The Only One Left

by Pamela Beason

  “Stop, Gumu!” Finn yelled. Pocketing the cell phone, he slid an arm under Grace’s shoulders, then snaked the other arm beneath her knees and struggled to lift her from the floor.

  A violent thump on the back of his head made him see stars.

  “No!” Robin yelped.

  Fighting the blackness that swarmed in front of his eyes, Finn gently released Grace to the ground again, and then sat, stunned for a few seconds, until his vision returned to normal. Less than two yards away, Gumu rose to his back legs and pounded his chest, baring his fierce canine teeth and roaring at Finn.

  Robin scuttled backward on her hands and feet, taking refuge near the wall. Neema hooted and huddled into a ball a short distance away.

  “Stop!” Finn yelled, rising to his feet. He staggered a few steps, but remained upright, trying to blink away the black spots he saw.

  Gumu pounded his chest again, then rushed at Finn and smacked him hard on the shoulder. Finn landed his own blow on the ape’s massive back as the silverback passed. When Gumu turned and displayed his teeth again, Finn bellowed “Stop!” at the top of his lungs, making the sign as well. “Stop!”

  Gumu roared and pounded his chest again. Finn was painfully aware that he was facing the same gorilla who had killed an intruder last year. Gumu glared, balancing on his fists, ready to charge again.

  Grace was part of Gumu’s family. Finn was pretty sure that he was not included in the silverback’s idea of clan. He held out both hands. “Stop!”

  When Gumu rocked forward, Finn pounded his own chest and roared as best he could.

  Gumu’s gaze stayed fixed on Finn. The silverback’s nostrils flared, and he grunted uncertainly.

  Finn lowered his voice and used the few signs he knew. “I love Grace. Grace comes with me. I love Grace. Good Gumu. Good gorilla.”

  He turned toward Neema. She crouched near the wall, near Robin. No help there. The mother gorilla was clearly not going to come to his rescue.

  Red-and-blue flickers of light on the barn wall indicated the aid truck had arrived. “Hello?” someone shouted. “Fire Department! EMTs!”

  “Coming!” Finn knelt to lift Grace. Gumu rocked forward and flashed his canines again, snapping his jaws together as he rose to his feet and slapped his leathery chest in a loud drumbeat.

  “Stop!” Finn thrust out his hand in the sign. “I love Grace.”

  The massive silverback watched, grunting, as Finn picked up Grace’s limp form and then staggered to the door of the barn. “C’mon, Robin,” he told the cowering woman.

  She quickly preceded him out of the gorilla barn.

  “Take Grace’s keys from her belt. Let us out.”

  Robin did as he asked. They both turned their backs to the gate, watching Gumu and Neema, who had followed them into the exterior enclosure. After handing Grace over to the EMTs, Finn turned back to observe Robin locking the gate behind them, her hands shaking so hard she could barely put the key into the lock.

  On the other side of the fence, Neema signed.

  “Is Neema talking about Grace?” Finn asked.

  “No, Kanoni. Baby give my baby,” Robin told him. “Kanoni’s in the staff quarters. She’s restrained and sedated so she won’t pull out her IVs.”

  “Can you stay here?”

  Robin nodded.

  Neema signed again.

  “Grace sad me baby give,” Robin translated. She rubbed a hand against the side of her face. “Now Neema’s worried about Grace, too.”

  “She’s not the only one,” Finn said.

  The EMTs loaded the gurney. The man climbed into the driver’s seat, and the woman climbed in the back and started to close the door.

  “I’m going with her,” he told the female EMT, climbing in.

  Robin Valdez watched as the door closed, her face anxious. “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” he shouted at her.

  As they rocketed down the road, the EMT wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Grace’s arm, listened to her heart, shined a penlight into her eyes. She groaned. Her face was pale and shiny with perspiration, and her jeans were dark and clingy as if she’d wet herself.

  Finn tried to answer the EMT’s questions as best he could. Not diabetic, no. No history of epilepsy or heart disease. Her parents had seemed healthy enough the last time he’d seen them, so her genes were good, as far as he knew.

