The McKays Box Set - To Kill For, Blood Sport, Hard Time & Gang Land

by A. J. Carella

  Twenty-Four

  Jamie was worried. They should have been back hours ago. She’d called the clinic, thinking maybe they had been delayed, but the office was closed. Calls to Kat’s cell had gone straight to voicemail and, despite leaving several increasingly worried messages, she’d failed to call her back. Something was wrong and she’d waited long enough. Picking up the phone, she dialed Finn’s number. It seemed to ring for ages as she paced up and down in the kitchen, keeping one eye on the window in case Kat’s car suddenly appeared, but at last he picked up.

  “Hi, Jamie,” he answered.

  “Finn, something’s wrong.” She didn’t waste any time with niceties.

  “What do you mean something’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “It’s Kat. She took Daniel to the therapist’s office ages ago and she hasn’t come home.”

  There was a silence on the end of the phone. “Have you tried her cell?”

  “Of course I’ve tried her cell!” she snapped.

  “Okay, look, it’s probably nothing. You know what the cell signal is like around here. She’s probably broken down at the side of the road or got a flat.”

  He was right. Of course he was right, Jamie told herself. She was being paranoid. “Okay, you’re right. Well, I’m going to go and retrace her steps, then, and see if I can find her.”

  “No, you stay there in case she comes home. I’ll get a couple of the guys to go and do it. You’ll see. She’ll be home in no time. I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve found her, okay?”

  Looking out the window with the now silent phone in her hand, Jamie tried to relax but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Not until she saw her safe and sound for herself.

  Twenty-Five

  Though he’d tried to reassure Jamie when she’d called, he’d immediately had a bad feeling when she’d told him that Kat hadn’t made it home. She was a very capable woman and if she’d had a flat she would have been more than able to change it herself. Yes, she could have broken down, but her car was new and it seemed unlikely. Making his apologies to Sally, he’d left her at his house and immediately joined the search.

  The police radio in his cruiser crackled to life and Jason’s voice came over the air. “I’ve found the car. It’s on the top road, about five miles out from Brecon Point.” Finn held his breath. “There’s no one with it.”

  Cursing, Finn put his foot down. That didn’t sound good. He was there in a matter of minutes. Jason was leaning against the door of his cruiser, smoking, when Finn pulled up alongside. “Put that out. You’re on duty,” he told him as he stepped out of his car.

  He watched as Jason shrugged and dropped the cigarette to the ground before grinding it out with his shoe. Satisfied, he turned and gingerly made his way down the bank to where he could see Kat’s car in the gloom, almost invisible from the road. “Well-spotted,” he said to Jason, who had followed him down the bank and now stood next to him. “How did you spot it from the road?”

  He just shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  The driver’s door of the car was open, as was one of the back doors, and there was extensive damage to the trunk and to the driver’s side. But Jason was right; there was no sign of Kat or Daniel. Crouching down, Finn pulled his flashlight from his belt and pointed the beam at the damage. There, clearly visible, were flecks of red paint. “Get on to CSI and get them out here.” He indicated the red paint with his flashlight. “Whatever happened here, another vehicle was involved.”

  Next he turned his attention to the inside of the car, noting that Kat’s purse was still there, its contents scattered over the passenger floor, including her cell. Slipping on a pair of latex gloves he retrieved from his pocket, he carefully picked it up, being careful not to disturb anything else. Standing up, he quickly flicked through her call logs and noted the 911 call. It appeared that it hadn’t connected and he saw that the phone wasn’t picking up any service. Any doubt that this had been a deliberate act vanished.

  There were no obvious signs of any blood which was good news. He had to hope that wherever they were, they were uninjured. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about. Instructing Jason to stay at the scene, he made his way back up the bank to his own car. He needed to go and break the news to Jamie and it wasn’t going to be easy.

  Twenty-Six

  Consciousness came slowly at first, her body in no rush to wake up. As she became more awake, memories started filtering through until finally she remembered the car crash and she awoke fully. Groaning, she opened her eyes and realized that she was lying on her back looking up the strangest ceiling she’d ever seen, one made of dirt. Daniel! She sat up quickly, too quickly, and the room started to spin out of focus. Closing her eyes again, she took several deep breaths until the spinning stopped. Carefully she opened them again, thankful that the room didn’t spin this time. It was very dark, with only a faint glow coming from the end of the room farthest from her, and it took a while for her eyes to adjust. When they did, what she saw made her gasp.

  She was in a cell, a cage really. The wall behind her and the one to her left where made of dirt, but in front of her and to her right, metal bars joined the floor to the ceiling. Standing up gingerly, unsteady on her feet, she walked to the bars at the front of her cell. In the dark, she could make out that several of the bars formed a door but that they were held closed by a padlock on a chain. Even before she took them in her hand and shook them she knew they’d be locked, but she tried anyway. The door shook but did not give way.

  “Kat!” The sound of his voice made her spin round. A face was pressed to the bars that ran between her cell and the next. She felt the relief rush through her as she went to him. “Daniel! Oh, honey, thank God you’re okay.” The words caught in her throat as she got near him and saw the bruises that marked the left side of his face. “Dear God, what did they do to you?”

