Authors: Shannon Kirk
About twenty steps into my morning commute, a maroon van appeared upon a whisper, masked by a clap of thunder. The side door slid open, and a pot-bellied man pulled me in from my left. Simple as that. Quick as that. He threw me on an armchair, which was bolted to the corrugated metal floor of the van. He jammed a gun so close to my face, the steel hit my teeth, tasting of an inadvertent bite of the fork, the one that lingers in your mouth. One car whooshed by, splashing the quick puddles on the pavement, oblivious to my plight. Instinctively, I crossed my belly with my arms. His eyes followed my action; he moved the barrel of the gun to my navel.
“You fucking move and I’ll put a bullet in that baby.”
Stunned to frozen stillness, I gasped and lost my breath. My heart even paused, despite the otherwise wild beating. I am not usually rocked so—only in times of serious shock might I be jolted, my heart set to race. For most of my confinement, I mastered this personal flaw. In the van, however, suffering the debilitation of a flash of emotion, I sat motionless as he pushed
me forward, yanked the backpack from my shoulders, and threw it to the floor beside my open umbrella. He placed the gun on an olive-colored stove, held in place on the opposite wall of the van by a series of bungee cords. Then he ripped my arms from my stomach and wrapped duct tape around my wrists and the arms of the chair. For some inexplicable reason, which I have not quite figured out, he turned a green oil rag into a sloppy blindfold.
But I’ve already seen your face. Your beady black-eyed, puffy face of patchy stubbles and poor complexion
.
I was taken that fast. I was taken for turning right. I was attacked from my left.
He closed the umbrella, flung it to the back of the van, collected his gun, and hunched his way up to the driver’s seat. All of which I did not see, but felt or heard, in the micro-filaments in the air, in the micro-decibels suspended on fractions of timing. It is these subatomic particles that now crowd my memory in cycles.
“Where are you taking me?” I yelled to him.
He said nothing.
“How much do you want? My parents will pay. Please let me go.”
“We don’t want your money, bitch. You’re going to deliver that baby for us, and I’m going to throw you in a quarry with the rest of you worthless girls. Now shut the fuck up or I swear I’ll fucking kill you right now. I don’t need any shit. Do you hear me?!”
I didn’t answer.
“Do you fucking hear me?!”
“Yes.”
And those were the facts. I put my foot on the backpack to prevent it from sliding away.
I was fifteen years with the FBI by the time they doled out case number 332578, the Dorothy M. Salucci case. Child abduction cases my lot, and such a miserable life it made. As for Dorothy M. Salucci, her case remains the hardest case of my career to overcome. Ultimately, because of her, I quit the FBI. Fifteen years of hell is enough.
I may as well start from the start.
On March 1, 1993, I got a call about a pregnant teen, taken outside her school. This case fit a pattern of cases I had been working over the last year: pregnant teen, married parents, between six to eight months along, Caucasian. The difficulty with these cases is the initial misperception that the child has run away. Statistically speaking, a whopping 1.3 million teens run away each year, a high percentage of which are due to unwanted pregnancies. This statistic means critical evidence is squandered and resources flag in a matter of days, actually hours, worse, minutes, seconds.
In the Dorothy M. Salucci case, we had a boyfriend and two married and seemingly supportive parents insisting Dorothy had not run away. I profiled the picture of the blond girl, noted her high grades and honor student status, interviewed the family and boyfriend, and determined the case required my full attention.
On the first day of the investigation, I arrived around ten a.m. to begin interviews and fieldwork. This was unfortunately not until the day after the kidnapping. The scenario: parents came home from work→ no child→ called police→ searched all night→ called
all friends all night→ she didn’t return by morning→ FBI alerted→ case lands on my desk. I, along with the local police and my partner, canvassed the entire school searching for anyone who might have seen anything on the morning she vanished. It was the morning, we knew, because her father stated that he woke Dorothy before leaving for work. The principal confirmed she had not shown for school, and due to a serious mix-up, no one called the parents. Fingers were pointed. There was evidence Dorothy had eaten breakfast, and her car was in the garage. Incidentally, the father’s co-workers and videotape of his place of business confirmed his arrival at work at 7:32 a.m. He appeared unruffled and normal. I did not suspect the father.
