the gates parted in front of his sedan. Briarwyck Farms was the American Dream, an upscale community entered through black iron gates, surrounded by a ten-foot-tall brick wall, and guarded 24/7 by a private security force, a place where all the homes cost at least $1 million, all the parents were successful, and all the children were safe.
But these walls and gates hadn’t kept Gracie safe.
It was Monday morning-sixty hours post-abduction-and Devereaux was stumped. He had a command post equipped with phones, faxes, and computers running RapidStart, the FBI’s sophisticated information management system capable of filing, indexing, comparing, and tracking thousands of leads simultaneously-he just didn’t have any leads.
The girl had vanished.
Devereaux stopped at an intersection in front of the elementary school. A crossing guard holding up a stop sign escorted several children across the street; over her long-sleeve shirt the guard was wearing a white tee shirt with Gracie’s image on the back under HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Below her image was CALL 1-800-THE LOST.
The guard waved him on. He drove down the next block and turned right. The uniformed officers stationed at the end of Magnolia Lane recognized Devereaux’s car and were already removing the wooden barricades blocking the street as he turned. When he did, he saw that the media circus had gone national. The networks had arrived.
“Shit. She’s gonna do it.”
“Mrs. Brice, please don’t do this. It’ll bring out every kook in the country. It won’t help. It’s a waiting game.”
“I’m through waiting.”
Elizabeth left Agent Devereaux standing in the kitchen, obviously frustrated with a victim’s mother who refused to play her designated role. Well, too damn bad. The victim had been missing for sixty-one hours now and this mother was through waiting-for a ransom call to come, for the abductor to be arrested, for a dog to track down her daughter’s dead body, for God to save her. This mother wanted her daughter alive or the abductor dead. Or both. So this mother was taking matters into her own hands.
She was dressed for court; her hair was done and her makeup concealed the bags under her eyes. She would not be the pitiful grieving mother today, looking like hell, voice quivering, tears running down her face and makeup giving chase, begging a pervert on national TV to spare her child’s life. Today she would be a tough-broad lawyer negotiating a deal, just like any other day and any other deal: you have something I want; I have something you want. Let’s make a deal, asshole.
She proceeded down the gallery; the familiar adrenaline rush energized her to the coming performance, the same as when she stepped into the courtroom for the start of a trial. All heads turned her way when she entered the library, which now resembled a television studio. The three networks were represented with cameras and behind-the-scenes personnel; the national morning show hosts in New York would conduct the interviews; and the interviews would run live. Those were Elizabeth’s terms.
“Five minutes, Mrs. Brice!” a little twerp wearing a headset shouted while holding up five fingers just in case she was deaf.
She sat next to John in a straight chair positioned in front of the bookshelves, a backdrop that gave the impression more of a law office than a home. Elizabeth had planned this event down to the last detail, the same as if she were about to bargain with a prosecutor for her client’s freedom; instead, she was about to bargain with a pervert for her daughter’s life. And only she would do the bargaining. She had given her husband the same explicit instructions she gave her guilty clients before a plea-bargain negotiation: Keep your fucking mouth shut!
John was dressed in black penny loafers, white socks, jeans, a yellow shirt, and a goofy blue tie with cartoon characters, his most solemn tie; at least he had tried to do something with his hair. He was staring off into space. She leaned into him and said, “Lose the tie.” While he obediently removed the tie, she plucked the tiny wads of toilet paper stuck to his face where he had cut himself shaving-and she saw the evidence of her attack two days ago. Remorse again tried to sneak into her thoughts; it got a foot in the door this time.
Elizabeth sighed. She always hated herself afterward-after the rage had romped. After she had lashed out at John. He didn’t deserve it. But then, he never deserved it. She had cursed him too many times, but she had never hit him. This time the rage had crossed the line… and it scared her. She stared at her husband and wondered if he hated her half as much as she hated herself.
Playing on the color monitor in John’s mind was his image of the abductor-coarse, thick, hairy, dirty, mean, and ugly-a man who, coincidentally, looked just like the Army bullies who had terrorized him as a boy.
He thought of the bullies again, Luther Ray in particular, wondering where his redneck life had led to-no doubt a double-wide mobile home in rural Alabama. John had always pictured Luther Ray sitting in his recliner under a Confederate flag on the wall and looking forward to a big day during which he would drive his piece-of-shit pickup into town to collect unemployment (having been laid off from the local chicken processing plant) and on the way back home he would engage in some curb shopping (checking out rich people’s trash for stuff that might fit the double-wide’s decor). Luther Ray would be hung over from the previous night’s meeting of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter when he opened his morning paper and read that John Brice was a billionaire.
“Got-damn, is that our Little Johnny Brice?” Luther Ray would say to the wife over at the stove fixing grits for breakfast. “That wimp’s a fuckin’ billionaire?” Then he’d laugh and say, “Shit, we used to kick his scrawny little ass just for fun.”
And then his wife (fat and missing a front tooth) would fart and say something like, “Well, Luther Ray, maybe you should’ve been nicer to Little Johnny and he’d’ve give you a good job and me and the kids wouldn’t be livin’ in this goddamn trailer park.” And from then on, every time they fought about money or his drinking (which is to say, every day), his wife would spew forth that flamage like green vomit from the Exorcist girl, reminding Luther Ray for the rest of his cretinous life that Little Johnny Brice had a billion dollars and he had a double-wide.
John had played out varying versions of that scenario at least once a day for the last nineteen years, conjuring it up on his first drive to MIT, when he had set a goal of being a billionaire by age forty, and improving on it each time. He had added the wife a few years back.
And that was why he had been so brain-damaged about becoming a billionaire. With the stock market and real-estate boom, everyone and their mother was a millionaire. But becoming a billionaire in one day like the Google guys-that would still make every newspaper in the country, even in rural Alabama.
But now Luther Ray would be watching him on TV, hearing how his daughter had been kidnapped in a public park with him right there, and he’d say, “No pervert would’ve snatched our Ellie May with me around and live to tell about it, that’s for goddamn sure. Little Johnny Brice got money, but he ain’t much of a man. Never was.” And the wife would nod in agreement.
And they’d be right.
“Mrs. Brice!”
Elizabeth jerked her eyes off John and focused on the task at hand-and the twerp standing directly in front of her; he was bent over, his hands were on his knees, and his round face was not two feet from hers.
“There’ll be a setup piece, three minutes”-he held up three fingers, then pointed to a TV monitor off to the side-“you can watch it there. Then DeAnn will go live with you.” Four fingers. “Four minutes, then commercial break. When I signal break, shut up. Don’t go on or we’ll cut you off.”
When the twerp vacated his position in front of Elizabeth, she found herself looking directly at Agent Devereaux standing back behind the cameras; he was leaning into the doorjamb and staring at her. Hey, fuck the FBI! You haven’t found my daughter!
“Quiet!” the twerp yelled. He pointed to the TV monitor.
The morning show first up was coming back on the air. The host introduced the reporter on the story, live from Texas, standing on the front lawn, a Gracie button on his lapel, the house looming large behind him.
“DeAnn, Gracie Ann Brice is ten years old”-Grace’s soccer picture flashed on the screen-“and she is missing this Monday morning. She was abducted by a blond man wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt after her soccer game Friday night here in Post Oak, Texas, a wealthy enclave forty miles north of downtown Dallas. I am standing outside her family’s three-million-dollar mansion in this community of mansions.”
