Abandoned: A Thriller (13 page)

James scowls. “Stop wasting time.”

“Ready?” I ask Alan.

He downs the last of his coffee, rolling his eyes heavenward in what I could swear is a brief prayer of thanks. He caps his thermos and stands up. “Ready,” he says.

Callie is pouting. I pat her on the cheek. “None of us is going to ask because we all know how it went,” I tell her.

She sniffs once, but seems mollified and follows James out the door.

Alan and I are driving to the hospital, both lost in our own thoughts.

We have an almost exact time period to put to Heather Hollister’s imprisonment. Eight years. It’s mind-boggling. Too much to take in. I think of all the changes just in my own life in that time and I am aghast. She’s missed everything.

I imagine there’s an empty coffin in a cemetery somewhere, perhaps filled with trinkets placed there by her family, friends, and coworkers. A headstone, maybe? What would it say?
Heather Hollister, beloved wife and mother? Mother and wife?
Which comes first—the eternal battle.

“You want to talk to her, or should I?” Alan asks.

“Let’s see who she responds to first. If she responds at all.”

He nods his agreement.

Eight years. That explains the scars. The doctor said that she was sun-deprived. Did that mean he’d kept her in the dark the whole time? A shiver runs through me.

How would I deal with that? Eight years shackled in the dark?

“Badly,” I murmur, before realizing I’ve said it aloud.

“What’s that?” Alan asks.

“I was wondering how I’d deal with eight years of prison with no sun.”

“Yeah.”

The sun is pale, which reminds me of Heather Hollister’s dusty alabaster
skin. I decide to change the subject. “Did you give any more thought to the whole strike team thing?” I ask Alan.

“’Course I did. Talked to Elaina too.”

“And?”

“She agrees. I’ll stick with you on the start-up, if you decide to do it. After that, we’ll see. No promises.”

“Thanks, Alan,” I say, and I mean it.

He gives me a sidelong glance. “You decided yet?”

“Not officially.”

He smiles at my answer. “So that’s a yes, then?”

“It’s a probably.”

“If you say so.”

I stick my tongue out at him. “You know, it’s funny, but I can’t help thinking about the early women in the FBI.”

“Duckstein and Davidson.”

My mouth drops open. “You know about them?”

He fakes affront. “Hey, I have depth, you know.”

“And Lenore Houston.”

“Right.”

Alaska Davidson, Jessie Duckstein, and Lenore Houston served in the “Bureau of Investigation” before it was known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover took over the FBI in 1924. By 1928, all three were gone, at Hoover’s behest. They were the last female agents until 1972, when Hoover died. Things are different now. More than two thousand women serve, and gender lines are largely blurred. Results speak loudest, doing what we do.

“I remember reading about those three women and how angry it made me.”

“It should have. They got it even worse than the black man, and that’s saying something. There weren’t many, but even African American agents were doing investigations in the twenties, thirties, and forties.”

“Now we’ve had an African American president who fought a woman to get the Democratic nomination,” I muse. “Things change. I’m always kind of proud each time something like that happens for women. If that makes sense.”

“’Course it does. I count coup sometimes myself. We’re here,” he says, turning into the hospital parking lot.

Counting coup, I think. Great phrase.

I whisk everything else from my mind and focus on the problem of Heather Hollister. We need to see if we can get her to talk to us.

We’re in her hospital room, sitting next to her bed. I’m a little bit closer than Alan. Odds are, it was a man who did this to her. She might feel safest with a woman.

Her eyes are open, but I’m not sure if they’re really seeing anything. They are roving, in constant, endless, nervous motion, flicking from my face to the fluorescent bulbs above her to the barred window on her left that lets in the light. It’s outside that her gaze goes to most, I observe.

“Heather?” I ask. “Heather Hollister?”

The eyes flick at me, but she doesn’t answer or show any signs of recognition. Her pallor is still ghostly. It’s not the clean white of poured milk; there are too many scars. New scabs cover her shaved scalp and forearms, which will heal and then turn into scars of their own.

I watch as she chews her lower lip, biting hard enough once to draw blood. She winces and stops biting. A moment later, the behavior repeats. She breathes with her mouth open—quick, shallow breaths. The breathing reminds me of a cat in a hot car I saw at the mall one time. It was July, and the summer that year was sweltering. The cat was panting like a dog, and its eyes were rolling. The solution then was easy: I smashed the car window and removed the cat. I left a note saying I was from the FBI and giving my name and cell phone number and why I’d smashed the window. I said I was taking the cat to a no-kill shelter and even gave the address of the shelter. I never heard from the owner of the car, and neither did the shelter. The cat was adopted.

No windows here, I think, and she’s no cat.

“Heather?” I try again.

She laughs, an awful braying laugh, like a donkey trying to speak human. I jerk back, startled by its suddenness. It stops just as suddenly, and the eyes go back to roving. Her right hand goes to her left forearm, and she starts picking.

“No, no, honey,” I say, keeping my voice as soft and soothing as I can. I reach over to move her hand away.

“Nooooo!”
she screams, jerking away from me. Her mouth opens a
little and she juts her chin out. It’s meant to be a gesture of defiance. It makes her look primitive, cavewomanish. I pull my hand away. “Sorry,” I say.

She starts picking again. The eyes go back to roving. “She’s not ready,” Alan says.

I want him to be wrong, but I know he’s right. Some part of me—the selfish, ugly part—wants to shake her, tell her to snap out of it. It only lasts a second, though.

I reach into my purse and find a business card. I show it to Heather. “This is my card, Heather. It has my name and my number on it. I’m from the FBI, and I want to find the man who did this to you. When you’re ready to talk, just ask for me.” I stand up and lay the card on her bedside table, at the base of the humongous lamp. “Let’s go,” I say to Alan.

