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Sillman was interviewed by the FBI ten times in ten weeks, but his story never changed and he was never able to provide any information of value. He said he had been listening to sports radio, with time to kill—he was forty minutes early on his pickup—when a knuckle rapped on his window. Someone squat, in a black coat, standing in the rain. Sillman had rolled down the glass and then—

Nothing. Just: nothing. The night melted away, like a snowflake on the tip of his tongue.

Sillman had daughters of his own—and granddaughters—and it ate him alive to imagine Marta and her mother in the hands of some sick Ted Bundy–Charles Manson f*ck who would screw them till they were both dead. He couldn’t sleep, had bad dreams about the little girl playing chess with her mother’s severed fingers. He strained and strained with all his will to remember something, anything. But only one other detail would come.

“Gingerbread,” he sighed to a pock-scarred federal investigator who was named Peace but looked more like War.

“Gingerbread?”

Sillman looked at his interrogator with hopeless eyes. “I think while I was passed out, I dreamed about my mom’s gingerbread cookies. Maybe the guy who knocked on the glass was eatin’ one.”

“Mm,” said Peace-not-War. “Well. That’s helpful. We’ll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I’m not hopeful it’ll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can’t catch him.”


IN NOVEMBER 1991, A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED RORY McCombers, a freshman at the Gilman School in Baltimore, met a Rolls-Royce in his dorm’s parking lot. He was on his way to the airport, was joining his family in Key West for Thanksgiving break, and believed that the car had been sent for him by his father.

In fact, the driver that Rory’s father had sent for him was passed out in his limo, half a mile away. Hank Tulowitzki had stopped at a Night Owl to gas up and use the bathroom, but he could remember nothing at all after topping off his tank. He woke up at one in the morning in the trunk of his own car, which was parked a few hundred feet down the road from the Night Owl in a public lot. He’d been kicking and screaming for most of five hours before an early-morning jogger heard him and summoned the police.

A Baltimore pedophile later confessed to the crime and described in pornographic detail the way he had molested Rory before strangling him to death. But he claimed not to remember where he had buried the body, and the rest of the evidence didn’t fit; not only did he not have access to a Rolls-Royce, he didn’t have a valid driver’s license. By the time the cops decided the kiddie fiddler was a dead end—just a perv who got off on describing the sexual assault of a minor, someone who confessed to things out of boredom—there were new abductions to work on and the ground on the McCombers investigation was very cold.

Neither Rory’s driver, Tulowitzki, or the Gregorskis’ driver, Sillman, had his blood tested until more than a day after the abductions took place, and any lingering presence of sevoflurane in their bodies went undetected.

For all they had in common, the disappearance of Marta Gregorski and the kidnapping of Rory McCombers were never connected.

One other thing the two cases had in common: Neither child was seen again.





Haverhill


CHRIS MCQUEEN TOOK OFF THE AUTUMN VIC BEGAN HIGH SCHOOL.

Her freshman year was already off to a rocky start. She was pulling straight C’s, except for art. Her art teacher had put a comment on her quarterly summary, six hastily scrawled words—“Victoria is gifted, needs to concentrate”—and given her a B.

Vic drew her way through every study hall. She tattooed herself in Sharpie, to irritate her mother and impress boys. She had done a book report in comic-strip form, to the amusement of all the other kids who sat in the back of the class with her. Vic was getting an A-plus in entertaining the other burnouts. The Raleigh had been replaced by a Schwinn with silver-and-pink tassels on the handlebars. She didn’t give a f*ck about the Schwinn, never rode it. It embarrassed her.

When Vic walked in, home from an after-school detention, she found her mother on the ottoman in the living room, hunched over, her elbows on her knees, and her head in her hands. She had been crying . . . still was, water leaking from the corners of her bloodshot eyes. She was an ugly old woman when she wept.

“Mom? What happened?”

“Your father called. He isn’t going to come home tonight.”

“Mom?” Vic said, letting her backpack slide off her shoulder and fall to the floor. “What’s that mean? Where’s he going to be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know where, and I don’t know why.”

Vic stared at her, incredulous. “What do you mean you don’t know why?” Vic asked her. “He isn’t coming home because of you, Mom. Because he can’t stand you. Because all you ever do is bitch at him, stand there and bitch when he’s tired and wants to be left alone.”

“I’ve tried so hard. You don’t know how hard I’ve tried to accommodate him. I can keep beer in the fridge and dinner warm when he gets home late. But I can’t be twenty-four anymore, and that’s what he really doesn’t like about me. That’s how old the last one was, you know.” There was no anger in her voice. She sounded weary, that was all.

“What do you mean, ‘the last one’?”