  He just shrugged. “I’m okay.”

  She reached up and gently ran a thumb over the side of his face, tears streaming down hers. “I’ll get us out of this, honey, I promise.”

  Daniel just smiled sadly. “Thank you for trying to help me.”

  “It’s not over yet so don’t you dare give up on me, okay?” She tried to sound positive. “Finn and Jamie will be looking for us and they’ll find us.”

  A groan from somewhere in the darkness made her jump. “What’s that?”

  “It’s one of the others.”

  “The others that you told us about?”

  She saw him nod.

  Dear God, where were they? Well, she wasn’t about to just sit around and wait for whoever had taken them to come back. She needed to try and figure out a way to get out of here, and fast.

  “Is everybody down here locked in?” She couldn’t see the rest of the room in the darkness. She could only just make out her own cell.

  “Yes, all the time.”

  “Is there anyone else in there with you, Daniel? Anyone who can help us?”

  He shook his head. “No, the boss keeps us all separate.”

  Not that she knew how that would help anyway, but if they were all separated in different cells and they were all padlocked in, as she was, then there was no hope of getting them all out. You just need to get yourself out and get help.

  “Daniel, can you tell me about this room? Tell me everything you remember.”

  Her heart fell as she listened. There really was no way out. Their lives depended on Finn now.

  Twenty-Seven

  The men he’d sent to recover the boy stood silently in front of him as he paced back and forth angrily in his living room. Throwing the cigarette he was smoking into the empty fireplace behind him, he turned to them again. “What the hell were you thinking? You were supposed to get the boy, no one else.”

  “She recognized me, boss. I couldn’t just leave her there.”

  “How did she recognize you? She doesn’t know you.”

  The man visibly squirmed “Well, I sorta met her in town last week, i
n the coffee shop.”

  The boss got closer to him and stood mere inches from him before hissing into his face, “What do you mean you met her in the coffee shop? The rules are you never, ever, go into town. Are you telling me you broke those rules?”

  The man nodded, not looking up to meet the boss’s eyes. “I was driving through town and I needed the bathroom so I stopped.”

  There was no warning as the boss struck out, hitting the man across the side of the face with the back of his hand and sending him stumbling to his knees. “You couldn’t use the side of the road like anyone else?” he shouted, covering the man in spittle. “Get him out of my sight. Now,” he shouted to one of the other two men. He would decide what to do with him later. For now, he had to worry about the woman. He couldn’t let her go; it was too late for that. “Clay, not you. I want you to go and get the woman and bring her to me.”

  He lit another cigarette and walked over to the window that looked out across his farm. It was a real working farm and how he made his legitimate income now that he was retired and his parents were long gone. He’d grown up here and although he’d worked in town for years, it was always assumed that when his folks got too old to look after it, he would. And so he had.

  They hadn’t known about his external interests, and it hadn’t been until they were gone that he’d been able to become more than just a spectator. He’d spent years converting the farm, making it perfect for his needs, and in the process becoming one of the biggest players on the scene. He was not about to lose it all without a fight.

  “Get your hands off me!” He heard her scream before he saw her as she was dragged down the corridor and pushed into the living room.

  “You bitch!” Clay shouted as he hobbled into the room after her limping.

  The boss laughed. “You’re a feisty thing, aren’t you? Haven’t changed a bit.”

  He watched as she went completely still, searching his face before recognition slowly dawned. “You!”

  “It’s been a long time, Kat McKay. How have you been?”

  “I don’t believe this. You bastard!” She tried to lunge at him but Clay grabbed her around the waist before she could reach him.

  “I am sorry about this. You weren’t supposed to get caught up in it. It was only the boy I was after.”

  “That’s supposed to make it better?”

  “No, I don’t suppose it does.” He waved at Clay to let her go. “But you’re here now and what happens next is up to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The ringing of his phone interrupted them and, turning his back on her, he took the call.

  “What news?” He listened for a moment. “Good to know. Phone me as soon as you hear anything else.” Terminating the call, he turned back to Kat.

  “Where were we?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” He smiled. “I would say I enjoy it but that’s only part of it. It makes me a hell of a lot of money, too.”

  “You enjoy hurting kids?” She was still in shock. “But you used to teach them!”

  “One doesn’t exclude the other,” he said, laughing. “Besides, there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s a sport. You wouldn’t believe how many of us there are.”

  She felt sick listening to him.

  “I’m just one chapter. There are many more spread across the country. Hundreds of kids.”

  “A sport?” she made herself ask. The longer she kept him talking and the more details she learned, the better chance she’d have of figuring out a way to get out of here.

  “Well, yes. There’s horse racing, football, NASCAR. This is no different, really. If you have a winning fighter there’s a fortune to be made.”

  Kat couldn’t believe that this man, this man who had taught her in high school, was this monster. He’d been one of her favorite teachers; actually he was a firm favorite with most students, with his friendly manner and interesting lessons. She couldn’t believe that all the while this monster had been hiding within him.

