by Leslie Wolfe
“Which Tommy? The coffee shop guy?” she asked. She had no recollection of having been in school with the bulky owner of the place.
“Yeah, he owns Katse now; his dad passed.”
“I didn’t know that,” Kay replied. “I’ve been there, but I didn’t recognize him,” she confessed. “I thought he was much older than us. He looks fifty, not thirty-something.”
Sam chuckled sadly. “Life does things to us. Look at me,” he said, holding out his hands with his stubby fingers fanned out. “You’d think I’d been working construction for twenty years. A couple of winters will do that to you, the cold and all that rusted hardware.”
She wondered if there was anything she could do to help while she was there, while she waited for Jacob’s release with not much else to do. Maybe she could advertise or get him new decals for his truck. She’d think of that later; for now, she still had a few questions in need of answers.
“Do you ever get canceled calls, or you go to the location and there’s no one there?”
“Yeah,” he groaned. “Damn those people. I wish they’d just have the decency to call me and cancel. At least I wouldn’t burn the fuel for nothing.” He pulled out his phone and looked at the screen for a moment, then said, “Just last night I had one of these no-shows.”
Kay felt a pang of fear driving a blade through her gut. “Where was that call?”
He reacted to the intensity in her voice, looking at her with an unspoken question in his eyes. “Just over the ridge from Katse. Why?”
She didn’t reply; turning her loaded gaze away from his, feeling the urge to spring to her feet and rush out of there, to see if she could catch up with the unsub.
He’d taken another woman yesterday, a woman they knew nothing about.
And he was long gone by now.
“When was that call, Sam?” she asked quietly.
“Yesterday, at about four,” he replied, intrigued. “Does this have to do with, um… I heard you are a federal agent now.”
“I am, yes. Well, I was,” she replied. “I’m not on the job, if that’s what you’re hinting at,” she said, and noticed he seemed relieved. “I’m asking because there are three children missing, and several women were found buried at Silent Lake. Murdered.”
“Yeah, I know. The entire town talks about that. I live here, remember?” he added, a trace of his old sense of humor surfacing under the sadness that seemed to engulf him like a shroud.
“I thought that maybe there was a connection, that’s all,” she said, leaning back into her chair and making it rock gently. It was soothing to her frayed nerves, and allowed her to think clearly.
Sam wasn’t the killer; that was a certainty, especially after seeing him, after speaking with him and noticing his reactions. The only thing he had to hide was his own despair, nothing more. But if he wasn’t involved in the murders, then who was?
“Nah,” he replied, “I don’t think there’s any connection. Cops asked me about that too, last week I think it was. Tourists drive up the hill in the wrong gear and overheat the engine. They stop for a while, call me, then they notice their engine is cooled off and they can keep on driving. And they leave. That’s it. They just don’t care,” he added, a loaded breath leaving his chest. “They’re quick to get out of there, happy they saved the tow money.”
“How’s your dad?” Kay asked, changing the subject. “Judy told me he’s got back problems.”
“Yeah.” He stood and started pacing the porch slowly, back and forth. “He’s pretty much screwed, and he’s not on Medicare yet. A few more years to go.”
“I told Judy I’d be happy to help. I make, um, made a good living. It would mean a lot if you’d take me up on this offer.”
He stopped his pacing by her side and put his hand on her shoulder. He stood like that for a long moment, while silence filled the space, heavy, connecting them yet unable to bring peace to either of them, each lost in their own thoughts.
“Is this the same old truck?” she asked, trying to infuse some normal curiosity in the tone of her voice, instead of it sounding like a suspect interrogation. “The one we were climbing on as kids?”
“Yeah.” He laughed fondly at the shared memory. “Dad used to drive it, then I took over. He doesn’t drive it anymore. He just tinkers in the body shop, wandering about, hoping clients will come.”
“It needs new decals,” she said, pointing at the half-torn logo on the left side of the truck. “Saw it earlier today on the interstate, almost didn’t recognize it.”
“It needs a lot of new stuff, this jalopy,” he replied. “No can do, though.”
She didn’t reply, feeling there were things he’d left unsaid. He was staring at the truck with disappointment, pressing his lips together. The seven-ton chunk of rusted metal had been a staple of the Stinson family’s existence for decades. It couldn’t’ve been easy for Sam to watch it break down and be unable to fix it, to maintain the lifeline of his business.
“One day it will crap out on me,” Sam continued, still staring at the truck. “Then what?” he said, throwing Kay a quick glance. He was smiling, but it didn’t fool anyone. The torment of his own powerlessness was tangible in the unspoken words, in the air between them.
“Sam, if I can—”
“It drives me crazy sometimes,” he said, as if he didn’t hear her words. He glanced at her again, his brave smile still pasted on his lips. “I swear to you, this thing has a life of its own.”
She frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”
He hesitated before speaking, even checked the surrounding area as if fearing someone could overhear their conversation.
“It’s playing tricks on me,” he eventually said, keeping his voice low. “You know me, you know I’m not crazy, right?” he asked, seeing her raised eyebrow and long stare.
