Mark Gimenez - The Abduction

He had smiled. “That’s real nice of you to offer-”

“No, Ben. I mean it. I want to live here with you.”

“Honey, this is no place for a girl.”

“Then you come live with us. It’s a really big house.”

“That’s no place for me. Once you’ve lived in a jungle, you can’t live in a subdivision.”

Gracie was quiet, then she said, “She still loves you.”

When Ben opened his wet eyes, the cab was pulling up to the entrance guardhouse at BRIARWYCK FARMS, AN EXCLUSIVE GATED COMMUNITY, or so read the sign embedded in the tall brick wall. Black iron gates with TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED across the bars blocked their way. Ben recalled the front doormat at his childhood home in West Texas that read Welcome, Y’all.

After Ben’s ID checked out, the guard gave the cabby directions and activated the automatic gates. They passed through the gates and entered an oasis in the concrete desert: tall oak trees shading the wide road, expansive stretches of green grass, sparkling blue man-made ponds encircled by walking paths, and magnificent mansions set deep into large lots, homes that would cause most visitors’ jaws to drop; but Ben barely noticed. His thoughts were of Gracie.

The cab driver turned up the radio: “At six-fifteen last night, Post Oak police issued an Amber Alert and provided descriptions of both the victim and the suspect. Gracie Ann Brice is white, ten years old, four feet six inches tall, weighs eighty pounds, and has short blonde hair and blue eyes. The suspect is white, twenty to thirty years old, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, has blond hair, and was last seen wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt. Police are asking anyone who videotaped any of the games at Briarwyck Farms Park yesterday to bring the tapes in.”

The cabby made eye contact with Ben in the rearview. “Little girl, she was taken. In my country, we find the man”-he slapped the edge of his open right hand down on the dash-“we cut off his dick. Then we cut off his head.”

The cabby’s eyes returned to the road-“ Aah! ”-and he slammed on the brakes; Ben was thrown forward. The cab had almost plowed into a police barricade across Magnolia Lane; two uniformed cops stood in front of the cab, their hands on their holsters and shaking their heads. The cabby turned in his seat, shrugged, and said, “Can go no more.”

Ben paid the $45 fare with a fifty and un-assed the vehicle. The morning sun punished his eyes; he patted around his clothes for his sunglasses then remembered he had left them in the Jeep. He rubbed his temples, but it did not relieve the pounding in his head. He needed his morning run with Buddy to exorcise last night’s demons, but that would not happen this morning; he was in Texas and Buddy was in New Mexico. Ben's buyer in Taos promised to check on Buddy each day; the dog could tolerate city life even less than Ben. He slung the duffel bag over his shoulder and walked past the barricade, down the sidewalk, and into a media circus.

Satellite uplinks mounted above TV vans lined both sides of the street and had lured the residents out of their homes before breakfast. Kids, parents, cameramen, reporters, and cops crowded the street and sidewalks; their voices competed with the incessant THUMP THUMP THUMP of a news chopper hovering low overhead.

His head ached.

Ben continued down the sidewalk, deep into the circus, and past a reporter talking to a camera: “Gracie was last seen at Briarwyck Farms Park wearing blue soccer shorts and a gold jersey, the team name, Tornadoes, across the front and a number nine on the back.”

Kids rode bikes and rollerbladed in the street, media technicians set up their equipment, and photographers snapped shots of the mansions. Another reporter addressed another camera: “She was abducted at a soccer game last night in this upscale suburb forty miles north of downtown Dallas.”

Parents huddled in small groups and held their children close, evident on their faces that fear peculiar to parents, the fear that their children might be taken in the night. Ben had seen that fear before.

Making themselves at home on the sidewalks and lawns were grungy (a word Gracie had taught him) cameramen wearing sunglasses and baseball caps on backward. They lounged in lawn chairs, drank coffee, complained about the early morning assignment, and offered expert opinions: “It’ll be someone in the family. Always is.”

This was their kidnapping now. Gracie Ann Brice was news.

And the world waited for news outside her home where a dozen TV cameras sat fixed on tripods and aimed at Six Magnolia Lane, a three-story French chateau-style mansion that looked more like a hotel than a home. Gracie hadn’t exaggerated: it was a really big house.

Ben started up the long walkway leading to the front door but paused to listen to a lone reporter speaking into a camera: “Gracie played in a soccer game here in Post Oak late yesterday, went to the concession stand, and hasn’t been seen since. Her parents are praying that Gracie was taken for ransom, that money can save their daughter. Only fourteen hours since her abduction and a massive effort is already underway to find Gracie and the man who took her. The FBI is setting up a command post, local police are organizing search parties, and at the park where Gracie was taken, bloodhounds will soon be combing the woods…”

Ben continued to the porch. Written in colored chalk on the gray slate steps, in a child’s hand, were the words WE LOVE YOU, GRACIE. The words had the same physical effect on Ben as his morning run: he stepped to the side of the porch and puked behind a low bush. He wiped his mouth with a red handkerchief, and then he rang the doorbell.

Inside the residence the doorbell could not be heard over the ringing phones and blaring TVs and cops hustling about and FBI agents shouting into cell phones and a little boy running around in a Boston Red Sox baseball uniform, pointing a finger-gun at everyone, and yelling “Stick ‘em up!”

Walking calmly amid the chaos down the wide gallery that stretched the width of the mansion was a tall black man. FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux was wearing black cowboy boots, blue jeans, a gold badge clipped to a wide black belt, a semi-automatic pistol in a belt holster, a blue nylon jacket with FBI stenciled in gold letters across the back, and an FBI cap. Devereaux was the lead FBI agent on the Gracie Ann Brice abduction. Searching for abducted children had been his life for the past ten years.

The heels of his 14EE boots resounded under his considerable weight with each step on the immaculate hardwood floor as he passed fine art on the wainscoted walls and furniture that looked like it would break if you even leaned on the damn stuff. Walking beside him was Special Agent Floyd, an index finger pointing up like he was gauging the wind.

“Is that the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen?”

Painted on the high-arched ceiling over the gallery was a mural depicting an old-time French street scene with shops, pedestrians, horses, and carriages; the street continued to the foyer where it merged into a village square. A similar street scene entered from the gallery ceiling over the east wing of the residence. It was in fact the damnedest thing Eugene Devereaux had ever seen.

“You ever work an abduction where the victim lived in a place like this?” Floyd asked.

Devereaux’s line of work did not bring him into homes like this. The typical abduction victim’s home was on wheels or in a run-down apartment complex or a cheap rent house; it was not a mansion with fine art on the walls and French murals on the ceiling.

“Nope. Rich girls don’t get abducted by strangers.”

Devereaux was an abduction specialist with the Bureau based out of the Houston field office; he investigated only abductions of children by strangers. Gracie Ann Brice was his eleventh this year and it was only early April.