Stolen (15 page)

L
eft or right—which way should I go? Wrong way, and chances were I’d run into an armed woman. Instead of bolting, I hesitated, overthinking and not reacting. For a few seconds my feet stayed rooted to the ground, with half my brain screaming to run and the other half debating which way.

Five seconds at most. That’s what it took to decide. Five quick ticks of the clock, but as it turned out, it was three ticks too many. When I broke left—which happened to be the right way to go—I almost made it to the side of the house when I heard a scratchy, hoarse-sounding female voice shout from behind me.

“You stop or I shoot!”

I stopped, all right. The world around me turned gray, as if all its color had gone swirling down a fast-draining tub. My eyes closed tightly, while my hands went unprompted above my head.

I heard footsteps approaching, slow moving. Either she was being cautious or she couldn’t move quickly. I kept my hands up and turned around . . . nice . . . and . . . slow. I can’t say which I saw first, the woman or the double-barreled shotgun pointed at my chest. We’ll call it a tie.

The woman, rollers in her hair, wore a faded white nightgown in mid-afternoon and had no shoes on her feet. Her cheeks were sunken, as though the bones beneath had dissolved over time. As for her face, she radiated toughness, a look enhanced by her leathery skin, which had crinkled the way a potato dries in the sun. Her lips creased back into a snarl, while her eyes, milky and blue, could not conceal the hatred that probably accompanied her every waking second.

“Who are you?” she said.

I could tell by the rasp that she inhaled at least three packs a day. She stood about twenty feet from me, but that gun shortened the distance between us considerably. This was probably how poor Giovanni felt, scared and cornered, though he had an aluminum bat stashed at his disposal, whereas I was unarmed.

The woman took a threatening step forward. “Who are you?” she asked again. “And what do you want?”

I kept my hands in the air and didn’t take a single step. I went rigid like the Tin Man, but I had a heart, and that organ was pounding away mightily.

“I’m looking for Carl Swain,” I said. My dry throat put a little crack in my voice.

“What for?” she asked. The word
for
came out sounding like “foah.” She took another step forward, keeping the gun pointed at my chest. Her toes curled in the dirt to show me that she was digging in. Hopefully, that meant she wouldn’t be coming any closer. Then again, she could blow me away just fine from this distance.

“I’d like to ask him about Elliot and Tanya Uretsky,” I said.

“Carl’s not here, and you shouldn’t be here, either,” she said. “So get off my property, or I’m going to shoot, and then I’ll call the cops.”

She raised the gun, taking aim with her eye. The skin of her arms where it had loosened from the underlying muscles flapped like two white, sun-spotted wings. Her toes curled deeper into the dirt. I was taking a cautious backward step when I caught movement behind her. It took me a couple blinks of the eye to realize that it was Ruby.

“Stop!” I heard Ruby shout. “You stop it right now!”

The woman whirled around and trained the gun at Ruby’s head. My breath caught in my throat, and I lunged forward, ready to tackle the woman to the ground and wrestle the gun away, but Ruby held up a hand that told me to stay put. So I stayed put.

Wearing her sun hat and glasses, Ruby looked about as threatening as Annie Hall, but she did not back down. Rather, she took a couple steps forward, her finger wagging at the weathered woman like a scolding schoolmarm’s. Ruby, who was a card-carrying member of the ASPCA, who checked food labels for genetically modified organisms, who loved to do yoga before she got sick, who contemplated veganism, and who read Mahatma Gandhi’s biography twice, did not appear ready or even able to preach the power of nonviolence. Instead, she strode right up to the woman and stopped maybe a foot away.

“You put that gun away right now!” Ruby said. My wife ripped off her sunglasses so the seriousness of her expression could not be misunderstood. “Right now!” Ruby said.

The woman hesitated, the standoff in full effect. Ruby didn’t back down, but the woman eventually did. She set the butt of the gun on the ground, the barrel aiming skyward, with one of her knotty hands still positioned near the trigger mechanism, ready to make a quick move if necessary.

