Swerve Page 7

  The car glides down the long driveway, her heart beating a little faster as they near the main entrance.

  The city holds some allure for her, its bright lights and pounding pulse appealing in their own right. But it is here, in this place she has resurrected from its own ashes, that she thrives. Recognizes her purpose in life. Knows the kind of control and power that make her wish for an extension on her probable number of years on this earth.

  She thinks of the new residents awaiting her approval, wonders if their detox is working at its most effective or if they will require her more convincing measures.

  This part is always exciting for her. Assessing whether the original trap creates a willing partnership or not.

  It is the rare captive who does not respond to this first phase.

  She has learned though that most people think they are strong. They’ve been convinced of this by the paper-thin walls of their lives, which they view as their security, their right to a safe existence. It takes so little, really, to throw them into chaos, confuse them as to what is up and what is down.

  She realizes this could be considered cruelty, but it’s really nothing more than a necessary part of the process. Human beings make decisions based on what they think is true, not what actually is. She has to show them what actually is so that they understand the importance of choosing correctly.

  At the hotel’s front entrance, her driver stops the car, sliding out to come around and open her door. “Welcome back, madam,” he says.

  “Thank you,” she says, looking at the front door. “Although somehow, it doesn’t feel as if I ever really leave.”

  Knox

  “In my life, I have made the occasional catastrophic choice, and it’s just a case of moving on and learning from it.”

  —James Nesbitt

  THE CHIEF IS a woman.

  But anyone foolish enough to mistake her gender as license for assuming softness almost certainly lives to regret it.

  At least anyone associated with the Metropolitan Police Department.

  Knox has never considered himself foolish, and he’s the last person to underestimate Willa Parker. Or the reason she has called him to her office this afternoon.

  He sits across from her desk, right ankle over left knee, aware from her expression that he has been called to the principal’s office.

  “A senator’s wife?” she says in a former smoker’s voice. “Seriously, Helmer?”

  He chooses silence as the best option, keeps his expression blank, unwilling to give her any cards to play.

  “You were sent to that party as a representative of this department. I chose you as one of only three detectives deserving of the recognition.” She leans back in her chair, arms folded, giving him a long look. “Are you aware of your propensity for shooting yourself in the foot?”

  “Was that what it was?” he asks.

  “What the hell else could it be?”

  “Sex, ma’am.”

  The words drop between them. Her eyes widen for the briefest second, and he takes a small degree of pleasure in having shocked her at least a little.

  “I repeat,” she says. “With a senator’s wife?”

  He shrugs. “I didn’t feel it was my role to question her choices.”

  “What about her motivation? Did you question that?”

  “I really think it was the same as mine.”

  Exasperation throws enough color in her Irish cheeks that her hair is a near reflection. “Well, I’m so pleased it was such an excellent match. Unfortunately, if Senator Hagan is made privy to the same surveillance video I was, you might need to rejoin the military.”

  “Why is that, ma’am?”

  “Because I can’t have that kind of heat in my department.”

  “No one got hurt. We were both consenting adults.”

  “No one got hurt yet.”

  He raises an eyebrow, starts to stand, a hand on either arm of the chair. “If that’s all—”

  “It’s not. Sit down.”

  He eases back into the chair, reluctant, but he knows an order when he hears one.

  “You know I had my reservations when I hired you, Helmer. My gut told me you were set on self-destruct. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  He meets her gaze, holding it for a moment before saying, “Not with the intention of taking anyone else down with me.”

  “Intention counts for shit. Stupid choices will get you there every time.”

  “What exactly do you want me to say, Chief?”

  “That you value this job. That you’re not going to make me regret hiring you.”

  “That’s not my intention.”

  “That intention thing again. Here’s what I see, Helmer. I know what your past looks like. My guess is you could have gotten yourself blown up in Afghanistan any day of the week. Living on that kind of tightrope would have to change your outlook on what a normal existence looks like. This job isn’t that. Are you trying to make it that?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “So maybe you need to be aware of it.”

  “Noted.”

  “And don’t think I’m not aware of your ability to pacify.”

  “Pacify?”

  “Say what you think I want to hear.”

  “Is it working?”

  “No.”

  He blows out a rush of breath, concedes with, “It won’t happen again.”

  “The senator’s wife or the questionable judgment in general?”

  “Both.”

  “I’d like to believe you.”

  “You can.”

