The Stolen Ones (32 page)

Luther stood just outside the bathroom window. The window shade was up a few inches, and he could see into the brightly lit room. Before long someone entered. It was a girl of eight or nine years old. She wore flannel pajamas in a floral print. She stood at the sink for a few moments, making funny faces in the mirror, then reached over, picked up a toothbrush, put a small amount of toothpaste on the brush, and began cleaning her teeth.

Luther thought of Marielle, of the nights he had taken her by the hand and watched as she did just this very thing.

At 10:10 Byrne’s phone buzzed. It was a text message from Colleen. The message contained three names. The first two included middle names, followed by MD. The third entry was just a first and last name.

There were no addresses.

Byrne wiped the face of the phone. His hands were trembling in the cold. He forwarded the text messages to Jessica.

The text came across the screen at the computer lab at 10:12 p.m. Jessica saw the names.

‘I’ll take the first two,’ Jessica said to Chris Gavin.

They began to search the police database.

The first name on the list, Elijah D. Ditmar, MD, was listed to a residence on South 47th Street, near Chester Avenue, in the Squirrel Hill section of West Philadelphia.

No
, Jessica thought.
Too far.
If Luther needed to get back to the drop-off point by eleven o’clock, or whenever he was going to set as the next deadline, he would never make it, not even if the weather was good.

And the weather was anything but. Twice in the past few minutes the lights in the lab had flickered.

‘The third name on the list is a bust,’ Gavin said. ‘The block where the house used to be was torn down three years ago. There’s a Rite Aid and a Subway there now.’

‘I have a hit on the second name. Ronald B. Lewison, MD. He lives at 3223 Ralston Street. That’s less than four blocks from the drop-off point.’

‘It has to be where he is headed,’ Gavin said. ‘If he isn’t already there.’

Jessica got on the phone to dispatch. They would send everybody and their mother to the location. She then scrolled down to the phone number listed on the screen.

She dialed the number. It went directly to voicemail.

Someone was on the line.

Luther leaned very close to the window, the image of the young girl becoming Marielle, becoming his beloved sister Kaisa, taken from him all those years ago.

He took out the old woman’s phone.

‘Jess.’

Jessica turned to Chris Gavin. He was pointing at the large LCD monitor. The map had shifted. The red icon was back on screen. But it was no longer close to the green icon, Byrne’s position. It was four blocks away.

‘It’s the Lewison house,’ Jessica said. ‘He’s there.’

Luther called the detective. In a few seconds the man answered.

‘I saw you,’ Luther said. ‘You were alone.’

‘Let’s talk about this,’ the detective said. ‘Let’s work this out.’

‘You let me down.’

‘We don’t have the girl.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Luther said. ‘I told you, in very specific detail, where to bring the girl, and when. I also told you what would be the consequences should you fail to follow my instructions. Now you will see in
scarlet
detail what I meant.’

‘You don’t understand —’

‘No, sir, I’m afraid it is
you
who does not understand. All bodies that fall tonight will be on your conscience. For —’

‘— example,’ the man said. Byrne could hardly see the man’s face in the darkness. From time to time the right side of his face was illuminated with a bright yellow light, but it was not enough to give Byrne any kind of context of place. He could have been anywhere.

Onscreen, the image began to shake. In an instant a new image appeared. At first it was so bright that it overexposed the screen. But in a few seconds, Byrne could see that he was looking in the window at a room of some sort. From time to time raindrops washed across the lens, transforming the image into a shimmering watercolor.

When the lens cleared Byrne’s heart fluttered. He was looking at a little girl brushing her teeth.

The image again shook as Luther’s face came back into focus.

‘The little girl – the little girl who is mine – I want her to be this girl’s age one day.’

Byrne’s TracFone buzzed. He scrambled to get it out of his pocket and silenced before Luther could hear.

‘I want you to make a promise, Detective,’ Luther said.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Byrne replied, not having any idea what was coming. He had to keep the man talking. He wiped the TracFone on his coat. He glanced down. He’d made it worse.