“How dare you point a gun at my husband?” Ruby said. “How dare you? You could have killed him!”

“What’s he doing sneaking around my property?” the woman said.

“We weren’t sneaking,” Ruby said. “We knocked on your door.”

“And I rang the bell,” I added.

The woman twisted her neck around to glare at me through those milky, dying eyes. Guess she didn’t need to know that part.

“You get off my property, and don’t ever come here,” she said.

“We have enough trouble just living as it is. Why don’t you leave us alone? My boy hasn’t done nothing to no one. You just leave and leave him be.”

Now, I may not be a professional detective, but even I could deduce that this angry old woman was Carl’s mother. I walked past Mama Meanie, taking quick and purposeful steps. Carl’s mom eyed me with contempt, holding on to the shotgun in a way that reminded me of the
American Gothic
painting. I only wished that she brandished a pitchfork.

Ruby took hold of my hand, and we slinked away backward, instinct telling us that vigilance was still necessary.

The woman followed us to the front of the house. Once again we were back inside Ziggy; once again we were driving away from this neighborhood. I kept looking in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see Carl’s mom standing in the middle of the road, leveling her shotgun and readying it to take a lucky shot. But I saw nothing more than a sunny street and rows of pleasant-looking houses—pleasant except for two of them, Carl Swain’s and Elliot Uretsky’s.

L
eaving never felt so good. Ruby and I were in recovery mode, still breathing hard, still trying to regain our equilibrium. I was driving through neighborhoods I didn’t know very well, using my GPS to guide us back to the apartment on Harvard Avenue—a place I couldn’t really call our home—when my phone rang.

Ruby saw it was Clegg calling, which did nothing to improve her battered spirits.

“Maybe you need to screen your users better, John,” Clegg said before I even got out the word
hello.

“Explain,” I said.

“The Triple I query I ran on this guy Swain came back jackpot. Not only is he a neighbor of this Uretsky guy, but he’s a level three sex offender. We’ve got one count of assault with intent to commit rape, indecent assault and battery on a person aged fourteen or older, and two counts of rape.”

“Crap,” I said. Ruby looked at me. I mouthed the word
rapist
and watched her pale skin turn even paler. “Shouldn’t he be in jail?” I asked.

“He served seven years, then got out,” Clegg said. “Average time behind bars is eleven for rapists, in case you wanted to know.”

I didn’t want to know. Seemed like infinity would be a more fitting sentence for a scumbag like Swain, but what do I know about the law.

“Got any physical stats on him?” I asked.

“White male, forty-six, six feet, two-ten. Hair brown. Eyes brown.”

“Can you send me a picture?”

“Sure. Or you can look him up yourself on the SORB Web site.”

“SORB?” I asked.

“Sex Offender Registry Board.”

“One more question,” I said, signaling to make a left turn. “The address I gave you, is that Mom’s place or his?”

Clegg looked it up. “By
Mom
I’m assuming you mean Lucille Swain, and yes, she’s the registered owner of the property on that address,” he said. “So, is this guy giving you grief? I’ve got plenty of contacts in the Medford PD who would love to pay this piece-o-crap a visit.”

“No. Not really. I’ll just deactivate his account. Thanks for the help.”

“Okay, hombre,” Clegg said. “Call anytime.”

I ended the call, wondering if the next time I tried to reach Clegg, he would be someplace far away, feet high above the earth, smelling the purity of the sky and feeling his soul come alive. I wished I could join him.

“What do you make of that?” Ruby asked after I put my phone away. I shouldn’t have been talking and driving, anyway. At least it wasn’t another crime.

“Well, let’s assess the situation,” I said. “The Uretskys seem to have vanished.”

“True,” Ruby said.

“But Elliot is a murdering psychopath who is still antagonizing us.”

“True, as well.”

“We know he’s going to try and make me commit another felony, and we have no clue what his snake and lotus flower thing means.”

