Once Taken (11 page)

She wished Bill were here. Or Lucy. Lucy would be exactly the kind of presence she needed right now—calm, intelligent, and compassionate. It really ought to be Lucy asking these questions, not Riley.

But there was nothing to be done about it now. And there was no time to lose. From her own experience, Riley could imagine all too well what April was going through. But what she didn’t know was how long April might have to live.

Brian and his mother were both staring at her. After a moment Carol asked shakily, “But what does Brian … what does my son have to do with it?”

Riley swallowed hard and managed to speak in a steady voice.

“Brian, you and April hitched a ride to my house the other day. I think the man who drove you took April.”

“Oh my God,” the boy said with a gasp.

“I need for you to tell me everything you can about that day. What kind of car was it?”

Brian paused, trying to remember.

“It was a Ford, I think. Yeah, a Focus, kind of old, 2010 maybe.”

“What color was it?”

“Gray. It was kind of beat-up. There was a big dent in the passenger door.”

Riley breathed a little easier as she jotted down the information. Whatever she might think of the boy, it was clear that he wanted to help. But the most important question was coming next. She took out her cell phone and brought up Peterson’s photo. She looked at it without showing it to him.

“What did the man look like?” she asked.

“He was a big guy. Not fat, but tall, and—wide, I guess.”

Riley felt even more heartened. Although she hadn’t gotten a very good look at Peterson during her captivity, she remembered him as being an imposing presence. The mug shot said that he was over six feet tall.

“That’s good,” Riley said. “Go on.”

“He had kind of shaggy hair,” Brian said. “And he had stubble on his chin. But it didn’t look like he’d forgotten to shave. It was more like a fashion kind of thing.”

Riley compared the boy’s description to the photo. In it Peterson was shorthaired and cleanly shaved. She’d remembered him without stubble. She’d been right in assuming that Peterson’s appearance had changed.

The boy was struggling now to remember more.

“What about the shape of his face?” Riley said.

“Oh, yeah, I remember. He had a pretty big square chin.”

Riley remembered the man’s jutting chin, how it protruded in the light from the propane torch. The same chin was clearly visible in the photo on her cell phone.

She thought fleetingly of showing Brian the photo to see if he recognized the man. She quickly decided against it. She no longer harbored the faintest doubt that the driver had been Peterson. But she also knew that she still had to persuade her colleagues at the BAU. For that, it would be best for Brian to describe the driver solely from memory. It mustn’t look as though Riley had influenced him.

Riley turned toward the boy’s mother.

“Carol, I need for you and Brian to come with me to the police station,” she said.

The woman’s lips were trembling and her voice was shaky.

“Do I need to call our lawyer?” she asked.

“It’s nothing like that,” Riley said. “Brian’s not in any trouble. I just need him to give a description to a sketch artist. He’s a very good observer and it will be helpful.”

Carol looked relieved.

“Let’s go, then,” she said. “We’d be glad to help out however we can.”

Riley was grateful for their willingness to help. She would get the boy started with a police artist and leave them there.

Then she would go to BAU and get what she needed to track Peterson down—and kill him.

The FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit buzzed with activity as agents went about trying to locate April. Now they all knew that Riley had been right all along. Peterson was still alive, and as much of a threat as ever. The flyer had put any remaining skepticism to rest, and some of the agents looked as embarrassed as she thought they should be.

The mug shot of Peterson and the sketch that had been made from Brian’s description were side by side on the flyer. Both showed an ordinary-looking man who might not stand out in a crowd except for his large size and prominent jaw. The resemblance between the sketch and the photo was unmistakable.

Riley wished she could feel vindicated. Instead, she felt utterly wretched.

Meredith stepped into her doorway, his craggy features knotted with sympathetic concern.

“How are you holding up?” he asked Riley.

Riley swallowed hard. She couldn’t let herself cry. She had to hold herself together.

“I feel so guilty,” she said. “Does that make sense?”

“No,” Meredith replied. “But nothing does at a time like this.”