  She makes a pretense of shuffling some of the papers on her desk, suddenly changes course with, “The missing girls case. You spoke to the sister of the Benson girl?”

  “Earlier this afternoon.”

  “What’s your gut?”

  “About as devoted as a sibling could be. Parents died when the younger sister was eight. Oldest had just started college and moved back home to raise her sister. No other immediate family.”

  Chief Parker raises her eyebrows. “Damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  She glances out the window to the side of the desk. “I don’t have a good feeling about this one.”

  “Me either,” he admits.

  “I’d like you on it full-time until further notice. Get with the uniforms and find out where they are with the door to door. And then you need to start looking under rocks. Get online with the pervs and see who knows something. Let’s give it the gas. You know we don’t have much time.”

  “I’m on it,” he says, standing up and adding, “That it?”

  “For now.”

  He’s just reached the door when she says, “Helmer?”

  “Ma’am?” he says, turning back with a neutral expression.

  “It sure would be nice to see you reach your potential.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” He turns the knob and walks out, wondering what she would say to the fact that he no longer thinks the word applies to him.

  Emory

  “You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

  —A. A. Milne

  I AM A DOER.

  I have to do something.

  I can’t sit and wait for my phone to ring.

  My next online search is “what to do when a person is missing.”

  WikiHow brings up “How to Find a Missing Person.” I read through the thirteen suggestions, making a list on the notebook beside my keyboard.

  I long ago figured out that lists are my friend when life feels out of control. Making a box to check off beside each task will at least give me the illusion of doing something that might make a difference.

  I start writing.

  _____ Contacting the police and file reports

  _____ Provide the police with information about the missing person

  _____ Keep a record of the report.

  _____ Contact the Nati
onal Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).

  _____ Contact the person’s friends and acquaintances.

  _____ Check with hospitals and coroners in the area.

  This one brings me up cold, a feeling of panic skittering along my skin. Call a coroner and ask if my sister is there? It is unthinkable. I leave this one for now and go on to the next one.

  _____ Check with your local county jail.

  _____ Check social media sites.

  _____ Put up fliers with a picture and description of the missing person.

  _____ Ask people to spread the word.

  _____ Alert the local media.

  _____ Consider hiring a private investigator.

  Once I’ve written down all the suggestions, I stare at the list, a staggering despair washing over me. I push it aside though, relieved to have something to focus on, anything to take my thoughts off where Mia might be and all the awful possibilities for what might have happened to her.

  I can’t go there. I tell myself to complete the list, and it is very likely that someone will come forward with information that will lead to finding her. And so I go back to the top of the list. The first three I’ve done. I check the boxes. Number four. Contact the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs).

  I find the link and start entering the information.

  ~

  IT TAKES THE entire remainder of the day to get the next-to-the-last box checked. I’ve personally contacted every friend and acquaintance I am aware of as someone Mia interacts with on a regular basis. I ask each of them to please let me know if they hear anything at all from her.

  I’ve called every hospital in the DC and northern Virginia area. That was painful, but calling the coroner’s offices within a fifty-mile radius, that was excruciating. It is only when I’ve hung up from the last call that I breathe a sigh of relief for the fact that neither office had anyone there who matched Mia’s description.

  I call every local jail within a fifty-mile radius. I cannot imagine Mia doing anything that would have landed her in any of them, but I’m following the list. There is no one in any of the jails who sounds like Mia.

  I log on to her computer and check every social media site saved in her Bookmarks. I check the messages of each, find nothing relevant. Her posts are typical of what I would imagine her posting. Positive memes, funny animal videos, photos of Grace and her, several of Pounce.

  Next, I write up a press release with as much detail about what has happened as I can come up with. I include one picture of Mia and another of her with Grace. I email it to sixty different editors of TV news stations, newspapers, and radio stations.

  Once that’s done, I make up a flyer and use my printer to print two hundred copies. I leave the house with the stack of flyers in my arms and drive to the location of the festival where I start posting them on every light pole within a mile of where I’d found her phone. I post the rest of them at local grocery stores, a fitness club, and the restaurants that allow me to leave one on a community bulletin board.

  It’s after ten o’clock when I get home. I’m so tired that I can barely drag myself back to the desk chair where Pounce has not moved since I left. I pick him up, arrange him on my lap, and stare at the to-do list I had spent the day completing.

  There’s one suggestion left.

  Consider hiring a private detective.

