Lisa Gardner - Gone

“You’ve both been to bad scenes before,” Mac said.

“Define bad,” Quincy challenged with a shrug. “As a professional, I can give you theories. That the combined weight of so many cases finally caught up with her-the tipping point, if you will. That actively preparing to adopt a child made her more vulnerable to this particular case-lack of compartmentalization, if you will. None of it really matters. At the end of the day, it seems that each and every member of law enforcement has that one case that hits too close to home. You had your case several years ago, Mac. In August, Rainie found hers.”

Mac looked away. He wasn’t going to comment on that, and they knew it.

“What about the upcoming adoption?” Kimberly asked. “That must have given Rainie something to look forward to.”

“It fell through.”

“Oh, Dad,” Kimberly murmured again.

“Naturally, the separation puts me in a slightly different light in the OSP’s eyes,” Quincy said briskly. “Sergeant Kincaid has opted to share some details of the investigation with me, but has obviously kept many more to himself.”

“Lovely,” Mac muttered. “As if you don’t have enough things to worry about.”

“In the good-news department,” Quincy continued, “I seem to have found an ally in Sheriff Shelly Atkins, Luke Hayes’s successor. She gave me a lead: Apparently the boy Rainie has been working with, Dougie Jones, commented first thing this morning that Rainie might be missing. He called Rainie a liar and said liars get what they deserve.”

“You think a child did it?” Kimberly asked with a frown.

“Dougie’s seven, which makes that doubtful. But then again…” Quincy shrugged. “He’s a troubled, mixed-up boy who’s led a troubled, mixed-up life. It’s quite possible he knows something about what happened.”

“So when do we go talk to him?” Mac spoke up, pushing away from the table and gesturing for the bill.

“I was thinking Kimberly would interview him. Soon as possible.”

“Me?” Kimberly looked around the table.

“Dougie doesn’t like cops or men.”

Kimberly narrowed her eyes. “And while I’m following up with this charming young boy, what are you two going to be doing?”

“Going to the fairgrounds, of course. Kincaid spent a lot of time and energy preparing the newspaper article, but he also made one very big assumption: that the UNSUB would read it before four p.m.”

“Oooh, fun,” Mac murmured, already reading between those lines.

Quincy said, “My thought exactly.”

Tuesday, 3:09 p.m. PST

“DO YOU BELIEVE IN TRUE LOVE? ”

The voice came from far away, accompanied by the rattle of pots and pans. She was dreaming again, Rainie thought. Dreaming of a dark void filled with a booming voice. Maybe this was heaven.

Heaven smelled like bacon, she realized without a trace of irony. Then the voice boomed again.

“My mom believed in true love. Believed it when she fell in bed with my father. Believed it when she scrubbed his clothes, bought his whiskey, and bruised from the impact of his fist. Yeah, my mom was a real romantic. Probably loved my father right until the moment he beat her to death. My mother called it love, my father called it obedience. Frankly, I think they were both full of shit.”

A hand touched her shoulder. Rainie flinched, discovered that she was propped precariously on the edge of a hard wooden chair and nearly fell off.

“Relax,” the voice said impatiently. “It’s time you pulled yourself together. You have work to do.”

More sounds, the person-lone male, probably early twenties to early thirties, based upon the voice-was moving around the room. A refrigerator door sucked open, slammed shut. A crack, sizzle, then a new smell filled the air. Eggs frying. Bacon and eggs. Breakfast.

It must be morning, she thought, but that estimation didn’t feel quite right. Still blindfolded, hands bound, it was hard to get her bearings. She’d been drugged, fading in and out. She could remember white light, movement, writing a note. Surely those things took time. But how much time?

She should sit up, clear her head. It was easier to remain in her dark, bound cocoon, slouched in the middle of God knows where. Captives didn’t have to think. Captives didn’t have to feel.

She realized faintly that the gag was gone, though her mouth was so dried out, it was no more capable of forming words without the gag than it had been with it. After another moment, she determined she could move her feet. So he’d removed the gag and unbound her feet. Why? Because she had work to do?

It couldn’t be morning, she decided. She had left her house shortly after one a.m. It felt as if that had been at least twelve hours ago. Her abductor must have gone back to bed. That made sense to her. After rampaging around in the middle of the night, he’d gone back to bed and was now eating a late breakfast/early lunch. Midday. That felt better to her.

He was scraping a pan now. The air in the room tasted smoky, laced with grease. She had a mental image of a small room without being sure why. Tiny kitchen in a shut-up house. Beneath the grease, she thought she could smell moldy linens and stale, uncirculated air.

The squeaking sound of something-a chair-being dragged across linoleum. The man sat down heavily and Rainie suddenly felt a forkful of eggs pressed against her lips.

“Eat, but slowly. The drugs can leave you feeling queasy. Throw up and you’re on your own. No way I’m dealing with that kind of mess.”

Just the smell of the eggs made her stomach roll. Rainie licked her lips, tried to form a word, had to try again. “Water,” she croaked. Then, slightly louder, “Water.”

Her voice sounded foreign to her. Harsh, guttural, raw. The voice of a victim.

The chair screeched again. The man was up, moving. She could sense his impatience in the hard slam of a plastic cup against a counter, the jerk of a water faucet being snapped on.

A moment later, the cup was thrust against her lips. “Four sips, then some eggs, then more water. Come on, start drinking. I don’t have all day.”

She did as she was told. On some level this surprised her. But maybe it didn’t. How long had she been feeling helpless now? It had started way before Abductor A had discovered her at Point B. She had felt overwhelmed and powerless since first walking through that house in Astoria, since gazing down at that small lifeless body. Since feeling the terror that still pervaded that room, since knowing what that little girl had been forced to know. No one to help her anymore. No one to save her. And that man would have loomed so large and powerful, as he ripped off her pajamas, as he prepared to do what he was going to do.

No happy ending here. The man had done what he’d wanted, then he’d placed a pillow over four-year-old Aurora Johnson’s face and smothered her to death. Where was the justice in that? Where was God?

And Rainie had been feeling herself slip away ever since. Time spent on the Internet, searching for stories she knew she shouldn’t read. A twelve-year-old boy who raped and murdered a three-year-old toddler. A mudslide killing a mother and three small children after the husband popped out the door to buy them all ice cream. Then there was the tsunami. Over two hundred thousand people gone in the blink of an eye, a third of them children who never stood a chance. Not that the survivors were much luckier. According to news reports, slave traffickers promptly took advantage of the chaos to pick off orphans and turn them into sex slaves.

All of these children born into the world simply to lead lives of terror, misery, and suffering.

What was one person to do? For every murder she helped investigate, millions more were happening. And the perpetrators were no longer hard-bitten criminals, with yellowed crooked teeth and small beady eyes. They were charming suburban husbands. They were soccer moms. They were children themselves, ten, eleven, twelve years old.