Riley nodded. Meredith was absolutely right. She ought to know that as well as anybody. But after all her years as a field agent, she’d never been in this position. She’d been threatened, but she’d only observed this kind of terror from the outside. These emotions were new to her.

“Have you got any news?” Riley asked.

Meredith sighed wearily. “Not much,” he said. “We’ve got cops going door to door in your husband’s neighborhood with the flyer. Nobody recognizes Peterson so far.”

“What about the car?” Riley asked.

“The Fredericksburg cops located the car the boy described. Peterson had stolen it. It was found abandoned not long after he gave the kids a ride. A neighbor across the street said that she noticed a black Cadillac backed up in your ex-husband’s driveway. It was probably stolen too, and we’re trying to find out about it. But the neighbor didn’t see anything that happened.”

Riley’s heart hung on Meredith’s every word, listening for some reason to hope. She didn’t hear much to encourage her.

Meredith gazed at Riley for a moment. Then he said, “There’s nothing you can do here right now. I don’t suppose I could talk you into going home and getting some sleep.”

Riley shook her head.

“It’s still early,” she said.

Besides, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until April was found. She doubted that much of the BAU would sleep until then either.

“Okay,” Meredith said. “I’ll let you know when we know more.”

He left her office. Riley stared at the flyer again. She picked apart Meredith’s choice of words just now. He’d said “
when
we know more.” He hadn’t said
if.
Riley tried to take comfort in that. Of course she knew that Meredith had chosen his words carefully. Did he really hold out any hope that April would be found alive?

 Right then she heard a familiar voice from her doorway.

“Riley.”

She turned around and saw Bill standing there.

“I heard,” he said.

His eyes were full of concern. They showed no trace of anger or resentment. Whatever bad blood had been between them recently, Riley knew that it had evaporated in the face of this tragedy.

Riley made one last vain attempt to keep her emotions under control. But then it hit her that she didn’t need to. Her friend was back—a friend who understood her better than anybody in the world.

Tears burst from her eyes and she leaped to her feet. She threw herself into Bill’s arms.

“Oh, Bill, you’re here, you’re here.”

She sobbed uncontrollably as Bill rocked her gently in his arms.

*

Bill was driving the SUV they’d taken out at Quantico. In the passenger seat beside him Riley was loading four three-inch shells into a Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun that she cradled in her lap. She’d requested the gun at the BAU before they left for D.C.

“Remember, that thing’s a SWAT weapon,” Bill said. “We’re just likely to be interviewing civilians for a while.”

“I’ll leave it in the SUV for now,” Riley replied.

Bill knew that he’d been right to come with her. His best friend was emotionally raw and in need of his presence. Abandoning their partnership when she was in such dire straights would have been all wrong. He was aware that his taking off tonight could mark the end of his shaky marriage, but he couldn’t let Riley go without him.

She was brilliant but she could be foolhardy. She had come so close to being killed when she’d struck out alone on their last case, and he couldn’t let that happen again.

 “Talk to me,” Bill said. “About Peterson. Have you found out anything since we last hunted him down?”

“He’s changing, Bill,” Riley said.

“How?”

“It’s hard to pin it down exactly.”

After a brief silence, Bill nudged her thoughts again. “Riley, I hate to ask you to remember it all. But think back to things that he said to you when he was holding you. Does anything stick out in your mind?”

“He told me once, ‘You’re not my type,’” she said.

“Hmm, okay, you weren’t his type,” Bill mused. “Did he say anything else?”

“Yeah, he went on to say something like, ‘But I like you anyway. You’re opening my horizons.’”

“What do you think he meant?”

“There’s so much we don’t know about him,” Riley said. “Nobody is sure just how many women he’s tortured and killed. The only ones we know of are the four that were found in shallow graves. There are probably more out there that nobody has found.”

“Right,” Bill said. “And the women we found were all markedly well-off. The first was married to a psychiatrist. The second was a newspaper editor. The third was married to a real estate developer. The fourth was high up in the food chain of a big corporation. Finally, there was Marie, a Georgetown lawyer. Obviously, this started off as a class thing. He probably grew up poor. He resented it. He especially resented women who had money.”

