The Abduction by Mark Gimenez Read Free Book Online Page A

a hotel than a home. Gracie hadn’t exaggerated: it was a really big house.
    Ben started up the long walkway leading to the front door but paused to listen to a lone reporter speaking into a camera: “Gracie played in a soccer game here in Post Oak late yesterday, went to the concession stand, and hasn’t been seen since. Her parents are praying that Gracie was taken for ransom, that money can save their daughter. Only fourteen hours since her abduction and a massive effort is already underway to find Gracie and the man who took her. The FBI is setting up a command post, local police are organizing search parties, and at the park where Gracie was taken, bloodhounds will soon be combing the woods …”
    Ben continued to the porch. Written in colored chalk on the gray slate steps, in a child’s hand, were the words WE LOVE YOU, GRACIE. The words had the same physical effect on Ben as his morning run: he stepped to the side of the porch and puked behind a low bush. He wiped his mouth with a red handkerchief, and then he rang the doorbell.
    Inside the residence the doorbell could not be heard over the ringing phones and blaring TVs and cops hustling about and FBI agents shouting into cell phones and a little boy running around in a Boston Red Sox baseball uniform, pointing a finger-gun at everyone, and yelling “Stick ‘em up!”
    Walking calmly amid the chaos down the wide gallery that stretched the width of the mansion was a tall black man. FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux was wearing black cowboy boots, blue jeans, a gold badge clipped to a wide black belt, a semi-automatic pistol in a belt holster, a blue nylon jacket with FBI stenciled in gold letters across the back, and an FBI cap. Devereaux was the lead FBI agent on the Gracie Ann Brice abduction. Searching for abducted children had been his life for the past ten years.
    The heels of his 14EE boots resounded under his considerable weight with each step on the immaculate hardwood floor as he passed fine art on the wainscoted walls and furniture that looked like it would break if you even leaned on the damn stuff. Walking beside him was Special Agent Floyd, an index finger pointing up like he was gauging the wind.
    “Is that the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen?”
    Painted on the high-arched ceiling over the gallery was a mural depicting an old-time French street scene with shops, pedestrians, horses, and carriages; the street continued to the foyer where it merged into a village square. A similar street scene entered from the gallery ceiling over the east wing of the residence. It was in fact the damnedest thing Eugene Devereaux had ever seen.
    “You ever work an abduction where the victim lived in a place like this?” Floyd asked.
    Devereaux’s line of work did not bring him into homes like this. The typical abduction victim’s home was on wheels or in a run-down apartment complex or a cheap rent house; it was not a mansion with fine art on the walls and French murals on the ceiling.
    “Nope. Rich girls don’t get abducted by strangers.”
    Devereaux was an abduction specialist with the Bureau based out of the Houston field office; he investigated only abductions of children by strangers. Gracie Ann Brice was his eleventh this year and it was only early April.
    He stopped. On the wall hung a formal family portrait illuminated from above by a spotlight; the parents and the boy were dressed in black, the victim in white. Her blonde hair was a stark contrast to the others’ black hair. She looked like a sweet kid. On a small table below sat a copy of Fortune magazine with the father’s face on the cover under The Next Bill Gates? Devereaux picked up the magazine and flipped it open to the feature article about the father. The same family portrait filled an entire page of the magazine—for all the world to see. All the world knew that John Brice was about to be very rich and had a wife named Elizabeth, a son named Sam, and a young daughter named