Her eyes scanned the muddy area around the car, searching for footprints.
She found none.
Had he swum somewhere?
That made about as much sense to her as the idea of him coming looking for her—which meant ridiculous, insane but possible.
Kendra tried to shake some sense into her head.
As she twirled the empty syringe in one hand, her gaze slowly came back to the snarled bumper. There was an oily smear just in front of the tire, and with every passing second that Kendra watched, nearly mesmerized, a drop fell from somewhere beneath the car and added to the puddle.
Give it up, it’s empty.
Without a gun, Martin could easily overpower her.
Without a gun, she would need something to protect herself.
She stopped toying with the syringe and made up her mind.
It might not be all that useful, but it was something.
Clenching her jaw, Kendra dropped to one knee in front of the puddle, which made a sick slurping sound. Then she put the needle in the liquid and filled the entire length of the syringe. When it was full, she held it up to a shaft of sunlight and admired the way the black substance seemed to have an iridescent quality to it.
Kendra slipped the syringe into her pocket, and put her left hand on the tire and pushed herself to her feet.
“Come with me, Kendra,” a little girl said.
Swallowing hard, Kendra turned slowly in the mud, her eyes wide, heart racing again.
Not real, she’s not real.
The smiling girl with the pigtails and bright blue eyes was standing less than twenty feet down the dirt road.
“Come,” she said, waving her arm with childish excitement. “Come on, Kendra, she’s waiting!”
Three blinks, four.
The scene didn’t fade or dissolve as Kendra expected.
“Kendra! She’s waiting!”
Kendra let her eyes drift beyond the girl, but only briefly, afraid that she might vanish like before.
There were several other young girls in the distance, she realized, but they were more cautious, moving in and out of the shadows so that she couldn’t get a good look at any one of them. She counted eight, maybe nine of them.
Kendra looked back to the girl who was still waving her arm.
“Come!” she said with a giggle.
Kendra swallowed hard.
“Lacy?” her voice was but a croak.
The girl nodded.
“Uh-huh. Now come! Hurry!”
Kendra blinked again, then pulled her foot from the mud and stepped forward.
CHAPTER 46
Father John Simone didn’t die.
For a long while, Brett thought that the man had already made the arduous trek into the afterlife that he more than likely spent normal Sundays preaching about. The man’s face was as gray as oxidized meat, his cheeks covered in a sheen of sweat.
Swallow, he had shouted.
And then, by some miracle, the man had swallowed, even though he was nowhere near conscious.
But now, based on the way he snored like a rusty chainsaw every few seconds, it was clear that he was just sleeping. It was an annoying sound, but as Brett continued to drive toward Batesburg, it was a welcome distraction to the shitstorm that paraded in his mind.
Martin was caught on purpose; he was caught by Kendra on purpose.
Brett shifted his hips in the driver seat and reached into his back pocket to retrieve the letter that he had obtained more than a year ago. Well, truthfully, it had been Paul Grover who had found it; Brett had only intercepted the delivery on its way to Kendra. He had meant to give it to her, of course, but after reading it, he couldn’t envision a scenario in which it would actually help the scarred woman. In fact, at the time she had actually been doing quite well—this was before the dreams had begun to kick in again, even before she had failed her psych report—and he hadn’t felt up to tipping the scales in the wrong direction.
He’d seen the scars by then—he knew what she was capable of doing to herself.
Was it worth it? Knowing what happened now, was it worth ruining her to keep a secret? Even if this secret might have pushed her over the edge?
The director knew of the letter, Paul knew of the letter, and of course he knew of it.
And for the betterment of the FBI, and all of the still unsolved crimes, they had collectively decided to never share it with her. But here he was, racing down the highway as a fugitive in a stolen car with a half-dead priest beside him, desperately trying to find Kendra and hand her the letter.
One way or another, he would get it into her hands.
“What’s that?” Father John’s voice was low and slow, but it still startled Brett nonetheless. He had become used to the sound of the man snoring. “The letter. What is it? I saw you with it before; it looked like you were going to give it to Kendra.”
The man’s eyes were pale as if struck by sudden onset cataracts. The nitroglycerin that Brett had shoved into his mouth might have stayed the heart attack, but there was no denying that the man was on his last legs.
Brett cleared his throat and held the letter in mid-air.
He debated telling the priest that it was nothing, to jam it back into his pocket, but he was too damn tired for more lies. Besides, he had a sneaking suspicion that he would need to rely on this man at some point in the future.
Maybe sometime soon.
“It’s a letter,” he admitted before handing it over.
Brett kept his eyes on the road as he drove, trying to concentrate as he approached Batesburg, because after he hit the town, he had no idea where to go next.
He hoped that he would be struck by some inspiration, something that would help him find his friend and partner.
Divine intervention, perhaps.
Brett’s eyes flicked upward, his gaze finding the sun that had slowly started to dip below the skyline.
Shit, why the hell not? After all, there is a goddamn priest in my stolen car.
Yeah, a little divine intervention would be nice right about now.
