Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

"The little girl I painted … she was alive?"

  T.J. continued to read.

  "The child had obviously been trapped when the camper was torn loose from the vehicle, rolled halfway down the embankment and came to rest on the roof."

  Dobbs reached over and patted Bailey's hand. She was trembling, her eyes wide and horrified.

  "Dead at the scene were David Whitfield, 26, and his wife Susan, 25, from Charleston. Their seven-year-old daughter, Caitlyn, was rushed by ambulance to Crenshaw County Hospital where she was listed Friday as critical. No further information on her condition was available at press time."

  "Alive," Bailey said, her voice soft, full of awe and horror. "She was alive when they found her!" She took a breath. "Seven years old." She turned to him then, her voice anguished. "That little girl was seven years old!"

  "Is that all?" Dobbs asked. "No more information about the wreck?"

  T.J. thumbed through the volume to the next week's issue, hoping for a follow-up story, but there was nothing. Nothing in the two weeks following that, either.

  "The byline on the story is Henry Burkhold, Managing Editor," T.J. said. "Let's see if he's still around."

  Bailey took a picture of the newspaper story with her phone, then they returned the books to their spaces on the shelves and went downstairs to talk to the receptionist, who informed them that Henry Burkhold had died in 2010.

  "The story quotes Ben Aberdeen, an Emergency Medical Technician who worked the accident," T.J. said. "Do you know where we might find him?"

  "Now that I can help you with. Ben's the fire chief now. You'll find him at the fire station, the big two-story building at the far end of Main Street."

  As they left the newspaper office, T.J. put his arm around Bailey's shoulders.

  "You okay, sugar?"

  "I thought she was dead. She looked dead. I guess she was just unconscious, but … with her eyes open? Caitlyn Whitfield. Can you imagine what something like that would do to a seven-year-old? Maybe she's still …"

  "Let's not count on that. They might have found her alive, but that don't mean she … You said you wasn't 'connected' to her, remember. So ain't likely she's …"

  The firemen were out front of the big building washing the tanker truck when Dobbs and the others pulled up. They directed the three inside, said the fire chief was making dinner for the other on-duty men.

  A burley man of about fifty, thick-shouldered and muscular with a bald head and a prominent nose, was pouring the water off a pot of steaming spaghetti when they stepped into the kitchen/dining area behind the front office.

  "Excuse me," Dobbs said, and introduced the three of them. "We're looking for Fire Chief Ben Aberdeen."

  "That'd be me," he said. "Can you hold on a second?"

  He finished draining the water, steam forming a cloud above the strainer, then dumped the mountain of spaghetti into a huge bowl, dropped a couple of dollops of butter on it and began to stir.

  "Early lunch," he said. "We were on a run at dawn and worked up an appetite. Grease fire at the McKendricks’ place. Smoke damage, but it coulda been a lot worse. You'll have to excuse me while I finish up."

  "Let us help," Bailey said, and picked up plates from a stack of them on the counter and began to deal them around the table like playing cards.

  The man looked a bit surprised, but smiled. "What can I do for you folks?"

  "We're looking for information about someone who was killed—" Dobbs stopped. He wanted to believe that wasn't the case, but wasn't hopeful. He'd seen too many pictures of the dead people T.J.'s mother had painted years ago to believe that this one time would be different. He didn't think the … magic … worked that way. "Well, someone who was in a traffic accident here eighteen years ago."

  "Eighteen years? Good luck with that."

  "We went to the newspaper office and found the story and you're quoted in it. You were one of the EMTs who worked the wreck."

  "I was an EMT for twelve years, so I worked a lot of wrecks."

  "I think you'd remember this one, though. It was … different." Aberdeen set the bowl of spaghetti on the table and returned to the stove to get the large pot of sauce still simmering there.

  "The car went off the road and rolled," T.J. said. "Didn't nobody find the wreck for—"

  He stopped when the fire chief turned to face him suddenly, his face ashen.

  "Nobody found it until a squirrel hunter stumbled on the car in the woods." His voice was hollow.

