You'll Thank Me for This Page 17

  Grace and Maaike had also asked the other police officers several times if they could join the search, but Detective van Dijk had insisted that they remain with him to answer questions. “If there is a real danger in the woods, you both could be potential victims of it as well,” he said. “It would be irresponsible of me to allow anyone else to get lost right now.” He promised them that his team was doing everything they could to scour the park, but having “two women out there with a bunch of domesticated dogs is only going to complicate matters.”

  “But they had her here,” said Grace. “The danger was these people in this camp, wasn’t it?”

  Detective van Dijk shook his head, remaining calm and considered. “Maybe she wasn’t ever in contact with them at all,” he said. “It’s possible she left her backpack somewhere and they found it, or snatched it from her and brought it here.” Her daughter’s backpack stolen at random by meth addicts while she was hiking—this was, apparently, the optimistic scenario.

  “And the blood on her shirt?”

  “I’m not sure it’s blood. Has an unusual chemical odor. If it is blood, it could also be someone else’s,” he said officiously. “Someone else may have been hurt and used the nearest available rag, a shirt that wouldn’t fit anyone in the camp, to stanch the wound. Our men will put the shirt through forensic testing.”

  “Where are the people who were living here—the…the junkies or whatever they are? Where have they gone?”

  “My sergeant is checking with park rangers and the organized crime division to see what surveillance of this area is available,” he said. “Whatever they encounter, we will know about it quickly,” he added.

  “Organized crime division?” she said. “You mean they may have known that this meth camp was here already?”

  “Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time. Lots of meth labs are springing up in our parks lately. Maybe you’ve read about it in the papers. It doesn’t take much to cook meth, so they make their pop-up kitchens everywhere. Most of the things you need are just household items. You’ve probably seen Breaking Bad? Big market for the stuff. We’ve disrupted labs on houseboats and cargo ships. Less so in national parks, but yes, it can happen. Lots of un-surveilled land. Usually they’re here for no more than a few days before they’re detected. Sometimes we don’t know about them until they’re gone, leaving all their garbage behind.”

  Grace took this in. Her mind was racing, and she was imagining other terrifying scenarios. That the junkies had fed meth to Karin or run off with her. That she was in some horrifying warehouse now, filled with international kingpins. That they were selling her into sex slavery, transporting her across borders. She felt Detective van Dijk’s hand on her shoulder. As if reading her mind, he said, “It’s best not to let the fear overtake you. We need you to stay sharp now so that we can use whatever information you may have to find her and get her back to you. Here’s what I can tell you: the fact that the other kids and two supervisors are also missing is in fact a good sign, at least as far as your daughter is concerned. My gut tells me that something entirely different is happening here, that may not have anything to do with this place. I just don’t know what yet.”

  At least this was a little bit of relief to Grace. She needed more reassurances. “Please tell me that we’re going to find her,” she said.

  He looked at her directly, his blue eyes translucent and focused. “As Dutch police, we don’t make those kinds of promises. But, Grace, I’m going to tell you that working with the Amber Alert in the Netherlands, we do boast a ninety-four percent success rate in finding lost kids within forty-eight hours. We’re especially good at it when we get early leads like we did in this case. So thank you for coming forward so quickly.”

  “And the other six percent?” Grace wanted to know. “What happens to them?”

  “Well, it’s interesting,” Detective van Dijk said, this time letting his eyes travel across the scenery. “The other six percent is most often a parent who makes off with their kid across international borders, to get them out of the reach of the other parent. We have a lot of that here, international child abduction. Sometimes it’s in the middle of a contentious divorce. Sometimes parents do it without even knowing that it’s illegal to run off with your kid to another country without the consent of the other parent. But usually they do know.”

  Grace felt herself flush, a sudden heat in her chest and face. A parental abduction—could that be…It immediately struck her, like a punch to the gut, that Martijn could actually have something to do with this. He was missing too, but, well, that didn’t mean that he was also a victim. What if Detective van Dijk was right, that this meth camp had nothing to do with what had happened to Karin and the others?

