by Kathi Daley
Chapter 13
Now that Lily was safe, Jeremy was no longer trying to pull me in or keep me away. This led to an almost immediate lessening of my headache, although I was sure it would be days before it dissipated completely. I had an image of the man who’d kidnapped the girls in my mind that Jeremy had shared with me. Assuming it was an accurate image, I hoped that knowing what the man we were searching for looked like would help us find him if he was, as we had hoped, headed toward Barron.
Once Houston and I boarded the plane for our trip north, I promptly put my head on his shoulder and fell asleep. By the time we reached Barron, I felt marginally better. I was glad the pounding in my head had lessened to the point where I could actually function since I had a feeling the next twenty-four hours were going to be long ones.
A police officer named Dru Belmont picked us up at the airstrip. He took us back to his office in Barron, where Houston filled him in on everything that had occurred to this point, and I searched the computer for images of men known to work in human trafficking. The problem was that there were too many to consider. I needed to pare things down a bit. Houston and Dru were busy talking in Dru’s office, so I used my cell phone to call my good friend, fellow search-and-rescue volunteer, computer geek, and all-around nice guy, Landon Stanford.
“Harmony. I’m glad you called. I’ve been worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” I rotely responded.
“Still having the headaches?”
“A bit, but they’re better. I guess you heard that we rescued the boy I’ve been connecting with and the first girl who was taken.”
“Yeah. I talked to Jake. I’m really glad these kids are safe, but it sounds like this madman has two others.”
“He does,” I confirmed. “Two girls, both twelve. One is named Emily Deerchild, and the other is Irene Bowman. He may have a third girl by this point, although I don’t know that with any certainty. I suppose if he’s headed toward Barron, where I assume he’s going to hand off the girls, he must be running out of time.”
“Yeah. It would seem he might be. How can I help?”
“I’m sitting here in the office of the man who seems to be law enforcement in Barron, looking at images on his computer. I was able to get a look at the kidnapper through Jeremy’s memories, so they have me looking at mugshots of men who are known to work in human trafficking, but there are so many. I need to organize them. Pare them down. Houston is busy, so I’m hoping you can help me.”
“I can. If you can get permission for me to link into the database you’re searching, I can take a look.”
“Okay. Hang on.”
I got up and crossed the room. I knocked on the door of the interrogation room where Houston was sitting talking to Dru. I explained who I had on the phone and what I wanted him to do, and Dru agreed to give him access. Once Landon had access, he took control of the search. He’d send photos to me, which I commented on, then he made modifications and searched again. By the time Dru and Houston emerged from the room where they’d been chatting, we had a name.
“Carl Decker,” I said.
Both men just looked at me.
“Carl Decker is the name of the man with the girls.” I turned the computer screen toward the men. “Landon helped me find him. He isn’t in the database of known human traffickers, but he does have a record.”
Houston pulled the computer closer and took a look. “Armed robbery, domestic violence, assault, and manslaughter.” He looked up at me. “Are you sure this is him?”
“This is the man who was in Jeremy’s head.”
Houston turned and looked at Dru. “Do you recognize this man?”
“No. But now that we have a name and image, we can ask around.” He glanced at the clock. “Things will be in full swing at Hades. I guess we can start there.”
“Hades?” I asked.
“Local bar.”
I supposed as names of bars might go, Hades was original, but, in my opinion, not nearly as charming as Neverland.
“Give me a minute to make a call, and I’ll go with you,” Dru said. “The locals in these parts don’t take kindly to strangers and probably won’t tell you a thing even if they have something to tell.”
Houston thanked him, and the two of us took seats at the table where I’d been working while we waited.
“I heard from Jordan,” he said. Jordan was Jake’s girlfriend and a doctor. “She’s waiting for the full autopsy report, but she said it appears that the old woman we found in the cabin died of natural causes.”
“I didn’t know they’d already retrieved the body.”
He nodded. “They used snowmobiles with a rescue sled to go in for her. Jordan called and spoke to the only doctor in Huntsville, and he did a preliminary exam. He’s having the body transported to Fairbanks for autopsy, but the initial exam didn’t reveal any signs of foul play. It appears she just sat down in the chair where we found her and passed peacefully.”
Well, I supposed that was something. I still didn’t have a feel for the old woman’s role in the whole thing. Was she willingly with the kidnapper, or was she a victim?
“Do you have an identity?” I asked.
He nodded. “Daisy Dunsmore. She used to run a foster home in a small town in Western Canada, but she sold her property and moved away a decade ago. I haven’t found a record of her whereabouts since then. I suppose she might have left with Carl willingly, but I also suppose he might have kidnapped her at some point.”
“I wonder how they knew each other.”
Houston shrugged. “I’m not sure. I suppose if we catch up with him, we can ask him, but if I had to guess, I suspect that Carl was a foster child and Daisy was the woman who cared for him.”
“That does make sense. I wonder why Lily called her Fran?”
