The Abduction (24 page)

“You know, Gary, if you lie to your lawyer, I can’t help you. Understand, this case isn’t a question of acquittal or conviction, it’s a question of life or death. Your life or your death. Life without parole would be a great victory, given the overwhelming evidence against you.”

“I want a lie-detector test!”

“Well, yeah, Gary, you could do that. And when you fail and the D.A. tells the world you failed, you will absolutely get the death penalty because every juror will know you’re guilty before the trial even starts. We won’t have a chance for any sympathy from even one juror to get you a life sentence.”

“But I didn’t do it! I was framed! Why don’t you find who put that picture in my truck, and her jersey, and made those calls? I’m innocent!”

“Her blood in your truck, but you’re innocent?”

“Gracie’s blood?”

Vic nodded. “FBI confirmed it’s hers with DNA tests. Media’s already got hold of it, but it’ll be officially announced tomorrow morning, right before your arraignment. So don’t even think about bail. This is home sweet home, pal.”

“But how did Gracie’s blood get in my truck?”

What an innocent face this guy could put on! Vic couldn’t help but laugh.

“Save the O.J. imitation for trial, Gary. Nobody planted blood in the white Bronco and nobody planted blood in your black truck.”

Vic checked his watch and stood.

“Look, I gotta go, I’ll see you at the arraignment. I’m gonna be on
Nightline
, railing against the death penalty. Time I’m through, I’ll have that McFadden broad crying like a baby wanting a bottle.”

Network television that night was like election night, all focused on one subject: Grace Ann Brice.
Strangers abduct children for sex. A child abducted by a stranger has a life expectancy of three hours. Grace’s blood in Jennings’s truck. Presumed dead.
Every channel, the same words, over and over again. Elizabeth was in bed crying when John walked into the master suite. She muted the TV and quickly wiped her face.

John disappeared into his bathroom without saying a word. She hit the volume and switched channels. She stopped again on
Nightline
. Jennings’s court-appointed lawyer wasn’t claiming his client was innocent, only that the death penalty was barbaric. How can he represent a guilty pedophile? Her guilty clients had only stolen money, not a child’s life.

Fifteen minutes later, John reappeared in plaid pajamas; his hair was wet and combed back. With the black glasses, he looked like a skinny Clark Kent. She again muted the TV. He walked to the bed and paused as if he wanted to say something, then decided against it and continued to the door.

He had slept in Grace’s room the first two nights; Elizabeth had thrown him out of their bedroom last night and the remote control at him. The rage. Now she was scared and alone and her child was presumed dead—
God, her blood in his truck
—and she needed someone to hold her, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask her husband, not after what she had done to him. What the rage had done to him.

If she asked, he would come and hold her. He would say he loved her. He would forgive her. He always forgave her. If she could ever let go of the past—
Let go? If she could ever escape the past
—perhaps she could love John as he loved her. He wanted her love, and she often found herself wanting to love him. There was something inside John R. Brice, something beneath the brainy geek façade. Something worth loving. But she could not love him as long as she hated herself. Her past wouldn’t allow it.

John stopped at the door, turned back, and said. “She was my daughter, too. I loved her just as much as you did.” He walked out and shut the door behind him.

Ben stood at the door to the command post. Agent Devereaux was gone, as were most of the agents. The young female FBI agent he had met—Jorgenson, he thought—sat at one computer station, telephone headset on, talking and typing. But the intensity level of the command post had noticeably decreased, as if the battle were over.

Ben laid the lead sheet on Devereaux’s desk, sighting number 3,317, Idaho Falls, Idaho, and wrote in the margin:
Spoke to this Clayton Lee
Tucker. Said he saw a blonde girl with two men, one with a tattoo, muscular, wearing a black tee shirt, at his gas station Sunday evening. If that was Gracie, you’ve got the wrong man in jail.

The wrong man was in jail and Gracie was in Idaho, where it was cold and where the trees stood tall and where snow covered the ground—a white blanket of snow. Not that the FBI would release Jennings on the basis of Ben’s dream. But once Clayton Tucker positively identified the men or the tattoo or Gracie from the FBI’s photos, they would. And if not then, surely after Jennings got a lawyer and passed a polygraph.

Ben Brice had spent six months in a POW camp; he figured one night in the town jail wouldn’t kill the boy.

“Jesus, boy, she sure kicked your ass!”

Jim Bob Basham, the night-shift jail guard, looked in through the steel bars at the sicko pervert. He was slumped on his cot in his cell, his head was buried in his hands, and he was crying. The mother’s attack on Jennings had made the rounds at town hall.

“How’s your nuts? Don’t that make you wanna just puke your guts up, getting kneed in the nuts? Shit, makes me wanna puke just thinking about it.”

No response from the pervert. Jim Bob figured, fuck being nice to him.

“Jennings, if I was you, I’d be praying they give me the death penalty, that’s a fact.”

The pervert raised his head.

“Yeah, see, that way they put you on death row, segregate you from the general population. You get life, you’re in with the rest of the inmates—the gangbangers, the Aryans, the Latinos, the brothers. Nothing they’d like more than to wear your ass out, and I don’t mean what the mother did to you.”

A confused expression from Jennings; the dumb ass didn’t understand what Jim Bob was saying. Jim Bob figured he’d put it in plain English, maybe the pervert could understand that.

“Those dudes gonna butt-fuck you five times a day, girlfriend. Time they get through with you, your asshole’s gonna be the size of a water main.”

Jim Bob cackled as he walked down the empty cell corridor.
Water main, that was a good one.

“Yep,” he shouted back to the pervert, “they just
love
child molesters.”

Minutes later, Gary Jennings was alone, standing in the jail cell, in near darkness, only a dim red glow from the emergency exit lights.

