DATE UNKNOWN LOCATION UNKNOWN
He was able to count the seconds in his mind like a metronome:
Equate two syllables per second to sixty beats per minute. Pause at each period, semicolon, exclamation mark, or question mark for two seconds; each em-dash and ellipses pause for one second. One prime number immediately followed by recitations of the classics, not to exceed five minutes before reciting the next sequential prime number, after which I will pause as if for a period. Twelve prime numbers per hour. Two hundred and eighty-eight prime numbers per day.
"—of a child, or of a young man, or of a feeble woman, or of a tyrant, or of a domestic animal, or of a wild beast?
"What kind of things those are which appear good to the many, we may learn even from this. For if any man should—three thousand one hundred and nineteen—conceive certain things as being really good, such as prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, he would not after having first conceived these endure to listen to anything which should not be in harmony with what is really good. But if a man has first conceived as good the things which appear to the many to be good, he will listen and readily receive as very applicable that which was said by the comic writer . . ."
—
When Spencer jerked awake from a terrible sensation of falling, he was on his right side and could neither see nor could he hear beyond the constant hum of what he later surmised was a ventilation fan. His throat and head were both throbbing, and a bone-deep fatigue blanketed him as though he'd gone days without proper sleep.
The tendrils of exhaustion slipped away in mere moments as frustrating confusion coiled around him. His eyes were slipped open, but it was a sea of darkness before him. Taking in a deep inhalation, he was inundated with the scent of laundered fabric—surrounding him, beneath him, suffocating him. A disorienting fog shifted, and he lifted his left hand to feel for bruising. Everything hurt or pounded—his head, his shoulders, his wrist, his throat and neck—and he was shivering.
It was with numb realization that he felt padding around his wrist before he even reached his neck, heard residual clinking at the smallest movement. The air around him thinned. The right was restrained, too. His brain didn't fire up like a stoked engine, but puttered, registering random bits of data as his fingers skittered—leather, metal, rivets, padding, dips, grooves, padlocks, chains.
The data was compiled; these were maximum security locking restraints. Instead of a buckle, there was a lock; with the tip of his index finger he discerned the dimples in the metal where a universal K-300 key would need to be fitted to authorize release. His chest tightened.
No.
Dipping his head toward his chest and wincing at the ache, Spencer brushed his fingers over it where he could feel a lump but his fingertips were met with fabric where he should feel skin and hair. His fingers grasped at it.
He was hooded.
His chest expanded as he drew in a shuddering breath; his heart pounded, and his fingers went down, down past his jawline where the fabric bunched, where he felt the edges of the hood. There seemed no way to pull it off. The thick, unbreathable fabric was sewn into the double-layered leather that was collared around his neck with another maximum-security lock.
The rattling of metal every time he moved either hand to tug at it pierced the silence, making him sink lower and lower into a well of distress.
"Mm." It was a short, pitched, desperate sound.
Don't panic.
Curling his body, his fingers continued in their exploration and he swallowed, mouth sour, throat drying like sandpaper, as he reached his left ankle. There was another locked, padded restraint, and beneath that he was laying on a firm mattress.
His mind's eye provided a visual memory of Noah's left ankle when he observed him on the metal slab in the morgue. It flashed to Marion's bruised wrists.
Okay. Okay. Don't—panic.
Bending his legs inward, Spencer winced as he began to push himself up. The arm that bore his weight was bandaged where he felt a twinge of pain, and his wrist and shoulder both smarted. What could have caused such injuries, such pain?
The morgue. He remembered the morgue. The call and conversation, a flat tire, Maeve, light, and—
Be water, my friend.
He sat upright at memories of the barreling white light and the cacophonous crunching metal that assaulted his ears, the momentum, the way his body rebounded. And then nothing.
Regretful upon that action, his head pulsed and he swayed for a moment. In time, the pain decrescendoed to a constant, soft zinging. He swallowed around a dry throat again and marveled at the ensuing ache, at last able to wrap his fingers around the column.
Ah. Yes. The hands wrapped around his neck—he remembered that, too.
It explained the soreness. It didn't explain why he was unconscious long enough to be transported here, wherever here was. It could be that he was drugged after he'd been strangled. That could, in fact, explain the shivering and the lingering weariness. He railed at the thought of such a violation.
What of Alex, who was with him? Was she okay? Was she here? He wouldn't expect so, but he tested anyway. "Alex?" His voice crackled. He waited. Five seconds, ten, fifteen, and again: "Alex?"
As expected, there was no answer.
Continuing his exploratory efforts, he pushed against the firm mattress beneath him and padded his hands beyond him, seeking the edge. Beyond it, his fingers crumpled against a cinder block wall, so he turned and did the same on the other side. With a slow, frustrating drag, he reached the edge of the bed, swung his legs over, and let his feet take a tentative dip down. The bottom of the full-sized bed was about a foot and a half off the ground.
More metal clinking.
The next few minutes were spent with Spencer surveying what he could with his hands and feet, clicking his tongue three times to register ineffective acoustics, cataloguing the auditory and tactile feedback, all to form a rudimentary mental picture of his surroundings with the limited information. This room might have proper and thorough soundproofing.
Climbing atop the mattress, he planted both feet down and rose up to stand unsteadily. The restraints on his wrists tautened as he raised his hands past his head while standing at his full height on the bed. He teetered as he tried to keep his balance, tipping and bracing his hands forward where they were met with the wall. Bending, his hands went up and down, left and right, towards the head and then foot of the bed. At the head to his right was a perpendicular wall; at the foot empty air. The bed was shoved against the corner of the room.
Sighing, convincing himself not to give in to the panic yet, he sat back on the bed and planted his feet back on the ground, facing out to the room again.
The floor was concrete, cold, and abrasive under his bare feet. Noah's feet were calloused; he had sliding abrasions on his legs and torso. Marion had those same abrasions on his hands.
Spencer swallowed down the nausea welling in him and continued to observe.
On that note, the tie, buttoned shirt, waistcoat, cardigan, and watch that he last wore were all removed, leaving him in just his t-shirt. Below, his belt had been removed, but his pants and underwear remained. He blinked a few times, rubbed at his eyes beyond the hood. Understanding that his contacts were removed disturbed him more than any of the other things missing from his person. The proximity needed to take his contacts from him, the thought of fingers on his person . . .
He couldn't dwell on it.
So he stood and walked forward until he could walk no further. Two steps from the bed and the length of chain attached to the restraint on his ankle stopped his course. It was an anchor, and with its tautness he pivoted in a small arc. The chains on his arms stemmed from somewhere on the right side of the bed, near the wall, and one of them was longer than the other by a few inches—to even out his mobility, he was sure. The one around his ankle was tethered to the underside of the bed, also from the right. He couldn't make two full circles without feeling the chains at his wrists strain against him.
Turning gingerly, he went back to the bed and felt its frame. It was cold and metallic, bolted to the floor at its feet and to both walls at the head and right side. No amount of tugging wedged it away; it was secured, it was sturdy, and he assumed that it was heavy, too. Even if it hadn't been bolted, he wouldn't have gotten far lugging it. His hands continued to skim over it, over the vertical bars flanked by rows of horizontal bars spanning its full width at the foot and at its head. His clammy fingers wrapped around the reinforcing—spherical bulges wherever each horizontal and vertical bar met perpendicularly.
Crafted with high artisanship. This could well be the work of his captor's hands. Judging by its texture, it might be wrought iron.
Its specific elemental makeup was of little concern to him, though. What he knew was that this bed—these chains—were of makeup and handiwork that would be neither bent nor carried.
So, weaknesses, then.
He had to check for weaknesses in the chain. Wherever link met with lock, there was chance of deficiency in the structure. There was a padlock where his chained ankle was shortened, and more lengths of chains gathered up under the bed. So much more. Where each cuff met link, there was a small padlock; where the chain was bunched and shortened, a larger padlock.
With each victim he becomes better at his methods of subjugation.
Rising from his knees, he stood aright and shuffled left, attempting to feel for anything beyond the foot of the bed. Again, the chains tightened before he got far at all. The arms could still extend a bit further.
Sitting atop the mattress, he drew air into his lungs, a slow and deep inhalation that served to calm him and to give him additional understanding of his surroundings.
