gant and a bald one with a thin mustache, Kaminski. They were nice enough, probably because I was just answering their questions. I had on a grimy blue T-shirt and jeans layered with dirt. They wore suits and hard-edged attitudes.

  I told them about Ruby’s cancer and stealing Uretsky’s identity so we could afford her medication. I told them about Uretsky’s phone call and how I believed he was just trying to scare us. “That’s why I didn’t try to shoplift those scarves,” I said, “and why Roberta Jennings was subsequently murdered.”

  I recounted my life of crime—lying to Henry Dobson, the investigator from UniSol; robbing Giovanni’s liquor store with an unloaded gun; orchestrating Ruby’s stint as a prostitute and finding the substitute, who ended up paying the ultimate price for her trick; and finally starting the fire in Southie. I gave them what information I had about the people Uretsky had used to control me—people connected to me in some way: Dr. Lisa Adams, Ruby’s oncologist; Winnie, her mom; and Tinesha, another mother who I somehow knew and who lived somewhere unknown to me. I told them what I could about the concrete room with a dripping pipe where Uretsky held his victims hostage.

  Gant left the interview room for a while and returned, not look
ing particularly happy or sad. “We don’t know of anybody named Tinesha who’s been murdered, kidnapped, or reported missing,” he said.

  “Whose heads did I dig up?” I asked.

  “We don’t know that, either,” Kaminski said.

  Gant was shaking his head.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “Just so I’m clear, you’re the guy wearing a ski mask in the surveillance video, doing CPR?” he asked me.

  “That’s me,” I said, no pride in my voice.

  Kaminski showed me his phone. “That video has got eight million hits.”

  It had shot up since the last time I looked, I thought.

  “You beat out the baby who got scared by his mother blowing her nose,” Gant said.

  “No? Really?” I said. I probably sounded surprised, but I didn’t know how else to act.

  Kaminski went back to his smartphone. “Nah,” he said, correcting himself. “That video has over twenty-three million views.”

  I don’t know how much I helped them with their investigation into the SHS killings. I told them they could take all my computers, access my phone, and search my apartments—yeah, both of them—for anything helpful. I did ask that they give the Spanish professors living in my Somerville apartment a heads-up first. We talked a lot about my drive by in Uretsky’s neighborhood, how he and his wife had been reported missing, and that the neighbor, a class three sex offender named Carl Swain, came from some very bad stock and enjoyed leering at Elliot’s wife.

  “I want to see Ruby,” I said.

  “Yeah, soon,” Gant said. “She’s doing all right. I promise.”

  I believed them, though that didn’t stop me from worrying.

  “So are you going to arrest me?” I asked.

  “We don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” Kaminski said. “To be honest, these are some pretty unusual circumstances. We do appreciate your cooperation, though. No matter what goes down, that’s going to count for something.”

  It was well past midnight when Clegg entered the interview room and relieved Gant and Kaminski of their duties. He looked haggard in a rumpled suit, red tie askew, with bags under his eyes big enough to be checked by TSA. He took a seat across the table from me and glanced at the mirror, which I knew was two-way glass.