Novels 11 Adam Read online

  But her assurance didn’t calm him. He wanted to know if she thought he was selfish. “Well, we can all be selfish,” she answered. But he wanted to know if he was especially selfish. Because a priest couldn’t be selfish. Then he told her what had happened, spinning the details in his favor, claiming that a recovering whore had thrown herself at him, and when he refused her she had said he would have to learn to love women, because even Christ loved the adulteress.

  “That story in the Gospels never made sense to Alex,” Jessica said. “And I couldn’t make sense of it either. Sex was one thing off-limits to us. It always had been. Alice was very strict about even the suggestion of any sexual behavior. There was no sex at the Browns’. I was severely punished the first time I menstruated, and every time after. It seemed to me that the adulteress in the gospel story should have been corrected.”

  Neither of them ever spoke of the incident again.

  For all of his social limitations, Alex proved to be an exceptionally bright student. His thirst for knowledge became evident to his teachers, who saw him as a wounded soul who probably understood pain more than most, and as such might very well make a good priest one day.

  Gradually Alex began to open up to his teachers, who encouraged him to engage the class in discussions. By the fall of 1988 he began to do just that, not frequently, but with an articulation that gained him a little bit of fame. Instead of being seen as the freak in the ridiculous black shirt, he was known as the smart one with something to say.

  “His thoughts were always highly organized, and his arguments, though challenging, were quite persuasive,” his eschatology professor recalls. “I can’t say I agreed with many of his arguments, but they did provide a balance.”

  Alex still suffered from his general aversion to women, but he soon recognized that his peers’ newfound respect for him was threatened only by this odd behavior. He couldn’t blame shyness any longer, so he set out to at least tolerate the women he was forced to come into contact with.

  “I was very proud of him,” Jessica recalls. “Every night, he would talk about how everyone looked up to him. He would go on about how even the teachers couldn’t refute his arguments. It was a huge confidence booster. He asked me to help him deal better with women, which was the first time he’d ever even admitted that he had a problem with them.”

  While Alex was relishing his newfound power as a respected student, Jessica was discovering a genuine interest in men. Because her brother was so protective of her, she didn’t tell him about the passes that interested suitors made, but she knew that eventually they would have to discuss the possibility that they wouldn’t be living together their whole lives.

  Now twenty-three and gaining selfesteem, Jessica spent more and more time wondering what it would be like to have a romantic relationship with a man. In the fall of 1988, she left the cleaning company that had kept her steadily employed since 1983 and took a job as a waitress at a Denny’s restaurant three blocks from the Hope Street Apartments.

  She told Alex about the change after she’d made it, and he reacted the way she thought he would—with anger. He argued that she didn’t belong in a job with so many men eager to ruin the lives of the first beautiful woman they met, which would definitely be the case with her. In Alex’s mind, Jessica was not only the most beautiful woman he knew, but perhaps the only beautiful woman he knew.

  Jessica’s timing was calculated. With Alex eager to adjust to the women at St. Peter’s, he wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse her the same courtesy, now was he? After a few hours of debate, he finally agreed and the matter was dropped. He never even quizzed her about the men at her work or, for that matter, any other men in her life.

  By the winter of 1988, Alex and Jessica were leading lives that on the surface appeared perfectly normal to all concerned, including themselves. They were so well-adjusted, in fact, that Alex began to develop a healthy desire to know who their biological parents were.

  Up to this point, he’d never told Jessica that he believed they’d either been adopted or taken as children. They’d both grown up believing themselves to be the Browns’ natural children. But a number of inconsistencies led Alex to believe differently.

  For starters, Alice’s abhorrence of sex and her claim to be a virgin would have prohibited her from having children, a fact Alex hadn’t put together until he was in California. There was also the vague memory he had of another mother and father when he was very young. The memory was burned into his mind when he was fourteen. He’d found an old pair of pajama pants with the name Alex Price sewed into the elastic waist. Upon learning that Alex found the pajamas, Cyril burned them the next day.

  When Alex sat Jessica down one night and told her about his theories, she broke down and wept. But he told her for a reason: he’d decided that they should search for their real parents. Jessica immediately agreed.

  They would have to be careful, because according to all legal documents, they were now Alex and Jessica Trane. Exposing themselves as Prices would identify them to the Browns, and neither had a doubt that Alice would find a way to have them killed if she ever learned their whereabouts.

  Using his resources at St. Peter’s, Alex began to hunt for newspaper records involving individuals by the last name of Price, starting in Oklahoma and then in surrounding states. Assuming that an abduction would have occurred when they were very young—three or four, judging by the size of the pajama pants he’d found—he needed newspapers dating back to the late sixties. Unfortunately, the surrounding libraries kept no record of newspapers from other states so far back. He would have to find another way to access the records.

  Investigators would later trace Alex Price’s obsession with law enforcement and forensic science to the search he conducted for his biological parents during the winter of 1988. For a highly successful student who had a voracious appetite for knowledge, the step from investigating religion to investigating crime was hardly a leap.