  Grace groaned again, opened her eyes, shut them. “I can’t go to the hospital.”

  “Yes,” he told her. “You can. And you are. Robin stayed behind.”

  “The gorillas . . .” she started.

  The female EMT’s eye rounded in surprise.

  “I managed,” he said. It might take a while to get the image of a threatening silverback out of his head.

  It was nearly ten p.m. when they arrived at the hospital. The staff wouldn’t let Finn into the exam area with Grace because he wasn’t family. After taking down the basic information, they left him in the waiting area.

  He paced. He couldn’t lose Grace. They’d barely begun their relationship. They were just getting to finally understand each other, accept each other’s lifestyle. Gorillas and detective work were a unique mix. He couldn’t lose her.

  His cell phone chimed several times as he paced, and he finally thought to check it. Miki had sent him information on Trevor Lee Vollmar. As his foster mother Deanna had told Finn, Trevor was fifteen in 2004 when Sutter was arrested with Angela Albro in his trunk, seventeen in 2006 when Sutter was sent to prison and Trevor was forced to change families. That was after Deanna had lost custody of her foster teens and had to move away from the farm on Old Forest Road.

  Trevor had lived with the Sutters from age twelve through seventeen and a half. He would have been living with Todd Sutter when Heidi Skouras, Anna Moran, and Magdalena Aguilar had gone missing. He hadn’t been with Sutter when the scumbag was caught with Albro, but what were the odds that Trevor knew what his foster father had been up to? What were the odds that he’d helped? What were the odds that he’d learned about the Gorge concerts as a prime hunting ground and discovered a perverted pleasure in torturing women?

  There was a gap of three years between Albro and Disanto. Maybe Trevor was just screwing up his courage to try on his own? Perfecting his techniques? He would have been twenty when Disanto went missing. And he would have known that Sutter had hidden corpses in abandoned barns, would have known the barn on Old Forest Road was empty. He would have been twenty-two when he went for Sheryl Pratt in 2009.

  The gap between Pratt, missing in 2009, and Kelly, missing in 2016, bothered Finn. Was he on the wrong track?

  He checked Vollmar’s history again. 2010 through 2015, Trevor Vollmar had been a soldier doing multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  He impatiently scanned Vollmar’s multiple addresses, scrolled through his vehicle history. There! Vollmar was the registered owner of a motorcycle, an older Harley Roadster model.

  Vollmar had been especially interested in the beams holding up the roof of the gorilla barn, had even asked Grace if anything had been found during the remodel.

  It all fit. Finn called the station, asked for an APB on Trevor Lee Vollmar as a person of interest in the abduction of Mia Valdez.

  He was reviewing the map where Mia’s cell and backpack had been found, scrolling and scrolling on the damn tiny cell phone screen, when Grace’s doctor, a woman who seemed impossibly young, walked into the waiting room.

  He introduced himself as Grace’s fiancé in the hopes that would convince her to tell him all the pertinent details. “How is she?”

  “She was very dehydrated, had low blood sugar, and is running a bit of a fever.”

  “Could that happen if she was exposed to measles?”

  The doctor shrugged. “If she’s been vaccinated, a reaction would be rare, but it has happened. I’ll put a note in the file that she’s been exposed. She seems to be exhausted, and in her condition, it’s little wonder she passed out.”

  “Is Grace
going to be okay?”

  The doctor eyed him. “She’ll recover just fine.”

  The woman was covering up some detail. “But?” he asked.

  “You’re not family yet, Detective Finn. Where is her family, by the way?

  His thoughts flashed to Neema and Gumu and Kanoni, then, angrily, to himself, and finally to her parents. “Her mother and father are in California.”

  “Can you call them?”

  “Of course.” He nodded, all the while thinking, like hell I will. Grace wouldn’t want her folks to know anything about this unless she had a terminal condition. “Can I see her?”