'What's that smell?'
'They're burning fish hearts and livers. Keeps away the devil.'
Everything—everything—smelled like what Javier had noted of the bathroom where Noah had been abducted: the distinct scent of something sterile that wasn't so astringent that it burned or dried out his nose. The sheets; the scent of citrus and lavender in the air beyond the bed—these were fused with his own musk, a scent that wasn't offensive, but was displaced within this room. No speck of dust was to be found on the frame. He was this enclosure's newest adornment.
This was the unsub's lair, where Noah, Victims B and C, and Marion had been before they met their ends.
There was no hesitation upon this insight; his immediate deliberation was of compliance to preserve his life. His compliance might prevent—
—tooth extraction, lateral bruising, sliding abrasions, impact sites, repeated strangulation, elinguation, a face pointing to the sky, eyes covered in blind—
'—folds fun again.'
'I don't love you.'
'Liar—'
Spencer sucked in a breath. "No." Nope. No, no.
He had to distract himself from the voices, from the spiraling, from the remembering of unpleasantries. They converged with the images he saw of Noah and Marion's bodies, of Victims B and C.
Evidence. What did the evidence show? Spencer spoke in an undertone to break the sound of the ventilation fan.
"Noah Turner was missing for over three months before he was killed by exsanguination due to elinguation. Several teeth were missing. The victim suffered excessive physical abuse, strangulation, and sexual assault that resulted in the formation of untreated anal fissures and fistulas. This likely attributed to his sepsis. Neither hands nor his tongue were found with the body. If Noah hadn't died by hemorrhaging, he would have died within mere weeks in captivity due to the septic state of his organs."
He didn't like the scent of his humid, pungent breath. He didn't like the sound of his muffled voice. He tucked his finger under the leather collar and tugged it away from his neck, hoping to get just a little fresh air, hoping that a little light streamed in. It did nothing to help.
He licked his dry lips, tongue darting at the fabric and unable to quell another aborted hum of discomfort. Despite his immediate aversion to it, he spoke again in a low whisper. "Victim B's approximate date of death could not be determined. Adipocere presence makes determining death more difficult. Cause of death is attributed to exsanguination, but other factors can't be ruled out. Hands were dismembered and not found with the body, and several teeth were missing.
"Victim C's approximate date of death could not be determined. Cause of death unknown. Hands were dismembered and not found with the body, and several teeth were missing. Victim C may have abused drugs.
"Marion Knowles was missing for two days but was likely killed from the single stab wound to the chest within the first 24 hours of when he was last seen on surveillance cameras. The victim suffered limited physical assault and no sexual assault as far as could be determined. Hands were not dismembered, teeth were not missing, and he was not elinguated. There were no signs of strangulation."
Might Marion Knowles have been a distraction? These murders were organized, and Noah's captivity was the manifestation of a patient disposition.
He and the team should have realized how wrong Marion's murder—even his abduction—was. Instead, they had been confused, stumped by the evidence before them. Foolish, the lot of them.
So what was the point? Was it to taunt them? To flaunt intellectual prowess?
"No, it can't be that. This is the type of person who wants his privacy. He doesn't want publicity and he doesn't seek adulation."
The only other logical conclusion was that this was a set-up.
Things weren't adding up, though. How did the unsub know it would be him to go to the ME? Their being at the side of the road, the car barreling toward him and Alex—was that all anticipatory, like chess?
How did he even know where their SUV was?
They had been followed. Obvious. But the only car that had been behind them had passed them minutes before they were even on the side street.
For how long, and how had they not noticed? What had he done—and when—that made him a target? He had been watched, and something he did made it right for his captor to pluck him out. After that, he was observed, then hunted. It didn't matter that he went to the ME, or that he was safe at the station, or that the team was staying at a hotel; this unsub was determined to get him, so he planned the work, then worked the plan when he was good and ready.
And there the truth was laid bare: he was designed to be here.
"Marion Knowles. Not a victim to tide the unsub over or a sign of a devolution. Not a cry for help. A lure, and we obtusely took the bite." Spencer could laugh at the brilliance of it. Marion was abducted and dumped to entice the federal presence that was already working the case. His phone was left on at a different forest to scatter them around, divide their numbers, give them more work. This unsub didn't panic, he didn't make mistakes, he wasn't reaching out, and his operation was predicated on the absolute confidence that he would not be caught.
"It was chess, wasn't it?"
We hadn't even noticed.
The panic that had dissipated in the wake of his observations returned in a rushing wave, made him queasy, threatened to crush him. He had to rest his head between his legs and breathe—five seconds in, five out, again, again—leg jittering up and down.
When it subsided after a few minutes, he sat up again, resolute. The unsub had worked the plan, yes; but he had to work the case. One possibility was that the unsub found the idea of subjugating an official as something too good to pass up, and so he went after what he presumed was the weakest of the males. The women—Jennifer and Alex—weren't even in his radar because his preference was males.
Something about that, though, didn't sit right with Spencer. Again, it wouldn't be a smart move to play such dangerous games. If that wasn't the case, he had to look at it from the angle that he somehow fit victimology.
How would his abduction supplement the data his team had already compiled about the victims? He, like Noah, wasn't blond, so it was something he did that triggered this captor to take him. What could it have been? What could he have said? Where did their paths first cross? Did they actually interact with each other?
Marion's car had been at the side of the road; he had been changing to a spare. So he had gotten a flat tire, too. And that tire had gone missing. So far, the common denominator between his own abduction and Marion's was the flat tire. The inference: these were no coincidences.
The unsub couldn't have waited for that opportunity to come about. He had to create the opportunity. How—and when?
Think. Every day brings about a different set of unpredictable variables. The unsub can't ensure that the victim would go down a certain road and fall into a trap. A flat tire wasn't a daily occurrence, either so he had to devise a scheme that would bring about that circumstance.
How? Spencer was sitting, legs crossed, thinking about what this scheme could be. It came to him. Oh.
The flat tire was noticed after he and Alex came from the ME. Marion had gone to the gym and it was after that he was changing it. In both cases, no one was near their cars. It was sabotage.
"What did he do?" he whispered. "What was it? What could guarantee the flat tire? Slashing it would have been an immediate inconvenience."
He sat and he thought. It had to take time, had to be done slowly.
Again, the word was highlighted in his mind's eye. Slowly. Ah, a slow leak. Obvious.
The same must have been done to them while they were inside the building looking at Marion's body. And why wouldn't the unsub do the same thing? It worked for Marion. The team would have no reason to suspect that the flat tire was anything other than what it seemed when they had called; the fact that it was Alex's front tire and that the car barreled to her side of the car—if his memory served him well—would be enough to mangle the evidence and make it indistinguishable from the rest of the wreckage.
It would take a keen eye and an astute reconstructionist to see that there was an extra piece with their car, and even then, he or she might attribute it to an object from the car that had hit them or debris from other random vehicles. It was, after all, just off a main road where they parked the car to inspect the flat tire.
The team was smart. They would come to this understanding. They would know that the two coincidences were too related. They would know.
Hide a tree in a forest, a needle in a pile of needles.
The mechanics behind causing a slow leak in a tire was intelligent, precise, inconspicuous; if it were done wrong it could be lethal. All one needed was a rigged screw or nail with a wide diameter and a drilled-out center length. It would be propped against the tire such that it would puncture the tread of the tire as soon as the victim backed up or drove off depending on how they parked. Upon being punctured, the tire would begin losing air at a rate determined by the size of a hole drilled in the screw or nail and the inflation pressure of the tire. The smaller the hole, the slower the deflation rate; the larger the hole, the faster the deflation. Again, chess; down to a science.
A flawless plan. Brilliant, yes, but terrifying.
It was easy with Marion; he was by himself, and his rear passenger tire was the one that was punctured. He was followed from the gym and then his captor struck when Marion found a side street and was in the middle of tending to the mechanical issue.
With him and Alex, though, the unsub had to devise a way to take her out of the picture, so more force was necessary once they had pulled off the main road and onto the side street. It was so risky, though. People could drive down the road at that time. People had, in fact. There had to be something else he was missing. Had he done the same thing that had been done in Marion's situation and used traffic cones to divert traffic? Another simple but clever tactic.
