No answer.
“Hey, I want to go home,” she said, trying not to cry.
Silence.
“I know you are listening. I want to know what you’re going to do to me. I mean, I want you to let me go home. I haven’t seen you. I don’t even know what it is that you want from me. Please. Call my mom!”
Like all of the times she tried to start a conversation with him, whoever he was, he ignored her. She could hear his breathing, or at least she thought it was his breathing. A small fan had been installed in the “apartment” presumably to provide fresh air intake. It was on all the time, whirring and spinning.
Emma waited, thinking it all out. She considered that maybe a more submissive approach might be more to the creeper’s liking.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the mattress. “I wish you would say something. I’m a very good listener. My teachers always said that I had excellent listening skills.”
Nothing.
Emma pushed on. She was not a quitter.
“I wonder if you’re as lonely as I am. I know you’re smart and talented. You made this really nice apartment,” she said, nearly choking on the phrase. “Please, sir, talk to me.”
Sir, she thought, was a nice touch.
And still nothing.
Emma got up and walked to the entrance to the apartment. Her captor had fashioned some kind of a narrow horizontal hatch on the door. It was only wide enough for a soda can turned on its side.
“Please,” she said, trying to remain as calm as she could. Freaking out, Emma believed, might make whoever it was breathing on the other side of the wall see that she wasn’t a threat.
For a second, when she heard the twisting of the lock on the other side of the hatch, she thought she was finally getting somewhere.
The hatch opened and the tray pushed forth.
Emma looked down at a People magazine with Selena Gomez on the cover. It was an article about some troubles the young actress had overcome recently. Emma took the magazine and went to her mattress. She twisted the gooseneck of the reading lamp and slumped against the army blanket.
God, Emma thought as she fanned open the magazine, this girl thinks she has problems. I’m probably going to be raped and murdered.
As she read, her mind wandered all over the place. She tried as hard as she could to remember exactly what she’d been doing before she blacked out. She remembered being at Starbucks and getting ready to close for the night. She remembered how she and Oliver had raged about the customers who had the nerve to bring their own food in to the coffee place that they now used as home offices. One guy had even had the gall to bring a thermos of coffee from home.
“It’s Starbucks coffee,” the young man said. “What’s the big deal if I buy it here or at Safeway? You’re still getting the profits.”
She remembered leaving Starbucks and walking toward the bus stop. After that, nothing. Her memory was a complete void. She felt the back of her head. The bump where she surmised she’d been struck had shrunk by then. The touch of her hand made her wince. Her long dark hair was getting tangled, the back strands turning into a white girl’s bad idea of dreads. When she adjusted the lamp, Emma noticed the shade’s interior was lined with reflective silver.
It was hard to see her face with the bulb glowing right in her eyes. But in a fleeting instance she saw what she looked like just then.
Around her eyes were dark circles. Emma gasped. She’d seen that kind of bruising around a woman’s eyes before when a neighbor had been battered by her husband.
“What did you do to me?” she asked softly, sure that the creeper couldn’t hear her above the omnipresent din of the running air intake fan. A tear fell down onto Selena Gomez’s pretty face. Emma refused to cry out. If she’d had thought for one moment that she had a chance to get out of there, she knew it was wishful thinking.
No one who captures a girl, beats her, and traps her in a so-called apartment ever lets her go.
CHAPTER 22
The next day, Olympic Security, the company with the contract to monitor the parking lot-and to tow cars that had stayed too long-gave up the video without so much as a whisper that they needed a subpoena in order to do so.
“Quality is the shits,” said the office manager, a big fat guy whose butt seemed permanently affixed to an office chair on wheels.
“That’s all right,” Grace said, as she took a small box of tapes. “We’re used to that.”
She’d arrived alone. Paul was back in the office “working,” whatever that meant. She wasn’t so sure.
“You want to watch it here? I have a TV in the back room,” the manager said, pushing off in his chair like a hermit crab toward the doorway.
“No. No thanks. We’ll watch it back at the office.”
Grace got in her car and started to drive, the box of small videotapes on the seat next to her. It really was a long shot, of course, but she hoped that the feed would show whatever had happened to the young woman. What had caused her to leave her purse behind? Had there been a struggle? Had she fought for her life only to succumb to someone stronger, more powerful than she was?
Oliver Angstrom was a complete weirdo, but the world was full of those types. Being weird was often an affectation. Like nipple rings on some accountant. That might only show when he took off his jacket, just a hint. Just something to get one noticed. More often than not, weirdoes simply ended up living benign, unremarkable, lives. Few were abductors or criminals, though they might have looked the part. Grace knew that it was the average guy or gal who was the biggest threat. They lived among everyone, their averageness a mask.
Weirdos like Oliver were too, too obvious in their quest for perpetual attention. They were on everyone’s radar.
Oliver was just some lame kid with a crush. He could not have butchered two girls and dumped them by the river.
Or could he? Ted killed his first victim as a teenager.
Grace and Paul sequestered themselves in a conference room and fed the videotape into the player. It was not lost on either one of them that video, like other technology, was changing. Most of the video feeds collected for evidence now had been handed over on thumb drives and disks. This was old school, like a lot of Tacoma was. The black-and-white images were not HD quality. They looked nearly as bad as the video that one of the blues had brought to show her sonogram.
“Right there!” she’d said. “See that? It’s a boy!”
Paul had turned to Grace and lowered his head. “You see anything?” he asked.
She shook her head and whispered back. “Looks like a girl to me.”
Paul grinned. “Hope she doesn’t name the baby Rocky or something.”
Grace smiled back. There were times when she and Paul really got each other. Not often, but enough to ensure that they had each other’s backs. When he and his wife split up, it was easy for Grace to choose whose side to be on. Paul could be a doofus, but he was real at least part of the time. His wife? Not so much. She was all about getting ahead.
Thankfully the parking lot videotape had a counter that actually had been reset to reflect the correct time of day when the images were recorded.
“This almost never happens,” Grace said. “Remember that time when we watched eighteen hours of tape because they’d failed to reset the counter?”
“Don’t remind me,” Paul said. “I about busted a nut when that idiot admitted that he was too lazy to change the time stamp and didn’t tell us because he didn’t want to ruin his chances for the employee of the month
