The Longest Winter Read online

  “So…” Kara thought for a moment. “Are we looking for a doctor or someone in medicine?”

  “It is possible. Or he found some other way to get it.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t buy this stuff on the street.”

  “No. This raises more questions than it answers.”

  “It does. It says here they couldn’t find an injection point on either of the boys?”

  “The coroner thinks it was given orally, probably mixed in with food or a drink.”

  “So they probably didn’t even know what was coming.”

  “Not likely. It would have been better that way though.”

  Kara looked back at the pictures of the two boys, classroom photos from a happier time. Their innocence stared back at her.

  “It’s past quitting time,” Yuri said. “I can drive you home.”

  “It’s not far,” Kara said, “and it’s a nice night. I think I’ll walk. Just leave the car here.”

  I could drive, Kara told herself. It was just one, just enough to take the edge off, just enough to dull the image of Kat she held in her mind. That’s all he smelled.

  Her hand started to shake, an almost imperceptible tremble.

  “I need to clean some of this stuff up anyway, put some of this away.”

  “Are you sure? You can leave it for tomorrow.”

  “Nah, I’ll deal with it tonight.”

  “Suit yourself,” Yuri said, turning to leave. Before he could reach it the door flew open, hitting hard against the file cabinet behind it.

  “Sorry,” the young woman said. “Come with me, quickly. French police have one of the boys. It’s Claude, and he’s alive.”

  Kara and Yuri didn’t hesitate. They took off at a run following the young woman out of the office and down the hall.

  Chapter Four

  The lights blinded him as he opened his eyes. He squinted hard, trying to make out something, trying to figure out where he was. The warmth and brightness of the room comforted him. It was so different from the cold, dark place he had been locked in.

  Am I safe?

  The last thing he remembered was falling, tumbling down the hillside onto the snow-covered road. It was cold, and he was hurt. He had looked up and seen him, seen the man he’d been running from, standing at the top of the hill looking down. And then there was nothing but black.

  Nothing until the light. No, that wasn’t right. There was more, the lights he saw were different, yellower, and it wasn’t warm. The snow was falling on him, each flake that touched his skin chilled him, and with every movement of his body he felt himself giving up.

  They wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard he tried to fight, and their hands were like hot irons pressed against his skin. He had cried out for help and they… he struggled to place the memories back in order, to put the pieces back together… they told me it would be okay.

  They told me I was safe.

  Their car was warm and there was a blanket in the backseat. They laid him across the seats, made a pillow from one of their coats and wrapped him in the blanket. The pain in his body had been excruciating, and with the newfound warmth came the pins and needles and the burning sensation of cold flesh thawing out.

  I remember crying, and then someone singing.

  His eyes adjusted to the light and he saw where he was: a hospital room, the shades open just enough to let the morning sun in. His mother, Marie, was asleep. Her neck was bent at an unusual angle – an attempt to find some sort of peace in an uncomfortable chair.

  He tried to sit up but the pain was too much. There was an unfamiliar weight on his left arm and leg that kept him from moving.

  He looked down at the casts and started to cry.

  “Claude,” his mother said when she heard her son. “Henri! He’s awake!”

  “Mom, are they broken?”

  She started to cry as well then nodded. “Yes, but you’re going to be okay.” The broken bones, the bruises, the cuts and stitches - those she could explain to him, those she could talk to him about. But the other things, what had happened to him, she didn’t want to consider the possibilities. She couldn’t bring herself to speak the words.

  There was another question, one far more pressing that she needed to know the answer to.

  “Where is Jacques? Is he okay?”

  Tears streamed down Claude’s face as he thought of his escape, of Jacques helping him through the window and then buying him time. But what cost did it come at? Claude didn’t even know if Jacques was still alive.

  “I don’t know, Mommy. He helped me get out, but then the man came in and I heard him yell that Jacques bit him. After that…”

  Claude couldn’t speak.

  “It’s okay,” his mother said, wiping away new tears and old mascara. “They’ll find him, they’ll bring your brother home.”

  She held Claude as tight as she could without hurting him. Henri walked past the two officers guarding Claude’s door and walked into the room to join in the embrace. He looked past Claude’s head into his wife’s eyes and mouthed Jacques’s name.

  Marie shook her head, shrugged her shoulders and turned her head away from Claude. He needed strength, he needed hope – neither of which she had in her to give.

  Chapter Five

  “Agnes, it’s Lincoln.”

  She paused for a moment, just as she always did.

  “I haven’t found her yet. But there’s something I need to check out. I need to go back to Lyon for a couple…”

  “We can pick the kids up from school. Just call and tell the office.”

  Link and Kasia were in school in Poland now, just a few blocks from our apartment in Warsaw, and they were learning the language at an alarming rate. I still lagged behind, but holed up in my tiny office I rarely had the chance to practice.