  “Dr. McKenna will have to give permission. And she’s sleeping right now. I suggest you leave her alone to rest, for at least a few hours.”

  He couldn’t stay at the hospital a few hours. He couldn’t stay ten more minutes, not while there was still a chance for Mia Valdez. “Can you give Grace a note?”

  “Leave it with the admitting nurse,” the doctor told him. “He’ll see she gets it.”

  He tore a sheet of paper out of his pocket notepad, then hesitated for the span of several heartbeats, his pen hovering over the paper. Finally, he settled on writing, I love you. I’ll be back. I’ll always be back. –Matt.

  After hitching a ride in a patrol car back to Grace’s to collect his own vehicle, Finn drove to the station where he could use a decent-size computer screen to review local maps. Centering the location where Mia’s belongings had been found, he scanned outward using an overhead view on Google Earth. He had to start somewhere, so he settled on a ten-mile radius. There were three dilapidated structures within ten miles of where the backpack had been found, two old barns and a building that looked like it had once been part of a chicken farm. Scribbling down the addresses, he dashed for his car and plugged them into the GPS system.

  He thought about calling for backup. But he was making a lot of assumptions; he still could be wrong. He didn’t need police cruisers with flashing lights following him around the county as he found nothing. No. He’d call in when he found something definitive.

  The county roads were dark. There were no streetlights outside of downtown Evansburg. Clicking on his brights, he raced down the road to the first location on his list.

  Chapter 26

  Friday

  When she struggled to consciousness, Mia was not completely sure she was still alive. The darkness in the room was so complete that she saw nothing. But her throat couldn’t possibly hurt this bad if she were dead. And her pants wouldn’t be down around her ankles, either. She pulled them up, glad she hadn’t been conscious for the assault this time. The mattress beneath her was still wet, and she was shivering with cold. Dusty had taken away what was left of the bedside table, so now the only remaining items were the two stacked mattresses and the sodden bedding. The shithead had even taken her shoes.

  No light filtered in through the crack or knothole in the exterior wall. Evening? Or the middle of the night? She felt her way around the room, sniffing for the aroma of food, but he’d left her nothing. The air in the room stank, but this time it wasn’t the smell of her own excrement. Instead, she got a vague whiff of something like gasoline.

  She’d made her way to the door, feeling along the wall with her hand and the floor with her toes, when she heard a faint voice from the other side of the room. “This will be the biggest one yet.”

  A voice outside? Hallucination? Dusty? She couldn’t decide.

  “Light it up.”

  A different voice? Tailing her hand along the rough boards, she moved back to the exterior wall.

  “Let me.”

  “No, all together. One, two, three!”

  Definitely multiple voices. Her heart in her throat, she pounded on the wall. “Hey! Help! Help! I’m locked in here!” Her throat was so swollen she could barely get the words out.

  A loud whooshing sound drowned out her feeble cries, and then, through the knothole, she saw light dancing outside. Flashlights?

  “Did you hear that?” one of the voices asked.

  “Fuck, didn’t you check inside?”

  “Help!” she screeched. “Help me!”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Shit, someone’s coming. Run!”

  “No! Don’t go!” She kicked the wall, pounded again, shouting as loudly as she could. “Help me! I’m locked in here! Help!”

  “Leave the truck. Go! Just go!”

  An engine approached. She heard the slam of a car door. Another voice. “You fuckheads! Fuck! Goddamn fuckheads!”

  The last sounded a little like Dusty. But it couldn’t be Dusty. He only came once a day, in the evening, and he’d already tortured her today.

  The light outside grew brighter, and the beam streaming from the knothole revealed wisps of smoke snaking in between the boards in the exterior wall.

  The barn was on fire.

  “Help!” she screamed.

  A horrific groan came from somewhere overhead, as if the building was in terrible pain. The smoke was pouring in, now so thick she could taste it. Her throat started to close up, and then she started coughing, so hard she couldn’t get her breath to shout. It hurt so bad. She pounded on the wall, using both her hands and feet.

  A loud snapping sound was followed by a crash. Was that the roof giving way?

