Kate Brice had refused to stay around for that day. She couldn’t save her husband from himself. So she had left him. Now, pacing her room, she felt like a teenage girl getting ready for her first date; she was working up the courage to go to him. She needed to lie next to him and to feel his arms around her, once more before he left her. He had left her many times, but she knew this time was different.
She knew that Ben Brice would not come back this time.
“When are you coming back?”
Sam was looking up at him, his face full of innocence. Ben Brice wasn’t about to say something that would change that.
“Soon.”
Sam shook his head. “Typical grownup answer-vague.”
Ben smiled. It was like talking to John at the same age. He sat on Sam’s bed.
“I’m not being vague. I just can’t say for sure.”
“But you will come back?”
Ben pondered for a moment. Vague was hard to come by now. He said what the boy needed to hear.
“Yes.”
Little Johnny Brice was small, weak, timid, and brilliant. He was teased and taunted, bullied and beaten. He was introverted and lonely, with no friends except his mother and an Apple computer. He was a mama’s boy because his father was off at war. He hated his life right up until the day he had arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where everyone was a Little Johnny Brice. He possessed a 190 intelligence quotient, he earned a Ph. D. in algorithms at the Laboratory for Computer Sciences, and upon graduation, he founded his own company and set about to write a killer app. Ten years later, today, he became a billionaire: at 9:30 A.M. Eastern time, BriceWare. com went public at $30 per share; by close of trading at 4:00 P.M., the price had bounced to $60.
John R. Brice was worth $2 billion.
This was the day he had dreamed about for as long as he could remember, like a teenage boy looking forward to the day he would lose his virginity, the day he would become a man. This was to be that day for John R. Brice. But now, standing in the master bathroom of his $3 million mansion and staring at himself in the mirror, he still saw Little Johnny Brice.
He had not found his manhood on Wall Street; perhaps he would find it in Idaho.
He had tried to imagine life without Gracie. He couldn’t. It was not the life he had lived or the life he wanted to live. And it would be a life without Elizabeth. Gracie’s birth had brought them together; her death would drive them apart. Elizabeth would leave him, and Sam with her. His family, his tenuous connection to the real world, would be gone; and he would give every dollar of his new fortune to save his family.
But he knew his money could not save his family. He knew his only hope lay with a drunk. Ben Brice offered hope. Hope that somehow, somewhere, Gracie was alive. Hope that one day she might come home. Hope that her father might again cup her perfect face and think how swell she was. He knew it made no sense. He knew there was no logic to it. No reason. No odds. There was just emotion. And hope. John had read about people with terminal cancer going to Mexico for enemas and other quack therapies, hoping for a miracle. He had wondered how desperate a person must be to do such a thing, to travel thousands of miles hoping for a miracle. Now he knew.
So John R. Brice would unplug from his virtual world of cyberspace and computers and code that defined and protected him and venture forth into the real world, untethered to his technology like an astronaut untethered to the mother ship, chasing Ben’s dream and his daughter. And hoping.
For the first time in his life, John Brice would follow his father.
The mansion sat dark and silent, as if in mourning. The FBI had packed up and moved out. Everyone had retired to their respective rooms to consider life without Grace. Everyone except Elizabeth.
She was in the media room watching the late news. A child abductor was dead. He would be buried tomorrow. Life would go on as before. But not Grace’s life. Or her mother’s life.
Her daughter was dead.
Evil had won again.
Mark Gimenez
The Abduction
11:07 P.M
Ben was lying in bed; the only light was coming from outside. His hands were clasped behind his head and his mind was filled with questions: Why couldn’t Clayton Lee Tucker identify Gracie or the men or the tattoo? Was he really a nutcase? And why was his phone line busy all day and night? Why had the two men taken Gracie to Idaho? And the most troubling question of all for Ben Brice: Had his past come back to haunt Gracie?
The door to the pool house opened, and Kate’s head appeared.
“Ben?”
“Yeah.”
Kate came over and sat on the edge of the bed; she stared at her hands and fiddled with the belt to her bathrobe. He gave her time to work up to what she wanted to say.
“Ben, has there been another woman?”
“No, Kate, just another drink.”
Kate stood, untied her robe, and let it fall to the floor. She pulled back the blanket and lay beside him, resting her head on his chest. Where she would be when he woke the next morning.
DAY SEVEN
Ben Brice opened his eyes not to a dog needing to pee but to his wife sleeping next to him for the first time in five years. The warmth of her skin against his brought a sense of regret to his mind: all the years he had lost with her.
Dawn was near and he needed to leave, but he lay still; he was not yet ready to let go of the moment. When he was young and life hadn’t yet had its way with him, he had let go of such moments freely, assured there would be many more to come; now he held onto each moment for as long as possible. He wrapped his arms around his wife one last time.
Ben recalled the first time Katherine McCullough had lain with him, on 6 June 1968, their wedding night. He was twenty-two and a second lieutenant; she was twenty and a virgin. When she came to him that night and let her gown slip off her shoulders and fall to the floor and stood before him, he knew he would never want another woman.
But life soon had its way with Ben Brice.
She had left him and now he must leave her. He released her and rolled out of bed slowly so as not to wake her. He was dressed and packed when she stirred. He went to her, sat on the edge of the bed, and brushed stray strands of red hair from her face. She opened her eyes and stared into his as if trying to read his mind. Finally, she said, “She really is alive.”
He nodded.
“Why? Why’d they take her?”
Ben broke eye contact. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
Kate got out of bed, slipped into her robe, and pulled the belt snug around her waist.
“Does this have something to do with that tattoo?”
“You mean with the war?”
“Yes, with that damn war.”
Ben stood and grabbed his duffel bag. “Kate, everything has something to do with that war.”
Elizabeth spat the last of the bile into the toilet and flushed again. The taste burned her throat; the lining was raw from her morning vomits. Still kneeling, she grabbed the bottle of green mouthwash that she now kept by the toilet, took a mouthful, swished it around, and spat it into the toilet. She sank to the floor; the marble was cool on her bare legs. She rested her head on the toilet seat.
When she had woken, her mind had immediately taken advantage of the early morning, when she was most vulnerable, and tortured her again with more gruesome images of her daughter: Grace’s body, dead and decomposing and dumped in a ditch, maggots crawling out of her silent open mouth and over her pale lips, vultures pecking at her blue eyes and rats gnawing on her beautiful face, fighting over her flesh…