The Abduction (11 page)

“I forgot,” he said.

“Forgot what, Mr. Brice?”

“I taped Gracie’s game.”

She was Michael Jordan in soccer shorts.

The other girls seemed like typical ten-year-olds, awkward, plodding, stumbling at times, while Gracie seemed … well, graceful, elegant even, her gait smooth and rhythmic, gliding down the field in her white shoes, then a sudden burst of speed propelling her past the defenders, all the while making the white ball seem like a puppet on a string, dancing in front of her, now to her side, then abruptly racing ahead on her unspoken command. And she owned her opponents equally, moving them about like pawns on a chessboard, a slight shoulder fake sending the defender charging one way only to watch helplessly as Gracie spun off in the opposite direction, where the ball was somehow waiting. Natural athletes always made it look easy. Gracie Ann Brice was a natural athlete.

Watching the victim running up and down the field on the videotape—her smile, her spirit, her soccer skills—FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux wanted to find this girl alive so much it hurt. The victim was not that photograph distributed to the media; she was a real live little girl who only two days before had not a care in the world, smiling and laughing and playing soccer. And play she could. As his daughter would say, Gracie’s got game.

She had captivated her audience.

Four FBI agents, the father, and the grandparents stood facing the nine-foot-wide projector screen built into the wall of the media room, hypnotized by the victim’s image and all too aware that they were likely watching the last moments of her life. The tape was playing with remarkable clarity—Agent Stevens, who was manning the camcorder connected to the TV, had said something about it being recorded in “high def”—and had captured the sights and sounds of the game: the girls playing,
a referee’s whistle, background noises, then suddenly a loud cheer and “Run, Gracie, run!” and the father’s voice: “Lou, I’m hard-core about thirty bucks a share!”

The camera abruptly swung from the field to the crowded parking lot in the distance and just as abruptly back to the field, creating a stream of blurred images. The victim appeared in frame again, up close, making a face at the camera as she ran past. Devereaux couldn’t help but smile. She then booted the ball across the field—“Go, Tornadoes!”—and the camera angle dropped precipitously, as if the operator had lost all strength in his arm; a pair of black penny loafers over white socks filled the screen. Devereaux glanced over at the father; he was still wearing the same shoes and socks. He had filmed his own feet. On the tape now, the father’s voice again: “Lou, if I had e-mail capacity at this soccer field, I’d beam Harvey a freaking shitogram!”

Back on the screen, another violent camera spasm and a close-up of a big white belly escaping from under a gold jersey and a booming voice that Devereaux recognized as the coach’s—“Gracie, stop her!” Abruptly back to the field: Gracie was running full speed then sliding, feet first, and kicking the ball away from an opponent trying to score, an incredible play … now the blue sky, then suddenly Gracie again, kicking the ball in front of her, racing down the field past her opponents—“Go, Gracie! Score, Gracie!”—to the goal, about to score, pulling her leg back, and … now the father’s shoes again. The room audibly deflated; Agent Jorgenson had damn near kicked Devereaux trying to score the goal for Gracie. On the tape, loud cheers erupted in the background … now the setting sun … and parents standing in the bleachers … and back on the soccer game … and the tape suddenly went silent.

“Did we lose audio?” Devereaux said to Agent Stevens.

“Don’t think so,” Stevens said, checking the connection.

“Increase the volume, run the tape back.”

Stevens did as Devereaux instructed. The tape replayed the same scene of the girls huddled in the middle of the field. There was a muffled sound in the background.

“Again. Louder.”

The same scene again. The same sound in the background.

“What was that?
Pant deck?
Again.”

The sound came through clearer this time, a male voice yelling, “Panty check.”

“The hell’s a panty check?” Devereaux said to the room.

“He was taunting her.”

All heads turned to the voice behind them: the mother stood in the doorway. She looked like hell. She hadn’t changed her clothes; her hair was wild and untouched; her blouse was hanging out; her skirt was twisted; she was barefooted. She said, “He was saying she’s really a boy, because she’s so good.” The mother turned her glare on the father. “You didn’t do anything, John? You didn’t go across the field and punch that son of a bitch in the mouth? That’s what I would’ve done.”

