Once Taken (9 page)

Something else began to make more sense to her. The shocking staging of his most recent murder, with the body hanging where everyone could see it, was not just an attempt to shock the world. It was also for his own benefit. He had a need to convince everybody—including himself—that he was far more savage than he appeared to be.

As his desperation mounted, Riley knew, his crimes were likely to become ever more outrageously vicious. He couldn’t allow himself to display the slightest telltale hint of mercy or humanity. He must do his best to become a monster beyond even his own imagining.

The steady click-clacking of train wheels was having a pleasantly hypnotic effect. Riley hadn’t thought she was tired, but now she realized she’d been under considerable strain for the last couple of days. She closed her eyes.

As Riley huddled in the musty crawlspace, her cage door opened and a stream of flame broke through the pitch darkness. The white light blinded her for a moment. The flame of that propane torch was the only thing she ever saw in this awful place—aside from the glimpses it gave of Peterson himself.

Now her tormentor’s face took form again as he taunted her with the hissing flame, forcing her to dodge its extreme heat. She couldn’t quite see what he looked like, but his presence was becoming familiar all the same.

“Welcome home,” Peterson said gleefully.

“This is not my home,” Riley said.

“It’s the only home you deserve.”

Riley wished she could grab the torch away from him and turn it against him. But his motions were too deft and swift. All she could do was duck and dodge, trying to escape being burned.

“I’m going to kill you,” she said, mustering a tone of defiance. “I want you to know that.”

Peterson chuckled grimly.

“Welcome home,” he said again.

Riley was awakened by the conductor’s shout …

“Penn Station!”

It was time to change trains.

*

As she drove into Fredericksburg that evening, Riley kept repeating in her mind:
One monster at a time.

The dream about Peterson had left her badly shaken, troubling her during the rest of her train trip to Quantico. Even so, she’d managed to get a fair amount of work done. She’d run searches on her laptop using the train’s Wi-Fi service, and pored over her own copy of the case documents and photos. She had emailed a report directly to Brent Meredith. There was no pressing need to stop at the BAU, so she had decided to drive straight to Ryan’s house where April was waiting for her.

Riley reminded herself that monsters took many forms. Right now, she wanted to focus on an altogether different monster—the monstrosity that her personal life had become. Perhaps there was hope of conquering this one, of reshaping it to a more agreeable form. After much grief and rebellion, April now wanted to talk to her. It was a positive sign. Riley wasn’t going to let her daughter down, not this time.

Besides, Riley was well aware that she needed to make some serious changes in her life. There wasn’t much point in waiting for a break between cases. There seldom seemed to be much of a break, and there probably wouldn’t be one in the foreseeable future.

First, she figured that she had to move out of her little house. Peterson’s break-in proved that it was much too isolated and vulnerable. When she’d first rented it, she and Ryan had just split, and she had felt financially insecure. The place outside of Fredericksburg had been all she could afford, and it had served to get her far away from her former life.

But the divorce would be final soon, and Ryan had agreed to pay regular child support instead of the erratic contributions he was kicking in now. He’d actually become generous, which she recognized as his way of freeing himself from any other responsibilities toward their daughter.

That was fine with Riley. She would be happy to have full care of April, and she desperately wanted to be a good mother to her. She just had to figure out how to manage her own responsibilities better than she had in the recent past.

Looking out her car window, Riley saw that she was driving past rows of attractive townhouses. When her supplementary income became steady and predictable, she could seriously think about a new place to live, maybe even about buying something suitable in town. It would be good to have neighbors, and the location would be convenient for April’s school. And Fredericksburg was big enough that she wouldn’t have to worry about crossing paths with Ryan.

The prospect of raising April on her own brought up another issue that had been on her mind. Riley couldn’t escape the fact that she spent a lot of time away from home. She needed someone to help take care of her daughter.

Gabriela was the obvious choice. She and April really liked each other, and April wouldn’t object to their longtime housekeeper being around to keep tabs on her.

