Capturing Angels Read online

  I could see the point settle firmly in Lieutenant Abraham’s mind. Any innocuous reason for Mary’s disappearance disappeared as quickly as she had.

  “How does your daughter get along with strangers?” he followed.

  “Strangers? We don’t have any strangers in our life,” I replied, not fully understanding.

  “No, I mean people she would see on the street or in a store, somewhere when she was with you. Didn’t strangers ever try to talk to her?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s very special, very pretty. People often stop us to remark about her, talk to her.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “What was usually her reaction to that sort of thing?”

  “She always responds correctly and with respect.”

  “Is there any particular sort of person she favors?”

  “Particular sort?” I asked. “You mean elderly or young, someone in uniform or not?”

  “Yes, exactly,” he replied, looking and sounding grateful for my intelligent response.

  “No, I don’t think so. Except maybe a priest.”

  “A priest?”

  “Anyone in any religious garb.”

  “Okay. That’s helpful.” He made some note in his pad.

  Another thought occurred to me. “Maybe there’s a security guard here with some sort of negative history.”

  “We’ll check that, but they do screen people they hire for security, Mrs. Clark.”

  “People fall through the cracks. Pedophiles have even been hired to work in grade schools and preschools.”

  “Right. Okay. I’ll get this picture of Mary duplicated and up all over this place,” he said. “We’ll also put out an APB and an Amber Alert with a detailed description. We’re still interviewing other salespeople in other stores, the parking-lot staff, anyone and everyone who might have seen something.”

  I nodded. Was I crying, or were my tears falling inside my eyes and raining down over my heart?

  “I should get you home, Mrs. Clark,” he said. “There’s nothing else you can do here. I’ll have one of the patrolmen take you.”

  “No. I can’t leave. I can’t leave without Mary,” I said.

  He looked as if he was having trouble swallowing.

  “What?” I practically screamed at him.

  “I really don’t think she’s here, Mrs. Clark,” he said.

  “I can’t believe I let that department-store door close between Mary and me,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “You were probably rushing in and, as you said, assumed she was right behind you.”

  “But why wouldn’t she just open the door herself and follow me into the store? Someone’s definitely taken her. But if someone did that, why didn’t she scream?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Once that part of the puzzle is solved, it will all be solved.”

  “I’m sure she expected that I would notice she wasn’t with me and rush out looking for her. If I had seen her with someone, some stranger, I would have rescued her. But I didn’t notice she was gone in time. What is wrong with me?”

  “It won’t do any good to blame yourself, Mrs. Clark. Look, we’ve pretty much covered this place. There’s no sign of her here now, or anyone’s having seen her, but we will have those pictures up in a few hours. I just made contact with the FBI. I have a good friend in the Bureau’s office here, Special Agent David Joseph, and he said he would take personal interest in and control of this situation.”

  “The FBI,” I repeated, the idea driving home how serious it all had become.

  “We have to look at the possibility that this kidnapping is to extract money from you, a ransom.”

  “We live in Brentwood, but we’re not ostentatious. We’re not anywhere near what would be considered very wealthy people today,” I said.

  “They might not ask for that much. There’s good reason for people like this to go after moderately well-off families. There’s less media attention, and they’d believe there would be less police involvement than there would be with a high-profile family. So,” he continued, “let’s get you home. Dave and his agents will meet us there. They’ll get your phones tapped. We’ll wait to see what these people have in mind.”

  He stood up and reached for my hand. I started to rise but felt my whole body tremble and sat again, shaking my head.

  “Can you get me some water first? I’ll take a pill.”

  “Sure,” he said. He hurried out and came back in with a cup of water.

  I opened my purse and found the pill bottle.

  “What is that?” he asked when I plucked out a capsule.

  “Just a tranquilizer. A mild one,” I said.

  “You didn’t take one before you came here today, did you, Mrs. Clark?”

  “No. You shouldn’t drive after taking one of these. I’m careful about it.”

  “How long have you been taking them?”

  “A while,” I said, and swallowed the pill.

  “Might I ask why?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t feel like going into all that right now.”

  “Okay, let’s get you home. Your husband should be on his way. He was leaving immediately.”

  I took a deep breath and stood up. Now I did feel as if I would faint. I started to cry, my sobs coming in small, tight gasps that tightened my body and closed my lungs, freezing my arms, my legs. This was really happening. I was going to leave without Mary, get into the car and go home to an empty house, look at her things, smell the scent of her hair, and not hear the sound of her voice. Every part of me said no. It was as if there was a great scream being sounded inside me. My legs wobbled.

  Lieutenant Abraham put his arm around me. “Lean on me,” he said. “I’ll get you home myself.”

  I closed my eyes and practically let him carry me out of the mall security office. On the street just outside the mall, he helped me into his automobile. He spoke quickly with some patrolman and then got in to drive me home. I lay back, my eyes closed. My pill had put me in a state of limbo, numbness. It was as though I were drifting in some dream. I embraced it.

