Stevens did as Devereaux instructed. The tape replayed the same scene of the girls huddled in the middle of the field. There was a muffled sound in the background.
“Again. Louder.”
The same scene again. The same sound in the background.
“What was that? Pant deck? Again.”
The sound came through clearer this time, a male voice yelling, “Panty check.”
“The hell’s a panty check?” Devereaux said to the room.
“He was taunting her.”
All heads turned to the voice behind them: the mother stood in the doorway. She looked like hell. She hadn’t changed her clothes; her hair was wild and untouched; her blouse was hanging out; her skirt was twisted; she was barefooted. She said, “He was saying she’s really a boy, because she’s so good.” The mother turned her glare on the father. “You didn’t do anything, John? You didn’t go across the field and punch that son of a bitch in the mouth? That’s what I would’ve done.”
The father: “I… I didn’t hear him.”
“Because you were working the numbers with Lou,” the mother said.
On the video, Gracie stood motionless in the middle of the field; her head was down and the other girls were gathered around her.
“You let a man say that to Grace, you let another man take her from me, because you were making goddamn sure you get your billion dollars. Grace is gone because you were on the fucking phone.”
The father’s voice on the tape: “Lou, a billion dollars upgrades this geek to manly out there in the real world.”
The mother was looking at the father, but not like she was going to smack him again; instead, with a look of profound disdain.
“A billion dollars won’t make you a man, John Brice. And it won’t bring Grace back.”
And she was gone.
The room was filled with awkward silence until the father’s voice came over the tape: “Lou, only way a geek gets respect in this world is to be a rich geek. Doesn’t matter how smart you are, without money you’re still just a freaking geek.”
The father’s head was hanging so low Devereaux thought it might just disconnect from his neck and roll down his body to the floor. The mother’s words had hurt him more than her hand had yesterday. He sighed. It was not the first time Special Agent Eugene Devereaux had witnessed a marriage destroyed by an abduction; it would not be the last. But he never passed judgment on parents of abducted children, most of whom fit the legal definition of temporary insanity by this stage of an abduction. They often blamed each other. Working through the parents’ emotions was part of the job; the FBI abduction protocol called it “family management.” But few families managed.
The grandmother went to the father and stood next to him; she put an arm around him and patted his back.
Devereaux took a deep breath to regain focus. He could not concern himself with the parents’ marriage. His only concern was the girl on the videotape. He was again staring at the screen, at jerky images of the ground, the sky, the ground, the sky, the parking lot, the parents, the spectators- What the hell was the father doing with the goddamn camera? — when he spotted something.
“Stop! Run it back!”
Stevens reversed the tape.
“There-stop!”
The picture was frozen on the people in and around the bleachers. Devereaux stepped to the screen and pointed to the image of a white male with blond hair and wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt. The view was from the rear but Devereaux knew.
“That’s our man.”
The man was mostly blocked out by a bigger man standing next to him: white male, tall, stocky, flattop, with a large dark spot on his left arm partially visible under the sleeve of his black tee shirt. A tattoo.
To the father: “You know these people?”
The father shook his head. “No.”
To Stevens on the camcorder: “Blow this frame up.” Devereaux touched the screen at the big man’s arm. “And that tattoo.”
To Agent Floyd: “Get the coach in here.”
The tape ran again: a shot of the parking lot, more deal talk from the father, more game action, Gracie hitting the ground hard-“Hey, she tripped Gracie!” Agent Jorgenson blurted out-back on the tape, the victim jumping up and running all out again, loud cheers, the camera jumping around again, the father’s feet, other feet, now a shot of another camcorder-“Yeah, Tornadoes!”-more shots of the sky, the grass, the bleachers, a pair of white soccer shoes, one with the laces untied “I didn’t tie her shoe,” the father said as if he were confessing to a crime.
— and the victim appeared close up again. Her flushed face glistened with perspiration; her hand reached up to the camera.
“Is she bleeding?” Devereaux asked.
Stevens ran the tape back.
“She is bleeding, from her elbow.”
The father’s eyes dropped down to his arm; he grabbed his sleeve and pulled it around to reveal the underside. The light blue material was stained a dark brown in several spots. He looked up at Devereaux.
“This is Gracie’s blood,” he said.
Was Grace dead?
From that moment in the park Friday night when the coach said her brother had asked for Grace-when the thought Grace was kidnapped first took shape-Elizabeth had prayed that it was about ransom- You don’t ransom a dead girl, she had heard an FBI agent say-and she had waged war with her mind. Her mind wanted desperately to force her into a dark world, to reveal to her all the possibilities, the maybes, the what ifs, to torture her with vile, horrible, gruesome images of her daughter being subjected to the sick desires of a sexual predator; but she had fought it off, beaten it back, blocked it out, refused to watch… until now.
Grace wasn’t taken for money.
Sitting on the marble floor of the steam shower, she had unconditionally surrendered to her mind’s dark side and allowed it to torture her with those images, to display them as graphically as if she were an eyewitness. And Elizabeth Brice wondered, as she had wondered once before: If for all intents and purposes you are already dead, is suicide still a mortal sin?
“Why, God?”
Steam inundated the shower. Elizabeth’s legs were curled around the drain; her tears mixed with the hot water. She was alone in her despair and wondering if she could slit her wrists with the safety razor she was holding. Once before evil had entered her life and caused her to entertain suicide, to seriously debate the various ways by which to end her life as if she were reading a menu at a restaurant. Once before she had stood on the precipice of death and peered over into the abyss, only to be saved by a child. This child. Grace had saved her life. Now, ten years later, evil had come back for Grace.
“Why did you let evil take her, too?”
She had lived only because of Grace. Without Grace, why live? She imagined her blood flowing out of her veins and swirling down into the drain until all the life had emptied from her. She put the razor to her wrist and pressed the blade into her skin and was about to slide it across her veins and spill her blood when a sudden surge of rage swelled her muscles and brain cells like a narcotic, hate and anger once again energizing her mind and body and driving her up off the marble.
Elizabeth Brice wanted to kill someone, but not herself. She wanted to kill the abductor. And she had the money to do it.
Two hundred children a year die at the hands of sexual predators in the United States. Those few cases
