The Stolen (15 page)

Frantically I bent over and began undoing the bonds at my feet. They were tight, but soon I was able to loosen them. Just then the man stood up, blood leaking from a cut across his cheek. He had fire in his eyes as he ran straight toward me. At that moment I pulled the bonds away from my feet, sidestepped the man and shoved his head against the metal pipe. There was a sickening thud as he bounced off it, then crumpled to the floor in a heap.

I was wobbly standing up. I heard a grunt, saw the man begin to push himself up. There was hatred in his eyes. I didn’t hesitate.

I ran forward and kicked him in the head as hard as I could. The breath left him as he lay there, motionless.

As I tried to get the blood flowing back to my feet, I noticed the glint of metal coming from a key ring in his pocket. There were three keys on it. I picked it up, ran for the door. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. I took turns inserting each key inside, and on the third one it clicked home. I twisted the knob, opened the door and prayed Amanda was all right. I glanced back, saw the man unmoving but still breathing steadily. Then I braced myself for whatever horrors awaited in the rest of this house.

But when I ran up the stairs to the main floor, I was shocked to see that I wasn’t being held in some dungeon. Instead, I was standing in the middle of what looked like the foyer of a typical suburban house.

“What the hell…?” I whispered.

The hardwood floors had been recently sanded and polished, and the carpeting on the stairs was white and clean. Several framed paintings hung from the walls. A crystal chandelier hung above me, and a family room with a large-screen television branched off to the left. There was a doll with braided hair lying on the floor, next to what looked like a scattered set of a child’s building blocks. Everything was clean. I didn’t know what to make of it.

“Amanda!” I yelled. There was no response.

I sprinted to the other end of the hall, then took the stairs two at a time to the upper floor.

I ran down a narrow hall. There were three doors, both closed. I opened the first one. It was a bathroom. Hand soaps. Clean towels. No window. No Amanda.

I approached the other door. Pushed it. It opened into what looked like a master bedroom. A king-size bed sat in the center, with a floral comforter cleanly tucked in. Oddly there were no photos anywhere, as though the place had been disinfected of humanity.

I looked around. Didn’t see anything.

Then I went to the other door. Stopped in front of it. This one was different. It was painted white like the others, but the paint seemed duller. I touched the surface, immediately recoiled. The other doors were wooden. This one was metal. And I knew right away that one of the keys on my chain would open the dead bolt.

I thrust the key inside, got it on the first twist, but then froze when I heard someone coming up the stairs.

The lock unlatched and I pushed the door open.

And then I was standing in what looked like the dream room of any young girl. There were toys everywhere. Coloring books. A large dollhouse filled with tiny furniture. Tapes and CDs and games were stacked high in a corner. Pink wallpaper, and every book a child could ever want to read. And there, sitting on a made bed, her face a mess of fright and relief, was Amanda.

She jumped up and threw her arms around my chest. I winced as she pressed on the cigarette burn, then took her arm and said, “We need to go. Right now.”

Then I noticed something. On the floor. A small scrap of paper. I picked it up, unfolded it. It was a receipt. It was from a store called Toyz 4 Fun. I clenched my jaw. At that moment I knew where we were. I knew what this house was.

Panic welled inside me as I shoved the receipt into my pocket, grabbed Amanda’s hand as we went for the door, still slightly ajar. I heard someone running down the hall, shouting, “Ray, where the hell are you, buddy?”

I waited until the footsteps were right outside, then I slammed the heavy metal door closed as hard as I could. There was an audible
oomph
as whoever was on the other side was knocked flat off his feet.

I flung open the door and ran past, my heart hammering when I saw that the man I’d just knocked down had a gun in his right hand.

We sprinted downstairs and toward the front door. Turned the knob. It was locked. One more key left.

I inserted the last key in the lock, let out a breath when it caught, then turned the handle and opened the door to the outside.

As soon as we stepped onto the front porch, Amanda let out a bloodcurdling scream. There was a body in the driveway. It was lying in a pool of blood. The beard gave it away. It was Dmitri Petrovsky, and he was very dead.

“Run!” I shouted.

We ran down the driveway, and I recognized that we were in the exact same place that we’d cornered Petrovsky. The high brick walls and trees obscured the view beyond the house. There was nobody to hear us scream.

We sprinted around the bend, wind whistling past us, and saw the metal gates up ahead.

They were closed. And I had no keys left.

When we reached the brick wall, I knelt down, cupped my hands and said, “Climb on.”

Amanda stepped onto my hands.

