Hunted (Reeve Leclaire 2) Read online

  They exit the freeway and turn onto Twenty-third Avenue. She cringes when they pass the spot where the drunk driver smashed into her captor’s car, remembering the crash, the sounds of crunched metal and broken glass as she was flung about in the trunk. Then the night went still, with only the ticking of the hot car. She had filled her lungs and checked for blood, making sure she wasn’t dead, but stayed quiet, listening for her captor’s voice, expecting him to take charge, waiting for the engine to start up and the car to drive off. Instead, she heard a growing wave of strange voices, followed by sirens. And though it has been more than seven years, she recalls cowering in the trunk, afraid to shout for help.

  She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly as Bender turns onto the road that winds through the arboretum, past the Japanese garden. Soon they’re cruising past houses with cartoonish black cats in the windows and ghosts haunting the trees.

  “When is Halloween?” she asks.

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  “Crap. That’s not good.”

  “Why?”

  “With Flint out there? I hate to think about all those kids walking the streets after dark.”

  Bender makes a tsking sound.

  As he parks the car, she sits rigidly, staring out the window at the house. She has never seen it from the front other than in photographs and is surprised that the new owners have managed to make it appear attractive. It’s painted a sunny yellow. The massive hedges are gone, the gloomy trees have been cut back.

  Bender puts a hand on hers. “You don’t have to do this, you know. No one expects this of you.”

  “But I’ve got to,” she says without moving.

  “No rush. Take your time.”

  She rallies her courage, removes her jacket, and puts it on the backseat. “I won’t be needing this.”

  A long walkway leads to a porch decorated with several pumpkins and bright pots of mums. The doorbell chimes and an Asian man opens the door to greet them. She studies him while introductions are made. He’s a pleasant-looking man, dressed in black jeans and a black sweater, just as she is. His name is Yoshi, so he’s clearly Japanese. She takes this as a good sign, given her study of the language and love of the culture.

  He shows them inside to where he introduces his partner, Yev, a sharp-featured man sitting at a table covered in blueprints. Yev removes his reading glasses, stands, shakes hands, and is making genial remarks when his cell phone rings. He excuses himself, carrying his phone toward the back porch.

  Reeve pictures rushing after him, fleeing the house out the back.

  Be still, she tells herself.

  A delicious aroma fills the air as Yoshi leads them into a bright kitchen with shiny appliances. “Could I offer you something? Coffee or tea? A slice of homemade pumpkin pie?”

  When they decline, Yoshi’s smile falters. He stands in awkward silence. Then, in a voice low as a whisper, he says to Reeve, “Mr. Bender explained to us that you’d like to look around. We are so, so sorry for what happened to you. Of course we saw it on the news. And we know the history of this house, which is why we’ve done so much remodeling. Anyway, we’re happy to help in any way we can.”

  Reeve’s field of vision narrows on the door across the room. “I’m just here to see the basement.”

  “Oh!” He looks from Reeve to Bender, who gives him a nod.

  Yoshi hurriedly opens the door. “We almost never go down here.”

  As they descend, the temperature drops. A step groans. Her throat constricts.

  The three stand in a pool of cold air at the foot of the stairs. She turns away from them, studying the rows of neat crates that line the wall. “It feels smaller than before, with those shelves.”

  “We put those in for storage.”

  She looks at their expectant faces and says, “I’m going to need some privacy.”

  “Of course. We’ll give you a minute,” Bender says.

  “Uh, better make it thirty.”

  “Oh.” Yoshi looks stricken. “Are you sure?”

  Her mouth is dry. Her palms are wet. “I’m sure.” Turning her back, she closes her eyes and listens to their shoes ascend the stairs. As they reach the top, she calls, “Could you please shut off the light?”

  “Oh! Really?”

