by Ninie Hammon
"Why would somebody bring her here and leave her lying on the floor?"
But neither woman has an answer.
The pain in T.J.’s leg was worse than the pain in his hand. Way worse. He hadn't seen the spider that bit him, but even if he had … pro'lly wouldn't a'recognized it. Who knew what kinds of spiders Melody's wealth had been able to purchase to stock this nightmare world. He could feel himself reactin' to the new venom, could feel his chest gettin' tight, makin' it hard to breathe, could feel his heart start to hammerin', knew his blood pressure was spikin' so high if there was any weak spots in the blood vessels in his brain he'd have a blowout.
His stomach was starting to ache, too. Like cramps. No, not cramps — one long cramp that tightened painfully and never let go.
Even if what had bitten him didn't deliver a fatal amount of venom, if T.J. didn't get out of here, get Bailey out of here, the accumulation of bites would do 'em in as surely as a single bite of somethin' deadly. How many spider bites would it take 'fore you suffered some kinda fatal reaction, even if it was an allergic one? Half a dozen? A dozen?
He yanked Bailey off the wall where she'd been leanin' in order to remain upright. There was bugs crawling on her — some spiders, too, but she wasn't even trying to brush 'em off. Just stood there.
"Bailey, you all right?"
She didn't respond. Didn't appear to have heard him.
"We gotta keep goin', keep movin'."
She seemed to really see him for a moment, then her eyes went blank again and he knew she was somewhere else entirely. The constant connections was unhinging her. Wasn't nobody could keep hold of their sanity if they was constantly lookin' into the heads of other people. Insane people. Or other things.
And he acknowledged the reality that Bailey made an "off-limits" subject among her friends a long time ago. A no-fly zone, nobody was 'lowed to cruise anywhere near it. But truth was Bailey Donahue had a bullet in her brain! A bump on the head could kill her. Or not. She'd survived lots of bumps and lumps in the months since she'd put that pistol to her temple and pulled the trigger. But those was physical blows. What about emotional, psychological blows? How many of those could she stand?
He had to get her out of here fast or might not be no Bailey left to rescue.
Yankin' her roughly along beside him, he crossed the theatre box, climbed up the slanted walkway to the next one and crossed it, too. He didn't know what it was that'd distracted Melody … Shannuck … but whatever it was, he hoped it continued to distract her.
"Bailey, you with me, sugar?"
No response.
He dared to pause for a moment, turned to her, took her shoulders and shook her hard as he dared. Her head lolled back and forth on her shoulders like she was a broken doll. He hated to slap her again, but …
Then present-ness came into her eyes. She focused. Saw him.
"Shannuck killed an orderly in the hospital, then climbed down a laundry chute," she said, spoke like somebody'd just got out of the dentist office and they mouth was still kinda numb. No, it was more like she was havin' to translate her words into a foreign language, conjugate the verbs and recall the words for "orderly" and "hospital."
"Try to stay here with me. Can you do that?"
"Try. Yes. But …" She just looked at him, helplessly, like she couldn't form the words to keep talking.
"We're goin' up in the elevator." He turned to point to the metal cage at floor level below them. He pointed up then, into the gloom of the ceiling. "The elevator opens up in that turret—"
Bailey grunted. Just grunted. He turned back to her and saw a spider on her neck. It was huge, gray and hairy, and he thought it might be a wolf spider. He slapped it off, knocked it to the floor and stomped it out of anger, smashed it under his foot. Then he looked back at Bailey, into her face.
"Bit me." She said it like she was reading the ingredients label on a bottle of hot sauce.
He grabbed her arm, hurriedly dragged her across the last of the box balconies to the circular staircase that led down from it to the dance floor. He plunged into the blackness, scooting his hand along the railing quickly, knocking aside the living things, staggering down the stairs way faster than it was safe to take them, dragging an almost catatonic woman along with him. Around and around. He fell twice. If it'd been a normal staircase, the two of them would have tumbled head-over-heels all the way to the bottom, but the circular railing rose up in a cage around them.
