"They found the van," he says. "Decommissioned rail yard, mile and a half from the highway exit. Abandoned. Engine's still warm. There are tire tracks from a second vehicle beside it. Another van, standard width. They switched."
"Direction?"
"The yard exits onto a rural road heading north-west. After that, the camera coverage disappears completely. We're into farmland and forest."
North-west. Away from the city. Away from Luca's known properties, which are all in the metro area. Wherever they've taken him, it's not somewhere obvious.
"Keep looking," I say. "Every traffic camera on every road heading north-west within a fifty-mile radius. And get Cath's phone on a trace. If the Castellanos call it, I want to know where the call originates."
Viktor nods and leaves. My father remains in the chair.
The office is quiet. The city glows outside the window. Somewhere out there, in the dark, on a rural road heading north-west, Theo is in a vehicle with people who took him from me and I am sitting in this office because my father told me to sit and for the first time in my adult life, I believe my father is right about something.
My gaze catches sight of Theo’s notebook, left on the side table. I reach over and open it.
It’s not the first time that I have. The coded notes cover page after page, a cipher that only he can read. I turn the pages slowly. His handwriting is small and precise and consistent. He wrote this sitting at the table in the bar. He’s never trusted me. It seems he was right.
I close the notebook. I put it in my desk drawer. I pour a glass of water because if I pour scotch I won't stop and I need to be clear when Luca calls.
My father watches me and I ignore him. I drink the water and I look at the window and I wait for a phone to ring. It doesn’t.
19. Theo
The first three days are the worst.
Not because of the fear. Fear is immediate and it burns off. The adrenaline spikes, crests, recedes, and what's left is a flat, gray alertness that I know from years of sleeping rough. Your body adapts. It has to.
The worst part is the nothing. Four walls. One bulb. One mattress. The water and the energy bars and the bucket in the corner and the silence. No clock. No window. No way to track the passage of time except the drip of the pipe in the corner and my own breathing and the meals that arrive without schedule or pattern.
They come once a day. Sometimes three times. Two men, always the same ones, always silent. The door opens and one of them puts a paper bag inside while the other stands behind him. The bag contains food. It turns out that the energy bars are in case they don’t come which happens twice.
The food varies. Fast food sometimes, a burger in a foil wrapper still warm. Other times sandwiches, gas station quality, the bread damp against the plastic. Once, a container of pasta in red sauce that was actually good and I ate all of it and then sat on the mattress feeling stupidly grateful for penne.
They don't speak to me. I've tried. The first time the door opened I said, "How long am I going to be here?" and got nothing.
The second time I said, "I need to see a doctor. I'm pregnant." The one holding the bag paused. His eyes went to my stomach, then back to my face. He put the bag down and left.
The next delivery included three bottles of prenatal vitamins. Three bottles, sealed, pharmacy brand
I take the vitamins. I eat what they bring. I drink the water slowly, two bottles a day, and when the case runs low, they replace it.
The energy bars I save for the gaps between deliveries, when the hours stretch and my blood sugar drops and the nausea rolls through me in slow, heavy waves.
The nausea is constant now. Mornings are the worst but it doesn't confine itself to mornings. It comes when it wants, sometimes in the middle of the night when I'm lying on the mattress staring at the ceiling, sometimes when I'm pacing the ten feet between the door and the far wall, which I do for hours because movement is the only thing that keeps my mind from eating itself.
Ten feet there. Ten feet back. Twelve hundred steps to a mile. I walk miles in this room.
I count them.
I count everything. The drips. The steps. The meals. The energy bars consumed and remaining.
The seconds between the bolt sliding on the other side of the door and the door opening, which is always between two and four seconds, depending on which of the two men is doing it. The left-hand man is faster. The right-hand man is careful.
I count the days by the deliveries. I scratch a line on the wall behind the mattress with the edge of a zip tie.
One line per sleep cycle. It's imprecise. I don't always know if I've slept for three hours or ten. The bulb is always on. There's no darkness, which I think is deliberate.
After seven lines I stop feeling certain that Dom is going to walk through that door today.