“One, two,
three.
”

I heaved up as she jumped. Her hands caught the rim of the wall. I pushed from below as Amanda pulled herself up, managing to straddle her legs across the wall.

“Come on!” she shouted.

Just as I got ready to jump, I heard a loud bang and a chunk of brick exploded right beside me.

“Come on, Henry, they’re shooting at us!”

I jumped up, managed to get hold of the wall. Amanda gripped my wrists and began to pull. I got a small foothold in the chunk of wall that’d been blown out, then pushed off and hoisted myself up. Another shot rang out, and brick flew apart right where my foot had been.

We toppled over the wall, landed on the other side in a tangled mess. I leaped to my feet, helped Amanda up. Then we ran as fast as we could, until the woods swallowed us.

We arrived panting at the road we’d turned off of when we followed Petrovsky. Huntley Terrace. It was dark out. I had no idea where we were or what day it was.

“Come on,” I said, taking Amanda’s hand again. I thought back to the last time this happened, the last time we were both running for our lives. Back then Amanda was fleeing with a man she didn’t know. This time, for better or worse, she knew what she’d gotten into.

We jogged down the dark road, continually looking over our shoulders to see if we were being followed. I heard nothing, saw nothing. My body felt numb. I was still shirtless, and my side ached. Amanda suddenly stopped, put her hand on my chest.

“Is that a burn mark?” she said.

“We don’t have time,” I panted.

Then out of the darkness a pair of headlights appeared. My eyes widened, and I ran forward waving my hands like a crazy person. I was in the middle of the road, and I only prayed the driver could see well enough not to run me over.

It was a gray Cadillac. It pulled to a stop a yard in front of me. I ran to the driver’s-side window, gasping for air. The driver was a woman of about forty, a DVD from Blockbuster on her front dashboard.

“Don’t…don’t hurt me,” she said. Her eyes were frightened. I could only imagine the sight in front of her.

“Please,” I said, “my friend and I were attacked. If you could just take us away from here and call the police…Please, they’re trying to kill us.”

She reached for the shift, prepared to drive away, then saw Amanda huddled next to me, shivering in the lights of her car.

A minute later we were in the backseat of the Cadillac, heading away from one nightmare.

Then I felt the receipt in my pocket, and knew that another nightmare had just begun.

T
he police station was cold. Nobody had gone out of their way to offer Amanda or me a blanket or a drink or anything else to settle our nerves. I was wearing a blue workshirt with the name “Bill” stitched across the front. One of the detectives had given it to me. I didn’t want to know where it came from, but didn’t get the feeling Bill was looking too hard for it.

Ironically the only hospital within driving distance was Yardley. After the kind Vanessa Milne picked us up on the side of the road in her Cadillac, she took us right to the emergency room. The docs smeared the burn with something called Silvadene, then dressed it, told me to change the dressing every two hours and reapply the cream. It was just a first-degree burn. Would go away in a week, and hopefully wouldn’t leave a scar. Amanda didn’t have a scratch on her. But she was pissed off beyond belief.

A pair of detectives met us at Yardley, but they made us wait a good two hours before arriving. And even when they did, they didn’t seem too keen to help. I found this odd, that two people had escaped from men who wanted to either torture or kill them, and they seemed about as interested as they would be in macroeconomics.

They asked several questions. First, why had we decided to follow Dmitri Petrovsky in the first place, and what we planned to ask him. I told them the truth. That Dmitri Petrovsky was linked to two children born in Hobbs County who’d disappeared, only to reappear several years later. I told them that we had a feeling based on his behavior at the pediatric clinic that he’d been withholding something. They asked for proof of misconduct. I told them we didn’t have proof. That was the point of following him.

After we were released, the cops took us back to the Hobbs PD station. We were led through a cubicle farm of desks and eventually seated in a nondescript gray room with a metal table and chairs that were bolted to the floor. A pitcher of water sat in front of us, along with two glasses.

The same two cops joined us and sat down. They poured themselves two cups of water, drank them loudly. I had a strange feeling that we were being treated like the criminals here.

“Can we get some of that?” Amanda asked. The cops just stared at us. They had identical mustaches that rode straight across their upper lips, then down the sides of their mouths at a right angle. I got a gross mental image of them standing over a sink with a razor, shaving those ’staches in neat lines.

