by Skylar Finn
The men in white coats called it Stockholm Syndrome, but he felt this was an oversimplification. He was merely giving her an opportunity, and she was logical and reasonable enough to recognize it. To take this chance to escape her condemned existence. So few were. Only the brave ones ever went with him.
As they walked down the hall together, he could hear Brittany yelling for help. She’d figure out the door was unlocked soon enough.
Or she wouldn’t.
We hustled Dana down the stairs. The smell of smoke drifted upward. I shined my light on the far end of the room. Elevators. A staircase. The basement.
To be fair to him, I didn’t give Harper a choice about who stayed with Dana and who went after the Piper. He held her in his arms, and I let go of her hand and took off into the dark like a shot. Harper was a thoughtful, intelligent man who respected me as equally upholding the law. It was noble, really—the fact that no matter what, it was still ultimately his most base and primitive instinct to protect me.
I’d worked with male agents who patronized me, chided me, ostracized me—and still flung their hand out when they slammed on the brakes of the car. I’d worked with male agents who were incredibly respectful and treated me no different than any other agent and threw themselves on top of me when a nearby building exploded during an operation. And that’s what he would have done. Women and children first, and all that.
It wasn’t bravery or fearlessness. I wasn’t either trying to be a hero or go out in a blaze of glory. I wasn’t trying to bag the villain and steal all the thunder for myself. It was a form of selfishness, really.
It was only after I’d done everything humanly possible within my power, even if it was my potential looming death, that my conscience could be even a little bit clear. If I didn’t try everything I possibly could at the moment, I knew I would never sleep at night again.
The first thing that hit me was a wave of smoke. Coughing and choking, I waved ineffectually at the air in front of my face. Smoke billowed out of a nearby doorway. My heart dropped. If the girls were down here, I might already be too late.
A hurtling weight plowed into me full-force. For an instant, I thought the Piper had struck me in the chest. Then I realized it was a tear-stained, soot-covered girl. Her tears streaked a path through her dirty face and long, tangled hair. She had thrown herself at me after coming down the hall at a dead run.
“Brittany?” I held her at arm’s length to examine her.
Other than being emotionally fraught and struggling to breathe in the smoky corridor, she looked otherwise unscathed. At least for the immediate present, she would likely have years of therapy in her future. It was still vastly preferable to the alternative.
“Crystal,” she wheezed. “He took—Crystal—”
I pulled her away from the smoke and flames billowing from the room ahead of us. I supported her as I walked her over to the stairwell. “Where did he take her?” I asked.
“I don’t…know…just gone…”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t talk.”
Harper’s face appeared at the top of the steps. I pushed Brittany up the stairs toward him. He reached down the stairs and took her hand. I turned around.
“Don’t—” I heard his voice behind me. It was the last thing I heard before I plunged back down into the smoky, hellish corridor and disappeared from sight.
26
Runaway Girl
I knew once I passed the column of smoke, there would be no turning back. The flames and smoke were getting bad enough that it would soon become a wall, a barrier cutting me off from my retreat. If there were no other way out ahead of me, I would be trapped.
But there must have been another way. Girls didn’t just vanish into thin air. He had to have gotten her out somehow.
When I reached the end of the hallway, I thought at first that I’d come to a dead end. The hazy corridor turned sharply, and I saw the room where he must have been keeping Crystal. I went in and rapidly searched the room: bed, corners, bathroom. There was no closet. There was no trapdoor in the floor. There was no sign of any way out.
There was a small window over the narrow cot, and I figured that in a worst-case scenario, I could barricade myself in the room, smash the window for fresh air, and hope that I had enough time for the fire department to arrive.
I turned back to the open doorway, certain there must be something I had missed. What I saw from the door chilled me to the bone.
I could see the hallway wall opposite the room, and rather than being smooth and impenetrable, there was a massive crack right down the middle of it like a monster had torn it open with its massive jaws. It looked like it was part of the renovations: an open space a full-grown man could step through. Like a seam in the side of a mountain.
I thought of the poem copied out so carefully in her notebook:
When, lo, as they reached the mountain's side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children follow'd,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain side shut fast.
Having Crystal with him would slow him down. I stepped through the crack and found myself in a narrow, dusty passage inside of the walls. Coughing, I shined my light ahead of me. The air quality wasn’t much better than the smoke-laden death chamber I’d just left, but at least now I knew I could get out of the building.
The passage snaked around, serpentine-like, and felt like it ran the full length of the building but underground. I moved as quickly as I could in the narrow space, brushing cobwebs away as they clung to my face and hair. I could hear the squeaking of rats.
The passage began to tilt upward, so subtly at first, I wasn’t sure if I imagined it. It looked like it had been dug out by hand, not by a construction crew. By a madman with infinite patience and determination, adding onto the original work underway within the building. The passage became so narrow that I had to crawl.
