Abandoned: A Thriller (26 page)

“Who is ‘them,’ Heather?” I ask.

Her smile is beatific. It erases the look of insanity and suffering from her features, replacing it with a kind of peaceful joy. “My boys,” she says. “The voices in the light that would comfort me. Without them … I don’t know.” She picks at her arm until it bleeds. “I might have gone insane.”

I feel my stomach rolling again, not in revulsion but in horror. My greatest fear, since I was a little girl, was exactly this: to go crazy and not know it. I remember seeing that movie about John Nash,
A Beautiful Mind
, and not being able to sleep afterward.

“Heather,” I ask. “Did you ever see the man who did this to you? Did you see his face or anything else that might help us identify him?”

The twitch in her cheek again, four times. She shakes her head. “Noooooo … all I ever saw was the dark, the dark and my light through the hole in my door.” She grimaces. “You can see the dark, just
like you can taste it. Everything gets more acute. I have bat ears now, did you know that?” She startles me by emitting a few high-pitched squeals—her imitation of a bat—which then dissolve into cackles. “And my skin …” She runs her hands over her arms, and I watch goose bumps rise. “It’s all more sensitive.” She squints at me. “But I’m seeing now. Am I really seeing? Or is this a dream?” She picks at the bloody spot on her forearm. “It’s real,” I tell her.

She looks around, peering with care at everything in the room. She shrugs. “It doesn’t seem real.” She sighs, lies back. “I’m tired again. It’s sleep time.” She sits up suddenly, fearful. “Or is it eating time?” She reaches out to me, her hand shaking. “If I missed eating time, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You won’t hit me, will you?”

I fight the welling tears and reach out to take her hand. “No one’s going to hit you anymore, Heather. I promise.”

She calms, but I can see in her eyes that she does not believe me.

“She’s not in any condition right now to give us more than that,” Alan observes.

We’re standing outside Heather’s room. Burns is silent, and he looks stricken. I feel tired already. The day is young, and we’ve only just started foraging through the sticky meat locker this perpetrator left for us. Heather Hollister could easily be the least of it.

“I agree,” I say. “Still, she helped. We know now how he took her and how he treated her. It’s going to help us with his profile.”

“Profile?” Burns croaks. “I’ll tell you what his profile is. He’s a dead man.”

Neither Alan nor I respond. We could give him the lecture about death threats in our presence, but we won’t. We empathize. “What’s next?” Alan asks.

“I’m going to call Callie and see if she’s confirmed the ID of Jeremy Abbott. Then we’ll go and check up on both him and Dana.”

“I’m going to pass on that,” Burns says. “I’ll keep Heather company for a while. If you need anything, call me.”

He looks old again, ancient and bent. Burns is one of what I call the old guard, a brand of man that seems to be dying off in the world
today. Built not of stereotypes but stone: heavy, strong, enduring like a mountain. Alan has these qualities, as do Tommy and AD Jones. Burns looks cracked, fissured, crumbling at the base.

“Call us if anything changes with her,” I tell him.

He nods and reenters Heather’s room.

“I don’t think her outlook is good,” Alan murmurs. “What happens when she finds out one of her sons is dead?” He shakes his head.

How would I deal with it? Eight years shackled up and locked away in absolute darkness, unable to track the days, without the benefit of human contact?

“It depends on her. You never know, she could bounce back.”

I don’t sound convincing.

“It’s confirmed,” Callie says to me. “The man in the hospital is Jeremy Abbott.”

My heart sinks. More bad news for Heather.

“Good work. Alan and I are going to see Dana Hollister and Jeremy now. What else is happening there?”

“James has almost finished the timeline and collation of the case files. He’s also discovered some interesting things about the car crashes.”

“He can fill us in when we get back. In the meantime, can you get in touch with LAPD CSU and get briefed on what they found in processing the Hollister home? Oh—and get hold of Leo Carnes. We’re going to need his expertise on this case.”