Staggering out into the awful red glow of the ballroom, he took off at his closest approximation of a dead run, hauling Bailey along behind him, toward the metal cage elevator affixed to the wall. He fumbled at the door catch, found it, shoved the door inward and pushed Bailey inside.
Would the elevator work? Or had Melody disconnected it?
He closed the door behind them with a soft clanging sound, dropped the bar across it that prevented it from opening in transit, then turned to the box on the back wall with a green button and a red one. He was about to punch he green one when Bailey squeaked out an incoherent sound. He looked where she was looking — at the big double doors at the other side of the room. One of them had begun to open slowly. The spider thing entered first. She was dragging something across the floor behind her.
Lucas Ferrigliano opened the door of the O'Halloran cabin and stepped out onto the porch. Then he just stood there with his hands at his sides.
"Clasp your fingers together behind your head," Nakamura called out through the bullhorn.
The boy slowly raised his hands in the air in surrender, but didn't clasp them behind his head. Then he started walking slowly across the porch.
"I said clasp your fingers behind your head."
The boy continued in measured strides across the porch and started down the steps.
"You going to arrest me or not?"
He got to the stone walkway and started out across it.
"Lie down on the ground, face down, your hands straight out to your sides."
"Come on, cuff me."
Lucas didn't put his hands behind his head and he didn't lie down on the ground. He just kept walking.
"Stop right where you are. Lie down—"
"You want me, come and get—"
The boy started to reach behind his back to pull the pistol he'd stuck down the waistband of his jeans.
Brice sprang off the porch behind him and tackled him.
After Nakamura'd called Lucas to tell him it was safe for him to come out and surrender, he signaled Brice. It would take the boy thirty seconds — at a dead run — to make it from the fire watchtower on top of the house to the front door, and he wouldn't likely be running.
That gave Brice plenty of time to jump out of the bushes east of the house and bolt across the open grass to the building. He leapt over the railing on the wraparound porch and was waiting at the edge of the house to pounce before the kid had time to draw his weapon.
Brice had six inches and sixty pounds on Lucas Ferrigliano and the boy collapsed under him, slammed into the ground hard, groaned and then began to cry.
Straddling the boy, Brice pulled the pistol out of the waistband of Lucas's jeans and tossed it on the ground out of his reach, then he pulled his hands behind his back and cuffed him. He stood and was pulling the boy to his feet when Nakamura stepped up beside him.
"Where's the little girl?" Nakamura demanded.
"What little girl?" Lucas was sobbing.
"Baby Girl."
"My dog?"
Several of Brice's deputies and three FBI agents had dashed into the house as soon as Lucas hit the ground. As Fletcher started inside, Brice called to him. "There's a security camera. Find the playback recorder."
"You're under arrest for—" Nakamura looked at Brice. "How many officers altogether?"
"Twenty-six."
"For twenty-six counts of attempted murder of a police officer."
The number was actually nine times twenty-six, one count for every shot he'd fired.
&nbs
p; Before Nakamura had completed rattling off the other charges, Agent Hardesty appeared in the doorway.
"Clear," he said. "Nobody's in here."
As he spoke, an old border collie moved slowly out the door beside him, down the steps and came to sit at the boy's feet.
"Where's Riley Campbell?" Nakamura asked Lucas.
The crying boy lifted his head.
"I didn't touch him. I swear. You have to find him — ask him. He'll tell you I never laid a finger on him."
"Christi Strickland — what did you do with her?"
"I don't know anybody named Christi Strickland."
"And the little girl you took from the mall this afternoon — where is she?"
"What little girl?"
"At 2:30 this afternoon you snatched a little girl out of a basket in Your Style Your Way. You slipped her into the back of your CRV parked behind the pizza parlor."
