Lulling the Kidnapper

by O. L. Gregory

  “Uhh,” Grandpa interrupted, “I think we should wait for her parents.”

  I waved him off, “We don’t have time to wait. I’m not a minor anymore, let’s just hit it.”

  Robles’ gentle smile morphed into one of appreciation. “Where is he, Erica?”

  “If he wasn’t lying, he’s on a business trip. He left early Thursday morning to get on a flight, and he’s supposed to land back here sometime Saturday afternoon. I don’t know where at, just that he’s with a national company, gathering people from a few departments of all the branch locations to train them on how to use some new software. He also said that he was leaving the car in airport parking.”

  “Which airport, BWI?”

  “I would assume because he never complained about having to drive too far away, but he didn’t say for sure.”

  “No matter. We got his license plate number off an earlier surveillance recording at the store. I’ll have someone make a few phone calls to airport parking garages, we’ll find it. Now, you said he was on a business trip, where does he work?”

  I shook my head, “I don’t know, but I timed him once. It took him fifteen minutes to get home. Though, I don’t know how much of that time was spent driving, and how much was spent preparing to leave.”

  “What name is he using for his job? ‘Sam’ didn’t pan out, no matter where I looked.”

  I sighed in frustration. “I don’t know. But, he keeps all of his paperwork in his office. It’s a locked room on the second floor of the house. His laptop is in there, too, because he didn’t want to chance airport security getting their hands on it.”

  “Okay. Where’s the house?”

  “North, along the river, on this side, past the interstate bridge. It’s the forest green A-frame.”

  The cop to Robles’ right shifted his weight from one foot to the other in agitation. “I knew it, I knew it.” He stomped off, past me and down the hall, to the mud room. I could hear him open the screen door and go outside.

  Robles, who had turned and moved back in his seat to look at the frustrated officer, now leaned forward again and focused his attention back to me. “Well, I think it’s safe to say that Officer Mitchell will take care of getting a team over to the house.”

  “He knew where I was?”

  “He had a hunch, said his gut could feel it. He’s been cruising up and down the river in his personal boat every day. He thought he’d heard ‘Sam’ mention buying a house on the water one of the times he was at the store.”

  “He can’t go in through a door.”

  “It’s all right. He won’t make a move on the property until he gets information about safety.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where in the house were you kept?”

  “I had access to all of the interior, except his office. There’s is a small, detached garage on the property, but I never saw inside it.”

  “How did he keep you inside?”

  “He secured all of the doors and windows with a personal alarm system, and he has at least seven surveillance cameras watching my movements. He monitored me on his laptop and his phone.”

  “Did you trip an alarm when you left?”

  “I sincerely hope not.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “I crept through the house in the dark, shut myself in a closet that had an outside wall on the south side, and busted a hole through it.”

  My grandfather chuckled. “That’s my girl.”

  My eyes shifted to Grandpa and I flashed him a smile.

  “Do you think he knows you’re out?” Officer Robles asked.

  “I don’t know. I did everything in the dark, and I don’t think the cameras are of the best quality. So I don’t think they have infrared or anything. He’d never left me alone overnight before, so he’d never needed anything that sophisticated in this house. And I don’t know if he has the exterior under surveillance, or not. I don’t know if he’ll be able to see the hole in the side of the house.”

  “Is he recording audio?”

  “I’m reasonably sure he’s not. He’d mention things that I’d done throughout the day while he was gone, but never anything I had said or mumbled to myself.”

  “So if the guys go in without light, he may not know they’re there?”

  “As long as you go in before dawn. That house has a glass wall, the sun lights most of the house throughout the day. And I have no idea if he has his office under surveillance, or not. Maybe you could just sneak one guy in to grab the laptop and some paperwork to get started with?”

  “How good is he with technology?”

  “He’s excellent with it. Whatever his job is, it has to do with computers. He knows how to rig it, get it to do what he wants, how to diagnose a problem, and how to fix it.”

  “So, if he does figure out you’re gone, he could send his whole system a virus and wipe his hard drives.”

  I was stunned. “He could do that? Erase any evidence without being anywhere near it?”

  “Yep, if he’s smart enough, he can. He could even have it set up so that if anyone turns his computer on before a certain time, it’ll erase the hard drive on its own.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Don’t you worry. However good this guy is, our guy is better.”

  He damn well better be. Otherwise, I’d just wasted months of waiting.

  “Is he the type to rig anything with explosives?”

  My eyebrows shot up as my eyes widened, “I’ve never seen him with anything explosive, no unexplained wires hanging anywhere, either. But, it was all there when we moved in. He had to have had people come in and wire everything. But I have no way of knowing who it was, or if they were legitimate professionals.”

  “Is it possible that he drugged you and then left to set up the wiring in the house?”

  I shook my head, “I don’t think so. The drive between the two houses took from dusk until dawn during the winter. I don’t remember loosing the kind of time it would have taken him to do a round trip plus all of that wiring. I mean, I could be wrong, but I don’t remember having had any symptoms of being drugged.”

