by Alex Grecian
Travis picked himself up and went to Donnie’s body, Bear padding silently along behind him. He knelt and felt for a pulse in Donnie’s throat. It was there, and steady. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Goodman’s number.
“I could use some assistance,” he said when the sheriff picked up.
He gave his location and cut the connection, sat on the broken blacktop and beckoned for his tired dog. He made Bear lie down, cradled his head in his lap, and waited.
7
Sheriff Goodman ended the call and went looking for Skottie. She was on the phone, pacing up and down in her bedroom, grabbing guns out of her safe and throwing them on her bed. She pulled the phone away from her ear and said, “Just a second, Ryan.” She gave Goodman a questioning look, and he could see that her wide eyes were red-rimmed, her skin puffy, her hands shaking.
“That was the doc,” Goodman said. “He caught the other kid. I’m gonna go pick him up.”
“Did he find out anything about my daughter?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We need to get going. Do you have any idea what Maddy’s going through right now?”
“No, ma’am, and neither do you. Thinking about the worst of it … Well, it might not be as bad as you think anyway. Not yet. You’re better off rounding up as many people as you can to help find her.”
“That’s what I’m doing. The Highway Patrol’s putting out an APB. Who else do you know who can help?”
Goodman could tell she was close to hyperventilating. He reached out to put his hands on her shoulders, then pulled back. “Well, shit, I ain’t much good to you. I got my best deputy on his way already, but he’s the only one I trust. Burden County ain’t all that big, but a lot of the people there are likely in that church or have family there. And everybody’s related to everybody. I don’t know who else I can call. Hell, the bad guys got people in my family, in my department … I don’t even know I can trust my wife right now. Don’t tell her I said that.”
“I don’t know—”
“Listen, they’re not too far away. They’re probably not expecting us to be on ’em yet, and they’re gonna be going slow. If I’m right, they won’t wanna get pulled over with what they got in the back of that truck. We got a little time to prepare. We might catch ’em with my Crown Vic or your Explorer, but maybe think about who’s got the fastest car you know and give him a call. I’ll be right back with the doc. It’s gonna be okay. I promise.”
He tipped his hat and turned away, hoping she hadn’t seen the doubt in his eyes.
8
They took Donnie to the emergency room at Hays Medical Center.
“A stray dog mauled him,” Travis said. “It came out of nowhere.”
“It mighta been a wolf,” Goodman said. “Should probably treat him for rabies. All the injections.”
The on-duty nurse gave Travis a clipboard with a form to fill out. He set it on an empty chair, and when no one was looking, he and Goodman left.
By the time they made it back to Emmaline’s house, Deputy Quincy Griffith had arrived with a giant thermos of coffee. It was his night off, but he had jumped in his patrol car as soon as Goodman called him and had made record time getting to Hays. Quincy took Emmaline’s two captives to the Ellis County sheriff’s office with instructions that they were to be held for the holiday and would be picked up after the weekend for transfer to Burden County. Quincy promised to return as soon as possible.
When she saw Bear, Emmaline took him by the scruff of the neck to the bathroom.
“Let’s get him cleaned up, and I’ll take a look at that cut,” she said.
Skottie came down the back hall, her phone calls complete and her arms full of the guns she had taken from her bedroom safe.
“We’re wasting time,” she said. “I think I have enough weapons here for all of us.”
“I have a few more in the back of the sheriff’s car,” Travis said.
“This boy went on quite a little shopping trip tonight,” Goodman said. “Pretty near cleaned out the sporting goods department.”
“Travis, I know you want to find your dad,” Skottie said.
“My father would be disappointed in me if I did not help you.”
“Thank you,” Skottie said. “We’re gonna get Maddy back tonight.”
“You find a fast car?” Goodman said.
“Better than that. I remembered I know a guy with an airplane.”
