The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

  “You go down. Use the via ferrata cable that runs off the end of this platform. Hold on to the cable and kick your feet into the cliff sides in order to work down to the water. Just above the high tide level you’ll reach a wide slab of rock that runs all the way to the bridge. It’s been scoured out by years of tidal action. If you can get down there, work your way along that platform to a point several meters before the bridge, where you will find an iron ring that someone drilled into the rock years back for some kind of moorage. At least I hope it’s still there. People used to tie rafts to it when the water was low and calm. If you can hook your rope into that ring and secure the other end to yourself, you can feed yourself out into the water and hold yourself against the currents. The rope should be long enough for you to reach Ginny.” She scrambled to her feet and hooked her pack onto her back, then scooped up the other coil of rope.

  “I’m going out onto the trestle bridge. I’ll try to cut Ginny free from the top. There’s a path around the back of this knoll that leads there.”

  “He’ll pick you off the second the mist clears.”

  “He’ll pick you off going down the cliff face, too. Pray the mist holds. I’ll try to provide a distraction from the top while you get out there at the bottom. Here.” She handed him a whistle from her pack. “Two sharp blasts and I’ll know you’re under her. The instant you blow that signal, I’ll try to sever her loose from the top. Give me your rifle.”

  “Angie, I can’t let you—”

  “Stop,” she whispered, pressing her gloved fingers to his lips. “Please, stop. And focus.” Then she said, “Maddocks, I’ve got nothing else. I need to do this.” She paused. “I need to try.”

  And he heard the subtext. She’d lost one partner. She’d lost the toddler. She’d lost Merry Winston, whom she felt she’d needed to protect. She’d lost her own identity. And she could not bear losing again.

  “I’m going to do it with or without you, Sergeant James Maddocks, you hear me? But I could use that rifle. I can put it to better use from up on the trestle than you can while you’re neck-deep in rapids.”

  He handed her his long gun and the extra magazines. She pocketed the ammo and slung the gun and the coil of rope across her body. “Be safe,” she whispered, before disappearing into the forest and mist. His heart slammed against his ribs as he watched her vanish. The rushing sound of waves rising reached him. He slung the other coil of rope over his own body, spun around, and carefully lowered himself over the edge of the platform, reaching for the iron cable. One slip of his feet or hands and he’d plunge to his death.

  So would Angie on that rotting rail bridge if she made a slip on her end.

  Or if the old rail ties gave in under her.

  CHAPTER 75

  Angie checked her watch. Just after 7:00 a.m. and still dark. Using her headlamp and flashlight, she negotiated the gully trail, protected from view by the knoll of trees above her.

  She reached the end of the trail, switched off her lights, and crouched down. The old trestle bridge stretched ahead of her into the dark and mist. From where Maddocks had pointed, Ginny had been strung down just over midway across that bridge. Angie shrugged off the coil of rope. She’d have to forsake fashioning a harness in favor of creating a temporary distraction. It would draw Addams’s attention to the bridge and away from Maddocks, who was negotiating his way down the cliff.

  Removing her headlamp, she fed one end of the rope through the strap and fastened it. Hooking the rope holding her headlamp to her shoulder, Angie edged out into the darkness and onto the bridge.

  The rail ties had gaps between them. If she slipped, she’d go straight through. Space yawed below her, and it made her head spin. Her heart hammered up into her throat. She paused, eyes adjusting, and she breathed in deep. Very deep. Then, exhaling in a slow, controlled fashion, she got down onto her hands and knees and began to crawl onto the bridge. She hated heights—she’d endured them for one of her recent Justice Institute courses, and it’s why she still had the ropes in the back of her Crown Vic. But she was even worse at swimming. Gradually, she inched out, trying to keep to the side where the ties adjoined the bridge structure in a solid stretch of wood. But the surface of the wood was slick with the slimy detritus of decay, and her hand slipped. She gasped, steadying herself, and she shut her eyes for a moment, marshaling her control. She resumed her crawl out into the chasm between the cliffs. Wind picked up the farther she moved into the void of mist and darkness. From below came the roar of surf.