  “Any chance that the houses aren’t really that far apart. That maybe he drove you around all night, just to make you think he took you farther away than he really did?”

  I shrugged, “He had me in the trunk of his car, so I couldn’t see where we were going. But he didn’t make a lot of aimless turns, and I’m pretty sure we were on an interstate or highway, going straight, for what sure seemed like hours.”

  He made a face, “Sometimes guys like this are connected to a network of people who live like this all the time. He could have arranged for a friend from the network to set the camera system up for him.”

  I think my face probably showed my astonishment. I’d had no idea that enough people like him existed to have created their own exclusive club to join. “Communicating through the internet?”

  Robles nodded, “It’s amazing what you can find on the internet, if you go looking for it.”

  “So… There really may have been more than just one person watching my every move.”

  He grimly nodded again, “It just depends on whether he was protective of you, or of his way of life. Was he much of an exhibitionist?”

  “I’m not sure that I understand the context of your question.”

  “Did he invite any of his friends over? Perform for the cameras?”

  I shook my head. “He never invited anyone over. Delivery men came by once and he was pleased that I had stayed out of sight. And I can’t say that he ever performed for the cameras, he always acted the same whether the cameras were in the room or not.”

  Robles looked at me for a moment before he asked his next question. “What areas of the house had cameras placed in them?”

  Ah. He was worried about the same thing that had crossed my mind when I went looking for the cameras in the first place. “Everywhere but the master bedroom and bathrooms.”

&n
bsp; “So, either he wasn’t connected, or he just wasn’t into sharing his toys.”

  I shook my head, “He definitely wasn’t into sharing me with anyone. Aside from holding me against my will, he was so prim and proper about everything. I had the thought that maybe in order to be able to keep tabs on me while he was away from the house, that the signals had to be going through the internet. I thought he was just protecting himself by not allowing any transmissions from the bedroom, in case someone hacked into his system. But I never thought about a group of friends who were into the same things he was.”

  “It doesn’t mean that he was letting friends in on the live feed. He could have just been trying to protect you, or himself, from that kind of potential public display.”

  Before this line of questioning, I had felt in control of the situation. Now, not so much. For Officer Robles to be bringing up things like explosives and networks, things I had never even thought of, made me feel absolutely stupid. How the hell had I managed to survive and get out? This is why I feared Asshole wouldn’t get caught, why I feared that he would come back and find me, there was always something I was missing, something I didn’t even know enough to think about.

  “What’s the likelihood that this trip is on the up and up?” Robles asked.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure of that one either. I do know that he’s never left me for more than twelve hours before, that I know of. He hadn’t showed any signs of growing bored of his ruse. And even though I started working on the hole last night, he didn’t show up today to stop me.”

  Robles nodded to one of the other officers, who nodded in return and left the room.

  “How long have you been in that house?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. I haven’t seen a calendar since I was taken. Months, it was winter when he moved me in there.”

  “Where did he have you before?”

  “I have absolutely no idea. It seemed colder, with shorter days. I assume I was somewhere up north.”

  “You never saw anything outside?”

  “Oh yeah, it was a development of sorts. The houses were spaced far enough apart to lend everyone a decent amount of privacy. All the houses had their own little architectural differences, but the materials were all the same. Vertical wood siding, all stained the same brown color. Some had porches, some had more windows than others, but typically nondescript. Woods surrounded the development, and the house was right on the edge. But the woods were creepy, no kids from the neighborhood running around and making trails through them, it was just this overgrown forest.”

  “Did you always have access to the interior of that house, too?”

  I looked away from him, towards the wall. “Not for a while. I started out in the basement.”

  Robles shifted in his seat. “What was the rest of the house like?”

  “A one bedroom rancher with an attic and a basement. He kept his office in the attic of that one. The windows were all up very high, like the sills were six feet up. The basement didn’t have any windows.”

  “So, how did it come to be that he took you to the store? Why did he eventually allow you access to the rest of the house?”

  Now I looked back to face him. “By playing his game. By convincing him that I’d be obedient and do exactly what he wanted me to do.”

  “He referred to you as his wife, a lot.”

  I nodded. “That’s what he thought me to be. That was his plan all along. He has this whole, elaborate fantasy in his head that I will turn out to be a proper and obedient wife who he can take out with him, wherever he goes, and I’ll just stand by his side. He wants to think that we are the eternally happy couple. That the kidnapping was just the necessary first step in making all our dreams come true.”

  “Pennsylvania police noted that no one in your family or circle of friends matched the description that your boss gave to them. They believed that he was someone you didn’t know and that you were a victim of chance. But did he know you from somewhere, before the kidnapping?”

  I shook my head again, “No. He saw me sitting on the sidewalk and said he just knew that I was being mistreated. He spent the first few months trying to convince me that I was abused and neglected, and that he had actually rescued me.”

