Once Gone

Copyright © 2015 by Blake Pierce. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright GoingTo, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

Blake Pierce

Black Pierce is an avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres. ONCE GONE is Blake’s debut novel. Blake loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.blakepierceauthor.com to join the email list, receive a free book, receive free giveaways, connect on Facebook and Twitter, and stay in touch!

Prologue

A new spasm of pain jolted Reba’s head upright. She yanked against the ropes that bound her body, tied around her stomach to a vertical length of pipe that had been bolted to the floor and ceiling in the middle of the small room. Her wrists were tied in front, and her ankles were bound.

She realized she’d been dozing, and she was immediately awash in fear. She knew by now that the man was going to kill her. Little by little, wound by wound. It wasn’t her death he was after, and it wasn’t sex either. He only wanted her pain.

I’ve got to stay awake, she thought. I’ve got to get out of here. If I fall asleep again, I will die.

Despite the heat in the room, her naked body felt chilled with sweat. She looked down, writhing, and saw her feet were bare against the hardwood floor. The floor around them was caked with patches of dry blood, sure signs that she wasn’t the first person to have been tied here. Her panic deepened.

He had gone somewhere. The room’s single door was shut tight, but he would come back. He always did. And then he’d do whatever he could think of to make her scream. The windows were boarded, and she had no idea if it was day or night, the only light from the glare of a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Wherever this place was, it seemed that no one else could hear her screams.

She wondered if this room had once been a little girl’s bedroom; it was, grotesquely, pink, with curly-cues and fairytale motifs everywhere. Someone – she guessed her captor – had long since trashed the place, breaking and overturning stools and chairs and end tables. The floor was scattered with the dismembered limbs and torsos of children’s dolls. Little wigs – doll’s wigs, Reba guessed – were nailed like scalps on the walls, most of them elaborately braided, all of them in unnatural, toy-like colors. A battered pink vanity table stood upright next to a wall, its heart-shaped mirror shattered into little pieces. The only other piece of furniture intact was a narrow, single bed with a torn, pink canopy. Her captor sometimes rested there.

The man watched her with dark beady eyes, through his black ski mask. At first she had taken heart in the fact that he always wore that mask. If he didn’t want her to see his face, didn’t that mean that he didn’t plan to kill her, that he might let her go?

But she soon caught on that the mask served a different purpose. She could tell that the face behind it had a receded chin and a sloped forehead, and she was sure the man’s features were weak and homely. Although he was strong, he was shorter than she, and probably insecure about it. He wore the mask, she guessed, to seem more terrifying.

She’d given up trying to talk him out of hurting her. At first she had thought she could. She knew, after all, that she was pretty. Or at least I used to be, she thought sadly.

Sweat and tears mixed on her bruised face, and she could feel the blood matted into her long blond hair. Her eyes stung: he had made her put in contact lenses, and they made it harder to see.

God knows what I look like now.

She let her head drop.

Die now, she begged herself.

It ought to be easy enough to do. She was certain that others had died here before.

But she couldn’t. Just thinking about it made her heart pound harder, her breath heave, straining the rope around her belly. Slowly, as she knew she was facing an imminent death, a new feeling began to arise within her. It wasn’t panic or fear this time. It wasn’t despair. It was something else.

What do I feel?

Then she realized. It was rage. Not against her captor. She’d long since exhausted her rage toward him.

It’s me, she thought. I am doing what he wants. When I scream and cry and sob and plead, I’m doing what he wants.

Whenever she sipped that cold bland broth he’d feed her through a straw, she was doing what he wanted. Whenever she blubbered pathetically that she was a mother with two children who needed her, she was delighting him to no end.

Her mind cleared with new resolve as she finally stopped writhing. Maybe she needed to try a different tack. She had been struggling so hard against the ropes all these days. Maybe that was the wrong approach. They were like those little bamboo toys – the Chinese finger traps, where you’d put your fingers in each end of the tube, and the harder you pulled, the more stuck your fingers became. Maybe the trick was to relax, deliberately and completely. Maybe that was the way out.