  “Anyway, enough about that. I don’t expect you to understand.” He stepped toward her menacingly. “I do expect you to tell me everything you know, though.”

  “Tell you what, exactly? There’s nothing to tell.”

  “What do the police know? How much did the boy tell them?”

  “He doesn’t know anything to tell them. You should know that. He’s a kid. A scared kid. Why couldn’t you just leave him alone?”

  “I couldn’t run the risk that he knew anything that would lead the police to me. That’s why you need to tell me exactly what he told them.”

  “You honestly think I’m going to help you? Go to hell,” she hissed.

  The boss nodded to Clay. “Go and get the boy. I’m sure he’ll help us make her talk.”

  “No!” Kat cried out. “Leave him alone!”

  “Then you need to tell me everything they know.”

  There wasn’t much to tell but she told him, every last thing she could think of, holding nothing back.

  “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “What’s going to happen to us now?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” he replied before telling Clay to take her back to her cell.

  He was pleased. What Kat had told him confirmed the information his source had given him. They had no idea about him or the farm. He would just give it a bit of time for all the initial activity to die down and then he would get rid of her. It was one thing keeping a group of kids prisoner, but he didn’t want to keep an adult captive. Especially one as smart as Kat. He remembered her from high school, and she’d been one of his brightest students. He wasn’t about to risk that she could somehow escape. No, far better that the threat she posed be terminated once and for all and she could then be disposed of in the same place all the bodies had been disposed of over the years. One of the benefits of having a large farm; there were plenty of fields.

  Twenty-Eight

  “Do you think this has anything to do with what happened to Daniel?”

  Finn was sitting on the couch in the living room at Jamie’s house. He’d come here straight from where they’d found Kat’s car to deliver the news.

  “I don’t know Jamie, it’s too early to say at this stage but I’ll be honest, I’ll be very surprised if it’s not.”

  Jamie nodded. “Of course it’s connected. You know that as well as I do. What else could have happened?”

  Finn just looked at her. She was right and he knew it.

  “So they were just coming from the therapist’s office?”

  “It was Daniel’s first session today. They had to have been on their way back.”

  “It can’t have been blind luck that whoever took them knew they’d been on that road. They must have been watching them.” This realization made Finn question his judgment. Should I have given them some kind of protection? He quickly shook this thought off, though. There had been no way of knowing that this would happen If he started down the road of self-blame he would lose focus and he couldn’t afford to do that right now.

  “Have you seen anything unusual, Jamie? Any cars hanging around?”

  She shook her head. “No, nothing at all. And I would have noticed. It’s not like we’re on a main street out here. Any unusual cars would have stuck out like a sore thumb.”

  Finn nodded his head in agreement. She was right.

  “We need to get hold of the CCTV from the therapist’s office. If that was the last place we can definitely place them, then chances are fairly good that whoever took them was there, too. There would have been no other reason for Kat to be on that road, so they must have followed her there.”

  “Finn, you have to find her. I can’t lose her. She’s all I’ve got.”

  “Jamie, I promise you I’ll find her.” And he would; he just wished he could promise that he would find her alive.

  ***

  Without the chief, the responsibility was weig
hing heavily on his shoulders. It’s wasn’t that he didn’t know what needed doing; it was more that he just wanted to be out there doing it rather than directing things, which is what he was doing now. As the last place they were known to have visited was the next town over, he’d reached out to his counterpart there. As a bigger town, he’d been able to spare some of his own men to assist in the search as well as agreeing to take on the task of getting hold of the office staff from the therapist’s office and get hold of a copy of the CCTV. As soon as they had it, they were going to bring it over to him.

  He looked around at all the faces looking at him and was pleased to see that they all looked as concerned as he felt. “Okay, this is where we’re at. CSI is processing the scene and will be recovering the vehicle. They’ll contact us immediately if they find anything that could help us. For now, though, all we know is that Kat and Daniel were traveling back from a visit to Daniel’s therapist’s office and were in a car wreck and have vanished. We have to assume it was deliberate from the damage to the car and the paint found.

  “We also have to assume it has something to do with Daniel’s original abductors.” He paused to look down at his notes. “We have no leads on them at all. What we do know is that this wasn’t a case of a single child abduction. From what Daniel was able to tell us there were several more kids held with him and those kids were still alive when he last saw them.”

  He’d made copies of the photos of all the boys that Daniel had identified and now he handed them round. “These photos are how the kids looked when they were taken, but some are quite old now.” He didn’t know if it would be of any use but just having the photos would make them all realize what was at stake.

  “I want all of you out there knocking on doors. Unfortunately, Daniel couldn’t tell us where he had come from or how long he’d been out there, but we do know it had to have been close because he couldn’t have gotten far in the state he was in. I don’t care if you wake people up, or if these are people that you’ve known all your lives. Poke around, check outbuildings and, if they’ll let you, go in and check houses.” He stood up from where he’d been sitting on the corner of a desk