“Kesha,” Ruby said.

“It’s not Kesha,” I said, “but yes, Kesha. Meanwhile, the Uretskys’ neighbor, Ruth Shane, is convinced that Carl Swain has something to do with their disappearance, or at least Tanya Uretsky’s disappearance, and it turns out she has some real reasons to think the way she does. Swain is a registered sex offender with a gun-toting mama.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait for Uretsky to contact me. Today should be the day. And we take it from there.”

We didn’t have to wait long. We were back in the apartment on Harvard Avenue, or “John’s Place,” as Ruby had taken to calling it. Ruby was feeding Ginger, and I was washing the potatoes we would have with dinner. Neither of us had grown accustomed to the fact that while embroiled in this nightmare, Ruby and I were required to observe the rules of life. We had to eat. We had to sleep. We were still alive, and though trapped beneath the shadow of pain and guilt cast by the deaths of Rhonda Jennings and Brooks Hall, we were obliged to live.

I kept my phone by the sink. When it chirped, I drew in a ragged breath, glanced at the text message, and yelled out, “Uretsky!”

Ruby came running over to read it. I assumed his text was untraceable; a guy who knew how to configure routers to hide out on the Internet knew how to send untraceable texts, too.

Uretsky’s text message read: Have you figured out my clue?

I texted him back—what the hell, why not? I was honest, too. I saw no reason to lie. It wouldn’t help us any. I wrote: We couldn’t spell your clue.

He wrote back: LOL! I didn’t think of that. Honestly, this deranged psycho used LOL! Like we were pals having a conversation over a Facebook status. The snake and lotus flower are gripped in Qetesh’s hands.

I showed the phone to Ruby and said, “Google Qetesh. Q-E-T-E-S-H.” Ruby went over to my laptop and typed in the correct spelling. She read for me verbatim what Wikipedia had to say about it. “Qetesh is a Sumerian goddess adopted into Egyptian mythology from the Canaanite religion, popular during the New Kingdom. She was a fertility goddess of sacred ecstasy and sexual pleasure.”

“What the heck?” I said, mulling that over. “Google the snake and lotus flower and Qetesh.”

Ruby did just that. “There’s a stone carving of Qetesh that shows her standing on the back of a lion. She’s holding snakes in one hand and a lotus flower in the other. According to what I’m reading here, these are symbols of creation. John, what is he planning?”

I heard the slight tremor in Ruby’s voice. Her alert eyes were wary.

What do you want from us? I texted to Uretsky.

The bastard typed a three-word reply: Check your in-box.

I
’d been through this before, so I expected everything that happened next, or I should say that I wasn’t surprised. I followed the instructions and looked at the admin e-mail account for my
One World
game. Right at the top of the queue was an e-mail from Elliot Uretsky. The time stamp on the e-mail read one minute in the past, and the message contained only a link, which I clicked without hesitation.

An on-screen prompt appeared, asking me if I wanted to allow a two-way video chat. No, of course I didn’t want to, but I did it, anyway. I had to. I also knew that the Web page that loaded ran through the same anonymous proxy server Uretsky had used before, to broadcast poor Dr. Adams’s misery.

The black rectangular shape centered on the Web page gave way to a depressingly familiar image, one that filled me with horror and rage all over again. I gazed upon the concrete windowless room, nondescript in every way except for a single lightbulb that dangled above a sturdy oak desk chair. I couldn’t feel the dampness of the room, but I could hear the echoes of dripping water from a corroded copper pipe—but only when the woman beneath that pipe wasn’t making muted cries for help.

I couldn’t see the gag silencing those cries, because a bag made from a velvety silk cloth, one that shone like a panther’s fur in the dim room, had been placed over her head. Her hands, white skin tanned to a shade of brown, were bound to the arms of the chair, and I assumed her feet were secured as well. I also assumed the chair was bolted to the floor; otherwise, her thrashing would have toppled it over.