Muscle by muscle, she let her body go slack, feeling every sore, every bruise where her flesh touched the ropes. And slowly, she became aware of where the rope’s tension lay.

At last, she found what she needed. There was just a little looseness around her right ankle. But it wouldn’t do to tug, at least not yet. No, she had to keep her muscles limber. She wiggled her ankle gently, gently, then more aggressively as the rope loosened.

Finally, to her joy and surprise, her heel popped loose, and she withdrew the whole right foot.

She immediately scanned the floor. Only a foot away, amid the scattered doll parts, lay his hunting knife. He always laughed as he left it there, tantalizingly nearby. The blade, encrusted with blood, twinkled tauntingly in the light.

She swung her free foot toward the knife. It swung high and missed.

She let her body slacken again. She slid downward along the post just a few inches and strained with her foot until the knife was within reach. She clutched the filthy blade between her toes, scraped it across the floor, and lifted it carefully with her foot until its handle rested in the palm of her hand. She clutched the handle tight with numb fingers and twisted it around, slowly sawing at the rope that held her wrists. Time seemed to stop, as she held her breath, hoping, praying she didn’t drop it. That he didn’t come in.

Finally she heard a snap, and to her shock, her hands were loose. Immediately, heart pounding, she cut the rope around her waist.

Free. She could hardly believe it.

For a moment all she could do was crouch there, hands and feet tingling with the return of full circulation. She poked at the lenses over her eyes, resisting the urge to claw them out. She carefully slid them to one side, pinched them, and pulled them out. Her eyes hurt terribly, and it was a relief to have them gone. As she looked at the two plastic disks lying in the palm of her hand, their color sickened her. The lenses were bright blue, unnatural. She threw them aside.

Heart slamming, Reba pulled herself up and quickly limped to the door. She took hold of the knob but didn’t turn it.

What if he’s out there?

She had no choice.

Reba turned the knob and tugged at the door, which opened noiselessly. She looked down a long empty hallway, lit only by an arched opening on the right. She crept along, naked, barefoot, and silent, and saw that the arch opened into a dimly lit room. She stopped and stared. It was a simple dining room, with a table and chairs, all completely ordinary, as if a family might soon come home to dinner. Old lace curtains hung over the windows.

A new horror rose up in her throat. The very ordinariness of the place was disturbing in a way that a dungeon wouldn’t have been. Through the curtains she could see that it was dark outside. Her spirits lifted at the thought that darkness would make it easier to slip away.

She turned back to the hallway. It ended in a door – a door that simply had to lead outdoors. She limped and squeezed the cold brass latch. The door swung heavily toward her to reveal the night outside.

She saw a small porch, a yard beyond it. The nighttime sky was moonless and starlit. There was no other light anywhere – no sign of nearby houses. She stepped slowly out onto the porch and down into the yard, which was dry and bare of grass. Cool fresh air flooded her aching lungs.

Mixed with her panic, she felt elated. The joy of freedom.

Reba took her first step, preparing to run – when suddenly she felt the hard grip of a hand on her wrist.

Then came the familiar, ugly laugh.

The last thing she felt was a hard object – maybe metal – impacting her head, and then she was spinning into the very depths of blackness.

Chapter 1

At least the stench hasn’t kicked in, Special Agent Bill Jeffreys thought.

Still leaning over the body, he couldn’t help but detect the first traces of it. It mingled with the fresh scent of pine and the clean mist rising from the creek – a body smell that he ought to have been long since used to. But he never was.

The woman’s naked body had been carefully arranged on a large boulder at the edge of the creek. She was sitting up, leaning against another boulder, legs straight and splayed, hands at her sides. An odd crook in the right arm, he could see, suggested a broken bone. The wavy hair was obviously a wig, mangy, with clashing hues of blond. A pink smile was lipsticked over her mouth.