“Anything else you want to add to that laundry list?” she complains. “When I say, ‘I live to serve,’ I’m talking about others serving
me.”

Finally, something that makes me smile. “We’ll see you soon.”

The doctor attending to both Dana Hollister and Jeremy Abbott looks like a teenager with old eyes. His blond hair and baby face contribute to the effect; I’m sure he gets plenty of jokes about being able to do surgery before he could shave.

“Both patients have had extreme damage to their prefrontal lobes,” he says, confirming what I already knew.

“A homemade lobotomy.”

“In essence.”

Alan shudders. “Jesus!”

“I’ve seen this once before,” I tell him. “A doctor did it to his wife.”

“Then you’re familiar with the prognosis,” the doctor continues. “The damage is done. Mrs. Hollister got the worst of it, but Mr. Abbott isn’t much better. Mrs. Hollister is in a vegetative state.”

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,”
Alan mutters.

“That’s right. She’ll have to be cared for like a coma patient. She can’t feed herself, she can’t speak, she can’t be responsible for her own continence. It’s unlikely that she has any awareness of the world around her.”

“And Jeremy Abbott?” I ask.

“He’s operating at the level of an infant. He can’t form words, and he wears diapers. He’s able to eat and crawl, though, so his physical prognosis is better than hers. If you can call that better.”

“What do you think he used to do this?”

“I’d imagine he got his hands on a classic orbitoclast—what laymen refer to as an ice pick. The diameter seems right, and I doubt they’d be hard to purchase. The procedure itself is pretty simple, though it would require some practice. The doctor who developed the lobotomy experimented on cadavers, using an actual ice pick from his own kitchen.”

I look down at Dana Hollister’s still form, lying on the bed.

“She’s not aware of anything?”

“Probably not. It’s hard to know for sure. There are accounts of coma patients coming out of long comas who remember snatches of conversations that occurred around them while they were comatose. When it comes to the brain and consciousness, we still have a lot to learn.”

I hope that he’s right, that Dana is living in a world of nothing, that she’s not floating alone in the dark instead.

“Tell me something I can use,” I say.

It’s late morning and we’re back at the office, with my team gathered around. We’ve briefed them on our interview with Douglas Hollister, on Heather, on all the rest of it.

I thought, on the way back, about Avery Hollister screaming into the thick shag of the bathroom carpet forever. I thought about Jeremy Abbott screaming like a baby for his next meal. I thought about the possibility of Dana screaming inside her own mind, beating with futile fists against the darkness.

I thought about Heather too, of course. He’d let her go, but she was still trapped. She sat in a hospital room, picking sores into her skin, surrounded by light that wasn’t real to her.

Murder is murder, and it’s always a terrible, inhuman thing, but my monsters are less concerned with that end result than they are with the elevation of suffering. It’s their successes in this regard that haunt me the most. Avery Hollister will bother me less than Jeremy Abbott ten years from now. I will not forget him, but he didn’t suffer enough to earn a place in my personal pantheon.

“I have something on the car crashes,” James says.

“Go ahead.”

“Four cars were involved in accidents. I was able to locate the accident reports on each one. Every case reported catastrophic brake failure, and all were slightly older-model vehicles, ten to fifteen years old.”

“That’s a pretty high percentage for one parking lot,” Alan says.

“It’s an impossible anomaly,” James replies. “Follow-up was done on two of the vehicles. Both were inspected under the auspices of the related insurance carriers and showed signs of deliberate tampering.”

“You think he did it?” I ask. “Why? As some kind of additional diversion?”

“I’m not ready to give my hypothesis yet. Let me finish. We told you the ViCAP search turned up three other similar crimes. Bodies dropped off in bags, suffering from catastrophic prefrontal-lobe damage. I followed up on two of those cases this morning, the one here in Los Angeles and the one in Portland. Both victims were identified, and both victims had been missing for extended periods of time.”