  They seemed to like school. They were doing well, had made a bunch of new friends, and were model students. I hadn’t had a single notice sent home or a phone call to tell me that they weren’t behaving. They seemed to be adjusting well, if only because it took their minds off of Kat.

  “Lincoln?”

  “Sorry, Agnes. Thanks, I’ll call the school right away. And I can drop their overnight bags off to you before I leave.”

  “We can get them, if it’s easier.”

  “Don’t worry about it, you’re on the way to the airport anyway.”

  “How many days do you think?”

  “Two or three at the most. I’ll keep you posted though.”

  “Do you really think you’ll find her?”

  “All I can do is hope. I’m getting closer… I have to be.”

  She took a deep breath. “I know. I will keep praying. God will bring her home to us.”

  There was so much I wanted to say, so much anger I had stored within me. I wanted to tell her it was God, or at least some psychotic’s belief in God, that was the reason Kat was taken in the first place. I wanted to tell her it had been almost eight months and God still hadn’t brought her home, even if Kris and Agnes prayed ten times daily, even if they’d organized half of Poland into prayer chains. I wanted to tell her that prayers weren’t going to bring Kat home. At this point, it was up to me and me alone.

  I wanted to tell her all of these things, but I knew it would only be for my benefit. We all dealt with our pain differently. Agnes had found peace in trusting God, I had found an outlet in hating Him – hating something I didn’t even believe in.

  Instead, I thanked her and let her know I’d be by in an hour to drop off the bags. Then I went to pack.

  * * *

  It was a short flight from Warsaw to Lyon, but with a five and a half hour layover in Zurich, I spent more time sitting in airports than I did in the air. It gave me time to go over my research i
n hopes of convincing myself that this wasn’t some fool’s errand.

  Duncan Crawford, Kat’s abductor, had been a methodical man; insane, but methodical. All of his killings - more than sixty of them all around the world - were planned with the utmost care. The birthdates of the victims corresponded to verse numbers from the Book of Revelation, every victim was buried in a shallow grave with their body lined up toward Jerusalem with their heads pointing to the Holy Land, and every victim had been ritualistically killed with a blade stabbed into the side. Then they were marked with a cross on the forehead and buried in linens.

  He had been obsessed with numbers, obsessed with the Bible and convinced that he would be the one, through his killings, to bring about the apocalypse. He had planned his acts to match Revelation, and twelve-hundred-and-sixty days after his first killing, three-and-a-half biblical Hebrew years, he had tried to enact his grand finale by blowing up the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, along with the hundreds of people inside. He had sought to cause maximum damage and hoped to raise his kill count over the Mark of the Beast, over six-hundred-and-sixty-six.

  But we had stopped him. I had stopped him. It had taken only one bullet, straight through the throat and severing his spine. It was the only way to keep him from detonating the bomb – instant paralysis.

  Saving hundreds of lives came at a cost. Crawford died before I could find out where Kat was, or if she was even alive. I had tried to get it out of him, but even in his final moments he refused to tell me. All he had said was that she was in France and underground. That and his belief that I wouldn’t find her before it was too late.

  The thoughts had raged through my head, visions of her buried alive and gasping in her final moments as she suffocated. I had assumed underground to mean buried, but I couldn’t shake the idea that he had her locked away somewhere. Maybe he had given her supplies, maybe he didn’t think I would find her before they ran out.

  There hadn’t been much time from when Crawford had abducted Kat after shooting two police officers - one fatally - to when we had arrested him in his apartment. I had done my best to calculate a radius that Kat had to be within. It was still a very large area though, too large to search fully. I had appealed to the Gendarmerie, the French military police force, the National Police, and to INTERPOL, and together we had combed the city in the early days of the investigation. Once Crawford was dead, our focus was on Kat. We searched everywhere we could, knocked on every door in the radius and distributed flyers to anyone who would stop and listen.

  The story went international and we had thousands of phone calls to sort through, both from those in the area thinking they had seen her to much further afield. We didn’t discount any tip, even sending our agents in other countries to investigate some of the sightings that had been called in. I knew it was pointless, she wasn’t in Namibia or Belarus, but every lead had to be followed.

  Nothing had come of it. It didn’t matter how many homes we searched, how many flyers and press releases we put out, how many so-called witnesses we interviewed; every step took us in the wrong direction. We had crossed off so many places, and yet we still had never been able to circle a single one.

  With any luck, we would be able to this time.

  Chapter Six

  Kara glanced up at the clock on the wall of the hospital waiting room. It was nearing midnight, the black and red hands ticking their way around the circle bit by bit. Yuri sat beside her, his eyes focused on the sports section of a local newspaper. Kara had passed the time playing Solitaire on her cell phone, at least until the battery died somewhere in the third hour of waiting. Her work phone had sat in her pocket, fully charged and begging to be played.

