Chapter 17 Jack
Icouldn't feel my hands.
They were locked on my knees, knuckles bone-white, but the sensation was distant. Like they belonged to someone else. Everything did, the screaming sirens, James's terse voice crackling over the radio coordinating the tactical team, the city blurring past the window in streaks of light and shadow.
The only thing that felt real was the video playing on an endless loop in my head. Anna's bruised face. That livid handprint on her cheek. Her split lip. Daisy pressed against her back, trembling, too terrified to even lift her head. Anna's lips moving: I'm sorry, Jack. I'm so sorry.
Sorry. Like any of this was her fault. Like she hadn't just used her body as a shield for my daughter.
"Jack." James's voice cut through. "We're two minutes out. You hear me? Two minutes."
Two minutes. One hundred twenty seconds. Each one a lifetime.
Just let them be there. Just let them be alive. Please, God, just let them be alive.
The scene hit me like a punch to the gut.
Blue and red lights strobed across brick, turning everything into a nightmare disco.
Police cruisers were blocking the street at both ends.
Yellow tape already up, snapping in the wind.
Neighbors crowded stoops and sidewalks with their phones out, filming, their faces slack with the ghoulish fascination people get when tragedy strikes someone else.
My daughter was entertainment. A developing story. Breaking news.
The building itself was worse than the surveillance photos had suggested.
Four stories of sagging brick and moss-stained concrete.
Fire escape listing to one side. The windows dark except for the flickering blue of TVs.
This was where Anna had lived. Where she'd been trapped.
Where Carter had controlled every aspect of her existence.
And now he'd brought them back.
Their apartment, 4B, second floor, had its lights on. Harsh white fluorescents visible through cheap curtains. Shadows moving behind them. The tactical team.
I was out of the car before James killed the engine, my legs carrying me forward on pure instinct.
"Jack!" His hand clamped on my arm like a vise, yanking me back hard enough to jar my teeth. "You stay here. Right here."
"That's my daughter in there—"
"Which is exactly why you stay." James pulled me behind a police cruiser, his face hard as granite. "If he's in there and sees you through a window, if he hears your voice, it could trigger him. He could hurt them before we breach. You want that?"
The logic was sound. The logic was unbearable.
"Let them do their job," James said, quieter now. Almost gentle. "Let them bring your girls home."
Your girls. I felt endless dread hearing those words.
It was the most helpless feeling of my life.
Standing behind a police cruiser, forced to be still when every cell in my body was screaming move, fight, do something. Watching men in body armor with rifles move with precision up the stairs and out of sight.
I counted their footsteps. Twelve steps to the second-floor landing. Then silence.
My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my temples, in my throat, in my fingertips. Every second stretched into infinity. I strained to hear if there was anything within that apartment, a shout, a cry, a gunshot, Daisy's voice, anything.
There was only the static crackle of police radios and the distant wail of more sirens converging.
I realized I was holding my breath. My lungs burned. I forced myself to inhale, the air tasting of exhaust and fear.
Thirty seconds. A minute. Ninety seconds.
What's taking so long? Why haven't they—
Then, a voice came through James's earpiece. Tinny. Distant.
"Clear."
Not "suspect in custody." Not "hostages secured." Not "we have them."
Clear.
It felt like the earth was opening beneath me.
James's face went from tense to that careful, professional blankness cops wear when they have to deliver bad news. He wouldn't look at me. That's how I knew.
They weren't there.
James didn't try to stop me this time. He let me follow him up those twelve stairs, down a hallway that smelled of cooking grease and mildew. Let me see for myself.
Apartment 4B. The door hung open, uniformed officers moving in and out like ants.
I stepped inside, and the air left my lungs.
It was a time capsule. A preserved crime scene of Anna's captivity.
Beige walls, once maybe cream, now yellowed with age and cigarette smoke.
Cheap beige carpet stained in places I didn't want to think about.
Almost empty except for a few pieces of discarded furniture, a sagging couch with visible springs, a particleboard coffee table with one leg shorter than the others, propped up with folded cardboard.
This was where she'd lived. Where she'd woken up every morning next to a man who hurt her. Where she'd learned to make herself small, quiet, and invisible.
The apartment smelled of dust and stale air, and underneath it, a faint trace of something floral. Her perfume. The cheap kind she used to wear.
It was a ghost of who she'd been. Who he'd forced her to be.