  When she judged she was about a quarter of the way in, Angie stopped. Carefully, she shrugged off the coil of rope. Breathing in, then out, using a steady rhythm to calm and distract herself from the gaping maw below, she secured the free end of the rope around a rail tie. Then, holding the end with the headlamp affixed to it, she continued inching her way to the center of the bridge. Her hand came into contact with what felt like thick polyester rope. Her pulse leaped.

  Angie felt along the polyester rope. It was tied to a trestle, and it stretched taut below the bridge.

  Ginny.

  Angie swallowed and reached for the knife in her pocket. She opened the blade and clung there, waiting for Maddocks’s whistle signal. Seconds ticked by. Time stretched. Her muscles started to cramp, then shake. She prayed Maddocks had managed to get down to the water, find the iron ring, feed himself out into the rapids far below her. She prayed the fog would hold and keep them all hidden, because a dull gray dawn was beginning to almost imperceptibly lighten the forest.

  She heard it. One sharp blast, then another. Emotion sparked into her eyes.

  Quickly, she switched her headlamp on to flash mode and dropped it into the void. Attached to the rope, it swung down and back toward where she’d tied the other end, light pulsing into the mist.

  The gunshot was instant. Then another. Addams was firing on the moving flashlight. Sweat prickled over her lip as Angie frantically sliced at the rope with the same blade she’d used to cut the cuffs off Maddocks that first night in the motel—the same blade with which she’d tried to kill him. Now she prayed that blade would save his daughter. Another gunshot sounded as her flashlight swung and pulsed below the bridge. She worked faster. Addams would wise up to the distraction trick sooner or later.

  It happened sooner. Another gunshot cracked through the canyon. This time he was aiming not at the bridge, but at the water below where he’d strung Ginny. A scream—a woman’s bloodcurdling scream—sliced the air as the last strands of polyester rope snapped free and the cut end of the rope dropped into the dark. Angie clung to the rail ties, listening. There was another shot. Then nothing but the sound of the surf.

  Her gaze flared to the dark forest as a light appeared in the trees. The light bobbed and moved slowly down the cliff. Addams. He was making his way toward the water on the opposite side. Balancing carefully, heart in her throat, Angie reached for the rifle on her back. Easing into a flatter position on the trestles, finger curling around the trigger, she aimed carefully at the moving light. And fired. The butt kicked against her cheek and shoulder. She swallowed. The light was still there, moving faster, but uphill now, away. She’d missed, but she’d set him on the run. She aimed, fired again. The light bobbed even faster. He was climbing a trail that she knew would take him west and up into even more remote wilderness. He was fleeing. Angie scrambled up onto her hands and knees. She hooked the rifle back over her body and crawled as fast as she could along the rest of the bridge toward the forested cliff on the west side.

  CHAPTER 76

  The bullet slammed like a mallet into his chest. Dazed, winded, Maddocks heard a scream as he sank down into the churning surf. Unable to breathe or thrash against the water engulfing him, he saw Ginny’s cocoon coming down beside him. She landed with a splash. Every instinct in his brain screamed to grab her before she went under and drowned, unable to save herself with her arms bound into that tarp. He fought to suck in a breath, the pain in his chest crushing. Managing to move his arms,
he flailed pathetically in the rolling surf to grab the loose end of Ginny’s rope that had come snapping down atop of them both. He snagged the rope and pulled himself along it, simultaneously pulling her closer toward him. Her cocoon reached him. He latched on to his daughter just as they washed into deeper water, faster, currents swirling. He kicked his legs like an eggbeater, struggling to keep them both afloat and hold her head above water, his wet clothes, boots, conspiring to drag him down. He saw her face. White like paper. Blood came from her brow. But her eyes … her eyes were wide open and wild with terror, and her mouth, too. She was screaming. The sound was all around him and being drowned by surf. His Ginny was alive and screaming and bleeding. The current snatched at them, suddenly whirling them in a mad fairground ride into a powerful set of roaring rapids as they were swept up toward the estuary.

  Angie reached land on the far side of the bridge. She wobbled up onto her feet, limbs trembling from the effort of keeping her balance and her focus. She felt sick with fear that Addams had killed Maddocks. Or Ginny. Or both. That they had drowned below her.

