by Kylie Brant
Wherever she was being held, she wasn’t alone.
* * * *
When Tommy Franks pulled into the drive of the old Coates place, Cam was on the phone with the Indianola police department.
“You suspect Dr. Denholt of having something to do with one of the killers?” On the other end of the line, Captain Zirbel sounded skeptical. “I don’t mean to make light of a very serious situation, but the doctor…he strikes me as someone who’d panic at the sight of a mosquito. He hardly fits the profile of a killer.”
“Maybe the profile of a victim. One who can be manipulated by the surviving killer.” Cam looked at the ruins of the structure that had been gutted by fire. Why anyone would leave it standing was a mystery. It looked like a litigator’s dream. He noted the pickup that had slowed when they’d turned. It paused in the middle of the road, as if the two individuals inside were debating, and then turned in after them.
He returned his focus to Zirbel. “I’ve checked with DMV and the Warren County assessor’s office. I find only one vehicle and one piece of property in Denholt’s name.”
“We got your BOLO alert. Have the force watching for it. You want me to double check on Denholt’s car? Monitor his house?”
“Whatever you can do without a warrant. I’ll take care of the rest.”
A shrug sounded in the other man’s voice. “I’ll get back to you.”
“We’ve got company,” Franks observed.
“Saw that.”
The other agent pulled the car around to the back of the house and the tan pickup pulled in after them.
When they got out, the driver of the truck buzzed down his window. “Don’t want to be rude or anything, but this is private property. You guys are trespassing.”
Cam went up to the man’s window, showed his credentials. “Oh shit.” The man wasn’t as young as Cam had thought. Maybe mid-twenties. “Sorry, man. Uh, agent. BJ said we should check it out, but shoulda known.” his voice got louder as he turned to look at the other occupant. “BJ doesn’t always have the best ideas.”
“What do you know about this property?” Maybe their parents had met Baxter when she was in the area. Even as he had the thought, he realized it was a longshot. And he was well aware with each passing minute that they couldn’t afford to waste their time on longshots.
“Our dad rents the land. Has ever since the Coates’ died.”
Cam and Tommy looked at each other. “Who do they rent it from?”
“The kids, out in California. I mean, I guess they aren’t kids anymore, but that’s who owns it. BJ here thinks the place is haunted.”
“I do not!”
“Yeah, you do.” Enjoying a joke on his brother, he leaned out the window and said conspiratorially, “He hears noises and stuff. Screaming.”
“That’s bullshit, Jake, and you know it.” BJ sounded incensed. “But there have been noises lately when I’d come to mow fence line. Like…bumping sounds.”
Cam’s nape prickled. “Bumping sounds?”
The young man hunched his shoulders. “I heard it about a week ago and again yesterday. I never said it was a ghost. Just…sounds.”
Cam felt a single thread of hope evaporate. A week ago. The noises would have nothing to do with Sophie’s disappearance. “Think your family will mind if we take a look?”
BJ shrugged. “I guess not.”
Without a word he and Tommy approached the house. Split up, each taking a side.
Except that Cam never got any further than the splintered slanted storm cellar doors on the side of the house. The hinges were rusted, the wood rotting.
But the padlock on the outside was new.
He turned to see the brothers had gotten out of the truck and had trailed him from a distance. “Whose padlock?”
Jake shook his head. “Beats me.”
Cam got down on his belly and pressed his ear against the crack in the door. He didn’t hear anything, but when he got to his feet he looked at that padlock again. Pointed it out to Franks when he joined him.
“Only one way to find out what’s so important it has to be locked up.”
Cam went to get a hacksaw and Maglite from the trunk. It took longer than he would have thought to saw through the shackle. When he had, he put the ruined lock aside and grabbed one of the door handles, pulled it open.
Grabbing his flashlight, he went down the surprisingly cobweb free stone steps. At the base, he shone the light around the area.
It was filled with debris. Timbers that had fallen in from the floor above. It smelled like mold and there was a faint odor of decomposition, as if a long ago animal had died in here. He flashed the light upward, and saw a huge hole. Wherever the fire had started, Cam surmised, it would have been the hottest area. That’s where the flames would have burned through the floor.