  The light goes out and the door closes. She braces herself, waiting for the clink of the keys and the sound of the lock. When it doesn’t come, she recreates it in her mind. And when she starts breathing again, she realizes she’s been holding her breath. She sniffs the air. The basement no longer carries her scent. Or his.

  Not a basement, she corrects herself. Torture chamber.

  She turns in a slow circle, waving her hands in the air, seeing nothing. It feels so different. Wrong, somehow. . . . Too comfortable. She peels her sweater off over her head. Her skin chills, but it’s still not right, so she sits on the hard concrete floor and removes her boots, her socks, then stands again, feeling the shock of cold on the bare soles of her feet. She paces back and forth, her toes losing heat.

  She hears the scrape of a chair overhead, then footsteps that are different from her kidnapper’s tread. She recalls the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of his pacing, the heavy way he walked on his heels. Each time his steps approached the basement door, she would freeze with dread, wondering whether he was bringing food or some new torment.

  As the familiar darkness closes in, the pounding of her heart grows loud, and images flash behind her eyes—the tray of tools, the hooks in the ceiling— and she starts to hyperventilate. If she resisted, he would press the cruel prongs of the stun gun into her thigh and set her skin on fire.

  His voice rasps in her ear: “Don’t you dare move. Not one chirp.”

  She nearly swoons and reaches out to steady herself, locating the stairs without thinking. The second her fingertips touch the wood, her breath stops and her eyes go wide in the darkness.

  Quickly, she steps around to the back of the stairs, where she gets down on her hands and knees. She feels along the underside of the third step from the bottom, and her fingertips touch the tiny gouges—still there—which she made years ago.

  After her capture, she’d wanted to keep track of time, but when she first asked for pens and paper, Flint had refused. Eventually, he allowed her one pen, but he required her to always return the pen to its place at the top of the stairs, so that she would never have an opportunity to stab him.

  Using the pen, she secretly started keeping this calendar. The first marks were sporadic and uneven. Over time, they became ordered into neat blocks of seven. She’d recalled her mother’s voice, reciting, “Thirty days hath September, April, May, and November. All the rest have thirty-one, save February, which has twenty-eight.”

  Time shaped into weeks, months, and seasons as the basement warmed and cooled. On rare occasions, she latched onto clues to actual dates. He might bring down leftover turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving, or ham and cold mashed potatoes on Christmas. She faintly heard firecrackers popping on the Fourth of July.

  But Flint never found her calendar. The underside of the stairs was her private territory.

  Now her fingertips trace the little marks in the wood. The careful “X” on each day identified. “X-C” for Christmas. “X-TH” for Thanksgiving. “X-H” for Halloween, with long dashes indicating each day that Flint left her alone.

  He was always gone for a few days around Halloween, leaving her with protein bars and a sack of fruit, returning with a bag of cheap candy. It was hard to gauge time without a clock, but she’d come to figure two bottles of water per day, and always felt a small rush of victory when Thanksgiving or Christmas arrived on the days expected.

  Where did Flint go every year at Halloween? And what did he call it?

  The pads of her fingers trace the markings made during those long, dreadful days, and she says the words out loud: “Halloween, Hallo-week . . .”

  Her skin crawls.

  She scoots out from beneath the stair, puts on
her sweater, and climbs the staircase in the dark. Opening the door, she calls, “Agent Bender? Could you come down here, please? There’s something you need to see.”

  Two minutes later, Bender is flat on his back, playing a flashlight beam across the underside of the stair.

  “What is that?” Yoshi asks, bending for a closer look.

  “A calendar”

  Yoshi gasps and looks at Reeve with alarm.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this,” Bender says to him, shimmying out from beneath the stairs, “but we’re going to need some tools. I’ve got to confiscate this board.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Milo Bender places the board on the car’s backseat, reminds Reeve to buckle up, and speeds directly to the FBI Field Office, where he raps on Stuart Cox’s door, tips his head inside, and says, “You’re going to want to see this.”

