Page 79 of The Girl Who Was Taken

“Cool,” Nate said, reading and rereading the words.

“So, will you help me?”

Nate closed the book, ran his hand over the cover that depicted the dark woods and the bunker from where Megan had escaped. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Inside Nate’s home, Daisy panted and whined as she did circles in her crate, her nails scraping against the plastic lining. The kitchen table stood in the middle of an epic explosion of waste and garbage. The countertops were invisible beneath dirty dishes, old pizza boxes, empty milk cartons, cereal boxes, and dog food. The table where Livia set her folder was sticky, and she got the sense Nate had just recently cleared the space.

There was no apology or embarrassment. Nate, she could tell, felt this was the way most people lived. And if it wasn’t, he didn’t care—it was the wayhelived. Take it or leave it. The whole scene confirmed for Livia that Nathaniel Theros was a different breed. She hoped it would pay dividends.

He pulled a chair out from the table, spun it around, and sat on it backward, resting his arms over the spine. A smile came to his face.

“Let’s see,” he said.

Livia opened her folder, which contained everything she had gathered over the last few weeks about Nancy Dee and Paula D’Amato, and laid the contents in front of him. The detectives who work cases such as these utilize profilers—criminologists who review the details and come up with conclusions about the perpetrator. Livia had no privileges with the detectives on these cases, and no clout with any criminologists. She wasn’t even sure she had Terry McDonald’s full cooperation. She did, however, have Nate Theros. Tattooed and creepy, he wasn’t the perfect match for the job. Buthe had an odd fetish with following missing persons cases and studying the demented men who took women. He had a binder full of cases he’d followed through the years, and Livia was sure he possessed a vast knowledge—much greater than her own—about these women and the man she believed took them.

They spent two hours reviewing Nancy Dee’s and Paula D’Amato’s disappearances, cross-referencing everything Livia had collected about the two girls with everything Nate had stashed in his creepy black binder. Then Livia, to Nate’s great pleasure, revealed all she had learned about the girls’ crime scenes—the shallow grave in which Nancy was buried, and the would-be grave that had waited to swallow Paula’s body but which remained empty, her remains waiting at the ledge of the hole. Livia noticed Nate salivating, literally licking his lips and swallowing the excitement that manifested in a hypersecretion of his salivary glands, as she laid out the crime-scene photos and autopsy shots. She allowed him time to dote over them and study them.

After a while, he ran both hands through his gnarly hair while he thought. Then he leaned forward, pressing his chest against the backward chair and resting his elbows on the table while he pinched the huge loops in his earlobes. Livia, seeing he was in some deep mode of concentration, decided to leave him with his thoughts. She stood and took a chance on the coffee that was brewed and waiting in the coffeemaker. She found what looked like a clean mug in one of the cabinets and poured a cup without Nate noticing she had moved. Nate Theros was gone. The photos, Livia hoped, had transported him into the mind of the manwho took these girls. The man who might have taken her sister. The monster who was still out there, plotting, perhaps, to take other girls. Who had possibly buried more, their bodies waiting to be discovered by other joggers and their dogs.

“Here’s what I got,” Nate finally said.

Livia swallowed a rancid sip of coffee before abandoning the mug in Nate’s overflowing sink. She sat at the table opposite him. “Let’s hear it.”

Nate was still rubbing his hands through his hair as he spoke, as if he had a frail hold on his thoughts. “Okay. With Nancy, you see.” He moved a hand from his head to the crime-scene photo depicting Nancy Dee’s body. He tapped the photo. “He OD’d her, right? On Special K. But I don’t think he meant to. I think it was an accident.”

Livia looked at the photo along with Nate. “Why do you think that?”

“Because he never hurt her. See? Nancy was never physically harmed. He took care of her. Loved her. Or wanted to love her. Maybe wanted her to love him back—that’s a very common emotion with these guys. They’re hungry for affection and can’t get it from the real world, so they create their own world in order to find it. Problem is, no one exists in that world so they have to find people, like Nancy and Paula, and make them part of their world. Most of the time, that shit doesn’t work. But from his perspective, it should all be fine. They should love being in this new world of his. They should be willing and eager to give themselves to him because he believes he’s providing something for them that doesn’t exist in the outside world that was so cruel to him. He thinks he’s filling the same gap forthese girls that he’s trying to fill for himself. Problem is, the real world ain’t like that for most of us. Our real world and his real world are different experiences. We have love and affection and relationships in our worlds. He does not. So when he takes these girls and transplants them into his make-believe world, they retaliate and fight. And he’s shocked by their resistance. He can’t understand why they don’t love being with him. He can’t understand why they don’t love him the way he loves them.”

