Dale crossed to the TV/VCR, pushed in a tape, and picked up a remote.
“Electrics hooked into battery system. Shouldn’t be a problem long as she’s idling. Ah, I’m new at this, so the quality is uneven. Ours will be better. I just wanted you to see…”
Under the sheet, Nina took advantage of the darkness to test the slack in her bonds. She had to get control of her breathing, she had to gather her strength. She had to begin to resist.
The screen filled with scrambled gray static, then Nina was looking at a black-and-white photo of a young blond woman, pert, attractive. The length and cut of her hair appeared a bit dated. With a chill she remembered Dale’s odd question when they met. I’ll bet you went to the prom, didn’t you? When the camera panned, she saw she was looking at pictures from a high school yearbook. The camera zoomed in close enough to read the block of type:
GINNY WELLER
Student Council 4
Cheerleading 1, 2, 3, 4
G.A.A. 1, 2, 3, 4
National Honor Society 2, 3, 4
Back to the jerky static, then to green. Too much lawn for a yard. It was a park, the trees not quite fully leafed out. White letters and numbers punched the date into the bottom of the screen: June 11.
Last month.
The camera picked up a running figure. A woman in brief running shorts, a sports top, and a Walkman: blond, in shape, tanned. The video was framed in black, some kind of window. Then it moved, unevenly panning across seats, a dashboard, a rearview mirror, and a windshield. The camera was shooting from inside a van.
Now the woman was closer, the camera picking her up out the passenger window as she jogged on a path. The path wound along a wall of shrubs.
A man Nina recognized as Joe Reed stepped from the bushes in front of the jogger. Powerful. Confident, his arms wrapped her up as he quickly stabbed an object into her thigh. Not a knife. One of those needles Dale stabbed her with.
Dale hit the pause button and explained in the patient tone of a tour guide who liked his job, “Epipen. Same thing I hit you with at the bar.” His patient profile was sidelit by the flickering screen. “Joe took out the epinephrine and replaced it with ketamine.”
Nina went back over the struggle in the Missile Park. How long had it taken the drug to take effect after he jabbed her thigh? Several minutes to put her completely out.
Dale hit a button. “Play,” he said in a dreamy voice as the tape resumed and showed Joe hauling the woman back into the shrubs. Quick, efficient. The snatch had taken less than five seconds.
The camera went to static, then focused again. This time on a box of Coco Puffs cereal, a used bowl, a milk spill on a tabletop, and the front page of a newspaper. As the camera panned, it caught a sweep of sunlight and shadow and a feel of kitchen windows open to a summer morning. The sound of a lawn mower. Now the paper came into focus. The Grand Forks Herald. It zoomed in on a color photo below the fold. LOCAL WOMAN MISSING.
Some of the sharpness had mellowed on the face but it was the same girl in the yearbook picture. Older now. A grown woman. Nina braced for nausea.
All this time Dale stood next to the bed, his left arm folded across his chest, and his right arm cocked up so he rested his chin in the palm of his right hand. In his left hand was the remote. Dale was absorbed.
The static blipped away. The video came on.
At first it was a confused jumble. The camera swinging over a bare mattress on a filthy floor. The light bouncing off blue cinder-block walls.
Ginny Weller startled up from the darkness, squinting, hands up defensively, starting to scream. She had backed herself into the corner. Her tank top was soiled, as were her arms and legs. An advancing shadow fell across her face, blacking out her image. Joe Reed’s cold, clipped voice gave direction in the background:
“Go on, Dale. Show her who’s boss. Don’t take any shit.”
Ginny put up a fight and Dale had to wrap her in his thick arms and smother her down. He jabbed her with one of those pens. The picture ended.
Dale turned and spoke in a bland voice, “I couldn’t stand to touch her when she was all squirmy and sweaty and dirty. The thing was, she wasn’t ready for me. So, the way it worked out, I had to prepare her.”
Prior to 9/11, Nina traveled back and forth between her posting in Lucca and the Joint Special Ops Task Force in Sarajevo. JSOTF targeted Serbs wanted by The Hague, and some of the pickup raids required covert female operators. During these operations she became acquainted with a Ranger captain named Jeremy Stahl. They had in common that both were the same age and both were going through career-related strife in their marriages. They were alone and attempting not to be lonely. Their flirtation was chaste and did not go beyond a few good-night kisses.
One early fall evening they went to a bar in Measle Alley. The street took its nickname from the Bosnian practice of commemorating their dead by painting red dots the size of large dinner plates on the street or sidewalk where they had died from shell or sniper fire. It was hard to walk a straight line anywhere down Measle Alley without stepping on a dot.
They drank beer in a bombed tavern that was missing most of its roof. They could watch the stars come out as they ate bad Bosnian pizza.
Jeremy was a beautiful man, much as Nina imagined Broker must have been when he was young, still in uniform, and standing in the close shadow of death.
Shawing more bravado than good sense, they drank and discussed the worst things in the world. What had she said? Something about never seeing her daughter again.
Christ. What good were words or thoughts? Nothing got you ready for this.
Ginny Weller lay on a white sheet that spread like a puddle of clean snow in the grubby basement. Her chest rose and fell softly. Drugged. Except now she was nude. She had been washed clean of dirt. The white bikini patches of her breasts and crotch gleamed against her smooth tan.
Dale’s shadow preceded him as he approached the mattress. He performed an awkward shuffle, some personal dance of discovery and joy in his nakedness.
He knelt, then got on all fours. Nina watched the limp spiral of Ginny’s arms and legs as Dale tried to position her beneath him.
Nina forced herself to watch everything. He might reveal a pattern, a weakness. The flicker from the screen clubbed her steady eyes. After his second toadlike orgasm, Dale crawled beside the still figure and experimented with touching. Caresses. A kiss.
Helpless, Nina found herself sinking into a corner of perfect grief and hatred. No escaping the single thought that smashed her again and again:
Kit. Kit. Kit.
Seven years old. She didn’t know things like this waited out in the world, in the shadows. Just that single thought crashing down like a bludgeon, over and over.
Dale paused the video and explained: “I must’ve got the dosage wrong, or maybe she had a lot to eat before we took her. Because she aspirated-that’s what they call it-threw up and choked her airway. Got a little snuffy there toward the end.” He hit the play button.
His last robotic climax was complicated by the onset of his victim’s rigor mortis. When it was over, Dale rewound the tape and opened the curtains. Just as the daylight flooded in, a fist slammed the side of the camper, echoing deep through Nina’s body.
“C’mon, for Christ sake,” George Khari yelled. “Finish up in there.”
Like they were working. Like they had taken a break.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dale yelled back. Then he turned to Nina and grinned. “I’m going to be real careful with you, so you last all the way to Florida.”
“C’mon, Dale, we gotta get on the road,” George yelled again.
“Coming,” Dale said, moving forward. He stopped as he pulled the curtain aside, turned, threw her a last exultant grin, and held up his right hand, like in a Boy Scout salute-thumb to little finger, three fingers extended. “You see that? Three times. I bet even Ace couldn’t do it three times in a row.”