“You have any idea what this town is like now?” the fatter one asked. He had a crew cut and a neck full of angry jowls, like he’d recently graduated from the Mike Ditka finishing school. The one next to him was slightly trimmer, yet had the same scornful look in his eye. Between these two and the runaround I’d received from Lensicki earlier, it was tiresome and frustrating to see the lack of support from this department. “What’s done is done, and now here you two come, harassing an upstanding member of our community. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

“Damn ashamed,” the other cop agreed.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I said. “I just want to know why there’s a doctor working at your hospital who knows two children that were kidnapped, and who ends up dead the same night we’re held captive in some house in the middle of Hobbs County. The fact that all of this went down in your neck of the woods should, I don’t know, make you just the least bit interested, I’d think.”

“About this…captive thing,” the fat one said. “I find it hard to believe that you followed this Russian doctor, as you claim, and then
you
end up being taken by some guy with a cigarette fetish? You’re a reporter, right?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Sure you’re not looking to add a little spice to your story?”

“Go to that house and you’ll see if I’m adding anything,” I said angrily.

The thin one chimed in. “So you followed the doctor to his home, is that right? You waited in the hospital parking lot?”

“I don’t know if it was his home,” I said. “We just followed his car. In fact, I don’t think he lived there at all. I think he knew we were following him, and probably did for a while. Wherever he led us wasn’t his home, but he set us up.”

The fat one, whom I would guess was playing bad cop, only the lines weren’t really that clear, said, “You followed him into, let me go over your statement again, a gated residence off Huntley Terrace?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“You followed him into a gated community.”

“No, it wasn’t a gated community, just a home with a gate out front.”

“And a brick wall surrounding the property.”

“That’s right.”

“And
you
want us to investigate
him.
” He paused, a scowl coming over his face. “Sounds to me like you two are the ones should be reprimanded.”

“The gates
were
open,” Amanda added. “And Petrovsky spoke to us when we got out of the car.”

“That’s when,” the thin one said, “everything went, ahem, black. Right?”

“Right,” I said. “They must have knocked us out or drugged us. I don’t remember.”

“And why did you follow Petrovsky to begin with?” Fatty said.

“We think he has knowledge about the kidnappings that took place over the past few years. He was the attending physician for the births of both Daniel Linwood and Michelle Oliveira. Both children disappeared and reappeared years later with no memory of their time gone missing.”

“And why did you decide to follow the good doctor?” thin man said.

“When we first spoke to him at his office, he claimed to not know anything. It was a blatant lie.” I paused, then added, “And I think there’s been another kidnapping. In addition to Danny Linwood and Michelle.”

“You fucking reporters,” Ditka said. “Another kidnapping? You find two pieces of information got no connection, you put ’em together and make up some story ’bout how there’s some big conspiracy. All just to sell a few newspapers, make a name for yourself. Do you have any proof of another kidnapping?”

“Proof? Not hard evidence, but…”

“Listen, fuckhead. Hobbs County is a nice town. I’ve lived here near twenty years. Now, ten years ago I might have said, yeah, we got some problems, not exactly the kind of place I’d want my kids growing up. But all that’s different now. Things have changed. It’s not right for you to go bringing up the bad times, because we’re past that.”

“Tell that to Dmitri Petrovsky.”

“We will when we find him,” the other cop said.

“Let’s go right now,” I said, standing up. “I’m pretty sure I remember how to get there. Us four, right now.”

“Calm your horses, tough guy,” Ditka said again. “We’re not going anywhere.”

We sat there in silence watching the cops drink water for ten minutes. Then right as I was about to grab the thing and douse Amanda and me with it, Wallace Langston entered, followed by Curt Sheffield. I’d never been happier to see anyone in my life.

“I got your message,” Wallace said. “And I figured you could use a little backup.”

The cops eyed Wallace with skepticism, but when they saw Curt standing there, all six foot three, two hundred sculpted pounds of him, they went right into bully mode once the bullies had been called on their bluff.

Wallace, happy to be good cop to Curt’s badass one, passed out his business card to the cops.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “My name is Wallace Langston, and Henry Parker is under my employ at the
New York Gazette.
Our legal counsel is on the way, but I do have some familiarity with legal rights, and unless you’re holding Mr. Parker or Miss Davies for a crime, I’m going to ask you leave the room so we can speak in private. And then we plan to leave your care posthaste.”

The cops conferred in a lame attempt at whispering, but we all heard every word. Since it was primarily lots of cursing under their breath, we didn’t learn anything new, but they didn’t seem particularly keen to grant Wallace’s request. Yet when Curt stepped forward with his hands folded across his chest, they got up right quick and left the room.