He shrugged. “I suppose Fran might just be a name Lily made up if she didn’t know the old woman’s actual name. It doesn’t sound like she talked to the girls.”
“That’s true. Maybe giving her a name made it easier to communicate with her even if the name Lily gave her wasn’t her real name.”
Houston and I both looked up as Dru came back into the room. “Okay,” he said. “I’m all set. Let’s head over to Hades and see if anyone has seen your guy.”
As it turned out, several men had seen him, just not recently. One of the bar’s patrons claimed a man who looked an awful lot like the photo was seen in town last winter, and another patron claimed to have seen him the year before that. We’d suspected this wasn’t our kidnapper’s first time doing what he was doing, and the statements of the men we spoke to seemed to confirm that.
Houston and I decided to hang out in the bar for a while and talk to other men and women as they came in. Dru got a call and went outside to take it. When he came back inside, he had a frown on his face.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Sarah Farmington, a local girl, went missing.”
I put a hand to my mouth. “Oh, no,” I gasped. “The third girl.”
“It looks like that might be the case,” Dru responded. “I’m heading over to talk to her parents.”
“If he has three, he might be planning to meet his contact as soon as this evening,” I said. “We need to find them, and we need to find them fast.”
“Any idea where the meeting might be taking place?” Houston asked.
“We assume the person who our kidnapper is handing these girls off to is a pilot,” I added.
“I’m afraid that if the man has a bush plane, there are a lot of places he could land in this area,” Dru answered.
“He needs to keep the girls somewhere until the meeting, and it will be close,” I said. “He’s missing both his helpers, so he’s on his own. He won’t go to a motel since it would be hard to hide three girls in a place like that. What about a cabin? A seasonal cabin would work best. Something out of the way, but not too far away. Something with boarded up windows and little chance that anyone will stop by.”
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“There are some seasonal cabins near the sea just west of here.” Dru looked undecided. “I really should go and talk to Sarah’s parents.”
“We can go and check out the cabins if you have a vehicle you can lend us,” I offered. “We’ll call you if we find anything.”
“I have a truck at my house with a snowmobile all loaded in the bed. It never hurts to be prepared. We’ll stop by and get it. I’ll head over to talk to the parents, and you can see if there is any sign of life in the cabins.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“I’ll send Mucker with you.”
“Mucker?” I asked.
“Mucker’s my dog. He’s search-and-rescue trained. If this man is holding the girls in one of those cabins, he’ll find ‘em. If you do find this guy, hang back and wait for me. We don’t know if he’s armed, but if he is, I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”
Houston and I both had guns and knew how to use them. I wasn’t worried about heading out to the cabin on our own, but I was curious why there weren’t men in town who’d been designated to help when needed. Sure, the town was tiny, and I had a feeling it was the sort of place where folks mostly did what they wanted, laws be damned, but I really couldn’t see how one man could run things on his own. Of course, Houston and I had only been sent out to the cabins to take a look and see if we could find the girls. I supposed that if a hostage situation occurred, Dru would have men he could call in.
“Do you really think this guy is holed up in one of these cabins?” I asked Houston as we drove west with Dru’s dog, Mucker, in the back seat. The dog seemed thrilled to be along for the ride, and I had to admit that his happy face was making me miss my happy dogs.
“Honestly, not really. Given what we already know about this guy, I think the cabins are too obvious. Unless he’s totally clueless, I think he would realize that these sorts of cabins are exactly where we’d be looking for him.”
“Yeah, it seems like a longshot to me as well, but so far, no one has come up with a better idea. I guess it doesn’t hurt to take a look.” I glanced up into the dark sky. “It would help if we had some daylight, but I guess that isn’t going to happen.”
“Not for another couple of weeks.”
“You’d think that after living in Rescue my entire life, I’d be used to the long dark days, but at least we get a few hours of sunlight even in the middle of winter. I’m not sure how it would be to have more than two months of darkness to deal with every year.”
“I guess you get used to it.”
“I guess.” I glanced out at the barren landscape. It really was beautiful in its own way.
“In a way, it’s too bad we rescued Jeremy,” Houston said. “Not that I’m not delighted to help the boy find his way out of an impossible situation, and not that I’m not thrilled that Lily was rescued, but he was your link to the man with the girls. It’ll be a lot harder to track him down without a bird’s-eye view.”
Mucker stuck his head over the back of the seat, and I gave him a scratch under the chin. “Yeah. That thought has occurred to me as well.” I turned my head to look out the window again. “I guess I can try to connect with one of the girls. I have names and faces now, so that will help. Even if I can find them, they’ll need to let me in, and there’s no guarantee of that happening.”
Houston’s lips tightened. “Maybe you should try to connect with them. I know that doing so causes you pain, and I really hate to ask, but I have a feeling that we’re running out of time. Once this man hands the girls off to whoever he’s here to hand them off to, assuming we’re correct in our theory and that’s what’s going on, it’s unlikely we’ll ever find them.”
“Yeah. I thought of that too.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “I may speak to you, but try not to speak to me and don’t ask me any questions unless you absolutely have to.”