CHAPTER 47
It only made sense to Kendra to reach out and hold Lacy McGuire’s hand. It made sense, when pretty much everything in her life to date didn’t.
After all, she was here to save the girl… wasn’t she?
And so Kendra took the girl’s tiny hand in her own and limped along the path with her.
There were more girls than she’d first realized, and they weren’t all young. Their ages ranged from four like little Lacy, to several larger girls in their late teens and possibly earlier twenties. But these girls were further ahead, migrating in and out of the trees, barely visible in the narrowing blades of sunlight.
Miraculously, with Lacy’s hand in her own, her pain seemed to vanish. It was like a beacon of hope in the horrible mess that her life had become.
Lacy was alive; not only alive, but she seemed happy, too. Kendra couldn’t remember what Meghan or Taylor looked like from the brief glance she had taken of their files, but she was oddly certain that they were here too.
If she had to guess, Kendra would have said that all the missing girls were here; the ones from today and the ones from two decades ago that Agent Grover had told her about.
What is this? Some sort of convent?
Lacy suddenly turned to look up at her.
“No, silly,” she said with a gap-toothed smile. “This is our home.” She had a minor lisp, making silly sound more like thilly.
Kendra simply gaped. She was positive that she hadn’t said anything out loud.
“How?”
The girl’s lips pressed together. If it had been possible for her cherubic face to look sinister, Kendra might have seen it as such.
Sis, why don’t you come join us?
But that just wasn’t possible.
Little Lacy was a four-year-old girl, one that had been abducted, stolen in the dead of night by a pedophile named Martin Reigns.
“You’ll see.”
Kendra didn’t doubt that she would eventually thee. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to.
They walked in silence for another minute, and Kendra eventually made out the shape of a house with a peaked roof and front porch jutting out of nowhere. She squinted, trying to make out the color of the place in the dying light.
Gray? Is it gray?
“No, not gray. It’s green. C’mon, Ken-Ken, let’s hurry. You are going to love it here!”
Impossible.
Kendra felt herself being drawn by the girl’s childish enthusiasm, wanting to laugh like her, high-pitched and carefree, and just spring across the lawn to the house.
But it was what the girl had called her that kept her grounded.
Ken-Ken.
After going more than two decades without hearing that word, hearing it twice in the same day, by a forty-something suspect and now a four-year-old victim, had a profound effect on her.
Kendra drove her heels in the mud. Lacy didn’t appear to notice at first and she kept skipping along, ending in an uncomfortable yank that caused the pain in her arm that had been hidden away to re-emerge.
“What’s wrong?” Lacy asked, turning back to face her. Her light blonde eyebrows rose up her smooth forehead. “Ken-Ken?”
Kendra resisted the urge to pull her hand away.
Cute or not, cherubic or not, there was something about Lacy that just wasn’t quite right.
Stockholm syndrome? Is that it?
She didn’t think so.
“How’d you do that?” she asked at last.
Lacy looked at her as if she had some sort of mental deficiency.
“Oh, we can all do that, silly.”
Thilly.
The girl tugged Kendra’s arm, but she remained rooted. Lacy’s shoulders sagged in frustration.
“You can do it too, you know.”
Kendra made a face, and Lacy responded by nodding vigorously.
“Sure you can. I mean, you have the dreams, don’t you?”
Dreams? What dreams?
“The dreams about this place, about the swamp? The fire?”
Lacy waved her arms around her, indicating their surroundings. Breathing suddenly became a challenge for Kendra.
Am I fucking dead? Did I die in the car crash? Is this the fucked-up hell that I was delivered into after death?
Lacy giggled.
“No, silly. You’re not dead. But you are making her wait.”
When Kendra still found herself unable to move. Lacy clucked her tongue.
“C’mon… okay, look. I’ll prove it to you. Candice? Beth?”
Two other blonde girls quickly appeared at Lacy’s side, one who looked about Lacy’s age and another about seven years old. Both were smiling.
“Candice, do the trick that we practice.” The girl on Lacy’s left nodded eagerly. “Okay, what number am I thinking of? Any number, from one to infinity.”
Candice didn’t hesitate.
“Fourteen.”
Kendra nearly smiled at their innocence despite herself. Lacy, naive to their ignorance, clapped her tiny hands together.
“You got it! Now you try, Beth.”
Lacy closed her eyes and Kendra saw her lips move ever so slightly. Unlike Candice, Beth seemed annoyed by this. She rolled her eyes.
“Fourteen again.”
“Yes! You got it too! Now you try, Ken-Ken.”
“Me?”
Lacy nodded.
“Yeah, you think of a number and I’ll guess it. Like I said, everyone can do it here.” She moved in close and cupped a hand around her mouth. Her words were a whisper now. “Even Charlotte can do it, but she doesn’t like to. She’s the old one, and she’s always grumpy.”
Charlotte… where have I heard that name before?
Lacy leaned back and removed her hand from her mouth. “Go on, think of a number, any number.”
It was ridiculous, really, or in Lacy’s words, thilly, but Kendra went along with the charade anyway. After all, what harm could come of it?