The mother’s firm confirmed her arrival as punctual as well; she arrived at 6:59 a.m., according to the security guard who logged all arrivals and departures. Video of the mother at McDonald’s, where she stopped for coffee, showed nothing other than a normal drive-thru transaction and commute to work. My partner and I studied the tape of her humming a song to herself and fixing her lipstick in the rearview mirror, daydreaming and un-agitated. I did not suspect the mother.
Dorothy’s boyfriend sobbed in the police station of his undying love for Dorothy and their unborn child. His mother insisted she dropped him at school right before eight-thirty a.m., and the homeroom teacher recalled his prompt arrival, because he shut the door on the ring of the bell. I did not suspect the boyfriend, nor did I suspect his mother of lying. But, I put surveillance on them anyway.
In the course of our site investigation, we uncovered two clues. Police found one black, low-top All-Star Converse sneaker, which had rolled down an embankment and into a bush off the side of the road, about twenty yards from Dorothy’s house. Her parents confirmed the shoe by wailing upon sight of the untied laces. The second clue came from a mother who had, on the morning of the abduction, dropped her daughter off at school. I’ll never forget her exact words: “I remember seeing a maroon van
stop, definitely maroon…Funny. I didn’t think it was odd at the time, but, I did notice the Indiana plate. I noticed only because the frame said ‘Hoosier State,’ and I had talked the night before with my husband about the movie,
Hoosiers
. It’s the only reason I remember. Divine coincidence, I guess.” She crossed herself.
Divine Coincidence
echoed in my mind, so I copied the words in curling cursive along the margins of my typed report.
A day later, after we compiled dozens of pictorial options, this Hoosier woman identified a 1989 G20 Chevy Conversion Sportvan, the TransVista, with two tinted side windows. All of this work, finally notifying me, identifying the shoe, interviewing the parents and the boyfriend, checking their alibis, canvassing the school, interviewing the Hoosier woman, collecting pictures of possible vans, and returning to the Hoosier woman for identification, put us three days post-kidnap, in other words, three days behind.
Dorothy’s parents went to every news source in the tri-state area and appealed to the national media. But, by the third day, the story no longer took top billing. The home office cut my resources for surveillance on the fifth day, and my partner, who remained on the case with me, got pressure to complete a backlog of paperwork on cold cases. The odds were against Dorothy M. Salucci.
Day 16 and there were the Kitchen People again. I imagined the kitchen a country kitchen, with yellow and green floral fabric tacked as skirts on wood worktables to hide pots and pans on makeshift shelves beneath. I imagined an old white country stove and a classic mixer in apple green. I imagined two women, of different generations, cooking my meals and wiping their flour-caked hands on red aprons lined with pink piping. I imagined very detailed things about their lives. One was the mother, the other her adult daughter. I imagined them doing this cooking routine for others in the area as part of their homespun business. I imagined they loved cooking for me in this kitchen with high ceilings. After all, most kitchens are on the first floor, yet we climbed three flights to get to my penitentiary, and I seemed to be directly above the kitchen. All of these things I imagined, and what was so shocking to me was how right I was about some things, and how wrong about others. I choose now to remember the kitchen and those vaporous chefs as I had imagined, a sweet nursery rhyme, a cat on a braided rug lounging in the sun, cushiony women with wide smiles, holding wooden spoons and tossing the cat scraps. A folk song of acoustic guitar lulling the air into a working happiness. Perhaps even a bird chirping on the top of an opened door.
To recap, as I mentioned, my captor did not detect the subtle change in my room when he came to hurl breakfast at me on Day 5. I had worked all night and had not slept the night before. Since then, I had continued to work my plot to fruition.
As he had on Day 9, on Day 16, he arrived earlier than the other mornings, crept up to my bed and shook me until I “woke.” Of course I’d been fake-sleeping, as if I hadn’t been working all night again. He dropped the diabolical china plate by my chest and barked that if I had to “use the shitter” I had to go “right now.” He also said he’d come in and strangle me if I moved an inch or made “even a ping of noise” before lunchtime. “You girls are a dime a dozen. I’m not taking any chances with you, bitch.”