  The thought of pursuing this tonight is more than I can process. I will call Detective Helmer first thing in the morning and see if I can get a feel for whether or not he thinks they’re making progress.

  If not, I’ll start researching private detectives.

  Pounce meows, stands on my leg, his paws kneading back and forth, his nails pricking my skin. He hops down then and heads for Mia’s bedroom, and I’m sure he expects her to be home in a bit. Why would he imagine anything different? This is the routine they follow every night.

  I start to call him back, take him to my room with me. But I can’t bring myself to do it, so I put one foot in front of the other until I reach my own bed where I fall face first onto the mattress.

  I am asleep before my brain can again latch on to the fear that has kept me awake for the past forty-eight hours.

  Knox

  “Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”

  —Hypatia

  HE WAKES TO a strip of light through the crack in the black-out drapes of his bedroom.

  He’d finally bought the curtains a few months ago in an effort to sleep more than a few hours each night. The difficulty was in getting to sleep in the first place, but once he did fall asleep, the blocking of sunlight sometimes prevented him from waking at the crack of dawn.

  He’d once been a great sleeper. He could go to bed at ten and wake up at seven, feeling renewed, rejuvenated.

  His deployment in Afghanistan had changed all of that.

  Dr. Thomason, the psychiatrist he reluctantly sees once a week, tells him PTSD is responsible for his inability to go to sleep. Trauma rewires the brain, convinces it that it must always stay on guard. To lower awareness is to invite disaster. And if a person is asleep, how can he stay on guard?

  He’s tried the artificial versions of sleep inducement: Ambien, Halcion, and Restoril—the last of which was supposed to make him stay asleep in addition to falling asleep. They all work for a couple of hours. But his brain usually wins out. It yells and screams behind the artificial veil until inevitably, finally, he comes wide awake, often in a sweat, as if he’s been running or waving his arms frantically trying to get his own attention.

  It isn’t as if his SEAL training hadn’t prepared him for the horrors of war. In a six-month program that included its own Hell Week, where the dropout rate was as high as ninety percent, he’d withstood the tests of torture himself and knew that every man has an eventual breaking point. The key was holding out just short of it.

  Among the methods used to teach him how to survive torture had been five nights of sleep deprivation and a handheld generator the size of a cell phone that when applied to his nipples made him lose control of all bodily functions.

  So he’d arrived in the Middle East fully understanding the depths of depravity to which a human being could stoop in a quest to torture, demean, break.

  And still, nothing really prepares you for its reality.

  Eyes open, he stares up into the darkness of his bedroom, letting each word of the long memorized Code of Conduct for members of the US Armed Forces march through his mind.

  I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.

  I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist.

  If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.

  If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information nor take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.

  When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.

  I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.

  During captivity, he had recited the code so many times that his brain had become programmed with each word, se
t on an endless cycle of repeat. It was the repetition of this code that saved his life. His determination to hang his will on every word.

  He’d been one of four captured from his unit after a two-hour shootout on a blazing hot afternoon when they had finally surrendered in exchange for the life of another team member bleeding out in the center of it all. Their surrender had gotten him help, and he’d ended up in a German hospital recovering two days later while the four of them endured round after round of torture that made his SEAL training seem like child’s play.

  Each time they’d come for him, when his number had again risen in the line of order, Knox turned his mind to the code, hammering each word into his resistance like nails into a coffin. The words allowed him to make himself not present, to hang what was happening to him on a higher cause. He’d used it like anesthesia, so that his own screams had registered as if they were coming from far away, rising up out of someone else.

  Lying here in the dark, those screams echo in his mind, and his eyes fly open. He doesn’t want to see the memory on the back of his eyelids so he vaults out of bed, turns on the shower in the bathroom, and stands beneath the freezing spray until the screams are gone, and he can close his eyes without seeing himself in that torture room.

  Only then does he get out of the shower, pull on some clothes, and head out of the apartment, hitting the sidewalk at a run. He doesn’t stop until his watch beeps ten miles.

  Mia

  “A drowning man cannot be saved until he is utterly exhausted and ceases to make the slightest effort to save himself.”

  —Watchman Nee

  IT WAS THE kind of perfect July day that made a person think life couldn’t get much better.

  At age ten, Mia was again beginning to believe that happiness wasn’t something that had forever abandoned her and her sister. There had been plenty of days when she couldn’t believe anything else. When it had felt as if not even the sunshine could penetrate the clouds of sadness that hung over them both.