Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10)(17)

“She committed the second shooting, Your Honor. Except her victim was a laptop. Which, let’s face it, we’ve all wanted to shoot at one time or another. So, yes, my client handled the murder weapon and, yes, she had GSR on her hands. But she did not kill her husband. We demand the dismissal of all charges as well as my client’s immediate release at this time.”

The judge regarded Delaney, then the ADA, whose face was now set in a grim line, then Delaney again. “Well,” the judge said, “it sounds like we have plenty to discuss at trial. Given there is sufficient evidence worth presenting, charges are not dismissed. However, I will grant bail. Five hundred thousand, cash bond.”

The judge banged her gavel. Evie Carter, who’d never looked left or right, was led from the room. A moment later, every reporter in the place had leapt to his or her feet and was racing to the door.

Phil, D.D., and Flora stood to the side to let the rush pass.

“I’ll be damned,” D.D. murmured. “She’s gonna do it.” She glanced at Phil, who nodded his agreement.

“Do what?” Flora demanded.

“For the second time in her life, Evie Carter’s gonna get away with murder.”





CHAPTER 6


    FLORA


MY FATHER DIED WHEN I was young. Traffic accident. So long ago, I no longer really remember him. The images in my mind are less from real memories than from the photos my mother still has up around the house.

Jacob, on the other hand, the man who kidnapped me, raped me, tortured me … six years later I still dream about him three or four nights a week.

Samuel Keynes, my victim specialist and a trained psychologist, has done his best to explain it to me over the years. Something about the omnipotence of an abductor. It wasn’t just that Jacob snatched me off a beach or locked me in a coffin-sized box for days on end. It was his total control over every facet of my life. I ate when he willed it. I drank when he permitted it. I lived, second by second, day by day, because he decided, for that instant, to allow it.

Stockholm syndrome is when a victim starts to bond with her captor, partially due to the captor’s role of complete power over her life. Did I bond with Jacob? The question isn’t as simple as I’d like it to be. I hated him. I still hate him. I worked hard every day on my own survival. Counting backward and forward in the long hours I was trapped in a box. Wiggling my toes, moving my limbs as the space would allow. Then, when he finally let me out, I observed, I learned, I adapted.

I don’t think I ever truly liked Jacob or saw him as a human being. He was a monster, plain and simple. But he was a monster who held the other end of my leash, so I tried to understand him. Anything to survive another day.

But not all days were awful. Not all moments torturous. After weeks turned into months, Jacob would sometimes show up with little surprises. DVDs of a favorite TV show I’d mentioned. Movies for both of us to watch. There’s a lot of time to pass in a long-haul rig. We’d look for license plates from all fifty states, play the alphabet game.

I never believed Jacob was human. But sometimes, like a lot of predators, he did a decent impression of one.

And to this day, he remains the single-most powerful relationship of my life.

Which is why I do my best to talk about him as little as possible. But if I’m being totally honest with myself, I’m not angry to finally be breaking my onetime, one-tell policy. I’m simply relieved to finally get the monster out of my head.

—

SAMUEL AGREES TO meet me after lunch. He’s an incredibly busy victim specialist, working for the FBI’s Office for Victim Assistance. A lot of his cases involve high-level executives kidnapped in various far-flung countries. Samuel’s job is to help the families understand the process, from the law enforcement steps involved in locating the evildoers to what it might be like when their loved one finally returns home. He also works with the victim him-or herself. Among other things, he generates a “strategy for reentry.” It’s to help guide both the family and the victim as they transition back to the real world.

Eight years ago, I had no idea such plans existed. Eight years ago, I didn’t understand that anyone would need a ten-point plan for reentering the “real world.”

Final step of being a victim specialist: supporting the family and victim through what can be a very long legal process, where they will still be asked to make statements, revisit statements, testify in this hearing, testify in that hearing. Part of the FBI’s impetus for creating the OVA is the modern trend of high-profile crimes (say, a five-year abduction case) and mass-casualty events (shootings, bombings, arson) that can take years to wind through the legal system.

See, one day, you’re a normal person with an ordinary family. Then, in a single instant, you’re not. You’re a young girl, waking up in a coffin-sized box. You’re a mom, back on her farm in Maine, getting a call from her daughter’s friends, asking if maybe her daughter has unexpectedly returned home from Florida.

It begins. The onslaught of local, state, federal investigators. The media camped out in the front yard. Maybe even taunting postcards from the predator himself, stoking fears, inflicting fresh terrors.

My mom had to learn how to work national media. Samuel is one of the people who prepared her. What to wear, what to say, the necessity of humanizing her daughter to an unknown kidnapper in order to increase the chances of his keeping me alive. My brother, Darwin, returned home from college to run the social media campaign. Again, with Samuel’s guidance. Posting pictures from my childhood. Quotes from friends. I don’t know how they did it, to tell you the truth. It’s one of those things we still never discuss. I don’t describe my time with Jacob, because I don’t want to hurt them. And they don’t mention the four hundred and seventy-two days they lived in constant fear of letting me down or maybe, through their own inexperience, making it easier for my captor to kill me.