  Bender has wondered for years what more he could have done as an agent, how he might have connected Flint to any number of missing girls, and now he feels as though he’s holding the answer in his hands. This simple plank of wood holds something significant. He’s certain. It’s as unmistakable as the smell of death.

  It doesn’t take long for Cox to assemble a group of agents, including Pete Blankenship, Nikki Keswick, and a few other faces that Bender recognizes. They take their seats in the conference room, casting questioning glances at the board and at Reeve.

  “Quiet down,” Cox says, holding up his hands. He introduces Reeve, then holds up the board and sets it on the table in front of her, asking her to explain.

  She speaks clearly as she describes where the board was located in the basement and how she kept track of her days of captivity. Meanwhile, someone arranges for the photos she has taken with her camera phone to appear on a large screen behind her. The scratches in the wood appear like hieroglyphs, and a buzz of interest rises while the board gets passed around the table.

  “Reeve, tell them about the horizontal lines,” Bender says, pointing to the small, secret marks. “They seem especially significant.”

  Reeve explains that the horizontal dashes designate prolonged periods of isolation. “He left behind food and water, but for two or three or four days at a stretch, Flint would simply disappear.”

  Blankenship picks up the board and frowns. “Why wasn’t this brought to our attention before?”

  “It was my case,” Bender says, rubbing his forehead and remembering how damaged and frail Reeve had seemed when they’d pulled her from the trunk of Flint’s car. Had he let her safe return overshadow everything else? “It’s my fault,” he says, “because I should have—”

  “Milo, you didn’t prosecute the case or run the crime scene,” Cox says.

  “Hey, I remember working that scene,” a man says with a note of defensiveness. “We searched that basement and recovered all kinds of weird stuff. Implements of torture, evidence of deprivation. We lifted fibers, prints, and DNA. It was a slam-dunk. No one ever said we needed to dismantle the friggin’ stairs.”

  “I must have talked about it,” Reeve says, “but I’m not sure. There was so much going on during the trial, it’s kind of a blur.”

  “Not the best prosecutor, either,” someone mutters.

  “All right, people. We all know it takes a big team to handle a major crime scene,” Cox says, holding up his palms. “Let’s not waste time assigning blame. The point is, we’ve got something new here. Let’s examine what we’ve got.”

  Reeve clears her throat. “If you want, I can reconstruct all the dates.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Missing Persons, FBI Field Office

  The walls are lined with photographs. Reeve looks around, aghast. “All of these people are missing?”

  Faces stare back at her from all sides. Cherubic toddlers. Wholesome, scrubbed schoolkids. Teens with bright, hopeful smiles. A few elderly people. There are individuals of all ages, some clearly loved and happy, others unkempt and discarded, with sad eyes and chipped teeth. “All of these people were kidnapped?”

  “All missing,” Keswick corrects. “Some were kidnapped, no doubt. But the senior citizens are often Alzheimer’s patients who’ve wandered away, and they usually show up within a few days. Still”—she sighs—“some of these individuals have been missing for more than a decade, some longer than that.”

  Reeve tries to speak but the words lodge in her throat.

  Keswick waves broadly. “We’ve got parental kidnappings on this wall— custody issues, you know. And over here are the violent abductions.”

  Reeve approaches that wall and leans in close, kneading her hands together, wondering how many of these people might still be alive. She searches their eyes, as though hoping to find some secret message. Each person seems so precious, caught in midbreath long ago. Laughing, smiling, unconcerned, wistful. There are snapshots of birthdays, and celebrations, and special events. Emotional, candid shots. Stiff portraits. A few are professional photographs, the subjects posing like models. But most are simply school pictures, taken for yearbooks and then shared like precious currency.

  Some of the photos are paired with age-enhanced versions, a youngster as she appeared when she went missing alongside what she might look like today. Reeve’s stomach knots. Her own photograph must have been posted here, too.

  She is one of the weirdly lucky ones, recovered after years, who make the news and give the other families hope. A cruel injection of hope, she thinks bitterly.