‘I want you to make a promise,’ Luther repeated. ‘Not to me, or even to yourself, but rather to the people in this house. I want you to promise them that no harm will come to them, that you will do everything in your power to give me what I want, what is rightfully mine.’

‘Yes,’ Byrne said. ‘I can make that promise.’

‘I want you to say it aloud.’

Byrne got the TracFone clean, saw the message:
We have sub fixed. Cars en rte. Keep hm talking.

Luther waited for the detective to respond.

‘I just heard from the commander of my unit,’ the detective said. ‘We know where the girl is. We have her.’

‘Where is she?’

‘There was a mix-up,’ the detective said. ‘The officer who was supposed to pick up the little girl and bring her down here went to the wrong place. He’s on his way here right now.’

Liar
, Luther thought.

‘The streetcar conductor showed me the same incivility,’ Luther said. ‘He thought there would be no consequence. For him it was merely a moment that came and went. But I remember. I remember it all.’

‘Wait,’ the detective said. ‘What you’re talking about – the conductor and his family – that didn’t happen to you. It happened to someone else. These are not your memories.’

The detective’s words were obscured by the staccato rhythms of the rain on the roof of the row house gutters overhead.

Luther once again turned the cell phone camera to the window. The girl was now standing in front of the window, drying her hands on a towel. This time she was making funny faces in the night-blackened window.

‘Can you see, Detective?’

‘Don’t,’ came the faraway voice from the phone’s speaker.

Luther was now face to face with the little girl, inches away. Through the window he heard a phone ring. It was an older phone, a land line.

‘I’ll get it!’ the little girl yelled. She put the towel back on the rack beneath the window, and turned toward the bathroom door.

Before she could take a step, Eduard Kross punched his fist through the glass, grabbed the girl by her hair, and pulled her into the storm.

Rachel sat with the tape recorder in her lap. She had found it under the bed. Bean’s bed.

She had listened to her mother’s voice reading a fairy tale three times through. She knew that her mother had recorded it for her and Bean one afternoon when she was sober, knowing that by nine or ten o’clock, on any given night, she would be too drunk to do it.

Rachel hated her mother for drinking, for dying in a car crash, but she loved her for doing this.

She stood up, put the recorder on the bed, looked again at the room. She now knew what had happened. It all came flooding back, all the nights the raggedy man had come to their house, their room. He had been watching years later when her mother threw out everything in Bean’s room. Her mother had put everything on the tree lawn and the raggedy man had come in the night and taken it, making a room for Bean in these catacombs.

Rachel walked to the door, grabbed the knob. As expected, it was locked. She glanced above the door, at the web cam in the steel mesh cage. She looked around the room, searching for options.

She walked over to the hope chest, opened it. It was too much to have asked for the contents to still be inside. It was empty. The same was true with the small drawer in the desk.

There were no windows in this room, just the one door, and the cold-air return in the wall to the left of the door, near the floor.

Rachel glanced again at the web cam. There was no red or green light on the camera, so she had no idea if she was being watched. But she soon realized that there was something she could do about it.

The light switch next to the door had no on-off switch; it was just a blank face plate. Rachel walked back to the desk, opened the top. There was a half-mortise lock built into desk, but the key was long gone, probably before Rachel’s mother and father even bought it. But Rachel recalled how every time she let the hinged top of the desk fall – scaring Bean half out of her wits – the escutcheon would fall off.

Rachel closed her eyes, hoped against hope.

She let the top fall, and sure enough the thin metal escutcheon fell to the floor. She stole another glance at the web cam, then kicked the metal strip toward the door.

Two minutes later she had the two screws in the blank switch plate out, and the wires separated.

The room went dark.

While the switch plate had come off with relative ease, the screws holding the cold-air return were a different story. They had been painted over so many times that finding the slot in the screws, in the dark, had proven to be all but impossible. For a few terrifying seconds Rachel thought the worst, that the screws were Phillips head, which would have put an end to her plan.

