Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

  "Would you show me?" Hardesty asked, and stood up.

  The little girl got up and walked to a spot between the bush and the electric boxes about ten feet from the rock fence. Brice and Hardesty trailed along behind her.

  "You had your back to the wall, right?" Brice asked. Hardesty was drawing a diagram on his notepad.

  "Uh, huh. And Sherri Lynn was beside me."

  "Her back to the street, too?"

  "Mostly, but not all the way. Kinda sideways."

  "Where was Christi?"

  "She was sitting here."

  She took a few steps into the park and turned around to face the fence and the street beyond it.

  "The dolls and other stuff is just like it was before Christi left, the best you remember, right?"

  The little girl crossed to the spot where she'd been sitting. On the ground there was a pink suitcase that contained a doll's wardrobe, a clear plastic pencil box with accessories — shoes, purses, hats, a tiny belt and what looked like a crumpled parasol. She pointed to the doll in a lawn chair.

  "That's my Barbie. Christi was here, with her Barbie and the motorcycle. And Sherri Lynn and I had our Barbies in the camper." She gestured to a toy camper lying on its side in the grass. "Except Sherri Lynn wanted her Barbie to drive and it was my turn."

  "To drive the Barbie camper?"

  "Uh huh. I told her it was my turn, that her Barbie got to drive last time, but she said it was different now, since we had them all dressed up for the party and my Barbie's dress wouldn't fit behind the steering wheel. But it would, too. I told her it would, but she said—"

  "So you and Sherri Lynn were arguing about your Barbies, is that right?" Hardesty slid the question in softly.

  "She was wrong. It was my turn!"

  "What was Christi doing?"

  "Her Barbie was on the motorcycle and she was waiting for Sherri Lynn to let my Barbie drive so we could take them to the party."

  "So Christi was just sitting there, waiting?"

  "Yeah, and then Sherri Lynn grabbed the camper and said she was going to take it home, that it was hers and her Barbie should drive. And I told her fine, take it home, Christi and I would play with the motorcycle and the other Barbies. We didn't need her and her old camper anyway."

  "Did Christi agree?"

  "No, she wasn't sitting there anymore, but I knew she would side with me because Sherri Lynn is always pulling that, saying she'll take her Barbie stuff and go home."

  "If Christi wasn't there, where was she?" Hardesty asked.

  "I don't know."

  "You had to see her leave. She was sitting right across from you."

  "All I saw was, she got up and walked away, walked past us toward the fence, so she was behind me where I couldn't see."

  "She just got up and walked away?"

  "Yeah. I think … we were talking and she … she looked behind us, like there was something she was looking at and she put down the motorcycle and walked away."

  "What could she have been looking at?" Hardesty said. "There's nothing here but a rock fence."

  "I don't know."

  "You didn't turn around to see what she was looking at?" Brice asked.

  "That's when Sherri Lynn was saying my Barbie's dress was too big. But it wasn't either too big."

  "Did you hear anything? Maybe somebody was there, on the other side of the fence, and they said something?"

  She shook her head. "I just remember she looked up and got up and walked past us."

  "Did Christi say anything?" Hardesty asked.

  "Uh uh. But I think she was looking at something, somebody, maybe. On the other side of the fence. She must have been and she went up to them. That was when Sherri Lynn was threatening to take her camper home and I was mad!"

  "So you think it was a person standing there, someone Christi went to talk to, or maybe someone in a car on the street?

  "It was a car!" She brightened that she knew something. "I remember now. Christi got up and walked past us to the street when Sherri Lynn and I were arguing and I heard a car."

  "But you didn't see the car?"

  "No. I didn't even think about it until now, that there was a car, but there was because I heard the motor running."

  "Did you hear the car door close when Christi got in?"

  "I didn't hear a door. Just the motor."

  "If Christi got into a car, you'd have heard the door closing."

  "I didn't hear a car door close."

  "So … did Christi climb over the fence?"

  "I guess so. She must have, but I didn't see."