  "That's right," T.J. said. "The newspaper story said that the two adults, David and Susan Whitfield, were killed, but—"

  "Their little girl, Caitlyn, survived." The big man's face was expressionless. He stood in the middle of the room, the spoon hanging limp in his hand, dripping spaghetti sauce on the floor.

  A buzzer suddenly went off somewhere in the building. Dobbs was afraid it was a fire alarm and the man who could give them information about the child Bailey had painted, the little girl she'd connected to, would go rushing out the door to put out a fire.

  But apparently, the buzzer signaled lunch rather than a fire because the firefighters who'd been out front when they arrived, plus a couple who hadn't, came through the double doors at the end of the room, laughing and talking as they came.

  "I been smelling that spaghetti sauce all morning and I'm about to drown," said a sandy-haired young woman, dressed as were the others in a t-shirt and jeans, and slip-on shoes.

  "You make any of that garlic bread …?"

  The woman didn't finish her sentence. She and the others had noticed the fire chief's expression and stopped.

  "Something wrong, Ben?" asked the woman who'd wanted garlic bread.

  The fire chief looked at her as if called back from some awful dream.

  "No," he said. "Nothing … I, yes, something's wrong." He turned to Dobbs and the others. "What do you want to know about this wreck for?" He sounded belligerent, but Dobbs spotted it for what it was — the backwash from painful memories he didn't want to relive. T.J. swooped in to ease the tension.

  Ever-intuitive T.J.

  "We're tryin' to locate the little girl, Caitlyn," he said.

  "What do you want her for?" the fire chief demanded, with more emotion than was appropriate. It was clear the other men picked up on that.

  "Ben, you need help with something?" one of them asked.

  "We're hoping she can help us save someone's life," Dobbs said.

  That part was true, in a convoluted sort of way. They were trying to save Riley Campbell. And given that they could never explain that to anybody, they had concocted a story. Dobbs was not by nature a deceitful person, and neither were T.J. and Bailey, but they had decided helping to find a kidnapped child was reason enough. As Dobbs listened to T.J. haul out the story, he marveled at how adept he was at making it seem not just realistic, but compelling. Shoot, if he'd been listening, he'd have wanted to help.

  "Caitlyn's family lost track of her years ago," T.J. said. "Now, her cousin — she's nine years old — needs a kidney transplant or she'll die and she has a blood type that's real rare. Oh, it's an awful long shot, but them parents will do anything … and the best they can determine, this Caitlyn Whitfield had the same blood type."

  The fire chief bought the story, looked stricken, but said he doubted the little girl who'd been in the wreck was still alive.

  Dobbs saw Bailey take the words like a blow to the belly.

  "I just worked the wreck, that's all … and I went to check on her when she was in the hospital."

  "Would you tell us about it?" T.J. asked, holding up his hand before the man could protest. "I'm a grunt, too. I get it."

  It wasn't until then that Dobbs noticed the USMC tattoo on Aberdeen's arm. T.J. didn't miss a thing, knew just how to play to their shared military service.

  "I know what you've seen, things that's hard to talk about. But the more we know about what happened to this little girl … any little thing, it might help us locate her."

  T
he man let out a sigh, then started to rise.

  "If I'm gonna tell this, you guys don't have to hear it."

  "Sit down, Ben," said the sandy-haired woman. "Go ahead."

  The fire chief shook his head.

  "Not this one. This isn't a story you hear and then eat a plate of spaghetti."

  He got to his feet and motioned Dobbs, T.J. and Bailey to follow. When they were seated around his desk in his small office, he told them the story.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nakamura was pointing out that the pipe-wielding Edgar Garrison's kiddie porn collection was exclusively female — "and these guys don't do crossover" — when he suddenly fell silent. Brice followed his gaze to the approaching deputy and the man's face silenced him, too.

  "Sheriff, we just got a call — there's a little girl missing from the park."

