Abducted From The Kroger Parking Lot

It all started with the blasted mustard. 

We were out of Kelly’s favorite honey Dijon, and since we were grilling out hamburgers this was a situation that had to be remedied. We had all the fixings but not the dadblamed mustard. Tonight, was supposed to be perfect, our first date night in two months, so as Kelly finished manning the grill, I volunteered to run to Kroger to get the mustard. 

It should have taken all of 15 minutes - park, go in, grab the mustard, use the self-checkout, leave, then home. Easy in, easy out.

All went according to plan right up until the ‘leave then home’ part. I was walking to my car and texting Kelly that I was on my way home when all of a sudden, my spidey senses started tingling. I looked up from my phone and saw two men in gray suits and sunglasses standing in front of me. 

Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly fit guy. I work out - lift weights, go for runs. But these guys? Man, these dudes were buff. Picture your favorite powerlifter influencer and now imagine that they replaced all their pre-workout supplements with steroids for like a year. That should give you a pretty good idea of what these guys looked like. 

Bottom line, they were extremely intimidating. I never thought of the Kroger parking lot as a theater of nightmares, but here I was standing stage front right under the spotlight gaze of the Men in Gray. 

“Mr. Deleford,” the Suit on the left addressed me. 

“Yes?” I said. 

The Suit on the left nodded curtly, and the Suit on the right walked towards me and then before I could react, he grabbed my arm, twisted it behind my back, and handcuffed my wrists together. 

“Hey!” I cried mustering all the indignation I could manage despite the pain in my shoulder and the absolute terror radiating through my entire body.

“You’re going to have to come with us,” the Suit on the left who was now standing in front of me said. 

“Me? What did I do?”

“You know what you did,” replied the Suit. 

“I didn’t do anything!” I protested, “you’ve got the wrong guy.” 

“Mr. Brian Deleford, son of John and Stacy Ann Deleford, resident of 2173 Millbrook Lane, yes?” 

“Um” was all the reply I could manage. 

“That is you, is it not?” 

Stunned, I manage to nod weakly. 

“Then no, we do not have the wrong guy.” 

“Now wait just a moment here!” My anger had finally overcome my shock, and I was livid. “You can’t do this! All I did was go to the store to buy my girlfriend some mustard.” I kicked the bag that had fallen to the asphalt when Suit the Second had so aggressively cuffed me. “The receipt is in the bag,” I added. 

The Suits said nothing, just looked at each other as if they didn’t deign to dignify my words with a response. 

“Come with us,” they repeated and then began dragging me to a black Escalade. 

“No, like you guys literally can’t do this. The government can’t just grab innocent civilians off the street. I have rights.” 

“We aren’t government.” Suit the Second said.

“You are not innocent,” Suit the First agreed, “nor do you have rights.” 

Not government? Then who in the hell were these guys? That is the moment the panic truly set in. 

---

After an indeterminable amount of time the van arrived at an undisclosed location. The doors to the Escalade opened, and Suit the Second said, “get out,” in that oh so courteous manner of his. 

Part of me, the angry and annoyed part of me, wanted to make his job difficult and resist - either physically or with some snarky comment. Sarcasm makes everything better, at least for me because it helps me cope, but it can also antagonize people and, as the frightened and overwhelmed part of my brain warned me, these were not the men to antagonize. It’s frustrating though, if not surprising, that the people who most provoke sarcasm are the ones least tolerant of it.

Compliantly, I got out of the van and looked around. I was standing in the middle of a barren, dimly lit cement room. 

“Um, where are we?” I tentatively ask. 

Suit the First gave an abrupt, humorless laugh. “Don’t you recognize it?”  

“No, how could I? I have never been here before in my life. This would go a lot faster if you stopped pretending we were on the same page.”

“Come,” said Suit the First, “We will show you. We have been tracking for you years since you left. You didn’t make much of an effort to hide, which is surprising considering you stole millions of dollars. Did you think we wouldn’t notice?”

“Um, what? Seriously, if you’ve been tracking me as closely as you say you should know that I do not have millions of dollars in my bank account.”

The Suit looked at me as if I were a child lying about having eaten the last cookie after being caught with crumbs on my face. “Not in your personal checking account of course. You may not be the most sophisticated of us, but you are not that careless. Your uncle succeeded in teaching you that much at least.”

“My uncle?”

Suit the First sighed. “Come, you will talk with him.”

I followed him out the garage and along a basement corridor led now by my curiosity as well as my fear.