  “In most cases,” Dick van Dijk continued, “it’s the mothers who abduct the children, sometimes trying to get them out of the hands of bad husbands.” He paused. “I guess we can rule out that scenario, since I’m standing here talking to you.” He smiled ever so slightly, but the thought made her shiver.

  Grace began to sweat inside her clothes. She unzipped her jacket and tugged at her collar. What he said made perfect sense. Wasn’t that what they always said? The people closest to you are the most likely ones to do you harm?

  At that moment another police officer approached and pulled Ricardo aside. “Excuse me,” he said to Grace. “Detective, I need a private conference.” And the two of them walked away from her, just as her head began to reel from all the other possibilities of what could have happened to Karin. Could Martijn have followed her here on purpose? For what reason? To abduct her? But to where?

  The two men had walked to a spot under a tree where the branches nearly grazed their heads. Watching them, she started to consider what Detective van Dijk had said and how it connected to what she had learned about Martijn that morning. Was it possible—could it be—that these things weren’t separate factors in her life, separate problems upending her existence, but one and the same? Could Martijn’s issues at home be linked to the problem with this dropping?

  Maaike, who had been standing some yards off this whole time, trying to keep her dogs under control, lurched toward Grace on her booted foot as soon as she saw the police detectives move away. “Grace, did they give you any information?” she said softly. “Do they have any leads?”

  Grace shook her head. “No, nothing yet,” she started. “Karin has been missing for hours, and we are only now trying to find out where she is. We’re so far behind. Maaike, I’m afraid, I’m terrified, and I don’t know what to do. I want to tell you something, and I need you to tell me if I’m crazy. Tell me if I’m losing my mind.”

  Maaike nodded compassionately. “I’m sure this is all very upsetting,” she said. “You’re not losing your mind; you’re just naturally upset.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s that I’m afraid maybe my husband has something to do with this…” She didn’t say out loud the other thoughts she was thinking. “If it’s true, I’ll never forgive myself. To put her in danger…The only important thing in the world to me is Karin, and I’m afraid my husband, her stepfather, may have been involved…”

  “I don’t understand,” Maaike said, steadying herself on her foot in the mud and rubbing Grace on the back. “Why would he be involved?”

  Suddenly there was the sound of a car arriving, and a man and a woman jumped out. Grace recognized them from the drop-off: Margot’s parents. The mother was as thin as a praying mantis and the husband a stocky wrestler type, who walked directly to the police officers, demanding answers. “I want to know what has gone wrong here,” he said. “I thought my daughter was going to have an adventure, and we were going to have a night off.”

  Detective van Dijk shook the father’s hand and started to explain how the operation was working.

  “Please, Bart, allow the officers to do their work,” the mother implored. “Don’t get in their way.”

  The detective told him that he was receiving a briefing, which m
ight help them understand the situation better, and asked the dad to wait nearby if he could. With a huff, the father agreed.

  “I told you we should have given her that watch with the GPS tracking device for her birthday,” Margot’s mother said, pulling him away from the officers. “She would have liked it and worn it all the time. It’s also a digital watch. Then we’d just know where she is.”

  “She would have had to leave it at home for this trip anyway,” he responded. “They weren’t allowed to bring any digital technology at all.”

  “We could have also put one of those little GPS trackers in her shoes,” she added, as if she hadn’t registered his objection. “She wouldn’t even have noticed that, and I bet that wasn’t off-limits.”

  “Sanne, I object to the notion of tracking our daughter’s movements like she’s cattle,” the father said decisively. “Childhood should be childhood. Nobody had to know where I was at every moment when I was a kid. We just got to run around free, like kids. Parents didn’t go to pieces if we didn’t show up at home immediately.” Now he glanced in Grace’s direction, nodding in acknowledgment, as if he hadn’t seen her there before.