Either way, the ensuing crash to Alex's side of the car was how the unsub got her out the picture. She was an insignificant cog in his plan.
Remove any collateral elements and your victim is yours for the taking.
What had his plan been for Noah, who was alongside three other people in the car? Run them off the road? Follow them until their numbers dwindled? Either was possible. Javier, the designated driver, might have put up more of a fight, but he reckoned that it wouldn't be a problem for this unsub. The other two, Nate and Terry, were intoxicated and would be easy to take down. A single stab wound to their chests as done to Marion would have gotten them out the—
"Oh god, Alex." Spencer had sat more upright, grabbed his own beating chest. He could never live with himself if she died—if she were murdered—in an effort to get to him.
Thoughts of how this was all facilitated, though, overcame him, and he began mulling over this again.
Javier never mentioned having a flat tire. An aberration to the plan? Something had to change. The unsub was determined to take Noah that night. So he had to make a change. Had it been foolish to risk it with the potential witnesses?
No, no. Again, the unsub wasn't above using force—as demonstrated with himself and Alex—to execute his plan. Spencer was positive that their going to the rest stop had saved Javier, Terry, and Nate's lives. This unsub was bold, but not brash. He had backup plans for his plans. And his ritualistic need to clean the scene of Noah's abduction, while it wasn't a taunt to any local official, almost now seemed so. Look what I did. Look what I can do. You'll never catch me.
He was forgetting something, though—which was worrisome—and it was something important.
He let out a shaky breath, overwhelmed by all that was coming to light.
Light. Ironic.
"Is someone there?" he ventured to ask, raising his voice to speak over the fan. There was no response, and he heard no sounds aside from the humming of the fan.
He couldn't abide this darkness. No more than half an hour or more had passed since he'd awakened, and he could already feel it pressing in on him.
To go after a federal agent, though? The man was smart. This? This was not. He wasn't minimizing the importance of the lives of the previous victims by putting his life above theirs, no. It was the lack of control that worried him. This was answering to a much greater need. This catered to a compulsion that couldn't be quelled, where self-preservation was an afterthought.
That made his abduction more worrisome. He knew with a sharp intimacy the need to fulfill a compulsion.
"You're an intelligent person. I know this. But I'm a federal agent." The words were said in a steady tone that didn't belie his abject fear. "You must know how reckless this is. Why would you do this?" The chastisement didn't go beyond that.
Concluding that he was alone, unable to see, neck and throat sore, achy from the bruises sustained during the crash, he began to think of every scientific journal, every news article, and every personal account he'd ever read about the bases for creating torturous environments—psychological, psychophysiological, and psychosocial. This captor was already implementing the psychophysiological terrorization of using sensory deprivation.
He told his workmates that he hated the darkness because of the inherent absence of light. It was true. Everything was a limitless expanse with no direction. Light brought about clarity. Furthermore, in darkness, shapes were all shrouded into the same mass. There was nothing concrete about it. So—figuratively—in the absence of light, evil and good were all the same. With no bounds, good could become evil, and evil could become more profound. Eviler.
Nothing good had ever come from it when he couldn't escape it.
He folded his hands together and rested them on his thighs before he began to rock gently, head tilted back. This was a long time coming. He teetered on the edge of this behavior for months since Maeve's murder. Before that, it had been years since he'd felt enough anxiety that he needed to assuage it in such a manner to slow the speeding thoughts or anxiety.
Self-stimulatory behavior.
He had trained himself to limit it when out in public, or to make it look more socially acceptable, to the point where it was rare to even do it in his privacy. But sometimes he couldn't help it: hands swiping over his face to rub at it or rubbing on his pants at the thighs when he was overwrought with anxiety; rocking gently or spinning in his swivel chair or fiddling with and twirling things—pens, paperclips, whatever—in his hands when he was mulling over something confounding.
When he began experiencing the near-constant bout of migraines a couple of years ago, and then again earlier this year, he resorted to the least censure-inducing motions because he couldn't abide the pain: bobbing his knees up and down.
Not even Tobias Hankel had pushed him to such an edge. Hankel was a mission-based killer and had no reason to prolong any torment of his victims. It had been a cold comfort that his death would be quick, if indeed he were to die. Over the course of his captivity, in being mock executed not once but twice, he resigned himself to his death, and he began the separation of himself from his being—along with a little assistance of the drugs. His team would find him dead, yes, but they would find Tobias Hankel and he would kill no further.
Upon confessing a sin that was Charles' own interpretation of transgression, being told to grab a shovel was a relief. He'd done his part. As he dug the hole and saw that Tobias—Charles, rather—was fingering a large bowie knife, he was again relieved to know that he would be killed like most of the previous victims, quick and efficient like another lamb to be poached. That knowledge made his impending death easier to take. Except Charles threatened to bury him alive, and for a moment he had thought his heart leapt into his throat.
The drugs gave him that distraction from stimming, too, providing a pleasant numbness during that captivity, helped him beyond each ordeal, helped slow his thoughts. It was one of the many reasons that he filched it from Tobias' pocket. It helped stifle his anxieties.
This unsub, though, had Noah for the duration of over three months, during which time he suffered physical and sexual abuse. If he lasted that long, he would be subjected to the same thing. He was certain of it. There would be no blade to the jugular, but rather a constant, continuing torture before a slow, hours-long death. And if his team never found him or if he never escaped, he might never know why.
So, yes, it took less than an hour to dispel near thirteen years of self-discipline.
To quell his absolute need to fall into old habits, he'd started counting prime numbers and reciting from the classics aloud.
And here he was now:
"I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the other direction. For nothing hinders us from saying so, even if the universe is administered according to definite periods of revolution."
—
His stomach squealed at its emptiness and his tongue was dry against the roof of his mouth. He hadn't had any liquids since the tea that Alex had given him long before his abduction and he didn't know how long he'd been asleep before he first woke up here. It could have been two hours; it could have been twelve hours.
And his head was pounding.
When he could no longer abide hearing his own cracking voice during his recitations or recoiling at his souring breath, he'd mouthed the words as they darted in front of his vision. That was at the fourteenth hour, twelfth minute, and sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth second.
He stopped the recitations for a while but kept counting the passing seconds in his mind. While doing this, he stretched himself under the bed and wrenched and pulled at the chains after feeling for their source. There was reinforcing wherever the leather looped through the framing. Standing, he wrapped the chain around both arms and yanked, muscles tightening and straining as he angled himself for better leverage.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
His feet slipped out beneath him, so he stayed seated on the floor, planted them against the cold side-frame of the bed, braced himself, and pulled with all his might, letting out the breath he held and flopping to the floor when he had no energy left.
When enough time lapsed, he sat on the bed, back against the cinder block wall, and tucked his finger underneath the collar again, scratching at his neck where the sweat pooled and where the itching was greatest. He had to keep his head tilted upward—if his blinded gaze went downward and if his neck slackened, breathing became difficult. He began dragging his head from side to side against the wall behind him to abrade the fabric covering his head. He tried gnawing through it. He wrenched and tugged at it, roared in frustration.
The fabric held. The leather held.
He was trapped, and he may as well be suffocating, too.
—
His bladder had begun to twinge near the eighteenth hour of his counting and recitations, but it wasn't until the twenty-first hour that it began its protestations. The sensation in his lower abdomen was growing from just a small, inconvenient spasm that he could ignore to a small ache. The thought of urinating on himself, however, was unpleasant.
He wouldn't allow it.
He could always urinate away from himself and from the bed, but he would then have to deal with the eventual smell.
When he was in high school, he trained himself to limit his bathroom use in order to avoid the bullies. He made sure to take little sips of water throughout the day to keep hydrated. He had taken to the habit of changing his clothes at the nurse's office and made quick work of it so he didn't run into anyone. He took advantage of sometimes using the bathroom while there, but still feared using it.
It took him a mere two weeks to fall into the pattern.
It wasn't a thing to be proud of. There were complications that came from holding one's urine for too long. He could get a urinary tract infection; he might make his bladder atrophy; on rare occasions it could make one's bladder burst; it could cause urinary incontinence. And yet, even when he was often staying on the grounds after the final bell rang so he could assist with coaching the basketball team, he had mastered himself to holding his urine for thirteen hours.
