by Mark Gimenez
“Gra-cie!”
All Ryan could see were the five feet of trees and ground cover in front of him illuminated by his Mag flashlight as he advanced deeper into the dark woods.
11:22 P.M.
He hears the others around him, but all he sees now is a vague vision of trees and vines and undergrowth, dense and impenetrable—a jungle. He’s fighting his way through a jungle on a dark night. He hears a child’s distant cry. He picks up his pace, but it’s like trying to run through molasses. He’s got to hurry, something terrible is about to happen, is happening. He hears more cries. He’s drenched in sweat now as he struggles onward through the steamy jungle. Vines strangle him, branches slash his face and arms, undergrowth grabs his boots, the cries grow louder, his breath comes faster, his heart pounds harder against his chest wall—
—and he suddenly stumbles out of the darkness and into the light. Fires light a hamlet, straw huts burn, and flames spit out of rifle muzzles. He hears the BOOM BOOM BOOM of high-powered weapons, people screaming, pigs squealing, and water buffaloes grunting. He smells the stench of burning animal flesh. He sees women and children being dragged out of their hiding places and thrown into the dirt, the blaze of their burning homes illuminating their terrified faces, their Asian features so delicate and desperate. He watches them being herded up and driven forward down a dirt path, carrying babies wailing in the night and begging for mercy—
“NO! NO! NO! NO VC! NO VC!”
A young girl, a fragile china doll stripped of her clothes and innocence, stumbles along, desperate to escape the savagery suffocating her, pushed forward by big hands connected to big arms. Terror seizes her face because she’s heard stories about what these men do to pretty young girls like her. She searches for sympathy in the hard faces, and she finds it in his. She turns to him, silently pleading for help. He knows he must save her to save himself: her life and his soul hang in the balance as she falls face down in the dirt. A big hand grabs at her, but he shoves it away and gently lifts her delicate arm. He hears her sobbing voice in her native tongue: “Save me. Please save me.” The china doll turns her face up to him, in slow-motion she turns into the light, and he sees her face, the face of—
Gracie.
Ben Brice screamed himself awake and sprang to a sitting position in bed, gasping for air. His heart was beating rapidly, his chest and face and hair were matted with sweat, and his ears were ringing. The phone was ringing. He reached for the phone and knocked over the empty whiskey bottle. He put the phone to his ear and spoke.
“What happened to Gracie?”
DAY TWO
5:18 A.M.
Dawn was breaking when Ben parked the old Jeep, grabbed the duffel bag from the passenger’s seat, and double-timed into the Albuquerque airport terminal. His head throbbed with each jarring step. Skiers heading home after the season’s last runs already crowded the gates early on a Saturday morning. He located an arrival/departure monitor. The first flight to Dallas departed at 0600 from gate eight.
“I understand it’s an emergency, sir,” the female gate attendant said, “but the flight is overbooked, and we have twenty stand-bys. In fact, all our flights to Dallas today are overbooked.” She glanced at her computer. “Earliest available flight out is Monday.”
She gave him a sympathetic expression and a shrug and held her hand out to the next person in line. Ben picked up his duffel bag, stepped away from the counter, and studied the waiting passengers, bleary-eyed college kids returning to school from spring break; none seemed likely to surrender a seat to a stranger.
But he had to get to Dallas.
He spotted three men in uniforms marching down the main corridor toward the gate: the flight crew. The man in the middle appeared about his age and wore captain’s wings.
He stepped over and intercepted them.
Karen, the nineteen-year-old gate attendant, shook her head when the man stopped Captain Porter. Six months on the gate and the story was always the same: It’s an emergency! A crisis! She always wanted to say, Well, so is my social life! But it was against company policy to act rude to customers, so she just smiled and shrugged. The man seemed sincere, though, not the type to lie his way onto an overbooked flight. He had nice eyes. Still, she picked up the phone just in case she needed to call security.
