[2017] The Extraction

by Steven F Freeman

  And Thorne himself loved the cat and mouse aspect of evading the police, the rush he got from knowing he was outsmarting the combined resources of multiple law-enforcement agencies. Given the history I had with this pervert, I could see it being worth his while to ruin my life…just as I’d ruined his.

  The minutes on the dashboard clock roll by with alarming speed. Never has Atlanta’s usual traffic snarl generated such frustration. I punch the accelerator and swerve around wide-eyed drivers. Fortunately, this kind of driving is an everyday occurrence in Atlanta and so goes unnoticed by the highway patrol.

  The latest poem’s second stanza occupies my thoughts for much of the remaining drive, but no new insight comes to mind.

  At last, I arrive at Willow Manor just after 11:00 o’clock.

  The apartment complex is equipped with an electric gate that requires a security card or buzz-through to enter. Not wanting to devote time explaining my situation to some remote guard, I tailgate a Buick, narrowly avoiding the double iron gates as they swing closed.

  My tires squeal as I corner around the circular parking lot to Thorne’s former building. A mom pushing a stroller on the sidewalk casts a dirty look my way—not that I blame her.

  I pull into a space fronting Thorne’s old building and jump from the car. Like before, it stands to reason that the box would be hidden outside rather than inside his old unit.

  Where could it be hidden? With the exception of a stairwell gap in the middle of the building, alternating euonymus and barberry bushes forming a border across the entire front of the edifice represent the only possible hiding place. I begin on the left side, pushing the prickly landscaping out of the way with my shoulder to examine the space underneath.

  The left side is a bust, so I move to the right.

  As I’m rummaging through the underbrush, a resident parks near Sampson’s Camry. She exits her Sonata and gives a wide berth to the blood-splattered man scrounging through the bushes. The co-ed glances over her shoulder at me one last time before scurrying into her ground-floor unit. The dead-bolt lock clunks as it slides into the doorframe.

  I’d better wrap up my scavenger hunt soon, or before long another rent-a-cop will be asking me what I’m up to—a distraction I don’t have the time to deal with. I should have asked for a uniformed officer to accompany me here, but it’s too late to fix that now.

  I reach the end of the row of bushes. No dice. I move to the back of the building and discover an identical row of shrubs. Taking a deep breath, I plunge into the prickly shrubs.

  As each minute passes, I quicken my search, oblivious to the cuts and scrapes accumulating on my arms and hands.

  The back row also fails to produce results. I race to each side of the building but encounter only an electrical box in the middle of grass. There’s nowhere to hide anything as large as the pine boxes I’ve already discovered.

  I venture up the stairs to both the second and third floors, only to encounter wide-open landings in which nothing could be concealed.

  On the way back down, I step off the stairs and test the door of Thorne’s former apartment.

  Locked.

  I continue down to the ground floor and scan the lip of the parking lot in desperation.

  A white F-150 with strobing yellow lights on tops appears around the curve of the parking lot, heading my way. That’s my cue to leave.

  I jump into Sampson’s sedan and ring her up on the borrowed cellphone.

  “You found it?” she asks.

  “No, I’ve looked everywhere. It’s not here—at least if it is, I sure as hell can’t spot it.”

  The security truck slows as it approaches my parking spot.

  “And we have only two-and-a-half hours left to find the next two boxes.”

  CHAPTER 39

  “Maybe it’s not there,” says Sampson. “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place.”

  “Could be,” I reply. “But if not here, where?”

  The security truck pulls into the spot beside me. I lock the doors.

  A scrawny, middle age-man heaves himself out of the truck and swaggers over to my window. He hitches up his pants and uses his Maglite to tap on the window.

  I point to the phone, using pantomime to show I’m on a call.

  Barney Fife doesn’t like this reply. He tries to open the door. Finding it locked, he bangs again, harder.

  “Hang on, Sampson,” I say. “I’m going to have to move my car…I mean your car.”

  I start the car and squeal out of the spot in reverse.

  Barney waves him arm downward, telling me to shut down the car.

  Fuck that.

  I slam the car forward and accelerate as much as I dare in a residential parking lot. Another security truck heads towards the property’s exit, trying to reach it before me and block the gate. Looks like he’ll make it, too.

  Punching the accelerator results in a tie. The Camry’s bumper slams into the truck’s front quarter panel, sending the security vehicle careening sideways onto the curb.

  Waiting long enough for the exit’s sensors to automatically open the gate, I race through and turn onto the main thoroughfare. Next step is a series of quickly executed turns onto side streets in case Paul Blart back there decides to call the real police.

  Five minutes later, I pull into an Exxon station and slide the Camry behind a Civic. “Sampson, you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m safe. For now. So do you have any ideas?”

  “Just a feeling, really—like we’re not taking all of the clue into account. Let me get out the note.” I hear the crinkling of paper before she reads it off.

  “Where is the next box?” you wonder

  I’ve gone and hid it down under

  Where athletes win gold

  And flesh gathers mold

  And machinery roars like the thunder.