It helped him, though. When he and Jennifer had gone to Tobias Hankel's home, he'd been holding in urine for most of the day, and he was desperate enough to ask him to use the facilities. Although he'd urinated on himself when Tobias knocked him out, the wherewithal he'd learned those previous years assisted him in the two days that he was in captivity; he'd neither urinated nor passed any stool during that captivity.
He could do this. He could.
—
As far as he knew since he'd first awakened here, he was beyond Marion's 24-hour threshold. But where was his captor?
—
By the twenty-sixth hour, his own body odor—the stench of his own armpits—punched through the hood and started to make him nauseous. Sensitive to scents, he could never abide the smell once he hit puberty, and he showered sometimes morning and night. It didn't matter how much he tricked his olfactory senses. It, along with anything malodorous coming from his body, was one of the few smells he couldn't take. He even kept a small travel-sized stick in his satchel.
He knew, though, that being so bothered by the pungency of his own body odor but not by the fetor of rotting corpses at crime scenes had more to do with memories attached to his scent than it did the actual smells.
Again, his experience in school made him this way. The memory came to him with ease. It happened when he was ten and not long after the school year began.
After his gym class, which was the last held during school hours, as he was changing his clothes, he was pushed into his locker and it was slammed shut. He was trapped for almost two hours with the scent of his own pits and sweat, among other students' clothes in the surrounding lockers. In the weeks prior, he was starting to notice the smell of his own pits. The classmates that trapped him in there came in minutes after the last bell rang and let him out. When he got home, he scrub scrub scrubbed until he couldn't smell himself anymore, and began using his mother's deodorant before buying his own. That was the last time he changed his clothes in the locker room and was when he started going to the nurse's office to do so. She was benevolent; she questioned him once, and at his reluctance to answer, she let him use one of the privacy blinds to do it.
Even when Maeve had died and he spent all of his time in his apartment—most of it spent on his couch cradling the book she'd given him—he hadn't been able to let his body odor linger for too long. He often laid in his tub and soaked in the water far beyond the pruning of his skin or the cooling of the water if he lacked the energy to get out.
He tried to keep still so that his movements wouldn't exacerbate the scent. It was unpleasant to the extent that he had to quell the urge to vomit. It would all catch in the hood, and he couldn't allow that to happen. That, too, would smell.
—
People experiencing sensory deprivation would begin to hallucinate within 24 to 48 hours from a lack of stimulation. Sometimes within less than an hour for some.
Spencer's first hallucination was at the twenty-eighth hour, thirty-third minute, and forty-first second. It was in the form of a dynamic, free-form triangular grid that pulsed before his eyes in unpredictable sequences. The edges of the triangles—some singular, some in groupings—flashed in blues and whites. It undulated before his eyes, swelling and contracting, sharp yet bulbous.
That hadn't been the strange part. No, he could form these kinds of images before his eyes all the time, and used them, in fact, to facilitate his breakneck speed calculations. However, the triangles started warping into something more formed and morphed into little, angular white lizards running around the empty space before him. He tucked his hands under his legs to refrain from reaching out to touch them or flick them away when they crawled on him.
Lizards, he reasoned, because he was dehydrated.
His head hurt to such an extent that he imagined a band of slow horses galloping within, and so the little lizards started hopping over invisible bars.
He couldn't resist his amusement, then, and succumbed to a dry bark of laughter.
He tried his best to keep the sight at bay, to keep his thoughts sharp. But his migraine grew as his hunger, dehydration, and the pangs just below his navel increased.
Had his captor forgotten about him? Or—better yet—had his captor been apprehended and the team was trying to locate him?
—
The sound of a great and terrifying, slow flapping, flying creature—that of something trying to land near him that couldn't quite touch down to the ground—was his first auditory hallucination.
The ventilation fan's rotations. That's its source. The sound ebbed and flowed, thrumming in his ears and pressing down on him in a way that he could feel its vibrations—or so he thought—and it turned his stomach. It caused his hearing to pulse in and out of focus. That, though, he attributed to the dehydration, the hunger, the headache.
It was now 31 hours since he woke up.
The throbbing below his belly grew in intensity, a pain great enough to make him groan, weep, gasp, and pant like a spent dog. At one point, he kneeled in front of the bed and lowered his head onto the mattress, hands wrapped around his torso as he moaned, thinking the position might help assuage the ache somehow. He had to go and he didn't know how much longer he could hold it in.
He—the unsub—could be watching him, waiting for him to break, and he wouldn't know it. He could be waiting for him to degrade himself. It could be a torture without even touching him. He had already begun by tethering him, by hooding him. These things—debasing a person with their basic needs—turned some people's screws, and it seemed that Spencer was going to have some time knowing what knobs got this man going.
Oh god.
He couldn't think this way. He couldn't dwell on it.
An hour later, though, he was laying atop the bed again, legs curled, hands squeezed between his quivering thighs to prevent what was an inevitability, and that was how he fell asleep, exhausted from having stayed up for almost a day and a half in vigilance, and probably not having slept long before first waking here, and for not having slept at all the night before he was abducted.
When he awakened with another jerk, his head still pounded, it felt full of tumbling rocks, and everything was a disorienting haze that was slow to dissolve. He figured that not many hours had passed, and he still needed to use the bathroom. He would wait no more than three more hours before he would allow himself to urinate away from the foot of the bed. That he hadn't done it while he slept was a surprise in itself.
He needed to preserve himself, so, yes, his decision was sound; he was foolish to have extended things this long.
He resumed his recitations and his counting so that—upon the strike of the third hour—he would get up and urinate. The flow of words came out strained, dry, desperate. They didn't help to distract him from the rocking and undulating of his hips, the keening and shifting.
—
He didn't have to wait that long.
Whispery wisps of cool air wafted against the hairs of his arms, the pressure seemed to change, and there was a misplaced clicking sound that he couldn't attribute to the chains or to the ventilation fan. He stilled.
Alert, wary, and no longer reciting text to himself in desperation, he sat up in alarm, canting his head. His skin prickled with goosebumps.
"Hello?" he whispered.
Even, purposeful footsteps filtered beyond the humming fan. He wilted toward the corner of the bed, back pressed against the joining walls as cold washed over him, too frozen with dread and understanding to cry out his horror.
In that moment, he realized what he had forgotten when he made his observations: Look what we did. Look what we can do. You'll never catch us.
We.
Us.
Yes, the memory was vivid now, that of the bright beams of the vehicle that had been parked behind him and Alex—the one he'd thought was the fast roadside assistance. It hadn't been.
The team had profiled the possibility of two unsubs but overall dismissed the notion when they thought of how necessary it was for this unsub to have complete control of his victims and complete control of how things operated.
Now he could confirm that this was the case, for there was another pair of footfalls accompanying the first. This might be a folie à deux.
Two people made the situation unpredictable. There was a greater likelihood with two people that they would keep their victims. Weighing the latter understanding with the fact that Marion had been killed so early in his abduction confirmed his suspicions: he had been these people's intended target.
"I'm a federal agent." His voice cracked and lacked venom, tongue unsticking from the roof of his dry mouth. "You've abducted a federal agent. There's a unit of—"
The blow was unexpected, and he was cradling his side where the pain blossomed. Throat papery, he couldn't make a sound beyond an aborted whimper, and he was too paralyzed with shock to say anything further. He had the wherewithal to compress the muscles in his pelvis and urethra to prevent himself from urinating right there on the bed.
The link of chains on his ankle was yanked and he was dragged from the bed to the floor in the next moment. He couldn't anticipate where anything would come from, so he remained frozen, listened.
There was silence. In those moments, the swift staccato of his pulse petered to a regular but rushed beat.
He spoke again. "I'm a federal age—"
This time, a hand grabbed at the hood and drove his head to the ground, grinding it against the floor. The rest of his words dissipated into a hiss as he gritted his teeth. When he felt himself rolled to his back before a large and heavy body sat atop him, he stilled and held his breath, every muscle tensing as his heart thudded against his chest.
Oh, no.
"Y . . . you can't—"
A hand slithered around his neck and clasped over the leather brace, though not enough to cut off his airway or blood flow, before he felt something—a finger, he realized—tap twice on his covered lips.