He stepped further into the area, his beam painting wide arcs across the walls and floor. Then he reversed its direction. Until it fell on the bound and gagged body lying in a motionless heap.
He sprang forward, turning the figure over. A woman, he saw, still breathing shallowly, eyes closed.
But he didn’t need to bring the light closer to know that it wasn’t Sophie.
Chapter 13
The body was too small for an adult, Sophia determined. The boy, probably.
Painfully, she rolled to sit and scooted over so her bound hands were toward Henry. She had some movement in her fingers turned that way, and she used them to discern his position. Seated, legs straight out. That’s what she’d tripped over.
She moved backward an inch at a time until she could get a handful of his shirt. Jerk it sideways. If he would lie down on his side, she may be able to get the gag off his face.
Henry whimpered and tried to move away, but Sophia persisted. She reached her arms up as far as they’d go to grasp his shirt by the shoulder. Jerked hard. Off balance, he tumbled over and she immediately shifted again to give her restricted fingers access to his face.
When he felt her touch this time, Henry stilled, as if recognizing what she was trying to do. She loosened an edge of the tape that extended to his cheek and pulled. It took several attempts, but finally he whispered, “You’re going to make the monster mad.”
Just the sound of another voice was enough to have the strength streaming out of Sophia’s limbs for an instant. Then she began again, exploring as well as she could to discover how he was bound. Baxter had simply wound the tape around the boy, his hands flat to his sides. But his fingers were free. Sophia nudged his arm with her head, trying to make him understand what she wanted. Then she shifted so that her face was near his fingers.
He didn’t move for a minute. Then finally, he wiggled his fingers and tried to pry at the tape. Sophia lay still. It took an excruciatingly long time, but at last the tape was partially pulled away.
“Good job, Henry.” She took a deep breath, filling her lungs. Having her mouth covered gave her a claustrophobic feeling, even when she could still breathe through her nose.
She supposed she ought to be grateful she was still breathing at all.
“My name is Sophie.” She wasn’t aware she’d used Cam’s nickname for her until she heard herself say it. “I’m going to move around so my hands are near your fingers. Maybe you can work at the tape around my wrists.”
“It won’t work,” he said, in a tone that was much too fatalistic to be coming from a six-year-old boy. “We’re locked in here. There are some stairs with a door at the top. She locked it from the outside. I heard her.”
She thought about that for a moment, wishing the pounding in her head would fade so that she could concentrate. “Are we in a basement?”
“No. It’s a little house like. But not a house. She said it was a well house. She said there were rats down here, and they’d probably eat us. Do rats eat people?”
“No.” She shuddered. She wasn’t about to tell him that the animals were capable of gnawing on anything that couldn’t get away. Ears straining,
she listened, but didn’t hear any rustling or skittering sounds that would have indicated that they had rodent company.
“I saw your dad yesterday, Henry.” The visit to the hospital seemed very far away now. “He’s very worried about you.”
“You did?” Rather than sounding hopeful, there was a twinge of distrust threading through the words.
“I really did.”
He was silent for a minute. “The monster keeps saying she’ll take me home if I do what she wants. But she never does.”
“No, you can’t trust her.” A fist squeezed her heart at the thought of everything the boy had been through already at Baxter’s hands. “Why did she tie you up?”
“She always does if I’m where she can’t watch me. Even when she slept yesterday she put tape on me, but she didn’t tape me to the bed that time. Maybe she forgot because she was really tired from killing that bad man.”
Oh, God. Sophia squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. What that child had experienced would take extensive therapy to reverse.
But therapy was better than death.
“The explosives…they were in your backpack. What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. She gave you a shot. Then she took the bag and she did something to the clock so it wouldn’t blow up.”
She remembered almost coming to in the back seat. Seeing that the digital numbers were no longer aglow. And Sophia again wondered where Vance and Baxter had gained their familiarity with explosives. It was clear they’d had the escape orchestrated. And a bomb had played a major part in the distraction.
“Do you know where she brought us? Have you been here before?”
“Uh-uh. We drove a long time, and I fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until we were on a bumpy road with a bunch of trees all over. They were tall and I couldn’t see anything else. Then she stopped the car and made me help her…” His voice halted.
“It’s okay.” Sophia’s voice was gentle. “She made you help her tie me up.”