As soon as Ditka and his buddy closed the door, I grabbed the pitcher and poured two glasses. We gulped them down in less time than it took Wallace to say, “Thirsty?”

Water dribbling down my chin, I said, “Yeah, thanks. Hope those assholes are better detectives than they are hosts.”

“I don’t think they’re any worse detectives than you’ll find in most departments,” Curt said. “I get the feeling they’re slacking off for a reason that doesn’t involve apathy.”

Wallace walked around to the other side of the table, pulled a chair out and sat down. He looked tired as he ran his hands through his thinning hair. Curt sat down, as well, much more at ease now that he didn’t have to play bodyguard.

“Damn, it’s fun to scare assholes,” he said. “How you holding up, Henry?”

“My chest hurts like hell and other than getting handcuffed to a pipe and seeing the dead body of the doctor I planned to investigate for his involvement in several kidnappings, I’m doing just peachy.”

“Amanda?” he said.

She said, “Hey, Curt. I’m okay.” Her words betrayed her. Her eyes gave away the terror we’d just escaped.

“Bullshit, but you’re one hell of a trouper, Amanda. You’re lucky it’s my day off, no way Carruthers would let me come up here to help your ass out on my normal shift. I expect major reciprocation. I mean
major
reciprocation.”

“No problem,” I said. “I can pull a few strings, get you in the gossip pages at the
Dispatch
for having a thirteen-inch prick or something.”

“Friends like these,” Curt said.

Amanda was still silent. I could tell she was upset, but there was a lot to choose from. If she was still scared or in shock from what happened last night, or from the fact our leads seemed to have shrunk, I couldn’t tell. At some point I’d need time to talk to her.

Wallace said. “Henry, tell me, what the hell were you thinking?”

I was taken aback, said stupidly, “Sir?”

“I can’t think of any reason for you to be up here. I spoke to the watch commander. He told me you claimed to be pursuing a Dr. Dmitri Petrovsky about his involvement or knowledge about the disappearances of Daniel Linwood and some girl named Michelle Oliveira. Last I recall, I didn’t give you permission to be working this story. In fact, I distinctly remember telling you to stay the hell away from it.”

“Sir, I know,” I said. “But there is more to this case than we think. Michelle Oliveira disappeared and reappeared in the exact same way as Daniel Linwood. And we were able to confirm that Petrovsky was the attending pediatrician for both children. He’s involved. We can be sure about that now. He set us up last night.”

“And now, what, you go on stakeouts? You put on a surveillance detail? Who are you, Kojak?”

“No, sir.”

“So did you not hear me the other day, Parker? Did you not understand me when I told you to work another story?”

I mumbled under my breath. Loud enough so that everyone at the table could hear me.

“I’m sorry, what was that, Henry?” Wallace said, folding his ear forward mockingly.

“I said nobody else gives a shit. That’s why I do.”

“I must have missed something,” Wallace said. “Where do you get off saying nobody cares?”

“Look at this!” I yelled. “You want me off the story because Gray Talbot sticks his manicured nails into things. He wants the community to heal. And I’m getting the runaround worse in Hobbs County than I did from my dad, and that’s saying something. These cops either don’t give a shit, or just want to sweep everything under the carpet. And meanwhile, the parents of these poor kids have to deal with the fact that there are five years missing from their children’s lives and everyone else is sitting around with their thumbs up their asses like it’s a source of protein.”

Wallace sat back, stunned for a moment. I caught my breath. Half expected him to fire me on the spot.

“You’re wrong, Parker,” he said. “We do care. But what’s done is done. Those kids are never getting those years back. These kind of wounds need time to heal, and the longer we leave them open, the more gangrene sets in, both for the families and their communities. Hobbs County won’t win any ‘best place to raise your family’ awards, but it’s a long way from what it used to be. People in Meriden regrouped after Michelle Oliveira came back. They banded together. Made the town safer. A better place to live. I hate to say this, but that girl disappearing was the best thing that ever happened to that town. I think you can understand why folks aren’t keen to reopen old wounds.”

“Maybe these wounds are deeper than anyone knows,” I said.

“And why do you think that?”

I dug into my pocket. Took out the receipt I found on the floor in the room Amanda was kept in. Put it on the table, where it sat like a rancid piece of meat.

“What is that?” Wallace asked.

“See for yourself.”

He reached across the table, picked it up, unfolded it, smoothed out the crinkles, read it. Then he dropped it back on the table.

“It’s a receipt from a toy store for dollhouse accessories. So what?”