But there might come a time when Gaffney would actually consider himself lucky, at least compared to Craig Pierce.

Craig’s night to remember was 3rd February. Duckworth remembered the details of his statement.

Craig awoke to the sound of falling water. Torrents of it. An unrelenting rushing.

As he began to be more fully aware of his surroundings, he noticed how cold he felt. From the waist down, anyway. It was, after all, winter. (If Craig had anything at all to be grateful for, it was that this particular February was a mild one for upstate New York.)

His buttocks and the backs of his legs were particularly cold. That, he soon realized, was because they were resting on a thin layer of snow. He was outside, flat on his back, and all evidence pointed to the fact that he was half naked.

He’d have sat up and assessed his situation, but there were some problems there. He couldn’t see, for one thing. He had some kind of woolen hood on, like a ski mask, except there were no holes for eyes or nose or mouth. The damn thing was on backward.

But the more serious problem was that he could not move. His arms and legs were splayed out, like he was a starfish, and secured somehow to the ground. He could feel bindings around his wrists and ankles. He was able to brush the fingers of both hands against sticks of some kind.

No, not sticks. Stakes.

Craig Pierce was staked to the ground. Minus pants.

“Hello?” His voice was raspy and panicked. “Is there someone there?”

There was no light filtering through the threads of the hood. It was nighttime, no doubt about that.

“Hello?” he said again. “What’s going on?”

Craig tried to control his breathing, which was becoming very rapid. He needed to concentrate on what was going on around him.

He sensed he was not alone.

Even with the background noise of the rushing water, he thought he heard people breathing. Someone—maybe more than one person—shifting weight from one foot to the other. Very, very close to him.

Whispering.

“I know you’re there,” he said. “What the hell is going on? What the hell is this?”

The last thing Craig could recall, before waking up staked to the snowy ground, was finishing his shift at Maria’s, a pizza takeout joint. It was midnight, and he’d come out the back door. He’d walked to his Camaro, where he found a van parked so close alongside it he wasn’t sure he could get the door open.

He heard someone say, “Craig Pierce?”

Then someone from behind put something over his face. A cloth. A very smelly cloth.

Nothing after that, until he heard the rushing of water.

“I can hear you!” he shouted. “I hear you talking! What the hell is this about?”