She leaned against the wall and sighed, savoring the silence and hoping none of the staff would come out and bother her. She pulled a Marlboro from her purse and lit it, letting the nicotine calm her nerves as it eased through her bloodstream.
Ah, a moment’s peace. This was what people didn’t understand about stardom—there wasn’t any peace. Not in her Manhattan penthouse, not in her winter home in Hawaii, nowhere. Because she had Internet everywhere. The trolls and the haters could always find her.
She took another drag and smiled. Well, they couldn’t find her here. Maybe she should move into this parking garage.
The scuff of a shoe scraping on pavement came from her right. She rolled her eyes. Great, someone had found her. She had earned a grand total of thirty seconds of peace. She decided not to turn her head. Perhaps if she pretended not to notice the fan, they’d go away.
Yeah, right. That never worked.
She took another drag, steeling herself for another session of being dazzling.
There was a gush of air and a black shape rushed into her peripheral vision. She flinched at the sudden movement and turned.
She didn’t get to twist more than an inch before a strong, gloved hand clamped on her face, a damp cloth covering her nose and mouth. She struggled, but another hand grasped her arm and twisted it behind her back. As she squirmed she inhaled a sweet smell from the cloth, making her vision blur and her head swim.
Panicking, she lashed out with her fist and smacked against flesh, but she was already too far gone to know if she had hurt her assailant or not. Her vision dimmed, the parked cars dancing before her eyes, her cigarette dropping to the floor. She tried to scream but only managed to suck in more of the sweet smell that was lulling her to sleep.
No, she mustn’t sleep! She stomped down on her assailant’s foot, connecting with her stiletto heel. That tore a grunt out of her attacker’s throat, a grunt that sounded a million miles away. She stumbled, and if her attacker hadn’t held her up she would have fallen. Isabel felt herself being dragged across the parking lot.
The last thing she remembered before going unconscious was a van door opening.
Chapter 2
Erin Bond sighed as she opened up her inbox and saw a message from a Daily Review reporter. Another interview request. Didn’t these people get tired of asking her about her childhood? It wasn’t like she could remember anything new. Well, at least the Daily Review paid. It was one of the UK’s biggest tabloids and had deep pockets.
After tucking her bob of blonde hair behind her ears, she opened the email.
“Dear Ms. Bond. I am the New York correspondent for the Daily Review. As I am sure you recall, we interviewed you five years ago regarding how you have come to terms with your childhood abduction and are getting along in your adult life. We would love to conduct a follow-up interview with you. It’s come to our attention since our previous talk that you have opened your own successful private detective service. I am sure that our readers would be fascinated with this new phase in your life and all the cases you have solved. It is truly inspiring that a victim of crime is now dedicating her life to bringing criminals to justice.
“I would be happy to drive up to meet you in Providence at your earliest convenience.
“Cheers,
“Benjamin Bridges”.
Erin smiled and shook her head. Reporters always said something along those lines. They always praised her and told her how inspiring she was when what they really wanted was a salacious story to sell copies.
She leaned back in her chair. But what could she give them that she hadn’t given them already? They didn’t really want to know about her private detective service, although she felt sure they would use it for some blaring headline. No, they wanted to pick her brain for memories of her abduction.
What could she tell them? She had only been six when she had been recovered, and that had been twenty-five years ago. What few vague memories she retained had been colored by all the media reports since then. It was difficult to pick them apart.
She had been five when she had disappeared. All she remembered was wandering through a supermarket looking for her mum in St. Albans, England, where they had lived. She’d thought she’d heard her mum shouting outside the supermarket. The next thing she remembered she’d been walking outside in a field holding hands with a man.
“I’ll take you to her,” he had said. She couldn’t remember him saying anything else.
The only other thing she remembered was his hands. They were big and rough, like an old man’s. They had passed through St. Alban’s Park. She knew this because she remembered seeing the remnants of the old Roman wall that stood there.
Her memories of the eleven months that she had been missing were almost nonexistent. A garden with a high wall. A closet full of pretty dresses for her. The hands. Never any other part of her abductor, just the hands. Serving her dinner. Locking the garden gate. Running a bath.
As she grew older she’d gradually learned what had happened that day she had disappeared, not to her, but all around her. Her mother had been drunk, as usual, and witnesses said she had come out of the supermarket alone to scream at one of her many boyfriends. This was before her mom and dad had divorced. Apparently there had been a lot of boyfriends.
Her mum had completely forgotten about the five-year-old girl she had left alone in the supermarket.
When her mum finally went back inside to look for her, Erin had disappeared. No one had seen anything—they had all been focused on the screaming match outside—and these were the days before widespread CCTV.
The press had snapped up the story, splashing Erin’s angelic face over the cover of every tabloid in the nation. Her mother was labeled “Worst Mum in Britain” and “Delinquent Drunk”. Reporters camped outside their home. When her parents went shopping, people screamed insults at them.
Her mum and dad divorced shortly thereafter.