We continued through the cavernous hallway (retracing my steps out of here would be impossible) and up a short flight of stairs. We emerged into a well-lit, whitewashed antechamber, which we passed through into a sparsely furnished, office like room. The room was windowless, illuminated by bright fluorescent lights and held a sofa, a table, and two chairs situated opposite the sofa. It looked normal enough except for the metal loops on the arms of the sofa and chairs and the bolts in the floor.

Suit the Second gestured for me to have a seat on the sofa. He uncuffed my left wrist and shackled my right wrist to the metal loop on the arm of the sofa. “Wait here,” he ordered me, and the two Suits left the room.

I didn’t have much of a choice, so I sat and waited. They had taken my phone and there was no clock in the room, so I had no way of knowing for sure how long I had been in the room. My curiosity to meet my ‘uncle’ and figure out what in the name of all that is good and holy was going made time feel sped up, but my anxiety over what kind of person kidnapped their own nephew who wasn’t even their nephew made time feel slowed down as my hyperalert mind held on to every second as it ticked by.

To pass the time and to occupy my mind with something other than my fate, I scanned the room trying to locate the hidden cameras. I had seen enough police dramas with Kelly to know there are always hidden cameras in an interrogation room.

Finally, the door opened and a man wearing a suit – his was navy – entered the room. He was accompanied by two young adults in white scrubs each holding a file box.

“Hello, Brian,” the man greeted me cheerfully, “how good of you to join us.”

“You’re welcome.” Somehow, he was not knocked over by the force of my sarcasm. Wanting to be the one to start the conversation, to try and establish at least a shred of dominance, I searched for something to say, yet could think of nothing.

While I was wracking my brains, Mr. Suit began to speak. “I didn’t think I would ever see you here again.”

“Funny,” I said, “I never thought I would be here either. At least, I don’t think I did. Not knowing where exactly here is, it’s hard to say definitively.”

“Ah yes. Davies told me you were insisting we weren’t all on the same page.”

“We’re not even speaking the same language.”

“Let’s start at the beginning, small we?”

“That’s a very good place to begin.”

“When you left two years ago -”

“Hang on a moment, that’s definitely not the beginning.”

“Don’t interrupt me. When you left two years ago, everyone was disappointed to see you go. People understood; you had met a girl and wanted to ‘clean up your act’ for her as you said, but it was certainly a shameful waste of talent.”

“Are you talking about Kelly?”

“Stop interrupting.” He frowned at me, then continued “No one suspected, however, that you had an ulterior motive for leaving. You had overseen the collection of payments from our investors, a job which you exploited as an opportunity for personal gain. By charging 110% and keeping the difference you not only frauded our investors but the corporation as well by jeopardizing these relationships. You did a good job covering your tracks, but we found your paper trail. Our forensic analysts are some of the best.”

“I’m sorry but you definitely have the wrong guy. I have never worked here before and I have certainly never stolen money from anyone. I am a videographer and have been for the past seven years.”

“That’s not what the data in these files say. We have everything – phone records, emails, bank records, receipts, photos, and DNA.”

“I don’t know how, but you have the wrong guy.”

“What you think someone switched their identities with you so that your information would come up under their DNA and photo?”

Well when you put it like that. “I don’t know how it happened. I just know that it did happen. I don’t know what corporation this is or who your investors are, but I swear I did not steal money from them.”

At that moment, the door opened, and a White Scrub stepped into the room.

Mr. Suit turned to glare at them. “I said I was not to be interrupted.”

“Mr. Abelard, sorry sir, there is an urgent matter that requires your attention immediately.”

With a frustrated growl Mr. Suit got up and said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time,” I said under my breath.

Once again, I found myself chained to a sofa waiting for Mr. Suit – Mr. Abelard – to return. Wait a minute, Ballard. Uncle. Investors.

Then it clicked.

---

Abelard. Ballard was my mother’s maiden name. She had a brother, Jeff, who had disappeared from the family scene about, oh 17 years ago. He hadn’t been very involved in my life even before his absence, but he did come to family gatherings and occasionally family dinners. I remembered him as a somewhat lively and irresponsible person who enjoyed jokes, taking risks, and didn’t take things too seriously.

The Men in Gray had referred to him as my uncle. If he really were my mother’s brother this would check out. But if he were my uncle then he would understand that this situation was of mistaken identity. Granted, it had been almost two decades, and I had not recognized him. But the indisputable fact was he knew I was his sister’s son and still he chained me to a sofa and accused me of fraud.

Which leads to the third part of my realization. Uncle Jeff had a shady side. He was the kind of person that made ‘questionable investments’ according to my grandma and ‘conned people out of the shirts on their backs’ according to my father. My aunts referred to these as his ‘scrapes’. He called them his ‘schemes’. Now, I had a strong feeling that he had taken his schemes professional. Whomever his investors were, I was fairly convinced they were being scammed and not by me. The organization he had referred to surely was some sort of white-collar crime organization.

