San Francisco, California
Reeve gasps awake. She sits up in the dark, heart thudding, and the nightmare vanishes, as though too terrible for her mind to haul to the shore of consciousness. But then reality dawns: Daryl Wayne Flint has escaped.
Her nightmares are real.
She tosses off the covers and snatches up her phone to scan the headlines. The news hasn’t changed—Flint is still at large—but now the stories have metastasized and there are many more photos. Photos of Daryl Wayne Flint, both from when he was arrested, looking heavy and untamed, and from when he escaped yesterday, looking neat and trim and wearing a beret. Photos of “Edgy Reggie” LeClaire, with fierce eyes and tight lips.
“Dammit!” she says aloud. Tossing the phone aside, she plunges her hands into her hair and curses Flint, curses their shared and twisted history. Why couldn’t that animal stay locked up where he belongs? It has taken years of hard work to shove his memory aside, but it’s like a living, breathing thing, and now it has snarled awake and found its feet.
She checks the clock—6:13—much too early to disturb her dad and Amanda, especially after they’d stayed up late last night, trying to reassure her while answering calls and e-mails from concerned relatives who’d heard the news.
She jumps to her feet and begins to pace, telling herself to cool down. What have years of psychotherapy taught her?
Breathe in and breathe out.
She inhales, exhales … and wonders what time it is in Brazil.
Two weeks ago, when Dr. Ezra Lerner had called to let her know that he was heading to Rio, she’d had to stop herself from teasing her psychiatrist about being overprotective.
He’d explained that he was going to Brazil to help a family deal with a hostage situation. “I don’t know how long I’ll be, but if you need to reach me,” he said, “leave a message with my office and I promise to get back to you.”
She had smiled into the phone, bemused that Dr. Lerner, an expert on captivity syndromes, was still so worried about her. She’d felt confident that her years of fuming and weeping on his couch were over.
Of course, she never expected her kidnapper to walk the earth again, rising up like some undead creature in a bad horror flick.
She tells herself to get a grip. Dr. Lerner is out of reach, and she needs to buck up and cope with Flint’s escape on her own.
Do something. Go for a run.
It’s the best she can come up with. But then she looks around and realizes she hasn’t brought a bag. No way she’s going running in those shoes from last night.
After a few minutes of rummaging through the closet, she comes up with some old gym clothes and a pair of Nikes that she left behind when she moved out.
She grabs the spare key, and minutes later she’s running along the Embarcadero, past the early risers and tourists streaming through the Ferry Building. Her muscles warm and loosen as she heads uphill.
By the time she reaches the park, sweat has saturated her clothes. She slows to a walk and shakes out her muscles, then unzips her hoodie and pushes the sleeves up to her elbows, revealing pale forearms dotted with small, circular scars.
The park smells fresh, and as the noise of the city falls away, she hears the parrots overhead and cranes her neck to watch. The birds’ distinctive green bodies and cherry-colored cheeks make them easy to spot. The wild parrots—made famous by a documentary film years ago—swoop and squawk and perch in pairs. She always takes pleasure in watching them flit from tree to tree, relishing the idea that so many South American parrots have escaped their cages to form this unlikely flock.
Once she has cooled, Reeve heads back downhill. As she passes a woman who is unloading boxes from the trunk of a car, the woman turns aside and calls, “Honey, I need your help with this.”
Reeve glances into the garage just as a man lifts his head from his task to call back, “Okay, one second.”
How nice it must be to call a spouse so easily for help. She tries to imagine having someone like that in her life, but intimacy eludes her. And at this particular moment, the only person she really wants to talk to is far away in Brazil.
And just like that, a realization looms.
She stops and shuts her eyes, coaxing it closer, and the idea snaps into certainty: Daryl Wayne Flint will seek out Dr. Moody.
She opens her eyes and stands up straight. “Dr. Ick,” she says aloud.
She’s often skeptical of intuition, but this insight unfolds with perfect logic: If she wants to talk with her psychiatrist, then Flint must also want to talk to his. Of course. Because, just as Dr. Lerner is the one person who has worked to understand Reeve, Dr. Moody is the one person who has worked to understand Flint. Who else has spent so many hours listening to that madman? Flint’s twisted psyche has been Dr. Moody’s bread and butter for years. He even wrote a book about his infamous client.
She absently touches the scar on the back of her neck, thinking that she and Flint are each bonded to their psychiatrists. They’ve likely been treated with some of the same drugs.
With a sudden chill she sees that they are, and ever will be, linked by their shared past. They are two sides of the same crime—captor and captive—and that’s a tie that can never be broken. They define each other. She can still feel him breathing on her skin.