Taken (12 page)

“May we see your neck?” Sergeant Andruksen asked Gregg.

“It's no big deal,” Gregg said.

“I'd like to see it,” Sergeant Andruksen said. It sounded like an order, not a request.

Gregg turned reluctantly and tugged down the neck of the sweater he was wearing. Sergeant Andruksen and Detective Carlysle both looked.

“When exactly did this happen?”

“The Monday after Stephanie disappeared,” my mom said. “Isn't that right, Greg?”

Gregg nodded.

“It looks like it must have hurt,” Sergeant Andruksen said. “Mrs. Rawls is right. That chain really cut into your neck. What happened to it? Where is it now?”

“It fell down a drain at work,” my mom said. “Isn't that what you told me, Gregg?”

“Yeah.”

“But he still has the medallion,” my mom said. “He managed to catch it before it fell into the drain too.” She reached out and squeezed Gregg's hand. Sergeant Andruksen and Detective Carlysle exchanged glances.

“That was quick thinking, under the circumstances,” Sergeant Andruksen said.

“I guess that's the only luck we had,” my mom said. “Until Stephanie came home again.” Her eyes teared up. “I was going to buy Gregg a new chain, but, well, you know, I had more important things on my mind.” She sniffled.

Sergeant Andruksen reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph. He held it out to Gregg. It was a picture of the chain I had found.

“Did your chain look anything like this?” he asked.

Gregg looked at the photo. He shook his head. “I'm not sure. It was a just a regular chain,” he said.

Sergeant Andruksen showed the picture to my mom. She seemed surprised to see it, but she studied it carefully before answering.

“That looks like the same kind of chain I bought Gregg,” she said. “Why?”

“Stephanie says she pulled a chain—this chain— off her attacker,” Sergeant Andruksen said. “It's a fairly sturdy chain, but as you can see, it's broken. If Stephanie pulled hard enough to break it, then it must have left quite a mark on the neck of whoever was wearing it.”

My mom's eyes widened.

“Surely you don't think that Gregg had anything to do with what happened to Stephanie,” she said.

Sergeant Andruksen looked at Gregg.

“Would you be willing to volunteer a dna sample, Mr. Hamilton?” he said.

“A DNA sample? What for?” Gregg said.

“To eliminate you as a suspect.”

“Suspect?” Gregg looked furious. “You think
I
kidnapped Stephanie? I'm about to marry her mom. She's going to be my stepdaughter. No, I would not be willing to volunteer a dna sample. How dare you accuse me!” He put an arm around my mom. “That's it,” he said. “Please leave this house.”

“I'm afraid we can't do that,” Sergeant Andruksen said calmly. He produced a document from his jacket pocket. “We have a search warrant.”

“Search warrant? What for?”

“To search this house and your apartment.” He nodded to the two police officers on the porch. They stepped inside. “Where is your run book, Mr. Hamilton?”

“My run book?”

“It's on the desk in the kitchen,” I said. Gregg gave me a sharp look.

My mom was staring at me. She seemed to have no idea what was going on. One of the police officers disappeared into the kitchen.

“We're also going to need the clothes you were wearing last Saturday—and the footwear. You can either give it to us or we can seize everything.”

“This is crazy,” my mom said.

“Mr. Hamilton?”

“I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt,” Gregg said. “But they've been washed.”

“What about a jacket?” Sergeant Andruksen said. “And shoes?”

“I had on a brown leather jacket,” Gregg said. “It's in the closet. So are my boots.”

“Show the officer.”

Gregg pointed them out for the second cop. The first one returned with the run book and handed it to Sergeant Andruksen, who flipped through it and then passed it to Detective Carlysle. He looked through it too.

“We need to ask you some more questions, Mr. Hamilton,” he said. “You too, Mrs. Rawls. We'd like you to come with us.”

My mom looked startled.

“What for? I don't understand.”

“Are you arresting us?” Gregg demanded. “Because we don't have to go with you unless you arrest us.”

“You're not under arrest,” Sergeant Andruksen said. “But you want to help us figure out exactly what happened to Stephanie, don't you?”

“Of course we do,” my mom said. “But—”

A cell phone trilled. Sergeant Andruksen pulled a phone out of his pocket and stepped aside to answer it. I heard him mention a name: Zeke. When he had finished the call, he waved Detective Carlysle over. They spoke quietly together. Then Sergeant Andruksen said, “You can either come with us now, Mr. Hamilton, or we can wait here until I can get someone to bring over an arrest warrant.”

“An arrest warrant?” my mom said. “For what? Gregg hasn't done anything.”

“Mr. Hamilton?” Sergeant Andruksen said.

Gregg looked at the door and then at the two uniformed cops. He didn't say anything.

SEVENTEEN

T
he police handcuffed Gregg, and the two uniformed police officers took him to the police station in the back of a squad car. My mom and I rode with Sergeant Andruksen and Detective Carlysle. When we got there, Detective Carlysle took Gregg into one interview room, and Sergeant Andruksen went with my mom into another one. I waited in the outer office. While Sergeant Andruksen talked to mom, another police officer called him out of the room and talked to him. The same police officer knocked on the door of the other interview room and said something to Detective Carlysle. Finally Sergeant Andruksen came and sat down beside me.

“Where's my mom?” I said.

“She's making a formal statement.”

“A formal statement? She didn't do anything, did she?”

“No. But we need to record what she knows about the accident and about Gregg's whereabouts the day you disappeared.”

“It was him, wasn't it?” I felt kind of shaky when I thought about him. He had been practically living at my house. He had been going to marry my mom. “He's the serial killer.”