Uretsky’s face filled the screen—not his face, really, but the mask of Mario from the
Super Mario Bros.
video game. Uretsky had used the same character as his Facebook avatar. The red hat, bulbous nose, and trademark mustache of Mario were all there, but Uretsky had cut out eyeholes where the mask’s eyes should have been, and he cut a hole for his mouth as well.

“John, how nice to see you again,” Uretsky said. That voice, soulless as the dead, chilled my skin. “You’re looking unwell, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“What . . . ,” I said, trying to catch my breath, finding it hard to speak. “What are you doing?”

Ruby got her face in front of the laptop’s camera and shouted, “Stop it! Stop it now! You let her go!”

Uretsky screamed loudly in response, with a high-pitched shriek, not unlike the noise of a boiling teakettle, a yell so piercing that we were both silenced.

“I can’t think when you two are shouting at me,” Uretsky said.

“Well, we can’t talk to you with that mask on. Take it off, you coward.”

“Can’t do that, John,” Uretsky replied. “You might take a picture.”

“You’re not a felon. I checked.”

I regretted the words the moment they slipped out of my mouth. “You checked up on me?” Uretsky said, his voice rising with surprise.

“On the Internet.” I spoke quickly, crafting a suitable lie without much fumbling. “I used a Web search to look you up. Not the police. I didn’t violate the rules.”

Uretsky stepped back from the camera, pondering. He nodded, slowly and several times, and I thought I could see the faint outline of a smile inside that grotesque mask. “Oh, very well. You didn’t cheat. So, what did you find?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “But I do know about Carl Swain.”

I fixed my gaze upon Uretsky’s eyes when I said Swain’s name, searching every pixel of the grainy video feed for a slight glimmer of recognition, a hint that I’d struck a nerve. Did he know Swain? Was there some connection? Behind the ovals he had cut out for eyeholes, I saw nothing but the black infinity of death. If Uretsky wondered about my non sequitur, he didn’t say.

“I’ve made sure to keep my face off the Internet. You don’t know what I look like, and that’s part of the fun. I want to keep this mask on, and I want you two to keep playing my game. Is that understood?”

What other choice did I have but to nod?

“Now then,” Uretsky continued. “Have you figured out what you’re to do next?”

“Qetesh,” I said.

“Yes, Qetesh, a luscious Sumerian goddess. Her name means ‘holy woman,’ ” Uretsky said. “A goddess of sacred ecstasy and sexual pleasures. So, do you get it yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, it’s going to be a dandy good time,” Uretsky said. “But I decided that you’ll need a bit more incentive than Dr. Adams’s life to pull this one off.”

Uretsky stepped away from the camera, giving us a clear view of the woman strapped to the chair, still struggling mightily, albeit futilely, to break free. Uretsky, mask on, materialized behind the woman, as though conjured from the ether. In a sweeping motion, he ripped off the hood covering the head of his prisoner. Ruby gripped the back of my chair in response.

“Mom?” Ruby’s shaky, uncertain voice caught in her throat. Eventually, after recognition set in, once the brain had time to process the inconceivable, Ruby shouted, “Mom!”

It took me a moment longer to register what I was seeing, but there she was, Winifred Dawes, Ruby’s mom, tied to that chair and somehow Uretsky’s prisoner.

Ruby began to scream. Her anguished cries, so visceral, so instinctual, went far beyond any sound I had ever heard from my wife. “Mom!” Ruby shouted again and again before the sobs took over.

Ruby, hyperventilating, couldn’t speak for a minute or so. She lost her footing, and I gave her my chair, while I leaned in close to get level with the camera. Ruby’s eyes stayed fixed on her mother. I didn’t know if Winnie could see her daughter, but the pain etched on her face whenever Ruby spoke told me that, at a minimum, she could hear her voice.

“Please . . . please, Elliot,” Ruby managed to say. “You could just let her go . . . let her go, now. Okay? You could do that.”