  She clicked on her flashlight. A trail of mud and rock and moss led steeply up into the trees. A fresh print showed in the mud. She swung her beam a little farther up the trail. More tracks. Leading farther up into the woods.

  There was no way she’d be able to climb down the cliff in time to save Maddocks or Ginny. She’d cut Ginny’s cocoon loose, dropping her into the water. Both she and Maddocks would have been swept up toward the estuary within seconds. If Maddocks was secured to the rope and still able, he might be able to pull himself and Ginny back to the safety of the rock ledge. She chose to believe this was the case as she dropped her pack and struggled with numb fingers to undo the side strap that held her two-way radio. The radio would be useless if there was no one in range, and it was unlikely the ERT guys would be close enough yet—that is, if they were even trying to access the area on foot. However, someone might hear her.

  She engaged the radio. “Mayday, mayday. Trestle bridge, Skookum narrows. Mayday, mayday, Skookum narrows.”

  She waited. Tried again. Nothing. She tried once more, and still no response. Replacing the radio, she swung the pack and gun back up onto her back. Aiming her flashlight beam ahead of her, she started up the trail, moving as fast as she could. Sleet came down hard, and the mud was slick. She fell again and again but kept on getting up. Her breath began to rasp in her throat, and sweat drenched her body under her jacket and clothes, but all she could focus on was getting him. Stopping him before he could disappear forever into the wild.

  Her advantage was that Addams didn’t know yet she was tracking him.

  Angie moved like this for hours. Her muscles cramped. Her toes went numb. Her heart beat like a rapid, deep drum in her chest. Daylight filtered into the forest, but beneath the old-growth canopy and with the low clouds, visibility was poor. She stumbled more and more. But she kept going, following his tracks, losing all sense of time. The forest grew darker again.

  Suddenly the prints ended.

  She stilled, tensed. Then clicked off her flashlight. Too late. A crack of a rifle snapped her attention upward and to the right, but at the same time she felt a slam in her arm. The impact spun her sideways, and her boot caught under a root. She went down hard into rock and mud. Pain screamed through her upper left arm. She heard the crash and crunch of brush breaking, of him fleeing. Rage exploded into her blood. Using her good arm, she grabbed on to branches to pull herself back up onto her feet. Retrieving her rifle from where it had fallen on the ground, she stumbled after him.

  Angie’s eyes watered with the pain. She felt her own blood soaking hot into her sleeve, going sticky down her arm. Her breathing became labored. Dizziness made the darkening forest spin. She stopped. Panting, she listened carefully. She heard him again, crashing through deciduous scrub. Suddenly she saw his light bobbing ahead. He was moving away from her and up a steep, mossy incline that exposed him.

  With her good arm and some limited movement from her injured one, Angie maneuvered her rifle stock into the socket between her shoulder and her jaw. She tried to inhale deeply as she sighted down the barrel. She aimed for the dark bulk of his center. Curling her finger around the trigger, she exhaled, and on the last of her breath, she fired. Her weapon kicked. Sound boomed through the forest. Sweat, melting slush, leaked into her eyes, blurring her vision. She saw him stagger, fall. But he didn’t stay down. He crawled a little farther up the incline, and then he swayed back up onto his feet. He started wobbling uphill again.

  A wild, unthinking animal came alive and roared inside Angie’s chest. In her mind she saw Drummond’s body on that morgue slab, Faith Hocking’s corpse cut wide open. She saw in her head what he’d done to them. Because they were women. Because they fit his sick sexual fantasy.

  I came to you because you said that you cared. And I believed you …

  She’d let Merry Winston down.

  And all those other girls before Merry … and Ginny and Maddocks …

  And suddenly, there she was again—the little girl in a wash of luminous pink. She floated with the mist in the trees. The forest was completely dark again—had night fallen once more?

  Words—like a rushing river, like the wind, like the sound of crashing ocean surf—boomed into Angie’s head. The noise seemed to come from within her skull, from the forest all around her, from the cloud …

  Come um dum … dem grove … come …

  The little girl chuckled, turned, and raced up into the trees, behind Addams.