I don’t think she even notices that we’ve left the room.

“What’s the verdict, Doctor?” I ask.

Dr. Mills appears to be a decent guy. He’s in his mid-to-late thirties, balding early, and he looks like he’s probably tired all the time, but I sense genuine care there. I tend to be sensitive to that kind of thing.

“She’s got various vitamin and calcium deficiencies. We’re working to correct those. She needs to put on some weight. Aside from that, she has no other major physical problems. I expect her to bounce back.” He sighs. “Mentally? That’s another story. I’ve asked for a psych consult, which will happen this afternoon. She’s obviously in the middle of a psychotic episode. I’m fine keeping her where she’s at temporarily, but she needs medication and psychiatric help.”

“What about the picking thing?” I ask. “Biting her lips?”

“I’m actually encouraged by that.”

Alan frowns. “Come again?”

“She stops after doing superficial harm to herself. Look, I’ve had people in here who have cut off their own noses; I had a guy who said he was a reincarnation of van Gogh, which is why he’d chopped off both of his ears with a set of gardening shears and sent them to the object of his affection. Heather knows when to stop. That’s a good sign.”

“You’ll let us know of any change? I left my card on her bedside table.”

“Of course. And please find out if she had a general practitioner. If I can get her old medical records, I’d appreciate it.”

Alan stops and turns as we’re walking away. “Two ears? I thought van Gogh only cut off one?”

Dr. Mills shrugs. It’s a tired shrug, to go with his tired face. “He said just one didn’t work last time.”

Callie calls me as we’re getting onto the freeway. She talks as I watch the hills of burned grass and fire-withered trees roll by. The last few years of wildfires have been especially hard on Southern California.

“Heather Hollister’s partner on the job died of a heart attack last year,” she begins, “but I have the case files.”

“What did you tell the locals?”

“I told them that profiling was an ever-evolving science and that we’re going over old cases with a new eye in the hopes that we’d see something we missed before.”

“Where are you now?”

“About twenty minutes from the office.”

I check the exit sign to see where we are. “We’ll see you there in thirty.” I hang up. “Callie got the case files,” I tell Alan.

He nods. “Good. Let’s get some meat on this bone. I feel like a dog gnawing air.”

Callie holds the case file as she sits in her desk chair. Alan nurses his coffee, while James sits with both arms on his desk, hands folded, like a schoolboy. I’m standing at the dry-erase whiteboard, marker in hand.

This is one of our methods, started on the first day of the first case we all worked together. I remember that day now, for some reason. I was nervous, not quite thirty, uncertain. I’d been involved with the FBI for years, my responsibilities steadily increasing, but this had been a quantum leap. I was now a boss, in charge of life and death and catching the creatures so concerned with these things in Los Angeles. I felt vulnerable and terrified.

I’d overdressed, wearing an expensive tailored blue business outfit, which I never wore again. James had just shocked me with some caustic remark. Alan was huge and imposing and not yet friendly, because he was checking me out, trying to decide if he should be taking orders from an agent with a lot less experience than he had. Callie was … well, Callie. Quick-tongued and more beautiful than I’d ever be. As a team, we started out slow and halting, gears grinding like a teenager’s first attempt to drive a stick shift. It took some time, but we found our rhythm. The board became our shared mind.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” I say. “Tell us about Heather. What kind of cop was she?”

Laying out a case graphically like this helps us see the whole picture. It’s not unusual to walk into this office and find all of us sitting, staring at the whiteboard like it’s a religious artifact.

“Heather Hollister,”
Callie reads.
“Got a BA in criminology and then went into the police academy. Graduated a week after her twenty-third birthday.”

“Thinking ahead with the criminology BA,” Alan notes. “Helps later when she applies for detective. Smart.”

“Or driven,” I say. “She was certain she wanted to be a cop right out of high school. Civic-minded or something else?” I look at Callie. “Anything in her file?”

Callie flips through Heather’s personnel file. She nods. “There is something here from her psych eval. Her father. He owned a tire shop in Hollywood. He was killed during a robbery when Heather was twelve.” Callie sighs. “My, my. Mother solved the need for income by remarrying an abusive husband. He beat on her regularly—her name was Margaret—until Heather was sixteen. Heather had the presence of mind to take video of her stepfather beating up her mother. She took the video to the detective who’d been investigating her father’s murder.” She pauses, reading ahead.

“And?” James asks, impatient.

“Hold thy horses. Things get murky here. Something about … apparently the video was thrown out of court because of the way she acquired it…. Margaret wouldn’t testify against her abuser …” She frowns, reads on a little further, and then her face clears. “Ah. There’s a notation here from the evaluator. A paraphrased snippet of conversation.

Callie looks up from the file, smiling.

“I can read between the lines,” Alan says. “Detective Burns, and maybe some of his friends, had a talk with the stepfather that probably
involved severe bruising and promises to make his life a living hell if he didn’t clear out. Street justice.”

I write two things on the whiteboard:
Became a cop because father killed.
And:
Detective Burns connection.

“We need to find Burns,” I say. “He took an interest in the family, Heather in particular. He’ll have insight.” Something else occurs to me. “Did the psych ask Heather if the stepfather ever abused her too?”

Callie puts her finger on the page and skims through the notes. Stops. “Yes, he asked. She said no. She said he basically ignored her. Mommy got all his love.”

“Lucky,” James says. “Statistically, she was at risk of sexual abuse.”

All debate and bias aside, stepchildren are more likely to be the victims of abuse than genetic children. It’s called the “Cinderella effect,” and, though controversial, I’ve seen it proven out in my own experience. Younger children are the ones most likely to suffer heavy physical abuse to the point of death, while older children are the biggest targets of sexual abuse.