Anonymous Caller (Chapter 4)
The man sitting across Karen’s desk was hiding something—she was certain of that. Rob Addelson was pale and shaken, the appropriate countenance for the worried boyfriend he claimed to be. But he diligently avoided eye contact as he shared his bizarre story of a late night phone call, a strange voice that could not be resisted, and Jenny’s abrupt exit from his life.
They’d given her the case because it was ostensibly another missing woman the same age as Lindsey, but it took Karen only five minutes to conclude that the two matters were unrelated. Karen turned over the facts of the Spickle investigation in her head as she suffered Addelson’s unlikely tale like a bad movie, sipping her coffee and occasionally taking notes and nodding encouragingly. By the time he was done, she thought she had a pretty good idea of what was really going on with this square-jawed preppy. She broached it delicately.
“Mr. Addelson, is it possible Jenny was, umm, seeing someone else?”
He frowned, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Someone she was dating on the sly? Maybe an older man. Married. Then he calls her up and says, ‘Now’s the time. I’m leaving my wife. Pack a bag, we’re running off to Rio together.’”
He was shaking his head before she finished. “I told you, I talked to the guy. He couldn’t have been older than 20. And she hung up on him the first time he called. It wasn’t until I answered...” He trailed off.
She doodled a scarecrow stick figure on her notepad and looked back up at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be dismissive. But I’m in the middle of a kidnapping investigation, and, frankly, this doesn’t sound like an FBI matter. At worst, it’s a missing persons case. Have you contacted the local police?”
“I told you, she’s not missing. She didn’t run off. He took her!“ He raised his voice, and a handful of agents at nearby desks looked up.
She nodded patiently. “I know. There was a voice on the phone, and you had to do whatever he said.”
“Yes.”
“And he made you sit down while she packed her bag and left.”
He looked at her desk.
“Mr. Addelson? Is that all he made you do?”
His hands curled into fists. He stared at them. “No,” he muttered. “There’s more.”
Karen’s phone rang. She excused herself and picked up the receiver.
“Karen, we’ve found her.” Bill’s voice was breathless. “She’s fine.” He rattled off an address. She scribbled it on the notepad and hung up.
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” she said, standing hurriedly and reaching for her jacket. “Agent Johnson will show you out.”
“B-but, what about Jenny?”
She started for the elevator. “I have your statement,” she called back. “I’ll look into it.” The doors slid closed, shutting out his protests.
Jenny kicked at the mud-splattered fender of her rented Kia, tears of frustration running down her cheeks with the rain. To have come so far, only to be stuck on the side of a road in the middle of Bumfucked, Indiana was torture. She was so near to him. What now?
There was a gas station a mile back down the road, but she’d been instructed not to draw attention, and she felt the keen eyes of the teenage attendant when she stopped for directions. Going back for a tow truck would invite questions that she couldn’t answer, even if she wanted to.
She kicked again, almost slipping in the mud. Then she took a calming breath and pulled her sopping hair back from her eyes. She climbed back into the car and unfolded her road map, the rain smacking metal above her head. There was little to navigate by out here—just fields of crops and derelict-looking farmhouses and barns. But she finally concluded that she was within walking distance of her destination.
Jenny left her luggage in the trunk, locked up the car and continued on foot down the road, her stomach knotting in growing anticipation.
The room could have been a maximum-security cell at any well-funded county jail. A combined toilet and sink made of stainless steel was bolted to the wall, near a thin mattress positioned on a slab rising from the smooth floor of poured concrete. Karen noted a pile of foil packages the size of paperbacks in the corner. “What’s that?”
“MREs, military rations,” said Bill. “He was ready for a long haul.”
The NYPD had uncovered the hidden cell after the Bureau passed out a list of Spickle’s real estate holdings, many of them masked by shell corporations. This was in the basement in an abandoned office park warehouse near the airport. The girl was fine—Spickle hadn’t touched her, she claimed, while on her way to the hospital for evaluation. At least, not since hitting her with a Taser as she left her brownstone, then gassing her with an anesthetic. When she arose from her twilight sleep, she was here.
She’d tried calling out for help, but the cell’s two layers of cinderblock sandwiched another layer of soundproofing material, muffling her cries. She could have been locked in here for a month without Spickle ever returning.
“This place must’ve cost a fortune to build,” Bill observed. “Why do you think he did it? It couldn’t have been the money.”
Karen reflected on Spickle’s ordered kitchen, and his cool, restrained gaze. “Control,” she said in a monotone. “I think he wanted to control her.” She shook her head clear. “Let’s get out of here.”
They passed through the thick doorway and mounted the stairs. “Where is he now?” she asked, her voice reverberating in the stairwell.
“We don’t know. He shook the surveillance team in New Jersey. But we’ll find him. We’ve frozen his credit cards, and issued BOLOs to every police department in the area.” He repeated, “We’ll find him.”
