by Mark Gimenez
Grace is gone!
Gone where?
Taken!
Home?
No, goddamnit! Someone kidnapped her!
He has never before seen Elizabeth panicked and out of control, and it scares him. Then the sound of sirens, the police, the search in the woods. And Gracie was gone. And he might never see her again. And Little Johnny Brice hurt in a place the bullies could never touch.
9:42 A.M.
“You’ve worked a hundred twenty-seven abductions?” the mother asked.
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“But no ransoms?”
“I’ve worked one ransom in thirty years with the Bureau. Not a child.”
He knew where this conversation would end. These conversations always ended there.
“Your job is to find abducted children?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Find abducted children?”
He gave her the same answer he always gave the parents, hoping they would not ask the logical follow-up question; most parents didn’t because they couldn’t bear to know the answer.
“Eventually.”
From the mother’s expression, he could tell her mind was working through his answer. Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes bore into him. She was a tough broad, tough enough to ask the follow-up question.
“Were any of the children found … alive?”
Looking at the mother, Devereaux found himself hoping mightily that her child had been abducted for money, as unlikely as that was. But he had hoped just as mightily one hundred twenty-seven times before for a happy ending to an abduction, each time in vain. One hundred twenty-seven abductions of children by strangers— ninety-three had ended with a dead child; the other thirty-four had never been found and were presumed dead—had taught him that holding out false hope only victimized the family a second time.
“No, ma’am.”
The mother’s entire body slumped. The tough-broad lawyer façade faded from her face; for a brief moment, Elizabeth Brice was just another desperate, tortured mother, no different from those dirt-poor mothers of victims living in trailer parks, because they now shared something in common—the peculiar pain of knowing your child was in the arms of a stranger. After a silence, she spoke, slowly and softly.
“This isn’t going to end well, is it?”
“Mrs. Brice, Gracie was extremely low-risk for a stranger abduction—upper income, non-urban, intact family … kids like her just don’t get abducted by strangers. And ransom is a long shot. It just doesn’t happen in this country. But this wasn’t a random grab. He targeted Gracie. He asked for her by name. Why? Of all the little girls at the park, why did he want her?”
Bobby Joe Fannin was breathing hard, fast as he was having to run to keep the dogs in sight. They got something, way they were yelping. Deep into the woods, the dogs abruptly stopped. Bobby Joe caught up and looked down. He spat.
“Shit.”
11:13 A.M.
Last fall’s leaves and twigs crunched and snapped beneath their feet as they ran through the thick woods toward the sound of barking dogs, but Ben’s thoughts were of another time and place when he had run through woods to a bad ending.
She’s twelve or maybe thirteen. They dragged her into the nearby woods. He heard her muffled cries and came running. “Get off her!” he yells as he drives his boot into the soldier’s ribcage, knocking him off her. The other soldier grins and points down at the girl. “Go on, Lieutenant, get yourself some.” He glances down at the terrified girl then back at the grinning soldier. He raises his rifle and puts the muzzle against the soldier’s forehead; the grin drops off the soldier’s face. The urge to pull the trigger is overwhelming. Instead, he pivots and slams the butt of the rifle into the soldier’s brow, knocking him unconscious. The two soldiers would have been court-martialed had they not been killed that same afternoon, their legs blown off by VC land mines, their death cries rising above the Plain of Reeds as they bled to death on a hot day in the Mekong Delta.
Ahead, Elizabeth stumbled and fell again; a skirt and heels were not suited to the terrain. Ben stopped to help her up. The heel on one shoe had broken off; she tossed the other shoe aside, pushed his hands away, and ran on, her face distorted by fear.
The local police chief was now in the lead, followed by Agent Devereaux then John, Elizabeth, and Ben. Chief Ryan had started off walking, carefully pushing limbs aside for Elizabeth’s safe passage, but when she had taken off running into the woods, hands flailing at the sharp branches striking at her face and arms and legs, he had realized that walking was not an option. They had overtaken Elizabeth on her first fall.