  It took less than five minutes, lights and siren, to get from the sheriff's office to Meadows Park. Nakamura rode with Brice in his cruiser, the black SUV with federal plates and a contingent of FBI agents following in the line of siren-wailing vehicles to the scene. The two men said little on the way, each a prisoner to the ugly but inescapable conclusion that unless these children were linked to each other in some as-yet-undetermined way, this was some sort of spree. Two children in three days. A psycho at the mercy of his own madness. Psychos on sprees grew bolder and bolder — and consequently, they made mistakes. The job of law enforcement was to spot those mistakes — fast, because the clock was ticking. Not just on these two children but on the whack-job's next victim. Psychos didn't stop until you caught them. Or killed them.

  Meadows Park was a neighborhood park, four blocks long and three wide, with big leafy trees and lots of shrubs, bushes and flowers. A small-children's playground that had stationary climbing equipment a-la a McDonald's play space and soft wood shavings instead of dirt or grass on the ground beneath occupied the west end. Soccer fields and tennis courts were on the east end. Picnic tables were scattered all around, in the shade of the big trees, looked like they'd all been freshly painted — bright colors, red, orange, purple, green and blue.

  A concession stand with public bathrooms was located in the center of the park and a parking lot opened off the south side. A decorative creek-stone fence a foot wide and about three feet tall ran the length of the north side. The only way to get into the park from that side was through the single opening in the fence midway. Or by climbing over it — easily doable but a monumental inconvenience, as voiced by countless protesting citizens at city council meetings over the years. To no avail.

  On-street parallel parking was allowed on the narrow stretch of gravel between the fence and the street. Most people used the parking lot on the opposite side of the park instead, so there were seldom any cars there. Brice knew that keeping the narrow street mostly clear of parked cars was the reason the city council refused to make more entrances in the fence.

  Three little girls had been playing under a tree in the park half an hour before. Sherri Lynn Williamson, Beth Ann Bradley and Christi Nicole Strickland. Now, Christi was missing.

  A swarm of deputies, state police troopers and FBI agents questioned witnesses and took down the names and contact information for every human being who'd been in the park at the time of the kidnapping. The Cottonwood Festival next to the school had swelled that list to 150 people.

  A youth league soccer game at the east end of the park had swelled this list to three hundred.

  Nakamura nodded at Gascoyne and said to Brice, "Eli and I will talk to the Williamson girl. You and Hardesty talk to Beth Ann."

  That was significant. Nakamura was like any good coach. Winning the game was the only thing that mattered and he relentlessly played only his best players. Apparently, Brice had finally claimed a spot in the starting lineup.

  A few minutes later, a little blonde girl, her hair in a pixie cut, was describing how Christi "was there and then she wasn't."

  Beth Ann Bradley wore a Wonder Woman t-shirt and sat on the bench of the picnic table with her mother draped over her like a cowl. The crowd beyond the line of black-and-yellow police tape was swelling by the second and the frightened/angry tone of the unintelligible grumble from them was distracting the little girl. She kept looking past Brice toward the crowd, probably hoping she'd spot Christi there.

  Lying in grass that needed mowing where the girls had been playing was a small case with Barbie dolls and Barbie accessories piled in it, plus other miscellaneous Barbie equipment including a motorcycle and a camper.

  The missing child, eleven-year-old Christi Nicole Strickland, was in the fifth grade at Madison Elementary School, on the other side of town from Corruthers Elementary where Riley was in the first grade. Riley was small for his age, Melody McCallum had said, just seven but looked maybe five — forty, maybe forty-five pounds. At eleven, Christi was a big girl, chubby, ten to fifteen pounds overweight — almost twice his size.

  "I don't know where she went," Beth Ann said and started to cry.

  "You need to leave her alone now," said her mother, crushing the child to her considerable bosom. "She's told you all she knows." She started to rise. "I'm taking her home now."

  "Please, sit down, Mrs. Bradley," Hardesty said. He had a booming James Earl Jones voice, but it was cranked down to soft now. Still, he was an imposing man and Brice considered that Nakamura should have teamed up with him instead of putting the two "giants" together. But that would have put Brice with Gascoyne. No, this was better.