  I was confident that by the time we arrived at my home, I would wake up and find myself sitting in the living room, thumbing through one of my fashion magazines. All that had happened wouldn’t even be a bad dream, much less any sort of memory. Mary would appear in the doorway to tell me that John was almost home. It was remarkable how she could sense that, but she was remarkable in so many ways that I had stopped being amazed.

  I felt us stop at a traffic light and opened my eyes.

  “You okay?” Lieutenant Abraham asked.

  I looked at him as if we had never met. Then it all came rushing back at me. I turned and looked back toward the mall. What if I was leaving forever without Mary? I envisioned John and me at the dinner table days, weeks, and months from now without her. During our meal, both of us would avoid looking at Mary’s chair. Whenever John would speak, he would sound like someone afraid of silence. No matter how hard he would try, for me, his words would fall like iron pebbles from his lips. He could try everything, talk about his day at work. He could run on and on with descriptions of the stock market and the economy that I was sure would be welcomed on CNBC or Bloomberg. None of it would work.

  But he wouldn’t be able to stop talking, and for that matter, neither would I. At these once-precious dinners, now without Mary, we would become two people housed together in some prison cell who spoke different languages but needed the sound of their voices to keep their sanity.

  Afterward, I would welcome the kitchen cleanup. I would avoid using the dishwasher. Scrubbing and drying pots, pans, plates, glasses, cups, and silverware would feel like penance. In fact, all of my housework would become an act of contrition. Not to mention how deeply dependent I would become on pills to get me through the day. Too often, that was already happenin
g.

  I thought that John might not blame me for losing my focus, failing to pay attention to Mary, and instead concentrating on material gifts with such intensity that I didn’t see my little girl led off and out of our lives that dreadful day, but I would always blame myself. I would always carry the cross down my own Via Dolorosa and dream of myself crucified in our backyard, moaning, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

  I sat up in Lieutenant Abraham’s car. “I’m so frightened,” I said.

  He nodded and drove faster.

  “Somehow, you read about these things in the papers or see them on television but never feel vulnerable, never think it can happen to you,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Will I get her back?”

  “I’m on it. Special Agent Dave Joseph will be on it. We’ll get her back,” he said firmly.

  I closed my eyes and leaned back again.

  I’ll be home soon—home—and John will be home soon, too. Surely he’ll know exactly what to do. I couldn’t wait to get home now.

  We had a two-story, three-bedroom Tudor house on Westgate in that area of Brentwood that seemed more like city suburbs than city. Although Brentwood had more than its share of celebrities from Hollywood and well-known businesspeople living there, its national infamy had come with the O. J. Simpson case. Everyone we knew and everyone we met who learned that we lived in Brentwood always managed to ask how close we were to the murders. John hated that.

  But there was no denying that we lived in a rather upscale community. Even the smaller houses and condos in Brentwood had drifted into the sea sailed by millionaires. Of course, every resident’s initial cost depended on when his home was built and sold. John said there were old homeowners sitting on millions in capital gains. There was a rapidly diminishing number of building lots and square feet still available, which kept the prices up.

  John wasn’t a very wealthy man when we first met. He had a good salary, but his parents had signed over some significant stock assets to him. Some of them poured out significant additional income, and some he sold at an opportune time. In fact, he had doubled his portfolio before we were married.

  When my parents learned that John and I were getting serious, they were pleased, because it was easy to see that he was very intelligent when it came to financial planning. After all, this was his career, his life’s work and interest. A girl’s parents are almost more interested in their future son-in-law’s economic prospects than they are in his personality, even his passion for their daughter.

  Here was this man, John Clark, handsome to the point where he could be compared with movie stars or classic statues and paintings, who also had a stability most parents fantasized about when it came to a daughter’s future. Why shouldn’t my father and mother gush over him to the point where I would be embarrassed? While we were dating, I was always making excuses for them, and John was always understanding.

  “If and when I’m like your father, I’ll think along the same lines, especially if I have a daughter,” he said.

  “But you won’t behave like he does when your daughter brings home a boyfriend you approve of.”

  He just gave me that knowing, self-confident smile and gently jerked his head to the left, a small gesture that made me smile, too. When you first find yourself falling in love with someone, you are so tuned in to his or her every gesture. I loved the way John poured my glass of wine at dinner, for example. He would never reach over to do it but would first take my glass, pour the wine, whirl it in the glass, and then hand it to me. Little things like that made me feel special. I couldn’t help lavishing compliments on him, subtly or otherwise. Rather than thank me, he would kiss me, almost like a royal stamp of approval. But our relationship was far from one-sided.

  John never picked me up for a date without telling me how beautiful I looked. They weren’t simply appropriate comments or words of praise that one of my girlfriends could call “good come-ons.” I knew he was sincere because of what he appreciated. He was truly impressed with my attention to style, to choosing clothes that flattered my figure and favoring colors that heightened the beauty of my complexion and my eyes, a shade of blue he swore he had never seen. Those sorts of things were important to him, and he would no sooner be attracted to a ravishing, sexy beauty who paid no attention to them than he would to a female ape.