They were now deep into the woods. From the intermittent sound of cars, a road ran nearby. Thirty meters ahead, uniformed cops and FBI agents stood silently in a circle, their heads down, as if joined in prayer. Chief Ryan and Agent Devereaux arrived first then turned and stopped John. Ben saw his son slump and fall to his knees; Ben ran faster and his heart beat harder. Agent Devereaux tried to block Elizabeth’s view—
“Mrs. Brice, you shouldn’t …”
—but she shoved him aside and pushed her way inside the circle; she cried out, and her hands snapped up to her mouth like a reflex. Her legs gave way, and she dropped to the ground. Her clothes were ripped and covered in dirt and dried leaves, one shoe was on and one shoe was gone, and her arms and legs and face were striped with fresh scratch marks. Ben stood over her, staring down and breathing hard. He took the pain and buried it deep inside him with all the other pain, clamping his jaws so tight his teeth hurt. The woods were eerily quiet, as if even the creatures understood the violation only they had witnessed.
Elizabeth crawled forward and reached out to the blue soccer shorts and white soccer shoe lying on the ground.
6:11 P.M.
The ten-thousand-square-foot residence at Six Magnolia Lane stood silent as night fell. Upstairs, Kate sat in her room saying the rosary through quiet tears. Elizabeth was sleeping in her bed, having succumbed to exhaustion after thirty-seven hours awake; she had managed to remove one leg of her torn pantyhose before falling asleep. Sam was watching Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in his room with Hilda; Pirates was rated PG-13, so he wasn’t supposed to be watching it, but Hilda didn’t know that—heck, she couldn’t even read English.
In Gracie’s bedroom, Agent Chip Stevens, an FBI computer specialist with the Bureau’s Computer Analysis Response Team, aka the “geek squad,” was quietly examining the victim’s computer; he was reviewing her e-mail history, checking the browser cache to see the websites she had visited and webpages she had downloaded, and trying to determine if she had been contacted over the Internet by a computer-literate sexual predator. Perhaps she had wandered into the wrong chat room and had been lured into disclosing personal information that had led the perpetrator to her soccer game. The Internet had opened a whole new world to sex offenders.
God, he hated child abductions.
Stevens dwelled on the victim’s last e-mail. Dated yesterday, from [email protected] to [email protected]. On the screen, Stevens saw:
ACK. Hm frm NYC. Nsnly dspr8 2 CU. Gd wk @ skl? RdE 4 mg gm? Gm tm? Wldnt ms 4 E9$. Rly. Pstgm, srs fdg n qlty fctm, grilf. CUL8R, alEG8R. X0XO, Kahuna.
He translated the message from Mr. Brice to the victim: Hi, I’m here. Home from New York City. Insanely desperate to see you. Good week at school? Ready for the big game? What is game time? Wouldn’t miss for a billion dollars. Really. Postgame, serious foodage and quality facetime, girlfriend. See you later, alligator. Love and kisses, Kahuna.
Stevens smiled. The victim and her father obviously had a running joke because no one abbreviated every word of their e-mail like that anymore. He found the victim’s reply e-mail:
E9$? ROTFL. PANS 2 tl U abt skl. Am I rdE 4 sccr gm? IMHO, I grok sccr! Gm @ 5. BthrRB[]. MB vprmom wl sho … Nt! UR
my fv prpllrhd n ntr bg rm. Ctch U ofln, d00d. OnO. Gracie. :-)
Tears welled up in Stevens’ eyes as he read her reply: A billion dollars? I’m rolling on the floor laughing. Pretty amazing new stuff to tell you about school. Am I ready for the soccer game? In my humble opinion, I am soccer! Game at five. Be there or be square. Maybe vapormom will show … Not! You are my favorite propellerhead in the entire big room. Catch you offline, dude. Over and out. Gracie. Signed off with the online emoticon of a happy face.