The pressure of the weight on his pelvis was intensifying the pressure in his weakened bladder. He was going to burst any moment, and while he tried to keep still, he couldn't help his shifting and quivering or the jutting of his hips to relieve the ache.
"I'm going to—"
It tapped twice again—slower, insistent—and stayed on the second tap. Be quiet, the action said. He gave a single jerk of a nod.
His head was tilted, and a finger tucked under the collar, cool against his neck. With the jangle of keys and the click of a lock, the collar was loosened, and he sucked in a rush of fresh air where it seeped in below.
The body lifted off him, he was pulled up, and his back was pushed against the frame of the bed so that he was seated on the floor. His chained leg was curled underneath him. The shuffling, shifting of the bed was near imperceptible a sound, whether due to the thudding in his own head or to his captor's chariness, but he knew someone sat at it. And then two legs on either side pressed against him. Their ankles were looped in front of his wrists, caging him. The position left him ill-protected and vulnerable, and his lack of nutrition left him weak.
An inability to understand what he might expect next left his mind reeling with anticipation, so he gasped when he felt the hood and leather scratching at his face as his head was pulled back, neck stretching. He gave a feeble struggle, adrenaline unable to assist his weakened state. The fabric rolled up and stopped over the bridge of his nose, and he relished the freshness. Ungentle, large and rough hands at either side of his head grasped at the fabric, forcing him to keep his head still between their thighs and keeping him blinded.
There was a distinct, sharp scent of rubbing alcohol. A third hand—one covered in a vinyl glove—was cupping his jaw, tilting his head.
What is this? What is this?
The hand then pulled away.
He didn't understand, and he didn't keep quiet. "Whatever you're about to do, don't do this. I'm a federal agent, do you understand? My team will find me. Don't do—"
His head was given a rough shimmy, yet he couldn't bring up his hands to protect himself.
He felt something against the side of his face starting at the tip of his left nostril. It was thin and silicone, rounded like a tube. When he felt it running along his nose to his cheek and then to the bottom of his ear lobe, he then understood what was to happen. He twisted his head.
The hands gripping at the fabric tensed, knees pressing inward to squeeze at him.
The vinyl hand stopped a few inches below his xiphisternum and then pulled away.
This hadn't been in the profile.
Knowing what was to happen next helped him anticipate the feeling of the lubricated, weighted tip of the tube at his left nostril. It didn't make it any less unpleasant. If he were a willing party to this procedure, he would have a glass or bottle of water to minimize his inclination to cough the tube out. Alas, he was immobilized and he felt it sit at his nose.
"Wait, wait." The words rushed out, spared no air to fill his lungs after.
They didn't wait.
He grasped his hands where he could on the jeans of his captor's leg, knuckles surely white as they shook when he felt it slide in.
His body tingled and he shivered as he felt the foreign object advancing from his nostril.
"Hnn."
Shoulders wriggling, he was like a worm between his captor's legs, but he tried to keep his head still. He wanted this out. But if he moved his head too much, there could be dire consequences. The tube could go up his sinus instead of down his esophagus. So he stilled. His back pulled away from the bedframe and his thighs quivered as he lifted his posterior from the floor.
It was invasive and his head spun in protest, but on the heels of that protest was a wash of something so intoxicating that he let out a gritty grunt as every sense went hazy and pulsed around him. In the fringes, he could feel the tip of the tube continuing its descent and approaching his gastroesophageal junction before it would reach the cavern of his stomach.
That feeling was still hitting him in waves, pleasant, warm, wet—he hummed out a shaking moan—
He jerked, coming to, and he still felt the hands gripping the fabric near his face.
He smelled it before he felt it sticking to him—the sharp and sour scent of urine—and he realized that urinating on himself was what had caused that euphoric sensation, and that he'd fainted from the sheer force of it. Micturition syncope.
It covered his thighs and calves, and its pungency wafted up his nose.
Mortified, shivering, repulsed by the sensation of the fabric clinging to his legs, he waited for violence.
But the tube was taped at the upper side of his left cheek and what remained of it and the port was tucked behind his ear. In time, he heard a soft click—that of the tube port being closed. As he swallowed, the muscles in his esophagus contracted against the alien object within.
The gloved hand tapped twice on his jaw. He felt no less horrified.
Body trembling in the wake of the invasive experience and his urinating on himself, Spencer was unable to detach himself from what just happened with a collected aloofness that would allow him to understand what this all meant. He was focused on the strangeness of having something so unwanted and so unneeded inside of him, and on his wet clothes.
The vinyl hands began fitting and wrapping a blindfolded harness about his head. The other hands pulled the hood up further, and the coarse fabric and leather tightened. Neither of their hands slackened and light didn't pierce the darkness. Surely they didn't think that he wouldn't rip this off at the first chance of freedom. If they kept his hands chained as he'd awakened, he would have complete autonomy to do so. Nevertheless, two buckles were cinched flat, tight, locked against his head.
Spencer stuttered out a breath, stomach jittering. He wasn't unfamiliar with some bondage gear due to the nature of his work. Whatever this was, it was some cross-breed of genuine mental-institution wear—padded and lined—and a fetishist harness.
The bed didn't make a sound but for shifting fabric as the legs caging him relaxed. He felt the whoosh of something swinging overhead, and mobility was restored to his arms.
Before Spencer could even touch his own face, though, a hand gripped the flesh of his arm and pulled him upright. There was no reprieve to dwell on this all—he instead felt his wrist being manipulated, wrenched, heard the click of a loosening lock.
Until the padded cuff fell away from his right wrist, Spencer was unaware of just how heavy those chains were. Below, he felt the padded ankle restraint removed and replaced by another without padding. It wasn't chained.
His head ticked. "What is all this? You don't need to do th—"
A large, calloused hand gripped over his face, covering his mouth and nose with enough strength to leave bruises where each of the fingers latched. The terror lanced through him, and his hands lifted up to grab at the hand while he took a bracing step back and was met with the wall of a human.
His shirt was tugged away from him, cold steel pressed against his belly, and he stilled. With a series of snip snip snips and the feeling of a sharp blade scoring against his abdomen and arms, he was shirtless. And with a movement too quick to register, the enforcer had his forearm wrapped around his neck and the fingers of his other hand laced in his hair, keeping him still. His bare back was flush against the man's cottony, flannel shirt.
From what he could tell, the man was built not unsimilar to Derek in height and stature, and so he had proper leverage over him. He reached up to release himself, wrapping his fingers around the clothed forearm, but with a loose hand, for he kept telling himself that he should comply.
His right hand was grabbed by the other person, and with another click, another cuff was soon locked around his wrist again. It dangled with a chain; he was sure that at its other end was the cuff for his other wrist. His left hand with the remaining restraint was freed, and his slow-moving brain slotted some logic together.
He wasn't tethered to the bed.
In the moment that he felt the pull of the dangling chain towards his left hand and he knew he was going to be restrained again, he acted.
Compliance be damned. He would fight this.
He was six years removed from Georgia. The moment that first dosage of Dilaudid was injected into his body against his will all those years ago, a weakness died in him and something else began to possess him.
It was that same possessed creature that emerged in this moment, and Spencer twisted and wormed himself away from his captor. It must have been unexpected, for his captor lost grip of him before colliding with him, yanking him around like a toy.
They grappled.
Spencer's hands arched into claws and scratched, balled into fists and punched, straightened out and struck from the heels. He went limp to frustrate his captor and used his body weight as an anchor that drove them both down; he contorted his body, and when he felt hair, he gripped at the roots and shook with force while his other hand punched.
There was no pattern or logic in the choreography, just the uncoordinated tangle of limbs for freedom. His growls and pants were feral, desperate.
He managed to wriggle from his captor again. Pivoting his body to his front, he got on his hands and knees, scrambled to his toes, then bounded up like an injured gazelle.
One step and then another from his captor to—Where exactly? You can't see. Fix that first—
His hand went to the blindfold to wrench it off in the same moment that a hand took hold of his ankle and down he went like a lumbering fool. There was no time to brace his hands for impact, and so his head collided with the ground with a great, hollow thud; his blackened vision flashed white.
A weight crushed atop him, pressing down on his back, squeezing his sides. He growled, twisting and writhing, bent his arms to try to push himself up. His spine went convex as he tried to buck the man off him.