  The whooshing and crackling and groaning grew louder. The smoke trailing across the room overhead seemed to snag on the light fixture. She watched it swirl and crawl, and realized that any second the ceiling would catch fire.

  Someone had to see the fire, didn’t they?

  Please God I’m not ready to die!

  She took a deep breath, screeched “Help me!” again, but her cry was thin and hoarse. Then her throat clenched and she choked, retching, gasping for breath.

  The ceiling flamed, a brilliant streak of light and heat overhead, and she started to scream again, but the sound caught in her throat, gagging her. Down, get down out of the smoke. She fell to her hands and knees. Embers rained on her from the ceiling. More of the exterior wall was ablaze now, and for a second she imagined she could crawl through the flames to the outside, but her eyes streamed, making everything a blur, and she couldn’t see an opening anywhere.

  God, she was so hot, so hot, her skin was going to bubble into blisters like zombies in the horror movies.

  No way could she break through the metal door. No window to climb out.

  She banged on the wall. The wood scorched her fists. She tried to yell again, but her throat was closing up.

  She was going to burn to death.

  Chapter 27

  Friday

  The old chicken factory was every bit as empty as the first barn had been. As Finn swept up the next rise to the third location on his list, he wondered if his assumptions about Trevor Vollmar had been completely off track. But after he crested the hill, a glow of flames greeted him. Leaning forward in his seat, he pressed his foot harder on the gas pedal.

  No! He couldn’t be too late.

  Pressing the button on his steering wheel, he called 9-1-1, identified himself, reported the fire. Then he asked to be connected with Detective Melendez.

  “I heard the call go out,” she said on answering. “I’m on my way.”

  “I’m almost there.” He screeched around a curve.

  “What are you doing there?”

  He missed the turnoff to the barn, identifying the gravel lane out of the corner of his eye as he passed. “Later, Sara.” He punched end.

  He stomped on the brake, his tires squealing as he wrestled the car around. A loud crash sounded somewhere near the fire.

  Then he was tearing down the gravel road, trees whipping past, and then he slammed his car into park ten yards back from the flaming structure. The barn was fully engulfed, the roof already falling in. He was too late.

  Although there were no other buildings in sight, two pickups were parked nearby, a white one back near the trees, a black one far too close. He watched as
a chunk of flaming debris from the barn roof tumbled onto the cab of that one.

  The sirens neared. The fire department volunteers were on their way. But once again, they’d be too late to save anything.

  He grabbed his flashlight, stepped out of his car, and quickly inspected both vehicles. Empty. Then he heard what sounded like pounding.

  Was that a shout? He raced toward the front of the barn where the doorway revealed that the barn was completely ablaze. Flames licked up the walls and crawled across the roof above, and everything below was obscured by dense black smoke. The structure groaned as a wall shifted, and Finn had no doubt that the building was within minutes of collapsing.

  Then he noticed that a long water hose stretched from the shadowy woods across the dirt and then snaked into the flaming interior.

  “Mia!” he yelled. “Mia Valdez! Is anyone inside?”

  Chapter 28

  Friday

  The door of her prison burst open, and flames leapt across the ceiling to race toward the opening. A jet of water hit her in the shoulder, spurting into her face and over her back. Now she welcomed its cold wetness. But water wasn’t air. She needed air. On her hands and knees, Mia crawled in the direction of the door, water dripping into her eyes. Something clamped viciously onto her arm.

  Dusty dragged her to her feet, sprayed water over her again. A bandage covered most of his forehead, and his nose and mouth were hidden under a wet kerchief. She was choking so hard she could barely straighten up, but she pulled against his grip, straining to precede him out of her prison. Air.

  He held tight to her arm, hissing in a hoarse voice, “You want to live, you tell them I saved you. Got it? I saved you!” He coughed then, his fingers crushing her arm.

  She struggled to get free, to get through that door. An ember fell from above, burning into her scalp. She wanted to slap it away, but he held both her arms in a viselike grip.