“Okay,” Houston nodded.
I leaned my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. I focused on the steady hum of the engine as I tried to create an image of Emily in my mind. Of the girls who were currently being held, she’d been with the kidnapper the longest. Chances were that she was the calmest at this point and would therefore be the easiest to connect with.
I willed an image of twelve-year-old Emily Deerchild into my mind. Brown hair, blue eyes, slight build, and engaging smile. At least she’d been smiling in the photo her parents had submitted when they’d reported her missing. I let the image develop and willed specific details to come to mind. The long ponytail, hanging off to the side, the small dimple on the left side of her mouth, the scar across her forehead that had probably been earned fairly early in life.
Unlike Jeremy, Emily had words, so I used words to call to her.
“Emily,” I thought in my mind as I focused on her image. “My name is Harmony. I want to help you. Can you hear me?”
I didn’t hear anything at first, so I tried again.
“I’m with the police. We are coming to get you, but I need your help.”
“Who are you? Why can I hear you, but I can’t see you?”
I smiled when I realized that I’d made it through. “My name is Harmony. I’m sort of a psychic. I can’t tell the future or anything like that, but I can get into people’s minds. I want to help you, but you need to let me in.”
I could feel her resisting.
“Please,” I deepened my focus. “We found Lily. She’s safe with her parents. She told us about you, and we want to help. We will help, but you need to let me in.”
“How do I let you in?”
“Just relax. I’m going to try to see what you see through your eyes. I’m going to talk to you in your mind, and I’ll need you to answer me back by thinking of your answer. Are you alone?”
“No. There are three of us.”
“Is the man who took you there?”
“No. The man locked us in a room and left. He was on the phone before he left. He was talking to someone about meeting a plane. I think he went to talk to the man he’d been talking to on the phone.”
“Okay. That’s great. You’re doing great. Now, just relax and let me see what you see.”
It took a few minutes, but when I was finally able to see what Emily was looking at, it really didn’t help. I could sense a small room with no windows, but it was almost totally dark.
“Can you see outside?” I asked. “Are there any windows in the room?”
“No. I think we’re in a storage closet of some sort. There’s nothing other than walls and doors. Can I tell the others you’re here in my head?”
“Not yet. Let’s see what we can figure out first. Just continue talking to me in your mind. Jeremy, the boy who was in the cabin with you, told me that the man who kidnapped you took you and Irene away on his snowmobile.”
“Yes. That’s right. The boy could talk?”
“No. I spoke to Jeremy in his mind the way I’m speaking to you. I’ll fill you in later. What happened after he took you away on his snowmobile?”
“He brought us to a plane. He tied us up, put us in the plane, and then he left again. A long time later, he came back alone. He was really mad. I thought he might kill us out of anger, but he didn’t.”
“Do you know why he was mad?”
“He was mad ‘cause the others were gone.”
“Okay. What happened after the man came back alone?”
“He took off and brought us here.”
“So he flew the plane himself?”
“Yes. He flew it himself.”
Okay, that was helpful. “And after you landed? What happened then?”
“He blindfolded Irene and me and brought us to this closet. Then he left. A little while ago, he brought another girl. He threw her inside with us and left again.”
“Did you travel far to get to the closet after you left the plane?”
“No. Maybe ten minutes.”
Ten minutes. The girls were definitely not all the way out here in these cab
ins unless the man landed the plane somewhere other than the main airstrip, which was likely now that I thought about it. “I know you can’t see anything, but can you hear anything?”
“Music.”
I was so shocked by the answer that I almost lost the connection. “Music? What sort of music?”
“I don’t know. It’s not a song I recognize. It sounds far away, but it’s so loud I can hear it.”
“I’m going to break the connection for a minute. I need to talk to someone. I’m going to come back in a few minutes, so try to keep your mind open and wait for me.”
“Where are you going? Are you still going to help us?”
“I am. I need to tell the police officer I’m with where to find you. Just wait quietly for a couple minutes, and I’ll be back.”
“Okay, but hurry.”
I opened my eyes and looked at Houston. “The girls aren’t all the way out here in one of these cabins. They’re closer to town. In a closet of some sort. Emily said she could hear music in the distance.”
“The bar.”
“That would be my guess. We need to go back.”
“I’ll call Dru.”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m not sure we should call Dru.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure, but something feels off to me. Let’s just go back and see what we can find. We can call Dru after we check things out.”
Houston turned the truck around and headed back. When we arrived at the bar, we parked out in front and just sat for a minute. If the girls were being held inside the bar, maybe the bar owner was in on things. The entire place was packed with rugged outdoorsmen whose loyalty would be to one of their own, so it didn’t seem smart to just push our way in and start accusing those who are inside of harboring a kidnapper.
“I’m going to try to connect again. Give me a minute,” I said.
This time, Emily was waiting for me and let me in right away.
“I was scared you wouldn’t come back.”
“I’m here. Can you still hear the music?”
“Yes.”
“Focus on it. I want to hear it.”