The murder weapon was still tight around her neck; she’d been strangled with a pink ribbon. An artificial red rose lay on the rock in front of her, at her feet.

Bill gently tried to lift the left hand. It didn’t budge.

“She’s still in rigor mortis,” Bill told Agent Spelbren, crouching on the other side of the body. “Hasn’t been dead more than twenty-four hours.”

“What’s with her eyes?” Spelbren asked.

“Stitched wide open with black thread,” he answered, without bothering to look closely.

Spelbren stared at him in disbelief.

“Check for yourself,” Bill said.

Spelbren peered at the eyes.

“Jesus,” he murmured quietly. Bill noticed that he didn’t recoil with disgust. Bill appreciated that. He’d worked with other field agents – some of them even seasoned veterans like Spelbren – who would be puking their guts up by now.

Bill had never worked with him before. Spelbren had been called in for this case from a Virginia field office. It had been Spelbren’s idea to bring in somebody from the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. That was why Bill was here.

Smart move, Bill thought.

Bill could see that Spelbren was younger than him by a few years, but even so, he had a weathered, lived-in look that he rather liked.

“She’s wearing contacts,” Spelbren noted.

Bill took a closer look. He was right. An eerie, artificial blue that made him look away. It was cool here down by the creek late in the morning, but even so, the eyes were flattening in their sockets. It was going to be tough to nail down the exact time of death. All Bill felt certain of was that the body had been brought here sometime during the night and carefully posed.

He heard a nearby voice.

“Fucking Feds.”

Bill glanced up at the three local cops, standing a few yards away. They were whispering inaudibly now, so Bill knew that he was supposed to hear those two choice words. They were from nearby Yarnell, and they clearly weren’t happy to have the FBI show up. They thought they could handle this on their own.

The head ranger of Mosby State Park had thought differently. He wasn’t used to anything worse than vandalism, litter, and illegal fishing and hunting, and he knew the locals from Yarnell weren’t capable of dealing with this.

Bill had made the hundred-plus-mile trip by helicopter, so he could get here before the body was moved. The pilot had followed the coordinates to a patch of meadow on a nearby hilltop, where the ranger and Spelbren had met him. The ranger had driven them a few miles down a dirt road, and when they’d pulled over, Bill could glimpse the murder scene from the road. It was just a short way downhill from the creek.

The cops standing impatiently nearby had already gone over the scene. Bill knew exactly what they were thinking. They wanted to crack this case on their own; a pair of FBI agents was the last thing they wanted to see.

Sorry, you rednecks, Bill thought, but you’re out of your depth here.

“The sheriff thinks this is trafficking,” Spelbren said. “He’s wrong.”

“Why do you say that?” Bill asked. He knew the answer himself, but he wanted to get an idea of how Spelbren’s mind worked.

“She’s in her thirties, not all that young,” Spelbren said. “Stretch marks, so she’s had at least one child. Not the type that usually gets trafficked.”

“You’re right,” Bill said.

“But what about the wig?”

Bill shook his head.

“Her head’s been shaved,” he replied, “so whatever the wig was for, it wasn’t to change her hair color.”

“And the rose?” Spelbren asked. “A message?”

Bill examined it.

“Cheap fabric flower,” he replied. “The kind you’d find in any low-price store. We’ll trace it, but we won’t find out anything.”

Spelbren looked him over, clearly impressed.

Bill doubted that anything they’d found would do much good. The murderer was too purposeful, too methodical. This whole scene had been laid out with a certain sick style that set him on edge.

He saw the local cops itching to come closer, to wrap this. Photos had been taken, and the body would be removed any time now.

Bill stood and sighed, feeling the stiffness in his legs. His forty years were starting to slow him down, at least a little.

“She’s been tortured,” he observed, exhaling sadly. “Look at all the cuts. Some are starting to close up.” He shook his head grimly. “Someone worked her over for days before doing her in with that ribbon.”

Spelbren sighed.