  “Rescued you by putting you in a windowless basement?”

  “Oh, yes, but just until I learned to trust again. He said that even severely abused dogs would attack its rescuers until they learned to trust.”

  “Erica, were you ever abused by your family.”

  My answer was emphatic, “No.”

  “Do you think this man is crazy, or just delusional?”

  “Delusional, I think. He… he over compensates for his crimes. He’s extremely intelligent, and he tries to counterbalance his bad deeds with good, like that can justify it all. If he could convince himself that I was abused, then he did well to kidnap me. He had me study a top-rated curriculum at home, so that it would be acceptable that I wasn’t attending school. It was fine to keep me in a basement for a while, because he rewarded me with my dream home later on. In his mind, no matter what he did, everything would work out because he made up for it later.

  “He walked that fine line of being smart enough to keep me locked away, and to carry a weapon on him at all times, but dumb enough to think that one day it wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “Did he have any idea that he’d moved you just up the river from this trailer?”

  “I’ve debated this one for months, and I just don’t think so. I know I never mentioned any family other than my parents. I never once mentioned this house. I was protecting my memories, because he was so doggedly determined to twist any good memory I had into a horrible one. I honestly think it was just dumb luck that landed him here. He specifically mentioned that he thought this would be a safe place for us to start over, because it was in a different state than the one he taken me from.”

  “Are there any other places that you would have been seen? Other than the store and the place he rented the boat from?”

  I turned to Uncle Mike and smiled, “Aunt Kate saw me, huh?”

  “You confused the hell out of her because you almost looked like you didn’t want to be found, but she knew it was you,” he answered.

  “It wasn’t safe for you guys to try and chase me down, or for me to jump and swim for it. But I wanted to re-stoke the fires of the investigation with another sighting.”

  Officer Robles cut in, “Kate gave me the description of the boat. Officer Mitchell and I rode around in his boat until we spotted it at the rental place. That’s where we talked to a few employees who had seen and remembered you. They said it was a bit of a strange dynamic they saw between the two of you. You wouldn’t accept their hand to get out of the boat, and you spoke in very quiet and concise sentences.”

  “I was trying to make an impression.”

  “Well, you succeeded. That’s also where we picked up the third name he’s using. So far, we have Samuel Weston, Seth Murray, and his car is registered to a Shawn O’Connor. How many other identities does he have?”

  That got a chuckle out of me, “Dude, I have no idea.” Shit, I’d slipped… My eyes shot around to look at all the officer’s faces… And then I almost laughed at myself. They didn’t care that I had said ‘dude’. They didn’t care if I spoke properly or not, so long as I could convey my meaning to them. I didn’t realize that I had held my breath, while I looked for reactions, until I relaxed and started breathing again. I had to wonder how long it would take me to start talking normally again.

  Everyone’s expressions were expectant, waiting for me to finish answering the question. “He told me to call him Sebastian. I tried not to call him anything because it made him seem too human to me, which made me think I could try and reason with him, but that’s who he said he was.” I took a deep breath to focus and wracked my brain. “I saw the name Sawyer Dawson written on an envelope once, and Shawn Dryson on a Nevada state driver’s license. He’d answered his phone
as both Scott and Seamus upon occasion. And once, I heard him applying over the phone for something in the name of Schuyler Davidson.”

  Robles’ pen was working furiously on his notepad. “What identities did he have set up for you?”

  “I don’t know that he did. He called me Mia, short for Amelia, but he never showed me any documentation with the name on it, though he did say that he had some for me. He never paired a last name with it, either, as far as I know. In the little world he had established in the house we were Sebastian and Mia, period.

  “What kind of business does he work for?”

  “Something to do with technology. Computers, I think. He talks like he’s worked himself up kinda high on the food chain.”

  He eyed me, “High enough to have to have references, and a bit of a history?”

  I nodded. “If I had to guess, his job has his real name. What he did behind closed doors was one thing, but how people perceived him out in public was quite another. He kept talking about gaining more and more responsibility at work, and little promotions here and there over the last few years. He talked as though he’d had the last job for awhile. And landing his current position was a huge score. He was always so conscious of appearances. Oh! He was telling me that the company he works for is looking into spreading itself down into South America. They want to start two branch locations down there.”

  Robles turned to the last officer standing in the room, “Start making calls.”

  The officer nodded and left.

  “Erica,” Robles said, “why didn’t you reach out and grab me, or hide behind me, or shoplift that candy bar, something, so that I knew you needed help right there, in that moment, in that store?”

  “Because you were by yourself and he always carries a gun and a knife on him. I didn’t want him to shoot you and the owner, and then grab me and put me back in a basement somewhere. I just… I’m not…” I shook my head and looked at him helplessly. “I wasn’t going back in a basement.”

  Officer Robles sighed.

  “What about the girl at the sandwich counter? She looked like she may have recognized me.”