“You said ‘most of the time’ it doesn’t work,” Livia said.

“Right. Because sometimes . . . it does. Sometimes, usually with people who are held for long periods, theydogive in to their captors. Theydodevelop a bond with them. And sometimes, theydoend up loving them on some weird, very screwed-up level. My guess here is that’s what happened with Nancy Dee. She was only gone for six months, but because he never physically harmed her, I’m guessing she was submitting to him. And to keep her doing the same, he was jacking her up on ketamine. He just messed up one day and gave her too much. OD’d her.”

Livia stayed quiet while she restudied the photos of Nancy Dee. Finally, she asked, “What about Paula?”

“Totally different,” Nate said, again with his hands running through his hair. “She was gone longer, right? Two years? But she never gave in to him. She was feisty. She wanted out. She never bought into this guy’s world. He tried to convert her. Tried to convince her that he loved her and that she should love him, but without the dope and the sedation, she never gave in to him. She fought him, right? That’s what the autopsy shows.Clawed at his face. Bruised her hands punching him? Broken toes from kicking him? Older injuries, too, found during the exam. Injuries suffered long ago, and healed by the time she died. A broken bone in her leg and a rib fracture? So he tried hard to break her. To convert her into one of the girls that gave in to him. But she wouldn’t budge. She was a fighter. And what did he finally do? Strangled her and beat her to death. Nancy, he OD’d. Paula, he got violent. Two totally different victims. But here’s the thing,” Nate said, arranging the photos of each of the girls so they sat side by side. “Both had bags over their heads. So he killed them, each in different ways, but for both of them he put a burlap sack over their heads. Why?” Nate looked at Livia. “Why?”

Livia, lost in the narrative Nate was offering, finally looked up and noticed he was staring at her. “I don’t know.”

“Because he loved them. Because he couldn’t stand to look at them after what he did. Had to put bags over their heads so he couldn’t see their faces.”

Nate went back to the photos and found the one of Paula D’Amato’s body stashed in a black vinyl bag and resting at the edge of an empty grave.

“And here? Why didn’t he dump her into that hole? Because he got interrupted? Bullshit! This guy is too smart to dump her at a time when someone might stumble onto him. It was because he couldn’t do it. He loved this girl. He loved Paula D’Amato so much he kept her for two years before he gave up on her. And when he had to dispose of her remains, he got overwhelmed. He’d done it too many times before, andcouldn’t bring himself to do it again. This guy is filled with guilt, I’m telling you! He’s barely hanging on.”

Livia listened to Nate, who was on such a roll that she forgot about the tattoos and the piercings and the too-big earrings. He was a man with a fetish for victims of kidnapping and an obsession with their captors, a man who unknowingly possessed a criminologist’s mind that was able to paint a picture of the type of person capable of stealing and stashing and raping and killing and disposing of women.

“He’s filled with remorse. It’s written all over these pictures,” Nate continued. “He’s on the edge. And with Megan? We see it again. Guilt. Sorrow. Regret. Why didn’t he just kill her? She was doped up, right? Doctors found her high on Special K. He had her high as a kite, not able to defend herself. Why not strangle her like he did Paula? Because he hesitated.” Nate pulled over his newly signed copy ofMissing.“Read this and you’ll see. He doped Megan, and moved her to the bunker. Maybe that’s where he killed the other two. Maybe there’re more girls out there that he brought to this bunker and then killed and buried. Maybe we find them later—weeks, months, whatever. But why didn’t he kill Megan? Because he lingered. He took the steps—doped her, bound her, transported her to the woods, and then . . . he wavered. When it came time to kill her, he stopped and thought about it. And in that hesitation, she ran. Feisty girl ran like hell until that guy found her wandering on Highway Fifty-Seven.”

Nate took a deep breath, as if the night had exhausted him. “So we got a guy who is lacking affection in the real world. A guy who wants love from the girlshe takes because he can’t find it elsewhere. A guy who is heartless enough to repeatedly rape the girls he takes, but remorseful when he kills them.” He looked up at Livia, took another deep breath. “That help you at all?”

Now Livia ran a hand through her hair. “I’m not sure. But I know a hell of a lot more than I did a couple of hours ago. Your theories will help when I talk with detectives or federal agents.”

Livia gathered the photos and reports and stashed them back into her folder.

“Thanks for looking at this stuff and taking so much time on it,” she said.

“Yeah. No problem. Thanks for getting me a copy of Megan’s book.”

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