And it was empty.
No Carter. No Anna. No Daisy.
"They were here." A detective I didn't know gestured to the center of the living room. "You can see the marks in the carpet where someone knelt. Two sets of prints, one adult and child."
I moved forward on legs that didn't feel attached to my body. There, exactly where I'd seen them in the video, exactly where Anna sat down, and Daisy had been pressed against her—
A small, pink plastic hair clip in the shape of a butterfly.
Daisy's.
I'd bought her a pack of them three months ago. She'd been so excited, had lined them up on her dresser in rainbow order. Pink was her favorite. She'd been wearing it yesterday morning at breakfast.
Yesterday. A lifetime ago.
My knees tried to buckle. I locked them, swaying slightly.
A few feet away, a single drop of blood had dried on the worn carpet. Dark. Rust-brown. A perfect circle about the size of a dime.
Whose blood?
Anna's? From her split lip, from wherever he'd hit her that hadn't made it into the video?
Or Daisy's?
The thought made bile rise in my throat. I turned away, one hand braced against the wall, fighting nausea.
The scene became a hive of activity around me. I was a statue in the center, useless, while professionals did their work.
Forensics moved in with their kits and cameras. A woman in latex gloves crouched by the hair clip, photographing it from multiple angles before carefully bagging it. Evidence marker #1 was placed where it had been.
Another tech took samples of the blood. Q-tip, swab, seal. Evidence marker #2.
They dusted for prints. The black powder coated everything. Doorknobs, the coffee table, the light switches. A camera flash went off, illuminating the room in stark white. Then another. And another.
This was my daughter's kidnapping. Catalogued. Photographed. Reduced to numbered placards and labeled bags.
The detective next to me, Ramirez, held a notepad. Ready to take a statement.
"Let's start with the basics," he said, pen poised. "The child. Daisy Spencer. Age five. Date of birth?"
I rattled it off. “May 3rd.” Her astrological sign was Taurus. Elena had joked that she was stubborn like one. She loved unicorns and the color purple and stories where the princess saved herself.
"Last seen wearing?"
"Unicorn pajamas. Pink. With—" My voice cracked. "With purple unicorns."
He wrote it down. Moved on. Professional. Efficient.
"The woman, Anna Stewart." He looked up. “A middle name?"
The question hung in the air.
I stared at him. I opened my mouth and then closed it.
The silence stretched. I became uncomfortable. Ramirez's pen was still poised, waiting. James, standing beside me, glanced over. I saw his brow furrow.
"Mr. Spencer? Her middle name?"
"I..." The word stuck in my throat like broken glass. "I don't know. I have no idea if she even has one."
I didn't know. I wanted to beat myself for not even asking her what her full name was.
Ramirez's pen paused for just a fraction of a second. He didn't look judgmental, but the pause was there. A beat of acknowledgment.
"That's okay," Ramirez said smoothly, moving on. "We'll get it from employment records. Date of birth?"
I gave it. “December 14th.” I only knew that because I'd seen it on her driver's license in surveillance photos.
As I recited facts, such as her height, weight, hair color, and eye color, the irony became a corrosive acid eating through my composure.
I knew which grocery store she frequented. I knew she bought the cheapest coffee brand. I knew she took her tea with honey. I knew she was afraid of thunderstorms. I knew she cried during sad movies, even when she tried to hide it.
I knew the exact shade of fear in her eyes.
But I didn't know if she had a middle name.
The man who had mapped her trauma, who had surveilled her for nine months, who had brought her into his home as part of a revenge plot, was stumped by a basic biographical fact you'd ask on a first date.
"Mr. Spencer?" Ramirez's voice pulled me back. "Are you alright?"
"Yeah, I’m fine," I lied. My words tasted like blood.
We were outside, James on his phone, me leaning against a police cruiser trying to remember how to breathe, when he got the call.
I watched his face change. Saw his eyes close briefly, the look of a detective receiving bad news he'd hoped wouldn't come.
"When?" he asked. Pause. "How long before someone reported it?" Another pause, longer. "Shit."
He hung up but didn't speak immediately.
"What?" My voice came out flat. Dead.
"They found the van. The one he used for the fake maintenance call. Torched in an industrial lot on the south side."
Torched. Deliberate. Professional. Erasing evidence.
"Any leads on what he switched to?"