  "We don't mean to upset Beth Ann, but we have a few more questions we need to ask her," he said.

  Cora Bradley turned belligerent. "I said we were done here! Beth Ann has told you everything she knows. She's upset, and she needs—"

  Brice cranked up his West Virginia accent to match the level of the mother's, his voice soothing.

  "Now, if it was Beth Ann who was the little girl missin', you'd want her friends to do everything they could to help police find her — why, you know you would."

  Hardesty was sitting on the other side of the little girl and briefly caught Brice's eye. Just the glance told Brice the agent had picked up on the accent, and would likely let Brice do most of the talking, since his own Pittsburgh accent — though not as pronounced as Gascoyne's — was still thick enough to label him immediately as an outsider from Away From Here.

  "Beth Ann, honey, would you mind sittin' over here by me so I can hear everything you say clearly?"

  He patted a space on the bench beside him — beyond the reach of her strangling mother.

  Pulling out of her mother's arms was like separating two pieces of Velcro.

  "I know you're upset and scared, sugar," he said, slathering his words in southern. "But I need you to focus on me, can you do that?"

  The little girl nodded, seemed more relaxed sitting beside Brice, without her mother choking her.

  "Now, please start at the beginnin' again and tell me everything that happened today, startin' with when you got to the park."

  The little girl explained haltingly that she and Christi and Sherri Lynn Williamson — the little girl Nakamura was questioning at the other picnic table — had agreed to meet at the park to play Barbie dolls.

  "Christi and Sherri Lynn live close," she said, indicating the neighborhood on the other side of the street from the park. "But Mama has to bring me."

  "School let out early — of course, you know that," her mother interrupted. "And I brought her directly here, never dreamed it wouldn't be safe to drop my little girl off in a public park. What's the world coming to when you can't let your children out of your sight? And where were the police when—?"

  Deputy Fletcher appeared at Brice's side like a genie out of a bottle.

  "Mrs. Bradley, I'd like to talk to you, please. Won't take but a minute, but we need to know what you saw when you dropped Beth Ann off."

  "I didn't see anything. I wasn't even at this end of the—"

  "You might think you saw nothing at all, but sometimes t
he smallest detail — something you weren't even aware of seeing at the time …" He oozed politeness as he got her to her feet and began to shoo her away from the picnic table "Step over here with me, if you would, so we can talk privately."

  Translate that: Come over here and prattle in my ear so the sheriff can find out what your daughter knows.

  With an almost indiscernible nod, Brice acknowledged his gratitude to Fletcher. The sheriff needed to find out everything he could while images were still fresh in the little girl's mind and before she had a chance to absorb the recollections of others and make them her own. Maybe this little girl had seen the kidnapper, could describe him. Christi Strickland's three-hour clock was ticking.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Brice draped a smile on his face like hanging a surgeon's mask from his ears, but it was authentic enough to fool an eleven-year-old.

  "Beth Ann, is this a place you often come to play with your dolls?"

  "Uh huh. On Saturdays, when the weather's nice. Today was special 'cause there was no school this afternoon so Mama stopped and got me a Happy Meal and I ate it in the car."

  "Do you always play in the same spot?"

  She shook her head.

  "Just somewhere in the shade. There's more shade under that big tree by the concession stand." She pointed to the building in the center of the park where the restrooms were located. In the small store there, you could buy overpriced candy, soft drinks, nachos, hot dogs and ice cream. "But high school let out early, too, and there were a bunch of teenagers there and this boy and girl were making out — ugh! — so we came here."

  Here was a secluded little cubby hole on the north side of the park in the shade of a juniper tree. A tangled, in-need-of-pruning lilac bush stretched out between the tree and the rock fence, dangling over it all the way to the ground on the other side. About twenty feet farther down the fence sat two sand-colored electrical boxes, both the size of washing machines. The bush, boxes and fence blocked the view of the girls on three sides.

  "I was sitting over there," Beth Ann said and pointed.