  Maaike, who was still at Grace’s side, volunteered helpfully, “We grew up in a different world, didn’t we? It was so much freer and safer then. We were lucky.”

  Sanne responded to both Maaike and her husband, “Well, that’s only because we just didn’t know that all the priests were molesting children and all these pedophiles were out there selling kiddie porn and all that kind of thing. Who knows if kids were really safer? I think we were just ignorant of all the ways children could be put in danger.”

  The father sighed, exasperated, and walked off, announcing, “I’m going to see if I can find out anything.”

  “I’m sorry that my husband is taking this attitude,” Sanne said to Grace and Maaike after he was out of earshot. “I think it’s totally appropriate that you called the police. It’s almost morning and the kids haven’t been in touch with anyone for hours. I do hope it’s nothing, though; I hope they are just fooling around, trying to frighten us all. And we can all go home soon and get some rest.”

  Then Grace’s phone was ringing again. Grace saw that it was Rutger.

  “Some progress,” he said when she clicked on to the call. “Riekje found Lotte, and they are both here now, back at camp. Lotte has been hurt. She’s got an injury to her head, and we don’t know how she got it. But she’s conscious and she was able to walk here with Riekje, and they are both safe now. Riekje had somehow lost her cell phone. That’s why she didn’t call. Lotte is getting looked at by one of the police officers who just showed up at the camp.”

  “Thank God,” said Grace. “Did Lotte say anything about Karin?”

  “She said she was with Karin after Dirk and Margot took off on their own; they were walking together and then she felt something hit her from behind. At first she thought it was Karin playing around, but then she turned around and didn’t see Karin anywhere. She did see someone’s feet. That’s all she saw before she went unconscious, she said. Then she couldn’t remember anything after that.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Grace. “Does she have a concussion?”

  Margot’s mother gasped on hearing this. Grace pulled the phone closer to her ear and cupped her hand over her mouth.

  “Riekje is with her, and they are talking to the police now,” continued Rutger. “An ambulance is on its way. I’m pretty sure they will take her to the hospital from here. She says that she is only feeling dizzy, which is a good sign. But she must have been unconscious for a while.”

  “Did she say anything else about the feet she saw? Were they Karin’s?”

  “No, no. She said it wasn’t Karin. She said she thinks it was an adult’s feet, not a child’s.”

  “An adult’s feet…” Grace pushed further. “Did she think it was a man or a woman?”

  “I’ll see if I can ask her,” said Rutger. “I’m trying not to put pressure on her right now, because she’s hurt, and I think the police will ask the questions, do the investigating. But I’ll try to find out what I can find out. Look,” he added, “we’re three out of six now, which is a good sign. We’ll find the others, I’m sure.”

  Grace’s mind began to reel, and she walked away from Maaike and Margot’s mother. She felt suddenly light-headed, as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff. In this heightened state, her brain started to try to pull all the strands of the narrative together, like a spider building a web in reverse. All the information she had gathered today started to connect: Martijn’s aggression toward her, the documents she’d found in his office, Karin’s shirt, Karin’s disappearance. The fact that Martijn didn’t answer his phone, after all this time, when all this was happening. She couldn’t figure out how it all connected, but she knew it must. There were just too many parts that seemed to point somehow to the same thing.

  “Wait,” Grace said to Rutger. “Ask her, ask Lotte, if you can, if she can remember the color of the person’s shoes. Were they bright blue hiking boots? Ask her: bright blue hiking boots?”

  Chapter 29

  The Box

  “There may be somebody there. But I took care of most of them,” said Martijn. “Margot and Dirk helped me out a bit by splitting off from the group early on. I only had to take care of Lotte.”

  “‘Take care of’?” Karin asked. “What does that mean? Where is she? Did you hurt her? Is she dead?”

  “Not dead,” he said. “I’m pretty sure she’s not dead.”