This was not going to happen to him. It wasn't! "Nn—"
Like a predator clamping its teeth into sinewy flesh, five fingers wrapped around his neck and he was pinned with the body arched over him, blinded eyes forced to look left. The palm was cool and dry in a way that told him that his subjugation hadn't enervated his captor. His right cheek scraped against the gritty ground below and he grunted, huffed, spat, fingers trying to find purchase, leg bending, toes gripping, sliding.
The hand tightened.
"No," Spencer gritted out in a low voice, teeth clenched. It was an order, and his captor best follow. "You won't do this. You won't."
The victim suffered excessive physical abuse, strangulation, and sexual assault that resulted in the formation of untreated anal fissures and fistulas.
The nausea washed over him.
"Please . . . don't do this."
The right hand gripped into his hair, his head was lifted and then—thump—it was struck against the ground.
Every tightened muscle slackened; he grunted.
He wasn't a weak person. He wasn't. His upper body strength increased as a result of using those crutches years ago after being shot, both his arms and his abdominals. In his college days, he'd powered his way to different parts of his campus on a bicycle and did so for many years, so his legs were strong and he was fast. Even now, instead of driving to work, he often elected to use public transportation while getting to work, which required he walk. Sometimes he reluctantly joined Derek at the gym and enjoyed proving to his more muscular friend with really great abs that he was capable of defending himself out in the field and that he could bench a significant weight.
Despite his ungainliness, he wasn't weak.
The struggle he just went through was not weak. But this—this was too much. It had taken every remaining reserve of strength out of him, and he was too spent to prevent this man from doing anything to him. If he were hydrated, if he had eaten, he might have been able to level the playing field even more.
He supposed that was the point—weakening the victim before the first encounter.
Filled with piercing disquiet that hit him in terrible droves in his past, his stomach began its protest. It wouldn't be long before he vomited.
While the left hand held him down, the right crossed over his body, grabbed his unmanacled wrist, and began sliding it across the floor and above his head.
Only one set of hands. Only one enforcer.
It would happen. He was soon to be raped, wasn't he? He clenched his eyes despite the harness.
Look up to the sky.
Derek. Those words had haunted him as a teenager. His captor hadn't said a single one yet.
And he remembered at the very moment: there were two of them.
He felt and heard the leather restraint and chain drag across the floor, and then his left wrist was grabbed by the second captor. The restraint wrapped around his wrist and clicked.
It was done.
The hand belonging to the man sitting atop him grasped his hair, shook his head in what seemed like boredom. This was child's play to him. Between his shoulder blades, he was clapped twice before the heavy body atop him lifted up and away.
Spencer hissed as he was dragged further around the room by the chain between his wrists, skin on his torso abrading against the floor as his shoulders groaned in protest. He couldn't orient himself; in his previous struggle, he'd lost grip on what might be where.
In a distant part of his mind, he registered the squeak of a faucet turning and water pummeling against a hollow tub. The dragging stopped and he was pulled up to sit.
A hand tugged at a belt loop on his pants, which were cold against his skin. He suspected they were torn as well. The hand tugged again.
Oh.
At the tugging, at knowing the meaning of it, his vulnerability was made manifest. There was a bubbling from his stomach that sat at the bottom of his throat.
He understood, yes, but his panic cemented him to the ground beneath him. He gave a vehement shake of his head. They couldn't have expected that he would in any way assist in his own assault—Drowning? Waterboarding? What does the rushing sound of water mean?—or whatever was to come.
"No," he asserted, voice shaking. "I won't."
The hand tugged again, slow and deliberate—a warning that he best follow.
He thought to himself multiple times that he would comply. He was already failing at this, and not just against the resolve, but against his captors. He had his limits.
A hand smacked him on the side of his head—not enough to hurt him, but enough to jog him from his inaction.
Perhaps he needed to be reasonable in this moment and pick his battles: if he removed his pants himself, if he held on to that bit of control, it would save him the shame and indignity of having foreign hands near places they didn't belong, and it would save him from some type of corporal repercussion that might further enervate and weaken him. He couldn't let either happen; he needed to keep their hands from his person where possible, and he needed whatever reserves of strength he had left.
Resigned, he leaned forward, planted his hands on the ground, and stood, putting on his defiant dignity. His nose flared and he puffed out a breath. With steadying hands, he unclasped and unzipped his pants before working them down his thighs and calves.
He paused as his first foot weaved out of them and wondered if this was some depraved way of watching him strip down. What was the point of this if they'd cut him out of his shirt earlier? They could just as easily do it again.
Cooperation. They want to enforce my cooperation. One action asserts immediate control and establishes the power differential; the other gives me a choice to show my compliance after demonstrating that I have no control. The same could be said of them intubating me while I was at my physical limitations and not while I'd been unconscious before I'd woken up here. They want me to know that they have all the control.
The hand slapped at his shoulder blade, urging him to finish, and so he stepped out of the pants after working them around the single leather restraint.
His hands then went to his boxers and he couldn't continue. He couldn't. They were trembling so fiercely that he thought he could hear the phalanges rattling. The sound was—to his surprise—not the sound of rattling chain links, but his teeth clattering against each other.
The captor's hand tugged again at the hem of his underwear.
What had happened to him when he was in high school, the hands stripping him, the goal-post tying—it had been bad then, a public humiliation that caused him fear and anxiety among a plethora of other things. He couldn't tell if that or this was worse. Over fifteen years ago, over time, he taught himself to at least accept his nudity despite that incident. But that same shame from that event was creeping up again.
His prolonged reluctance was met with a back-handed wallop against the right of his face. It was unexpected, and he stumbled, unable to brace his hands before him as he went down. They crumbled beneath him, and he felt blood dribble from the side of his mouth as his teeth clamped down on his inner cheek.
Cowed, pushing himself up, he began to pull down his underwear, bending forward at the waist as the fabric went past his thighs. He then leaned forward and brought his knees toward his chest to hide his groin, his bare buttocks cold and achy on the floor.
Not just cooperation. Instilling a fear of imminent rape.
These two people had uttered not a word to him; meanwhile, he was naked, cold, tethered, and itching from the drying urine. Degradation. Asserting their control through cooperation, fear, degradation.
Minutes passed like this, with him hearing the roar of the running water, of the tub being topped off, and then silence.
Anticipation. Terrorization.
These people knew their craft damn well.
A hand clenched his elbow, he was wrenched up again, and then he was ushered forward with a hand latched onto his neck. He resisted, taking a step back, covering his groin. The man behind him pushed him forward until his leg touched the cold lip of the tub. A gloved hand patted his foot while a bare hand nudged at his back.
Just comply.
He tottered in, and a hand pressed at his shoulder to guide him down into the warm water until he was seated at the bottom of the tub. He had expected to be assaulted; he next expected that he might be waterboarded; now he was expecting that he might be drowned. His breaths rushed out and he expanded his lungs in preparation to ride into this. He was half ready to dip in himself and get it over—
Click.
The length of chains hanging between his hands were fettered. He hadn't even registered the rattling that preceded it. It extended above him and he tugged, testing it. It was secured to the wall next to him and, reaching his hand up, he felt a thick, large eye hook through which the chain was threaded and padlocked into place.
He swallowed.
His arms couldn't fully extend unless he were to dip himself under the water's surface or stand.
When something thudded next to him just beyond the tub, he stiffened.
Oh.
Flushed, perturbed, Spencer lowered and angled his head away from his captor. All he could hear beyond the ventilation fan was his own trembling, shallow breathing above the water's stilling surface.
His head twitched and jerked from side to side, tucking nearer and nearer the crook of his arms when he heard a dip, a lathering of fabric. He couldn't decide between screaming or laughing. This was unexpected. And this wouldn't be happening.
But it did.
A foamy, rough towel touched his shoulder and he jerked away. Not drowning. Bathing. "Absolutely not," he objected. "Unfetter me. I can do this myse—"
The leather bracing his head was gripped and he was dipped beneath the water but for a second before pulling him out. The grip stayed, kept his face at the surface, nose skimming, breaching. He held in a breath. It was a teasing warning, punctuated by another jerk of his head at the surface.
"Okay. Okay."