  “I love the fact that you know yourself so well and know that less is often more,” he told me, referring to how I wore my makeup, how much jewelry I put on, or how I styled my hair. It was important to him to be comfortable with a woman. As trite as it might sound, I knew he really believed it when he said we were a good fit.

  Besides looking good together, we could have intelligent conversations. I knew enough about economics, the stock market, and business to understand the things he said and add substantively to the discussion myself. I never tried to be someone I wasn’t or put on airs, and neither did John. Whatever hesitation, walls, and guarded language a man and a woman have when they first meet was diminished with every subsequent date John and I had, until we were naked and exposed, every fear, quirk, and dream revealed.

  Trust has to come before love. Maybe that was why John didn’t believe in the “at first sight” concept. “You can be immediately attracted to someone sexually, but love requires an investment and a risk,” he said. “Once you confess it, you’re out there hanging, hoping you have not misjudged the person you hope loves you, too.”

  I knew he was more religious than I was, but he was never obsessive about it when he was with me. I think it was simply part of his faith to believe that whatever he believed, eventually I would, too, and to the same extent and intensity. We had disagreements about it, but he was always tolerant during those early days.

  Of course, my parents just loved that he was a religious man, even though they weren’t very religious. They went to church on holidays and for funerals and weddings, but in my father’s mind, giving up his golf on a Sunday was more of a cardinal sin. John made no argument. He was about as accepting a man as I could ever imagine. I know that was because of his confidence that what he believed was right. He didn’t have to convince anyone.

  “I’d be just as comfortable in a room full of atheists,” he once said. “No matter what they profess, they live in doubt. I don’t.”

  In a social world where young men were increasingly superficial and openly arrogant, John Clark was a dream come true. I could see the envy in the eyes of my girlfriends whenever they saw us together. Every one of them surely asked herself what I had that she didn’t, why I had found a man like John and she couldn’t. When I complained about this once to John and told him how I couldn’t stand the jealousy I saw in my so-called good friends, he thought a moment and said, “The only people who really feel happy for you are people who already have what they want, people who are comfortable being who they are. Seek those out to be your close friends. Acquaintances are fine, but think of them as just what they are—temporary, disposable imitations of real friends and pools of green envy.”

  How could I not fall in love with John Clark and want to spend my life with such a man, a man who could give away wisdom as easily as one of those people hired to stand on street corners could hand out advertisements?

  Before we were married, John had already gone after the Tudor house we would own. He loved the cul-de-sac, the clean, quiet neighborhood. The first time he showed it to me, I did think it looked like an illustration torn out of a children’s fable, with its white picket fence, immaculate front walk, hedges, and bright green lawn. No one had a great deal of acreage in Brentwood, but the house had a good-sized lot with a row of lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees in the backyard. It was easy to imagine us as a family there, our children laughing and squealing with a feeling of complete security. There would be no drive-by shootings, no inner-city terrors. Fences were designed more for appearance than for safety. It would always b
e safe to walk at night.

  John knew the real estate agent handling it, and he knew just how to bargain for it, because the owner was in some distress. The day after we bought it, its value was already up twenty percent. Anyone hearing all of this wouldn’t have to wonder why I thought that every day, every month, every year of John’s and my life together would be filled with success and perfection.

  Of course, it wasn’t that way. It isn’t that way for anyone. Lately, I was having more and more trouble navigating the sea of perfection on which John had placed our marriage. Ironically, it was his mother who had suggested my therapist. She had a good friend whose daughter used him. She relented with, “If you young people today need such things, at least you can seek the best.”

  The pills he prescribed were meant to bring me to an even keel so our sessions could be therapeutically successful. I had kept this from Lieutenant Abraham because I feared that he would think this was all my fault, that my psychological and emotional problems were the culprits. I was afraid that in his mind, it would be a convenient way to explain what had happened and he wouldn’t be as vigorous in his pursuit of discovering whatever had happened to Mary.

  Of course, I couldn’t escape from my own thoughts and questions. Was this turmoil I had been experiencing the reason I had neglected her, hadn’t noticed she was gone? If so, it was even more my fault. I knew that the first question out of John’s mouth when we were alone would be, “Did you take one of your pills before you went to the mall?”

  Would he believe me if I told him no?

  Would I believe myself?

  3

  Ringing

  Lieutenant Abraham’s FBI friend was waiting at the house with a team to tap our phones and run the sting operation and retrieval of Mary in the event that ransom was indeed the purpose for her abduction. Although he was as tall and as stocky as I’d imagined an FBI agent to be, David Joseph had a soft, almost feminine face, with eyelashes most women would die for. He had thin lips and a light complexion, almost tissue-white, emphasized more because of his carrot top and the freckles on the crests of his cheeks. I thought he had a comforting smile and imagined he was successful in his work because of how quickly he might put a nervous mother especially at ease.