Karen handed a boarding pass to the next customer in line and then glanced back at the man pleading with Captain Porter. She liked Captain Porter; all the girls did. The airline hired only military pilots; the younger ones thought they were such studs, always bragging on themselves and expecting every female employee to drop her skirt on command. The older ones, like Captain Porter, were different. They were respectful of the girls, probably because they had daughters the same age, and they never bragged on themselves or what they had done in the military. The younger pilots thought Captain Porter was some kind of god; they said he had been a real top gun in some war she barely remembered from history class in high school and had been held prisoner for like, three years. Karen shuddered at the thought: no MTV for three whole years!
The man was now pointing up at the CNN monitor. Karen leaned around the counter to see the monitor. On the screen was the face of a little blonde girl under CHILD ABDUCTED and above RANSOM SUSPECTED. She was cute. Karen looked back at Captain Porter, fully expecting him to send the man packing with a sympathetic expression and a routine shrug—What can I do, I just work here?—the universal response to any passenger complaint quickly mastered by all airline employees. But Karen stood slack-jawed and oblivious to the passengers waiting in line when Captain Porter dropped his flight bags and hugged the man like he was his long lost brother then released him, picked up his duffel bag, and carried it over to Karen.
“Karen, stow the colonel’s gear,” Captain Porter said. “And bump someone in first class.”
Karen could swear Captain Porter had tears in his eyes.
8:13 A.M.
Over her mother’s objections, Gracie had come to visit him every few months and for a month each summer, for five years now. But for her visits, the morning Ben would not answer Buddy might have already arrived. He needed her and he knew why; she needed him but he did not know why. All he knew was that God had bonded them together in a way he neither understood nor questioned: his life was inextricably tied to hers, and somehow, hers to his.
Ben now sat in the back seat of a yellow cab doing seventy on the Dallas North Tollway, a turbaned driver behind the wheel, the city noises beyond the windows, a ferocious pounding behind his eyes. Outside, a concrete world raced past; inside, his stomach stewed over the thought of never seeing Gracie again. He felt as if he might puke the peanuts-and-coffee breakfast he had on the plane; and if he continued to focus on the four little Dallas Cowboy dolls standing on the cab’s dashboard, their oversized helmet heads bobbling around, he surely would. So he leaned his head back and closed his eyes; his thoughts returned to Gracie’s last visit. They had sat in their rocking chairs on the porch and watched the sunset; after a period of silence, she had said, “Mom says you’re a drunk.”
He had said, “She’s right.”
“But you don’t drink from those whiskey bottles when I’m here.”
“I don’t need to drink when you’re here.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess I only think good thoughts when you’re here.”
“Then that settles it: I need to be here all the time.”
He had smiled. “That’s real nice of you to offer—”
“No, Ben. I mean it. I want to live here with you.”
“Honey, this is no place for a girl.”
“Then you come live with us. It’s a really big house.”
“That’s no place for me. Once you’ve lived in a jungle, you can’t live in a subdivision.”
Gracie was quiet, then she said, “She still loves you.”
When Ben opened his wet eyes, the cab was pulling up to the entrance guardhouse at BRIARWYCK FARMS, AN EXCLUSIVE
GATED COMMUNITY, or so read the sign embedded in the tall brick wall. Black iron gates with TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED across the bars blocked their way. Ben recalled the front doormat at his childhood home in West Texas that read Welcome, Y’all.
After Ben’s ID checked out, the guard gave the cabby directions and activated the automatic gates. They passed through the gates and entered an oasis in the concrete desert: tall oak trees shading the wide road, expansive stretches of green grass, sparkling blue man-made ponds encircled by walking paths, and magnificent mansions set deep into large lots, homes that would cause most visitors’ jaws to drop; but Ben barely noticed. His thoughts were of Gracie.
The cab driver turned up the radio: “At six-fifteen last night, Post Oak police issued an Amber Alert and provided descriptions of both the victim and the suspect. Gracie Ann Brice is white, ten years old, four feet six inches tall, weighs eighty pounds, and has short blonde hair and blue eyes. The suspect is white, twenty to thirty years old, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, has blond hair, and was last seen wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt. Police are asking anyone who videotaped any of the games at Briarwyck Farms Park yesterday to bring the tapes in.”