“He could’ve been in jail already,” she said glumly. “I let him go for nothing.”
He laughed humorlessly. “Honestly, Karen, nobody’s second-guessing you on this one. You saved the girl, and Spickle’s as good as handcuffed. You did a good job, kid.”
She smiled wanly. “Maybe.”
“What you need is a vacation.” They reached the landing, and Bill paused at the door to give her a meaningful look. “There’s forensics training at Quantico next week. We could both go. Stay at the Marriott.”
The Marriott. She flashed to Bill’s muscular body pressing against her on the firm bed, his mouth playing over her throat while his hand slides between her naked thighs. His left hand. His ring hand.
Bill stroked her arm lightly. She pulled away, and glanced back down the stairs to make sure none of the other agents or officers were behind them. “I told you before,” she said quietly, making eye contact. “That will never happen again. Ever.”
“Karen, listen—”
“No,” she shook her head and hunched her shoulders, symbolically shielding her ears. “You’re married.” She grabbed the doorknob. “Never. Again.” She wrenched open the door, and stepped into the dusty, dead warehouse air.
Tim was in the basement riffling through family records and photographs for clues to the machine’s genesis when the phone rang. He shut off the light and climbed the stunted flight of creaky stairs to the kitchen.
“Hello?”
“I just want to know one thing,” said Amy. “Why did you make Bobby cheat on me? Why didn’t you just make me hate him, as long as you were thrashing around in my head?”
“Amy...” It was good to hear her voice. “Why don’t you meet me someplace. We can talk about this.”
“Just answer the question.”
He sighed. “I tried making you hate him. You resisted it, and I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“You have hurt me.” She exhaled a deep, shaky breath. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” she whispered, “and it’s killing me.” He sat down on a chair at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about you, too. All the time. For years.”
“It’s not the same. Not even close. Goodbye, Tim. Don’t call me; I won’t answer.” Click.
He sat with the empty phone and listened to the faucet drip. There had to be a way to get Amy on the machine again, maybe through her parents or a friend. She’d be paranoid for a while, but eventually, she had to slip up. Then he could make her love him so completely that she wouldn’t care how he’d done it. They’d both be happier.
Tim was pulled from his reverie by the doorbell. He hung up the phone and walked into the living room.
He opened the front door, and his heart nearly stopped. The blonde woman on his doorstep seemed to glow in the muted sunlight of the storm. Her clothes were drenched; soaked denim hugged her hips, her sweater clung to her breasts and narrow waist. Her long hair was tangled and wet and there was a smudge of mud on her cheek.
She looked at him with keen blue eyes. “Is... is it you?” she asked in a small but familiar voice.
Tim’s jaw hung slack.
His heart pounded and sweat broke out on his chest. He’d never seen a woman this exquisite in real life, and wouldn’t dare speak to one if he did. The intelligence in her eyes scared him a little. It seemed... wrong... somehow that he could have bent this creature to his will. But he had. The evidence was in front of him, close enough to touch.
He swallowed and cleared his throat.
“Yes. It’s me, Jenny.” The stranger bounded through the door and embraced him like a long lost friend. He could feel her body trembling as she squeezed him. Her soft cheek pressed against his face, and the organic smell of her wet hair filled his nostrils.
Her eyes closed and she began kissing his face madly, finally ending up on his lips. Her tongue darted into his mouth and her fingers clawed at his hair. He lost his balance and folded onto the floor with her atop him, still kissing him, then tugging his shirt off over his head.
She crossed her arms at the hem of her sweater and pulled it off it in a single fluid movement. He couldn’t help gasping aloud at the sight of her perfect breasts. He touched one of them, savoring the smoothness of her skin as she worried off her wet pants. She stared into his eyes anxiously, as though at any moment he might cease to exist.
Karen spent the afternoon faxing Spickle’s mug shot to every field office in the tri-state area, and compulsively checking her e-mail for new developments in the hunt for the kidnapper. She’d never felt so helpless.
She sipped her coffee, and her eyes roamed over the notepad she’d covered with doodles and random details of the new “abduction” reported by the preppie. She sighed, and brought up the FBI case management tool. After a moment’s hesitation, she entered some likely search queries: “mind control,” “telephone.”
Karen paged through the results with growing interest. Less than a week earlier, a switchboard operator at a Minnesota paper factory was put on medical leave after openly fondling herself while on the job; she’d called the local FBI to report a mysterious phone call that compelled her to obey.
The same day, two female workers at an ice cream parlor in Miami made a similar report of a strange caller: the voice on the phone allegedly “hypnotized” one worker into putting the receiver to the ear of the other, then compelled both victims to make out while a store full of customers watched.
