The Abduction by Mark Gimenez Page B

full military dress, wearing a green beret, a chest full of medals, and what Stevens knew was the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck. Who was this soldier and why did he rate a front-row spot on a ten-year-old girl’s desk, where she would look at him first thing each morning and last thing each night? Questions like that haunted him for weeks after the child’s body was found.
    Other than being about five times as big with an adjoining bathroom that was like something out of a fancy hotel, the victim’s room looked remarkably similar to his nine-year-old daughter’s room: posters on the wall, the same Orlando Bloomone and a life-sized Mia Hamm, trophies, books, TV/DVD, telephone, boom box, electronic keyboard, soccer ball, and a closet stuffed with clothes. Gracie Ann Brice is a real live kid. Or was. She had sat where he sat, done her homework on this computer, watched TV in this room, talked to her friends on that phone, and slept in that bed, where her father now slept, curled up in the same dirty clothes and clutching the girl’s teddy bear. He did not appear at all like the genius Stevens had read about in that Fortune magazine article. Stevens had felt envious that day: he was a GS-11 geek making $51,115 a year and Brice was a geek about to become a billionaire. But now that Brice’s daughter had been abducted and murdered—he had never worked a stranger abduction where the child hadn’t been murdered—Stevens was not so envious. He wouldn’t trade his daughter for Bill Gates’s money.
    FBI procedure was to secure the victim’s bedroom and seal it off from everyone, even the family. But he didn’t have the heart to wake the father, not after what he had been through the last twenty-four hours. So Agent Stevens was working quietly.
    The entire house was quiet.
    Downstairs, eleven somber FBI agents manned the hot-line phones in the command post, logging every lead, no matter how unimportant, and every reported sighting, no matter how inconceivable, into the computer. And waiting. Mostly waiting, as few calls were coming in.
    Agent Jan Jorgenson sat at one computer, running database searches on the family per orders; she was still shaken from having witnessed the victim’s mother slapping the father, defenseless in his despair. If this was a typical child abduction case, Jan had no desire to become a specialist like Agent Devereaux. She glanced across the room at him.
    FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux felt tired, so godawful tired. He was holding his personal cell phone to his ear as the call rang through and thinking, What the hell’s wrong with people, a man could do that to a child? And leaving her soccer shorts behind like a perverted calling card: See what I did? Yeah, we see—die and go to hell, you sick bastard! When Devereaux’s seventeen-year-old daughter answered, he said, “Hey, baby, I just wanted to tell you I love you.” She laughed and said, “What, are you dying or something?” Somewhere deep inside him, he was.
    Coach Wally Fagan sat at another computer; he was scrolling down mug shots of the forty-two thousand registered sex offenders on the state’s official sex offender website—pictures, names, addresses, and criminal histories—starting with those registered in the county, hoping to ID the blond man in the black cap and plaid shirt who had asked about Gracie after the game and wishing he had never pointed her out to him. The mother was right: he was a fucking idiot.
    In the kitchen, Sylvia Milanevic, the Brice family maid, was preparing a fresh pot of coffee for the FBI agents. Sixty-three, an immigrant from Kosovo, she had lost two children in the war. She had concluded long ago that life was about enduring pain: you’re born, you suffer, and you die. The small TV on the counter was on: “A child abducted by a stranger has a life expectancy of three hours. Gracie Ann Brice has been missing for twenty-four hours now …” Sylvia looked out the window over the