  Five hours had passed, the two detectives sitting in the cold, hard, plastic hospital chairs. They waited for word that Claude had awoken, waited for their chance to speak to him. Claude had been awake when they had arrived at the hospital, but neither Kara nor Yuri wanted to intrude. His parents had been waiting for news about their sons; to have it come in the form of only one of them being returned would have caused an impossible to handle mix of emotions. The relief and joy of having Claude back would be balanced by the fear of the unknown regarding Jacques. They would have their questions, many that Claude wouldn’t be able to answer, but nothing would fix things.

  Nothing short of having Jacques returned as well.

  Claude’s return had filled part of the gaping hole in their hearts, but there was still a large hole waiting to be filled. And a hole is a hole, no matter how deep.

  The definition of bittersweet, Kara thought. She thought of Lincoln, of Kat, and of their children. Their situation was reversed. The kids had lost their mother and she had been gone far longer than Claude and Jacques were. Every day that went by, the chances of bringing a person home safe and sound diminished. With Kat, the probability was fast approaching zero.

  Kara thought back to Claude, to what the nurses had told them when they arrived. Yuri had taken notes while Kara had asked the questions.

  “I know the parents asked him some things, I overheard some of it.”

  Kara nodded, hoping the nurse would continue. She paused for a moment, looked around, then looked back at Kara.

  “Can I say anything though? Isn’t it private?”

  “His brother is still missing. We need to find him.”

  The nurse nodded. “Right, right. Well, Claude said he didn’t know if Jacques was still alive. Said that Jacques helped him escape and then he heard what sounded like Jacques being beaten. He said the man had a temper, if he got angry, they got beaten. Usually Jacques would try to take the brunt of it, egging the man on if he had to.”

  “Anything to protect his little brother.”

  “Yeah. Those poor boys. My son and daughter are both older now, out on their own. But it was always my worst fear.”

  “I think it is for every parent,” Kara said. “Was he able to say where they were? Or what the man looked like?”

  “Evil. He just kept saying he was evil. Dark eyes, like lumps of coal. And he was big, very big. Claude didn’t say much else about him. It was obvious how terrified he was. And I don’t think he knew where they were, in a field somewhere was all he could say.”

  “A field?”

  “He said he was running through a field before he fell down a hill onto the road.”

  “Are there any farms around here?”

  The nurse hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. “A lot.

  It’s quite rural around here.”

  “Damn. Anything that he said, anything that might help us find Jacques?”

  “Nothing that I can think of. He didn’t talk too much before…” She paused and considered the balance between helping the police and protecting the rights of her patients.

  “Before what?”

  “We had to sedate him. His parents were asking him about Jacques, maybe a little too much. Although I get it, they’re obviously worried and want to know. But I think Claude couldn’t take it. He’s on some pretty powerful painkillers too. Those might have had some effect.”

  “What happened?”

  “He became extremely angry, just full of hatred and he was swearing like I’ve never heard from a child. Said he was going to kill the man and free Jacques. He almost leapt out of his hospital bed before I could grab him. Would’ve gone right onto his broken leg.”

  “Good thing you stopped him.”

  “I almost couldn’t. Two more nurses came running in, including…”

  She paused and gave a cock of her head in the direction of the desk. Standing at a computer was a woman who must have stood six feet tall and weighed in at close to three hundred pounds.

  “She was pretty much lying on him and he was still struggling. The doctor had to give him a shot and put him out.”

  “Is tha
t common?”

  “Not in children. It’s very rare for them to react to morphine like that. I think it was everything coming to a head, and the drugs just made things worse. He’s been out for about an hour now, shouldn’t be much longer before he wakes up.”

  Three and a half hours later…

  Kara looked back at the clock. “This is insane, Yuri. How long are we going to wait for? Even if he does wake up, do you really want to start asking a ten-year-old boy the hardest questions of his life in the middle of the night?”

  Yuri put his paper down and glanced at the clock, then to his watch and then back to the clock.

  “It’s not broken, Yuri.”

  “I think I read this whole section three times over.”

  “We have a few hours before morning comes, we should be out there searching for Jacques. They still haven’t found anything.”

  “When did you last check in?”

  “About twenty minutes ago. They’ve been driving around as long as we’ve been waiting here and that couple still can’t remember where they picked Claude up.”

  “They should have called an ambulance.”

  Kara nodded. “Yeah, but would you have?”

  “Probably not.”

  The couple, Peter and Naomi Flynn, were expat Americans living and working in the south of Belgium at the Université de Liège. They had married prior to leaving Massachusetts to begin their postdoctoral work - Peter in chemistry and Naomi in biophysics - and had delayed their honeymoon at the time. When it finally came, Paris was the destination of choice. They had spent four days among the cafes and museums before heading to the small French town of Verdun to visit friends.

  They left late, driving their rental Peugeot back to the university. It wasn’t long after crossing the border into Belgium that they came upon Claude laying battered, broken and unconscious in the middle of the road. A layer of snow had fallen on him, and with his arms tucked beneath his fragile frame, he was almost unrecognizable as a person.