  “Pretty sure?” Karin started to breathe more shallowly. If he had her father killed…if he was willing to hurt Lotte…if he had…“What did you do to Margot and Dirk?”

  “I just had to make sure they were out of the way,” Martijn said. “They made it quite easy for me. I caught them when they were out in the woods, doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing. I just told Dirk that he’d better get going or else I would make sure their parents and the Scout leaders were well informed about their misbehavior. He took off into the woods after that. Margot I had to deal with a little differently. But when I left her she was still breathing.”

  “Still breathing?” Karin felt like she was speaking to a complete alien. What had happened to her stepfather? Was everything that mattered to him in the world contained in this metal box?

  Karin was absolutely sure now that what she felt behind her back, in the hole in the tree, in the hollow, was the box he wanted. It was very small, no bigger than the size of a cell phone. It probably didn’t contain film negatives—no, it was either a small hard drive or just a memory stick. The tips of her fingers were touching it, of that she was sure. But what would happen if she told him? What would he do once he had it? Was he going to “take care of” her as well? She just couldn’t imagine that he would simply let her go.

  “What did you do to Margot?” she asked. “Is she hurt? What did you do to Lotte?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said, as if he were completely innocent. “I just needed to get you alone out here, that was all. There are a lot more lives at stake than just a few girls in the Netherlands. You have to understand that. There are hundreds of thousands of people being killed over there.” Now he was making it sound like he was some kind of humanitarian. But Karin already knew that he was only trying to save his own skin.

  Martijn’s pocket lit up. He pulled out his phone, which was vibrating. It had probably been vibrating all evening, over and over again, and he had been ignoring it. Karin figured it had to be her mom calling. She wished she could somehow get the phone out of his hands. Martijn just looked at it, as it lit up his face, and didn’t answer it. He looked at her.

  “Let me talk to her,” said Karin. “Let me tell her what you’re looking for. Maybe she can help. I’m sure she knows better than me. You can tell her what you want and she can help us find it. She’s good at that sort of thing. Then we can all make sure you’re exonerated, just like you wanted, and we can al
l go home, no problem, all safely. We won’t tell anyone what happened. We’ll keep it to ourselves, in the family. We’ll just keep it between us.”

  Martijn let the ringing die out and the phone went dark again. “I’m not ready to talk to her,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to find what I’m looking for, so now I have no more recourse. I have to end this and just escape.”

  “What do you mean, ‘end this’?”

  “I’ve already caused too much damage,” he said. “There’s no turning back at this point. So I have to go forward. That means I have to get away from here, and I have to just leave the country. The Dutch authorities will be chasing me.”

  The phone rang again. He picked it up and looked at it but still didn’t answer it. “Let me talk to my mother,” Karin said. “Please. Please, Martijn. I’ll explain that we got lost in the forest and that you are helping me find my way back. I’ll tell her that we’re fine and that we’re on our way to the campsite. And I’ll say that nothing at all is wrong. We all just got lost.”

  Martijn looked at her, as if considering this idea. But the ringing ended again, and the phone went dark again. “I think you have a good head for this,” he said. “You’re smart. You probably got that kind of thinking from your dad. But unfortunately, if we don’t find the photos, I can’t go back. I’ll be arrested and put on trial, and I’ll face the highest penalties for treason. There’s no going back now. It’s over for me.”

  Karin was pretty sure this meant that he didn’t care much about her life either. Would he try to kill her now? Or could he let her go? He had told her everything, confessed to her. That probably meant he couldn’t let her go now.

  She moved her fingers and tried to grasp the small box in the hollow of the tree. If she could get it, she would give it to him, because that was the only way he would stop. But she had to find a way to get it, and then get him to untie her first. If she gave it to him when she was still tied up, he would leave her there, or he would kill her. If she got him to untie her, at least she could try to make a run for it. She was faster than he was, and if she got out ahead of him she could get away—she knew that much, at least.