Winnie, with her short and spiky hair, bleached blond in some spots, left brown in others, and her skin pruned by the persistent Caribbean sun, should have seemed a familiar sight, but here, in this dark prison, she was barely recognizable. Her bright blue eyes were as wide as two quarters, but I couldn’t get a good look at her face. She kept shaking her head, as though her hair were on fire. The ball gag in her mouth, I suspected, had once been in poor Dr. Adams’s mouth, too.

“I’d make the introductions, but I know you’re already well acquainted,” Uretsky said from behind Winnie. “And you’re going to have to push the limits to save this sweet lady’s life . . . or not.”

“Let her go,” I said. We still had a chance to save Winnie’s life if we did whatever Uretsky had in mind. Perhaps that was why my voice came out sounding oddly calm. “She’s done nothing to you. Come get me instead, dammit!”

Winnie nodded a vigorous yes. Son-in-law or not, she’d switch places with me in a heartbeat. I couldn’t blame her. That was just the survival instinct kicking in.

“Doesn’t work like that,” Uretsky said. “You’ve got more crimes to commit, John . . .” Here Uretsky paused . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . and then he said two words that truly chilled my bones. “And Ruby.”

I hated that he’d even spoken my wife’s name. The privilege wasn’t his. Besides, this wasn’t about her; it was about me, and what I’d done to him, or so I thought.

But in that very next instant, I knew. Qetesh. Sacred ecstasy. Sexual pleasure. Uretsky wanted Ruby to commit the next crime, not me. And I knew what the crime was, too.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t do this. There’s got to be another way.”

“No,” Uretsky said. “The show must go on.” The mask made Uretsky’s low voice sound hollow and breathy, more terrifying. “Now, Ruby, aren’t you at all curious how I managed to get your mom to be my guest here?”

Each ragged breath Ruby took sounded like a record skipping. She managed only to say, “Please let her go. Mommy, I love you. Don’t worry. We’re going to save you. I’ll do anything.”

Uretsky put the bag over Winnie’s head again. He came around in front of her chair to face the camera.

“I called your mom and pretended to be one of John’s climbing buddies, told her we were the closest of friends,” Uretsky said. “I also broke the good news that you’d gone into complete remission, that the meds had worked wonders, and I was putting together a big surprise party in your honor. You and John knew nothing about this, of course, but I was arranging the flights and accommodations for all the out-of-town relatives. Guess who picked her up curbside at the terminal?”

Behind Uretsky, I could see Winnie thrashing about like her chair was electrified.

“This isn’t an acquaintance’s life hanging in the balance. It’s Mom. Good relationship or not, she’s still your mother, Ruby. How far are you willing to go to save her? What will you do? Can you be transformed? Those are my questions. Questions that demand answers.”

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

“Not you,” Uretsky said, confirming my darkest fear. “Ruby is going to have to participate this time.”

“What do you want?” I asked again.

“Qetesh represents divine sexual pleasure. Ruby is going to provide someone with the real deal.”

“She has cancer, you sick bastard,” I said.

“The crime she is to commit is one of the oldest known professions.”

Ruby got her face level with the camera. She didn’t flinch from Uretsky’s eyes—eyes swimming with madness. “Tell me,” she said.

“You will go to a bar of my choosing, and there you will proposition a stranger for sex in exchange for cash. You will whore yourself to this strange man and bring him to a hotel room that I’ve set up for this rendezvous. I’ve taped an envelope to the front right tire of your car.” Ruby and I glanced at each other, thinking the same thing: He was here? “Inside that envelope you’ll find the address to the hotel I’ve rented under the name John Bodine, and the key card to your room. You will also find the name and address of the nearby bar where you will select your client. You will let him have his way with you, whatever his desire, and then, once it’s over, you’ll take his money. You have twenty-four hours to complete this task. Simple as that.”

“And if I don’t?” Ruby asked, her voice a whimper.

Uretsky held up the pruning shears for us both to see. “Then I’ll strip your mother of her fingers, one by one, before I strip her of her life.”