An Excerpt from CAPTIVES

Okay, folks! Here’s a short excerpt from the opening of Captives…

 

A

my’s coffin had been closed for over an hour, but Douglas Timothy still couldn’t get the image of his daughter’s dead body out of his mind. The girl in that box looked nothing like the Amy he had known—the Amy he had loved and raised. Instead, the girl in the coffin was an emaciated skeleton with sunken-in cheeks and eyes, pierced and tattooed beyond recognition. It had been difficult for them to dress and make her up in a fashion that hid signs of the life she had been leading before her death.

When they identified the body, Anne, his wife, had even gone so far as to say, “That’s not Amy. That can’t be Amy. It doesn’t look anything like her!” In his own desire to believe that Amy might still be alive, Douglas had been swayed momentarily. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe she was still out there and they just needed to keep looking. But he knew it wouldn’t do them any good to deny the truth. It might not have looked like Amy, but there was good reason for that.

Amy had been seventeen when they last saw her, a junior in high school preparing for college. Although hospitalized briefly when she was sixteen for an eating disorder, she had always appeared to be a strong-minded girl who filled her life with all sorts of activities. Amy was a member of the school’s swim team, drama club, and her church’s youth group. She was, by most accounts, a typical seventeen-year-old. The girl on the slab in the morgue was twenty, a prostitute shot full of drugs, a victim of sex trafficking.