I assumed it would come out close to the building, near to where the work took place. But this new passage had been created for an entirely different purpose. By the end, I was pulling myself along through the dirt and grit on my stomach like a snake. When I finally felt fresh air hit my face, I gasped with relief and an intense need for fresh oxygen.
I pulled myself out of the hole in the ground. Disoriented, I gazed around the darkened streets as I attempted to discern my surroundings. I coughed up smoke and dust, rubbing my face with the back of my hand as I tried to see more clearly. I could hear sirens in the distance. The streetlights were out where I was, despite the light being on in Dana’s room. I didn’t understand it. If the entire grid was out, it should have knocked out the power to the Inn.
It was then that I saw it: the pristine birthday cake house that stood, just as imperious and beautiful as the day it had been built. The house right next to the river. The ferry launch. The river.
In the poem, the Pied Piper of Hamelin drives the rats into the river. When he plays his second song in order to punish the townspeople for their failure to remit payment for his services, they fear at first that he’s driving the children to the river.
As the Piper turned from the High Street
To where the Weser rolled its waters
Right in the way of their sons and daughters!
I stumbled down the rise of the hill toward the river. I could just make out the ferry launch through the thick fog that rolled across the water. I ran for the dock. I was slow and stupid from inhaling so much smoke, coughing from the dirt and dust of the tunnel. My eyes burned.
Just ahead of me, I could make out two shapes: one tall and broad-shouldered, the other small and slight as a child’s. The light from my Maglite bobbed drunkenly ahead of me in the dark.
“Crystal!” I called her name or tried to. My voice was a hoarse rasp. My limbs were so slow and sluggish it was as if I was in a nightmare where you try to r
un, but your heavy, useless limbs won’t cooperate.
It was then that I noticed a strange thing. She wasn’t be dragged or forced along, at knifepoint or gunpoint. She walked alongside him freely, as if of her own volition. As I forced my molasses legs to move closer, I saw that she held his hand.
They drifted ahead of me effortlessly as if they were shadows or ghosts. They glided down the pier. She never once turned around.
He had a boat. This much I knew. He had it waiting there for them. I don’t know how many he had intended to take with him. Maybe just her, or maybe all three of them. Maybe even more. It was large enough to hold ten and small enough that it left the launch with scarcely a ripple.
There was a single light on down at the launch. It hovered over them at the end of the pier like a spotlight. The fog parted with a breath of wind blowing over the river. It was only then that she turned around.
His back was to me as he guided the boat down the river. His dark-green hood was up, and I never saw his face. But she sat in the boat, facing the launch, facing me, as I reached the end of the pier too late. Like the citizens of Hamelin, I watched helplessly as the child was borne away by the Pied Piper.
She watched me back, her small face pale like a ghost’s in the river. She looked at me, gasping, covered in dirt and now tears. And she smiled.
Harper said when he saw me lurching up the now-empty street empty-handed, like a zombie, he thought I had gotten shot. He rushed through the crowd outside the Wells Inn. The firetrucks and police cars were surrounded by the curious onlookers who had been the final ones to trickle out of the fairgrounds, their cars parked and double-parked as they took in this substitute spectacle for the original one they had driven all that way to witness.
He gave me a swift, hard shake that pulled me from my stupor. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t get there in time, I couldn’t—” I could not think of anything but to confess my shame. My failure. I thought of her face, disappearing into the darkness.
He did a surprising and kind thing. He hugged me. It was a real hug, the kind of embrace that allows the person being embraced to come apart at the seams and still remain supported. I hadn’t cried for many years. But I cried that night.
I cried in spite of the two girls wrapped in blankets tucked securely away in the back of an ambulance together while they waited for their parents to arrive. In spite of the fact that both Brittany Hayes and Dana Haskell would be going home safely tonight, in spite of the odds against them. In spite of the fact that she went quite willingly. All I could think of was the one who got away. All I could see was her face, drifting through the darkness. Away from me.
CARD found Lombardo dead in a motel room overdosed on black tar laced with fentanyl. Brown was happy with us and furious with herself for chasing after a man she deemed a red herring. She assured me numerous times that the Piper’s departure from the town of Sistersville with Crystal in tow was not something I alone could have prevented. If anything, it was her oversight. Had the full team been there to back us up, she said, he might never have gotten away.
Regardless of Brown’s willingness to bear the burden of guilt, it did little to alleviate my misery. The pain of losing Crystal and knowing the Piper was still out there, somewhere, and would continue to find children to steal wherever he went was another I would carry with me. It hung heavy on my heart even at the knock on my hotel door, which was the result of a surprise guest.
I opened the door to find Brittany Hayes looking at me with her big, serious, dark eyes. I glanced up and down the hallway behind her, concerned that she’d come alone.
“My mom’s waiting in the car outside for me,” she explained, sensing my confusion. “She didn’t want me to come, but I like, made her. She’s kind of a mess since Daniel went to jail, so it’s easy to push her around. Not that I want to, anymore.” She paused, then added, “Dana wanted to come, too, but her parents aren’t letting her leave the house until she’s like, thirty.”