Might Gabriela agree to move in with them if she could have a room and bath of her own? Or at least stay over when Riley had to be away for days at a time? Riley made a mental note to talk it over with Gabriela as soon as she got the chance.

When Riley reached her destination, she drove her car up the driveway and under the carport alongside the house. When she got out of the car and walked to the front door, she rang the doorbell, as had become customary since she moved out. Gabriela answered with an anxious look on her face.

“Señora Riley!” she exclaimed. “Do you know where April is?”

Shock jolted Riley’s entire body.

“Isn’t April here?” she asked.

“She was, but not now,” Gabriela said. “
Vente!
Come in!”

Riley stepped inside and Gabriela shut the door.

“She was here when I went out to the
tienda
for groceries,” Gabriela explained. “When I came back she wasn’t here. I told Señor Ryan, and he said not to worry. But still I worried. She said nothing about going out. I don’t understand.”

Riley’s agitation mounted.

“Where’s Ryan?” she asked.

“Having dinner.”

Gabriela led Riley to the dining room. Ryan was seated at the table, simultaneously picking at his dinner and talking on his cell phone. Another place was set, but it had not been used. Gabriela nervously began clearing the table.

“That will be fine,” Ryan said to whoever was on the phone—a client, Riley guessed. “I’ll be there at nine. We’ll take care of everything tonight.”

He ended the call and looked up at Riley with surprise.

“I hadn’t expected you here today,” he said. “I thought you had a case in Upstate New York. How’s it going?”

“Where is April?” Riley asked.

“How should I know?” Ryan replied with an annoyed shrug. “She’s in one of her moods. She gets that from you, not me. Do you think she’d tell me anything?”

Riley ignored her ex-husband’s accusatory tone.

“Where have you been today?” she asked.

“Not that I have to report my comings and goings,” Ryan said. “But I’ve actually been upstairs all day, working in my home office. I haven’t left the house since this morning. I’ve barely been out of the office. I’ve been busy.”

“Did April come home from school?”

Ryan finished his meal and set his napkin down.

“Yeah, and we had a fight. Don’t ask me what it was all about. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I sent her to her room, told her not to come out until she was ready to apologize. I thought she’d stayed there until Gabriela came to my office and told me she was gone.”

Ryan got up from the table and started to walk away.

“Look, I’ve got to get ready to go meet a client,” he said. “It’s a lot more important than this, believe me—especially since you expect me to be so generous with my support payments. Honestly, I don’t understand why you and Gabriela are in such a panic. The girl took off in a huff, and she’ll come back when she feels like it.”

Riley stepped in front of Ryan, blocking his exit.

“She did
not
take off in a huff,” Riley said. “She said she wanted to talk to me, and I texted her that I was coming back. She was expecting me. She wouldn’t have left the house.”

“Well, that’s exactly what she did, apparently,” Ryan said. “She’s probably at your house right now.”

Riley felt a glimmer of hope. Was it possible that April had expected to meet Riley at her own house? Might her daughter be waiting there for her?

Riley pulled out her cell phone and dialed her own landline number. She listened to her recorded answering machine message, then after the beep she said, “April, if you’re there, pick up. I came back to see you.”

There was no response.

Then she tried April’s cell phone number. When she got April’s voice mail message, she couldn’t stop herself from yelling. “April, if you’re there, pick up. Where are you? You’ve got me scared to death. Call me right now.”

Riley ended the call and stood staring at the phone in her hand.

“She’ll call whenever she feels like it,” Ryan said. “Now if you don’t mind—”

He tried to push by Riley, but she wouldn’t let him pass.

“You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

“I’ve got a client, Riley.”

Riley’s voice was shaking with barely restrained rage and fear.

“You’ve got a daughter too,” she said.

Riley turned around and saw that Gabriela was standing in the kitchen doorway, looking stricken and horrified.

“Gabriela, what time did you go out for groceries?” Riley asked.

“About three, I think,” Gabriela said. “April’s bedroom door was open and she was there. When I got back, she was not in the house and I told Señor Ryan.”

