CHAPTER 76 The Kidnapper
The Kidnapper
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, gesturing pointlessly to the rope, the tape. I advance towards her, and she backs away. ‘I’m sorry I have to …’
Here she is, in the flesh, the person I have been searching for all this time: the kidnapper’s daughter.
In the end, it was the only way. I realized early on what I’d have to do.
The second we decided to run, I directed us to Terlingua – I’d overheard the daughter say she lived there, though I never told Mum that fact; I knew she’d stop me from doing this.
It’s easy to act when you’ve been taught how.
I saw her through the crack in the door, and I knew I’d find her again, if only I looked hard enough.
I had the right house, but it was easy to check once Mum told me the kidnapper’s name. Michaela, the Border Patrol officer. Michaela, the owner of this house.
She owns it, and her daughter lives in it, evidently in fear, as she leaves the shutters closed and only goes out at nightfall.
All I had to do was come back here, once we got back to Terlingua after Mum’s arrest, and do the deed.
I had no idea the kidnapper was a woman, but, to me, it changes nothing.
It’s old-fashioned inside. A stone kitchen, fluorescent light up ahead littered with flies. The shutters make the place feel smaller, keep the morning out. A coffee machine steams on the counter, puffing plumes under the cupboards.
I take a breath. It’s time to use the kidnapper’s only Achilles’ heel, and it’s time to save my mother.
And then, in that tired kitchen in Terlingua, she does the thing that I would never expect.
She nods, like: OK, I get it. And also: I knew this would come.
And also: understanding. She knows more than perhaps I’d counted on.
‘I saw you on the news,’ she says. But her face changes, a micro-emotion passing over it.
And suddenly, I think she doesn’t only watch the news. She knows precisely her mother’s involvement in it.
‘She …’ she says, and with a single syllable, I know that she knows everything.
Exactly who I am, exactly what her mother does, and possibly even what I want.
She waits a beat, then very deliberately, she raises her right hand, which contains a set of keys I didn’t know she was still holding.
One sharp key held between index and middle finger.
It’s something I recognize as such a mark of femalehood I almost have to look away.
I know the exact feel of it, and the fear that predicates it. And here I am, causing it.
Then, to my surprise, she puts the keys down on the counter. ‘You’re here about her,’ she tells me.
‘Your mother,’ I reply.
The fluorescent light above us is off, only silvery glare coming in through the gaps around the shutters, hitting a couple of glasses sitting on a draining board but not much else; her face is shadowy.
And then she says it. The thing that changes everything. She steps forward, towards me, not afraid at all.
‘You want her to confess,’ she tells me. ‘You’re going to take me.’
I blink, surprised to find my eyes wet. When it comes down to it, I have almost no plan. I was meticulous in finding her. There was nowhere I didn’t look. But now I’m here, and I thought I’d take her through threats, through surprise. But I can’t. That isn’t me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I have to …’ I walk towards her with no idea what’s next.
‘No.’ She holds out a hand, and that’s when she says it. ‘I want her in prison, too. Always have.’ She reaches towards me. ‘Take me, and ransom her. But I’ll help you – let’s stage it.’
She – Andrea’s – legs are bound at the ankles with blue rope which – regretfully – leaves a mark. Her wrists, too. She’s tied to a chair we brought in the car with us, driving several miles from her house to some unidentifiable part of the desert.
‘Blindfold,’ I say, drawing it between my fingers softly, so softly it doesn’t scare her. The cotton material is new, tough and thick.
The tape comes next. The worst part. It was so painful ripping it off. ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her, as I cut a small piece off.
‘It’s really fine.’
I pass it to her and she pats it into place, now mute. She does it so gently, so carefully, it moves me. A hand, her mother’s hand, was clamped to my mouth, that first night.
I look at her, sitting there, slim and slender in the chair, then take a photo, and get ready to send it.
How strange and otherworldly it is to be on the other side of it.
To do the things the kidnapper did to me, only with different intent, and with my victim without fear.
Really, it’s totally different. It occurs to me that I probably never would have been able to do it if she hadn’t complied.
I just thought I could. There’s a difference between good people and bad people; there just is. I think so, anyway.
‘No,’ Andrea answers me, sitting casually in the dust of the desert. ‘She’s always been this way, but she’s getting worse. She’s so good at it that nobody knows it. She just wants money. Always wants more and more of it, no matter how much she’s got. She roped her cousin in, too. Then a friend.’
We’re together, by the roadside, two women who – it turns out – were born just three months apart.
‘That’s awful,’ I tell her, a hand outstretched, which she grasps.
‘Yeah. I know. I mean, she was dealing, always dealing. I didn’t know what for years.
Dad died when I was a teenager – heart attack – and she got more cunning after that.
’ Andrea pauses here, crosses her legs in front of her.
‘I moved out eventually, couldn’t cope with it.
She made me go to the little house in Terlingua, said nowhere else was safe because of her dealings. That’s how she refers to them.’
‘So she knows you know.’
‘Oh yes. And she’s not wrong, either. I’ve been followed, sent threatening texts. She has so many enemies. It’s better for me to stay shut away in the day – studying. Psychology.’
‘Do you think your enemies are people she’s kidnapped, made to do things and released?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. They could easily be her wingmen, part of the supply chain. In the end I kind of started to just disengage, you know?’ She pauses. ‘But she’s trying to keep me safe.’ Another beat. ‘She cares about me in her own way.’
‘You were waiting for somebody to come forward.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Does it … Does she not consider the fear she engenders in people? As a woman?’
Andrea scoffs. ‘No. All the time, I was thinking about how I could get her to stop. But I was the only one who ever knew, so I couldn’t hand her over. She’d know it was me.’
