HELL IS EMPTY: PROLOGUE AND CHAPTER 1

Below is the Prologue and first chapter of my next novel, titled HELL IS EMPTY. The title is from a line from Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." This definitely would not be classified as literary fiction, as FLOATING TWIGS is. This is a crime thriller, which should be obvious by the end of the first paragraph. However, in this book I explore the damage done to an entire family when tragedy like this strikes, as well as trying to convey some of the terror being subjected to such torture creates in the victim, Samantha. The book is now finished and will be available from Amazon on September 1, 2019. Be advised that this is NOT meant for children! Comments are urged! You may comment as a "Guest," but I would appreciate if you would "sign" your post so I know who is commenting.

PROLOGUE

Detective Tony Pantera stood over the body of sixteen-year-old Jacqueline Borden. She was naked, posed by her killer with her arms crossed over her chest. There was no blood, despite the deep gash across her throat. The body had been moved here after she’d bled out enough for death to save her from more torture. She had been left beside a dumpster, as if her body had been nothing more than garbage.

She had disappeared thirteen days before her body had shown up here. Pantera had searched for her, but with no real clues, he had zero luck. Heartbreaking didn’t begin to describe this result. Pantera apologized silently to the girl’s body for his failure.

Beyond the open wound on her neck, she appeared unharmed—no bruises or other wounds. She looked almost pristine. Later, Pantera would learn the body had been scrubbed thoroughly with bleach to remove any evidence, including DNA.

Though Pantera had skipped lunch, the pain in his stomach was from more than hunger. He was dreading the next step in this nightmare—telling the girl’s mother her daughter would never be coming home. Having Jacqueline’s mother identify the body would follow, despite his being able to do that here. Identification by the next of kin was considered legally more reliable.

The crime scene techs were well underway, and he had finished his investigation of the crime scene.

Jacqueline was his first kidnapping case other than those involving a custody battle. Those cases almost never involved a desire to harm the child. That aspect didn’t make the kidnapping any less illegal, but he didn’t worry as much about the child’s safety and what was happening to him or her in those cases. His goal in those instances was more about finding the children than saving them from being raped or murdered.

Jacqueline had been different. She was just a teenager who’d been taken from her home after school one day by someone the evidence suggested she knew.

Evil both repulsed and fascinated Pantera. The fascination was born from his desire to understand where it came from. How did someone grow up to be such an evil creature as to do irreparable harm to another human being, especially a child?

He recalled interviews of the childhood friends of some of the world’s most vile people. Almost universally, they would say the man who was now in prison for heinous acts was just a typical kid, at least as far as what they knew of him. Any evil growing inside them had been well hidden. Pantera knew each person was, in some way, a Jekyll and Hyde. His job was finding the ones who embraced Hyde.

Now, staring down at Jacqueline’s body was like gazing into Hell itself. She was physical proof that incomprehensible evil existed, and a line from Shakespeare occurred to him. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” The pain in Pantera’s stomach worsened.

As he arrived at the former home of Jacqueline Borden, her mother answered the door. Seeing him, her face crumbled. She must have seen the truth in his eyes. He stood in the doorway holding the woman as she sobbed. He wanted to comfort Ms. Borden, who had just lost the most precious thing in her life, but because he wasn’t God and death was final, he could only stand there helplessly.

Six Years Later

 Samantha listened to the sound of water dripping from a faucet somewhere. She lay there, aware only of the hollow tick of drops hitting metal like a bizarre metronome and the headache that wanted to rip her head apart. She could feel her nudity as her eyelids fluttered. The darkness surrounding her was so complete she had to blink to make sure her eyes were open as she wondered where she was. She tried to move, but taut ropes secured her wrists and ankles to something solid. Then memory began slinking back.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she grasped her last memory and moved forward from it.

She had decided to walk the two miles home from school instead of taking the bus so she could stop at a local rec center to watch Bobby Pepperdine play basketball. She would still arrive home in plenty of time to avoid being grounded again.