Good morning to you too, asshole
.
I took his offer to go to the bathroom because I had determined to take whatever he offered. I did not want to turn down any possibility to collect assets or knowledge. Also, I had taken the offer on Day 9, and I did not want any change to our established routine. The slightest deviation could be a serious threat to my list of ordered assets and might alter my forming Escape/Revenge Plan, which, as you know, I had named at that point, “15.” Any branch from the path I had set upon could have been fatal. And while fatality was surely in store, it was not I who would be death’s prize.
After quick marching me to and from my morning relief, he returned me to detention and placed the bucket next to me, just as he had on Day 9.
Jabbing his finger in my face, he ordered, “Use this, but use it on the bed if you have to piss. Do not get off this bed.”
Fortunately, I had returned the handle to the bucket only ten minutes before his arrival.
As the heat rose, the Kitchen People began with the electric mixer, as they had on Day 9. The sound whirred me into a state of near hypnosis for a full hour. I rubbed my growing stomach with the palms of my flat hands, mesmerized by a heel or fist that pushed back to meet me.
Baby, baby, I love you, baby
. Then my floor began to vibrate, which movement was accompanied by a low humming. I concluded this had to be a ceiling fan in the kitchen. With the fan came wafts of roasted chicken, bacon, brownies, rosemary, and most welcome, the scent of fresh bread.
Ladies, do you know your food is for me? Do you know I am
a kidnapped girl?
I didn’t think so. Why else the early morning charade with my captor? Also, his phlegm-filled wheezing accompanied his agitated panther pacing outside my door; him there, my nervous warden. But only on the days they came. On the days the Kitchen People did not come, I don’t know where he spent his time in between hurling food at me and collecting that damned plate. Still, certain factors led me to doubt the Kitchen People.
Only their muffled voices found a way to my straining ear. I caught some words, such as “hand” and “pan.” Their female tones, one raspy and old, one light and breezy, revealed a mini-hierarchy; one clearly bossed the other.
The Kitchen People’s pattern, so far, was to come on the seventh day, which made sense. By studying the smells and the sequence of my meals, I could easily support a hypothesis that they came on Tuesdays to cook my meals for the coming week.
On the morning of Day 16, I almost shouted for help. But I needed more evidence to prove their innocence, and so with Asset #11, patience, I lay in wait to judge them. I had doubt about the level of their involvement because I didn’t understand why he didn’t bind and gag me on the days of their visits.
Could be, like with the van, he’s stupid or lazy or both
. Still. I also had doubt because on Day 9, he greeted them by saying, “We really like the food.”
We? So they know there is someone else? Here?
When I heard this, I realized they had cooked my meals for the first week in captivity. Seeing the timeline in thin air, I calculated the days between data points:
Day 2 = Kitchen People cook first week’s food while I was in van
+ 7 days
Day 9 = Kitchen People
+ 7 days
Day 16 = Kitchen People
With this, it was easy to postulate their intervals at one week apart, and so, I could plan around this predictable cycle.
When he greeted them on Day 16, he said, “Thanks so much, such great food for us.” This time he gave a false, fake laugh.
Phony
. I thought of my mother. Her disdain for phonies was even greater than her disdain for the lazy. When she encountered the PTO mothers at bake sales, done up in their thick-layered makeup and fried, dyed hair, clickety-clacketing across the gym in their kitten heels and capris and whispering to their fellow cougars about the hot phys-ed teacher’s affairs with multiples of their kind, my mother would lean in and say, “Never be like those vacant idiots. Use your brain productively. Don’t waste your time on gossip.” And when they sing-songed a “hellooo” to her, but soon enough shared looks of distasteful judgment about her, my mother never reacted, except to straighten her already cobra-straight posture and tailored Prada suit jacket. It was as if she and I had a world of our own, which not one unworthy person could penetrate. Shouldn’t all little girls live as such? Raised on horse pills of self-esteem.