“Yeah, sure,” she replied, nodding a couple of times. Sam was one of the sanest people she’d met. Unable to climb out of his rut, if that meant throwing away his family business, yes, but nevertheless he was practical, of solid judgment, someone whose words she believed. Yet she was thrown off by what he’d just said.
Trucks didn’t play tricks on people.
Something was going on, and the thought of it lit a glimmer of hope in her heart.
Maybe it wasn’t the truck who was playing games with Sam’s mind. Maybe it was the unsub.
“Tell me, what did the truck do?” she asked, instilling just enough humor in her voice to encourage her old friend to open up.
“It’s like it’s cursed, or something,” Sam replied grimly. “Haunted even.”
“Why?”
He scratched the back of his head. “Last night, for example, I left it with the radio off. I know that for sure, ’cause there was too much talking about politics on the air, and I can’t stand it anymore. But this morning, the radio was back on.” He swallowed hard, then looked at her over his shoulder. “That thing doesn’t turn on by itself. It’s minor things like that, but it drives me nuts.”
“What else happened?” she asked. “And when?”
“About a month ago, I left it with the wheels straight, like I always do, but in the morning, I found it with the wheels steered left. All the way left. See, when you come up this driveway, you have to steer left to align with the house, but I always straighten my wheels, so I don’t trip over them in the dark.”
Approaching him, she leaned against the porch railing by his side, then looked at the truck. She believed she knew exactly what was going on; but didn’t have it in her to tell Sam. It would break his heart to know his truck had been involved in such horrible crimes.
“Has anyone been by the house lately? Friends, relatives, anyone?”
“No,” he replied, “no one ever comes here.” He smiled awkwardly, seemingly embarrassed of his solitary lifestyle.
“Where do you keep the keys?”
“In the ignition. No one’s gonna steal this piece of—” He stopped mid-phrase and slapped his
hand against the railing. “Someone’s messing with me, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly, squeezing his hand. “Someone is messing with you.”
Forty-Six
Cabin
He stood in the large room, looking at the children, deeply disappointed.
It wasn’t how he remembered it. His sister and brother used to laugh all the time, chasing each other around the dining room table until Mother sent them outside, mock-threatening them, and they obeyed, taking the squealing and the giggles away with them.
While he wasn’t allowed to participate or come anywhere near them.
But he wanted to prove that the children were safe with him, that he wouldn’t harm his sister in the way his mother feared. It wasn’t his fault his body reacted the way it did when her skirt rode up her legs exposing her panties or when her girlfriends came by the house and played.
He would never touch his sister, not like that. He only watched, looked at her with yearning eyes, not understanding why the sight of his sister’s bare skin would stir him that way or why his eyes clung to his mother’s plunging cleavage, unable to look elsewhere, attracted by the sight of her full breasts touching, like a moth to an unforgiving, deadly flame.
He would’ve never touched his sister, not like that.
He wasn’t an animal, out of control, driven only by the urges of his body. He’d proven that already, refusing himself the gratification his entire being craved, until it was safe to act. Even if it had taken years.
Now he wanted to prove to Mother he could play with his younger siblings, but the children wouldn’t engage. They weren’t laughing, they weren’t chasing each other around the living room, they weren’t even talking. Not to him, not to each other.
The girl sat on the edge of the bed, her little arms wrapped around her thin body, shivering. She whimpered sometimes, but immediately stifled her own sobs, probably knowing how much it pissed him off to see her like that. She kept her eyes riveted to the toy-littered floor, unwilling to look at him, unwilling to smile and make his day.
The boy stood by the window, staring into the distance at the edge of the woods, barely acknowledging his presence. When he’d entered the room earlier that day, that’s where he found the boy, standing, staring at the far end of the stony ravine, where he’d buried Ann’s body.
It wasn’t his fault Ann had died last spring.
The little girl didn’t obey his rules, and his rules were clear. The children could do anything they wanted, except go to the basement or try to leave the house. They had plenty of food, water and toys while he was gone. He had to go to work every day; it wasn’t as if he had nothing else to do but watch those kids.
Everyone obeyed the rules, Tracy and her brother Matthew, Hazel, even Ann at first. But Ann was untamed, restless, a wild child who always sought ways to free herself from captivity. One day, when he was away, she’d managed to squeeze her thin body through the bathroom window, the only window he hadn’t nailed shut, just because it was a tiny hole in the wall, six feet above the ground.
She must’ve climbed on Tracy’s shoulders to do it, and must’ve gone through the opening headfirst, unaware the window opened twenty-five feet above the ravine.
He’d had the cabin built there, on a rocky ledge above the ravine, to enjoy the elevated vantage views and the absolute solitude. There was a single road leading up to it, barely a path, and only his four-wheeler made it that far into the woods. The entire versant belonged to him, and a mile down the road he’d built another house, that one larger, complete with a two-car garage, where he changed vehicles. That’s where he left his Cadillac when he needed the ATV to drive up to the cabin or go hunting.
No one knew the cabin existed; he’d made sure of that. Not even the park rangers who patrolled the area sometimes; they always stopped at the edges of his property, marked clearly with NO TRESPASSING signs affixed on top of a wire fence every twenty yards. Of course, everyone knew about the house, a modern Craftsman with vaulted ceilings and stone-accented exteriors. He entertained guests and political allies there; he’d even held a press conference at that house, when he’d just won a capital murder case that had made headlines for weeks in a row.
