Chapter Seven
The Messenger Speaks
"Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs"
Gordon Lightfoot "Sundown"
Previously
It had become clear that the night's sweep was not going to bear fruit and nothing further would be learned from the pimps and street prostitutes of Washington Heights. The watch commander, satisfied that nothing more would be gained by keeping extra bodies on the streets, ordered the operation closed for the night. They would attack it with fresh eyes in the morning.
As the all clear sounded and every vice cop on the streets reported in, one officer's mic was strangely silent. Detective Third class Ann Hastings had failed to report in since her last scheduled 'all clear'. It was as if the night had simply swallowed her up. She had radioed in to go to the bathroom and then nothing.
All attempts to reach her were met with static.
Ann Hastings woke up in the dark.
Her second sensation was that of a scarf wound around her eyes. She felt groggy and her head throbbed, like the worst hangover she had ever experienced. The hangover from the three-day bender after she'd come home from Afghanistan, and the one after her dad's funeral both paled in comparison with the pain in the back of her head.
She knew she was on a bed, but when she tried to move to confirm this, she found that her wrists were securely bound. As the remainder of her senses began to check in a plethora of sensations began to make themselves known, the first of these was that she was naked under the blanket thrown over her. Not that she had been wearing all that much to begin with... just enough to cover the slight baby bump on her abdomen where once only lean muscle resided.
The place practically reeked of antiseptic and sanitizer...like it had been cleaned extensively before her arrival and there were no noises she could detect, nothing to tell her where she was, how long she had been here or who had taken her. One moment she was in the hotel bathroom feeling dizzy and nauseous and the next she was here.
The sheets smelled freshly laundered and the mattress was firm but not terribly so, as if care had been taken to make her comfortable. (other than the fact she was securely bound in place)
Suddenly the thought hit her: the observation about feeling hung over.
"Oh, God..." she whispered quietly to herself, "my baby..." a tear crept down her cheek at the thought, the first twinges of real fear began to creep up her spine before she saw light around the periphery of her blindfold.
"You can yell and shout all you want, nobody will hear you."
The voice of her captor was so heavily modified that she couldn't tell if the speaker was male, female or even human. No sense of inflection was apparent, nor sign of any emotion. Nothing she could use to get a handle on the person behind the voice. Ellis, she knew, could tear the modulation apart and find the true voice behind it in about an hour on a recording, but she doubted that was ever going to happen.
"I'm a cop...badge number 56324...out of the12th Precinct," Hastings said, throwing as much authority behind her voice as she could under the circumstances. "half the city is out looking for me."
"I know who you are, detective. They won't find you until I want them to...just like the others," the voice replied.
'Oh fuck...it's him,' the voice in Hastings' head told her, the voice that had kept her alive during two tours in Afghanistan. The voice she was struggling to listen to now, not the haze in her mind caused by the pregnancy hormones.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked quietly, trying to inject a calm into her voice she most certainly didn't feel.
Hastings knew she was in no position to attempt escape, so she fell back on her military training, hoping to gather as much intel as she could, in case she got out of this in one piece. -Beckett would need any information she could provide to get this guy- but also realized that she would have to probe very carefully to avoid provoking him.
"My apologies for the inconvenience, detective," the voice said, "had I known you were pregnant I would have chosen somebody else, but a new message needs to be sent. You are that message."
Hastings felt a prick to her neck, her last thought a whispered apology to her unborn baby before everything went black again.
4:35 PM
Within half an hour after she was declared missing, every officer and detective on the island of Manhattan had been mobilized, including the canine unit, in the search for Ann Hastings. The search had gone on for most of the morning and well into that afternoon. To say that Victoria Gates was beside herself would be a gross understatement. She was furious. She stalked the corridors of the 12th Precinct like a woman possessed and spared no amount of vitriol for the new Captain of a now reorganized Narcotics/Vice unit.
"This is the second time I have placed one of my detectives into your division's care for a sting operation and the second time you have managed to lose them!" she raged on the phone, not letting the man get in a word edgewise,
"Are you guys incompetent when it comes to security over there? I don't care what you have to do, you just find her!"
After slamming her phone on the cradle, Gates looked up at Hastings' partner, Detective Grant Sullivan, who looked like he hadn't slept or eaten since his partner had gone missing. He looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
"This wasn't your fault, Detective Sullivan." Gates looked over her nose at the man who completely withered under her scrutiny as if he desired to collapse in on himself and disappear. "You were both on a break and there was supposed to be a detail on her, just like when Beckett went missing. You couldn't be there every minute."
"She told me over the radio she had to use the bathroom." Sully breathed, his eyes filled with guilt, "I wasn't sure whether it was to pee or throw up...when we got the 'all clear' I didn't think anything of it...until she didn't respond. I thought she might have fainted...or her mic had gone dead...when I finally kicked in the door to the hotel bathroom... she was gone."