“The perp was pissed off about something,” Spelbren said.

“Hey, when are we gonna wrap up here?” one of the cops called out.

Bill looked in their direction and saw them shuffling their feet. Two of them were grumbling quietly. Bill knew the work was already done here, but he didn’t say so. He preferred keeping those bozos waiting and wondering.

He turned around slowly and took in the scene. It was a thick wooded area, all pines and cedars and lots of undergrowth, with the creek burbling along its serene and bucolic way toward the nearest river. Even now, in midsummer, it wasn’t going to get very hot here today, so the body wasn’t going to putrefy badly right away. Even so, it would be best to get it out of here and ship it off to Quantico. Examiners there would want to pick it apart while it was still reasonably fresh. The coroner’s wagon was pulled up on the dirt road behind the cop car, waiting.

The road was nothing more than parallel tire tracks through the woods. The killer had almost certainly driven here along it. He had carried the body the short distance along a narrow path to this spot, arranged it, and left. He wouldn’t have stayed long. Even though the area looked out of the way, rangers patrolled through here regularly and private cars weren’t supposed to be on this road. He had wanted the body to be found. He was proud of his work.

And it had been found by a couple of early-morning horseback riders. Tourists on rented horses, the ranger had told Bill. They were vacationers from Arlington, staying at a fake Western ranch just outside of Yarnell. The ranger had said that they were a little hysterical now. They’d been told not to leave town, and Bill planned to talk to them later.

There seemed to be absolutely nothing out of place in the area around the body. The guy had been very careful. He’d dragged something behind him when he’d returned from the creek – a shovel, maybe – to obscure his own footprints. No scraps of anything left intentionally or accidentally. Any tire prints on the road had likely been obliterated by the cop car and coroner’s wagon.

Bill sighed to himself.

Damn it, he thought. Where’s Riley when I need her?

His longtime partner and best friend was on involuntary leave, recovering from the trauma of their last case. Yes, that had been a nasty one. She needed the time off, and the truth be told, she might not ever come back.

But he really needed her now. She was a lot smarter than Bill, and he didn’t mind admitting it. He loved watching her mind at work. He pictured her picking away at this scene, detail by minuscule detail. By now she’d be teasing him for all the painfully glaring clues that had been staring him in the face.

What would Riley see here that Bill didn’t?

He felt stumped, and he didn’t like the feeling. But there wasn’t anything more he could do about it now.

“Okay, guys,” Bill called out to the cops. “Take the body away.”

The cops laughed and gave each other high-fives.

“Do you think he’ll do it again?” Spelbren asked.

“I’m sure of it,” Bill said.

“How do you know?”

Bill took a long deep breath.

“Because I’ve seen his work before.”

Chapter 2

“It got worse for her every day,” Sam Flores said, bringing up another horrific image on the huge multimedia display looming above the conference table. “Right up to when he finished her off.”

Bill had guessed as much, but he hated to be right.

The Bureau had flown the body to the BAU in Quantico, forensics technicians had taken photos, and the lab had started all the tests. Flores, a lab technician with black-rimmed glasses, ran the grisly slide show, and the gigantic screens were a forbidding presence in the BAU conference room.

“How long was she dead before the body was found?” Bill asked.

“Not long,” he replied. “Maybe early evening before.”

Beside Bill sat Spelbren, who had flown into Quantico with him after they’d left Yarnell. At the head of the table sat Special Agent Brent Meredith, the team chief. Meredith cut a daunting presence with his broad frame, his black, angular features, and his no-nonsense face. Not that Bill was intimidated by him – far from it. He liked to think that they had a lot in common. They were both seasoned veterans, and had both seen it all.

Flores flashed a series of close-ups of the victim’s wounds.

“The wounds on the left were inflicted early on,” he said. “Those on the right are more recent, some inflicted hours or even minutes before he strangled her with the ribbon. He seems to have gotten progressively more violent during the week or so that he held her captive. Breaking her arm might have been the last thing he did while she was still alive.”