“Of course.” I was still a little bewildered by her sudden appearance. I stepped aside so that she could come in.
She took in my room with a matter-of-fact air: the open suitcase on the bed, the airplane bottles of liquor lined up on the dresser. I felt exposed and a little embarrassed. I’d never had the victim of a crime I’d been investigating turn up at my room the day after a case was closed. Or not entirely closed, in this particular case.
“You’re leaving now?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I have a train to catch.”
She nodded. Then with the surprising sagacity of youth, she said, “you shouldn’t feel bad. About Crystal, I mean.”
“I do,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Brittany. It should have been all of you.”
“Crystal wasn’t happy here,” she said. “Neither was I—well, I thought I wasn’t, anyway. Then I realized there are worse things.” She was silent a moment, looking reflectively out the window before continuing. “But with Crystal, it was different. She was truly unhappy. She wasn’t in a good place. She acted so tough, but she was really hurting. She was never going to be happy here. I’m not saying she’s going to be happy with some strange man who may or may not be a pervert. It might be even worse. But if you brought her back, you wouldn’t have been rescuing her. Not really.”
I thought of the decrepit house, thick with smoke. April laughing about doing porn and naming her daughter after her favorite drug.
“Anyway,” Brittany continued, “that’s not really why I’m here.”
“It’s not?” I hid a smile.
She was so serious. It was charming. “I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For finding me.”
I no longer had to hide a smile. Immediately tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. It was an act of pure will to keep them from welling up and spilling over. I didn’t like the idea of crying twice in a decade, let alone two days.
“There were times in that basement that I never thought I’d see my family again. Or go to school, or dance practice, or just like, hang out in my backyard, you know? All these things I took for granted. But now I get to do them again. Because of you, and because of Agent Harper.” She handed me an envelope and waited patiently while I opened it.
Inside was a hand-drawn card. It was decorated liberally with flowers and vines, like the backs of their notebooks, and both Brittany and Dana had signed it. I turned away to read it so she wouldn’t see my tears, with which I was now fighting a losing battle.
I had one more visitor before I left. Harper stood at my door, holding a grease-stained paper bag.
“Fish sandwich for the road?” he asked.
I smiled as I let him in. “I was expecting maybe doughnuts,” I said.
“Nah, it’s afternoon,” he said. “Doughnuts are morning food.”
“Is that the rule?”
“That’s the rule.” He perched on the edge of the desk while I zipped up my suitcase, the card from Brittany and Dana placed neatly on top.
“When are you leaving?” I asked. I wasn’t very good at making small talk, and now that we were no longer crashing through the underbrush, chasing forest assassins, or trying to track down a child predator, I didn’t really know what to say to him.
“I have a flight out this evening.”
“Back to Grosse Pointe?”
“Back to Chicago.” He placed the paper bag with the sandwich in it on the desk beside him. “It’s been a pleasure working with you. You live up to your reputation.”
“Do I?” I went and got a cup of coffee, which was what I did whenever I didn’t know what else to do. And pretty much every other minute that I was awake and conscious.
“I know you’re going to beat yourself up for the rest of your life about the Piper,” he said. “I know that because I am, too. But maybe give yourself a little bit of a break, just this once.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I said. I sat heavily on the bed, my coffee forgotten.
“I know. But you should.”
“
We had him, Harper,” I said. “He was right there. And so was she.”
“She would have run away again,” he said. “She’d already run away six times. The local cops told me. And as for the Piper…” He shook his head. “There are things in this world I will never be able to fathom. A man who takes girls and keeps them in a basement someplace and then doesn’t even lock them in, just to test them. No matter how many scumbags I encounter, there’s no handbook we can ever follow on this stuff. We do our best, as decent human beings appointed with upholding the law, but as decent human beings, we can never comprehend the mind of a psychopath. It’s not incompetence that keeps you from apprehending every maniac on the planet. It’s your goodness.”
I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years, good and bad, but Harper was one I would remain grateful for throughout my career. He was a class act, that one.
27
The One That Got Away
A few weeks later, I got a fat envelope from Harper. I’d already been assigned to another case. I was trying to put the Piper behind me. I was mostly failing at it, but with the passage of time, most of my more unpleasant cases tend to at least recede to background noise that I would only have to contend with in the space between when I went to bed and when I (didn’t) fall asleep at night.
Harper sent me the file on everything the Bureau dug up on the perp since we’d discovered he’d been staying at the Wells Inn. It was under an alias, but Harper had tracked down his supervisor on his latest job and gotten his social.
His name was Donald Harbor. Or at least that was the name he gave to the supervisor of his latest job. The supervisor and his co-worker, the only other guest at the Wells Inn, Peter David—a man with an affinity for sharpshooting, hunting, and a fondness for wearing camo, regardless of hunting season.
