Lisa Gardner - Gone

Kimberly was looking at her father again. Quincy was still shaking his head, ambushed, stunned. Rainie had found a new way to hurt her husband after all. She had sought help-she just hadn’t reached out to him.

“I got the listing of the contents of the victim’s purse found in her vehicle,” Detective Grove was saying now. “No report of any prescription medication. But then I got to thinking: What if the victim didn’t want anyone to know she was taking an antidepressant? People are pretty touchy about these things, you know. So I thought, where’s a logical place to hide some pills where she would always have them with her, but no one would suspect a thing? And I found them. Inside the Pamprin bottle she carried in her purse.”

The detective’s tone was triumphant. “I counted them all out. The number matches the prescription given by the doctor. So best I can determine, the victim took her dose yesterday morning, but hasn’t had one since. Meaning…”

“We have to find her,” Quincy said tightly.

“Yep. Or apparently, she’ll lose her mind.”

Tuesday, 9:38 p.m. PST

SHE COULD NOT FALL ASLEEP. Would not fall asleep. Absolutely, positively should not fall asleep.

Rainie forced herself to remain vigilant, hyperaware. She focused on the sound of water, dripping down the cellar walls, the feel of Dougie’s small body, pressed against her side, the smell of mildew filling her nostrils. She was freezing, shivering in periodic spasms that wrenched through her aching body and rattled her teeth. She used the discomfort to keep herself alert. It gave her something to feel, lost in a black world devoid of sight.

She had wanted to get Dougie up off the damp floor. With her bound hands and feet, however, it had been impossible to manipulate the boy’s unconscious body onto the dry table. Instead, she’d done the best she could to drag them both up the first few steps. The hard wooden edge of the staircase dug into her bruised ribs, cutting off circulation to various parts of her body. She developed a routine, shifting first left, then right, then stomping her bound feet. Movement brought warmth, warmth brought hope. So she kept moving.

Rainie had once been involved in a case where a young girl had been abandoned in an underground cave. She knew from that experience a person could die of exposure at fifty-five degrees. All it took was wet clothes and the constant chill.

She and Dougie were both soaked to the bone.

She had a feeling the basement was a good deal cooler than fifty-five degrees.

Funny, how many long nights she had spent the past four months, her mind racing with thoughts she didn’t know how to control. She’d fallen asleep to horrible nightmares. She’d awakened to a displaced anxiety that often felt far worse than her dreams.

She had watched herself erode from the outside. From a relatively happily married woman with a challenging job, to a jumpy, hunch-shouldered bundle of nerves, who couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hope. She developed a hair-trigger temper that frightened even her.

Any time she thought of Astoria, of Aurora Johnson’s final moments of terror, she went nearly out of her mind with rage, felt the anger claw at her skull like a feral beast, desperate for escape. Even when they completed their profile, even when the lead detective read it, and said, “Hey, I know this guy,” nothing changed. The maintenance man had a built-in alibi: Of course his prints were in the apartment-he maintained the unit. Of course there was blood on his shoes-he had called in the bodies.

Quincy devised a strategy for interrogation. The stringy-haired twenty-one-year-old high school dropout shrugged for four consecutive hours, stating, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.”

And so it went. They worked, they churned, they dug frantically for details. And Aurora Johnson’s cries for help once again went unanswered.

Professionals were supposed to be able to handle that sort of thing. They were supposed to shrug it off, dig deep, as Quincy seemed able to do. You can’t win them all. The subject will screw up sooner or later. Which implied another slaughtered mother, of course, another terrified little girl.

Rainie couldn’t find that level of acceptance inside herself. She dreamed of the bloody apartment, night after night. Sometimes she even fantasized about visiting the maintenance man herself. She knew how forensic science worked. Like any law enforcement officer, she had spent her fair share of time contemplating the perfect crime. She would take care of matters up close and personal. She would make sure that what happened to little Aurora Johnson never happened again.

Except, of course, the maintenance man was only the tip of the iceberg. Obsessively, she started following other news cases: kidnapped children, abuse cases, stories from the Iraq war. She would wait until Quincy was out of the house, and then she would sneak to the computer like a thief. Google search: three starved children. Google search: house of horrors. Google search: rape of infant.

It was amazing the amount of horror that would appear on her screen. She would sit there, hours at a time, reading, reading, reading, while the tears poured down her face. So much pain and suffering. So much injustice. The world was a miserable, cruel place, and there was nothing one woman could do that would ever make a difference. How could so many children be screaming, and nobody answer their cries?

Then she would hear the crunch of Quincy’s tires on the drive. Quickly, she would close out the windows, scrub at her cheeks.

“I was just checking e-mail,” she would tell her husband when he appeared in the hallway, smelling of rain and fir trees. And he would nod at her, and he would continue on to their bedroom, while she sat there, hands folded, head down, wondering how she could lie to someone she genuinely loved.

And she would feel the darkness grow in her, a living, breathing beast, cutting her off from the rest of civilization, isolating her from her own husband. She continued her horrible research and she didn’t tell Quincy about any of it. He wouldn’t understand. No one would understand.

It had been a relief when she had finally taken that first drink.

She was an idiot, she knew. It was her lot in life to live both inside and outside her body. She moved, she functioned, she felt. She was also an objective party, quick to criticize her own actions.

Aurora Johnson was dead. How did Rainie drinking, Rainie lying, Rainie self-imploding, change anything about that? On her better days, when the fog receded from her mind, when her hands shook less and her thoughts grew clearer, she understood she was doing all the wrong things. On one of those days, when Quincy was shut in his office working on his memoirs, she even called and made a doctor’s appointment.

Much to her amazement, she kept the appointment two weeks later, though she’d actually managed to sleep the night before and down some eggs for breakfast, so maybe the worst was behind her and she was starting to be sane after all. These things came and went, right? She’d been strong once, she’d be strong again. Hey, she was Rainie. Nothing got her down.

She went to the doctor, a kind elderly gentleman who looked like he was straight out of a TV show. He told her she had an anxiety disorder and gave her a prescription. She carried the prescription in her purse for two more weeks, before one day having it filled. Then she went into the ladies’ room, and for reasons she couldn’t even explain to herself, she poured the pills into a Pamprin bottle, keeping one in the palm of her hand. She stared at it for a long time.

She probably should’ve told the doctor about the number of beers she consumed in a day. The whole drinking thing probably made a difference.