by Blake Pierce
The important thing was that she was starting to feel good about the case. They were definitely heading somewhere, and she didn’t think one more stop by a local’s home would derail them at all.
Besides, it was still early. Depending on the length of DeMarco’s Skype call, she figured they could be in Richmond by noon. And if Kate could be in the same city where their likely guilty part was currently being housed and where her daughter was wrestling with having just dodged a scary situation, Kate would consider that a win.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Kate was fully expecting no one to be home. She arrived at Jack Kramer’s house at 8:40, figuring he was probably at work—at the body detail shop that Bill of Bill’s Tire had seemed to scoff at. But when she pulled into the small gravel driveway, she saw a single truck parked in the driveway. The house itself was rustic and simple and, like a lot of the trailers tucked just off of the back roads, looked like it was just a few years from falling in on itself.
The lawn looked as if it had been freshly cut and that was about the only positive thing she could say about the property. Out to the back, the yard stopped suddenly, overtaken by weeds for several yards before the forest took over. An old doghouse sat to the side of the yard, along with what looked like a few old lengths of copper wire.
Kate walked up onto the thin porch. The wood was partially dry rotted. A wasp nest clung to the far corner, thankfully quiet. Kate knocked on the door and it sounded like the door was just as weak and rotted as some of the boards of the porch.
She heard footfalls approaching quickly—so quickly that she could feel the reverberations through the old porch boards. The door opened about halfway, a man of about forty or so peering out at her. He wore no shirt and his hair was wet, indicating that he had just gotten out of the shower. He looked perplexed to see a woman standing there in front of him—and even more off his game when she showed him her identification.
“I’m Agent Kate Wise, FBI,” she said. “I’m in town investigating a man that I’m told you recently had a physical altercation with.”
His eyes suddenly seemed to focus and his posture relaxed a bit. “Nick Sanders?” he asked.
“That’s the one.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. That asshole is a mess. And believe me…I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“Do you have a few minutes?”
“Sure. I don’t have to clock in until ten.”
He opened the door the rest of the way but made sure to always have his eyes on her when she entered. He simply stared at her for a moment as she stepped through the doorway and into the living room. After an awkward silence, he seemed to realize for the first time that he didn’t have a shirt on.
“Let me grab a shirt,” he said, hurrying off through the living room elsewhere into the house.
Kate used the opportunity to look around the living room, trying to get a better gauge on the sort of man Jack Kramer might be. He had an older model television sitting on an entertainment center that had seen better years. There were a few DVDs scattered around it, mostly action titles. The house had the smell of a place that had not seen a good cleaning in a while but there wasn’t too much clutter. From where she stood in the living room, she saw a hallway to the right—where Jack had disappeared about thirty seconds ago—and the opening to the kitchen to her left.
Jack came back into the room, looking a little embarrassed. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Now, what do you need to know about Nick Sanders?”
“Well, he’s the prime suspect in a case my partner and I are working on. We’re finding out some things about him from just about everywhere. And before we have a solid case against him, we need to find out every detail about his time here in Duck Branch.”
“Well, he came in as a worker for Bill a few years ago from what I heard. I was in between jobs earlier last year and Bill took me on. The job sort of stuck and I ended up staying there for a pretty good amount of time. But the whole time I was there, Nick just got on my damned nerves. He’s just that’s kind of guy. Really unlikable, you know?”
“Anything in particular?”
“Well, he was a hard worker, I’ll give him that. But he also had this holier than thou thing going…which made no sense to me because he was clearly always high or drunk or something. I will say this, though…there was one day where he just randomly opened up to me about his wife dying. A heroin overdose, he said.”
“Did he ever mention any other family members?” Kate asked.
“You know, he did. And I just thought it was him trying to make up this other life. Sort of trying to make us think he was important. He told us about some daughter he had that had gotten away. He said she’d gone missing or something. Talked about how he was going to get her back, make up with his other daughter, too, and start a new life. He’d get emotional over it, but not in the way a normal person would. He’d get violent. Kicking tires, punching cars, things like that. Honestly, he’s just a scary dude.”
“And you felt he was just making it all up?”
“I did.”
“Mr. Kramer, can you tell me what the fight was about a few months back?”
It was the first time Kramer came off as uneasy. He looked to the floor for a moment, a trick Kate had seen multiple times from people who were simply trying to buy time. It wasn’t a hard equation; she knew that Nick had been doing hard drugs and selling them as well. It wasn’t a stretch to assume that Jack Kramer might have been one of his customers.
“I assure you, I am only here to find out information about Mr. Sanders. Anything you may have been involved with concerning him will not be held against you.”
Jack eyed her skeptically and let out a sigh. “I loaned him some money. Well, I didn’t loan it to him…I gave him some to score me some pot. He said he could get the really good stuff, you know?”
Kate was fairly certain that Nick Sanders didn’t waste his time with pot, but she let it slide. “Did he cheat you?”
