Page 63 of The Girl Who Was Taken

“We were just friends.”

“Have you ever heard of a group called the Capture Club?”

“No, what is it?”

“A group of nuts who get off on abductions. Readabout them, study them, discuss them, and even perform them. Mock abductions, anyway.”

“That’s sickening.”

“I agree. This guy,” Livia said, holding up the picture of Casey, “created the club. Nicole was part of it. I don’t know what any of it means. Maybe nothing. But I haven’t been able to calm my thoughts since he landed in my morgue.”

Megan checked her watch. “Let’s see if this helps answer some questions.” She pointed to the courthouse. “We’re late.”

* * *

They both showed their IDs and passed through the metal detector without a hitch. They walked down the long hallways as justice was practiced beyond the heavy oak double doors of the courtrooms next to them. Lawyers counseled their clients on benches outside the courts, and a hundred defendants of DUI, littering, speeding, and alimony failure wandered the halls and searched for their destinations. Megan opened the door to a stairway and Livia followed her down to the lower level, where there were no windows and no foot traffic. They conquered another long hallway and came to locked double doors, above which readEVIDENCE AND PROPERTY.

Megan used her ID card to unlock the doors. Inside was a vestibule with another locked door and a glass partition next to it, the window slid open. A thirtysomething man in an ugly brown uniform sat on a high stool behind the glass, paging through an auto magazine.

“Hi, Greg,” Megan said.

“You’re late.”

“Sorry.”

Greg looked behind him to make sure he was alone. “My supervisor takes an hour for lunch.” He checked his watch. “Forty-five minutes, now. I’ll give you half an hour to be safe.”

Greg pressed a button from his perch behind the partition and the door buzzed.

“Thanks, Greg. I owe you one,” Megan said.

Livia followed as Megan pulled open the buzzing door and entered the Evidence and Property storage area, where just about every piece of evidence collected from a Montgomery County case was located. In the back corner were rows of metal shelves stacked with cardboard boxes. Megan walked with efficiency to theM’s and pulled a box off the shelf. She’d been here before, Livia determined. Within the isles were waist-high tables. Megan deposited her case box onto one of them and lifted the lid.

“So, what exactly are we looking for?” Megan asked.

“I’m not sure.”

They spent ten minutes looking through the contents of the “McDonald, Megan” evidence box, which contained several photos of Megan from the night she climbed into Mr. Steinman’s car on Highway 57. From the hospital bed, Megan had been photographed from every angle. The camera isolated and highlighted her injuries—contusions on her ankles from two weeks in shackles. Friction burns on her wrists from the duct tape. Scratches on her face from her frantic run through the forest, and a gaping wound on her heel that required sixteen sutures to close. There were medical records andnotes from the emergency-room doctors who initially cared for her. Livia read with interest until she found the toxicology screening, seeing that ketamine was indeed in her system the night Megan had escaped her captor.

Livia, standing within the quiet row of shelves, paged through pictures of the bunker from which Megan had escaped. There were photos of footprint impressions and random items found in the vicinity of the bunker. They included candy bar wrappers and beer bottles, an old rancid belt and a single Converse All Star shoe. The owner of either of the items unknown. Random fingerprints were sequestered from the door handle and from the objects found on the forest floor, but none matched each other or led to anyone in particular.

Stored in plastic evidence bags was the duct tape that bound Megan’s wrists the night she journeyed through the forest. Other bags contained her blood-soaked shirt and shorts. The items retrieved from the forest were also sealed in plastic—the wrappers and bottles and a few other random items Livia pawed at on the bottom of the box.

She pulled out the file that contained the detectives’ analysis and findings in the weeks after Megan had escaped. Livia had seen many such reports in her three months at the OCME. Mostly, the file contained dictated interviews conducted by the two investigators assigned to the case. Livia skimmed through Megan’s interview, where she recalled for the detectives her movements on the day she was abducted and everything she remembered about the night she was taken. Livia read briefly about Megan’s time in captivity and about the night she escaped from the bunker. Most wasredundant. She’d read all of this in Megan’s book. There were other interviews of Emerson Bay High School kids, including Matt Wellington, but they were boring and mundane and led the detectives nowhere important.

Megan read Livia’s expression. “I’ve been through it before and there’s nothing in there that’s useful.”

Livia restacked everything back into the box and closed the lid. “You ever look at Nicole’s case?”

Megan nodded, embarrassed to admit she had.

“Let me have a look,” Livia said.

They walked two rows down to theC’s and Megan pointed. Livia read the label on the box:CUTTY, NICOLE.

She pulled the box and placed it on one of the tables. She slowly opened the lid and pulled out a file that contained interviews and notes similar to those in Megan’s box. More than a year before, Livia had given her statement to the two detectives who had come to her house and talked with Livia and her parents. She and her parents had received updates from these two detectives for the first few weeks of the investigation, but after a while the calls slowed and the updates became more random. Eventually, they stopped altogether. No one ever came out to the house to tell Livia and her parents that the case was stalled. But today, Nicole’s case, sitting quietly on the shelf in the basement of the Federal Building, felt as cold as a body kept overnight in the morgue’s cooler.

At the back of the folder were pictures that Livia flipped through. They were of Nicole’s car, which was found abandoned on a frontage road near the beach where the end-of-summer party took place and from where Megan had established her abduction took place.Jessica Tanner and Rachel Ryan had confirmed having been in the car that night with Nicole when they all drove to the party together. The photos of the car made Livia’s heart ache. It sat parked on the side of the road, pitched slightly to the right as the passenger-side tires rested on the gravel shoulder. The car looked ominous and lonely, and Livia fought hard to block the images her mind tried to produce about what her sister had gone through on this isolated frontage road. How soon after she placed her call to Livia, a call Livia overtly ignored, had Nicole’s car become a crime scene?

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