She took a shortcut through a neighborhood development, one of many in the Richmond area. When she saw the van, she wondered if the driver had gotten lost. The same van with the rusty dent on the rear bumper had passed her just a few minutes before. Otherwise, the street was empty. The van turned onto the next street and stopped there. How does it feel to be clueless, dumb-ass? she thought.

As she crossed the empty street behind the van, the rear door burst open and muscular arms dragged her inside as a large hand clamped a foul-smelling rag over her nose and mouth.

The next thing she knew, she lay in this darkness.

Panic seized her as the full impact of what had happened punched her chest, and she screamed. The man standing near the end of the bed wearing night-vision goggles smiled.

1 

Monday, October 18

Lori Dobson swung the Audi into the driveway, braking suddenly to avoid demolishing her teenage son’s bicycle. She couldn’t count the times she had told Craig to make sure he kept the driveway clear of his things, and for a moment, she considered the harsh object lesson of running over the expensive Schwinn, but she knew that would only be punishing herself and their bank account. Stephen would insist on buying Craig a new bike, especially if he thought she had destroyed this one on purpose.

She honked the horn, hoping Craig would hear and come move his bike, but the honking only served to scatter a few birds from the elm in their front yard. Finally, she pulled herself out of the car and wheeled the bicycle onto the grass where she dumped it. Climbing back into the Audi, she pushed the garage door opener on her visor and pulled in, finally getting out and gathering the few groceries and a file from work before entering the house.

Her seventeen-year-old daughter Callie, Craig’s twin, was at the kitchen table, hovering over her phone with all the concentration of a scientist mixing volatile chemicals. Lori placed the grocery bags on a counter.

“Callie, could you stop texting for a minute and help put these groceries away?”

Callie grunted what could have been a yes, but Lori wasn’t sure.

“Now, please?” Lori said, putting the milk in the refrigerator.

Callie rose from her chair with a huff and started unloading a bag.

“Where’s Craig?” Lori asked.

“In his room.”

“What’s he doing?”

“How would I know?” Callie answered, shoving a box of cereal into a cabinet before closing the door a bit harder than necessary.

Ignoring Callie’s petulance, Lori walked down the hall to Craig’s room, gathering all her patience as she went. He was Callie’s twin, but other than the mid-teen angst, they were as different as their genders. Where Callie wore her emotions for the world to see, Craig was quieter, more of a loner.

Knocking on the door, she waited for him to open it. When he didn’t, she pushed the door open a crack and called, “Craig?” Nothing. She opened the door farther and saw him lying on his bed, reading a book with his ear buds firmly planted so he could listen to music that was so loud she could hear it herself from the open doorway.

Annoyed, Craig looked at his mother and yanked an ear bud free. “Yeah?”

“First, you’re going to damage your hearing if you don’t turn that down. And second, you left your bike in the driveway again. I didn’t stop in time, so now it’s ruined.”

“What?!” He jumped from his bed, tossing the book onto the mussed covers.

“Okay, I did manage to stop this time, but next time you might not be so lucky. For the millionth time, put your bike away when you’re done with it. I left it in the grass. Go put it away.”

Craig heaved a sigh and stomped out of his room.

 “Where’s Samantha?” she called after him.

Craig shrugged as he walked away. “I don’t know. Haven’t seen her since lunch.”

“She wasn’t on the bus?”

“Nope.”

Frustrated, Lori returned to the kitchen, where Callie was back on her phone, her thumbs a blur on the keypad.

“Have you seen Samantha?”

“No,” Callie said without looking up.

“Why didn’t you tell me she wasn’t on the bus?”

“I don’t know, maybe because you didn’t ask?” Callie answered, still concentrating on her phone. “Besides, I figured you must have known.”