Erin didn’t remember being freed at all. She had been found standing in front of the same supermarket from which she had been taken eleven months before, wearing the same clothes she had worn that day, now a size too small. She had been incoherent and a blood test determined that she had been given sleeping pills over a long period of time, which had erased most of her short and mid-term memory. She had slept through much of her abduction. The medical report said she was still a virgin. The papers wrote a lot about that.
As with her abduction, no one remembered seeing someone leaving behind a little girl in the supermarket parking lot. The only clue was the number thirty-one written with black marker on her left hand. That number had stuck with her all her life. Now she was thirty-one years old.
Again her parents got drowned in a media furor, a furor that was slow to die down. Dad had applied for jobs overseas and eventually got a position in the English department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Erin had chosen to go with him. Mum had barely noticed.
Erin got taken out of her thoughts as another email popped into her inbox from the same reporter. Erin clicked on it.
“I have just learned that you will be assisting in the Isabel Morales abduction case. I am covering that story. Please contact me as soon as possible.
“Best regards,
“Benjamin Bridges”.
Erin blinked. What in the world was he talking about? Isabel Morales had been abducted? The Isabel Morales?
A second later another email popped into her inbox. This one was from someone named Sergio Cruz and the subject line read, “WOULD LIKE TO HIRE YOU IMMEDIATELY TOP PAY.”
Usually she was wary of subject lines in all caps. Clients who screamed online tended to scream in real life too. And they generally paid late. But what the reporter had said piqued her curiosity and she opened the email anyway.
“Dear Mrs. Bond,”—Erin rolled her eyes internally. Why did everyone automatically assume she was married?—“I am the manager and personal assistant to Isabel Morales. She was kidnapped a few hours a
go at a press conference in New York City. So far there has been no communication from her abductors. I’ve heard you are the best in the business and have a good relationship with the police. I need to hire you. Please call me immediately!!!”
There was a number at the end of the email. Erin hesitated, too stunned by the news that Isabel, as the world knew her, had been abducted, and abducted from a press conference at that. It was also strange that the kidnapper hadn’t released a statement. Celebrity kidnappings were extremely rare. People usually became celebrities because of being kidnapped.
Like she had been.
Erin walked out of her office and into the living room of her cozy Colonial home. Thick roof beams dating back to the eighteenth century spanned the ceiling, and high windows looked out over the skyline of Providence. The walls were decorated with old prints from Rhode Island and England. She flicked on the TV. The local CBS affiliate was covering the story, as she suspected every other channel in the world was too. She watched for a few minutes. The journalist at the scene reported that Isabel had been giving a press conference about the stunt she had pulled on Wall Street the day before. She had gone outside, apparently to smoke a cigarette, and no one had seen her since.
After a couple of minutes the CBS journalist interviewed a couple of passersby, no one important, just a “regular folks on the street” reaction. He was obviously trying to fill up time until he had something more substantive to report. After speaking to the wide-eyed citizens about how horrible it all was, he turned back to the camera and started repeating what he had already said about the abduction.
Erin flicked off the TV. Looked like the police didn’t know much yet. This was just the kind of case she specialized in. She grabbed her phone. As she walked back to her office to look up the number on her email, she wondered who had recommended her. While this Sergio fellow was correct that she was the best in the business, or at least one of the best, whoever had told him that she had a good relationship with the police didn’t know what they were talking about. She’d alienated just about every police commissioner on the East Coast.
Apparently Sergio Cruz hadn’t known that when he had decided to hire her, and arrogantly assumed she’d take such a high-profile case. In her experience, the higher-profile the case, the more she ended up angering local police officials.
A sly smile spread across Erin’s lips.
Chapter 3
Consciousness returned to Isabel slowly, in muddled thoughts and fragments of memory. Abuelo was there, her grandfather, that smiling man with the thick grey moustache that tickled her cheek and made her giggle every time he dropped her off at the school in the little town in Sonora where she grew up.
Abuelo had been her father, mother, big brother, and confidante. Her father had died in a narco-trafficking shootout when she was only three. Mother had run off with some other man when she was five. She had no brothers or sisters, at least none that she knew of. There was only Abuelo—kind, patient, and poor. They lived in a two-room wooden shack that Abuelo had built with his own hands, set in the fields where his herd of sheep grazed. There was no electricity, and water came from a pump out back, but it had been home. Isabel had lived in mansions, in penthouses, on giant yachts on the Mediterranean, but that little shack that she could have bought with the money in her pocket was the only place that she had ever felt at home, the only place that she had ever felt safe.
It was where she went in her mind any time she felt scared.
But as Isabel returned to full consciousness, the half-dream of standing in front of the shack in the bright Mexican sun as Abuelo brought the sheep into the pen broke apart and faded, replaced by nothing but darkness.
She lay curled up in a wooden box only slightly larger than herself. Some sort of plastic bands tied her ankles and wrists. Her hands were tied behind her back. A leather strap held a rubber ball in her mouth, keeping her from screaming. It was stuffy in the box, but she could see dim light coming through several holes in the top.
