Mark Gimenez - The Abduction

“She is bleeding, from her elbow.”

The father’s eyes dropped down to his arm; he grabbed his sleeve and pulled it around to reveal the underside. The light blue material was stained a dark brown in several spots. He looked up at Devereaux.

“This is Gracie’s blood,” he said.

Was Grace dead?

From that moment in the park Friday night when the coach said her brother had asked for Grace-when the thought Grace was kidnapped first took shape-Elizabeth had prayed that it was about ransom- You don’t ransom a dead girl, she had heard an FBI agent say-and she had waged war with her mind. Her mind wanted desperately to force her into a dark world, to reveal to her all the possibilities, the maybes, the what ifs, to torture her with vile, horrible, gruesome images of her daughter being subjected to the sick desires of a sexual predator; but she had fought it off, beaten it back, blocked it out, refused to watch… until now.

Grace wasn’t taken for money.

Sitting on the marble floor of the steam shower, she had unconditionally surrendered to her mind’s dark side and allowed it to torture her with those images, to display them as graphically as if she were an eyewitness. And Elizabeth Brice wondered, as she had wondered once before: If for all intents and purposes you are already dead, is suicide still a mortal sin?

“Why, God?”

Steam inundated the shower. Elizabeth’s legs were curled around the drain; her tears mixed with the hot water. She was alone in her despair and wondering if she could slit her wrists with the safety razor she was holding. Once before evil had entered her life and caused her to entertain suicide, to seriously debate the various ways by which to end her life as if she were reading a menu at a restaurant. Once before she had stood on the precipice of death and peered over into the abyss, only to be saved by a child. This child. Grace had saved her life. Now, ten years later, evil had come back for Grace.

“Why did you let evil take her, too?”

She had lived only because of Grace. Without Grace, why live? She imagined her blood flowing out of her veins and swirling down into the drain until all the life had emptied from her. She put the razor to her wrist and pressed the blade into her skin and was about to slide it across her veins and spill her blood when a sudden surge of rage swelled her muscles and brain cells like a narcotic, hate and anger once again energizing her mind and body and driving her up off the marble.

Elizabeth Brice wanted to kill someone, but not herself. She wanted to kill the abductor. And she had the money to do it.

Two hundred children a year die at the hands of sexual predators in the United States. Those few cases always capture the public’s undivided attention. FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux had investigated one hundred twenty-seven such cases. Consequently, he was accustomed to the media events child abductions inevitably became.

But this case was different. Maybe it was because Gracie was a rich white blonde girl who lived in a mansion with murals on the ceiling; maybe it was because her father’s face was on the cover of Fortune magazine; or maybe it was just a slow news cycle. But this case was fast moving beyond anything he had previously experienced. There was an energy in the air, building with each passing hour without Gracie’s recovery, along with the number of people on the front lawn of the Brice mansion, where Devereaux now stood on this sunny Sunday afternoon. He was flanked by the local mayor and police chief and facing microphones clumped together on a stand, TV cameras, reporters, and beyond them, in the street, the residents of Briarwyck Farms. They had posted missing child fliers with Gracie’s image on every car, printed Gracie tee shirts, tied pink ribbons to car antennae, mailboxes, and trees, and pinned a Gracie button on every shirt and lapel.

There was a time when media briefings made Devereaux feel important, a black agent born in the Louisiana backwoods directing a major FBI case; now these briefings just made him tired. He stepped forward.

“I’m FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux. The FBI is involved in this case at the request of Chief Ryan. Unless the victim is transported across state lines, jurisdiction is solely local. But we have offered our resources to assist Chief Ryan and his investigation.”

Devereaux always maintained the pretense that the locals were in charge of the case. They were legally, but not actually. Locals like Chief Ryan understood that they didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of finding an abducted child without the FBI-and they didn’t mind sharing the failure with the Feds when the child’s body was found.

“The status of our investigation of the abduction of Gracie Ann Brice is as follows: Gracie has been missing for forty-two hours. She was taken from Briarwyck Farms Park here in Post Oak at approximately six P.M. Friday by a white male, twenty to thirty years old, six foot, two hundred pounds, blond hair, wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt. An artist’s sketch of the suspect has been distributed to the media. We are pursuing two parallel investigative tracks: the first is to find Gracie, and that is our primary consideration; the second is to identify and locate possible suspects, starting with registered sex offenders. We urge any citizen who may have seen Gracie or the suspect or who has any information to please contact our hot-line number on the missing child fliers. We need your help. Questions?”

Devereaux pointed to the first reporter.

“Agent Devereaux, do you suspect family involvement?”

“No.”

“Have they taken polygraphs?”

“Not yet.”

The next reporter: “Can you confirm that Gracie’s shorts were found at the park?”

“Blue soccer shorts and a single white soccer shoe were found. We believe them to be Gracie’s.”

And the next, not waiting to be acknowledged: “Do you have any leads?”

“We’re taking calls, reviewing videotapes of the soccer games Friday night, developing a profile of the abductor-”

From the crowd: “Forty-two hours and all you’ve got is a blond man in a black cap?”

Devereaux sighed and felt tired. “Yes.”

Shouted from the back: “Was Gracie sexually assaulted?”

That was the question they always asked. Why? Why did they want to know whether a little ten-year-old girl was raped? What the hell do they think a sexual predator did with her, take her to dinner and a goddamn movie? They know damn well what he did to her, but they wanted him to say it, to provide the fear factor sound bite for the evening news teaser-fear causes more viewers to tune in. But he never played their game. Even if he knew, which he didn’t, at least it wasn’t confirmed, FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux would never tell. Not until the body was located. Until he knew for sure the child was dead.

Gracie Ann Brice deserved that much.

A mile away, Ben Brice stood in the middle of soccer field no. 2, a solitary figure in the vast, vacant park. He had come out before the FBI reopened the park for that night’s candlelight vigil to retrace Gracie’s last known movements Friday afternoon; he had to be where she had been.

He had to know.

If not for ransom, why would someone take Gracie? For sex? Ben Brice had seen the evil in man, so that was a possibility. Perhaps even a probability. But not a certainty, as the FBI seemed to have concluded. Sexual predators work alone, Agent Devereaux had said. But the blond man in a black cap hadn’t been alone; two men had been here at her game.

Ben first had to learn how Gracie had been taken. He now walked toward the low bleachers. According to John, Gracie’s game had ended and she had come to him about here. Ben stopped. The other parents had been in the bleachers and the two men just behind. John had spoken with Gracie, then she and the other girls had gone to the concession stand. John had watched them all the way to the building.