Hold Tight

“Adam is missing,” Mike said.

“I understand that.”

“I spoke to the New York police about it. But who do I talk to here about helping me find my son?”

"TELL Cassandra I miss her,” Nash whispered.

And then, finally, at long last, it was over for Reba Cordova.

Nash drove to the U-Store-It on Route 15 in Sussex County.

He backed the truck into the dock of his garagelike storage unit. Darkness had fallen. No one else was around or looking. He had placed the body in a trash can on the very outside chance someone could see. Storage units were great for this sort of thing. He remembered reading about an abduction where the kidnappers kept the victim in one of these units. The victim died of accidental suffocation. But Nash knew other stories too—ones that would make your lungs collapse. You see the posters of the missing, you wonder about the missing, those kids on milk cartons, the women who just innocently left home one day, and sometimes, more often than you want to know, they are kept tied and gagged and even alive in places like this.

Cops, Nash knew, believed that criminals followed a certain spe- cific pattern. That may be so—most criminals are morons—but Nash did the opposite. He had beaten Marianne beyond recognition, but this time he had not touched Reba’s face. Part of that was just logistics. He knew that he could hide Marianne’s true identity. Not so with Reba. By now her husband had probably reported her missing. If a fresh corpse was found, even one bloodied and battered, the police would realize that the odds it belonged to Reba Cordova were strong.

So change the MO: Don’t let the body be found at all.

That was the key. Nash had left Marianne’s body where they could find it, but Reba would simply vanish. Nash had left her car in the hotel lot. The police would think that she had gone there for an illicit tryst. They would focus on that, work that avenue, investigate her background to see if she had a boyfriend. Maybe Nash would get extra lucky. Maybe Reba did have someone on the side. The police would zero in on him for certain. Either way, if no body was found, they would have nothing to go on and probably assume that she had been a runaway. There would be no tie between Reba and Marianne.

So he would keep her here. For a while at least.

Pietra had the dead back in her eyes. Years ago, she had been a gorgeous young actress in what used to be called Yugoslavia. There had been ethnic cleansing. Her husband and son were killed before her eyes in ways too gruesome to imagine. Pietra was not so lucky—she survived. Nash had worked as a military mercenary back then. He had rescued her. Or what was left of her. Since then Pietra only came to life when she had to act, like back in the bar when they grabbed Marianne. The rest of the time there was nothing there. It had all been scooped out by those Serbian soldiers.

“I promised Cassandra,” he said to her. “You understand that, don’t you?”

Pietra looked off. He studied her profile.

“You feel bad about this one, don’t you?”

Pietra said nothing. They put Reba’s body in a mixture of wood chips and manure. It would keep for a while. Nash did not want to risk stealing another license plate. He took out the black electrical tape and changed the F to an E—that might be enough. In the corner of the shed, he had a pile of other “disguises” for his van. A magnetic sign advertising Tremesis Paints. Another that read CAMBRIDGE INSTITUTE. He chose instead to put on a bumper sticker he’d bought at a religious conference entitled The Lord’s Love last October. The sticker read:

GOD DOESN’T BELIEVE IN ATHEISTS

Nash smiled. Such a kind, pious sentiment. But the key was, you noticed it. He put it on with two-sided tape so he could easily peel it off if he so desired. People would read the bumper sticker and be offended or impressed. Either way, they’d notice. And when you notice things like that, you don’t notice the license plate number.

They got back in the car.

Until he met Pietra, Nash had never bought that the eyes were the window to the soul. But here, in her case, it was obvious. Her eyes were beautiful, blue with yellow sparkles, and yet you could see that there was nothing behind them, that something had blown out the candles and that they would never be relit.

“It had to be done, Pietra. You understand that.”

She finally spoke. “You enjoyed it.”

There was no judgment. She knew Nash long enough for him not to lie.

“So?”

She looked off.

“What is it, Pietra?”

“I knew what happened to my family,” she said.

Nash said nothing.

“I watched my son and my husband suffer in horrible ways. And they watched me suffer too. That was the last sight they saw before dying—me suffering with them.”

“I know this,” Nash said. “And you say I enjoyed this. But normally, so do you, right?”

She answered without hesitation. “Yes.”

Most people assumed that it would be the opposite—that the victim of such horrific violence would naturally be repulsed by any future bloodshed. But the truth was, the world does not work that way. Violence breeds violence—but not just in the obvious, retaliatory way. The molested child grows up to become the adult molester. The son traumatized by his father abusing his mother is far more likely to one day beat his own wife.

Why?

Why do we humans never really learn the lessons we are supposed to? What is in our makeup, in fact, that draws us to that which should sicken us?

After Nash saved her, Pietra had craved vengeance. It was all she thought about during her recuperation. Three weeks after she was discharged from the hospital, Nash and Pietra tracked down one of the soldiers who’d tortured her family. They managed to get him alone. Nash tied and gagged him. He gave Pietra the pruning shears and left her alone with him. It took three days for the soldier to die. By the end of the first, the soldier was begging Pietra to kill him. But she didn’t.

She loved every moment.

In the end, most people find revenge to be a wasted emotion. They feel empty after doing something so horrible to another human being, even one who maybe deserved it. Not Pietra. The experience just made her thirst for more. And that was a big part of why she was with him today.

“So what’s different this time?” he asked.

Nash waited. She took her time, but eventually she got to it.

“The not knowing,” Pietra said in a hushed tone. “Never knowing. Inflicting physical pain . . . we do that, no problem.” She looked back at the storage unit. “But to make a man go through the rest of his life wondering what happened to the woman he loved.” She shook her head. “I think that is worse.”