Expire

by Danielle Girard

  His one hand held her head, the other on the bar. Which meant no weapon. She twisted her feet ever so slightly, testing the strength of the rope between them. If she kicked him, could she get away? The rope bit into her ankles. She pushed harder, testing the give, but there was almost no space—certainly not enough to free one of her feet. And there was no way to run with her feet tied.

  The candy bar pressed against her lips with a little force, and she took another bite. A faint breeze touched her chin, and she smelled his cologne, hints of ginger and frankincense. Her nausea reared again, and she paused to draw breath through her mouth, fighting off the urge to vomit. She needed the food and water.

  The haze lifted momentarily, and she pictured the two plastic sticks on her bathroom sink.

  The pregnancy tests.

  She hadn’t seen the results.

  But she didn’t need confirmation. She felt certain she was pregnant. Which meant keeping the food and water down was all the more important.

  The tail end of the bar passed her lips. She closed it in her mouth and chewed slowly. The man crunched the wrapper into his hand. She felt a shift in the air. “Is there more water?”

  Silence met her, and she swiveled her head as though she might sense his location. “Please,” she said. “I’m still thirsty.”

  She smelled his breath first. Onion rings and ketchup. Heat and moisture, then his lips on hers. His tongue, warm and sour in her mouth. She twisted her face away, but he gripped the back of her head, holding his mouth to hers. She held her breath, clenched her teeth, panic building in her chest.

  He stopped and laughed loud. The stench of onions filled her nose as his untrimmed fingernails bit into the back of her head. “You said you wanted more . . . Maybe next time you’ll be happy with what you get.”

  Schwartzman drew her knees to her chest, forcing space between them.

  The man released the back of her head, and the odor of onions faded slightly. He drew his fingers along her leg, his nails grating against the fabric of her yoga pants. Somewhere in the distance, an engine started.

  His fingers halted. He’d heard it, too.

  Another car.

  “Help me!” Schwartzman screamed. “Somebody help me!”

  “Shut up,” he hissed as his hand clasped her leg. Those nails clawed through the fabric.

  Launching her feet straight out, she connected with his body. He grunted, and she heard him fall back. The clank of something on the metal.

  “Help me! Help!” she shouted, rolling herself toward the cold air. Her head struck something hard, and she tried to shift her course, still screaming. “Help! I need help!”

  A hard, flat surface struck the side of her face. She gasped, tasting blood in her mouth. Another strike against the bone of her hip, the weapon catching the side of her ribs. She struggled to draw breath. Heard the click of the door closing.

  She rocked slowly, fighting against the fear. The residual air in her lungs had been forced out with the blow; it made it hard to get that first breath. Her rational brain knew the cause, but adrenaline filled her with panic. Slowly, the air seeped into her lungs, and she drew a full, agonizing breath.

  The pain echoed in her brain as she tried to get onto her knees.

  His hands clasped her shoulders, and she was heaved off the floor of the truck and thrown. Like a bag of potatoes. She landed awkwardly against the wall, excruciating pain drilling her back. Tears streamed down her face, absorbed in the fabric against her skin.

  He pressed her shoulders down, pinning her to the floor of the van.

  “Don’t. Please.”

  Saying nothing, he straddled her, forcing her knees straight. She tried to rock against him, but he was too strong. The bindings on her feet prevented her from getting any leverage to fight back.

  His weight drove her back into the hard metal floor until the ridges dug into her spine. “You want to scream?” he hissed. “I can make you scream.”

  “No. Please.” The shearing sound of something ripping startled her, and then his hand pressed against her mouth. She breathed in the smell of plastic and adhesive just as she felt the pull of the duct tape across her lips.

  Head turned, she huddled, waiting for him to leave. But he remained on top of her. Slowly, he shifted against her, grinding his hips.

  She fought to close him out, to find a quiet place in her own head. Bide your time. Find a way out.

  “That water you drank?” he whispered. “The drug’ll take effect anytime.”