Gates softened a little as she saw that his remorse was genuine. He had been out all night with Hastings. After she had turned up missing he had run himself into the ground searching for his partner. He was dead on his feet, the morning shift watch commander had finally had to order him sent home, but instead had come straight here looking for either absolution or punishment, she wasn't certain which.
He had insisted on telling Paul Whitaker himself that his wife was missing, and had the black eye to prove it. Paul had only struck him once, and had apologized profusely after, but from what she'd heard, Sully had just taken the punch without so much as ducking or blocking it, as if he had expected it. He had refused to press charges.
"Go home Detective Sullivan," Gates said softly. "You can't help anybody if you can barely stand."
"But what about...?" Sullivan began, but Gates cut him off,
"Rest assured, Grant, there are no cases in this precinct today, and there won't be until she is found, one way or the other."
Gates looked up at the doorway of her office and nodded to L.T. and Velasquez who were also on their way home to catch a breather before returning to the search.
"Make sure he goes home, or at least someplace to get some rest," Gates ordered. "I don't want to see him for at least six hours."
2:30 AM
Almost precisely twenty four hours after Detective Hastings had disappeared, Grant Sullivan received a text message from her cell phone alerting him that she could be found in one of the seedier motels in Washington Heights. When ESU cleared the lobby and breached the place fifteen minutes later, (with Sullivan close on their heels) she was found alive but unconscious, laid out naked on the bed - in exactly the same position the last victim had been, the wound pattern from the previous killing drawn out in grease pencil on the skin of her abdomen, chest and lower regions.
Sullivan thought he was going to be sick, but he managed to hold it together as they cut her bindings and the ESU paramedics slid her onto the gurney to take her to the bus waiting downstairs. He gripped her hand and didn't release it as they fast-walked the gurney to the elevator, his other hand holding his cell phone to his ear as he called her husband.
Hastings woke up in a panic as they lifted her gurney up into the ambulance. She thrashed and twisted in the restraints until Sully took her hand again.
"Hastings... shh ...Ann... it's ok...you're safe...I've got you." he whispered into her ear.
The soothing words in her ear from the only man she trusted as much as Paul gradually seemed to get through to her and she began to settle down before she finally opened her eyes. The man she saw holding her hand was not the happy-go-lucky Grant Sullivan she knew...the partner that made her laugh at his antics and made her roll her eyes at his messy desk. Though the relief on his features was palpable, he seemed hollowed out and broken in ways she could only imagine.
The words her captor had spoken were still echoing in her mind like a bad dream.
"...had I known you were pregnant I would have chosen somebody else..."
The bastard had known she was pregnant. He had obviously undressed her and must have done at least a basic physical exam. Her baby bump, though easily concealed would have been noticeable upon close inspection...but she didn't remember...
"Is my baby okay?" she whispered, fear still tugging at her mind, filling her mind with real and imagined terrors only a woman would understand, "Sully...did something happen to my baby? Where's Paul?"
"I called him just after ESU breached the hotel...and I knew you were safe..." Sully replied as gently as he could manage, "I told him to meet us at the hospital...Gates insisted you get checked out...she wanted to protect the scene."
"God... Sully... did he - did he...?" Her mind suddenly turning from one worst case scenario to another... the panic in her mind leaving her unable to focus and she couldn't choke out words.
"I don't think so... from what we were told... that... doesn't seem to be his style," Sully replied, his voice suddenly devoid of any emotion... his eyes filling with a rage he was barely keeping in check, "but I can have them do a - " He couldn't force the word "rape" past his lips, " - a... kit if you want... I can make the arrangements quietly..."
Hastings nodded. She wasn't sure she liked this hurt, broken, hollowed-out version of her partner. The pain and anger in his eyes almost drew her attention from the bruising around his right eye.
Almost, but not quite.
"Where did you get the shiner, Sully?"
With Detective Hastings safely ensconced in a hospital room for observation with two uniformed guards at her door, the cops of the Vice division hit the streets in force. An undercover cop had been kidnapped under their very noses and "nobody had seen anything" - only now, the NYPD wasn't taking no for an answer.
There were uniformed cops, with body armor on full display their patrol cars lit up on every corner shutting down all illicit trade. They weren't even trying to make arrests, simply scaring off anyone who would make use of such trade. If the traffic in illegal goods or services moved to another corner, the police followed them there.
Word was soon out on the street - and the message was crystal clear - that there would be no peace and no money to be made until somebody came forward.
It was only a matter of time.
**Author's note** In case any of you are wondering, (and at least one anon reviewer commented on the subject) I never had any intention of having Hastings...or her baby...come to harm, merely scare the bejesus out of her and provide the clue that out antagonist has medical knowledge. Next chapter will explain why Jack has played it this way.
I borrowed the behavior of the NYPD from two sources. The TV Series Cold Case, where the drectives on the show sat on a sreeet corner making it clear they were cops (calling the maneuver "no drugs today") to get the street hookers to talk to them. The other was from Third Watch after an EMT was killed and the cops on the show said there "would be no peace" for anyone who shelters the man who shot him.