  Brice asked her more questions but could get no more information out of her. Hardesty was silent, adding details to the drawing he'd made in his notebook. Beth Ann had not turned to look where Christi had gone but maybe the other little girl had.

  He consulted briefly with Nakamura, and then — much to the distress of Mrs. Bradley — the two sets of officers traded places. Brice and Hardesty talked to Sherri Lynn Williamson, Nakamura and Gascoyne talked to Beth Ann.

  When they were finished, they compared notes.

  The two girls' stories were essentially the same. Neither child heard a car door close. Sherri Lynn didn't even remember hearing a car motor on the other side of the fence. But she did remember something Beth Ann didn't notice. She remembered that when Christi looked up past them, at whatever she saw behind them, she had smiled, had put down the toy motorcycle, and walked right by them.

  Then the officers tried to fit together the pieces of what the girls had seen so it made sense.

  Two hours later, it still didn't.

  "So we have a kid who walks into a rock wall and vanishes." Trimboli said. "Doesn't make a sound, doesn't say a word, just — poof!"

  "Nobody saw a car pull up beside the fence here," Gascoyne said. "We've asked maybe two hundred people so far and nobody remembers a car."

  "But the girls, well, one of them, says she heard a car motor." Brice said. "And she was sitting closest to the fence. The car could have pulled up and left in — what? If there was no conversation—"

  "Yeah, and why was there no conversation?" Trimboli interjected.

  "—the car could have pulled up and pulled away in … seconds," Brice said. "Could be why nobody noticed it."

  "It had to be a car, a vehicle of some kind," said Gomez. "She was there and then she wasn't; how else did she leave so fast?"

  "How did that kid get into a car without the other two little girls hearing a car door open or close?" Gascoyne argued.

  That was one of a handful of unanswerable questions they'd been grappling with all afternoon.

  "So the kid's sitting here, facing the fence and the street, and a car pulls up next to the fence," Nakamura said, then amended when Trimboli started to argue. "Beth Ann said she heard a car motor."

  Brice and the other agents nodded.

  "She gets up, walks past her friends to the fence and … what? Climbs over it, willingly, and then climbs in a car window?"

  "She had to have climbed the fence willingly," Hardesty said.

  He went to the fence, put his right foot on the edge of a rock about ten inches off the ground, and easily swung his other leg over the fence so he was seated on top of it, straddling it. Then he swung his left leg over and hopped to the ground.

  "So I'm in a car and I drive up next to the fence, really close." Hardesty feigned being in a car. "The kid's on the other side of the fence. How could I possibly get her into the car against her will? Say I could instantly incapacitate her, I can't just reach out and grab her, lift her over a fence and in a window! I'm a big guy, but that little girl weighed eighty-five, ninety pounds. There's no way somebody reached out a car window, grabbed her, hauled her off the ground — ninety pounds dangling at the end of your outstretched arms — over the fence and into a car. And she didn't make a peep."

  "Maybe it was a van, not a car," Trimboli offered.

  "Maybe it was a motorcycle or a motor scooter," Gomez said.
/>   "Or a yak," Gascoyne bleated.

  "Even if it was a van …" Hardesty took a couple of steps away from the fence toward the street and stretched his arms out toward it. "I couldn't reach out a van door and pick up that child, lift her over the fence, not from that angle."

  "Two kidnappers, then," Gomez put out there. "A team. One's walking along the fence, spots the little girls playing, signals his partner. The partner drives up beside the fence. One or the other of them gets Christi to come within grabbing distance, the guy on the ground chloroforms her, lifts her over the fence and dumps her into the car through an open window. That'd work. It would at least be possible. You'd still have to have a really strong guy, but it's possible."

  "So where does the second kidnapper go?" Nakamura asked. "Into the car with the little girl?"

  "Not unless he climbed in the window, too — no car door closing, remember," Gascoyne said. "He just keeps walking. Walking along … grabs the kid, throws her into the car, keeps right on walking."

