TORTURE ME_ The Bandits MC(2)
“Two days ago,” Mr. Greenwood replied.
Gage took a deep breath, preparing himself to give the canned response that was obligatory in this situation. “That’s not necessarily cause for alarm, Mr. Greenwood. Kids run off sometimes. Most often, 99.9% of the time, they come back. You might not need me here.”
“You don’t know Victoria,” Mrs. Greenwood said sharply. It was clear from her tone that Gage’s prepackaged speech had offended her. Hell, it would’ve offended Gage, too. He hated telling parents to calm down, but if he didn’t, people would accuse him of fanning the flames of hysteria every time a kid went missing.
“Tell me about her,” Gage replied, leaning back in his chair to get more comfortable.
Tori’s mother bit and sucked on her bottom lip, staring down at the floor as she gathered the right words into her head. “She’s…responsible. To a fault, even. She never misses a homework assignment, never late to anything, always does her chores.”
“Dream child, huh?” Gage asked, and Mrs. Greenwood nodded, smiling sadly.
“She said she was just going out for a study group at the nearby pizza parlor,” Tori’s father began, “but then she never come home. That night, I called the parlor and asked if she’d left to come back home, but they said she never got there.” He paused for a minute, his throat working visibly as he attempted to keep his voice under control. “So…we knew something was wrong right away. And then...in her room, I found…I found this,” Mr. Greenwood said, taking a small slip of paper out of his pocket and pushing it across the desk to Gage.
It was a normal slip of plain, white paper, the kind that Gage used to print off documents for his cases. But in the center of it, done in pencil, was a crudely-drawn knife with small little droplets of blood drawn coming off of the sharp tip. Below the knife and the line of blood was a heart, lopsided and full of thick veins. This was his signal—The Knife.
“Have you shown this to the police?” Gage asked.
Mrs. Greenwood shook her head. “They think she’s run away and staged this to make it look like she was kidnapped. Why…why would she do that? She would never do that to us. I know my daughter. I know my daughter, and she just wouldn’t,” she rambled, sighing deeply as her words ran out.
“I understand,” Gage said, attempting to make his tone as soothing as possible. “Look, I’m going to be upfront with you.”
“Oh, boy, here it comes,” Mrs. Greenwood said. “Is this the part where you tell me that my daughter just ran off for no reason?”
Gage shook his head sadly. “No, it’s the part I tell you she didn’t. I’ve been…following this case in my spare time. The Knife, that is,” Gage said, noticing that Mr. Greenwood flinched when he spoke the name of the serial killer that had been terrorizing the city over the past year. “This is his M.O. Each month, he targets girls from different parts of the city, making it hard to guess where he’ll strike next, and then he…Well, I guess you know the rest.”
The Greenwoods looked at each other for a second, their shoulders slouched down like they were carrying the weight of the world itself. “Will you find her?” Mrs. Greenwood whispered, a pitiful mixture of desperation and hope blended together in her voice and the expression on her face.
Gage sighed, staring across at their distraught faces. It was so tempting to just offer them a lie, wrapped up tight with a nice, neat, little bow. That would be so much easier than the alternative. But he chose the tough path, anyway. That was kind of how Gage operated in most circumstances. “I’m not going to sit here and give you empty promises. It’s not guaranteed. This guy has killed over twelve young women already, and if I don’t find him…that’s what’s going to happen to your daughter.” Mrs. Greenwood flinched at that, her face crumpling a little as she fought to keep herself from crying.
“But,” Gage continued, “I will do everything in my power to find her, to get her back for you. I swear to you on that one. I’ll do everything I can.”
“Please, please,” Mrs. Greenwood said, her words coming out shakily in between little pants for air. “Please, please, find her. I’ll pay anything. Please.”
Gage shook his head. “Not necessary.”
“Please,” Mr. Greenwood said. “Money is no object here. We just…we need our daughter back. Please.”
Gage nodded. He knew he was the Greenwoods last and only hope, but he still didn’t want to give them false confidence. It was possible that their daughter was already dead, even if The Knife usually kept his captives for about a month, torturing them, before doing enough damage to kill them. The last girl he kidnapped hadn’t even been found yet, but thus far, there had been no survivors.