I hope they never know how that feels.
The truth is, we all have a then and a now. For some of us, thethen, our past, is a part of our lives we have no desire to revisit. Sometimes, though, in spite of our best efforts, life forces you back to that ugly past, and you run from it or block it as quickly as possible.
But this is different. Mythenhas invaded my now, and I am forced to resurrect a part of me I long ago buried. It is the only way to survive. After what he did to me, revenge is the only possible ending. But first, I want him to remember every depraved moment of our time together. I want him to feel what I felt.
And then I want him to die a slow, agonizing death.
There are those who will completely understand how I feel even without knowing the grisly details. There are others who even if they knew every single horror I suffered would say he is still a human being. All human beings deserve mercy, forgiveness, do they not?
They are wrong. He is not a human being. He is a monster. He is evil. He is going to die soon, but first he is going to suffer.
After all, he started this, then and now.
I was just a child when he took me.
The man’s name was Carl Fanning. I didn’t comprehend how unfortunate the situation was at the time, but I learned very quickly.
Carl was a very bad man. He pretended to be nice at first. He bought me new clothes and gave me a teddy bear. He had plenty of food in his dumpy little place—even ice cream. I had only tasted ice cream once.
He called me “the child,” or “it,” never by my name. He said I didn’t have a name anymore, and after a while I couldn’t remember it anyway. There was a big old trunk in his bedroom, and that’s where he put me whenever he had to go out alone. It was dark inside and I always worried that the holes wouldn’t let in enough air. At least I had my teddy bear. I gave it a name, but I don’t remember now what it was.
Eventually I became too big for the trunk, so he built a box for me. It reminded me of the boxes they put dead people in before they bury them in the ground.
Soon the possibility of death would become very appealing to me.
In the beginning, the things he did to me hurt really badly. I cried a lot, but then he would give me candy or ice cream. The soreness would be bad for a few days, and then I would forget for a while ... until the next time.
I didn’t mind the dress-up playing. But it was the part that came after I didn’t like.
During the time I belonged to him, I was the only one he kept. All the others went away after a few hours, but not me. Never me. He said I was special.
Until one day when I wasn’t.
I stare at him now. He looks so old. Old and stooped. His hair is gray and thin, his body pale and frail. I’ve heard what they do to men like him in prison. I hope those things were done to him over and over for the past fourteen years.
He stares at me, his lips smiling despite his current circumstances. I shouldn’t have removed the gag. I’ll put it back on before I go. Doesn’t really matter. There’s no one to hear him scream if he does so.
I worry, though, that he’s up to something. He is the devil himself. He cannot be trusted. He is capable of anything and completely undeserving of any sort of mercy.
After all, like I said, he started this.
Now I am going to end it.
Four
Detective Olivia Newhouse
Wednesday, May 2
I cradle my coffee. Can’t get warm. Last night the temperature dropped to almost freezing. It’s cold as hell this morning. Blackberry winter or one of those crazy little cold snaps that disturbs the spring warm-up each year. I can definitely do without an encore of last winter’s unusually cold temps and all that extra snowfall.
I consider the names on the whiteboard in our joint cubicle. Even a detective as senior as Walt doesn’t get an office in the Criminal Investigations Division. Not enough offices. But we do get a larger cubicle, one big enough for our desks to sit face-to-face in the center of the small square. On one side we have a row of filing cabinets with anything else we need to store stacked on top; on the other side of our work area we have a whiteboard and an extra chair for anyone we want to entertain with our scenarios and progress on a given case. The cramped digs aren’t such a big deal. We spend most of our time in the field anyway.
“So we can’t actually confirm that Sanchez is in Mexico?” I say this knowing my partner is well aware of our current dilemma. What I don’t say is that the name is somehow familiar to me. It’s a feeling Ican’t quite put my finger on. A knowing, some small, fleeting flare of recognition that just won’t be captured and assimilated. Sanchez doesn’t have a criminal record, but somehow I’ve encountered him before. Or maybe it’s only that I’ve run across someone with that same last name.
Walt shakes his head. “Both of his buddies, Lassiter and Watkins, are single with no significant others that I’ve been able to locate. I’ve called all three cell phones and left messages. Lassiter doesn’t have any extended family that we know of, so there’s no one to reach out to for confirmation on his whereabouts. The other guy, Watkins, has a mother, but she only knows that her son is on vacation in Mexico. She confirmed the trouble with cell service in the area where they’re supposed to be.”
I glance at my notes. “The three men drove in Sanchez’s SUV, so we can’t easily corroborate travel.”
