Darknet (15 page)

Who’d have thunk?

She found herself at the baby-sitter’s place before she knew it and stepped out into the steaming heat to go knock on the door.

It took a couple of minutes for Mrs. Estahazy to answer, and she seemed distracted, glancing back at her television as they spoke.

“Didn’t you know? Avril’s gone already.”

Cindy wasn’t sure she understood.

“What do you mean?”

“Her dad picked her up. About two hours ago.”

“What? Tony? Are you sure?”

Mrs. Estahazy glanced back and Cindy wanted to shake her and tell her to pay fucking attention. She did lightly reach out and touch her on the shoulder.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure. At least I think so.”

“He’s never picked her up before. Are you sure it was Tony?” She felt faint and just needed reassurance.

The babysitter seemed to focus on Cindy for the first time. Her lips were tight as if she were angry, and her old-fashioned horned-rim glasses made her look like an owl.

“Well, who else? Avril was happy to see him and ran out to him. What am I supposed to do, haul her back in? She’s home and happy, I’m sure.”

Cindy locked eyes, afraid to believe anything other than what she was being told, but she knew Tony would never come to get Avril. Why would he?

“What time was it? Exactly?”

“I’m afraid I’m not sure—maybe 5:00. No, it must have been closer to 4:00.
Rooster County
was on and Jesse was having a miscarriage. I remember missing the ending. It’s always a cliff hanger on that show, and I didn’t much appreciate being interrupted. You tell your husband to just let you get her at your normal time, and we’ll all be happy.”

Cindy just shook her head and ran back to her car. In the few minutes the car sat without the air turned on, the temperature had soared. She felt sweat forming on her forehead as she dug her iPhone from her purse and clicked her way to phoning Tony.

“Yeah, what is it?”

 “Do you have Avril with you?”

“What? No. What are you talking about?”

“The baby-sitter said you picked her up about 4:00.”

“She must be fucking crazy. I don’t even know where she is.”

Oh, Jesus.

The drive home was normally only a few minutes but it seemed to take forever today.

“AVRIL!”

Cindy ran through the house, calling for her daughter, even though she knew without a doubt that her precious baby wasn’t anywhere inside.

She knew
he
had her.

The house was silent except for the click-clack of her sandals as she hurried around and checked each room.

When she was convinced Avril wasn’t home (and wasn’t in the backyard or in the garage), she sat and tried to calm herself down. She leaned over and held her cheeks with her hands, tears slowly rolling down between her fingers.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .”

Her heart felt heavy but she didn’t know what to do. She wanted to phone the police, but would
he
know if she did? Would he take it out on Avril?

She decided to go to her office and sign in to her DarkNet portal. Only a few days ago she had vowed never to enter DarkNet again. She now had no choice.

The chat room opened up and she typed, “Where is she?”

After a minute, she saw the answer. “If you’d just paid what you owe me, she’d be with you right now. This is all your fault.”

“GIVE HER BACK!”

“Just pay what you owe me and I will.” There was a short delay as he typed the next sentence. “The price is now $500,000. You should have paid the bargain-basement price before.”

“PLEASE!”

“Click on the Video Link button on the side toolbar.”

Cindy looked, almost unable to realize what she was looking at, then saw the button he was talking about. She pressed it.

It almost looked like a photograph, but then she saw the body moving.

“Avril, baby . . .”

On the monitor, a young girl lay in a bed, and Cindy could see chains leading from her legs to the bed frame. She was wearing the same light green blouse and darker green shorts that Avril had worn when Cindy had seen her earlier today. That seemed like a million years ago.

The girl was struggling but couldn’t move. Cindy suspected her arms were chained as well, but she couldn’t see that. There was no sound, but it looked like Avril was screaming.

“No . . . no . . .”

Cindy reached out to touch the monitor. She saw a zoom button in the lower-right corner and clicked on it. The image became larger and slightly grainy.

She saw Avril’s face, saw the terror in her eyes as she screamed.

Cindy couldn’t help it. She screamed along with her daughter and started to beat her fists on her desk. At some point, her hands were red from blood, but she didn’t notice. She’d passed out.

* * *

The Manipulator cocked his ear, trying to see if he could hear anything.

He was in the old barn that he had taken over. It was hot, but he didn’t much care about that for himself. He sometimes worried about all the computer and video equipment scattered around him, but so far everything was hanging together nicely.

No sound. The kid must be asleep. He clicked on an icon on his desktop and brought up the image from the cellar.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

He kept the cellar dark. That way the image on DarkNet would be grainy, which in turn would cause Cindy McKay to wonder if the girl chained to the bed really was her daughter after all. It was only human nature to believe in wishes, hopes, dreams, fairies, unicorns, and anything else that made people happy, so of course, she’d want to convince herself it wasn’t
really
Avril.

Part of him wished he could just sit down with her and ask, “So, Cin, what do you think’s really going on here? Is that your daughter or not?”

Only the Manipulator knew for sure. He laughed. Of course it was really Avril.

He clicked on the side toolbar and could tell that the video was streaming to Cindy’s computer. He played with the keyboard a bit and replaced the image of Avril with the view from Cindy’s own webcam.

She was slumped over her desk, and he couldn’t help but start to laugh again.

The Manipulator grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Then he picked up the red Mariners baseball cap he’d tossed on his desk earlier.

“You’re out of your depth, Cindy.”

The baseball cap was the same one that Avril had told her mother about. It belonged to Johnny, the guy who had bought her the ice cream at the chess tournament.

The Manipulator had hired the guy to hang around and befriend Avril, knowing the description (and particularly the unique hat) would find its way back to Cindy. Of course, the guy (Mike Salowski was the name he went by, but who knew if that was real) was found on DarkNet. Anybody can find anybody for hire on DarkNet. It cost only a few bitcoins to give Avril a new buddy and ensure Mommy knew about a fake version of the Manipulator. Mike Salowski never met him, had no trail back to him, and so was of no concern.

