“You can call me Eugene now.”
“Eugene… You taught me a lot. Thanks.”
He nodded. “You did good, Jan.”
“You know, most of the agents I work with in the Dallas office, they’re pretty cocky, like carrying the federal badge makes them special. You’re not like them. You’re different.”
“Difference is, Jan, I’ve seen dead children, up close. That’ll take the cocky right out of you.”
Devereaux exited the vehicle, shut the front door, retrieved his bag and briefcase from the back seat, then leaned in the front window and said to Jan, “Collect the outstanding evidence, write up a final report. I’ll review it when I’m through in Des Moines. You’ve got my cell phone number, call me if you need me.”
He was about to turn away when Jan said, “You really think Jennings took Gracie?”
“I don’t know… but I know she’s dead.”
“If we had jurisdiction, would you have closed the case?”
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux stood straight, stared into the blue sky a minute, and then leaned back down to the window.
“No.”
Life is not a fairy tale.
But Katherine McCullough had not known that in 1968. She had married the man of her dreams only to lose him to the nightmare of war. Ben Brice had given his heart and soul to the Army and that damned war, only to have his heart broken, his soul blackened, and the war lost. When he had returned from Vietnam, he tried to find peace in a bottle. And he had never stopped looking.
The Army tried to put the war and its warriors in the past and move on to a peacetime military. The Army brass couldn’t very well demote the most decorated soldier of the war, but it didn’t have to give him a command. Ben said you don’t get a parade when you lose a football game or a war.
After his retirement, Kate had gone with Ben to the cabin he had built. She had hoped retirement would set Ben free; but he took the war with him to Taos. After a few years, she had woken one morning and accepted the truth: the war would never be over for Ben Brice. He would never find his peace, not until the day he died. And the way he was drinking, that day was not far off.
Kate Brice had refused to stay around for that day. She couldn’t save her husband from himself. So she had left him. Now, pacing her room, she felt like a teenage girl getting ready for her first date; she was working up the courage to go to him. She needed to lie next to him and to feel his arms around her, once more before he left her. He had left her many times, but she knew this time was different.
She knew that Ben Brice would not come back this time.
“When are you coming back?”
Sam was looking up at him, his face full of innocence. Ben Brice wasn’t about to say something that would change that.
“Soon.”
Sam shook his head. “Typical grownup answer-vague.”
Ben smiled. It was like talking to John at the same age. He sat on Sam’s bed.
“I’m not being vague. I just can’t say for sure.”
“But you will come back?”
Ben pondered for a moment. Vague was hard to come by now. He said what the boy needed to hear.
“Yes.”
Little Johnny Brice was small, weak, timid, and brilliant. He was teased and taunted, bullied and beaten. He was introverted and lonely, with no friends except his mother and an Apple computer. He was a mama’s boy because his father was off at war. He hated his life right up until the day he had arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where everyone was a Little Johnny Brice. He possessed a 190 intelligence quotient, he earned a Ph. D. in algorithms at the Laboratory for Computer Sciences, and upon graduation, he founded his own company and set about to write a killer app. Ten years later, today, he became a billionaire: at 9:30 A.M. Eastern time, BriceWare. com went public at $30 per share; by close of trading at 4:00 P.M., the price had bounced to $60.
John R. Brice was worth $2 billion.
This was the day he had dreamed about for as long as he could remember, like a teenage boy looking forward to the day he would lose his virginity, the day he would become a man. This was to be that day for John R. Brice. But now, standing in the master bathroom of his $3 million mansion and staring at himself in the mirror, he still saw Little Johnny Brice.
He had not found his manhood on Wall Street; perhaps he would find it in Idaho.
He had tried to imagine life without Gracie. He couldn’t. It was not the life he had lived or the life he wanted to live. And it would be a life without Elizabeth. Gracie’s birth had brought them together; her death would drive them apart. Elizabeth would leave him, and Sam with her. His family, his tenuous connection to the real world, would be gone; and he would give every dollar of his new fortune to save his family.
But he knew his money could not save his family. He knew his only hope lay with a drunk. Ben Brice offered hope. Hope that somehow, somewhere, Gracie was alive. Hope that one day she might come home. Hope that her father might again cup her perfect face and think how swell she was. He knew it made no sense. He knew there was no logic to it. No reason. No odds. There was just emotion. And hope. John had read about people with terminal cancer going to Mexico for enemas and other quack therapies, hoping for a miracle. He had wondered how desperate a person must be to do such a thing, to travel thousands of miles hoping for a miracle. Now he knew.
So John R. Brice would unplug from his virtual world of cyberspace and computers and code that defined and protected him and venture forth into the real world, untethered to his technology like an astronaut untethered to the mother ship, chasing Ben’s dream and his daughter. And hoping.
For the first time in his life, John Brice would follow his father.
The mansion sat dark and silent, as if in mourning. The FBI had packed up and moved out. Everyone had retired to their respective rooms to consider life without Grace. Everyone except Elizabeth.
She was in the media room watching the late news. A child abductor was dead. He would be buried tomorrow. Life would go on as before. But not Grace’s life. Or her mother’s life.
Her daughter was dead.
Evil had won again.
Mark Gimenez
The Abduction
11:07 P.M
Ben was lying in bed; the only light was coming from outside. His hands were clasped behind his head and his mind was filled with questions: Why couldn’t Clayton Lee Tucker identify Gracie or the men or the tattoo? Was he really a nutcase? And why was his phone line busy all day and night? Why had the two men taken Gracie to Idaho? And the most troubling question of all for Ben Brice: Had his past come back to haunt Gracie?
The door to the pool house opened, and Kate’s head appeared.
“Ben?”
“Yeah.”
Kate came over and sat on the edge of the bed; she stared at her hands and fiddled with the belt to her bathrobe. He gave her time to work up to what she wanted to say.
“Ben, has there been another woman?”
“No, Kate, just another drink.”
Kate stood, untied her robe, and let it fall to the floor. She pulled back the blanket and lay beside him, resting