Obviously, the telephone brainwasher was one of those strange delusions that seemed to lurk in the popular psyche, hissing like background noise in the Bureau’s database. She’d get similar results searching for mind control satellites and alligators in the sewer.
But when Karen clicked back through the archives, the cases stopped suddenly. Prior to a week ago, the most recent reports were from 15 years earlier. They were even more disturbing: after a strange phone call, an 18-year-old fast food worker in DesMoines is confronted by unexpected advanced from her middle-aged boss. When she resists, he hands her the phone, and she’s soon tearing off her uniform and begging him for sex.
And at a grocery store in Arizona, a caller gets the manager to put every customer on the line, one-by-one, until everyone in the store is stripping off his or her clothes and dancing to the in-store Muzak.
Karen pored over the details of the reports. Finally, she hit the print button.
Tim studied his new girlfriend by the light of the fire. She was lying on her side, facing the fireplace. The pajamas she’d packed clung to the curves of her body provocatively.
He’d have to take her out at some point, maybe down to the diner where the kids gathered on the weekends. He wanted Amy to see her, and to know that he had someone a million times more sexy and sophisticated than she’d ever been.
She looked back over her shoulder at him and smiled flirtatiously. “What are you looking at?”
He blushed and grunted a non-answer.
“Thanks for fixing my car.”
“No problem. Next time rent American.”
Her blue eyes played over his body in a way that made his dick hard. He was sore and sleepy from hours of sex, but if he were honest with himself, he’d have to admit there wasn’t much else to do out here. In between workout sessions, they’d shared their life stories. She was in her first year at a Manhattan law firm. He told her all about the gatehouse, and was pleased when she seemed perfectly happy knowing that he’d used the machine to steal her from her life—as happy as he’d programmed her to be.
But what now? What did he normally do when he was bored? He excused himself and ran up the stairs to his old room. When he came down Jenny laughed at was in his hand.
“Oh, God. I haven’t done that since high school.”
“It’s like riding a bicycle,” he said, plopping down next to her. She rested her head on his shoulder as he opened the zip lock and packed the bowl of the pipe. He handed it to her with a lighter. “You first.”
Fifteen minutes later, he was nicely buzzed, and Jenny seemed completely wasted. She started telling him a story from work—something about a fax machine mix-up between two legal contracts—but somewhere along the way the convoluted tale dissolved into peels of meaningless laughter. He laughed with her.
She coughed. “Oh, wow,” she said, suddenly seized with the exaggerated seriousness of the truly stoned. “You know what just occurred to me?”
“What?”
She punched his arm affectionately. “I’m, like, totally your slave.”
He laughed, surprised. “Yeah, that sorta was the idea.”
“No, I mean, I’ve been trying to think of something you could order me to do that I wouldn’t do. And... and there’s nothing.” She laughed some more and leaned into him. “I mean, I’m thinking up the most disgusting stuff... " she crinkled her nose... “things I don’t even want to say out loud. And if you told me to do them, I would. I can’t say no to you.”
He started packing another bowl. “Then it’s a lucky for you that I don’t have that kind of imagination.”
She gathered her legs beneath her and stood up, eyes forward and shoulders back. “Make me do something,” she demanded.
“I’ve been making you do things for hours.”
“Not sex,” she said. “I’ve wanted to screw you since New York. Something else. Let’s really test this out.”
He put down the pipe and pulled himself up to the sofa. She looked pretty hot standing at attention. Maybe this would be a fun game.
“Bark like a dog.”
“Arf! Arf! That was lame.”
“Fine. Give me a foot massage.”
She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled over to the sofa. She pulled off his socks and began kneading his left foot. He rested a hand on her blonde head.
“You know, I’ve given foot rubs before,” she said.
“Have you sucked a guy’s toes before?”
She looked at his feet warily. “No.”
“Do it.”
Her lips wrapped soft and warm around his big toe, and she began sucking. He rolled his head back dreamily and watched the ceiling through half-open eyes. This was the life.
A beam of light played across the ceiling. He jumped. “Stop!”
She pulled back. “That wasn’t good?”
He stood up and ran to the back window. They were far away, but clear, even through the rain. Flashlights. Four of them. Maybe five.
“There are people back there. By the gatehouse.”
“What?” She jumped up and ran to his side. “Who?”
Tim walked briskly into the kitchen and wrenched open the utility closet by the back door, Jenny at his heels. He retrieved the .22 rifle from the gun rack, then fished around for the box of ammunition while searching his memory for how to load the gun. It had been years since he and his dad went out shooting at jackrabbits in the fields around the farm.
Finally satisfied that he’d loaded it correctly, he opened the back door, admitting a gush of cold air.
“I’m going with you,” Jenny said.
“No. Stay here. Lock the door behind me. Lock all the doors.”
He stepped out into the rain.