She felt movement like she was in the back of a vehicle. Her stomach churned. A cold sweat beaded her brow and limbs. That was something no one had ever asked in all those countless interviews. No one was interested in whether or not the world’s most successful female entertainer got carsick.
Her stomach churned again and she panicked. If she threw up with that rubber ball in her mouth, she’d choke on her own vomit. She’d drown in her own half-digested lunch.
Nausea welled in her throat and she made a determined effort to tamp it down. It subsided, rushed back worse than before, and then finally settled into a sickly puddle at the base of her gut.
The moment after she could stop thinking about her body, her nausea was replaced by terror. Isabel wanted to lash out, kick against the box and try to break through. She wanted to flail her body back and forth, scream against the muffling bulk of the rubber ball.
She didn’t do any of these things. She didn’t dare.
He would be listening.
Some sick guy had abducted her. One of her fans, perhaps, someone so star-struck that her image had twisted his mind. Or perhaps one of her haters. One of the #rapeIsabel crowd.
She had never resented her smoking habit so much.
For several long minutes she didn’t move, only trembled, eyes wide and searching the darkness. Vaguely she was aware of the even movement of the vehicle, like they were on a highway. Occasionally the vehicle—a white van, she remembered now—moved from one lane to another. She got the impression the driver drove cautiously, at moderate speed. Invisible to the cops. Her air holes flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed. Streetlights, set far apart. They were on some rural stretch of highway, without the constant light of the highways around the city. Where was he taking her?
Isabel tried to calm herself. She did what she did before any concert in front of a stadium of fifty thousand screaming fans, before any interview with a major news outlet, before she walked into the middle of Wall Street and slipped off her evening gown. Isabel slowed her breathing, forced her muscles to relax. She closed her eyes and imagined the sheep farm. She imagined Abuelo.
It only worked a little bit, but it allowed her to think. First thing to do was get the rubber ball out of her mouth before her carsickness came back and she drowned in her own vomit.
Isabel shuffled her body back and forth in the close confines of the box until she managed to lie on her stomach. Relaxing her arms and bending back her legs, she hooked her wrists around her ankles, then scraped them along her shins, wincing in pain as her shoulders stretched and threatened to dislocate. Trying to do this quietly made it even harder, but she didn’t dare catch the attention of her captor.
She couldn’t stop a grunt of pain and relief as she forced her arms over her knees and got them in front of her.
Her muscles relaxed, and Isabel took a few deep breaths, then tensed again as she heard a sound on the top of her box.
Pat, pat, pat.
Her abductor had reached back from the driver’s seat and patted the box the way you’d pat an obedient schoolchild on the head.
He had heard.
Isabel froze, and waited.
The van continued to drive down the highway. Her abductor said nothing.
He knew she was awake, but did not know what she had been doing. Whoever this was hadn’t read her interviews very carefully. She always talked about how she did an hour of yoga every day for relaxation and flexibility.
Now that flexibility might save her life.
Without making a sound, she eased herself onto her back again and now, with her hands in front of her and free to use, she felt the leather strap around her head and found the clasp. Within a second she had unlaced it and popped the rubber ball out of her mouth. She breathed a silent sigh of relief.
Her next instinct was to scream at the top of her lungs, but she stopped herself. No one would hear her except the guy driving the van.
Now for her wrists. Bending them painfully so she could
feel her bonds with the tips of her fingers, she found they were zip ties, the plastic handcuffs policemen often used. Isabel tried to pull one of her wrists free and soon gave up. Then she tried to gnaw at them. Whatever kind of plastic they were made with, they were tough. She’d chip a tooth before she bit through them. Feeling at her ankles, she found that they were fastened with zip ties too.
She tried to remember how police got zip ties off. In one of her movies, Police Fury, there had been a cop on set as a professional advisor. He’d talked about them. What had he said?
“You can’t break out of these things. The only way is to cut them off.”
Isabel gave in to despair. She brought her hands to her face to muffle her sobs. She didn’t want that sicko in the driver’s seat to hear her. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
Her heart turned to ice. He would get whatever satisfaction he was looking for as soon as they got wherever they were going. She was helpless. She had always been an object of desire, even in the early days of her career when anyone old enough to have graduated high school should have been ashamed to have fantasized about her. Even in those teenybopper years she could tell what those men were thinking, and she played on it. Got them to come to the concerts, got them to buy the CDs. She had made a career of taking men’s desire and turning it into cash, giving them the fantasy but never coming through the way millions of men—and a fair number of women—went to bed every night fantasizing she would.
She’d always known there was a hateful side to her fan base. All those weird letters her manager hid from her when she was still young. A couple of stalkers in the past few years. And now Twitter with its #rapeIsabel hashtag.
The world was ugly, but even that ugliness had given her strength. She had thumbed her nose at those sickos, still offering what she had to the cameras, still having passionate romances with movie stars and athletes, but not giving the regular fans what they really wanted.
And now someone was going to take it.