The Victim (60 page)

“
This Court will recess for twenty-four hours to allow sufficient time for the witness to be located and returned to this court. If the witness cannot be located by that time, the court will entertain any motions for a mistrial.”

Morales smiled, delighted by her own decisiveness.

Diego brought the jury back in as everyone stood, honoring the commitment they had no choice in undertaking. Their faces were fraught with annoyance. Their thoughts turned to how this process could entirely uproot their lives, and put their jobs, families, and sense of control on indefinite hold.

Morales delicately explained that some legal matters needed to be taken care of and that they would break early for the day. They were given the same instructions about avoiding news websites, social media, and discussing the case with anybody. They were ordered to return tomorrow at a quarter to three.

Some of them quietly sighed with relief at the thought of twenty-four hours of free time. A few others seemed even more pained at the thought of this trial dragging on another day.

Morales thanked them and all rose, watching as the jury exited the courtroom single-file. Anton felt his phone vibrating on his belt. Discreetly, he thumb-flicked the magnetic snap and slid the phone into the palm of his hand. Gina was calling. Not much he could do about it now. He pressed
decline
.

The jury left and Morales returned her attention to the lawyers, wanting to nail down some housekeeping measures before excusing everyone for the day. Anton felt his phone vibrating again. Gina. It was usually understood that if he didn’t answer the first time he was either in court, on the other line, or with a client. A pang of anxiety seized him. He rapped his fingers on the tabletop, his thighs shaking impatiently as Morales took her time going over routine matters.

A short vibration from the phone. A text. He positioned his hands under the table to view it. It was Gina.

Call now! 911!

Something thick and bitter bubbled up into his throat and he reeled forward, his hands bracing himself on the edge of the table. He choked back the vomit. His heart raced beyond control, a breakneck rhythm of about two hundred beats per minute that placed him well above his ability to handle his motor skills. He could barely close his hand in a fist. His lips twitched and trembled. His worst fears eroded away his insides, a stabbing acidic burn.

His defense mechanisms clicked on, a faint voice inside his head trying to remind him that sometimes Gina’s idea of a
Call now! 911!
text was nothing more than a stopped-up garbage disposal or a power outage. He mustered a calming breath that slowed his heart rate, a temporary peace interrupted by another call.

This was serious.

Morales was talking but he heard no sound, only recognized the changes in pitch and shifting in her seat that court was adjourned. She rose and walked down the steps and Anton bolted for the door, throwing it open with a two-handed thrust, bumping the glass vestibule door ajar with his hip and squeezing out into the hall. He sprinted for the spot by the emergency doors where he got the best cell reception. His jittery hands nearly dropped the phone. He fumbled and pressed the wrong keys as he punched numbers into the touchscreen, doing what he could with his numbing dexterity.

The phone rang an eternal ring. A second.

On the third, she answered, “
Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!
”

He could make out the words but they were unformed. Just guttural blasts of primitive sound, unearthly almost, like something out of a Pentecostal mass. Without having to know more, Anton’s cheeks jerked involuntarily, tears flooded his eyes and poured down. His mind was a tornado of worst-case scenarios. Survival kicked into gear, ready to prepare him for acceptance.

Through his quivering lips he barked, “What happened?”
There was no reply, just a long shrill cry, an expulsion of emotion with no regard for breath.
“What happened?”
He shouted louder, his frustration matching his fear.
“Goddammit, what happened
?”

“
Sh…sh…she’s…she…” Gina was hyperventilating, her words catching before she could finish them. Anton closed his eyes, tears streaming off his face, making spatter marks on his jacket. “Char…Charley…Charley’s…”

A creaking sound escaped his throat as his forehead fell against the wall. The grip on his phone loosened although it remained planted to his clammy palm.

“
Oh my God, what happened?”

“
She’s…
gone…
”

CHAPTER 67

His tires screeched, leaving trails of white smoke as he took the curve of his street at sixty miles per hour, nearly broad siding a landscaping truck. He stomped on the brake, his forward movement caught by the taut seatbelt, and parked at an angle across the driveway behind Gina’s SUV and Luisa’s Dodge Caravan.

She’s gone.

The words spread through his brain like a tumor. His forearms tensed, strengthening his grip on the steering wheel. He chomped down on his folded tongue and looked at his hands, the implements of bone-snapping, eye-gouging torture that would be visited upon anybody who dared touch his child.

He threw himself out of the car, stumbling, snapping a plastic sprinkler head with the toe of his shoe. The car chimed as he left the door open and the keys in the ignition, trampling his pentas as he cut across the lawn and burst through the front door.

Gina sat on the living room sofa, her eyes adrift in a catatonic gaze. She was clutching Charley’s stuffed bunny, the ears stiff and crusted with dried baby spit. Anton slowed his progress, stopping dead in the foyer, eerily recognizing that gaze.
Déjà vu
set in, transporting him back nearly eleven months earlier, his white-knuckled hands shaking Gina’s shoulders as she lay on the sofa in a mental state somewhere between reality and elsewhere.