"I was here at 2:30. I've been here all day. When I was leaving for work this morning, I heard the FBI agents on the Campbells' porch saying that when a kidnapper takes a second child, the first … Not Riley, oh please no, not Riley. You have to find Riley. Please, please find him. If you don't, nobody will ever believe I didn't …"
His tears turned into great heaving sobs then and he stood with his hands cuffed behind his back, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Fletch stepped to the doorway.
"I've got the playback ready."
Brice instructed two deputies to take Lucas to a patrol car while he and Nakamura went into the cabin to a small room off the pantry where a wall-mounted monitor was paused on a frozen shot of the porch on the side of the house and the gravel driveway beyond it.
"I've got it cued up to what you'll want to see," Fletch said and hit the play button. "I fast-forwarded through. The vehicle never moved after it pulled up. This is the last image until we got here."
The camera showed the bottom portion of a red vehicle — halfway down the door and the tires — as it pulled up the driveway. Then feet. Then the boy came into view, walked up the steps to the door. He was alone except for the old border collie that padded along beside him. He stood there, punching in the numbers on the lockbox that held the house key.
Nakamura said something under his breath Brice didn't hear.
"What?"
"Look at the time stamp."
Brice looked more closely at the frozen image and the gray letters on the bottom of the screen: 10:31:40. The boy had arrived at the house that morning. And unless he'd walked into town, he couldn't have been at the mall when the little deaf girl was snatched out of her mother's shopping cart.
Brice and Nakamura stood up from the screen at the same time and the FBI agent nodded toward the window where the boy could be seen in the back of a patrol car, still sobbing.
"Maybe he really hadn't touched Riley Campbell," Brice said.
"Not yet, anyway. He would have eventually, though. They always do." Nakamura paused. "We'll probably never know."
An acknowledgement. He didn't expect to find Riley Campbell alive. Neither did Brice.
Nakamura dug at his bloodshot eyes.
"I'll ride back into town with Hardesty to brief the other agents."
Reinforcements from Pittsburgh. They would intensify the investigation, question every human being in the lives of all three children. Go down every conceivable rabbit hole, however unlikely. Maybe someone only wanted one of the children and the other kidnappings were a smokescreen. Maybe there was more than one kidnapper. Stranger kidnapping was rare, despite all the cop show plots to the contrary. But more than one stretched the bounds of possibility. Still …
Of course, Riley Campbell blew all the theories out of the water. If a stranger had somehow fixated on that particular little boy, there were dozens of easier places to snatch him than off a school playground. Why at school? And how at school? The other kidnap locations were difficult; the school was impossible. Brice was convinced that the missing piece to all the puzzles was there. The thought triggered the feeling he'd had before all else was shoved aside in the pursuit and capture of Lucas Ferrigliano. A niggling itch, a feeling in his gut that he had missed something at the mall. But he couldn't grab hold of it before it vanished like smoke from a dying campfire. He was too tired. Perhaps the best thing the new phalanx of FBI agents could provide was fresh eyes on what they already knew. Every mother's child who'd been working on this case was fried.
Nakamura looked at his watch, and when he looked up at Brice their eyes locked. Understanding passed between them that needed no words.
Marley Ewing had been missing for almost three hours.
Brice's tired mind didn't want to do the math, but the numbers appeared anyway.
Christi Strickland had been missing for more than twenty-four hours.
And Riley Campbell … three days. Three. Days.
Brice walked slowly to his cruiser, inhaling the fresh smell of coming rain as he pulled out his phone to check his messages. He stopped where he was when he spotted the voicemail from Bailey.
"The private investigator found her, found Caitlyn Whitfield." Her voice was full of excitement, awe and wonder. "She's alive! Dobbs'll forward you the whole report and you better be sitting down when you read it. Brice, Caitlyn Whitfield grew up to be … Melody McCallum. No, I am not making that up. Melody McCallum. I plan to have a loooong talk with that woman!"
He hit replay, listened again, certain he'd misunderstood—
Melody McCallum.
He stood dumfounded, trying to get his mind around it, then listened a third time as he got into his cruiser.