He was pulled back up, the hand gave him a single clap on his head, and he resigned himself to what the next few minutes told him was a clinical bathing at the hand of his other captor. Hair first, leather and fabric soaked, then with a hand-towel the exposed parts of his face were washed, around the tape and line of tubing and blindfold, then the rest of his body was cleaned: his neck, shoulders, and arms. After each limb and from what he could tell, the towel was rinsed, soaked, wrung, then lathered with soap before it then cleaned him again.
Ritualistic, obsessive.
The gloved hands lingered far longer than appropriate with his hands, taking it in theirs. The wet vinyl gloves cleaned one with deliberate care, front and back, between each finger, under the nails, spreading the digits, rubbing and massaging them, all as if they were caressing him beyond the gloves.
'These body parts can be viewed as a memento, or a trophy. If there is indeed a sexual element in this, the post-mortem mutilation of Noah's hands may be an indication of a necromantic mutilation. This is the obtaining of a body part to be used for sexual gratification. It could be a manifestation of a type of paraphilia called partialism, which is a sexual interest with a focus on a specific part of the body excluding the genitals.'
The nausea that had been in his throat now sat at the back of his tongue. He wrenched his hands toward his chest, clenching them into fists. The captor grabbed him by the manacled wrists and his hands were both bent palm-down before the other's thumbs wedged between his pinky and fourth fingers, coaxing them to open, and his fingers were spread again.
The ventilation fan, the occasional splash of water, his own huffing, shaking breaths, the drumming of his heart—these were all sonorous to him, invasive, compounding his disquiet. He began shivering as the hands finished with his own. The towel was rinsed-soaked-wrung-lathered again, and it moved to his chest, his torso, his sides. He was pushed forward, the enforcer's hand gripping the roots of his hair to keep him in place while his back was cleaned by the other captor.
The lower the towel went, the more intense the shivering. But it stopped at his sacrum, and he was let go again. The hands returned to his front, scraping along just below his navel, beginning its descent.
He curled into himself further and his blackened vision went red as his head filled with the blare of a horn.
"Wait, wait—" He barely heard it himself; his head was pulsing with an empty heaviness that trilled, dulled, trilled again, drowning out the sound of his own voice.
When he'd been poisoned with anthrax, he had to get nude to be properly scrubbed down. It required more physicality than he ever experienced, next to his painful high school memory. He made sure Derek wasn't there to see it and disguised it under a flippant attitude. The nudity wouldn't bother him—he would be removing his clothes himself. But it was the thought of the scrubbing, of hands, though gloved, touching him. He didn't know how he might react and thought best that Derek not be there. He knew then that it was a necessity; he knew that those people were doing a job. This understanding had allowed him to separate his emotions and apprehension from the cleansing that followed, and he was fine throughout it. His body and his mind knew: it was protocol.
This was not. They did not have his consent.
The hand went down again, he clasped his legs together, and his thighs pressed against his chest, knees tucking under his chin. His fingers splayed out and he managed to turn his arms just enough to cross his right hand over his upturned left hand, and he shakily patted the air to feel the edge of the tub or his captor's arm.
"Please, I can—just take off—I—please, let me do it. I'll do it; you don't have to do this," he babbled. He waited for a reaction and there was no sound but for his erratic breathing, the clinking of the chains, the shifting of fabric.
For a moment, it seemed that his silent captor was considering making a concession to his blathering, but the blood in his veins seemed to congeal as he was pushed forward again and the hands continued instead to wash his lower back and posterior. He twisted, threw his shackled hands to the back of his neck, and scratched the foreign arm.
When it let go, he sat up and slid his buttocks alongside the bottom of the tub to get away from the unavoidable cleaning.
He slipped, his head tipped back, his arms tautened, and his legs flailed, undignified in his panic once the brackish water breached his mouth and nose. A hand was pulling him up by the tendrils in his hair and as he broke the surface, he coughed and sputtered and gasped.
The thick arm of the enforcer wrapped around his neck again with another tight squeeze, pulling him back as the chains stretched and straightened his arms. The other hand of the enforcer gripped at the roots of his hair, keeping him in place, and he hissed.
His cuffed ankle was caught and pulled forward and he was stretched before—click—it was attached to another length of chain. Between the hands restraining him, his hands rendered inoperative with the stretch, and now his leg tethered, he couldn't bend or curl inward. If he twisted, he could curl his hip, bend his right leg over his left and kick.
It would be better to accept this, though. He would be fighting for no purpose other than his pride, which these two would continue to dash.
His breaths aspirated in quick succession when he heard the hand dip into the water, and he thought he might faint from his inability to draw in enough air.
A soft whinny escaped from his nostrils as he felt the washcloth scrape lower: under his navel, past his iliac crest, across his unshorn pubis, on his genitals, wrapping around and tugging on his penis for a good and thorough cleaning. Every muscle from his pelvis to his throat was tensed and contracted as he willed himself not to vomit. It sat right on the precipice.
The towel-scraping continued, and throughout it he held his breath. It went beyond his scrotum to his perineum, then scraped forward again. The towel left his front, was rinsed-soaked-wrung-lathered, dipped below again, trailed further below him, wedging between his buttocks and the tub, before it dipped into his cleft and abraded his skin to clean him, scraping forward.
He jutted his hips upward in abject shock, warm tears slipping past his clenched eyes into the blindfold and an aborted grunt passing his gritted teeth.
And then the towel returned to his thighs and continued to clean his legs and feet. He let out a shuddering breath. On the heels of that breath he retched, the pungent smell and acrid taste of the gastric acid making him retch again. It leaked down his chin, trailed onto his captor's arm still tucked under his neck, and was across his chest and stomach. He—shivering as cold swept over him—threw up a third time, lightheaded and pulsing everywhere.
He was overcome with the discomfort of knowing that he was immersed in his grime and now his vomit. An imperceptible gurgle pushed past his lips, and the noise stopped at the throbbing still in his throat as his muscles swelled around the tube.
The vinyled hand patted the side of his face, and he again jerked, unable to avoid the touch with the hands still locked around him.
The water was draining, the arm around his neck and the fingers threaded through his hair pulled away, and a spray of water tickled his skin to clean away the grime and vomit.
The strong hands returned, and his head was gripped between them, one below his jaw and another fisting his hair, as something touched the corner of his lips. He flinched away, tightening his jaw, but was forced to still his head.
In his motionlessness, he smelled mint, and he realized it was toothpaste. The toothbrush prodded at the corner of his lip.
'You don't care for someone that's disposable to you.'
Clean teeth. Clean gums. Alex had postulated this. Noah learned this. The association was simple. Clean teeth were a sign of care; care was given to something indisposable, and the only way he might make himself indisposable was through compliance despite any discomfort. Divorcing himself of his autonomy, allowing his captors to disregard him as human, meant his life.
The nasogastric tube was a control mechanism; he wouldn't be able to control what or even when he ate. The implications of him having one filled him with both dread and relief: there was dread because it implied that he was to be within the clutches of his captor for some time; there was relief because this would allow his teammates to find him.
His captors wouldn't go through all of this just to murder him soon after. He was already indisposable.
So he didn't dare move as his teeth were brushed, outside, inside, and thoroughly.
The foam dribbling down the side of his mouth was caught with a towel. He gagged and coughed when the toothbrush scraped across his tongue a few times. A cup was put to his lips for him to rinse and a bowl beneath his chin for him to spit. The rinsing process was repeated, and his face was wiped with a damp towel.
He would have time—time to formulate a plan and make an escape after observation.
The chain between his hands was detached from its tether, and with it he was pulled up on shaky legs as his ankle was released from the restraint. He was ushered to step out of the tub. A dry towel was rubbed on his shoulders and arms, his back and torso, pelvis and—his hands whipped over his groin as a deterrent—his legs.
He was led back to the bed with a hand on the back of his neck. There, he was pushed down to sit atop it, and something cottony with a fresh linen scent was put in his hands. Feeling it, he realized they were boxers. He couldn't see worth anything at the moment but was willing to bet that the boxers were white.
Also, it smelled like the floor had been cleaned where he'd urinated on it. Shame flooded through him, and his cheeks felt hot. The bed sheets no longer held his odor. Obsessive cleaning, he had to remind himself. It was a small consolation to know that he might not be stewing in his filth due to this person's—or these people's—obsession with cleanliness.
