Abandoned: A Thriller Read online

  “Well?” I ask. “What do you think?”

  Tommy wipes the corner of his mouth with the paper towel in his hand. “Bonnie’s the one with the time crunch,” he says. “You and I can talk after she catches the bus.”

  I turn my attention to Bonnie. “So?”

  “What would change?” she asks.

  It’s the perfect question, really. The key one.

  “Well … I guess not much in the beginning. We’d still be living here.” I frown. “No, that’s not right, is it? We’d be covering the whole USA, so I imagine even though we’d be living here, I’d be traveling more. Kind of like last year, when I had to go to Virginia. Later, if this becomes permanent, we might have to move to Virginia.”

  She nibbles on her toast. “What’s Virginia like?”

  I don’t have a detailed answer to this question. I spent twenty-one weeks in Quantico, Virginia, for my training, but I don’t think Quantico is a good demographic. It’s on 385 acres of woodland. Breathtakingly beautiful in the fall, surprisingly mild in the summer, at least when I was there. Humidity was higher than California, for sure, and rainfall was scattered but always welcome. I was gone before the winter.

  “It has four seasons,” I say. “Snow in the winter. Trees with the red and yellow leaves in the fall. Nice summer. Beautiful spring, I guess, though I wasn’t there for that.” I struggle to put words to the faint memories. “Everything feels older, but not in a rundown kind of way. California has a newer feeling to it. The East Coast has more weight.”

  “I’d like to see it,” she says.

  “Of course, honey. I promise, if this all comes to pass, we’ll take a trip out there.”

  She brushes her hands off over her plate. “Okay, Mama-Smoky.”

  “Okay what, honey?”

  “I’m okay if we have to move. And I think you should do this job.”

  “Why?”

  “What you do is serious. It’s important.” Her voice is grave. She means what she’s saying, maybe more than a thirteen-year-old should “mean” anything. “Your boss is right. You’re the best person for the job. If that’s true, then you have to take it. It’s your duty. And it’s my duty to help make it okay for you.”

  I have no immediate response to this. Duty? She throws the word out with certainty and intensity. It’s another look into the direction her mind is growing, and it makes me wonder if agreeing to do this would be all wrong, after all.

  “I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll let you know.” I check the clock. “Time for you to go.”

  She collects her backpack and I walk her to the door. The bus stop is only a block away. She turns before she leaves and gives me a hug. “I love you, Mama-Smoky,” she says.

  This I can handle. I hug her back. “I love you too, baby. Don’t forget what I said about the extracurricular activity.”

  “I won’t, promise.”

  Then she’s out the door and I watch until she disappears at the curve of our street. I close the door and sit back down at the table. Tommy has poured me another cup of coffee, bless him. He’s nursing his own and gives me a little smile.

  “She’s something,” he says.

  “Something? What’s with all the ‘duty this’ and ‘duty that’? Sometimes I think it would be better if I hung it up altogether. Quit the FBI and just concentrated on her.”

  He studies the inside of his cup, takes a sip, then studies me. “I’ll back your play whatever you decide, Smoky. You want to quit the FBI and be a mommy? I’m with you. You want to head up this strike team? I’m with you. If you don’t want to work, we won’t need your income, and if we move, money won’t be a problem.”

  One of the things I found out about Tommy as our romance progressed was that he is, if not rich, financially stable. He isn’t cheap, but he is thrifty. He struck out on his own as a security consultant after leaving the Secret Service and has done very, very well for himself. We can’t rent private jets for weekend jaunts to Las Vegas, but money isn’t a meaningful issue. I have my own assets too. The house was paid off by Matt’s life-insurance settlement and is worth a lot more than what we originally paid for it, even with the current housing-market depression.

  All of that is nice, but it’s not what I need to hear from him. “But what do you think I should do, Tommy?”

  He smiles at me and reaches out a hand to stroke my cheek. “I think if you quit working you’ll go crazy. It’s still in your blood. One day it won’t be, but for now it is. When I first joined the service, and for a long time after, that’s how it was for me. I had to leave when I was ready. You’re not ready.”

  “And Bonnie?”

  He sips from his cup and looks off into the distance. “People don’t come in boxes with ingredient listings, Smoky, so we’ll never know for sure how Bonnie is going to turn out. That’s life. There are a few things I do think. I think she needs to go to therapy. I understand why you haven’t taken her there before, but it’s time. In my opinion.”

  I sigh. “You’re right. I just have trouble trusting anyone else when it comes to dealing with her.”

  “I know. But get over it.”

  “You said ‘a few things.’ What else?”