Three numbers formed in Kendra’s mind—her house number back before her father had abandoned her. She still remembered those three large white letters.
439.
Lacy made a confused face.
“Hmm,” she said, scratching the top of her head. “I don’t know that one.”
Reality suddenly struck Kendra like a ton of bricks.
I need to find a phone—I need to find a phone and call the director and Brett and tell them to get the fuck up here.
“No, wait!” Lacy pleaded. “It’s just a big number. It’s…” She pushed her tongue into her cheek. “Four, I know the first number is four…”
Kendra leaned away a little.
“The next is a three… I know that one because Father says it looks like half a snowman. But the last one…”
Kendra’s eyes grew wide.
This can’t be.
“Unggh! I always get this mixed up. I think it’s a… it’s a… six?”
Beth shook her head.
“No, retard, it’s a nine. The number Ken-Ken is thinking of is four-three-nine.”
Kendra was floored, and would have fallen on her ass had her feet not been stuck in the mud.
“That’s impossible!” she gasped.
Lacy giggled again.
“You keep saying that! But we can all do it, all the sisters can do it. You can do it too!”
Im-fucking-possible.
Kendra felt the scars on her stomach and chest start to itch. It was all she could do to resist the urge to tear off her shirt and scratch them until they bled.
“Oh, c’mon! She’s waiting! She has been waiting a long time to see you, Ken-Ken.”
“Who?” The word came out as a breathless whisper.
Instead of answering, Lacy’s face grew serious and she leveled her pale blue eyes directly at Kendra’s.
And then, as if materializing out of the moss and dust motes that occasionally floated across her vision, a single word materialized in Kendra’s mind.
But it wasn’t her word, she realized; it was Lacy’s.
And this time she completely lost her balance, her entire world shifting, and she collapsed to the mud in a limp flop.
The single word that formed in her head was MOTHER.
CHAPTER 48
It seemed impossible that Father John’s face could lose any more color. In fact, he was so pale that Brett actually glanced at the man’s body—his hands, ankles, chest—to see if he hadn’t somehow been stabbed during their escape from the Rickshaw Police Station and was bleeding out.
To make the image even more striking, the letter in the man’s frail fingers shook worse than a tea cup in the hands of someone suffering from late-stage Parkinson’s.
“What?” Brett asked, the word coming out more harshly than he had intended. He softened his tone, worried that so much as a fly landing on the man’s shoulder would cause his heart to fail. “What is it?”
Father John swallowed, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing.
“I—I—” The man just couldn’t seem to get the words out.
Brett chewed his lip, debating what to do next. They were less than twenty minutes outside Batesburg, and he still had no idea what to do once they got there. His instincts told him to head to the police station, but if he knew the director as he did, not only had the man most likely commandeered a car and was racing after them, but he had also sent out an APB.
If he went into any police station, he would be arrested. Of that, he had little doubt.
Time was clearly of the essence, but Brett made a calculated decision to take the next exit off the freeway. Safely off the highway, he pulled over on the soft shoulder and put the car into park. A quick glance around showed that the sun was setting, casting an eerie orange light over the farmland that seemed to stretch for miles on either side of the vehicle.
Thick black clouds were also rolling in, forming a dark canopy.
A storm is brewing.
Brett shook his head, trying to clear the fatigue that seemed to blanket his very being.
Focus.
He turned to Father John, who was still staring at the three short paragraphs on the yellowed paper.
“Father,” he said gently.
When the man failed to react, Brett reached out and gently laid his hand on the priest’s shoulder.
Father John nearly jumped out of his skin. When he turned, his eyes were wide, his mouth slack. The man licked his lips feverishly before finally breaking his silence.
“I know this man,” he said. His voice was hoarse, like a man begging for water in the desert.
Brett furrowed his brow.
“Who? Kendra’s father?”
Father John shook his head.
“No, not him. The priest who this was written to. Father Horatio Callahan.”
Brett pondered this for a moment. He had gone to Sunday school, had gone to a Catholic high school, but when he had grown up, he had left the spiritual world for one of pragmatism and cold, hard facts. It had been a calculated, necessary decision in order for him to make sense of the world around him, a world so often filled with real demons, with horrible people that did horrible things. Considering a God that would infect his people with this plague was unthinkable.
Is there some sort of network of priests? Do they all know each other?
This seemed impossible given the sheer number of parishes in the southeast alone. But if not, then this was one hell of a coincidence. And, to add to the improbability, the letter wasn’t addressed to any Father Horatio Callahan, but to a Father H. Callahan. Brett had himself tried to track the man down, but had come up with too many names to investigate. There were nearly fifty Father Callahans in Boston alone.
“How do you know—how do you know it’s the same person?”
Father John turned the letter to him, and pointed to a specific passage.
‘We have not spoken, but I have heard about you. I have heard that you are particularly kind to children of broken homes. While our home is still intact, I fear that a break is imminent. I fear that there is something coming for our daughter, something evil. Something that we cannot protect her from.’
Brett knew the passage by heart.
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