November 2018
Ransom was nodding off in his rocking chair when he heard the door handle. Rudy came in and closed the door behind him and looked around the tiny room as if he had never seen it before. They were in one of the sheds that lined the inside of the church’s fence. The books on the shelf next to the door had titles like Stay Invisible, Black Like Them, Dark Matters, but Ransom had no desire to read them. He wasn’t sure he could read them if he wanted to. He spent most of his time watching shadows on the wall and thinking about his children.
Rudy sat across from him on the edge of one of the two bottom bunks, propping his cane between his legs. He watched Ransom rock back and forth. Ransom couldn’t help it; he needed to rock all the time or he felt anxious. His fingertips tingled, and the side of his head burned where the half-moon incision was beginning to heal.
“Didn’t sleep?” Rudy said. “I understand. I don’t sleep much myself.”
Ransom glared at him.
“How are we today?” Rudy said.
Ransom didn’t answer. He formed several responses, but his mouth wouldn’t make the words.
Fuck you, he meant to say.
If I could move any faster, I would kill you.
Wait until my sons get their hands on you.
He said none of this, but he took some satisfaction from the apparent fact that Rudy didn’t know he could still think clearly. Whatever Rudy had done to him, Ransom was still whole inside. It was just that his brain couldn’t communicate very well with his body.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m very proud of you,” Rudy said. “I can’t call you a complete success, but our time together has taught me a great deal. If you could understand my work, you might even thank me for allowing you to be a part of it.”
“Fuck,” Ransom said. He grinned, proud to have blurted out the one word that summed up all his feelings.
“Probably not,” Rudy said. He leaned back and stroked his beard. “I don’t imagine you’ll be doing that ever again.”
Ransom slumped in his chair, exhausted by the achievement of speaking that one word. Rudy grabbed his cane and pushed himself up from the bed. He went to the mini-fridge under the shelf and opened it, grabbed two longneck bottles of imported German beer, and held them up.
“Drink?”
Without waiting for an answer, he took his keys from his pocket and popped the caps off with a bottle opener on his key ring. One of the caps went flying and he retrieved it from the floor, setting his keys on the edge of the shelf above, pushing the books back toward the wall to make space for them. He tossed the caps in the small trash can and straightened back up with some difficulty, holding the small of his back with one hand. He passed a beer bottle over to Ransom and sat back down on the bunk bed with a huge sigh.
“I’m getting old,” he said. “But you understand. You’re no spring chicken yourself.”
Ransom concentrated on moving his arm. He considered throwing the bottle at Rudy, but knew the attempt would fail. Rudy was three feet away, but he might as well have been on the moon. Ransom brought the bottle up to his mouth and took a shaky sip of beer.
“I’m very close,” Rudy said. “I feel as if my life’s work is finally … Well, I’m making progress, and you’ve helped show me the way. I really think that.”
Ransom lowered his bottle and stared at it.
“I have someone new on my table,” Rudy said. “A girl. She’s got mixed blood. I wonder which race is stronger in her. Later, I’ll bring you back down to my laboratory and let you watch as I work.
It’s sort of a tradition. You may recall I let Kenny sit in on your transformation.” He shook his head. “Poor Kenny. He didn’t turn out as well as you have.”
“Where?” Ransom said.
“Where’s Kenny? Oh, you might say he’s gone for a swim. One day soon Deputy Puckett will take you out to see him.” Rudy took another sip of beer. “You know, I think I’ll miss you, Mr. Roan. But we must always move forward, never look back. This little mixed girl they found for me, she seems strong. She’ll last me quite a while, I think.” He raised his bottle to Ransom in a toast. “To the next generation, my friend.”
Ransom tried to raise his arm, but lost control of his fingers. He dropped his bottle and it exploded against the floor, foamy beer dripping away through cracks in the plywood.
“Look what you’ve done,” Rudy said.