“Yeah. He basically stole the money from me and didn’t do much to even deny it. Things got heated when I confronted him and we started throwing punches.”
“Is that why you quit working for Bill?” Kate asked.
“Partly. I had been talking to the people at my new place of employment for quite a while. The pay is about the same and I have to drive a bit farther but at least I wouldn’t have to put up with Nick.”
“When he mentioned his family, do you know what he meant when he said he had a daughter that had gotten away?”
“No. But I figured if he was telling the truth at all—which I honestly still doubt—he meant she had gotten lost in the foster system or something. I can’t quite imagine Nick Sanders being a father.”
“Any other altercations between the two of you?”
“No. That was it. I mean we’d argue over work stuff but that was about it. When he wasn’t being all pissy and violent, he kept to himself. A moody sort of guy. Just…I don’t know. He’s not the kind of guy you’d want to hang around with, you know?”
Kate nodded. She did know. She was beginning to get a very good picture into who Nick Sanders was and the more she learned, the more she started to wonder if he had indeed killed Wendy and Alvin Fuller in order to get his daughter back.
“I’ll let you finish getting ready for work, Mr. Kramer,” she said. “Thank you for your time.”
Jack rushed to the door, doing his best to show courtesy by opening the door for her. Kate smiled and made her exit, walking back down the rickety old porch steps. Her mind was already in Richmond, ready to put Nick Sanders away and return to her normal life as soon as she could.
She got into her car and put the keys into the ignition. Before she could turn them, though, something started to churn in her heart. And with it, an inner voice that she had heard before, blaring almost like an alarm.
Wait. Hold on…
She dropped her hand away from the keys and looked to the house. Had she missed someth
ing? Her instincts certainly felt that she had. But Jack Kramer checked out. There was no reason for her to investigate him further. If anything, he had given her more nails to slam into Nick Sanders’ coffin.
Kate shook the feeling off and started the car. The engine revved and although her mind still reeled toward Richmond she could not help but feel something here had been forgotten.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Mercy could hear footsteps walking outside, and then the sound of a car door opening and closing. She was pretty sure there was a woman driving it. Moments ago, she’d thought she’d heard a woman’s voice, very faint as she spoke to her captor.
No, Mercy thought. Please. Help.
She tried to actually give voice to these thoughts but the tape was too tight over her mouth.
Don’t start the car, Mercy thought. Don’t leave, don’t go…
But then Mercy heard the engine start. She closed her eyes and screamed against the tape. The muted sound rattled in her head until it ached, until it felt like her head would split right in two from the force of it.
Mercy tried to make sense of what was going on. Her captor must have some sort of plan for her, a plan that he kept changing. Last night, he had let her inside and gave her dinner. Cornbread, tomato soup, bacon, and a Coke. She’d eaten so much that she’d nearly gotten sick. He’d invited her to sleep in his house, in his bed, assuring her that he would not rape her. When she had asked instead to sleep on the couch, he’d lost his mind. He’d slapped her hard enough to bust her lip all over again and then ended up giving her his bed while he slept on the couch. He had tied her legs together so she could not escape and had kept his rifle by the couch just in case she managed to walk through the house with any ideas of escape.
But then this morning, he hadn’t said a word to her. He had allowed her to eat a bowl of Cheerios and then hauled her out to the barn. There, he’d duct-taped her mouth and then taped her wrists together. He did it all in a hurry and she had prayed the entire time that he’d make a mistake. But no…he had been thorough. Her legs were tied together with just a little slack and her wrists were bound in front of her—the one thing she thought he might have screwed up on because with her bound arms in front of her, she was at least a bit more mobile than she would have been if he had taped them behind her back.
He had been working with the lock on the old trailer at the back of the barn when he heard the car turn onto his driveway. That’s when he’d thrown her to the ground, apparently not feeling that he had time to mess with the busted old lock on the trailer. He’d gone to the side of the barn, bent down, and opened up what looked like a trapdoor. He had grabbed her up and nearly thrown her down the shallow set of stairs. She’d hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She’d also twisted her right wrist in the fall and it currently ached like hell. Before slamming the hidden door shut, he had looked down at her and said the first words of the morning to her.
“You try coming out and doing anything stupid, I’ll rape you and then kill you. Slow. You’ll beg for the rifle.”
She had believed him but had still tried waddling to the trapdoor. There was a catch on it, but it was bent and warped. She was pretty sure she could just push it open. But then what? Her legs and arms were still tied up. As she studied it and tried to come up with a plan, she could hear the engine of the car. It was fading away as it pulled away, back out toward the road.
Mercy collapsed backward, her legs giving out. For a moment, she was afraid a rush of Cheerios and milk were going to come up out of her stomach, blocked by the tape and ultimately gagging her. But she managed to keep it all down. She focused on her breathing and stared up at the cracks in the floor overhead. Dirty little rays of light spilled in, illuminating the dirt floor of what she assumed had once been a cellar of some kind.
