“In what way?”
“Curious about them. I wanted to know what happened to the people who were taken. I wanted to follow their stories and see what became of them.” Diana shrugged again. “Same as anyone else who reads Events magazine when a missing girl is plastered on its cover.”
“Okay,” Livia said. “Did you join this club?”
“I wanted to but . . .”
Livia waited.
“To become a member you have to go through an abduction. A fake one.”
“You have to agree to be kidnapped?”
“All I said,” Diana continued in a defensive tone, “was that I was interested in the club. I never agreed to the abduction, just said that it sounded cool. Then they surprised me and made me believe it was real. I was drunk the night I met Casey. I had no idea he was the guy from the chat rooms. He made me think he was interested in me. He flirted with me. And at the end of the night, I went with him, got into his car thinking we were going to a late-night party. That’s when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
“They put a bag over my head, tied me up, and brought me to some abandoned building.”
“Christ,” Livia said.
“But I was so hysterical—I think I went into shock or something—they ended up driving me back to the bar and leaving me in the parking lot.”
“He didn’t hurt you?”
“No. Not physically.”
“Did you ever see Casey again?”
“Never. Until he was on the news a few weeks ago.”
“And you went to the police about this? Afterward?”
“My parents made me.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. They said they never found anything about the club, and that I was a willing participant.”
Livia looked down at the notes she had scribbled. “You said Casey was with a friend. Did you know him?”
“Two friends. A guy and a girl. I didn’t know them. The girl was the one who put the bag over my head after I got in his car.”
“How many were there?”
“In the car? Just Casey and his friends. But after they brought me to that abandoned building, there were lots. Like, twenty or more. The whole club, I guess. But before I saw everyone in the club, it was just Casey and the girl. They tied me to a chair and whispered all these horrible things in my ear. The girl was telling me the things they were going to do to me. All these nasty, disgusting things.
“You ever see this girl?”
“No. She was at the bar with Casey, but I never paid attention to her. And when we were in the car, she was in the backseat and it was too dark to see her. Then she put the bag over my head.”
Livia put her pen to the page. “You know this girl’s name. The one who put the bag over your head?”
“Yeah,” Diana said. “He called her Nicole.”
CHAPTER 21
Two early-morning transports with the investigators had Livia back to the OCME by two p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. She sat behind her desk in the fellows’ office and perused the Internet. She was looking for anything she could find about Casey Delevan or the strange group of twisted individuals Diana Wells had called the Capture Club, whose membership Livia was scared to admit included Nicole. Although Livia found no specific organization by this name, she did manage to locate a strong online presence of people interested in the details of current and past missing people.
After an hour of research, she turned her attention back to Casey Delevan. In a defunct website from 2015 that had not been updated for some time, Livia found an advertisement for Two Guys Handyman Service. Listed were Casey Delevan and Nathaniel Theros. There was a phone number and address. Livia wrote both down just as Kent Chapple poked his head into her office.
“We’re done for the day, Doc. Any calls after three o’clock go to the second shift. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Thanks, Kent,” Livia said.
She ripped the sticky note containing Nathaniel Theros’s information from the pad and left the office. Mr. Theros lived on the west side of Emerson Bay, not quite a two-hour drive from Raleigh. Her brakes squeaked when she stopped in front of his house—a single-story ranch with overgrown shrubs, unkempt grass, and weeds pushing through the sidewalk cracks. Nathaniel Theros’s house sat in a crumbling neighborhood of other dilapidated homes that made up the ruins of West Emerson Bay, where industry had died over the last few decades as factories shut down and moved overseas. The years had seen a great transformation take place in Emerson Bay, when shipping and port industries spread to the north and south, as if a drop of detergent had fallen onto Emerson Bay and pushed away the greasy factories and grimy shipping yards, leaving behind the squeaky-clean waterfront community of East Emerson Bay, called East Bay by locals, which was hip and young and booming. The waterfront homes attracted the wealthy, and tourism was rampant. Restaurants, shops, and galleries prospered as local residents and tourists walked the cobblestone streets and ate on verandas while staring at the bay and watching restored steamboats chug up and down the waterway.
But when tourism took root and sprouted to become the major economy in Emerson Bay, the west side suffered. Without the factories or the shipping yards, and without the benefit of a beautiful waterfront, West Bay became the dying side of town with crumbling shells of old refineries, and train yards that made for noisy living. What used to be a place where hard-working folk retreated after a day on the docks or in the factories, a place where a small yard for your kids and safe streets in the neighborhood were enough for a pleasant existence, West Bay now was somewhere only visited when necessary. And for Livia, today there was no way around it.
One last check of the address, then she walked up the steps and rang the bell. Dogs barked incessantly and clawed the door from the other side. There was some yelling and corralling before the door finally opened.
“What’s up?” the man said.
“Nathaniel Theros?”
“Only if I’m in trouble. Nate, otherwise.”
Livia smiled. “No trouble. My name’s Livia Cutty. I wanted to ask you a weird question.”
The man was bent over, holding a large Rottweiler by its collar. Faded tattoos crept from under his T-shirt, down his arms and up his neck. He pulsed his eyebrows. “I like weird.”
“You used to know a guy named Casey Delevan?”
Instant smile. “Oh, yeah. While back.”
“Mind if I ask you some questions about him?”
“He in trouble?”
“You could say that.”
“You a cop?”
“No, I’m a doctor.”