“So tell us how to reach her,” I said.
“I don’t know how to reach her,” he said. “She didn’t want me to know. She wanted a clean break and an entirely new life. I respected that.”
“No phone number?” I asked.
“Lost my phone, remember?”
“I’m not buying it,” Sampson said, marching him back toward the roof hatch. “We’re taking you in, and we’ll be searching your apartment. That snuff film you made is going to send you to prison for the rest of your life.”
“No, wait,” Parks said. “I’m not lying. Emily’s alive. Somewhere.”
“Hell of a defense,” I said.
He said nothing this time. After I’d climbed down through the hatch, Sampson removed Parks’s handcuffs and ordered him at gunpoint onto the ladder. The pimp dropped down and offered no resistance when Sampson put the cuffs back on.
When we led him down the staircase, Parks said, “How about I help you and you help me here?”
Sampson grunted. “How can you help us, Neal?”
Parks licked his lips and said, “I want you to know that I could be killed for saying this, but I can tell you about real snuff films and the crazy, sick bastards that make them.”
“Uh-huh, and what good does that do us?” I asked.
Parks hesitated again but then said, “Maybe you’ll figure out what happened to those blondes that have been disappearing.”
“Like Emily McCabe?” Sampson said.
“No,” Parks said. “Like two blond lesbian bitches from Pennsylvania.”
CHAPTER
26
TWO GIRLS CRYING.
Those were the last clear sounds Gretchen Lindel had heard, and that had been hours ago.
Two girls crying, Gretchen thought, and she strained to hear more.
But through the plywood walls, the seventeen-year-old heard nothing. No voices. No floorboards creaking. Not even a jangle of chain. Or a desperate sob.
The silence made Gretchen mad beyond reason. She kicked and shook the chain that ran from her left ankle to the wall, and she glared at the little camera mounted high in the far corner, where she couldn’t reach.
“Who are you?” she screamed. “Why am I here? What do you want?”
Gretchen collapsed into sobs as she had too many times since she’d woken up in a plywood box about the size of a prison cell dressed in a cheap white flannel nightgown, lying on a new mattress still in its wrapper, and covered with thick wool army blankets.
There’d been food. A big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken and bottles of Gatorade. A metal bucket to relieve herself in the corner where her chain would reach. And the single LED light overhead that never went off.
The constant light had made Gretchen lose track of time. As her crying subsided and she pulled the blankets up around her, she realized she had no idea how long she’d been in the box. Three days? Five? A week? Longer?
The kidnapping itself had felt like a nightmare, like something that she’d wake up from. But no matter how many times she slept in the box or how hard she tried to forget, she kept seeing the men grabbing her, kept seeing Ms. Petracek murdered.
They shot her like she was nothing.
What will they do to me?
Gretchen felt panic surge and tried to turn her thoughts to something else. She’d heard her father talk about doing that many times as a way out of pain.