The Girl Who Was Taken Read online

  She stood from the bed. It squeaked as she rose, the springs expanding without the compression of her weight. She shuffled to the plywood-covered windows, her feet scraping against the concrete floor and her shackles clinking as the chain became redundant upon itself. Every noise, Megan noticed, was amplified now that she was free from Dr. Mattingly’s voice—from the bedsprings, to her shuffling steps, to the shackle. She ran a hand over the plywood and listened to her skin skate against the grain of the wood. An airplane soared overhead and she listened to that familiar sound of jet engines high in the sky, having just made the long journey across the Atlantic and now on the descent into Raleigh-Durham.

  When the plane was gone, she stayed still and continued to listen, unmoving and expectant. It came after a moment, that long, low whistle. Megan knew now, after hours of research, that it belonged to the freight train that ran through Halifax County. When the whistle was gone, eaten by the midnight darkness of the cellar, she turned from the plywood windows and walked blindly to the only piece of furniture she could reach—the small table near the stairs where he left her meals. She ran a hand over the surface, hearing her unclipped fingernails scratching the wood. She came to associate the food and drink left for her with a deep, groggy sleep that came afterward. The nourishment was where he’d placed the ketamine, Megan had decided. The drug that made her dance above her sleeping body. The preparation that brought hallucination and out-of-body experiences in that dark, lonely cellar. The medicine, which after two weeks of ingesting, she had worried she was coming to depend on.

  Empty now, she shuffled from the table and made it back to the bed, lying on its thin mattress and hearing again the coiling of the springs under her weight. She lifted her legs onto the bed and heard the chain of her shackle clanking against the bedframe. She closed her eyes, which had little effect in the darkness. All the noises disappeared as she lay still. No planes. No whistles. No walking. She heard her breath leaving her lungs, but nothing more. No shackles, no chains. Dr. Mattingly’s voice was nowhere in this place Megan had found. The place of her captivity. It was a new place without Dr. Mattingly. She knew, as she waited on her bed, that it had to be this way. Despite the desire to reach for the familiar voice that could so easily pull her to safety, that could rescue her in an instant, Megan needed this isolation from her therapist. She needed seclusion and loneliness, the way it had been for the two weeks of her captivity. She needed to be vulnerable. She needed to be back in the place where she had been, with no one to help her but herself. She needed to find her dying spirit and revive it. It was, she had determined, the only way to find what she was looking for.

  Then, through the subtle sounds of her slow and calm breathing, she heard it. A car engine. Far off at first and then closer. Wheels crunching over gravel. Brakes crying in a small whine as the car came to a stop. The thump of the driver’s-side door closing. The footsteps climbing outside stairs. The door opening and closing behind him.

  She’d made it this far before only to be pulled back by Dr. Mattingly’s voice, betrayed by her rapid heart rate and hyperventilating lungs. Megan had prepared herself for this moment, studying as she sat in the empty filing room of the courthouse the nuances of meditation and the methods used to calm her pulse and slow her heart rate and settle her lungs. She knew, even without hearing Dr. Mattingly’s voice, that if her vitals went wild, the good doctor had ways of reaching a patient lost in hypnosis. So, in order to avoid being saved by Dr. Mattingly, Megan put to use all the tools of meditation she had learned during the long, boring hours spent at the courthouse.

  Now, despite the fear that overwhelmed her as his footsteps thumped overhead and the cellar door opened and the stairs creaked, Megan worked to keep her heartbeat at a slow and controlled grandfather-clock rhythm, her breathing at a measured in-and-out, and her eyelids at a reasonable state of flutter as she listened to him descend the stairs.

  His comings and goings had told her there were thirteen stairs into the cellar, and she listened to every noise, each sound that came and went as he made his way down them, closer and closer and closer.

  Ten, eleven, twelve . . . thirteen.