I’m going to die here, she thought. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but I don’t think he’s going to let me go. Maybe at one point he had planned on it…but I think something has changed. I’m going to die here. The only question is if it will be a slow or a quick death.
Staring up at those boards, Mercy Fuller started to cry for the comfort of a mother she knew was no longer alive. Through the tears, she could no longer hear the car outside, moving further toward the road, the driver oblivious to the young girl trapped in the barn just seventy-five yards to her right.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Kate hit the brake pedal hard enough to jolt her. Through the course of her long career, she had only felt an instinctual tug like this twice before. It was almost like a strange surge of déjà vu, a knowledge that there was something here that she should be recognizing. It was a feeling of something being incomplete…of something important just out of her reach.
The back end of her car was less than two feet from the back road that would take her back to the main highway through Duck Branch. She looked back toward Jack Kramer’s house, wondering why she felt so drawn to it.
“Because you missed something,” she said out loud. “But what?”
Her heart felt like it was beating straight up into her throat as she put the car back into Drive and crept back up Jack’s driveway. This time, she did not focus on the driveway itself or the house sitting at the end of it. She kept her eyes on the edges of the yard, in the tree line and in the tall grass around the edges of the property.
And just like that, she saw what she had missed.
Just off to the right side of the house, partially hidden by tall grass and a bit of deadfall and woodland debris, was an old barn. It looked like a horse barn, complete with the second story up in the rafters. A black hole of an ancient window looked out onto the yard. The barn itself did not look all that ominous. After all, this was the South; hundreds of old structures like this sat all across fields and wooded lots.
But sitting right there, like a ghost on the property of a man who had thrown punches with Nick Sanders, made it a bit more relevant. It wasn’t that Kate had not physically seen it upon arriving; she had simply let it blur into the surroundings because she had been so hyper-focused on returning to Richmond to wrap this case and get back to Melissa.
She stopped her car along the side of the driveway. It was still in view of Jack Kramer’s house, but he’d really have to make an effort to look for it through his front windows. Before getting out of the car, she texted DeMarco, just in case she was about to make a mistake. She sent the text and then got out of the car. She stayed along the edge of the driveway until she came to the yard. There, she clung to the tree line, hunkering down in the tall grass as she moved toward the barn.
As she reached it, she saw old pieces of lumber scattered in the weeds. There were also old tractor parts and rusted tools strewn about. She looked back to the house, saw that there was no sign of Jack, and tried the barn door. Given the age of the barn and the condition of most of the boards that comprised its structure, Kate was not all that surprised to find that the door opened easily. It creaked a bit on its hinges but opened up without a problem.
She stepped inside and within two seconds of looking around, felt that her instincts had led her down the right path once again.
There was an old storage trailer at the back of the barn, the kind that was often pulled behind trucks when people were moving but did not need an entire U-Haul. The rest of the barn looked practically boring in comparison.
The trailer’s door was the rolling kind, similar to a garage door. It was held in place along the back end, just below a small step and what looked to have once served as a bumper. The lock itself was an old Masterlock, battered and scratched up. It was also unlocked, the U-shaped clasp placed into the latch at the bottom of the door, but opened.
Kate removed the lock as quietly as she could, sliding it up out of the latch and setting it on the bumper. She placed her fingers inside the small groove that served as the handle and pushed up. The door slid up easily enough but it squeaked along its track. It wasn’t too loud, but loud enough to cause Kate
concern. Jack would not hear it from inside, but if he happened to be out in his yard, there was a chance it would have reached his ears.
She didn’t bother opening the door all the way, not wanting to make any more noise if she didn’t have to. She peered inside and again saw that her instincts were spot on.
In the back of the trailer, she saw several empty wrappers. They were clear and plastic, with an orange design. From the back of the trailer, Kate could see enough to know that they were the wrappers to snack crackers. A few empty water bottles were back there as well. As stealthily as she could, Kate crawled into the trailer and investigated the trash. Unlike the trailer and the lock, the wrapper and the bottles were not old. In fact, there were still a few drops of water sitting in the bottom of one of the bottles.
These had not been in here for any longer than a few days. The still-orange cracker crumbs in the trailer floor were further proof of this.
Kate turned and stepped out of the trailer. It was far too easy to imagine Mercy Fuller in there, eating those crackers and drinking that water. But nothing seemed to line up. Why would a man who worked with Nick Sanders have any reason to abduct his daughter?
You can get those answers later, she thought. For now, get what answers you can from the creep that lives here.
Kate took quick and quiet steps to the bran door, drawing her Glock. It was eerie how easily the motion came back to her—and how comfortable she felt with it in her hands. She slipped out of the barn door and stayed low, crouched in the tall grass. She inched her way along until she was square with the backyard. A screen door sat along the back, above a set of old wooden stairs.
She had no way of telling where Nick was inside of the house, so she was just going to have to make a run for it. If he saw her, it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. After all, she was armed.