Riley nodded in agreement. “It made him feel emasculated,” she said. “So he went on a spree of revenge, targeting women who represented everything he hated. They also happened to be women who weren’t available to a guy of his social standing. Maybe his first victim was a wealthy woman who rejected his advances. He probably fantasized that he was some sort of one-man revolution. So his anger had a sexual component, even though rape was never part of his MO.”

“You’re getting at things we hadn’t worked out before,” Bill said. “Keep going.”

“And he got to be very good at it,” Riley continued. “Judging from the pictures we’ve got of him, he’s probably the kind of guy who can blend in anywhere. And the last car he stole was a Cadillac. Just by taking the right clothes and props, he can probably pass himself off as rich. He might have socialized with the women, even dated or slept with some of them. What mattered was what they represented—the kind of wealth and privilege that he felt cheated out of.”

Bill grunted—the sort of noise he made whenever an insight came to him.

“Riley, that’s it,” he said. “You’re
not
his type—not a wealthy professional, not some society housewife, not the kind of trophy he’d been looking for till then. But he liked you anyway. That surprised him. He realized that the whole class thing didn’t matter to him anymore. He wasn’t some lone fighter for the oppressed. He was in it for the sheer sadism—the joy of inflicting pain and terror.”

 “You’ve nailed it perfectly, Bill,” she said. “He’s no ordinary serial. He can change. He’s adaptable. That’s why he’s been so hard to catch.”

“Let’s hope that’s about to change,” Bill said.

Right then, they arrived at their destination—a desolate block of condemned row houses. It was dark in the ramshackle neighborhood, all the more so because some streetlights were out. All that was left of the house where Peterson had held Riley was an empty lot. The explosion had destroyed the house where Peterson had been squatting. The two empty houses on either side had been damaged so badly that they were promptly torn down.

Bill pulled the SUV to the curb and parked. He said. “Do you want to call in the D.C. police? They could cover a lot more ground, questioning people.”

“No, Riley replied. “If the search becomes that obvious, he’ll get spooked and disappear. Let’s just go it on our own for a little while. We’ve got two car keys, so we can split up. You go east, and I’ll go west.”

“Okay,” Bill said. “But you call me if anything happens—anything at all.”

He watched as Riley walked onto the vacant lot where she had encountered Peterson before. He knew that she needed to confront her demons there.

Bill headed down the street, determined to find some lead, some answer to where Peterson was holding Riley’s daughter. He knew that if he found the man first, he’d probably kill the monster himself.

Riley watched Bill walk away. She looked back at the SUV longingly, feeling reluctant to leave the Remington behind. But carrying a shotgun around at this time of night would draw the wrong sort of attention. The plan for now was to search, not to destroy.

At least not yet,
Riley thought.

Right now, she felt the need to reach back into a dark recess of her memory—a place where she’d come to know what little she knew about Peterson.

She walked out onto the barren lot. She’d returned here just once since her captivity and escape. It had been broad daylight then. But she had felt certain then that she’d found the place she’d been looking for. Now she retraced her steps the same way. Soon her instincts told her that she was there—standing in the very spot.

She breathed the night air deeply. Yes, this was it. There was no doubt about it. Below her feet was exactly where she’d found Marie in that dark and dismal crawlspace. It was where she’d been captured in the very act of setting Marie free. It was where she’d suffered days of pain, torture, and humiliation.

A feeling of rage rose up in her. It seemed to seep up from the ground, into her toes and feet, up her ankles and legs, all through her abdomen and arms, until her chest and head felt ready to burst with it. For a moment, the house itself seemed to be a real presence all around her.

If only it really was still here,
she thought.
If only
he
were here.

How gladly she’d do what she’d done before—beat the man nearly unconscious, open his propane tanks, throw a match inside, and watch the whole place erupt into a fiery explosion.