  "So we're looking for a team of kidnappers. Two people — that nobody saw," Brice said. "Two kidnappers who snatched Riley off the playground … and nobody saw them there, either?”

  "What does it tell us about the kidnapper that he was so brazen?" Trimboli mused. "Grabbing a little boy off a school playground in broad daylight, then two days later a little girl out of a park only a few feet from her friends. If either of those little girls had so much as glanced …"

  "Whoever she went off with wasn't just someone she knew," Brice said. "It was someone she was glad to see, someone she liked and trusted. She didn't cry for help, didn't make a sound. She wanted to go."

  Nakamura stood. "I want to know the whereabouts starting at noon today of every adult in that kid's life," he said.

  Brice had his phone out, looking at the faces of the two missing children whose pictures were already in the hands of every police officer in five states. Serious Riley Campbell, grinning Christi Strickland. Nakamura looked with him.

  "I have to believe there's a connection, that those kids' lives intersect somewhere," the FBI agent said. "We have to find out who was in both their worlds."

  From the park, Nakamura took agents Gascoyne and Hardesty with him to talk to the Strickland family and their neighbors. Brice was dispatched back to the Campbells’ to look for a connection between the two families.

  As he settled himself behind the wheel, he couldn't help glancing at his watch. Riley Campbell had been missing for two days. Christi Strickland had vanished out of this crowded public park less than three hours ago.

  Christi's clock had started a countdown.

  Had Riley's clock already stopped?

  "You could smell it from the road," said Fire Chief Ben Aberdeen. "The stink of decomp." The big man stopped, took a long, gulping drink of the glass of ice water he'd brought with him from the kitchen.

  Bailey could see him mentally go there, to that day, June 25, 1997.

  "A squirrel hunter found the wreck. We were called out to an injury accident, that was all. We didn't know what had happened until we got there."

  He described standing at the top of the embankment, looking down at the car in a little creek at the bottom of the hillside.

  "There were two dead bodies in the car and they had been there at least … for days. Trooper Haggarty told me later that he had to shoo away the vultures so they could see into the vehicle."

  Aberdeen had asked why they'd called the ambulance, since it was obvious the victims were dead. Long dead. And the trooper told him that he'd gone down to the wreck, got close enough to see the bodies, started back up the hill and then spotted this little camper turned upside down, almost completely hidden in the bushes at the base of a sycamore tree.

  "He went to the camper, got down where he could look in a broken window and there was a body in it — a child. He couldn't see much — just a pink sneaker with a foot in it. But there was a big wasp nest on the ground right beside it, might have been knocked out of the tree when the camper hit it, and there were wasps swarming — he got stung twice just looking in the window and he backed out of there fast.

  "He didn't believe for a minute there was any chance the kid was alive, of course — still, he called us and the rescue squad. It was obvious she hadn't died in the wreck, had lived for some time afterwards because the other two, her parents, probably … those bodies were ripe.

  "The rescue squad pulled up right after we did. Their truck was in the shop and they were using an old fire department tanker. Hank Boward took a hose from the tanker down the hillside and trained it on that wasp nest. Washed it all the way down the hill into the creek and kept a stream of water on it while Bill Halsey and I grabbed the Jaws of Life — and two gas masks.

  "The little camper was smashed, crushed like a soft drink can, couldn't imagine anybody could have survived in there. The car wasn't more than fifty feet downhill from it, but you couldn't have seen the car from the camper." He paused. "You could have smelled it, though.

  "Bill used a break-and-rake and took out the little window, reached in to the shoe, and touched her leg. She was alive! Then we were all over it — Haggarty, Bill, my partner, Andy and me. Used the Jaws of Life to pry apart the camper the best we could, then the four of us — we bent the metal with our bare hands to open it up so we could get to her!

  "We had to dig. There was all this stuff around her — trash, opened cans of tuna and chips and — that's what the little girl'd been living on."

  When they'd cleared away enough of the mess, Aberdeen could see her face.

