Disappeared
“The girl is dead.”
“Bernie!” Aida said. “The parents!”
“They cannot hear me. And you know it’s true. She’s gone missing for twenty-four hours now. Chances are she’s already dead.”
“Chances are, officer Doberman,” a third voice interjected. “Chances are. If we played the chances, we’d never succeed.”
“Captain Radtke, ma’am,” Doberman said. “I’m merely stating the facts.”
Radtke pushed her glasses upwards. Doberman was a pain in the ass, but she knew the man was as fierce as his namesake when she needed him, so she used to cut him some slack. Not today.
“Those are not the facts, Doberman. Statistics are just numbers. Balaceanu, have you questioned the parents?”
Aida cleared her throat. The fact that a petite woman such as Captain Alison Radtke could intimidate a large man like Bernie still amazed her. “Yes, ma’am. The girl -Mabel, aged 8- was playing in the yard. The mother -Nellie Frazier- was in the kitchen, overlooking the yard, and kept an eye on the girl. She recalls seeing her standing on the yard, holding her stuffed bear and looking out into the woods. The next time she looked, the bear was on the ground and Mabel was nowhere to be seen. She called her husband, Joseph, who had been working on the upper floor, and they searched for the girl, to no avail. In the end they called the police.”
“And here we are,” Doberman interjected, “because the police cannot handle this. Okay, okay,” he backpedalled before Radtke’s stare.
“Any signs of violence on the yard?” Radtke asked.
“No.”
“Are we sure the husband was were he says he was?”
“Yes, ma’am. The computer guys checked the temporary files in his laptop.”
Radtke gazed around her. The two-storey house was far from the village, but no so far. The forest stopped just on the other side of the nominal fence. The girl could have seen an animal between the trees and run after it, but she wouldn’t have left her bear behind, would she?
A CSRU officer walked up to her and gave her a sealed evidence bag. A bag with a short length of blue ribbon in it.
Radtke cursed. She showed the bag to the others.
“Damn. This looks too much like The Snatcher.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Aida said. Doberman nodded too, suddenly sullen.
They had never liked the name the press had given him, but as it usually happens, it had stuck. Five little girls had disappeared more than a decade ago, in a rapid succession. And then he had stopped. It had been one of the first cases of Radtke’s newly formed division, and its first major fiasco. All they had managed to find were what remained of the bodies. And the blue ribbons. The hardened Radtke still felt a chill whenever she thought about what The Snatcher had done to them.
“If it’s him, why is he back now, after ten years? Or is it a copycat?” she said.
“We cannot be sure, ma’am,” Aida said, knowing her boss. “It could be neither.”
“No,” Doberman said. He was staring at the trees, at the mist tendrils climbing from among them. “It’s just like then. It’s him.”
The three of them just stood there. Now Doberman was not being his usual, insufferable fake pessimistic self. He was just being realistic. If it was The Snatcher, Mabel was doomed.
***
The basement was dark until a tight beam from his torch illuminated the stairs. Murmuring to himself, he carefully took one step down after another.
“Hrmph. I don’t know why you couldn’t put the switch up there,” he said.
“You know why. It has to be this way. It’s safer,” he answered.
“I don’t like it,” he said. He saw the switch on the wall and touched it. The underground room illuminated brightly. He saw the slab, and the small body bound to it. He took in the stains, the blood, the saliva.
He licked his lips in anticipation.
~~~~
This is my entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: October 5–11, 2015 at the Writer’s Discussion Group in Google+. Amy Knepper gave us a bonus challenge this time:
This week, focus on creating a great hook for your first sentence, and an image that really sticks for the reader for your ending. Beginnings and endings are the things that readers really remember.
Therefore, I tried to make the first and last images as strong as possible. I think the first one works quite well right after seeing the picture. The last one is dreadful enough in itself. And the fact they’re both single sentences adds them strength.
The story came out dark, gloomy and hopeless. Maybe that’s me this week. Also, when I wrote it I overshot the limit by some thirty words that I had to edit out and are back in the version presented here. But more importantly, I also added a couple of sentences (I decided to leave them in italics above), which I believe improve the end result immensely.
