John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

Now she found it almost impossible to breathe. Panic rose inside her as the darkness closed around her, and for a moment she almost gave in to it, almost began screaming and thrashing.

Instead she concentrated on slowing her breathing, forcing herself to relax her body, limb by limb. She blocked out the blackness, instead visualizing a perfect day at the beach.

And there, in her mind’s eye, she saw Emily, playing happily in the sand.

The panic surged forth again.

Relax, or you’ll hurt yourself. As long as you’re here, there’s nothing you can do for her. And it isn’t just Emily, either. Think about Lindsay. If you can’t help Emily, at least you can help Lindsay and—

What was the other girl’s name? The question itself seemed to turn the tide against the panic, and finally she began to think.

She took a deep breath, and the panic further loosened its grip on her. “Lindsay?” she said, her whisper sounding to her like a shout in the silent darkness. When there was no response, she repeated the single word, more loudly this time.

A moment later there was the sound of chains rattling somewhere to her right. “How do you know my name?” a faint, almost lifeless, voice asked.

“I saw your picture on television. My name’s Ellen Fine.”

More rattling.

Ellen imagined the girl struggling to sit up. “Your mom is hunting for you.”

“You saw my mom?” A little more life in the voice now.

“She’s been on TV, trying to find you.”

There was a silence, then: “H-How long have I been here?”

Instead of answering the question, Ellen countered with her own: “Who’s the other girl?”

“Shannon,” Lindsay whispered.

The name meant nothing to Ellen. “Does he give you anything to eat or drink?”

“Sometimes. But I don’t even know—” Lindsay’s voice caught, and Ellen could hear her choking off a sob. When she spoke again, her voice was hollow and she made no attempt to mask her fear. “I don’t even know what time it is, or what day it is, or anything else. I just—”

Her voice broke again, but this time Ellen was ready. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “We’re going to get out of here — there are three of us and only one of him. We can do it if we have a plan, and if we work together.”

No response. Then, in the quiet, Ellen could hear Lindsay crying, a sound that brought back memories of Emily, frightened of a nightmare, sobbing in the darkness of her room.

Only this was not a nightmare.

This was real.

“Listen to me, Lindsay,” Ellen said. “It’s going to be all right. We’re going to get out of this.”

There was a sniffle, then Lindsay uttered a single word. “How?”

Desperately, Ellen cast her mind back to the moments after she had awakened to the surreal scene in the room with the tiny table and chairs and the grotesquely leering smiles she’d seen on all the faces around her. And she realized what they had to do.

“We have to give him what he wants.”

“But I don’t know what he wants,” Lindsay moaned.

“Of course you do,” Ellen told her. “Think of the smiles, Lindsay. And think of what he said. He called me Mommy, and he kept talking about how happy we all were. Don’t you see? He wants a happy family. He wants us to be his family, and he wants us to be happy. So here’s what we’re going to do…”

Slowly, uncertain if Lindsay had enough energy left even to understand, let alone follow it, Ellen began to explain her idea.

Andrew Grant raked his fingers through his hair, tried to slow the thoughts that were tumbling chaotically through his mind, then leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. There were a million things that had to be done, but if they weren’t done in the right order, everything could — and undoubtedly would — turn into a disaster.

With the third deep breath, he felt his mind begin to clear, and he began to assess the situation.

For the moment, the powers-that-be had given him interjurisdictional authority, which presumably meant the guys in Smithton would have to cooperate with him, at least until the FBI guys arrived. And, for now at least, the guys in Smithton had given him everything he’d asked for, though what they had wasn’t much. Still, it was enough that he’d at least be coherent at the press briefing scheduled for nine o’clock.

According to the big clock on the wall, it was now 8:38.

It was going to be a long night.

First things first.

Seventeen minutes to figure out exactly what he was going to say, and then…

Then it would be a very long night.

A couple of patrolmen who had been called in more for show than because anyone expected them to do anything tonight were grumbling in a corner, and half a dozen reporters were already in the lobby, glancing impatiently at their watches every few seconds as they waited for the briefing to begin. To Andrew Grant, they looked like nothing more than a flock of circling vultures waiting to descend on a corpse, and if he made one false step, the corpse they descended upon could be his. Eyeing them balefully, he decided that maybe the briefing would start on time and maybe it wouldn’t.

The telephones had been ringing steadily since word of Ellen Fine’s disappearance had gotten out that afternoon, and they hadn’t slowed yet. The reporters seemed to have put two and two together at least as quickly as the two police departments involved, and into the evening the local talk radio stations had done their best to whip the public into a frenzy. It worked: apparently everyone on Long Island had seen someone who looked “suspicious” at an open house sometime over the last year or so.

The talk jockeys had even come up with a name for the guy: Open House Ozzie. Well, maybe if it got bad enough, they’d both wind up in one of Ann Rule’s books, and he would become a character on a TV miniseries.

More likely, he’d get fired for being the obtuse dunderhead he now felt like. Why couldn’t he have at least listened to Kara Marshall, instead of insisting her kid had just decided to take off?

The office walls seemed to be closing in on him.

He took his mug to the coffee machine, filled it with the dregs of the lunchtime coffee, then took the curse off its bitterness with a double shot of sugar and powdered cream and slowly made his way back to his desk. Stirring the sludge in his cup, he relegated his mistakes to the back of his mind so he could concentrate on getting it right from here on out.

The first priority, of course, would be to keep anyone else from vanishing from their own homes after an open house. He needed to get the word out that three abductions had taken place after open houses on Long Island — within fifteen miles of each other, in fact — in the past month.

And this was Sunday night; for all he knew, another abduction had taken place today, making it four. He needed a detail to work on that. O'Reilly and Murphy could handle it, along with the guys who first responded to Shannon Butler’s disappearance in Mill Creek.

He scrawled a note on his yellow pad.

The next thing was to find Shannon, Lindsay, and Ellen. He’d handle that one personally. Rick Mancuso remained at the top of his list of probable perps, but primarily because he didn’t have any other names on the list so far. Mancuso had been cooperative enough, but the guy didn’t have an alibi for any of the nights after the disappearances had happened.

Which didn’t mean nearly as much as the general public thought it did.

Still, there was no reason to hold him.

And so far, at least, there weren’t any bodies, so it was just possible — and now he knew he was grasping at straws — that all three victims actually had just taken off.