  "Her eyes were open, but she was just staring."

  The men maneuvered a spine board into the opening and carefully moved the little girl onto it.

  "I couldn't find any apparent injuries other than a head wound — there was a big lump and bruise on her forehead."

  The men carried the child on the spine board up the hill to the ambulance.

  "I started an IV, checked her vitals. She was in bad shape, heartrate fast and thready, breathing shallow. We hauled her into the back and blew out of there lights-and-siren to the hospital."

  He shuddered.

  "I was too busy trying to get her cleaned up, checking to make sure I didn't miss any injuries, I wouldn't let myself think about what she'd … Then they came running out with a stretcher from the emergency room and rushed her away. Haggarty, Andy and me were left standing there, just standing …"

  Another breath, then, "You get it, don't you?" He sounded belligerent, but it was just his emotion bleeding through. "That little girl was trapped in that camper with her dead parents fifty feet away — for days. Who knows how long. And wasps …"

  He got up then and headed out of the room, walking too fast. The three sat in silence in his office until the fire chief returned. He'd gotten control of himself. His face was wet where he'd splashed water in it.

  "I can't figure how hearing that helps you find Caitlyn Whitfield," he said. "But I did visit her in the hospital the next day, talked to the docs. They said I didn't miss any injuries. She didn't even have a concussion, just the bump. She had some other … issues, though, from being out there in that environment with bugs and … some infections, I think. They said she wasn't 'unconscious,' that she was catatonic. And I thought, 'Why wouldn't she be!'"

  He stopped again.

  "They'd cleaned her up, probably threw everything away but a little necklace and earrings — she had pierced ears. Little yellow flowers. And they'd taken the hair ties off her braids, washed her hair and brushed it and it was clean, all fanned out on the pillow around her face. So blonde it was almost white. She looked like … an angel. As I was leaving her room, her grandparents came in."

  "Do you remember their names?" T.J. asked and the fire chief shook his head.

  "They were really torn up, said they'd lost a son so their last name was probably Whitfield."

  The parents had reported the family missing. David Whitfield had told the owner of the camper he borr
owed that they were going to the Smokey Mountains, so that's where authorities had searched for them.

  "The next day, I went back. Caitlyn was still in pretty bad shape. You lay unmoving … in an environment like that and … Out in the hallway, a woman came up to me, somebody'd pointed me out, I guess, and she wanted to thank me. Said she was Caitlyn's aunt."

  Did you get her name?" T.J. asked.

  Bailey remembered what Katydid had said about playing in the creek behind her aunt's house.

  "It was Ellen," Bailey said, and everyone turned to look at her. "A last name, though … and where does she live — do you know?"

  "Summerville, Ohio. I remember because my grandparents lived in Winterville — which is only about twenty miles from there. Summerville only had about a thousand residents when I used to visit, and that was counting the dogs and chickens. The phone book was the size of a comic book — but there were five or six pages full of Mattinglys. That was odd and I remember. So Mattingly would be a good guess." He paused. "Of course, who knows now? That was decades ago."

  Chapter Nineteen

  "Anybody got any ideas?" T.J. tossed the question out into the car as Bailey drove them out of Hemphill toward Kavanaugh County. No one responded.

  They rode along in silence, the only sound the hum of the tires on the road.

  "Brice gave me the picture of Riley and I went to that place, wherever or whatever it is, and what I found there was Caitlyn Whitfield." Bailey's voice was a little too shrill. "Why? It's not a coincidence. There has to be a reason."

  "Far as I know, my mama didn't never try to paint one of them pictures. That was the last thing she wanted to do. Maybe when you try to paint somethin', try to make that connection, it gets all messed up and don't work right."

  "And so you just paint some random scene?" Bailey said. "Okay, let's run with that. How is painting a dead child—"

  "Catatonic child."

  "—from a car wreck eighteen years ago random? Of all the possible things, events, people there would be to paint, why that? Why her? There's some connection to … something. To Riley … or the school … or …"