The father: “I … I didn’t hear him.”

“Because you were working the numbers with Lou,” the mother said.

On the video, Gracie stood motionless in the middle of the field; her head was down and the other girls were gathered around her.

“You let a man say that to Grace, you let another man take her from me, because you were making goddamn sure you get your billion dollars. Grace is gone because you were on the fucking phone.”

The father’s voice on the tape: “Lou, a billion dollars upgrades this geek to manly out there in the real world.”

The mother was looking at the father, but not like she was going to smack him again; instead, with a look of profound disdain.

“A billion dollars won’t make you a man, John Brice. And it won’t bring Grace back.”

And she was gone.

The room was filled with awkward silence until the father’s voice came over the tape: “Lou, only way a geek gets respect in this world is to be a rich geek. Doesn’t matter how smart you are, without money you’re still just a freaking geek.”

The father’s head was hanging so low Devereaux thought it might just disconnect from his neck and roll down his body to the floor. The mother’s words had hurt him more than her hand had yesterday. He sighed. It was not the first time Special Agent
Eugene Devereaux had witnessed a marriage destroyed by an abduction; it would not be the last. But he never passed judgment on parents of abducted children, most of whom fit the legal definition of temporary insanity by this stage of an abduction. They often blamed each other. Working through the parents’ emotions was part of the job; the FBI abduction protocol called it “family management.” But few families managed.

The grandmother went to the father and stood next to him; she put an arm around him and patted his back.

Devereaux took a deep breath to regain focus. He could not concern himself with the parents’ marriage. His only concern was the girl on the videotape. He was again staring at the screen, at jerky images of the ground, the sky, the ground, the sky, the parking lot, the parents, the spectators—
What the hell was the father doing with the goddamn camera?—
when he spotted something.

“Stop! Run it back!”

Stevens reversed the tape.

“There—stop!”

The picture was frozen on the people in and around the bleachers. Devereaux stepped to the screen and pointed to the image of a white male with blond hair and wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt. The view was from the rear but Devereaux knew.

“That’s our man.”

The man was mostly blocked out by a bigger man standing next to him: white male, tall, stocky, flattop, with a large dark spot on his left arm partially visible under the sleeve of his black tee shirt. A tattoo.

To the father: “You know these people?”

The father shook his head. “No.”

To Stevens on the camcorder: “Blow this frame up.” Devereaux touched the screen at the big man’s arm. “And that tattoo.”

To Agent Floyd: “Get the coach in here.”

The tape ran again: a shot of the parking lot, more deal talk from the father, more game action, Gracie hitting the ground hard—“Hey, she tripped Gracie!” Agent Jorgenson blurted out—back on the tape, the victim jumping up and running all out again, loud cheers, the camera jumping around again, the father’s feet, other feet, now a shot of another camcorder—“Yeah, Tornadoes!”—more shots of the sky, the grass, the bleachers, a pair of white soccer shoes, one with the laces untied—

“I didn’t tie her shoe,” the father said as if he were confessing to a crime.

—and the victim appeared close up again. Her flushed face glistened with perspiration; her hand reached up to the camera.

“Is she bleeding?” Devereaux asked.

Stevens ran the tape back.

“She is bleeding, from her elbow.”

The father’s eyes dropped down to his arm; he grabbed his sleeve and pulled it around to reveal the underside. The light blue material was stained a dark brown in several spots. He looked up at Devereaux.

“This is Gracie’s blood,” he said.

Was Grace dead?

From that moment in the park Friday night when the coach said her brother had asked for Grace—when the thought
Grace was kidnapped
first took shape—Elizabeth had prayed that it was about ransom—
You don’t ransom a dead girl,
she had heard an FBI agent say—and she had waged war with her mind. Her mind wanted desperately to force her into a dark world, to reveal to her all the possibilities, the maybes, the what ifs, to torture her with vile, horrible, gruesome images of her daughter being subjected to the sick desires of a sexual predator; but she had fought it off, beaten it back, blocked it out, refused to watch … until now.