Texas blisters, still, in the autumn heat beyond us. Another abandoned highway, another crime, I guess, though this one is ethical. It’s win-win for both of us, though I’m surprised Andrea saw it like that immediately.
‘So the thing is,’ she says, ‘this gives me an out, too.’
‘Yeah?’
‘By the time I had moved out, she had taken three women, in total; the ransom was the drugs deal. You’re the fourth, as far as I know.
I’ve been mostly living out here, but I went by her place when she had you.
She was weird about it, and right away I knew she had someone.
It was chilling. She never keeps them long.
The people ransomed always do what she wants.
It’s just a business model. Before the kidnaps was just old-fashioned drugs. ’
‘Is it often parents and children?’
‘It’s always loved ones, that’s all,’ she says sadly. ‘It’s always women she takes, from camps.’
‘I heard you tell her you were going back to Terlingua, and there just aren’t that many houses around here.
As soon as we made a run for it, I started steering us in this direction.
I knew deep down that this was the only way to fix it, though I had hoped I wouldn’t have to resort to it.
We tried other stuff,’ I tell her. ‘We tried finding her in other ways. We had a lawyer look, too, but we were searching for a man. Then in Terlingua I started searching for you in earnest. I googled stuff, too. I googled Torture kidnapper to see if I could torture her into confessing. I was trying to find out if it would work, if somebody who kidnapped would offer a confession under the right circumstances. Under duress. In my case, if their daughter was kidnapped.’
‘Well. She’s good at hiding. As, I guess, am I.’
‘Did you ever want to tell anyone?’
She shades her eyes with a slim hand. ‘Obviously,’ she says.
‘The three before you – it’s awful to witness.
But it’s a whole web of people. Her cousin does the scouting.
Someone at the airport gathers information on their stay.
Mom gets the drugs over. But then someone else distributes, too.
’ And then she looks at me. ‘Which is why your plan is perfect. She’s the snitch, not me, or you.
It’s brilliant. No one makes a single enemy except her.
Even if you did have to scare me at first.’
‘Ha.’
And then, together, away from the house, we compose the ransom. Not dissimilar to the one that started it all.
I have your daughter, I write to her on the burner phone, obscuring the number so it simply reads CALLER UNKNOWN, just like hers did.
Your instructions are clear. Confess in the arraignment of The State vs Simone Seaborn, Jeff Davis County Courthouse, your exact involvement in Lucy Seaborn’s kidnap together with your associates’.
So long as you do this, your daughter will be freed.
A sigh escapes my body as I watch for several seconds, waiting to hear from her.
And then she replies, like the pro she is: Send me proof of life.
So we send the video we already made, of Andrea bound and gagged, while we sit out in the desert, together, both of us free. She, like me, is an excellent actor, and I knew from the first take that her mother would do it, just like mine did.
I’m outside the courthouse, later, when I see a woman arrive. I’m right by two security guards in the shadows of the building, standing on some steps that lead to basement rooms. I’m unseen. Feeling safe but ready.
As she breezes past me, I smell them. Lemons from her car air freshener: it’s her.
She’s wearing a cowboy hat and loose linen clothes. Under the brim, her eyebrows flicker and rise in stress. She looks down at her phone again. She hasn’t seen me. And, finally, I hold the cards. I have the thing most precious to her. Or, rather, she thinks I do.
But then, as she looks at her phone, I see such a familiar expression cross her features, it stops me right there and has me unable to look away.
It’s the same expression I’ve seen on Mum’s face a hundred thousand times.
Love and concern, comingled, their ingredients combined so well you can’t distinguish them from one another.
I stare at her for just a few seconds, this parent who loves her child so much.
She doesn’t turn to me. She hasn’t seen me. And, anyway, I’m safe. There are people all around. Law enforcement. Police. Judges. Lawyers. Even though, in the end, it took a vigilante to sort it.
She ascends the steps, this ordinary woman who is prepared to do violent and amoral things, who I may dream about for the rest of my life, and heads inside.
I watch her go and, do you know what? She seems like nothing to me.
A woman who loves her daughter, like all parents – the bare minimum – but is much less than that.
A criminal, a woman driven by greed. Somebody without morals or scruples.
Somebody so sad and insignificant, I don’t want her impact on my life any more.
I take a breath. Maybe I can stop that. Maybe this is healing.
‘Where’s Courtroom One?’ I hear her ask somebody, just in the foyer.
I can hardly stand to listen, my breath held as she goes inside.
Instead, I walk a slow lap of the building.
It’s both stately and somehow false, too, the outside too white, the sky so vivid; a felt-tip blue.
I keep walking, around to the side, then the back, the panicked and purposeful strides reminding me of the desert, of the journey we started in Texas and ended here, still in Texas but someplace different, too.
On the right side of the law, then the wrong, then the right again.
Halfway around, towards the back, I catch a glimpse of a window.
It’s mullioned, old-style, stands out in the modern architecture, and something in me knows it’s the right window before I can really check it, before I see the crest and the judge and the jury.
I take ten steps back, twenty, on to the neat lawns separated off by little swinging ropes that I have to step over, and then I can see inside.
And – I swear it – I see the exact second it happens. Michaela, in the witness box, hat off, her expression full of regret. I stare and stare at her.
And then – just across – there’s Mum in the dock, looking straight ahead, her shoulders braced, ready to serve life or near life in prison for me.
The moment comes. I see the precise second it happens. Michaela stops speaking, and Mum’s head hits her chest in both relief and disbelief. The instant she learns it: that she is free.
My gaze goes back to Michaela.
Fuck you, I think.
Fuck. You.