Lethal Expedition

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Hallie Leland came to with a noose tight around her neck. She had to open her mouth wide to breathe, and the air coming and going sounded like steel wool scratching on wood. The sides of the loop pulled up under her jawbone and joined in a knot where her skull and spine met. A rope tight against the back of her head led straight up to some solid connection. Whoever had done this understood knots: if she moved, the noose tightened but would not loosen. It was pitch dark, but scents — old rope, damp concrete, stove fuel, and the milky smell of climber’s chalk — revealed that she was in her own windowless basement.

She was sitting in a stout wooden chair. Towels wrapped her forearms and lower legs like soft casts, and duct tape bound her four limbs to the chair’s arms and legs. She thought: Why towels? Then: No marks.

Yelling for help was pointless. Her house sat alone at the end of a dirt road twenty-five miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The nearest neighbor lived a half mile away. She didn’t yell for another reason: she would not give her captor that satisfaction.

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