  “What you did last night was on the money, Smoky. As long as you’re on the case as her mother and don’t let that slide, I think you’ll be doing the right thing. I’m not convinced that it would be any better for Bonnie to have you around all the time, if you weren’t working. In some ways, it might be worse.”

  “Why?” I ask, intrigued.

  “She needs a balance. What happened to her, and to her mom, did happen. We can’t unmake that. On the one hand, exposure to what you do runs the risk of keeping her attention on it too much, leading to things like the cat incident.”

  “But on the other hand?”

  He shrugs. “On the other hand, I think watching you do what you do, seeing you put away the kind of men who killed her mom, is therapeutic. Cathartic. It gives her a goal. It’s a balancing act, a darn shoddy one, but I think it’s more helpful than harmful as long as we keep that balance.”

  I grin in spite of the gravity of the conversation; I can’t help it. “‘Darn shoddy’?” I tease. Tommy is a Boy Scout. Had literally been one. He never, ever uses profanity.

  He doesn’t respond to the humor. My stomach flutters a little at the determination in his eyes.

  “I’ll back you in either direction, Smoky, but I have one condition.”

  “What’s that?” I ask, though I already know.

  “If you decide to take the position, you tell them everything.”

  You don’t even know what everything is, Tommy.

  I keep this to myself. What he’s asking is fair.

  “Deal.”

  He shakes his head in the negative. “Don’t be flip. I want your promise. Your oath.”

  Tommy flouts almost all of the Latin macho stereotypes, but now and again these oddities appear. Things like “your oath.” I’d crack a joke about it if he wasn’t so deadly serious.

  Relationships are born of love but survive on compromise. Who was it who said that?

  I reach over and take his hands in mine. Both are warm from our coffee cups.

  “I promise.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “We have a hit on her fingerprints, honey-love.”

  It’s the first thing I hear when I walk into the office. This is one of the good mornings, the well-organized kind. I am already well caffeinated and awake.

  “Tell me,” I say.

  Alan and I had met in the parking lot and taken the elevator up together. James and Callie had arrived before us. Alan unscrews the top of his thermos and pours coffee into his mug. I gave him a coffee grinder for Christmas. He’d rolled his eyes at the time, joking that all the real cops grew up on Dunkin’ Donuts and 7-Eleven coffee, but not long after he’d started bringing the thermos.

  “I’m a junkie now,” he’d confessed. “After fresh ground, everything else tastes
like crap.”

  “Her name is Heather Hollister,” Callie says.

  I frown. “Why does that name seem familiar?”

  “Because,” she continues, “Heather Hollister was a homicide detective. From our very own LAPD. She disappeared eight years ago, without a trace. No body was ever found.”

  “I remember that case,” Alan says, nodding. “Eight years? Jesus Christ.”

  I remember it too. “It was big news,” I say, “and not just in the law-enforcement community. She was married, right?”

  “That’s correct,” James pipes in. “Husband worked for an Internet service provider. His name is”—he consults his notes—“Douglas Hollister. They had twin sons, Avery and Dylan. They were two at the time.” He looks up from his notes. “They’re ten now.”

  It’s an unnecessary statement, but I understand why he says it. James is human, however hard he tries to hide it. The concept of this woman being held for eight years is difficult to grasp. Her children provide the necessary contrast.

  Avery and Dylan were two when she went away. They would have been riding tricycles and speaking in small sentences, disobeying and acting out, like all two-year-olds. When she disappeared, they were still three years away from kindergarten. Now they’re closing in on the fifth grade or are already there.

  I force myself to focus. “What do we know about the investigation that was done at the time?” I ask.

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” Callie says. “The FBI assisted, of course, but the primary investigation was headed by LAPD.”

  Of course it was. Heather was one of their own. No way they were ceding that to anyone else.

  “Do we have any news on Heather’s status?” I ask.

  “I called the hospital from home,” Alan says. “She’s quiet now, so they’re no longer sedating her. She still hasn’t spoken.”

  I chew on a thumbnail, a bad habit that replaced smoking. I think it’s a pretty good trade.

  “Callie and James, I want you to collect all the case files from that investigation. Do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone why we want them or release her name to the family yet.”

  “Why?” Callie asks.

  “Because,” James says, already keeping pace with me. “Everything points to either someone who knew her or collusion with someone who knew her. How else do you take a trained homicide detective without leaving a trace?”

  “Understood,” Callie says. “What are you and Alan going to be doing?”

  “We’re going to go and see Heather Hollister at the hospital. Maybe knowing her name will help us reach her. She’s the best witness we’ve got.”

  James stands up and heads toward the door.

  “Wait!” Callie cries.

  Everyone stops.

  She smiles a sly smile. “Aren’t any of you going to ask me how my honeymoon night went?”

  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.”