The cabby made eye contact with Ben in the rearview. “Little girl, she was taken. In my country, we find the man”—he slapped the edge of his open right hand down on the dash—“we cut off his dick. Then we cut off his head.”
The cabby’s eyes returned to the road—“Aah!”—and he slammed on the brakes; Ben was thrown forward. The cab had almost plowed into a police barricade across Magnolia Lane; two uniformed cops stood in front of the cab, their hands on their holsters and shaking their heads. The cabby turned in his seat, shrugged, and said, “Can go no more.”
Ben paid the $45 fare with a fifty and un-assed the vehicle. The morning sun punished his eyes; he patted around his clothes for his sunglasses then remembered he had left them in the Jeep. He rubbed his temples, but it did not relieve the pounding in his head. He needed his morning run with Buddy to exorcise last night’s demons, but that would not happen this morning; he was in Texas and Buddy was in New Mexico. Ben's buyer in Taos promised to check on Buddy each day; the dog could tolerate city life even less than Ben. He slung the duffel bag over his shoulder and walked past the barricade, down the sidewalk, and into a media circus.
Satellite uplinks mounted above TV vans lined both sides of the street and had lured the residents out of their homes before breakfast. Kids, parents, cameramen, reporters, and cops crowded the street and sidewalks; their voices competed with the incessant THUMP THUMP THUMP of a news chopper hovering low overhead.
His head ached.
Ben continued down the sidewalk, deep into the circus, and past a reporter talking to a camera: “Gracie was last seen at Briarwyck Farms Park wearing blue soccer shorts and a gold jersey, the team name, Tornadoes, across the front and a number nine on the back.”
Kids rode bikes and rollerbladed in the street, media technicians set up their equipment, and photographers snapped shots of the mansions. Another reporter addressed another camera: “She was abducted at a soccer game last night in this upscale suburb forty miles north of downtown Dallas.”
Parents huddled in small groups and held their children close, evident on their faces that fear peculiar to parents, the fear that their children might be taken in the night. Ben had seen that fear before.
Making themselves at home on the sidewalks and lawns were grungy (a word Gracie had taught him) cameramen wearing sunglasses and baseball caps on backward. They lounged in lawn chairs, drank coffee, complained about the early morning assignment, and offered expert opinions: “It’ll be someone in the family. Always is.”
This was their kidnapping now. Gracie Ann Brice was news.
And the world waited for news outside her home where a dozen TV cameras sat fixed on tripods and aimed at Six Magnolia Lane, a three-story French chateau-style mansion that looked more like a hotel than a home. Gracie hadn’t exaggerated: it was a really big house.
Ben started up the long walkway leading to the front door but paused to listen to a lone reporter speaking into a camera: “Gracie played in a soccer game here in Post Oak late yesterday, went to the concession stand, and hasn’t been seen since. Her parents are praying that Gracie was taken for ransom, that money can save their daughter. Only fourteen hours since her abduction and a massive effort is already underway to find Gracie and the man who took her. The FBI is setting up a command post, local police are organizing search parties, and at the park where Gracie was taken, bloodhounds will soon be combing the woods …”
Ben continued to the porch. Written in colored chalk on the gray slate steps, in a child’s hand, were the words WE LOVE YOU, GRACIE. The words had the same physical effect on Ben as his morning run: he stepped to the side of the porch and puked behind a low bush. He wiped his mouth with a red handkerchief, and then he rang the doorbell.
Inside the residence the doorbell could not be heard over the ringing phones and blaring TVs and cops hustling about and FBI agents shouting into cell phones and a little boy running around in a Boston Red Sox baseball uniform, pointing a finger-gun at everyone, and yelling “Stick ‘em up!”