  Then he was there. But Megan had arrived as well. Finding after so long what she had been searching for. Uncovering that thing she needed. She let go of all her breathing techniques. Abandoned all the methods she had utilized to keep her heart from racing, and let her eyes run wild under her lids. It had the effect she wanted. She heard Dr. Mattingly’s voice, not the calm, collected voice of her psychiatrist, but the hurried and troubled voice of a hypnotist who had lost control of his subject.

  “Right now, Megan! I want you to come to my voice!”

  But returning was not as simple as in the past. She was stuck in the cellar. Unmoved by the pull of Dr. Mattingly’s voice. And her captor was there, in the darkness. Placing her meal on the table. Ready to make his advance upon her after she was properly sedated.

  “Come to my voice, Megan!”

  Megan shook her head, tried to move her arms as she sat up in the bed of the cellar.

  She heard snapping and clapping. “Megan! Come. To. My. Voice!”

  Her captor stood in the darkness. A black ghost against a black background.

  Her eyes suddenly opened. Dr. Mattingly was kneeling in front of her in his tailored suit. Snapping his fingers and clapping his hands. His forehead was beaded with the same dots of perspiration that covered Megan’s flushed face.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “You’re supposed to respond to me when I engage you.”

  But Megan was paying no attention to her doctor. She had a beat on the thing she had so long searched for. That elusive item she knew was there in her memory but until now had been unable to reach. She stood from the plush chair and brushed past Dr. Mattingly.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Megan ran a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and wandering the room. She swallowed hard, her saliva rough against her dry throat.

  “I’ve gotta go,” she said, heading for the door.

  “Megan. We need to discuss this. It’s unhealthy to leave a session without vetting what was learned.”

  But without turning back, she was gone.

  * * *

  She tore out of the hospital’s parking lot to a chorus of horns. The startle filled her with a burst of adrenaline, and the screeching tires brought Megan closer to consciousness. She had no memory of fleeing Dr. Mattingly’s office. She could not recall if she’d taken the stairs to the lobby or ridden the elevator, and she had no mental picture of climbing into her car until the horns and weaving cars brought her focus back to the present. Her mind fought to retain what she had discovered in her rogue therapy session, but despite her efforts those images were slipping from her memory the more the world swerved around her.

  The stimulus of the traffic and the highway suddenly became too much for her hypersensitive mind to tolerate. Without consideration she crossed two lanes of traffic, generating more screeching tires and blasting horns, to swerve onto the ramp that would take her to Points Bridge, across the Roanoke River and into West Bay. Her eyes were frantic and unblinking as she remembered the dark cellar from moments ago and the noises that were there. She fought against it, refused to go back there, while at the same time unwilling to let go of the images and sounds and smells she had discovered.

  The battle lasted thirty minutes until Megan found herself in West Bay. As the images and sounds spinning in her head tugged her back to her therapy session, back to the cellar, her car slowly veered to the left and crossed the middle line. An oncoming vehicle squealed its brakes and slid onto the shoulder to avoid the collision. Megan jerked the wheel to her right and momentarily lost control of her car in a wild fishtail. The near miss finally brought her back, the trance passing entirely so that she became wholly aware of her surroundings. She pulled onto the gravel shoulder, setting loose a dust storm as she stepped too firmly on the brake pedal and skidded to a stop.
/>   Taking deep, heavy breaths, Megan looked around and wondered how she’d gotten to West Bay. A sign told her she was outside a subdivision named Stellar Heights. It was nearly four p.m.; her session with Dr. Mattingly had started at two o’clock. Almost two lost hours. Megan pieced together what she remembered after she had untethered herself from Dr. Mattingly’s voice and walked unfettered through the cellar of her nightmares. Assembling those memories was more difficult than she imagined, and after ten minutes she began to cry. She thought she’d found a way to locate the thing she was looking for, and she could briefly remember making a breakthrough while on her own in the cellar of her captivity. But now, parked on the shoulder outside a subdivision in West Bay, Megan felt no closer to the truth than she had the day before.