These thoughts were interrupted by the door being abruptly swung open. Yet another man in a suit entered the room. “Are you Mr. Deleford?”

Déjà vu.

“I am,” I say cautiously.

The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a badge.

“Mr. Deleford, I am Detective Peter Sims with the FBI division of white-collar crime. Your girlfriend, Ms. Kelly Grant, reported you missing to the police five hours ago.”

Five hours ago?! How could this be? I wondered. I felt sick. Poor Kelly, god she must have been absolutely sick with worry.

“About an hour ago the police got an anonymous tip that you seen in the area,” Detective Sims continued.

Wait. How could that have been? I hadn’t been outside this building for probably longer than that. And I had entered through a basement garage so who could have seen me?

Detective Sims produced a key and came over and freed me from the couch’s hold on me. “Mr. Abelard has been under surveillance for some time now, but so far our evidence has been largely circumstantial. Until tonight that is,” he added.

“His real name is Jeffrey Ballard,” I say, “he’s my uncle.” I stop hoping I had not just incriminated myself. Oh, to be released from the frying pan just to be thrown into the fire.

Detective Sims looked at me. “Yes, we know about that. Sit down, there’s a lot you should know about.”

“If you don’t mind, I think I’d prefer to stand for a bit.”

He nodded agreeably and took my vacated seat on the couch. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we,” he said.

“Finally,” I agree.

---

Two hours later, after a lengthy debrief and much paperwork – I had now become a witness in the trial against my uncle testifying to his true identity and the fact that he had kidnapped me and spied on me through illegal means – the FBI returned me home.

As soon as she heard the car pull into the drive, Kelly rushed out of the house. No sooner had I stepped out of the car than she flung her arms around me and buried her face in my neck. I hugged her back, relishing her closeness and the fact we were both alive and ok, a conclusion I had not foreseen earlier this evening.

“Hey,” I said gently pushing her away, “let’s go inside. I have a lot to tell you. Besides, I could really use some food.”

She laughed, the kind that was hiding a sob. “We have plenty of hamburgers,” she said, “Unfortunately, you’ll have to eat them without mustard because this guy went to the store but forgot to bring the mustard home.”

“Gosh, he sounds like a terrible person.”

“He has his moments.” 

We headed inside. While Kelly fixed me a plate of food, I told her the story.

To properly tell this story, it’s necessary to go back to the very beginning to when my mother was pregnant with me. It turns out I had a twin in the womb. We were attached at the shoulder. After we were born, we had surgery to separate us. My brother, being smaller and weaker, did not survive. Or so everyone thought.

As it turned out, Jeff had seen this moment as an opportunity for his own prodigy and heir. No one expected my twin to survive as it is rare for both Siamese twins to survive the surgery, so Jeff bribed and/or threatened one of the nurses to falsify the death certificate.

He raised my brother in secret, under the name of Abelard. During this time, he was involved a variety of schemes, more than the family had any notion of. Seventeen years ago, he was fired for misappropriating company assets. He had caught the eye of a prominent member of the white-collar underground, who took him on as his protégé. A year later, after having been fully baptized into the world of the fraudulent and the corrupt, he disappeared to become Thomas Abelard.

He quickly moved up the ranks and founded his own empire of deceit. As best I understood Detective Sims, Jeff aka Thomas had built a franchise that centered around billing companies for nonexistent services and recruiting investors for nonexistent products then.

The scam that he accused me of us was carried out my brother. Furthermore, Jeff was in on it. He was able to keep the rest of the Suits from finding out for a while, but once they did, he had to offer them up a head on a platter. Since my brother and I were identical twins and bore a striking enough resemblance to be easily mistaken for each other, I was the natural choice. Furthermore, my brother didn’t exist in the eyes of the government and had even gone by my name, so anyone searching for him would find me, not the heir invisible of Thomas Abelard.

The probably would have worked except my brother returned to the complex. Apparently, he wanted a glimpse of his long-lost twin. By this point, Kelly, alarmed by my continuing absence and silence, had contacted the police and they had put an alert out. A cop patrolling the area had spotted ‘me’ and called it in. Since the FBI had been investigated Thomas Abelard for quite some time, they became involved as kidnapping gave them probable cause to search the premises.

Now, my uncle is in custody and Detective Sims says he is hopeful the trial will be successful. They found quite a lot of evidence at the complex tonight. I’m not sure how I will move forward knowing I have a brother. My brain is a little too much in shock to process that information.

It’s been a night. For now, I am content to lie down with Kelly by my side and drift off.

Hopefully, my dreams will not feature suits or the Kroger parking lot.