  There were simpler methods for going about finding the truth, but Alex chose the one that interested him most. He undertook the task of writing a paper for his hermeneutics class at St. Peter’s that compared biblical investigative and interpretive methods to those employed by law enforcement in contemporary society. His teacher, Dr. Winthrow, thought the idea was a good one.

  With the full support of his teacher, he meticulously laid out an argument that researching evidence in the biblical record was essentially the same as researching the veracity of facts found in the criminal record. To complete his paper, he needed to pick a reported criminal event and attempt to determine whether that event had actually occurred, using only recorded reports.

  As part of his research, he insisted that he should interview a professional involved in such things on a daily basis. Someone from the criminal records division of the FBI, for example. Eager to lend a hand, Cynthia Barstow from the Los Angeles field office agreed to Dr. Winthrow’s suggestion of a phone interview with Alex.

  It was only a matter of time and several clever interviews before Alex had what he needed. His paper used a purported murder case in Texas as an example, but during the course of his interviews with Cynthia Barstow, using a series of “what ifs” and “for examples” to better understand how the FBI kept records, he learned that a widely publicized kidnapping of Alex and Jessica Price had indeed been reported in Arkansas on January 15, 1968.

  He also learned that the siblings’ father and mother, Lorden and Betty Price, had died in an automobile accident when another car slammed into their truck in 1976. No surviving children. The abduction case was still unsolved.

  When Jessica returned home from waitressing that night and learned the truth about the fate of their true parents, she wept. Alex, on the other hand, seemed strangely unaffected. He was far more bothered by the confirmation that they were abducted by the Browns.

  “I couldn’t understand why at first,” Jessica stated. “He was upset, but the emotion wasn’t sorrow or regret or anything like
that. Then I realized it had to do with Alice.”

  The abduction case was still unsolved, and they, Jessica realized, had the information needed to solve it. They could simply tell the FBI who they really were, and tell them to look for the Browns somewhere along the train tracks in Oklahoma.

  But Alex rejected the idea. He threw out all sorts of arguments. The Browns (he refused to use Alice’s name, Jessica said) were too smart for that. They’d long ago moved and covered all the evidence. They were probably in California, waiting for news of Alex and Jessica to leak. Opening up the case now was way too risky and wouldn’t prove a thing. Their real parents were dead anyway.

  Jessica argued for justice, but he only became more agitated, begging her not to force him to relive anything that would bring him closer to “that whore.”

  But there was more, she thought, and she made the mistake of suggesting it to him. “That’s not what this is really about, is it? You want to protect her. You actually want to protect Alice the same way you protect me!”

  The moment the words left her mouth, she tried to retract them. Alex flew into a rage, tearing around the apartment, smashing trinkets and throwing books. Then he stormed out and slammed the door.

  As he had done once before, Alex stayed out late as Jessica worried and paced. And as before, when he returned early in the morning he crumpled at her feet and sobbed like a child, begging her forgiveness. Jessica thought he’d done something terrible, but she didn’t have the heart to confront him.

  Instead, she embraced him and cried with him. He was right, she reasoned. They’d suffered enough and shouldn’t have to relive any of their childhood, not even for the sake of justice. For all they knew, the Browns were dead. Sobbing together, brother and sister reaffirmed their love for each other and their vow to leave the Browns out of their lives forever.

  Little did Alex or Jessica know how this choice would lead to an unraveling that would make their abduction from Arkansas pale in comparison.

  SIXTEEN

  2008

  DANIEL WASN’T SURE which of his growing troubles was worse: the fact that he wasn’t closer to finding Eve, the fact that Eve had killed him and left him with a terrifying case of recurring fear, or the fact that Eve had evidently threatened to kill him again if he didn’t drop the case.

  There was no way he could spend more than a few minutes at the field office in his deteriorating state. His going dark had been a stroke of blind brilliance. Little could he have known that doing so would protect him more than the integrity of the case.

  To say that the fears came back after DMT had given him a brief respite would have been a falsity of offensive proportions. The fears were indeed back, but DMT had not given him any respite. It had only coiled around his mind like a snake, waiting to strike with doubled ferocity.

  After waking from his nightmare at 6:00 a.m., he’d successfully fought off two more bouts of terror, one every ninety minutes or so. Each had been severe enough to force him to the bathroom floor and the couch respectively. He simply could not stand under the assault. Or brush his teeth. Or talk on the phone. Or take a shower. Or cook eggs.

  Or drive.

  He called the field office at nine, five minutes after the second attack, feeling reasonably certain he was safe for an hour or so. As he expected, Lori was already in the lab.

  “Good morning, Dr. Clark.”

  “Morning.”

  She wasted only a breath before dropping the big question. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I did. For about six hours.”

  “That’s fantastic. Good, right?”

  “Then I was awakened by a nightmare that made the one I had in the hospital seem like a trip to Disneyland.”

  Lori stayed silent on the other end.

  “Any update on the case?” he asked.

  “Always. Skin and hair tests came back positive.”

  “Eve’s.”

  “Full report from the Colorado evidence team on the Caravan. It was reported stolen in Billings, Montana, six months ago under a different set of plates. Looks like our boy slipped up.”