  CHAPTER 40

  Livia pulled to the curb of the dilapidated house again and knocked on the screen door. Daisy went berserk, barking and clawing at the front door. She heard scrambling and hollering until the pit bull was corralled, then Nate Theros opened the door.

  Livia held up the book for him to see, as if presenting ransom money.

  “Signed?” Nate asked.

  Livia opened the cover of Missing to display Megan’s signature.

  “She even wrote you a note.”

  Nate pushed through the screen door and took the book. He read the cursive on the first page.

  “Cool,” Nate said, reading and rereading the words.

  “So, will you help me?”

  Nate closed the book, ran his hand over the cover that depicted the dark woods and the bunker from where Megan had escaped. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

  Inside Nate’s home, Daisy panted and whined as she did circles in her crate, her nails scraping against the plastic lining. The kitchen table stood in the middle of an epic explosion of waste and garbage. The countertops were invisible beneath dirty dishes, old pizza boxes, empty milk cartons, cereal boxes, and dog food. The table where Livia set her folder was sticky, and she got the sense Nate had just recently cleared the space.

  There was no apology or embarrassment. Nate, she could tell, felt this was the way most people lived. And if it wasn’t, he didn’t care—it was the way he lived. Take it or leave it. The whole scene confirmed for Livia that Nathaniel Theros was a different breed. She hoped it would pay dividends.

  He pulled a chair out from the table, spun it around, and sat on it backward, resting his arms over the spine. A smile came to his face.

  “Let’s see,” he said.

  Livia opened her folder, which contained everything she had gathered over the last few weeks about Nancy Dee and Paula D’Amato, and laid the contents in front of him. The detectives who work cases such as these utilize profilers—criminologists who review the details and come up with conclusions about the perpetrator. Livia had no privileges with the detectives on these cases, and no clout with any criminologists. She wasn’t even sure she had Terry McDonald’s full cooperation. She did, however, have Nate Theros. Tattooed and creepy, he wasn’t the perfect match for the job. But he had an odd fetish with following missing persons cases and studying the demented men who took women. He had a binder full of cases he’d followed through the years, and Livia was sure he possessed a vast knowledge—much greater than her own—about these women and the man she believed took them.

  They spent two hours reviewing Nancy Dee’s and Paula D’Amato’s disappearances, cross-referencing everything Livia had collected about the two girls with everything Nate had stashed in his creepy black binder. Then Livia, to Nate’s great pleasure, revealed all she had learned about the girls’ crime scenes—the shallow grave in which Nancy was buried, and the would-be grave that had waited to swallow Paula’s body but which remained empty, her remains waiting at the ledge of the hole. Livia noticed Nate salivating, literally licking his lips and swallowing the excitement that manifested in a hypersecretion of his salivary glands, as she laid out the crime-scene photos and autopsy shots. She allowed him time to dote over them and study them.

  After a while, he ran both hands through his gnarly hair while he thought. Then he leaned forward, pressing his chest against the backward chair and resting his elbows on the table while he pinched the huge loops in his earlobes. Livia, seeing he was in some deep mode of concentration, decided to leave him with his thoughts. She stood and took a chance on the coffee that was brewed and waiting in the coffeemaker. She found what looked like a clean mug in one of the cabinets and poured a cup without Nate noticing she had moved. Nate Theros was gone. The photos, Livia hoped, had transported him into the mind of the man who took these girls. The man who might have taken her sister. The monster who was still out there, plotting, perhaps, to take other girls. Who had possibly buried more, their bodies waiting to be discovered by other joggers and their dogs.

  “Here’s what I got,” Nate finally said.

  Livia swallowed a rancid sip of coffee before abandoning the mug in Nate’s overflowing sink. She sat at the table opposite him. “Let’s hear it.”

  Nate was still rubbing his hands through his hair as he spoke, as if he had a frail hold on his thoughts. “Okay. With Nancy, you see.” He moved a hand from his head to the crime-scene photo depicting Nancy Dee’s body. He tapped the photo. “He OD’d her, right? On Special K. But I don’t think he meant to. I think it was an accident.”