… Dobbs'll forward you the whole report …
Scanning down through his emails, he clicked on one that had come in from Dobbs, opened the attached report and read it.
Then he read it through a second time.
Chapter Forty-Five
T.J. watched Melody McCallum scuttle spider-like across the open floor, her body distorted and misshapen, hunched over, her arms and legs double-jointed. She was draggin' a silver package like the other plastic-wrapped pouches that held the bodies of three murdered children sealed inside. This one was a lot bigger, though he couldn't get a good look at it from here.
Slippin' a loop of the rope attached to one end of the package around her shoulder, the Melody-spider thing grabbed the lowest-hanging piece of rigging and started climbin', a spider skittering 'cross a web, carryin' a sack of—
T.J. froze.
Bailey screamed — shock and terror and grief like he woulda screamed, too, if he could have. If his mouth hadn't suddenly been welded shut, his jaw froze like he'd been hit by a taser.
The body the woman spider was draggin' across the webbing wasn't wrapped up all the way like them kids' bodies, head-to-toe like leftovers in the refrigerator sealed in a silver glaze of the Saran Wrap. This body was only wrapped from the shoulders down. Above that was visible.
It was Dobbs.
"Is he …?" Bailey whispered voice was anguished.
"Dead?"
He couldn't believe he'd said the word. 'Cause wasn't no way Dobbs was dead. That was as impossible as the sun fallin' into the ocean with a sizzzzz sound. Couldn't happen.
Yeah, it could. T.J. was a Marine. A soldier. He'd gone into battle with many a friend who didn't deserve to have his head blown apart by a sniper or his gut ripped open by an IED.
But … Dobbs?
Then T.J. saw movement.
Dobbs was dangling upside down from the rope as the spider creature hauled him upward into the web and T.J. seen his head turn! Seen him look around. He was alive.
Alive right now.
But for how long?
Raymond Dobson weighed 270 pounds if he weighed an ounce and if Melody McCallum weighed more than 110 T.J. was a dill pickle. But there she was, carryin' Dobbs's body up rope spiderwebs like he was made outta paper mache.
T.J. had to do something.
What?
Clearly, she'd overpowered D
obbs, not that that was much of an accomplishment. Though Dobbs was big, he wasn't particularly strong. But even if the man coulda bench-pressed a Buick, no human could match the strength of a spider. Unarmed, all of 'em together wouldn't stand a chance 'gainst the beast. T.J. had to get outta here and get a weapon. He had a "Colt 1911" pistol, a favorite of Marine old-timers, in the glove box of his car. A bullet between the eyes would drop the creature — whether it was a first-grade teacher or a human spider.
That was the only hope for Dobbs or Bailey, the only chance all three of them had to survive. T.J. had to shoot that thing.
He turned and punched the green button on the back wall of the elevator. It lurched, but made no sound, just started risin' slowly up the wall toward the opening at the top that led outside. Unless she'd sealed that, too.
The elevator had been designed to give the occupants a panoramic view of the ballroom, where ladies in evenin' gowns and gentlemen in tuxes whirled 'round and 'round in the sparklin', kaleidoscopic light show of the big chandelier. To make that view last as long as possible, the metal box literally inched up toward the ceiling.
The spider creature stopped halfway up the web rigging and 'tached the rope tied to the cellophane capsule holdin' Dobbs.
Left him there hangin'.
Upside down.
The human body was designed for the heart to pump blood from the legs up the body, but not in the opposite direction. Hangin' upside down 'lowed the blood to pool in the brain. T.J. had read ‘bout triathletes and the like decidin' to dangle themselves upside down for various periods of time — for hours even. Dobbs's overweight body couldn't take that kind of trauma. The increased pressure of the blood would eventually cause swelling severe enough to do brain damage. Or kill him.
Every moment that he just dangled there …
As soon as the spider creature'd secured Dobbs to the netting, it skittered up into the gloom above and vanished. Had to be an entrance up there somewhere into the ceiling, some way to get outta here when she’d heard Dobbs at the door.