“Yeah. I mostly only don’t get taped when she needs me to do something.”
She could imagine. “When she stopped the car and you got up, could you see the sky? Was it daytime or night?”
“Daytime.”
“Did you stop to eat on the way down here? Did you have to stop for gas?”
“No. But she gave me a Gatorade and some donuts before she tied me up again.”
So they hadn’t driven a great distance. The realization gave Sophia reason to hope. A place an hour or two away, with a lot of trees. If she had a better idea of how long she’d been out, she could more accurately guess their location.
“Could you see the sun when she was driving? Which side of the car was it on?”
“I don’t know. It was in the sky.” He moved restlessly. “I have to go pee.”
“I think we’re just going to have to do what we have to do, buddy.”
“Yeah, I know. Me and that other lady had to go in our pants lots of times. I heard her.”
“Another lady?”
“In that basement. In the burned house. We were there a long time.”
The words staggered Sophia. The other lady had to be Lisa Hansen. The ambulance driver’s wife.
The kidnapped victims had been kept in the Coates’ house. That thought drummed away inside her head, adding to the din there. Because Vickie Baxter had returned to an area she knew. What she was familiar with.
Which meant that wherever they were being held right now, it had likely been chosen for the same reason.
* * * *
“Denholt looks clean. I saw his Mazda myself. He even left his practice to follow me to his place, let me do a walk through. It’s empty. I took a look around the property, but there was no sign of visitors.” Zirbel’s voice said that the findings were no more than he expected. “He swears up and down that he doesn’t own other property. Seemed pretty shook up at the suggestion that Baxter might contact him.”
“Thanks.” Cam got another alert on his phone and added, “I appreciate you following up.” Then he switched to the incoming call. “Prescott.”
“This is Officer Recker with DMPD, calling about your BOLO.”
A spike of adrenaline stabbed through him, hot and fierce. “You have the vehicle?”
“Well…I don’t think so. But I’ve got the plates.”
* * * *
“This is bullshit! Them ain’t my plates, so you had no call to come after me. You can’t arrest me on that outstanding warrant,’ cuz you had false…false pretenses or something. I know my rights.”
“You might want to leave the legalese to your defense attorney,” Franks said drily.
Given his shirt logo, Les Neimann appeared more familiar with racing and beer than with the law. Although given the outstanding assault warrant in his name, the law was more than familiar with him.
Cam let the conversation flow over him as he squatted down by the patrol officer and examined the bent and dented plates on the black Suburban. Wrong make and model to be Kohler’s vehicle, but it was a black SUV and that had likely been enough for Baxter’s purposes.
Distraction and diversion. That had been her intent. Frustration rose, strong enough to choke him. So far, it was looking like she’d been pretty damn successful.
Rising, he turned to Neimann, his voice whiplike, cutting through his protests. “Where was this car from yesterday at noon until now?”
“Lots of places,” the bearded man muttered. “Mostly at home until about seven last night, then I was at Stiffy’s until it closed. Needed a ride home.” Here his voice rose again and he directed the next sentence to Recker. “’Cuz I don’t drink and drive. Left the car there overnight, got a ride to get it and you picked me up before I could drive back home. Like I said, pure bullshit.”
“Did you talk to anyone going into the bar?”
“Talked to just about everybody, man. There weren’t that many there.”
Cam pulled out a folded photo of Baxter and handed it to the man. “Do you know this woman?”
Neimann took a long look. “Everyone in the city who has a TV knows that broad. She’s the killer they’re looking…” His gaze widened. “Are you telling me she did this? She set me up? Holy shit man, it’s lucky I was wasted. If I’da gone out to the car when she was there…”
She was likely out cruising for a vehicle to switch plates with long after the bar had closed, Cam thought. Which meant she’d laid low until dark and then started hunting.
“Think she had another motel room to hide out in that we didn’t know about?” Franks murmured. His head was down as he texted Agent Boggs an order to change the BOLO alert for all law enforcement agencies.
Cam shook his head. They couldn’t know for sure, but it didn’t feel right. “She’d be too paranoid to go to one of them after we nearly caught her in one.” And the failure to do so still burned. “I think she got spooked by the fact we had tracked down the license plate on the car she’d been driving. Wasn’t going to take the chance of it happening again.”