  More drugs. No. She thrashed beneath him, crying through the tape. He was erect against her, rubbing himself into her stomach. Panic lit her nerves on fire. Water rose in her throat. The residual taste of the candy bar was acidic at the back of her mouth. She focused on breathing, willing herself to stay awake.

  But the haze descended. The rocking of his pelvis, the hard pain against her back grew more distant, less vivid. She tried to shake it off. She could not pass out. She could not be unconscious in this truck, with this man on top of her.

  Her body grew light, the drilling pain on her spine far off as though it were happening in the past rather than in that moment.

  His rocking rhythm seemed to slow. Everything seemed to slow. And then stop. Her head lolled, and her tongue felt too large in her mouth. There was a dull buzzing in her ears. Then she felt nothing at all.

  And from somewhere in that floating blackness, she heard his words. “Sweet dreams, Bella.”

  3

  Sunday, 2:19 a.m. PST

  Hal Harris paced a track from the coffee table in Anna’s living room to the edge of the kitchen, while Buster sat facing the door. Every time a car drove slowly down the quiet street, Hal went to the window, and Buster stood on all fours, wagging his tail. When the car passed, Buster whined and sat, and Hal went back to pacing. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked it again. The picture of his nephews and niece on the lock screen, with their bright gapped-tooth smiles, seemed oddly menacing. He no longer noticed the time. It was late—or early. He needed sleep, but he couldn’t close his eyes.

  When he tried, the panic set in—his heart raced, beating in his throat and neck, and his eyes burned as though they were on fire. Buster was no better. Since Hal had arrived at the house, the dog had kept vigil at Anna’s door. Hal pressed his palm against his left pocket, feeling the two pregnancy tests inside the plastic bag.

  The sound of a car slowing on the street made Buster rise to his feet, ears pointed forward. Hal watched a black sedan pull to the curb and the front door open. The dome light illuminated a curly-haired woman. Hailey Wyatt, his old partner. He forced himself to stand still, though he wanted to turn around and go back into the house, close the door.

  He thought of the pregnancy tests in his pocket, longed to study the faded blue plus sign again, to confirm for himself that he hadn’t made it up, that he could be a father, that Anna and he had made something. Before . . .

  The car door cracked open, and Hailey stood on the street. “You up for company?”

  He shrugged.

  She studied him without moving. They had worked together for almost twelve years. There had been a time when she had known him as well as he knew himself. Maybe better. Still standing at the car, she asked, “If I go, will you sleep?”

  He shook his head. She closed the door and rounded the car to walk up the front path. The interior dome light went black, and she was caught in shadow momentarily. He found himself noticing all the differences between Hailey and Anna. While Anna was tall, probably five eight, Hailey was barely five three. Where Anna was lean and thin, Hailey was curvy. Her hair was a nest of wild curls while Anna’s was a gentle wave.

  He looked away, the comparisons suddenly painful.

  Hailey entered the house and sat on the edge of Anna’s couch. She cranked up her chin and watched him pace. “Hal.”

  He looked back, and she nodded to a chair. Hal sighed and sat.

  “The whole department is working her dis
appearance.”

  Hal bristled at the word disappearance. Anna had been abducted. He drew a slow breath and let it out. He was grateful for the response from the department. His captain, Marshall, had put out a bulletin, and the response had been overwhelming. A dozen active officers were on the case, and more than thirty off-duty personnel had volunteered to go door-to-door to talk to neighbors. But they didn’t know what Spencer MacDonald was capable of. They would inevitably underestimate him.

  “Roger has been in the lab all night,” Hailey said. “He and Ting are sorting through the CCTV and traffic footage in a one-mile radius.”

  Ting was great with photo enhancement and manipulation, but finding a clear image of a face going thirty miles per hour in a white van . . . Hal wasn’t hopeful.

  “And I checked in with Casazza in Missing Persons. She’s met with Eileen Goldstein twice.”

  The woman who had been struck by the white van in the neighbor’s driveway. The reason Anna had left her house. The bait. Hal couldn’t blame an old woman, but the what-ifs spun like webs in his brain.