Ransom saw his opportunity, the only opportunity he was ever likely to get, and focused every ounce of thought and energy into standing. He pushed himself up from the chair and used the rocking motion to help propel him forward. He took one agonizing step forward, and then Rudy stuck his cane out and tripped him. Ransom fell, putting out his arms and grabbing the shelf. It came free and he smacked the side of his head and right shoulder against the wall as he fell. Books spilled down on top of him.
Rudy braced himself and rose. “I’ll send someone along to clean this up.”
He stepped over Ransom and opened the door hard, banging it into Ransom’s arm. He looked up at the sky, then stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him.
Ransom listened to his captor’s footsteps until they faded away, then he rolled over and began the long process of pushing himself up. He got his knees under him and unclasped his fist, stared at the keys he had grabbed from the shelf. Then he got back to work. The first step was to stand up, then he would concentrate on getting out of the shed and walking around the empty swimming pool to the parking lot.
Chapter Eleven
1
Skottie watched out the windshield over the plane’s nose. Every once in a while she saw a pair of headlights below, but traffic was sparse. The Cessna’s shadow moved across the fog beneath them at what looked like a walking pace, and Skottie had to will herself to sit still and be patient. She knew they were traveling much faster than any truck could, but patience wasn’t her strong suit, even in the best of circumstances.
Travis leaned forward, and Skottie turned to look at him. He was in the seat behind Dr. Iversen, and next to him was a big stack of towels and blankets from Emmaline’s hall closet. He reached out and gave her shoulder a squeeze.
“We will find her,” he said. The steady roar of the Cessna’s engine made it hard to hear his low rasping voice. “Finding people is what I do.”
Skottie nodded in response, unable to put her fear into words.
“I’m guessing they’ve probably crossed into Oklahoma by now,” Dr. Iversen said. “Or pretty close to it.”
“How long until we get there?”
“Not long,” Dr. Iversen said. “Just hang tight. They’ll be going the speed limit. Won’t want to get pulled over with what they’re carrying. We’ll be on top of them soon enough.”
The coroner had met them at Hays Regional Airport, his Cessna 172 gassed and ready to go. Skottie wasn’t sure if he’d been asleep when she called him, but he was alert and eager to help as soon as he learned about the situation. Travis had loosely estimated the truck’s lead time based on when the first call had come from Donnie, and they had determined there was no way to catch up to it on the ground. After hanging up with Dr. Iversen, Skottie had called Ryan Kufahl again. The trooper had still been awake and, based solely on Sheriff Goodman’s guess that Maddy and her father were on that truck, he had begun coordinating a ground search, pulling in state troopers across southern Kansas and Oklahoma. They were gambling that the truck would indeed head south. If they were wrong, Maddy could be anywhere to the north, east, or west of Hays. She might never be found.
Skottie didn’t want to think about what her daughter was going through or what would happen if they caught up to the truck and Maddy wasn’t on it.
Lightning flickered and faded somewhere behind them. The plane crossed over several acres of featureless farmland, following the invisible thread of US-183 south, then leapt back up above a wooded area, the trees mired in swirling mist in a way that reminded Skottie of the dead bleached trees that reached up to break the surface of Kirwin Lake. She wondered what was beneath the water back at the nature preserve, what had been dumped there over the decades, how many tortured bodies with strange scars.
The Foundation’s file on Rudolph Bormann didn’t mention bodies in the lake or human trafficking, it had contained no clues to Maddy’s whereabouts, but Skottie had read it through twice already, hoping to find something that might lead her to her daughter.
Bormann had arrived in Kansas sometime in the fifties or sixties, carrying false identification. There was no record anymore of where he had come from, how he had escaped Germany after the war, who had given him his papers, but at some point he had acquired four thousand acres of pastureland in Burden County and had dubbed it the Third R Ranch. Skottie assumed the name was a reference to the Third Reich, and it astonished her that he would be so bold, so open about who he was and where he came from. But apparently no one had ever connected the dots. Kansas was a long way from Mauthausen-Gusen.
