
CHAPTER ONE

aurie Fallon raised the intelligent alarm. Her whole being bore down double sharp notes peeling glass with her shriek. Just like the movies Laurie thought afterwards, remembering how Peter Lorre's character had murdered Myrna Loy in the never finished 1933 movie "Taxi Murders Express."
The director Josef Von Sternberg had stopped production when Myrna Loy stand-in stunt double was strangled on the movie set. No one was ever charged with the crime although some suspected Lorre.
It was another Hollywood murder that left scars for fifty- nine years.
ABDUCTION: "The Struggle for Righteousness"
11:20 PM -- Friday, April 10, 1992
Outside the Gables Bar set almost on the curb the music inside blasted along River Road Edgewater, New Jersey almost to the Hudson River edge. It was an old not too fancy but popular bar that featured live rock music and Wednesday through Saturday night female and once a month Friday night male strippers. It was a pick up joint and a place for lovers.
Six foot tall, seven months pregnant, twenty-six year old Laurie Fallon dressed in a modest too large dress walked slowly from the bar to her car swinging the keys. A one time exotic dancer and barmaid at the Gables, she often returned to chat with the affable owner Lilly and several of the regulars.
Laurie was sad that night. Having fought with her man Henry who was now out of town, she didn't want to return to their empty apartment. Not even the swagger of the male strippers lifted her spirits.
As she stood on the curb she looked back at the Gables as if she might return. Laurie hated being indecisive. Getting ready to cross to the other side, she waited for a lone truck to pass, and then stepped slowly between the parked cars to cross.
Suddenly a strong young man wearing a black ski mask grabbed her from behind by her neck and mouth.
Stalking her from the drab spaces between his van and the cab of a truck, he had missed her mouth with his gag. When she screamed, biting his fingers, he pulled back, almost frightened. Using that moment Laurie caught his face with her nails driving furrows from cheek to chest.
His scream was pity by comparison to hers, but often those who are abused as children stammer when failure accompanies a crime.
By her reaction Laurie captured the man's ski mask pulling it quickly over his head while suffering his kicks and shrieking curses. Falling down against the curb between the street and the parked cars, she scraped her knees and elbows, and her easy dress twisted by her legs, split wide, rode up exposing her neatly trimmed and shaved auburn pubic hair.
Pushing the wool mask between her legs, Laurie hid it there. As the short but solid man beat and kicked her with his boot, she refused to release it. Turning her back to the man, twisting her body, leaning into the curb, protecting the child she carried from the blows, Laurie drove that fetid disguise deeply against her bare sex.
As the earthquake continued inside, outside the man had stopped wondering what he could do next now that the gag and ether were discarded.
In that second pause, Laurie reached for his balls. Holding them in her palm, she squeezed and in the next instant bent over, he caught her mouth square with his boot. On impact Laurie released him.
Kicking her endlessly in the back, grit under her nails, the man's blood on her mouth, Laurie realized how much she wanted to live to save her child. At that turn in the battle, she submitted wondering why no one had helped her.
Losing the fight, Laurie's belly seven months fat with child stopped her short of escape. She fell back short of victory breathless, sabotaged by a gentler instinct.
Quickly, taping arms, legs, and mouth he gathered the almost unconscious woman into his dirty white van. Leaving quickly, the man later identified as one of the infamous "Genesis Killers" did not notice that his ski mask had dropped from between Laurie's legs to the street.
THE DIRTY WHITE VAN
Inside the van, bound and gagged, Laurie could not watch the neon lights of the Gables exotic dance club shimmer in yellow and blue slivers against the cloud of the river and New York City's skyline.
Just before man pulled out into the traffic, a dazzled movie clouded her eyes: captured by rough tape, she refused to concede.
Laurie did remember that she had screamed silently "No" as he shot her full of shit to make her ass collapse. He didn't hear, "don't hurt her."
As ends are often not righteous, Laurie slept. Not dead, living in transition for the next ten months, Laurie suspended her life within an odd assortment of dreams and neurotic fixations conjured to keep her sane.
Later, when Laurie looked again at that two-minute skirmish, she marveled at the failed strength she had struck into the earth.
No meager Joan of Arc burned at the stake - Laurie Fallon would survive.
The Next Morning
At 0932, Edgewater police reported that an eyewitness had come forward, known only as Rose, to describe that crime outside the Gables the previous night.
Without that account no one would have immediately known Laurie was missing.
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