But, slowly, she had managed to find the slots in the screws, and gently turn them to the left. Before long she had them all out. She ran the escutcheon along the top and the sides of the grill, digging out years of dry paint. Every so often she tried to pull the grate from the wall, without success.

Finally, using the thin metal strip as a lever, she began to pull the grill from the wall. When she thought it was out far enough, she worked her fingernails behind it on both sides, and pulled with all her strength.

The grate came free.

She put her ear to the wall, listened. She heard nothing.

Rachel looked through the opening into the next room, hoping that the heat ducts had long ago been removed, and there would be passage. There was. The room on the other side was dark, but she had to take the chance.

She took off her jacket and shoes, removed her belt. She shoved them all through the opening. She then put her arms through the hole in the wall, and began to squeeze herself through.

Five minutes later Rachel found herself on the other side of the wall. It was one of the first times in her life she was glad she was barely five feet tall.

The room was pitch black. Rachel felt her way up the wall, over to the same wall where the door was in the room she had just left. Within seconds she found a light switch. She flipped it on.

This room was large, much larger than the room she had just been in. There was a queen-size bed, a refrigerator, a kitchenette. There was a television on a stand, a bookshelf with books and DVDs.

He lives here
, Rachel thought.
This is where the raggedy man lives.

She turned to the door that led to the hallway. There was no key in the lock, just a hasp with an open padlock hanging from it. She quickly put on her shoes, her jacket, her belt, took a deep breath, trying to prepare herself for whatever was on the other side of this door.

They didn’t call her Tuff for nothing, right?

Rachel Anne Gray opened the door, and found she wasn’t prepared, not by a long shot. There was someone standing in the hallway, just a few feet away.

‘Hi,’ the person said.

It was her little sister.

It was Bean.

The image had gone black for a few seconds. Byrne heard what sounded like breaking glass, then the image on the screen seemed to spin out of control.

Then he heard the scream.

Byrne ran down the steps of the train platform. When he reached street level the water was over his shoes. He tried to orient himself. He raised Jessica on his TracFone.

‘He’s got her,’ Byrne yelled into the phone.

‘Who?’ Jessica said. ‘He’s got
who
?’

‘The girl. At the Lewison house. Where the
fuck
are the sector cars?’

‘They’ll be on scene within a minute.’

Byrne looked at his watch. The location was almost four blocks away. He could never make it there in time.

‘Stay on channel,’ Byrne said.

He ran across the platform, upended a trash can, dumped the garbage onto the ground. He dug through the discarded fast food trash, cans, newspapers. He found a handful of paper napkins, discarded the wet ones. He pulled the iPhone out of his pocket, cleared the screen.

It was dark, but Luther was still on the line. There was an image of a streetlamp. Rain drove across the illuminated area. The street was flooded, deserted.

Luther turned the camera to his own face. His eyes were manic, possessed.

‘Do you dream, Detective?’

Byrne knew he had to keep the man on the line. ‘Yes, Mr Kross. All the time.’

‘When you dream, are you always the hero? The white knight?’

‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘I am not.’

The camera moved. In the stuttering image Byrne saw the girl who had been brushing her teeth. She was propped against the base of a streetlamp. She was not moving. The image returned to Luther’s face. He now wore a floppy black hat, soaked with rain.

‘I fear in this dream you will be vanquished,’ he said.

Luther turned the camera around, again showing the girl. Byrne could not tell if she was dead or alive. From the left side of the frame he saw the blade of a knife, a long, bone-handled knife.

No
, Byrne thought.
Don’t.

Luther pulled the hair from the right side of the girl’s neck. He lay the long blade up against the skin at the base of her throat.

‘This is your nightmare, Detective. For the rest of your life.’

‘Drop the weapon! Get down on the ground!’
 

For a moment Byrne did not know where the shout came from. He soon realized it came from Luther’s phone.

Officers from the 8th District were on scene.

The image onscreen tumbled, went black.

The last thing Byrne heard coming through the small speaker on his phone was the sound of gunfire.