The victim and her father must have had a great relationship. Stevens wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Problem was, he got way too emotional working child abductions. Sitting in the victim’s room among her personal effects, he couldn’t help but wonder about her life and the importance of each object in her life—like this, a framed portrait of a young soldier in full military dress, wearing a green beret, a chest full of medals, and what Stevens knew was the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck. Who was this soldier and why did he rate a front-row spot on a ten-year-old girl’s desk, where she would look at him first thing each morning and last thing each night? Questions like that haunted him for weeks after the child’s body was found.
Other than being about five times as big with an adjoining bathroom that was like something out of a fancy hotel, the victim’s room looked remarkably similar to his nine-year-old daughter’s room: posters on the wall, the same Orlando Bloom one and a life-sized Mia Hamm, trophies, books, TV/DVD, telephone, boom box, electronic keyboard, soccer ball, and a closet stuffed with clothes. Gracie Ann Brice is a real live kid. Or was. She had sat where he sat, done her homework on this computer, watched TV in this room, talked to her friends on that phone, and slept in that bed, where her father now slept, curled up in the same dirty clothes and clutching the girl’s teddy bear. He did not appear at all like the genius Stevens had read about in that Fortune magazine article. Stevens had felt envious that day: he was a GS-11 geek making $51,115 a year and Brice was a geek about to become a billionaire. But now that Brice’s daughter had been abducted and murdered—he had never worked a stranger abduction where the child hadn’t been murdered—Stevens was not so envious. He wouldn’t trade his daughter for Bill Gates’s money.
FBI procedure was to secure the victim’s bedroom and seal it off from everyone, even the family. But he didn’t have the heart to wake the father, not after what he had been through the last twenty-four hours. So Agent Stevens was working quietly.
The entire house was quiet.
Downstairs, eleven somber FBI agents manned the hot-line phones in the command post, logging every lead, no matter how unimportant, and every reported sighting, no matter how inconceivable, into the computer. And waiting. Mostly waiting, as few calls were coming in.
Agent Jan Jorgenson sat at one computer, running database searches on the family per orders; she was still shaken from having witnessed the victim’s mother slapping the father, defenseless in his despair. If this was a typical child abduction case, Jan had no desire to become a specialist like Agent Devereaux. She glanced across the room at him.
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux felt tired, so godawful tired. He was holding his personal cell phone to his ear as the call rang through and thinking, What the hell’s wrong with people, a man could do that to a child? And leaving her soccer shorts behind like a perverted calling card: See what I did? Yeah, we see—die and go to hell, you sick bastard! When Devereaux’s seventeen-year-old daughter answered, he said, “Hey, baby, I just wanted to tell you I love you.” She laughed and said, “What, are you dying or something?” Somewhere deep inside him, he was.
Coach Wally Fagan sat at another computer; he was scrolling down mug shots of the forty-two thousand registered sex offenders on the state’s official sex offender website—pictures, names, addresses, and criminal histories—starting with those registered in the county, hoping to ID the blond man in the black cap and plaid shirt who had asked about Gracie after the game and wishing he had never pointed her out to him. The mother was right: he was a fucking idiot.
In the kitchen, Sylvia Milanevic, the Brice family maid, was preparing a fresh pot of coffee for the FBI agents. Sixty-three, an immigrant from Kosovo, she had lost two children in the war. She had concluded long ago that life was about enduring pain: you’re born, you suffer, and you die. The small TV on the counter was on: “A child abducted by a stranger has a life expectancy of three hours. Gracie Ann Brice has been missing for twenty-four hours now …” Sylvia looked out the window over the sink at the lonely figure by the pool.
Ben was sitting in a patio chair. His face was wet with tears and the pain was eating at his insides like a cancer. He closed his eyes and thought back to 1964 when he was eighteen and boarding the train to West Point. His father had shaken his hand and said, “Do your country proud, son.” His mother had hugged him tightly and whispered in his ear, “God has a plan for Ben Brice.” Ben opened his eyes now and turned them to the heavens above.
“Do you still have a plan, God?”
DAY THREE
7:08 A.M.