“He's the person who drugged you and left you in that shack, Stephanie. He admitted it. He didn't have much choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“We found trace amounts of blood on that chain. They match Gregg's blood type. We also found trace amounts of blood on the collar of his jacket. When we do a dna analysis, we'll be able to confirm that it's his blood on that chain.”

I had figured out as much when I saw the mark on his neck.

“What about that mark on his shirt? Did he tell you about that?” I asked.

“It was makeup.”

“Makeup?”

“When he came to the police station that time, knowing you were alive, he covered the mark on his neck, just in case. I guess he didn't want to have to answer any awkward questions. We also have a link between him and that shack you were in.”

“You
found
the shack?”

“Zeke did. He backtracked you. He found a shack that matches the description you gave me, and he found the rope that was used to tie you up. It turns out the shack belonged to an uncle of an old friend of Gregg's. The place has been abandoned for fifteen years or so. Gregg's friend hasn't been to it since his uncle died. He was surprised to hear that the place was still standing. But Gregg knew. And you were right about the night you were taken. Gregg had a run booked up around Birch Lake. He was supposed to drive up there and back.”

“And he didn't make the trip?”

“He made it. But he showed up about six hours later than he was supposed to. He told the manager at one of the machine locations that he had some kind of family emergency.” Sergeant Andruksen paused to let everything sink in. “We also found a gas-station operator near Ogden who remembered that Gregg had stopped there for gas late Saturday night.”

“Ogden?” I said. “That's nowhere near Birch Lake.”

“No, it isn't, which accounts for some of the lost time,” Sergeant Andruksen said. “Birch Lake isn't far from Angel Falls, and it's even closer to that shack. We decided to check if anyone had seen him in the vicinity of the cabin, and we found the gas-station operator. We also talked to the manager of the store where your mother says she bought the medallion and chain for Gregg. He had a copy of the receipt, and he was able to identify the chain as identical to the one he sold your mother.”

I was still having trouble believing it.

“Gregg is a serial killer.”

Sergeant Andruksen was silent for a moment.

“About the other two girls who were taken,” he said finally. “Both of them were buried in shallow graves, which means that they didn't escape like you did. Somebody buried them—most likely the same person who murdered them. They'd been chained, not tied with a rope. And we found no evidence that they'd been drugged.”

At first I didn't understand what he was telling me. What difference did it make that Gregg had used chains on the other two girls and a rope on me? What difference did it make that they hadn't been drugged? Then I remembered what Derek Fowler had told everyone in school: serials killers are all about patterns and rituals. Sergeant Andruksen was telling me that what had happened to me didn't fit the same pattern as what had happened to those other two girls.

“You don't think Gregg took those girls, do you?” I said.

“We're pretty sure he didn't. The dna sample will confirm it for us. But he was afraid that's exactly what we thought, especially with all the evidence we had that he'd been lying to us. That's why he confessed.”

I started to shake as I thought about what that meant.

“It was me,” I said. “He just wanted to kill me.”

“He took advantage of the disappearances of those other two girls,” Sergeant Andruksen said softly. “He was well aware of the similarities between you and them in terms of age and appearance. He used that to make it seem that you were the third victim. He drugged you, tied you up and left you in that shack, where he was pretty sure no one would find you—until it was too late. He said he planned to go back there eventually and…” He didn't finish his sentence. He didn't have to. I remembered how those other two girls had been found.

“But why?” I said. “Why would he do that to me?”

“He said he did it because he loved your mother.”

“He did it for
her
?”

Sergeant Andruksen shook his head. “He did it because when he met your mother, it was just the two of them. You were up north with your grandfather. He said everything was different when you came back. He wanted her for himself. He said they had plans together.”

They were going to start a business. They were going to use the money my dad had left.

“He also said that every time you and your mother got into an argument, your mother would say they'd have to wait. She told him she didn't want you any more upset than you already were after what happened to your father, and to give you time, that you would change your mind about him once you got to know him better. Gregg was tired of waiting.”

I wasn't sure I wanted to ask the next question, but I had to know.

“And my mom?”

“What about her?”

“Did she know?”

“He says she didn't.”

He says.

“Do you believe him?”

“We have no evidence to suggest otherwise.”

No evidence? What did that mean?

“Did she know or not?” I said.

“We've talked to the chief of police here, and to her friends. She seemed genuinely distraught over your disappearance, Stephanie. We have no reason to doubt that her emotions were real.”

I wanted more than that. I wanted a definite no: No, your mother didn't know anything about it. We're one hundred percent positive.

My mom came out of the interview room. Her reddened eyes and puffy face told me that she had been crying. She asked if she could see Gregg.

“I'm afraid not,” Sergeant Andruksen said. “I'll get someone to take you and Stephanie home.”

My mom was so upset. She kept saying she couldn't believe what was happening. She said she'd thought she'd known him so well. She'd been going to marry him. He'd even talked about starting a new family.

“How could I have been so wrong?” she said. She said it over and over again for a long time. It really shook her up that she hadn't even begun to guess what was going on. She said it so often and looked so upset every time that I was finally convinced that she'd had no idea what Gregg was up to. I heard her tell one of her friends she was never going to get married again. She wasn't even sure she wanted to date. “How can I trust my judgment?” she said.

Gregg went to prison.

But the cops didn't find the serial killer. As far as I know, he's still out there. I never take shortcuts anymore. I don't even like to walk alone. And if I have to be somewhere after dark, I always call my mom, and she always comes to get me.

NORAH MCCLINTOCK is a five-time winner of the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award for Best Juvenile Crime Novel. Although Norah is a freelance editor, she still manages to write at least one novel a year. She lives with her family in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.