“The wounds look like the work of one perpetrator to me,” Meredith observed. “Judging from the mounting level of aggression, probably male. What else have you got?”

“From the light stubble on her scalp, we’re guessing her head was shaved two days before she was killed,” Flores continued. “The wig was stitched together with pieces of other wigs, all cheap. The contact lenses were probably mail order. And one more thing,” he said, looking around at the faces, hesitant. “He covered her with Vaseline.”

Bill could feel the tension in the room thicken.

“Vaseline?” he asked.

Flores nodded.

“Why?” Spelbren asked.

Flores shrugged.

“That’s your job,” he replied.

Bill thought about the two tourists he’d interviewed yesterday. They had been no help at all, torn between morbid curiosity and the edge of panic at what they had seen. They were eager to get back home to Arlington and there hadn’t been any reason to detain them. They had been interviewed by every officer on hand. And they’d been duly cautioned to say nothing about what they’d seen.

Meredith exhaled and laid both palms on the table.

“Good work, Flores,” Meredith said.

Flores looked grateful for the praise – and maybe a bit surprised. Brent Meredith wasn’t given to making compliments.

“Now Agent Jeffreys,” Meredith turned to him, “brief us on how this relates to your old case.”

Bill took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.

“A little over six months ago,” he began, “on December sixteenth, actually – the body of Eileen Rogers was found on a farm near Daggett. I got called in to investigate, along with my partner, Riley Paige. The weather was extremely cold, and the body was frozen solid. It was hard to tell how long it had been left there, and the time of death was never exactly determined. Flores, show them.”

Flores turned back to the slide show. The screen split and alongside the images on the screen, a new series of images appeared. The two victims were displayed side by side. Bill gasped. It was amazing. Aside from the frozen flesh of the one body, the corpses were in almost the same condition, the wounds nearly identical. Both women had their eyes stitched open in the same, hideous manner.

Bill sighed, the images bringing it all back. No matter how many years he was on the force, seeing each victim pained him.

“Rogers’s body was found seated upright against a tree,” Bill continued, his voice more grim. “Not quite as carefully posed as the one at Mosby Park. No contact lenses or Vaseline, but most of the other details are the same. Rogers’s hair was chopped short, not shaved, but there was a similar patched-together wig. She was also strangled with a pink ribbon, and a fake rose was found in front of her.”

Bill paused for a moment. He hated what he had to say next.

“Paige and I couldn’t crack the case.”

Spelbren turned to him.

“What was the problem?” he asked.

“What wasn’t the problem?” Bill countered, unnecessarily defensive. “We couldn’t get a single break. We had no witnesses; the victim’s family couldn’t give us any useful information; Rogers had no enemies, no ex-husband, no angry boyfriend. There wasn’t a single good reason for her to be targeted and killed. The case went cold immediately.”

Bill fell silent. Dark thoughts flooded his brain.

“Don’t,” Meredith said in an uncharacteristically gentle tone. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have stopped the new killing.”

Bill appreciated the kindness, but he felt guilty as hell. Why couldn’t he have cracked it before? Why couldn’t Riley? There were very few times in his career he had been so stumped.

At that moment, Meredith’s phone buzzed, and the chief took the call.

Almost the first thing he said was, “Shit.”

He repeated it several times. Then he said, “You’re positive it’s her?” He paused. “Was there any contact for ransom?”

He stood from his chair and stepped outside the conference room, leaving the other three men sitting in perplexed silence. After a few minutes, he came back. He looked older.

“Gentlemen, we’re now in crisis mode,” he announced. “We just got a positive ID on yesterday’s victim. Her name was Reba Frye.”

Bill gasped as if he’d been punched in the stomach; he could see Spelbren’s shock, too. But Flores looked confused.

“Should I know who that is?” Flores asked.

“Maiden name’s Newbrough,” Meredith explained. “The daughter of State Senator Mitch Newbrough – probably Virginia’s next governor.”