  “That all must fit together, somehow,” she continued. “So what does flesh gathers mold mean?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I say. A flash of inspiration hit me. “Could it mean a grave? That would fit with hid it down under.”

  “Yeah, that would fit. But what about the other two lines? In the other notes, all the lines fit with the clue.”

  I rubbed my chin. “Where athletes win gold. Makes me think of the Olympics. And hey, Atlanta hosted the Olympics in ninety-six. But that was spread out all over northern Georgia, not one particular spot. It’s not much of a clue. Think he just needed it to make the limerick work?”

  “My gut is telling me there’s more to it than that,” says Sampson. “An Olympic reference that has to do with a grave…and machinery. Geez.”

  I glance at my watch, an action that’s becoming an every-minute obsession. Trin has two hours and twenty minutes.

  “Let me look up something…” says Sampson. Keyboard keys clack over the phone.

  “You have an idea?”

  “Hold on,” she says absent-mindedly, her attention focused on her task. The clacking stops. “Grinder, listen to this.” Excitement grows in her voice. “The second victim…her name was Alyssa Catalán.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember I told you I spent a semester in Spain during college?”

  “Yeah.” Where is she going with this?

  “Catalán isn’t just one of our victim’s last name. It’s also a region of Spain. And Barcelona is the biggest city in that region.”

  I catch her excitement. “And Barcelona had the summer Olympics back in the early nineties, right?”

  “Exactly! What if the next box is somewhere near Alyssa Catalán’s grave?”

  I rev up her car. “Tell me where it is! And just to be safe, can you check and see if there’s some kind of factory near her gravesite? Or maybe an interstate? Something that would fit with the machinery clue?”

  “Will do.”

  I drum my fingers on the wheel, anxious to begin. A cop car cruises by the station. The officer sitting shotgun looks to be scanning
the neighborhood—hopefully not for me.

  “Here it is,” she says. “Anderson Brothers Funeral Home and Cemetery.” She reads off the address, which I punch into my borrowed cellphone.

  “That’s near the intersection of two eighty-five and I-20,” she says. “Hey, that’s where they’re building the new UPS distribution center, right? That’s gotta be noisy.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” I fire up the Camry and pull back onto the side road. The patrol car continues to recede from the station but is still visible. “Sampson, can you let the local cops know what’s up so they’ll lay off looking for your car? I had a fender bender back at the apartments.”

  “Yeah, I could hear.” She doesn’t sound happy, but to her credit, she doesn’t give me grief about it, either. “I’ll let them know.”

  In minutes, I’m back on I-285, Atlanta’s perimeter road, heading southwest to the cemetery…and hopefully, the next clue.

  CHAPTER 40

  With a start, Trin awakens from her half-slumber.

  The room remains as dark as ever. She knows time has passed. How much is impossible to say. Her muscles flare with discomfort, and the agony of unbroken contact with the bed shoots along her back and buttocks. Not once has her captor untied her. And why would he? If he truly plans to kill her, what would be the point?

  A burning, chafing sensation on her legs reminds her she urinated in place—how many hours ago, she can’t say. She probably would be hungry, but fear and anxiety have eradicated all trace of appetite. But her parched, raw throat would be overjoyed to drink a single sip of water, another accommodation she’s been denied. The dehydration renders her dizzy, lightheaded.

  For the hundredth time, she tests her restraints. No good. They’re too tight to allow one hand to reach the other’s knots.

  A grim certainty settles on her mind. Her captor’s deadline must not be too distant in the future. Otherwise, the lack of food and water could kill her before then.

  Does Decimus even know what has happened? It wasn’t typical for them to go a day without communicating, but sometimes her investigations required it. Impromptu text blackouts between them had happened before. Would he assume it had happened again, or was he aware of the danger she faced?

  She closes her eyes and lifts a silent prayer, hoping by some miracle her fiancé will intervene.

  CHAPTER 41

  The moment I turn onto I-285, my mind divides itself between maniacal driving and ruminating on Wyatt Thorne. The location of this clue matches his personality to a T. Of course he’d want to force me to visit the body of one of his victims, metaphorically rubbing my nose in the fact that I never caught the creep.

  Was it hard for him to recruit the family and friends of the other offenders? After all, Thorne certainly had help. Not all of the information in the clues had been made public. A Google search wouldn’t have cut it. That being the case, how did he bring associates with such disparate backgrounds together and unite them in this common cause?

  A shared theme among the criminals I pursued was blaming everyone but themselves for their behavior. Yes, some of them had terrible childhoods. Yet plenty of folks experience similar or worse without resorting to serial crime. But among the criminals I pursued, not a single one wanted to man up. This attitude is typically reflected in the people associated with them, like family and friends. It could have been Thorne’s rallying cry, the technique he used to convince the other criminals to join him: let’s go punish the man who “got my loved one in trouble.” Not that the offenders’ serial crime was their own fault; it was mine for putting a stop to it. Yet this was the distorted lens through which they viewed the world. And bringing in the other families would allow Thorne to conceal his identity and involvement until the end…until tracking him down directly would require too much time. But if that’s the case, why didn’t he wait for the very last clue?