Riley turned toward Ryan again. His expression was still unconcerned. She found it maddening that he couldn’t see how serious the situation was.

“Did anyone come to the door this afternoon?” Riley asked.

“I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve been in my office the whole day,” Ryan said.

“Ryan,
think.
Did you hear the doorbell at all today?”

Ryan paused to think for a moment.

“Once, I think. In the afternoon. Yes, I did hear a car pull up and then the doorbell. It was after I’d sent April to her room. I’m sure Gabriela answered it.”

Riley turned to the housekeeper.

“Gabriela, did you answer the door for anybody today?”

“I did not hear the doorbell ring all day.”

Riley was now shaking with alarm and ager. She turned back to Ryan.

“Gabriela did
not
answer the door,” she said to him fiercely. “She was out getting groceries. April answered the door, and she’s been gone ever since. By now, she could have been missing for four hours. Gabriela told you, and you didn’t care.”

Ryan was starting to get flustered now.

“Look, you’re making too much of this,” he said. “It was probably her boyfriend. He probably drove up and she took off with him. When she gets back, I’m going to ground her but good. You should have done it long ago.”

Riley’s mind flashed back to catching April and her boyfriend smoking pot in her back yard.

“Have you even met her boyfriend?” Riley snapped. “His name is Brian, and he’s fourteen or fifteen. He doesn’t drive. It wasn’t him, and it wasn’t any of her friends. She doesn’t have friends with cars. Jesus, Ryan, don’t you know
anything
about your daughter?”

Riley didn’t wait for a reply. She pushed past Ryan and headed straight up the stairs to April’s room. Ryan and Gabriela followed her. As Gabriela had said, the door had been left open. The room was its typical mess.

Again Riley took out her phone and dialed April’s number. This time, her heart dropped. She could have sworn she heard a buzzing from the bed.

She rushed over to the bed and pushed aside some clothes and her heart stopped.

It was right there.

Riley picked up the buzzing phone and stared at it in horror.

April didn’t have her phone.

And that could only mean one thing.

She was taken.

April cringed at the sound of the man’s footsteps overhead. He was pacing back and forth on the wooden deck less than a foot above her head, chuckling to himself, occasionally laughing out loud. She struggled to keep from screaming. He had told her he would shoot her if she screamed, and she was sure that he would.

She knew that the man walking on the deck was Peterson. It had to be him. Like everyone else, April had doubted her mom’s conviction that Peterson was still alive. She had wanted to believe that the murderer who had once captured her mother was dead. But he was alive and now he had taken her.

She remembered with horror the little that Mom had said about this man, about how he had treated her as a captive. But April was even more terrified by what her mother
hadn’t
told her. She was sure that her mother had held back the truth of her own suffering. She always did that to spare April, but now April dreaded finding out what horrors had been left unsaid.

Even after hours in captivity, April still didn’t have any idea where she was. When Peterson had dragged her out of the car trunk, she’d glimpsed a small house with a large raised deck. But how long had she been in that trunk? How far away from home had they traveled?

When he’d pulled her from the trunk, he’d ripped the duct tape gag off her mouth, and she’d still been too scared to scream. Then he’d carried her over his shoulder to the house, shoved her under the deck, slapped a barrier in place, and just left her there, still bound hand and foot. She had writhed and twisted in panic but the plastic restraints held tight.

When she had been able to stop her body from shaking, she had looked around her prison. The base of the deck was enclosed with wooden lattice. He had removed one section to put her in this cage and the fastened it back in place. She thought that the lattice was made of fairly flimsy wood—but she didn’t dare try to kick it out. Not now, with Peterson walking right overhead.

April squirmed around in the shallow space. She could sit up but she couldn’t stand. She leaned back against the house foundation. It was dim under the deck, but it was still daylight outside. From what she could see through the square holes of the lattice, the house seemed isolated. The land all around was barren except for a few scattered trees. She could see no sign of other houses and she had no idea how far away the nearest human being might be.