Blake Pierce - Once Gone

It’s like a doll house, Riley now realized.

And Marie was posed in the coffin – not a real corpse, but a pretend one, in a pretend funeral.

Horror cascaded over Riley. The two murderers – Peterson and whoever had killed Cindy MacKinnon and the others – merged together in her mind. It didn’t matter that the pairing was completely groundless and irrational. She couldn’t disentangle them. They became one to her.

It seemed as though this well-crafted funeral was the monster’s final touch. It announced that there would be many more victims and many more funerals to follow.

As she sat there, Riley noticed out of the corner of her eyes someone slip in quietly to the service and sit on the other end of the back row. She turned her head slightly to see who had arrived in the middle of the service and saw a man dressed casually, wearing a baseball cap drawn low, shielding his eyes. Her heart beat faster. He looked large and strong enough to be the one who overpowered her when he caught her. His face was hard, jaws clenched, and she thought that he had a guilty look about him. Could it be the killer she was looking for?

Riley realized that she was almost hyperventilating. She slowed her breathing down until her head cleared. She had to restrain herself from leaping up and arresting the latecomer. The service was obviously coming to a close, and she couldn’t disrupt it and disrespect Marie’s memory. She had to wait. What if it wasn’t him?

But then, to her surprise, he suddenly got to his feet and quietly left the room. Had he spotted her?

Riley jumped up and followed him. She sensed heads turn at her sudden commotion, but that didn’t matter now.

She trotted through the funeral parlor hallway toward the front entrance, and as she threw open the front door, she saw that the man was walking briskly away along the city sidewalk. She drew her handgun and charged after him.

“FBI!” she shouted. “Stop right there!”

The man whirled around to face her.

“FBI!” she repeated, once again feeling naked without her badge. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

The man facing her looked utterly baffled.

“ID!” she demanded.

His hands were shaking – whether from fear or indignation, Riley couldn’t tell. He fished out a wallet with a driver’s license and as she scanned it, she saw it identified him as a Washington resident.

“Here’s my ID,” he said. “Where’s yours?”

Riley’s resolution started to slip away. Had she ever seen this man’s face before? She wasn’t sure.

“I’m an attorney,” the man said, still very shaken. “And I know my rights. You’d better have a good reason for pulling a gun on me for no reason. Right here on a city street.”

“I’m Agent Riley Paige,” she said. “I need to know why you were attending that funeral.”

The man looked at her more closely.

“Riley Paige?” he asked. “The agent who rescued her?”

Riley nodded. The man’s face suddenly sagged with despair.

“Marie was a friend,” he said. “Months ago, we were close. And then this terrible thing happened to her and…”

The man choked back a sob.

“I’d lost touch with her. It was my fault. She was a good friend, and I didn’t stay in touch. And now I’ll never get a chance to…”

The man shook his head.

“I wish I could go back and do everything differently. I just feel so bad about it. I couldn’t even make it all the way through the funeral. I had to leave.”

This man was feeling guilty, Riley realized, and in pain. For reasons very much like her own.

“I’m sorry,” Riley said softly, deflated, lowering her gun. “I really am. I will find the bastard who did this to her.”

As she turned to walk away, she heard him call out in a perplexed tone.

“I thought he was already dead?”

Riley didn’t reply. She left the bereaved man standing on the sidewalk.

And as she walked away, she knew exactly where she needed to go. A place where no one else on earth, except Marie, could possibly understand.

Riley drove through city streets that transitioned from Georgetown’s elegant homes to a ramshackle neighborhood in a once-thriving industrial area. Many buildings and stores were abandoned, and the local residents were poor. The deeper she drove, the worse it became.

She finally parked along a block that consisted entirely of condemned row houses. She got out of the car and quickly found what she was looking for.

Two vacant homes flanked a broad, barren area. Not very long ago, three deserted houses had stood here. Peterson had lived as a squatter in the middle house, using it as his secret lair. It had been the perfect spot for him, too separated from living inhabitants for anyone to hear the screams coming from beneath the house.

Now the space had been leveled flat, all evidence of the houses cleared away, and grass was starting to grow there. Riley tried to visualize what it had looked like when the houses had been there. It wasn’t easy. She’d only been here once when the houses were standing. And then it had been night.

As she walked into the clearing, memories started to come back to her…

Riley had been trailing him all day and into the night. Bill had been called away on an unrelated emergency, and Riley had unwisely decided to follow the man here alone.

She watched him enter the wretched little house with boarded up windows. Then, just a few moments later, he left again. He was on foot, and she didn’t know where he was going.

She briefly considered calling for backup. She decided against it. The man had gone away, and if the victim was really inside that house, she couldn’t leave her alone and in torment for another minute. She walked up onto the porch and squeezed her way between boards that only partially blocked the doorway.

She turned on her flashlight. The beam reflected against at least a dozen tanks of propane gas. It was no surprise. She and Bill knew that the suspect was obsessed with fire.

Then she heard a scratching below the floorboards, then a weak cry…

Riley paused the flow of memories. She looked around. She felt sure – uncannily sure – that she was now standing on the very spot that she both dreaded and sought. It was here where both she and Marie had been caged in that dark and filthy crawlspace.

The rest of the story was still raw in her mind. Riley had been captured by Peterson when she set Marie free. Marie had staggered a couple of miles in a state of complete shock. By the time she was found, she had no idea where she had been held captive. Riley was left alone in the dark to find her own way out.

After a seemingly endless nightmare, tormented repeatedly by Peterson’s torch, Riley had gotten loose. When she did, she had beaten Peterson nearly unconscious. Every blow gave her a great sense of vindication. Maybe those blows, that small vindication, she reflected, had allowed her to heal better than Marie.

Then, crazed and maddened with fear and exhaustion, Riley had opened all the tanks of propane. As she fled the house, she threw a lighted match back inside. The explosion threw her all the way across the street. Everyone was amazed that she’d survived.

Now, two months after that explosion, Riley stood looking around at her grim handiwork – a vacant space where nobody lived or was likely to live for a long time. It seemed like a perfect image of what her life had become. In a way, it seemed like the end of the road – at least for her.

A sickening feeling of vertigo came over her. Still standing in that grassy spot, she felt as if she were falling, falling, falling. She tumbled straight into that abyss that had been yawning open for her. Even in broad daylight, the world seemed terribly dark – even darker than it had been in that cage in that crawlspace. There seemed to be no bottom to the abyss, and no end to her fall.