But the cabin no one knew about. The general contractor who’d built it and his two workers had a terrible accident coming down the winding, sloped roads of Mount Chester, when the steering froze and the contractor’s truck flew through the side railing into the steep rocks of the mountain, where it instantly burst into flames.
No one survived.
He’d designed the cabin to be completely off the grid, knowing that someday it could be possible he’d have to hide up there for a longer period of time. Heated solar panels covered the roof, instantly melting the snow that would cover them during winter. A backup powerline had been drawn from the house, and water was pumped up from the stream running through the ravine. He could live up there for months, years even, unseen and unknown by anybody, hunting for food and enjoying all the comforts of a well-equipped log cabin. No one knew that if one took an ATV and circled the house downhill, in the back there was a path that led to the cabin. No one knew, and no one could accidentally stumble upon that path either. It was hidden from view by low-hanging fir branches and shrubs, an apparent wall of green hiding the ATV’s barely visible tire tracks on the foliage-covered rocks.
When Ann had ventured to escape through the bathroom window, she had no idea there was nowhere she could run, even if she’d survived the twenty-five-foot fall to the bottom of the rocky ravine. She would’ve gotten lost and surely met her death when a bear or a coyote would’ve picked up her scent.
Either way, it wasn’t his fault she’d died, but he wanted the other children to learn something from it. He was mad as hell over the senseless death of that girl. What would Mother have said? That he couldn’t be trusted to take care of his siblings, that one way or another he ended up harming them, maybe not with his body’s urges, but with his carelessness. It didn’t matter that Ann had grown increasingly restless after her mother, Lan Xiu, had vanished from the cabin. Little Ann had listened for her mother’s voice for days, and had even asked him about her. But Lan Xiu was gone already, resting peacefully at Silent Lake. There was nothing he could say to her daughter to make her feel better.
Then she’d made her escape attempt, and had probably lost her footing and broken her neck in the fall. When he arrived at the cabin that night, after finding out what had happened, he didn’t rush downstairs, as he usually liked to, for a visit with his latest guest, a stunning blonde named Shannon. Instead, he took Shannon’s two children, Tracy and Matthew, and gave them each a shovel, then took them down into the ravine, to see Ann’s body with their own eyes.
And bury it themselves.
They’d remember Ann’s fate for the rest of their lives, and they would never, ever try to escape again.
A few days later, he had to drive Tracy to the city and set her free near the Tenderloin somewhere. After having seen and buried Ann’s body, the girl wouldn’t stop screaming, and it drove him crazy. The children weren’t supposed to scream; only Mother was. Only the mother’s wails soothed the pain eating him from the inside out.
But Matthew had stayed behind, quiet, absent-minded, as if not even really there, refusing to engage with him. He hadn’t spoken a word since his sister had been taken away, not even after Hazel had joined him. There was no laughter to be heard in that room, no playfulness, no giggles.
It wasn’t like he remembered it. Not even a bit.
He tried approaching Hazel holding a new toy in his hand, but the girl whimpered and withdrew into a corner. Right then, a distant scream came from the basement, where Wendy was slowly coming to grips with her new reality. Matthew flinched, but his eyes stayed riveted on Ann’s resting place, while Hazel’s whimpers turned into sobbing, her little shoulders heaving while she crouched on the floor, away from him.
That’s not how family life used to be, before Mother screwe
d everything up.
These kids weren’t good for anything. He didn’t know what was wrong with them, why they didn’t want to play with him. His sister and brother always wanted to play with him; only Mother wouldn’t allow it.
He’d have to deal away with them, and soon.
He didn’t know how yet, because taking them back was dangerous. Everyone was looking for those kids. There were AMBER Alerts active, and, most recently, a description of his car had been added to the alerts. How the hell did they find out he was driving a blue Cadillac? What else did they know, and how close were they to finding him? He needed to manage that, to do something. To derail Kay Sharp and that detective off his scent, before it was too late.
It was about damn time Kay Sharp joined him at the cabin.
And no, he couldn’t take the children back. Someone could recognize him, now that he was a public figure who’d been interviewed on local television a few times.
Maybe the ravine would be a good resting place for the children who wouldn’t play. Or, perhaps, joining the others by Silent Lake would be better.
He had to decide quickly, before the ground froze completely.
Unable to make up his mind, angry, dissatisfied, he closed the door to the large room and went downstairs, where Wendy was sobbing hard. Her fingers were bleeding from senselessly scratching at the door like a caged animal. There was nowhere to go; he wished she’d listen to him.
When she saw him enter, her pupils dilated in fear, and she stumbled backward until she hit the concrete wall.
“No, no, please,” she whimpered. Tears were streaking down her cheeks, staining her beautiful skin.
Feeling the tremor of anticipation kindle his entire body, he took a whip, his hand welcoming the sensation of the braided leather handle against his skin. Then he closed his eyes and saw the image of his mother, tied up in chains in front of him, naked, begging his forgiveness, screaming with each strike of the whip against her trembling body.