It had taken him eight years, his father’s death, moving to another city, marrying Debbie, and getting a job to get over that college incident. Or so he had thought. He now knew he would never get over it. And he would never get over this.

In the morning he would be marched into the courthouse through a gauntlet of cameras to be formally charged with abducting, raping, and killing Gracie Ann Brice. His face would be on national TV again: Gary Jennings, child molester, sexual predator, murderer. And Debbie—poor, sweet Debbie, she didn’t deserve this. But they’d stick the cameras in her face just the same and identify her as the wife of the child molester, sexual predator, and murderer, pregnant with their child who would forever be identified as the daughter of the child molester, sexual predator, and murderer. She’d be like Lee Harvey Oswald’s daughter.

He had never told Debbie about his college conviction—what was she thinking of her wonderful husband now? And what would his daughter think of her father when she learned all this? There would be no education trust for her. No vested stock options worth a million dollars. No house for Debbie. No company of his own. No future. He would be forever shamed. As Debbie would be. More like devastated. They would have to move to yet another city—
if
Debbie believed him.
If
he was acquitted.

But how would he be? Gracie’s blood in his truck. Child pornography and her jersey. Calls from his cell phone. The coach pointing at him in court.
Overwhelming evidence
, the lawyer had said. Who would believe Gary Jennings, Fuckup?

Gary’s only prior experience with the law eight years ago had taught him that the American criminal justice system was about everything but truth and justice. Which was why he had agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and receive probation, on his lawyer’s recommendation.

“Gary,” his lawyer had told him, “if you’re willing to put your life in the hands of twelve citizens who ain’t even smart enough to get out of jury duty in the first place and who’d rather be catching the Early Bird specials at the Wal-Mart instead of sitting in that jury box deciding your fate in the second place, then we need to change your plea to not guilty by reason of insanity because you’re fucking nuts!”

Gary Jennings would surely be convicted. Then what? Death row, waiting a decade to die by lethal injection? Or life without parole, waiting for the next inmate to enter his cell and rape him, eventually contracting AIDS and dying a long, slow, painful death? Debbie would divorce him and his daughter would never know him or want to. His parents were dead, he had no siblings, he soon would have no one. He was destined to die a lonely fuckup.

Darkness enveloped his mind as hot tears ran down his face. He felt so alone, so empty, so without faith, hope, or a future. His life was over. That he was still breathing was just a technicality. He looked up. There was only one thing to do.

Gary Jennings unzipped his white jail pants.

Lying awake last night, Chief of Police Paul Ryan had begun having doubts about the prime suspect. Had Gary Jennings really abducted and murdered Gracie Ann Brice? All the evidence said yes: the jersey, the porn, the phone calls, the prior offense, the coach’s ID, and now her blood, but still … it just didn’t seem to fit. It was too pat. All the evidence pointed at Jennings when it shouldn’t. An educated employee at a computer company stalking the boss’s daughter? Calling from his own cell phone at work, no attempt to cover his tracks? Leaving her jersey in his truck? Child porn under the floor mat? Was Jennings really that stupid? And if that dumb-ass Eddie had found Jennings’s truck unlocked, who else might have?

A thorough search of his truck by the FBI’s finest turned up nothing but a thin blood smear, not another piece of evidence that put Gracie in his truck, not her hair or fingerprints or fibers from her clothes or grass from the soccer field or leaves from the woods. And the coach’s ID wasn’t all that positive, even though Jennings fit the suspect’s general description.

Of course, Jennings’s photo and residence address were on the state’s sex offender website; anyone who wanted to find a blond, blue-eyed convicted sex offender living in the county could easily do so. But one who worked for the victim’s father? What were the odds of that? And why would anyone want to? To frame a sex offender? It made no sense. He weighed in his mind the upside and downside of looking deeper and quickly decided there was no upside, at least not for Paul Ryan.

Fifty-two years old, there were no other police jobs out there for him. This was the end of the line. Seventy-five thousand a year plus benefits. Eight more years, he would earn his pension. Enough to retire to a little house in Sun City, him and the wife. A good life, or at least good enough. Was he willing to throw it all away for Jennings? For that little frat-boy fuckup? Hell, maybe his big-time lawyer can prove the boy is innocent. Not likely in an emotionally charged high-profile child abduction case—death by lethal injection, that was this boy’s future. But that wasn’t Ryan’s fault; that was the law! Why should Paul Ryan risk his financial security for this boy? On the off chance that Jennings might not be the abductor? Even a step in that direction would cost Ryan his job—the mayor would not be pleased—and where would that leave him? Unemployed and unemployable. No health care. No pension. Working at the Wal-Mart. He could not think of one good reason to look deeper.

Except that it was the right thing to do.

And there was the baby. The baby named Sarah was lying in the neonatal unit in critical condition, born almost two months’ premature. Was the baby on Paul Ryan’s tab? Damnit, he didn’t put the victim’s blood and jersey in Jennings’s truck! He didn’t make nine phone calls to the victim! He didn’t haul Jennings’s pregnant wife into the station!

But he did show her the porn.

Because he needed a confession to keep his job, a baby might die. So Paul Ryan felt guilty—a guilt that kept him awake through the night and pacing the house until a sense of shame had overwhelmed him: Baby Sarah.

By 4:00
A.M.
, whether born of a need for personal redemption or simply sleep deprivation, Paul Ryan had made a life-altering decision: he would do the right thing.

By 6:00
A.M.
, Jennings had done it for him.

Ryan was standing outside Gary Jennings’s cell, looking in at his lifeless form hanging there, one leg of his white jail pants tied around his neck, the other tied around the pipes of the new sprinkler system the town had installed last month to meet code.

Innocent suspects don’t commit suicide.