Manx- Gingerbread KOing

Their driver, a sixty-two-year-old named Roger Sillman, was parked on the far side of the turnaround, in no condition to pick them up. He was out cold and would remain parked there, sleeping behind the wheel, until he came to at nearly midnight. He felt sick and hungover but assumed he had simply (and uncharacteristically) nodded off and that the girls had caught a cab. He did not begin to wonder if something more had happened until the next morning and did not contact the police until he was unable to reach the Gregorskis at their hotel.

  Sillman was interviewed by the FBI ten times in ten weeks, but his story never changed and he was never able to provide any information of value. He said he had been listening to sports radio, with time to kill—he was forty minutes early on his pickup—when a knuckle rapped on his window. Someone squat, in a black coat, standing in the rain. Sillman had rolled down the glass and then—

  Nothing. Just: nothing. The night melted away, like a snowflake on the tip of his tongue.

  Sillman had daughters of his own—and granddaughters—and it ate him alive to imagine Marta and her mother in the hands of some sick Ted Bundy–Charles Manson fuck who would screw them till they were both dead. He couldn’t sleep, had bad dreams about the little girl playing chess with her mother’s severed fingers. He strained and strained with all his will to remember something, anything. But only one other detail would come.

  “Gingerbread,” he sighed to a pock-scarred federal investigator who was named Peace but looked more like War.

  “Gingerbread?”

  Sillman looked at his interrogator with hopeless eyes. “I think while I was passed out, I dreamed about my mom’s gingerbread cookies. Maybe the guy who knocked on the glass was eatin’ one.”
...

  In fact, the driver that Rory’s father had sent for him was passed out in his limo, half a mile away. Hank Tulowitzki had stopped at a Night Owl to gas up and use the bathroom, but he could remember nothing at all after topping off his tank. He woke up at one in the morning in the trunk of his own car, which was parked a few hundred feet down the road from the Night Owl in a public lot. He’d been kicking and screaming for most of five hours before an early-morning jogger heard him and summoned the police.
...

  Neither Rory’s driver, Tulowitzki, or the Gregorskis’ driver, Sillman, had his blood tested until more than a day after the abductions took place, and any lingering presence of sevoflurane in their bodies went undetected.

- Disappearances: Various Locales