  Angie could see nothing but the pink glow. It tugged her forward, as if with strings attached directly to her heart. Panting, she scrambled and staggered and fell and crawled and got up again and again as she was pulled forward by that pink glow and her desperate urge to protect it, to stop it from getting any closer to the evil that was Addams.

  She reached the top of the incline. And saw him.

  Addams.

  He sat on a rock, holding his thigh, his head bent. His weapon lay on the ground by his boots. She’d wounded him.

  “Spencer Addams!” she screamed.

  His head shot up.

  She saw his face, white in the light of her headlamp. His eyes met hers. He remained motionless for a moment. She raised her rifle stock to her shoulder, oblivious now to pain, to any physical sensation at all.

  “Step away from that weapon—get down on the ground! Now!” She moved forward as she yelled. “On your stomach!”

  Very slowly, with his gaze locked onto hers, he moved, lowering himself to the earth.

  The little girl ducked behind him, behind his rock. Angie blinked, trying to keep focus. Rain and sweat leaked into her eyes. He kept looking right back at her, just kept looking. Time stretched and warped. “Move it! Now!” she yelled, her voice cracking. Her finger curled tighter around her rifle trigger. That tinny nursery rhyme music began inside her head—quiet and distant at first, then loud and discordant and crashing, like a bad fairground ride … There … were once two little kittens. A-a-a, a-a-, two little kittens …

  Angie swallowed. Her finger was tense on the trigger. She kept staring into those devil’s eyes as reality seemed to blur. He moved suddenly, snatching up his rifle. He rose into a squat. She squeezed.

  His head blew back. He dropped the gun. His body seemed to hang motionless as he kept looking at her. Blood, black in the light of her headlamp, bloomed white around his mouth, making him look like a mad, laughing clown. He slumped backward.

  Panting hard, she moved quickly toward him.

  He was on his back, just in front of the rock, writhing in the mud. She’d hit him in the jaw, on the left side of his mouth. He reached a hand out to her, like a claw, as if to plead for mercy, to grasp onto her. He was saying something … yelling something with that bloody maw … trying to scoot and wriggle backward in the mud.

  Ice filled her heart. Rage mushroomed through her body, stealing all logic that remained in her exhausted mind. Two little kit
tens … there were two little kittens …

  Angie raised her gun. She fired. Again. Into his face. And again. And again. She emptied the rest of her ten-round magazine and dropped to her knees in the mud, shaking.

  Tears streamed down her face.

  CHAPTER 77

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20

  Angie became gradually aware that she was lying in a bed. Her body hurt. She tried to open her eyes. Light was bright—pain. She shut them again quickly, nausea washing into her stomach. Her mouth felt dry, tasted bad. Confusion swirled thick in her brain. The memory struck her suddenly. Her pulse quickened. Spencer Addams.

  Hunting him through the woods.

  Her eyes flared open wide, heart racing. Hospital—she was in a ward. Angie struggled to sit up. Dizziness swirled, and she collapsed back onto the pillow with a groan.

  “Whoa, easy there. Take it easy.”

  Slowly, she turned her head. Blinking, she tried to bring the speaker into focus. He was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room.

  “Holgersen?”

  He tossed aside the blanket covering him and came to his feet.

  “Where am I?” She managed to pull herself up into a quasi-sitting position against the pillow. She realized her upper left arm was bandaged. It throbbed like all hell. Her head, too.

  Holgersen came up to her bedside. “Bullet ripped through muscle and flesh, but missed bone. Doc says yous should regain full use of that arm, but it’ll take a while. And plenty of physio.”

  Her hand went to her head. She tentatively touched a sensitive area that felt like a golf ball.

  “Guess yous got a bash on the head, too, eh? Maybe when you passed out.”

  “What … what happened to me?”

  “All’s I know is you was lying there bleeding, unconscious, hypothermic, dehydrated, when the SAR guys found you and Addams’s body.”

  Her brain reeled. She closed her eyes, trying to remember, struggling to bring it all into focus. She recalled tracking him. For how long she didn’t know. Catching up. Yelling at him to lie facedown. Then … then nothing. Blackness. She opened her eyes.