  Hal had spoken with Casazza, too. “White man, white van.” Hal woke his laptop and checked his email. Marshall had requested FBI assistance. Hal had reached out to the Greenville police, but they weren’t interested in interviewing MacDonald about the disappearance of his ex-wife in San Francisco. Hal was considering flying down there himself.

  He toggled to his spreadsheet that listed the things he wanted access to—MacDonald’s client list, known associates, phone records, bank and credit card records, GPS from his car, if he had a navigation system. If this were a San Francisco homicide and MacDonald a suspect, all of this would be within reach.

  But Hal’s confidence that MacDonald was behind Anna’s disappearance was not enough to warrant that kind of access. Not officially. Hal had called in plenty of favors around the Bay Area. He’d responded to plenty as well. But across the country? In Greenville, South Carolina, of all places . . . He didn’t have any kind of inroad there.

  “They’re sending a police artist over to sit with Goldstein tomorrow,” Hailey said. “We might get something from that.”

  Hal said nothing. They both knew how imperfect that science was. And what good would an image do them? Facial recognition software didn’t work like it did on television. There was no way to upload an image and run it through some database of CCTV footage across a city, let alone the state. And certainly not with a sketch.

  They weren’t going to get a photograph. Hal knew for a fact that the sketch Goldstein would help create was not going to be of Spencer MacDonald’s face. According to the local police, Spencer MacDonald had been home in Greenville at the time of Anna’s disappearance.

  “Are you staying here?” Hailey asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t have the dog at my place, and someone has to watch him.”

  She nodded, holding her lip with her bottom teeth as though holding back a question. She opened a magazine on Schwartzman’s coffee table—something called Dwell—and images of perfect home interiors flipped by as she turned the pages.

  Hailey closed the magazine. “Roger said there was a private investigator in Greenville.”

  “Colton Price,” Hal said, standing again. “I spoke to him a few hours ago. He’s got people looking for MacDonald. There’s a credit card hit at a local hotel, which doesn’t make sense. He’s going to call me as soon as he knows more.” Hal drew the phone from his pocket again.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Hal walked the length of the room, turned back. Shook his head.

  Hailey stood from the couch and made her way to the front door. “Try to rest.”

  He nodded. “Thanks.”

  After a moment of awkward silence, Hailey let herself out. Hal watched her walk back to the street and to her car. She wanted to help. He wished there was something she could do. Their friendship was built that way. During his divorce and after the death of Hailey’s husband, they’d leaned hard on each other. They had been fortunate to have one another. And he was grateful.

  But this time was different. No amount of leaning on Hailey was going to bring Anna home to him.

  That he was going to have to do himself.

  4

  Sunday, 8:09 p.m. MST

  Pulled toward wakefulness, her head heavy and painful, Anna Schwartzman felt a strange sense of vertigo, a wave of nausea. She remembered taking a pregnancy test but couldn’t recall the results. Hal was supposed to come over. Had she passed out? The room was cold, but the air was still, full of the scent of dust and wood chips. Silent.

  Something was wrong.

  It smelled wrong. And the surface beneath her was too hard to be her own bed. No sounds of Buster’s snoring and Hal puttering around in the kitchen. No sounds at all.

  Flipping mentally through her memories, she tried to recall where she’d gone. Why was it so dark? She’d been home. The doorbell rang. Eileen Goldstein had come by with a piece of mail. Had she ever opened it? No. The old woman had cried out, and Schwartzman had gone to her.

  The neighbor’s driveway. The white van. The smell of onions, his lips on hers. The Snickers bar, the water—she had been so thirsty. And then more blackness.

  Heart pounding, she opened her eyes and blinked into darkness. Where was she? She sensed a blanket beneath her, tried to imagine the hard surface below that. Tears filled her eyes as she drew a breath, imagined the lid of a coffin above her.