He thought about the fear—strikingly similar to that which he was feeling at the moment. The stark realization that their newborn had been left for over an hour inside of a sweltering car.

Gina held the bunny to her chest, rocking back and forth with her eyes fixed on the wall. She said nothing, acknowledged Anton’s arrival in no manner at all. Luisa and Marta stood at the far end of the living room, their eyes glistening with tears, their faces wrought with the horror that they were somehow responsible for all of this.

Anton took cautious steps as if approaching a wounded animal he didn’t want to startle. He sat in one of the wicker chairs beside the sofa, pulled it close so that he could put his hands on Gina’s knees. She was trembling.

“
Gina,” he spoke softly, hypnotic almost. “What happened?”

Nothing. Shock had rendered her useless. She swayed back and forth, her stare unwavering.

“
Gina?” Anger crept into his voice. “Gina, tell me what happened!”

He glanced at Luisa and Marta, who looked away, embarrassed, as if they shouldn’t be seeing this. Clearly, they were bothered by the dystopia in the home of a young upper-middle class white family, contradicting all that they understood about the way these people lived. Not that they needed to understand things. They were just there to clean their houses.

No response. She brought the bunny up to her nose, breathing in the sour milk odor of the chewed-up ears.

He could feel himself starting to simmer but he got it under control before it could materialize. Was this a relapse of her postpartum psychosis?

The tension in his hands dug his splayed fingers into her knees.

“
Gina? Gina? For fuck’s sake, Gina, where the hell is she?”

“
Umm…Meester Anton?” A slight voice came from across the room. He looked up. Luisa stood nervously, knees close together, her hands clasped at her waist. “Umm…eh…I try to tell her but she no listen.”

He exhaled, annoyed. “What?”

She sensed his tone, smiled awkwardly. “Eh…how you say…” She twirled her hand, trying to find the English translation. She tapped her head. “Eh…
mujer con pelo negro.
”

The lady with black hair.

Something in Gina snapped her out of it because when Anton opened his eyes and blinked through the murky veil of tears, Gina was looking right at him.

“
What?” She took his hands in his. “What is it? What did she say? Do you know where Charley is?”

He mustered up enough voice to whisper, “Yes.”

Her eyes widened with relief. She tightened her grip, shaking his hands. “Oh my God, where is she?” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Anton, where is she? Is she okay?”

“
Yeah.” He closed his eyes, breathing hard through his nose. “I’m sure Charley’s fine. I don’t think she would hurt a child. She’s just trying to get to me, that’s all.”

“
Who? Who are…Anton, what…?” Panic trembled in her voice. “What’s going on here?”

He brought her hands up to his lips, kissing them.

“
Just sit here with me for one minute. That’s all I ask, hard as it may be. Just one minute. Because I want to be able to remember this minute for the rest of my life. This is the last minute of our old lives. Before everything changes forever.”

He swallowed a breath and told her everything.

CHAPTER 68

Cleaning out his nightstand, Anton picked up the iron gun safe, laid flat at the bottom of the drawer, roughly the same size and dimensions as a laptop. He dropped it on the bed, its substantial weight sinking into the mattress. He twisted the combination lock until the tumbler clicked and the lid popped open.

Nestled in foam padding was his home defense piece. A Colt Anaconda, a massive stainless steel revolver, full-barreled with a black rubber grip. He ejected the cylinder and let the bullets fall into his open palm. Each .44 magnum round was the size of his pinky.

He reloaded the weapon and placed it back in the safe, closing it and setting it at the bottom of his suitcase, open and unzipped, lying on the top of the bed. The orders had been simple and disturbingly curt.

Get out.

He could hear Gina crying in the other room. So much had just been laid upon her he couldn’t figure out which haunted her more. First and foremost, the whereabouts of their daughter had her paralyzed, her hand gripped tight around her cell phone unable to punch the two 1’s after dialing 9 on the keypad. Halted, in part, upon Anton’s assistance, who figured that police involvement would only cause Lola to panic. Panic that could have grave consequences.

He assured her that Lola wouldn’t hurt Charlotte, a premise in which his confidence was shaky. Although he presumed that given her upbringing, the last thing she would want to do is hurt an eleven-month-old baby.

“
She’s after me,” he had pleaded, reaching out to grab her shoulder as she scurried away from him.

She whipped around, smacked away his hand. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”

“
She wouldn’t hurt Charley.”

Gina’s eyes bulged. She set her hands firmly upon her hips. “Oh, you know that, do you? Fucking some crazy bitch makes you a goddamn mind reader?” The tension waned; her shoulders drooped. “How could you do this to me? To our family? I mean, I feel like I’m staring at a total stranger. You tell me you killed two people when you were in college, this woman who knew those two people is your client’s wife, you cheat on me with her, and now you say she’s come in here and taken our daughter?”

The ploy had Lola’s name all over it. Upon further inquiry, Luisa admitted—in a flux of Spanish and broken English—that the black-haired lady walked right in with an air of familiarity and introduced herself as Gina’s sister. She had announced, in perfect Spanish, that she was there to pick up the baby.