  Daniel leaned back in his office chair. “No. He doesn’t care that we know he was in Montana six months ago. Or that he stole the Caravan from some poor sap in Billings. Brit will chase it down to its bloody end, but if I know Eve, it’ll lead nowhere.”

  “He was in Montana for a reason. Why?”

  “Because he was stalking a woman in Billings,” Daniel said. “Or because Montana happens to be between Vancouver and Florida. He was just passing through and needed a new van. It could be anything.”

  “Brit’s following up Montana,” Lori said.

  “He’d be a fool not to. For all we know we’ll catch a break. I’m just telling you what my experience with Eve has been.” Daniel leaned forward, picked up a black fountain pen that Heather had given him for his fortieth birthday, and turned it in his fingers.

  “Do we have the personal physical effects from the van yet? It should have been flown up on a red-eye.”

  “The reports are—”

  “No. I want to see whatever they found. His personal habits. What kind of food he eats. Anything that sheds light on the man. If it’s there, I need to see it as soon as possible.”

  “Hold on.”

  Although all recovered evidence was critical to any investigation, Daniel preferred to focus on the details that weren’t necessarily related to the crime itself. Eve would carefully remove any incriminating evidence from the crime scene, but it was harder to cover traces of mundane details related to everyday life. Evidence that fleshed out the man more than the crime.

  Lori came back on in thirty seconds. “It’s here.”

  “Can you pick me up? I don’t want to drive.”

  She hesitated. “That bad?”

  “Worse,” he said. “Not as often, but worse. Much worse.”

  “Give me an hour?”

  “Actually . . .” An hour might put him on the brink of another attack. Then again, he couldn’t run into hiding every ninety minutes. He would have to find a way to deal with the fear throughout the course of a normal day, however abnormal that might be. “That’s fine.”

  Daniel hung up and checked his e-mail. Mostly trash, even the stuff his filter allowed through. He opened a note from Montova asking him to copy the new SAIC—Brit Holman—on any and all Eve-related information Daniel might run across during his medical leave. The next paragraph made it certain that until a full psychological workup cleared Daniel of any adverse side effects, he would continue his convalescence.

  Daniel reached for the phone to call Heather at the office, then decided against it. Six months ago he might have seriously considered her suggestion to drop Eve and take up another case if it meant getting back together. But she must know that his interest in rekindling the relationship had waned. Two years was a long time to be systematically rejected. He still loved her, he thought, but living apart from her had become synonymous with being himself.

  There was the matter of Eve’s threat to kill him, assuming it had been Eve who made the call. But letting Eve off the hook to save his own skin struck Daniel as morally reprehensible.

  He spent the next thirty minutes setting up an exhaustive search for the driver who picked up Heather. He couldn’t spill the beans about the actual threat, but he gave his contacts at CHP and the Santa Monica Police Department enough to call in favors. Chief Tilley immediately agreed to send a couple of officers down to the bar that evening to canvass for witnesses.

  He was a little more straightforward with Brit, who agreed to keep the investigation clear of Heather on the understanding that the caller might present a threat to her if he knew she was talking to the authorities.

  Satisfied the gears were in motion, Daniel shut down his computer and pulled on his shoes. If the caller had left any clue as to his real identity, they would find it. Daniel doubted he had.

  Lori picked him up just after ten, as promised, drove him to the f
ield office, and hovered as he opened a plastic evidence bin she’d retrieved for him: the personal evidence Eve had left in and around the scene where he’d killed his sixteenth victim.

  The bin contained a pile of clear evidence bags, which Daniel spread out on the table in the evidence room.

  Three red, white, and blue Baby Ruth candy bar wrappers

  One crumpled aluminum Cherry Coke can

  One Heath toffee bar wrapper

  Three feathers, labeled chicken

  One dirty white sport sock

  One empty roll of gray duct tape, and another with about an inch of tape left

  One piece of dried-out jerky

  One stick of Big Red gum, still in its wrapper

  Daniel slid the eight plastic bags to one side, leaving a ninth in front of him. “This is new.”

  Lori shook her head in amazement. “Same thing every time, huh?”

  She’d read the file. He glanced at the spread of bags he’d moved aside. “He practically lives on candy bars and Cherry Coke. Fairly typical of obsessive-compulsive personalities to limit their patterns of eating. Health means nothing to him.”

  “No receipts for this stuff? Where does he get his money?”

  “He’s never left a receipt. No wrapper has ever had a price tag with a store name on it. He leaves these knowing they won’t help us narrow his traveling patterns. The rest is conspicuously absent.”

  She picked up the bag with the old sock. “He subdues his victims with an inhalational general anesthetic.”

  “Generic sock, sold in every Target and Wal-Mart in the United States. Seventh one we’ve recovered. If it hasn’t already, the lab will find traces of halothane on it.”

  Lori set the bag down. “Why does he leave such clear evidence of his abductions behind? You’d think such a careful person would leave nothing so incriminating.”

  “He doesn’t care about incriminating evidence, as long as he doesn’t get identified and caught. In this case he clearly thinks it’s more important we know that he makes his victims unconscious before giving them a fatal disease.”