  Livia looked at the photo along with Nate. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because he never hurt her. See? Nancy was never physically harmed. He took care of her. Loved her. Or wanted to love her. Maybe wanted her to love him back—that’s a very common emotion with these guys. They’re hungry for affection and can’t get it from the real world, so they create their own world in order to find it. Problem is, no one exists in that world so they have to find people, like Nancy and Paula, and make them part of their world. Most of the time, that shit doesn’t work. But from his perspective, it should all be fine. They should love being in this new world of his. They should be willing and eager to give themselves to him because he believes he’s providing something for them that doesn’t exist in the outside world that was so cruel to him. He thinks he’s filling the same gap for these girls that he’s trying to fill for himself. Problem is, the real world ain’t like that for most of us. Our real world and his real world are different experiences. We have love and affection and relationships in our worlds. He does not. So when he takes these girls and transplants them into his make-believe world, they retaliate and fight. And he’s shocked by their resistance. He can’t understand why they don’t love being with him. He can’t understand why they don’t love him the way he loves them.”

  “You said ‘most of the time’ it doesn’t work,” Livia said.

  “Right. Because sometimes . . . it does. Sometimes, usually with people who are held for long periods, they do give in to their captors. They do develop a bond with them. And sometimes, they do end up loving them on some weird, very screwed-up level. My guess here is that’s what happened with Nancy Dee. She was only gone for six months, but because he never physically harmed her, I’m guessing she was submitting to him. And to keep her doing the same, he was jacking her up on ketamine. He just messed up one day and gave her too much. OD’d her.”

  Livia stayed quiet while she restudied the photos of Nancy Dee. Finally, she asked, “What about Paula?”

  “Totally different,” Nate said, again with his hands running through his hair. “She was gone longer, right? Two years? But she never gave in to him. She was feisty. She wanted out. She never bought into this guy’s world. He tried to convert her. Tried to convince her that he loved her and that she should love him, but without the dope and the sedation, she never gave in to him. She fought him, right? That’s what the autopsy shows. Clawed at his face. Bruised her hands punching him? Broken toes from kicking him? Older injuries, too, found during the exam. Injuries suffered long ago, and healed by the time she died. A broken bone in her leg and a rib fracture? So he tried hard to break her. To convert her into one
of the girls that gave in to him. But she wouldn’t budge. She was a fighter. And what did he finally do? Strangled her and beat her to death. Nancy, he OD’d. Paula, he got violent. Two totally different victims. But here’s the thing,” Nate said, arranging the photos of each of the girls so they sat side by side. “Both had bags over their heads. So he killed them, each in different ways, but for both of them he put a burlap sack over their heads. Why?” Nate looked at Livia. “Why?”

  Livia, lost in the narrative Nate was offering, finally looked up and noticed he was staring at her. “I don’t know.”

  “Because he loved them. Because he couldn’t stand to look at them after what he did. Had to put bags over their heads so he couldn’t see their faces.”

  Nate went back to the photos and found the one of Paula D’Amato’s body stashed in a black vinyl bag and resting at the edge of an empty grave.

  “And here? Why didn’t he dump her into that hole? Because he got interrupted? Bullshit! This guy is too smart to dump her at a time when someone might stumble onto him. It was because he couldn’t do it. He loved this girl. He loved Paula D’Amato so much he kept her for two years before he gave up on her. And when he had to dispose of her remains, he got overwhelmed. He’d done it too many times before, and couldn’t bring himself to do it again. This guy is filled with guilt, I’m telling you! He’s barely hanging on.”

  Livia listened to Nate, who was on such a roll that she forgot about the tattoos and the piercings and the too-big earrings. He was a man with a fetish for victims of kidnapping and an obsession with their captors, a man who unknowingly possessed a criminologist’s mind that was able to paint a picture of the type of person capable of stealing and stashing and raping and killing and disposing of women.