  Fifteen minutes of frenetic driving have brought me to the cemetery. My reflections on Wyatt Thorne take a back burner.

  Pulling through the entrance, I swerve into a parking spot and slam the brakes. A large brick building with the white façade of a chapel on its left side sits across the parking lot. To the left of the building, a paved road leads to the cemetery, a grassy expanse dotted with dogwoods and maples.

  I’ve already jumped from the car before realizing I have no idea where Alyssa’s grave is located within the rolling hills of this four-acre site. Asking someone inside the building is out of the question. My disheveled appearance didn’t sit well with the female apartment dweller and probably wouldn’t improve my odds of a quick answer here.

  I run past the funeral home and stop at the sloped entrance to grassy fields. A walled-off section to the right is labeled, “God’s little angels.” Is that a children’s section? Might as well try there first.

  Headstones flash past as I race that direction. My breath becomes ragged, and my lungs fight for air. My stomach starts to protest, but I arrive at the area before anything comes up.

  I scan headstones frantically, searching for one labeled “Catalán.”

  There! A foot-high marker. Nothing special. Nothing to indicate the horrendous death this child suffered at the hands of a madman. I race to the granite tombstone. Something about the permanence of the surname chiseled into the stone brings me up short, causing me to pause a moment to remember Alyssa—the way I’d want people to remember Trin if I fail today.

  I can’t allow myself to think like that. Trin isn’t dead yet—at least I don’t think she is—so let’s make sure we keep it that way. Time to get busy finding that next box.

  There’s nothing around Alyssa’s marker. I scout nearby headstones but come up short. There actually aren’t many places to hide the type of twelve-by-six inch box which contained the other notes.

  Suppressing an uneasy feeling of irreverence, I paw the soil directly over Alyssa’s casket in case Thorne literally did “hide it down under.”

  Nothing.

  Is this cemetery the wrong place again? It can’t be. It fits every line of the clues. But in that case, where’s the box?

  I swivel in desperation. Wait—what about that three-foot headstone to the left of Alyssa’s? The ground around it contains no box but does feature a huge vase fashioned from concrete. It contains a fresh batch of flowers, despite the fact that the child at rest there was buried eleven years ago.

  Perhaps a melancholy relative brought fresh flowers within the last twenty-four hours, but another possibility is that Thorne used flowers to conceal his latest box.

  I rush over and yank the bouquet from the vase.

  Boom! A plain pine case rests at the bottom of the vase, a duplicate of the others. I snatch up the box and open it. As expected, it contains a single piece of folded paper with my name printed across the outside.

  Now there’s only one more box to find. I locate that, and my next stop will be Trin herself. A glance at my watch reveals I have only an hour and fifty minutes to do so.

  CHAPTER 42

  I unfold the note. Before reading it, I snap a picture on my borrowed cellphone and send it off to Sampson—two heads being better than one and all that.

  Now to check out the note’s contents myself.

  You’re rounding the bend

  Nearly reaching the end

  Of a puzzle only you can untangle

  This next clue’s a blast

  Come straight from your past

  ‘Bout a man that proved tricky to wrangle

  The feast’s all prepared

  Tell me Farr, are you scared

  To sit down at the table I’ve laid?

  A hot dog and a side

  Of pop to imbibe

  And a view of the panic I made

  What…?

  I stare at the paper, dumbfounded.

  My mind locks up, unable to analyze these last clues. I’ve solved plenty of crimes and laid bare dozens of sociopathic personalities, but this experience is different. This time it involves
someone I love. The pressure to find Trin mounts with each tick of the clock. Like a dripping faucet, this chronological stress pushes against the gears of my reason, sapping my capacity to draw the right conclusions from vague clues—draining away, in essence, the quality I most need to save my fiancée. It’s maddening, yet it can’t be helped.

  Focus!

  I call Sampson. “You read the note?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I was going to ask you that,” she says. “Do you know which offender it’s talking about?”

  “No, I…” I take a deep breath and exhale, fighting back the physical exhaustion that normally would have floored me by now. “Sampson, I’m starting to lose it. Like I can’t focus anymore.”

  “You can’t give up now. You’re almost there.”

  “But there’s only an hour and forty-five minutes left. Even if we solve this—”

  “Then you might save her! We don’t know where the next clue is going to lead you, right?” It’s her turn to pause. “Look, Grinder, you can do this. I know you’ve been out of the profiling gig, but your skills are just as good as ever. Anytime you want to come back, we’d all be glad to see you.”

  Jesus. Come back to this? A living nightmare?

  “Thanks for the pep talk,” I say. “But it won’t help us solve this last pair of clues.”

  “Yes, but you needed to be reminded you’ve got what it takes to solve it. So…which offender from your past could this note be referencing?”

  “Usually, the first stanza or two IDs the perp.” I smooth the note out across the top of the closest tombstone.

  You’re rounding the bend

  Nearly reaching the end

  Of a puzzle only you can untangle

  This next clue’s a blast

  Come straight from your past

  ‘Bout a man that proved tricky to wrangle

  “We know this one is a male,” said Sampson. “The poem says ‘bout a man’.”