Chapter One

Part I - January

"If  Elvis was alive today, he'd be… well, he'd be dead by now."

Bob cringed when he heard the radio announcer's cheerful voice. He was glad Mary Ellen hadn't been in the car to hear that.  She definitely would not have reacted well to that remark.  She had reminded him just this morning that today was Elvis' birthday.

Of course, when Mary Ellen spoke of Elvis, she wasn't really talking about Elvis. Whenever Mary Ellen mentioned Elvis she was really talking about Chloe.  Mary Ellen never mentioned Chloe.  It hurt too much for her to speak of Chloe.  Four years later, it was still too soon.

Elvis and Chloe had a lot in common.  They shared a birthday.   Chloe loved to sing, and by age six she had learned to play guitar and was already becoming a talented musician.  Chloe had jet black hair and a smooth southern accent that endeared her to anyone she came into contact with.  Everyone who met her had said that she would be a star someday, and Bob didn't doubt it.

Like Elvis, Bob had sung his daughter to sleep when she was a baby, and he truly could not help falling in love with her.  He supposed it was the same for any father.  Chloe was his angel.  He would do anything for her.

When Chloe had disappeared on her seventh birthday, Mary Ellen's entire world fell apart.  At first, she did as any parent of a missing child would do.  She organised search parties, appeared on television issuing heartfelt pleas for Chloe's safe return, and tirelessly followed every lead possible, even the ones that seemed so unlikely that the police didn'y persue them.  She got into the habit of keeping the lights on at night.  Day after day she never gave up hope that her beloved daughter would at any moment come walking through the door, and she made sure that there was always someone in the house in case Chloe came home. 

Rewards were offered, leads followed, friends and neighbors interviewed, but no trace of the girl was ever found and no clue as to her whereabouts had ever surfaced.

Four years.    After four years she was out of tears, completely drained of emotion, reduced to a virtual basket case.  Bob did what he could to keep her together, but how do you heal a broken heart?  Their marriage was pretty much over, but he stayed with her, trying to do anything he could to keep her from going completely over the edge.

As a police officer, he knew that the chance his daughter was still alive was practically nonexistent.  He found it difficult to hold out hope, one part of him praying she was safe somewhere and the other part of him knowing that she probably wasn't. 

As far as missing child cases went, situations where the child was found alive after more than a few days were few and far between.  There was that one case in New Jersey where some sadistic phony psychic had proclaimed on live television quite confidently that the missing boy was dead, and that she had been in contact with him from beyond the grave, only to have him turn up alive years later, along with another missing child, both being held captive by some sick pedophile.  There was the case out of California where the kidnapped girl had escaped eighteen years later, held captive by another pedophile who kept her as a sex slave with the full knowledge and cooperation of his wife, and who fathered two children with her, all while on probation for molesting yet another child.  Then there was the case of the girl in Utah who was missing for almost a year, who turned up after being held as a sex toy by another sick bastard.  Sexual slavery seemed to be the only fate one could expect for a child gone missing for any great length of time.  For Bob Morgan, that possibility was just too gruesome to contemplate.  He was certain that she must have died long ago.  He hoped that she hadn't suffered.  He always expected that they would find her body some day, the victim of some fatal accident.  He still went out on the weekends, checking out remote areas, looking in abandoned wells and mineshafts, trying to determine how she had met her end.  The possibility that she might be alive and locked up by some screwed up pervert had never even occurred to him, but that's exactly where she happened to be.

For the past four years, Chloe Morgan had been locked in a basement room less than five miles from her parents’ home.  The room wasn’t much bigger than a prison cell, nor was it very comfortable.  It was decorated as one would expect a child's room to look, with many stuffed animals, posters of boy bands on the walls, and a pink ruffled canopy bed, but it was all somehow wrong.  It was as if it were contrived, a Hollywood movie studio's version of a child's bedroom, with too much lighting and a sterile quality to the decorations that gave no indication of the personality of the occupant.

Chloe’s room had no window, no clock, and no television, nothing to mark the passage of time except for the steady arrival of packaged meals that were delivered to her three times a day through a slot in the door.  Breakfast each day was cereal and milk.   Monday, Wednesday and Friday it was frosted flakes, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday it was rice crispies, and on Sunday it was raisin bran.  Lunch was a sandwich and more milk.  Monday, Wednesday, and Friday it was bologna, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday peanut butter and jelly, and Sunday it was always a turkey club and a can of coke.  Dinner was a take-out hamburger and fries every day, served with coleslaw, pickle and another carton of milk. 

The only other thing that happened to break up the monotony of this prison were the occasional visits from the men who would come to do things to her.  Once or twice a month, without warning, men would arrive to interrupt her solitude.  They would come into her room through the locked door, undress themselves, and do things to her that were both painful and humiliating.  It puzzled her how they could do those things without ever once displaying any regard for her humanity. 

She never got to know any of the men that came to her room.  It was someone different every time, and she rarely saw the same person twice.  Most of them never spoke to her other than to tell her what they wanted her to do, but some of them would ask her questions about her life before they got down to business.  She didn't get the sense that they cared about her in any way.  They just seemed fascinated with the idea that she lived in this little room all by herself.  Over the years she had asked many of them to help her escape, but none of them ever did.  They just used her and then went on their way, leaving her alone until the next man came to visit.

She had lived this way for four years.  At first, she would cry and hope and pray that someone would come and rescue her from this dungeon.  She would construct elaborate fantasies about her father busting in through the doorway, guns blazing, shooting the bad guys and taking her away from this place.  For a while the fantasies became darker, with her father coming to rescue her while one of the men was there, and perhaps giving him a taste of his own medicine with the barrel of a gun before sending  the bad guy to his maker and taking her home.  After a while the fantasies stopped.  Her father would never come for her.  He was dead and so was her mother.