In 1971, Rudy had bought an abandoned church in Paradise Flats and had moved into town with his family. The church still owned the ranch property. Skottie made a mental note that the land should be checked for buried bodies. How long would it take to inspect four thousand acres?
And where had Rudy’s money come from? Even in the 1960s and ’70s, that much land wouldn’t have been cheap.
Skottie hoped she would have a chance to ask Rudy in person.
However he had purchased it, once the church was established, young women and girls began disappearing from the area. Not too many, not enough to cause a panic, but there was a pattern, and the Roans had eventually pieced much of it together from decades’ worth of local newspapers on the Internet and microfiche files.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Goodman had been pursuing a parallel line of investigation. Rudy had tried using his son’s position to help cover his tracks, but when Kurt Goodman began to realize the extent of his father’s crimes, he had left the church and severed ties. It had not been easy for him to reconcile the man he thought he knew—a prophet, a preacher, a magician in every sense of the word, but a largely absent and unavailable father—with the monster who began to emerge when Goodman started tracing missing person cases back to Purity First. Reluctant to jump to conclusions, the sheriff had spread his inquiries out farther, to eastern Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas. Missing children, grown women, and men all seemed to funnel through the church and disappear. The pattern later established by the Roan Foundation had already begun to take over a file cabinet in Sheriff Goodman’s spare bedroom. But Goodman hadn’t known what to do about it, hadn’t been able to put together enough legal evidence to act.
Until Ruth Elder had spotted Rudy Goodman in a diner in Phillipsburg and made that half-remembered connection between an old monster and a new saint.
But the monster didn’t know he’d been seen until Ransom Roan came to Kansas. Skottie wondered whether Roan had directly approached Rudy or had simply asked the wrong question of the wrong person. In whatever way Rudy discovered Ransom’s presence, the former Nazi had acted quickly. And then Rudy, or someone working for him, had panicked. The smooth and efficient machinery by which Purity First had abducted dozens, maybe hundreds of people, had broken down. Maybe Ruth Elder had died of natural causes; maybe she had been murdered in such a way that it looked natural. She was an old lady, and no one had looked closely at the cause of death. But she had told others about Rudy Goodman, and those others had been silenced, too.
From beyond the grave, Ruth Elder had pointed her finge
r at the saint of wolves and butchers. Rudy and his people were lashing out blindly. They had grown complacent after a half century of peace and safety, and their plans were out-of-date. They had thought they could control Skottie by sending lawyers after her, by breaking into her home, by kidnapping her daughter.
Skottie balled her fists up in her lap. First she would find Maddy, then she would end the danger of Rudy Goodman, no matter what it took.
“Is that it?”
Dr. Iversen was pointing out the window on Skottie’s side. They had outraced the fog, broken into flat grassland, and she could see the pale rectangular roof of a semitrailer truck moving along the highway below them.
“Travis,” Skottie said, “is that the truck you saw in the church parking lot?”
He was looking out his window behind them. “I have no idea. There were no markings on it.”
“Chances are good that’s it,” Dr. Iversen said. “It’s right about where it should be, given when we think it left and how fast it must have been going. There’s not a lot of traffic down there.”
“But there are other trucks,” Skottie said. “Pretty much all the traffic this time of night is gonna be trucks.”
“Yeah,” Iversen said. “It’s a gamble.”
“I’m calling it in,” Skottie said. “How does this radio work?”
“Dodge City Regional’s probably the closest,” Iversen said. “But the tower closed at ten and it won’t open until six. There’s nobody there to take a call right now. Just use your cell. It’ll work.”
Because of the cease and desist, they had decided an APB should come from Ryan Kufahl rather than Skottie. She called him and, after consulting with Dr. Iversen, gave the trooper the approximate location of the white truck. After ending the call, she stared out the window at the truck below, trying to sense whether her daughter was in there, caged in the dark, helpless and frightened.