  “Come sit over here,” Bender says, “and let’s try to pair up some of these missing girls with those days when Flint went AWOL.”

  With a last look at the photographs, she folds into a seat beside him. Open files lie on the table, along with the wood plank from the basement stairs.

  Keswick opens her laptop and types. “Okay, I’ve got the calendar keyed up here. Let’s try to identify the actual dates when you were left alone in that basement.”

  “Okay.” Reeve steels herself, adjusts the board in front of her, closes her eyes, and carefully places her fingertips on it. She suffers a sense of vertigo as she’s swept back into the basement, but she shakes it off and begins reading the small gouges like braille.

  She counts from day one, getting oriented. After a long moment, she opens her eyes and taps a spot. “Here’s the first Halloween after I was kidnapped. He was gone for three days.”

  “Before or after Halloween?”

  “Halloween was the day in the middle. I figured out Thanksgiving that year and then counted backward to be sure. I remember he was gone every year at Halloween. And Flint used to say something—it was three words: Halloween, Hallo-week, and . . .” She frowns. “And something else.”

  Bender adjusts his bifocals, looks at the board, then at Reeve. “Let’s just continue, okay? Because there are other dashes, too. Can you identify other specific periods?”

  She closes her eyes again and runs her fingers across the rows. Counting the days, weeks, months. “Here,” she says at last. “Memorial Day weekend. He was gone three days again.”

  She opens her eyes to see Bender and Keswick exchanging a look. “What?”

  Keswick frowns, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “Let’s just keep working. We’ll pair up the missing at the end, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Counting days with her fingertips, she goes through week after week, and it’s as if each thin mark in the wood is a step backward, as if she is descending into that awful darkness. She’s again a child chained in a basement, hungry. Some days she was suspended and whipped. Others, she was drugged and woke to the bite of a blade.

  She had promised herself early on that he would not make her cry. It had taken only weeks of practice before she’d mastered that skill. It was the one thing she could control.

  Reeve fingers the marks she made during those terrible days, checking and double checking dates until she has identified ten periods when Flint left her alone in the basement for more than twenty-four hours, usually for just two or three days. Tw
ice for four days, once for five.

  “I ran out of water that time,” she recalls. “I was really thirsty when he got back.”

  When her fingers reach the end of the calendar, she blinks and looks around.

  The room is bright and clean. She is safe and healthy. She sits back and takes a deep breath.

  “Okay, good,” Keswick says. “Now, do you remember anything he said that might have indicated where he’d gone?”

  She casts a look at Bender, remembering what she’d blurted about a fishing cabin, but shakes her head. “I wish I had some idea where he went, but he never explained anything to me. He never answered questions. Sometimes he’d come back angry. Sometimes he’d seem almost giddy. But he never mentioned any other girls, or not specifically, anyway.”

  After a beat of silence, Bender says, “I’m sure that wasn’t easy for you,” and pours her a glass of water, which she clasps with both hands.

  An idea flickers behind her eyes. “There’s one other thing, though. I always knew there must have been other girls because he sometimes told me I was his favorite.”

  Keswick mutters something unintelligible, shoves back her chair, and gets up to leave the room. She returns a moment later with Agent Blankenship, and the two of them begin conferring over lists of missing persons on the computer screen.

  Reeve watches, feeling ill, as Keswick begins retrieving photos of missing girls from the wall, which she places in sequence on the table.

  The picture of one pretty teen with a heart-shaped face and a cascade of honey-colored hair makes Reeve gasp.

  “What’s the matter?” Bender asks sharply.

  She says nothing, bending over the picture.

  “Do you know her?” Blankenship asks.

  Reeve swallows hard.

  “What?” Keswick asks, looking from the photo to Reeve and back again. “Do you think she looks like you?”

  Blankenship bends over the picture, saying, “Yeah, she kind of does.”