Walking calmly amid the chaos down the wide gallery that stretched the width of the mansion was a tall black man. FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux was wearing black cowboy boots, blue jeans, a gold badge clipped to a wide black belt, a semi-automatic pistol in a belt holster, a blue nylon jacket with FBI stenciled in gold letters across the back, and an FBI cap. Devereaux was the lead FBI agent on the Gracie Ann Brice abduction. Searching for abducted children had been his life for the past ten years.
The heels of his 14EE boots resounded under his considerable weight with each step on the immaculate hardwood floor as he passed fine art on the wainscoted walls and furniture that looked like it would break if you even leaned on the damn stuff. Walking beside him was Special Agent Floyd, an index finger pointing up like he was gauging the wind.
“Is that the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen?”
Painted on the high-arched ceiling over the gallery was a mural depicting an old-time French street scene with shops, pedestrians, horses, and carriages; the street continued to the foyer where it merged into a village square. A similar street scene entered from the gallery ceiling over the east wing of the residence. It was in fact the damnedest thing Eugene Devereaux had ever seen.
“You ever work an abduction where the victim lived in a place like this?” Floyd asked.
Devereaux’s line of work did not bring him into homes like this. The typical abduction victim’s home was on wheels or in a run-down apartment complex or a cheap rent house; it was not a mansion with fine art on the walls and French murals on the ceiling.
“Nope. Rich girls don’t get abducted by strangers.”
Devereaux was an abduction specialist with the Bureau based out of the Houston field office; he investigated only abductions of children by strangers. Gracie Ann Brice was his eleventh this year and it was only early April.
He stopped. On the wall hung a formal family portrait illuminated from above by a spotlight; the parents and the boy were dressed in black, the victim in white. Her blonde hair was a stark contrast to the others’ black hair. She looked like a sweet kid. On a small table below sat a copy of Fortune magazine with the father’s face on the cover under The Next Bill Gates? Devereaux picked up the magazine and flipped it open to the feature article about the father. The same family portrait filled an entire page of the magazine—for all the world to see. All the world knew that John Brice was about to be very rich and had a wife named Elizabeth, a son named Sam, and a young daughter named Gracie.
Devereaux replaced the magazine and said, “Maybe this really is a ransom grab.”
He hoped it was. A ransom grab was the only real chance the girl was still alive: you don’t ransom a dead girl.
“The father,” Floyd said, “he’s a basket case. I don’t think he’s up to
taking the call, if there is a call. We may need to go with the mother … defense lawyer, white-collar perps.”
From down the hall, Devereaux heard a voice, female and firm: “Hilda, your only job is Sam.”
The victim’s mother—forty, slim build, intense expression—appeared at the far end of the gallery, marching toward them with an entourage trying to keep pace: the family nanny, a young Hispanic female; an older white female of Eastern European descent in a maid’s uniform; and a local cop, young, flattop, muscular, wearing an expression that said he would rather be in a shootout with a Mexican drug cartel than taking orders from the mother. She was dressed for the office, looking impeccable in a tailored suit and heels. Her hair was done, and her makeup was in place. She was a woman you would notice on the street. Her finger was punching holes in the air.
“Find him, feed him, follow him. Don’t let him out of this house or your sight. Comprende?”
“Sí, señora.” The Hispanic woman exited the entourage.
The mother, to the maid: “Sylvia, call the caterer. They can’t find my daughter on empty stomachs.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She was off before the words had died.
To the officer: “Get those people off my front lawn.”
“I’ll try, Mrs. Brice, but—”
“No buts. Do it. Shoot them if you have to.”
“Uh, yes, ma’am.” The young officer was no match for the mother; he surrendered, shaking his head.
As the mother came closer, Devereaux noticed her eyes, alert and focused, not the vacant, lost eyes he was accustomed to seeing on mothers of abducted children. Devereaux gave her a sincere nod—“ma’am”—as she passed him in the foyer. The morning after her daughter’s abduction and she was dressed for court and in control, barking out orders. Devereaux knew that this was her way of coping, acting as if she were still in control of her life. Of course, she wasn’t; her daughter’s life—and so her life—was now controlled by the abductor.