Lori felt a pang of disquiet. She always made sure her children were safe when she got home. It was her routine. Samantha could be headstrong, but she would always make sure at least somebody knew where she was. She’d received no calls from Samantha, and there were no messages on the house phone either.

Pulling her phone from her purse, she pressed a few buttons to call her. When the call went immediately to voice mail, Lori’s pang of disquiet became a twinge of unease tinged with anger. Her children were on strict orders to make sure their phones were charged overnight and not used during the school day unless absolutely necessary. Letting someone know about being home late qualified as necessary. Not only that, turning their phones off if they weren’t home was totally forbidden. Lori glanced at the time on her phone: 5:42.

Where the hell was she? And why did her call go straight to voice mail? Had Samantha traveled so far from home that she was in some rural area with no signal? Lori considered it but discarded the idea as far-fetched. There was no way any of her children would do such a thing without letting someone know, not even Samantha.

She phoned Anita, the mother of Samantha’s best friend, Emma, but there was no answer, the call eventually going to voicemail.

Doing her best to calm down, she decided to call Stephen. The kids sometimes called him instead of her, though that was so rare she couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. Still, it seemed to be the only explanation left.

As Stephen’s phone rang, she managed to convince herself that he would know where their daughter was. Maybe Emma had asked her to go somewhere with her family or something, perhaps to go out to the country to get some pumpkins from a local farm for Halloween.

“Hey, Hon,” Stephen said when he answered. “What’s up?”

“Did Samantha call you and tell you she wouldn’t be home ‘til later?”

“No. Why? She’s not home?”

“No, and Callie and Craig haven’t seen or heard from her either.”

“Well, she’s probably with Emma or something and forgot to call. Why not call her?”

“Oh, wow. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You called?”

“Yes, Stephen. It went straight to voice mail.”

He could hear the panic taking root in her. “Maybe she’s having so much fun she decided to turn her phone off.”

“Only if she wants her mom to kill her,” Lori said. “She knows the rules.”

“Have you tried Anita?”

“Yes, but she didn’t answer.”

“Maybe Samantha dropped her phone and something broke,” Stephen offered.

For a moment Lori tried to stifle her anger that Stephen wasn’t as upset as she was. What he’d said was possible, but if that had happened, she would have simply borrowed someone else’s phone. She told Stephen this, speaking in a tone that suggested he was a small child.

Stephen sighed. “She’ll be home. Then we can ground her. I’m sure there will be a rational explanation for everything.”

“Stephen! She’s not home, she hasn’t called on her phone or anyone else’s, and she knows the rules!”

“Calm down, Lori. I’m coming home now. We can figure out what to do if she hasn’t called or come home by then.”

After disconnecting, Lori called Samantha again, praying she would answer. When the voice mail answered, she hissed, “Samantha Dobson! We don’t know where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing, or when you’ll be home! Call me the second you get this message!”

By nine o’clock that evening, Stephen’s panic was matching Lori’s. Without saying Samantha was technically missing, Lori had finally gotten ahold of Anita and was told Samantha wasn't there and that Emma was with another friend having been invited for dinner, but Samantha wasn’t with them.

Lori finally called the police and tried to report Samantha missing, but the police believed she had run away because she had done that twice already, though only as far as Emma's house. They refused to do anything for twenty-four hours, explaining that Samantha qualified for the waiting period because she had run away before. Lori reluctantly admitted they might be right. She had always called Samantha “my harebrained child.” It was possible she might think running away somewhere other than Emma's would be a good idea.

Lori prayed Samantha had run away. Any other explanation made her heart seize. She was only fifteen. She would discover the world was a mean place and come home, apologetic and frightened, probably as soon as tomorrow.

She tried not to think of the possibility that Samantha had been kidnapped or was lying in a ditch somewhere, but the images would intrude on her hope like a 3 AM phone call. If she were hurt, she would eventually come to and call home. But she knew that if Samantha had been abducted, their chances of seeing her alive again were near zero.