A duplicate red cap was all that was needed when he went to pick up Avril. She smiled because she knew exactly who he was—not the guy she’d seen around, but who he
really
was, but Cindy would never suspect him, because she already knew about the guy in the red cap, who wasn’t anybody she’d ever heard of before.

He checked the time: a little after nine o’clock. He stood and stretched and then grabbed a family-sized bag of Lay’s potato chips. He turned the live streaming off, just in case Cindy woke up and checked the monitor. He pulled open the fake floor that led down to the underground shelter and climbed down to the basement.

The smell hit him. She must have shit herself, and the heat was making it seem much worse.

Avril had her eyes closed. Her face was smudged with tears.

He’d set up a fan in the corner, too far for her to reach, so it was a little bit cooler here than up in the main part of the barn, but it was still awfully hot.

“Avril?”

The girl didn’t move. He walked a few steps closer to be sure she was still breathing, and she was. He checked the chains, but of course there was no way she could have loosened them. She was locked solid.

There was a small plastic water cup on a table beside her. The table itself was bolted to the floor, but she could reach the cup. It was empty. A jug of warm water sat farther away and he used it to fill the cup. He then opened the bag of chips and left it for her for dinner.

As he climbed back to the main floor, he thought of waking her, but she’d wake herself soon enough. It was time for him to leave.

Maybe tomorrow he’d let her clean herself up. Maybe.

It all depended on how Cindy behaved in the meantime.

Cindy McKay was used to being the center of attention. She grew up with a million-watt smile that could capture the attention of both boys and girls, and her long blonde hair gave her an exotic Scandinavian look that seemed very curious. It was impossible to ignore her. When she hit 15, she finally got her parents’ approval to date, but they never approved of any boy she went out with. It wouldn’t have mattered if he could turn water into wine. They’d still raise their noses and ask why he couldn’t turn it into a 40-year-old Scotch.

Her memories of those days were dark and unhappy. She knew that being trapped between two smarter siblings had caused her to look stupid in her parents’ eyes—especially her dad—but she never understood what exactly they expected her to do about it.

She worked hard to get her B- average. It’s just that facts and figures and the order of the presidents and the history of the California gold rush just didn’t stick in her mind. For Wendy and Randy, things
stuck
. They only had to hear one time about some obscure historical fact and they could recite it years later without the slightest effort.

Why were their brains wired so differently?

Why didn’t she get the same wiring?

And most importantly, why couldn’t her parents have seen that it was just the way she was born? She got her genes from them, so wasn’t it
really
their fault that she didn’t have the recall the others did?

At times, when her parents thought she was asleep, she clicked open her bedroom door and happened to hear them talking. She remembered the hateful words that came floating up from the main floor: stupid, lazy, pathetic, worthless . . . and that was before they started drinking and added in even more colorful adjectives.

They never cared that they were chasing their daughter away from them.

Cindy hadn’t spoken to her mother or father in five years.

So why did she dream of them after collapsing on her desk? The question receded from her mind as quickly as it had formed.

Avril!

Oh, God, let it be a dream . . .

But the video cam window was still open on her laptop and she could see at a glance that it was all true. She gritted her teeth, forcing herself not to scream, but she couldn’t help but reach to the monitor and touch the image of the girl. She was struggling against the chains. There was no sound; Cindy double-checked to be sure she hadn’t accidentally muted the speakers, but everything was normal. The Manipulator had simply chosen for her not to hear anything.

Was the girl screaming? Crying?

The image was grainy and hard to see any details.

“Is that really you, sweetheart?”

She leaned closer and stared at the image, trying to put her emotions aside. Part of her knew it really was her daughter, but there was always the one chance in a million that the Manipulator was just living up to his name, and this was some other girl.

Dressed exactly the same?

She ignored the voice in her mind. It was still possible Avril was safe somewhere. Possible. Possible.

It could be a simulation. He’d admitted to her that anything was possible on DarkNet.

She wanted to believe it. If it wasn’t Avril, Cindy knew that meant some other girl was suffering in her place, and she felt horrible for wanting that to be true, but if it came down to it being Avril or somebody else . . . well, there was no real choice there.

“I need you back.”

She refused to cry. That would accomplish nothing. She continued to stare at the image of the girl. Her web cam was in the middle of the top of the laptop, invisible to her because it was just part of the scenery.

“My baby.”

Just then, lights flooded the room the girl was locked in. The camera zoomed in on the girl’s face.

Bruises covered her cheeks, and a red line ran across her neck, as if the Manipulator had sliced her throat. The girl’s eyes blinked and she was shouting, but still no sound came to Cindy.

Even with the bruises and cuts and the blood stains covering her face, Cindy recognized Avril immediately.

Her last hope that it was a different girl had been destroyed. And at that moment, Cindy knew that she would hunt down the Manipulator no matter how long it took, and she wouldn’t rest until he was dead.

She couldn’t stop staring. A million thoughts rushed through her mind. She should call the police. She couldn’t call the police, because the Manipulator would know and would immediately kill Avril. She had to tell Tony, but then
he
might kill
her
if she told him the whole truth.

There had to be somebody who could help. Maria. Dr. Moore. Ryan. Maybe even DarkNet itself. If evil men like the Manipulator could run amuck, hiding in the shadows of the deep web, why couldn’t good men be there, too?

Most often, though, her thoughts went to Avril. Kidnapped, strapped to a cot, beaten and hurt, all alone, wondering why her mommy wasn’t rescuing her. Cindy’s heart broke when she thought of that.