Grace wasn’t taken for money.

Sitting on the marble floor of the steam shower, she had unconditionally surrendered to her mind’s dark side and allowed it to torture her with those images, to display them as graphically as if she were an eyewitness. And Elizabeth Brice wondered, as she had wondered once before: If for all intents and purposes you are already dead, is suicide still a mortal sin?

“Why, God?”

Steam inundated the shower. Elizabeth’s legs were curled around the drain; her tears mixed with the hot water. She was alone in her despair and wondering if she could slit her wrists with the safety razor she was holding. Once before evil had entered her life and caused her to entertain suicide, to seriously debate the various ways by which to end her life as if she were reading a menu at a restaurant. Once before she had stood on the precipice of death and peered over into the abyss, only to be saved by a child. This child. Grace had saved her life. Now, ten years later, evil had come back for Grace.

“Why did you let evil take her, too?”

She had lived only because of Grace. Without Grace, why live? She imagined her blood flowing out of her veins and swirling down into the drain until all the life had emptied from her. She put the razor to her wrist and pressed the blade into her skin and was about to slide it across her veins and spill her blood when a sudden surge of rage swelled her muscles and brain cells like a narcotic, hate and anger once again energizing her mind and body and driving her up off the marble.

Elizabeth Brice wanted to kill someone, but not herself. She wanted to kill the abductor. And she had the money to do it.

Two hundred children a year die at the hands of sexual predators in the United States. Those few cases always capture the public’s undivided attention. FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux had investigated one hundred twenty-seven such cases. Consequently, he was accustomed to the media events child abductions inevitably became.

But this case was different. Maybe it was because Gracie was a rich white blonde girl who lived in a mansion with murals on the ceiling; maybe it was because her father’s face was on the cover of
Fortune
magazine; or maybe it was just a slow news cycle. But this case was fast moving beyond anything he had previously experienced. There was an energy in the air, building with each passing hour without Gracie’s recovery, along with the number of people on the front lawn of the Brice mansion, where Devereaux now stood on this sunny Sunday afternoon. He was flanked by the local mayor and police chief
and facing microphones clumped together on a stand, TV cameras, reporters, and beyond them, in the street, the residents of Briarwyck Farms. They had posted missing child fliers with Gracie’s image on every car, printed Gracie tee shirts, tied pink ribbons to car antennae, mailboxes, and trees, and pinned a Gracie button on every shirt and lapel.

There was a time when media briefings made Devereaux feel important, a black agent born in the Louisiana backwoods directing a major FBI case; now these briefings just made him tired. He stepped forward.

“I’m FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux. The FBI is involved in this case at the request of Chief Ryan. Unless the victim is transported across state lines, jurisdiction is solely local. But we have offered our resources to assist Chief Ryan and his investigation.”

Devereaux always maintained the pretense that the locals were in charge of the case. They were legally, but not actually. Locals like Chief Ryan understood that they didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of finding an abducted child without the FBI—and they didn’t mind sharing the failure with the Feds when the child’s body was found.

“The status of our investigation of the abduction of Gracie Ann Brice is as follows: Gracie has been missing for forty-two hours. She was taken from Briarwyck Farms Park here in Post Oak at approximately six
P.M.
Friday by a white male, twenty to thirty years old, six foot, two hundred pounds, blond hair, wearing a black cap and a plaid shirt. An artist’s sketch of the suspect has been distributed to the media. We are pursuing two parallel investigative tracks: the first is to find Gracie, and that is our primary consideration; the second is to identify and locate possible suspects, starting with registered sex offenders. We urge any citizen who may have seen Gracie or the suspect or who has any information to please contact our hot-line number on the missing child fliers. We need your help. Questions?”