“That confirms his involvement,” I say. “It fits his MO.”

“Both victims in those cases were female, and both were taken at night in parking lots. One at a superstore of some kind, another from a bowling alley.” He looks up. “I did a further search and found that multiple car accidents also occurred in both locations, on the same evening of each abduction. I haven’t tracked down the data on the vehicles involved, but I’m confident we’ll find they were sabotaged as well.”

“Weird,” I say. “Not exactly a foolproof diversion. How would he know when or if those particular cars would be driven again?”

“He wouldn’t,” James says. “It’s irrational. This is a subject who apparently operates with great care and planning. The accidents are not only unreliable as a diversion, they are unnecessary. Taking the women in the parking lots is similarly risky. Why not take them at home? Illogic is a form of insanity, small or large. Why would he take this kind of risk?”

“Because he needs it,” I say. “Not professionally but personally.”

It’s the only answer that fits, and it’s a behavior we see in serial offenders all the time. Serial killers collect trophies, even though they know, if they get caught, those same trophies will assist in convicting them. They can’t help themselves. They need little Cassie’s Barbie doll (with the blood drops on it) or Grandma Barbara’s wedding ring (kept on a necklace around her neck since her husband died, until the killer ripped it off her body).

“What’s he need?” Alan asks. “Car crashes?”

“It’s called symphorophilia, dear,” Callie says. “Someone who is sexually aroused by accidents or catastrophes.”

“Seriously? That actually gets someone’s motor running?”

“It’s a factual paraphilia,” James confirms. “It’s just a hypothesis, of course, but I think it’s worth exploring. He seems to be a meticulous and careful planner in every other way. Why do something so illogical unless some personal aberration was involved?”

“Fine,” I agree. “We’ll throw it into the mix. So let’s examine this guy further. What do we know?” I count off on my fingers. “One: He’s highly organized and effective. Other than the possible—what did you call it?”

“Symphorophilia,” James says.

“Right. Other than that, he exhibits no signs of being a disorganized offender. Two: His motivations, based on Douglas’s testimony,
appear
to be financial.”

“Money as the motive would explain the way in which he selects his targets,” James offers. “In Hollister’s case, the perpetrator didn’t choose Heather—the husband did. There’s no evidence of any personal ties, and I doubt we’ll find any.”

“Impersonal fits with what we know so far about how he treats them too,” Alan says. “Granted, we’ve only heard from Heather, but I think we can take her at her word. The way she talked about him whipping her for punishment, it didn’t sound like he was getting off on it.”

“As the doctor said—workmanlike,” Callie says.

I nod. “That’s a good tag for this line of thinking.” I go over and write it on the whiteboard. “So, organized, methodical, everything he does he does for a purpose. That’s our current theory. The overriding purpose, for now, appears to be money. But is money just his excuse?” I shake my head. “What about keeping them in darkness and housing them for at least seven years. Is it sadistic?”

“I don’t think so,” James says. “I—” He stops, pondering. “I think that
was
a good word,” he murmurs, staring at the whiteboard. “Workmanlike. Maybe that’s everything to him. Pragmatism. No wasted motion. Waste is the thing you don’t forgive.” He looks at me. “Darkness enforces compliance over time by making the prisoner insane. It’s incredibly efficient. It saves on electricity, it eliminates the need for assistance from others, and it breaks down the ability to resist.
Heather Hollister said that he told her to exercise daily. Why? Because he knew he needed to keep her alive. Why? Because of the possibility Douglas Hollister might renege on their agreement.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s about sadism. I think it’s about maximum return on minimum effort.”

“Heather said he didn’t even bother to speak to her when he punished her,” I allow, though I’m still cautious. “He took her, whipped her, told her it would be worse the next time, and stuck her back in her room. Where’s the enjoyment in that?”

“There isn’t any,” James says. “Probably because it
is
a business, and she was just a commodity.”