  Her breath caught in her throat as she reached one hand out, tentatively, into the air. No box or lid. She raised her other hand and stretched her arms. Felt around her, touched the bed below. Sheets, a mattress. Her hand found a bedside table.

  She cried out in relief. She was on a bed. Hard, but a bed. Pain stabbed behind her ears as she lifted her head. The corners of her lips cracked when she opened her mouth. Dehydration.

  Fighting the pain, she turned her head. Her cheek throbbed. The truck. He’d hit her. She froze a moment, holding her cheek as she sat the rest of the way up. Something whirred above her, like a window shade being released. She stilled and waited for other sounds. The quiet was resounding, completely foreign. For a moment, she feared her hearing had been damaged. She slapped the wood table beside the bed, the cracking sound a comfort. Keeping her hand on the flat wood, she held her breath and listened.

  She was alone.

  She had to get out of here.

  Standing made her even dizzier. Nausea gripped her stomach, and her ribs ached with every breath. She drew a slow breath through her nose, then another. The soft whisper of her breath was comforting in the deafening silence. When had she last eaten or had something to drink?

  Shifting her feet off the bed, her bare soles met with cold wood. Old. Dirty. The smell of dust clung in the air, and she shivered. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. A thin sliver of deep gray shone from behind the shade of a small window on the far side of the room. A basement, she thought. But where?

  She recalled waking in the truck. How far had they traveled?

  They. She recalled the eyes she had seen. Why couldn’t she place them? For years, she’d imagined being abducted. Again and again, she’d dreamed of Spencer leaping from some dark corner and grabbing her. She had always known the day would come.

  But those eyes had not been Spencer’s.

  Surely Spencer was behind this. She sat in the darkness, listening to the silence. No cars. She was no longer in San Francisco, probably not in the Bay Area at all.

  She’d been drugged, but with what?

  An unfamiliar pulse drummed at the base of her sternum, and she pressed a palm to the beat. Her baby. But of course, the beating wasn’t the baby. It was much too early to feel the baby. It wasn’t even a baby. Not yet. An embryo, then a fetus.

  Semantics.

  Was she even pregnant? Could it be wishful thinking? She had never looked at the pregnancy tests. The fear was paralyzing. Fear that she was pregnant. Fear that she wasn’t.
<
br />   She felt it, though, didn’t she? Drugged and pregnant.

  “Stop.” The word skidded across her vocal cords like the first tracks on a freshly graveled road. It seemed to echo across the silent room, then pinball inside her head. She was not going to think about the baby. Not now. Figure out where you are and get the hell out.

  She twisted her head to listen again. Something shifted against her neck. She jumped at the sensation and fingered her throat. A band of hard rubber circled her neck. A collar. Taking it in both hands, she yanked and twisted, pulling to free herself. The pain in her ribs sharpened, and she cried out as the rubber dug into her neck. She winced and let go, pressed the backs of her hands against the raw skin to cool it.

  Reaching up, she located a cord over her head and ran her fingers down until it connected with her collar, then up overhead. A thin cable, coated in plastic. It was surely connected to the ceiling.

  When she pulled on the cable, it came loose, giving her slack to move. Above her, something clinked and grew closer, metal sliding on metal. A track.

  It was a tether to limit how far she could travel. Like a dog. She worked her hands around the band, found where the thick rubber connected to the cord, and discovered some sort of bracket, a metal plate on its front. For a key, perhaps. Again she wrapped her fingers under the collar and pulled and twisted in an effort to break the two sides apart. She grunted and yanked until the collar cut into her neck. Tears burned in her eyes.

  She released it and fought back her panic. Drew breaths. She gagged, her stomach heaving. But nothing came. Lowering her head, she fought to control her breath. Her mind filled with the images of a dead woman from Seattle. Zhanna Doe had been one of Schwartzman’s first cases, a Russian woman held hostage in a nice Seattle building, yoked in a collar and tethered to a track.

  Just like you.

  Her breath came in shallow bursts. Her ribs throbbed dully. Did the Seattle police ever find out her real name? They had called her Zhanna because it was Russian for Jane.