The morning sun filtered through the shutters of the spacious master suite on the second floor of Six Magnolia Lane. Elizabeth stirred under a thick down comforter in the tall king-sized four-poster bed that was accessible only by wooden steps. A faint smile crossed her lips.
Not guilty on all counts.
She rolled over and groaned. Her body was sore. Her head was groggy, like she had a hangover, but she didn’t remember having anything to drink last night. It was probably just the trial; a long trial always left her physically and mentally exhausted, especially after coming down from the adrenaline high of victory.
Twelve good citizens with the mental range of a windshield wiper.
Was today Saturday? Or Sunday? Must be Sunday. John and Kate probably had the children at church. She did not attend church; religion and the law were the opiates of the masses in the twenty-first century, holding the peasants at bay with their firm faith in God and justice. Elizabeth Brice knew better. Her faith in the justice of the law had ended five years out of law school, late for most lawyers, and she had not prayed to God since …
Yesterday?
Did she pray yesterday?
Elizabeth tried to shake her head clear of the fog. She took a deep breath and realized she was hungry. Very hungry. When had she last eaten? She couldn’t remember. A big breakfast on Sunday morning while the others were at church would be nice, a quiet time to drink coffee, read the paper, and relive her courtroom victory—there might even be an article about the stunning Shay verdict! Thus inspired, she stretched, threw off the comforter, and rolled out of bed.
She hit the wood floor hard.
What the hell? Her legs were tangled in her pantyhose … The hose was ripped and shredded … She pulled dried brown leaves from one leg of the torn hose … Why was one leg off? … Why was she sleeping in her pantyhose? … Why were her legs dirty and streaked with fresh scratch marks? … And her arms … And her hands … Nails broken … Clothes dirty and torn … Why was she sleeping in her clothes? … She touched her face … Why had she gone to bed without cleaning her face of makeup? … What the hell was going on?
A nauseous tide washed over her. She crawled on her hands and knees to the front windows, dragging one leg of her pantyhose behind her like a bridal veil, knelt up, and peeked through the shutters. Down below, out front of her house, were police cars, TV trucks, cameras, and people. The media circus. She slumped against the wall. She remembered now.
Grace was gone.
Downstairs, Ben entered the kitchen from outside. Kate and Sylvia were busy cooking enough breakfast for a battalion, and the smell of pancakes, sausage, eggs, and biscuits lured a steady stream of cops and FBI agents to the kitchen.
Ben had woken at dawn after only a few hours of fitful sleep. He had heard the back door, Kate leaving for early Mass to do what Irish-Catholic women have done for centuries in the face of famine, poverty, pestilence, war, and evil: pra
y. He had showered and dressed then gone outside and watched the sun rise over the trees, the start of another day without Gracie—and the first day knowing that money would not save her.
Now Ben was trying to pour a cup of coffee, but he was fighting the morning shakes. Kate took the coffee pot from him and poured then walked the cup and saucer over to the breakfast table without a word. Ben sat down, held the cup with both hands, and sipped the coffee. Five years since she had made his morning coffee, but Kate remembered the routine; there was enough caffeine in this coffee to defeat the mother of all hangovers. But Ben Brice had not surrendered to the bottle last night.
Sam sat across the table. He was still wearing the Boston Red Sox uniform, but he now had a blue scarf wrapped around his head. He was alternating between taking syrupy bites of his pancakes and reciting lines as if acting out roles in a play.
“Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren—”
Sam turned slightly as if facing another character; his voice changed.
“First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement. So I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirates’ code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.”
Ben looked at Kate by the stove. She said, “Movie dialogue. He’s got John’s memory. He can recite entire movies verbatim.”
Sam continued: “So that’s it then. That’s the secret grand adventure of the infamous Jack Sparrow. You spent three days lying on a beach drinking rum!”
Sam gestured as if his knife and fork were bottles.
“Welcome to the Caribbean, luv.”
Kate said, “Sam, is that from a PG-13 movie?”
Sam froze, his mouth full, his arms still outstretched, and his eyes suddenly wide as if he’d been caught red-handed. His eyes darted to Ben. He decided to save his grandson again.
