as the two police departments involved, and into the evening the local talk radio stations had done their best to whip the public into a frenzy. It worked: apparently everyone on Long Island had seen someone who looked “suspicious” at an open house sometime over the last year or so.
The talk jockeys had even come up with a name for the guy: Open House Ozzie. Well, maybe if it got bad enough, they’d both wind up in one of Ann Rule’s books, and he would become a character on a TV miniseries.
More likely, he’d get fired for being the obtuse dunderhead he now felt like. Why couldn’t he have at least listened to Kara Marshall, instead of insisting her kid had just decided to take off?
The office walls seemed to be closing in on him.
He took his mug to the coffee machine, filled it with the dregs of the lunchtime coffee, then took the curse off its bitterness with a double shot of sugar and powdered cream and slowly made his way back to his desk. Stirring the sludge in his cup, he relegated his mistakes to the back of his mind so he could concentrate on getting it right from here on out.
The first priority, of course, would be to keep anyone else from vanishing from their own homes after an open house. He needed to get the word out that three abductions had taken place after open houses on Long Island — within fifteen miles of each other, in fact — in the past month.
And this was Sunday night; for all he knew, another abduction had taken place today, making it four. He needed a detail to work on that. O'Reilly and Murphy could handle it, along with the guys who first responded to Shannon Butler’s disappearance in Mill Creek.
He scrawled a note on his yellow pad.
The next thing was to find Shannon, Lindsay, and Ellen. He’d handle that one personally. Rick Mancuso remained at the top of his list of probable perps, but primarily because he didn’t have any other names on the list so far. Mancuso had been cooperative enough, but the guy didn’t have an alibi for any of the nights after the disappearances had happened.
Which didn’t mean nearly as much as the general public thought it did.
Still, there was no reason to hold him.
And so far, at least, there weren’t any bodies, so it was just possible — and now he knew he was grasping at straws — that all three victims actually had just taken off.
Taking yet another deep breath, Grant signaled to one of the guys who’d been called in from their Sunday dinners. “I want every logbook from every open house from every agent in a thirty-mile radius. For the last month or so.” The patrolman, who’d only been with the department for three months, gaped at him.
“But that’ll take all night.”
Grant rolled his eyes. “So people won’t go to bed. Too bad. Just do it.”
As the patrolman went off to find a phone, Grant set two more patrolmen to work on the local agents: faxing, calling, and following up on everybody who had signed in at the Fine, Marshall, and Butler open houses. Not, of course, that this guy would have signed in, but you had to go through the motions, and who knew? Maybe the guy wasn’t nearly as smart as Grant thought he was.
He sipped his coffee and winced at the nastiness of it while he prayed to the gods of caffeine that it would keep him sharp through the night.
Then he turned his attention to his third priority: dealing with the press while at the same time keeping the spotlight off himself.
This was going to be a media circus. Once the FBI arrived, it became their baby, and they didn’t have far to come. They’d be here by morning, telling him and everybody else what to do. Between now and then, he would be in the spotlight, and he’d better look good.
Or, in the best of all possible worlds, find those girls.
Grant checked his watch. Five minutes left. He could feel the energy rise in the building as the briefing room filled up, and in a couple more minutes he’d be at the podium, his lieutenant sitting in the audience, observing him.
If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, the chief himself would have come down to watch.
Shit.
He took a last gulp of the mud in his coffee cup, grabbed his legal pad, and stood up to go deal with the press, which until today had never been more than old Marguerite Gould, who delighted in making public every minor disturbance Smithton and Camden Green and every other town on the north shore ever experienced, even if it was only a dog running loose in the park. Tonight, Marguerite probably wouldn’t even be able to get a question in edgewise.
Billy Ferguson poked his head around the corner.
“Sarge?”
“I’ve got a briefing.”
“I know,” the patrolman said, “but look at this here.” He held out the guest book from the Butler open house. “Mark Acton — you know, the agent who held the Marshall open house?”
Grant’s attention was instantly riveted on the kid. “Yeah?”
“He was at the Butler open house.”
Goose bumps rose on Grant’s arms.
The patrolman shrugged. “I don’t know. If he was, he didn’t sign the book.”
Grant’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened into a hard smile. “Go get him.”
“Yes, sir.” The young man’s face disappeared.
Feeling better now, Grant shrugged into his jacket, smoothed his hair, and picked up his yellow pad. Now, at least, he had a real suspect.
Mark Acton — a guy who had given him a bad feeling the moment he met him. And if there was one thing he’d learned over all the years he’d been a cop, it was this:
The light woke Ellen. That and a moan from Shannon, the first sounds she’d heard from the girl.
Ellen’s heart began to hammer in her chest again. How long had it been? Minutes? Hours? Not days, but how could she know, really? Not that it mattered. The only thing that mattered now was to keep her mind clear and stick to the plan.
Whatever happened, she had to stick to the plan and pray that Lindsay had not only understood, but had the strength and the will to go along with it, too.
Banishing the last tendrils of sleep that clung to her mind, and ignoring the knot of fear forming in her belly, she sat up on her mattress, tucked her legs beneath her and leaned on one arm, trying to make herself look as relaxed as if she were lounging on a picnic blanket. The wound in her leg shot a stab of pain through her as she dragged it across the coarse mattress, but she stifled the scream that rose in her throat as the light from the trapdoor opening illuminated the man in silhouette. Then it went dark again for a moment, until he turned on a beam of light. She squinted into it as he came down the stairs and moved toward the dark chamber. As he approached, she spoke.
“Is that you, honey?” she asked, hoping her voice didn’t sound as artificially bright to him as it did to her. “How was your day?”
The man stopped in mid-stride and turned to her, his grotesque mask smiling at her even in the indirect illumination of his flashlight.
“Did you bring something I can make for dinner? I haven’t had a chance to get to the store, and the girls are hungry.”
The man reached into the darkness, and a moment later the dungeon was flooded with light from a naked bulb overhead. Now Ellen could see the madness in his eyes. “Be quiet,” he said, but she thought she heard a hint of uncertainty in his voice.
“Don’t be like that, sweetheart. The children need to be fed. That’s why they haven’t been happy the last few days.”
Suddenly the man’s eyes were blazing. “Stop that. Stop that!