He felt for the telltale hole in the front of the tagless boxers and bent forward to slip them on, relieved for the covering.
Another piece of fabric was placed in his hands, thicker, longer. These were sweatpants. Make you remove your clothes to shame you, reward you by allowing you to dress yourself. Lull the victim. It was a good game they played. Checking, he found that there was no drawstring. Thorough. These he too slipped on, and he breathed a sigh of relief at the extra layer of clothing. The room wasn't cold, just a touch cooler than room temperature. But it was a little chillier than his Nevada blood could bear.
If he was in a basement, of which he was certain, the humidity was also well maintained. He was sure that he could attribute that to the ventilating fan. It didn't smell of mold.
His ankle, the left one, same as before, was once again wrapped in the padded restraint and cinched with a click below him. He swallowed. Compliance for now.
The restraints between his two hands were removed, and another piece of fabric was placed in his hands. It was a t-shirt. He felt for the tag and realized there was none—a minor detail that alleviated some anxiety. He fitted the shirt over his damp head, pulling down on it.
He waited and he swallowed again.
But then heat rushed upon his face and he heard the whir of a dryer. He couldn't prevent the tilt of his head or the straightening of his mouth.
The clothes were a privilege. This, though, was indulgent, unnecessary, accommodating in a way that belied the very peril of the situation. For the following few minutes, the dryer vacillated between his damp hair and the wet fabric, and a towel pulled on the tresses.
After the initial threat had passed, it would normally take between twenty to sixty minutes for the body to return from its elevated, primal hormone-induced fight-flight-freeze mode to its pre-arousal levels. The fatigue—the weariness from the past hours and days, the very bathing he'd just received that triggered the rush—was crushing and smothering him now.
Whatever was happening right now—whatever this was—the feeling was not wholly unpleasant to his taxed body and mind, and he could only hold half an ounce of concern at finding his mind wandering with such dangerous thoughts. He knew he couldn't associate any of their acts with anything positive, no matter how kind or benevolent. And yet.
The dryer turned off and his head kicked forward. He'd begun to doze off.
Not good at all.
Another fabric was put in his hands. His fingers wrapped around it, felt at it. More indulgences. He put it over his head and weaved his arms through. With these layers, the cooler temperature was tolerable. Comfortable.
They had been silent, but perhaps a word of goodwill would appease his captors.
He cleared his dry throat. "Th—thank you," he said as soon as his tongue unglued from the roof of his minty mouth. His head whipped to the side, neck cracking from the force of the unexpected blow. His body bounced atop the mattress and he was grabbed by the wrist.
The gloved hand pushed down on his neck while the calloused hand worked.
His breaths sped, and he tried to twist his hands underneath him.
The padded restraint wrapped around it, and he had the wherewithal not to let out anything more than a bleat when the other wrist was plucked from between him and the mattress before it, too, was wrapped with a padded restraint.
He was again as he'd awoken. He didn't understand what he'd done wrong to warrant that reaction.
The same large, calloused hand grabbed him under his jaw, forcing him to kick his head back to breathe easier. The tube pressed against his esophageal walls as he swallowed. The hold slackened.
"I . . . I'm—"
There was another great thwack against the right side of his face. He let out an aborted cry, and he again tasted blood.
He was starting to get the notion that his captors didn't want him to speak.
I observe.
In actuality, this wasn't uncommon with sexual sadists. To immerse him in their fantasy, strip him, objectify him, they might set ground rules about what he was to say, when he was allowed to say it, and straying from such would lead to corporal or sexual violence.
He wanted to avoid this and wasn't at all ready for the latter.
The hand of his captor took his own and he tightened it into a fist. With force, his fingers were unfurled by calloused hands. He stopped resisting. His other hand wrapped around the man's wrist, trembling, and he felt that—unlike before—he could feel the man's bare skin, the hairs of his forearm, sinews of muscle that belied his tone. At that, it dawned on him that there was no pungency of vomit on the man, either. He'd removed his shirt.
Was this it, then?
Tears formed behind his closed eyes and he shook his head.
His hand was forced near his mouth, though, and then it was pulled away. It happened again.
He still had that hypothesis. I observe and I assess. Once is coincidence. Twice is deliberation that warrants further testing. So Spencer whispered, "You don't have to do this."
The other hand of his captor went to his mouth and as it had done before, hands wrapped around Spencer's face with enough force to leave bruises.
They indeed didn't want him to speak, just as he'd thought earlier. But if that were the case, why wasn't he gagged?
The hand lifted away again.
Defiance again, then, and one properly warranted: "You need to give me water. I'm dehydrated. If you want me to stay alive as long as Noah, you give me water." And then he added: "Please."
It was clear that is captor had enough of him, for Spencer's hands slapped against him futilely as soon as he felt the man sit astride his pelvis—
He's not wearing pants. Where are his pants? Is this—
—clasping both hands above his clavicles and squeezing.
The thrashing and bucking began before his senses even dimmed. Lights began flashing before his eyes, heat pooled to his head, the noises around him dulled to a soft din, and tears pricked at the corner of his eyes as he scratched and kicked and pummeled his hands on anything he could.
Victims of strangulation usually died within four to five minutes of constant pressure. Before that, they could lose consciousness within ten seconds. It had been less than that and he felt he was about to expire.
He couldn't hear his own gasps and wheezing intakes, and he could no longer hear his hands slap slap slapping weakly against his captor to let him breathe—
'—cut off all the oxygen to his brain, which sent a distress signal to his heart, slowing it down.'
He couldn't breathe.
Can't breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe, can't—can't—
This primal need had to be fulfilled.
'Then his brain, in an effort to preserve itself, shut off all non-essential bodily functions.'
A sense of tranquility washed over him, and in that moment, he knew he was ready to lose consciousness.
'His arms gave out. His legs gave out.'
Just another moment now and—
The hands loosened and he turned his body and inhaled jerking breaths, body convulsing with his coughing. It was painful to swallow, and the tube pressed against his muscles, his mouth so dry but for the coppery tang of blood. His ears rang, his eyes pulsed, and he felt the nausea crawling up his throat again. The galloping in his head crescendoed.
The hand patted his head a few times before pressing a single finger over his bare lips.
Three times is an undeniable pattern of confirmation. The principle of his captivity was that he was to remain quiet to elude corporal punishment for as long as possible.
Spencer was putty in his captors' hands. While one of them held up his head, the other worked: foam was plugged into his ears before his ears were then cupped. The quiet world around him became an empty void. He could no longer hear the hum of the fan or the clinks of the chains or the rustling of fabric.
Moaning, hands padding out to remove what occluded his hearing, he shivered from the chill the room took on as he felt another harness tightening around his head over it all.
He knew what this was. These were usually fitted on some asylum patients. But the muzzle was cut away, so his mouth wasn't obstructed. Why not, if they didn't want him to speak? The strap below his ears was tightened, as was the one around his neck.
There were no buckles, but this was cinched instead with the locks; there would be no way for him to remove it on his own, or the headphones or blindfold. With each cinch, his stomach tightened, and his breathing became more stuttered. He whimpered, and hated how the sound reverberated in his own head.
The removal of the mouth guard was a test: he was free to speak despite being directed in so few words not to do so. There were obvious consequences if he did. So he was given a choice and as such would learn the lesson of cause and effect of that choice. That was a lesson he was already coming to learn. It would be his responsibility to remain silent. It was another control mechanism. Speech would be meted out with punishment, and the onus would be on him.
Was he to be a mindless doll? Just a—a sex toy? Maybe the two might have controlled their urges for now, but Noah had been savagely raped.
Oh, god.
Two people. Would—would they both take part in raping him?
I can't. I can't do this. He couldn't separate himself and look at this from the objective lens of a profiler.
'He cannot break you.'
No!
'He cannot break you.'
There was no he in this situation. It was they. He knew they would break him. They would. And they started before he'd even awakened, depriving him of his sight, now of his hearing, letting him starve, dehydrating him, beating him.
He truly couldn't do this.
He was eased down on the mattress, turned to his right side to face what he remembered was the wall. The tube shuffled and stretched. Exhausted, pulsing with pangs, distressed, he began to tremble as a familiar, dreadful languor overcame him and—
—my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself, 'I'm falling—
