The FBI Thrillers Collection: Vol 11-15

by Catherine Coulter

  43

  THE SEARCH WAS A BUST.

  An hour later, forensic expert and team leader Dirk Platt walked to where Savich and Sherlock stood watching the operation at Martin Backman’s grave site. He was shaking his head even as he said, “Sorry, guys, but there are no bodies here.”

  “She moved them,” Sherlock said. “Blessed notified her and she moved them. Or she suspected either Autumn or Joanna saw what they did and that’s why they ran.” Sherlock looked out over the cemetery. The forty graves positioned in odd triangles. The last graves were not two feet from a thick stand of oak trees that reached up the sides of the bowl to spear green and fat into the sky. The trees surrounding the cemetery laced their branches together, creating moving shadows in the breeze.

  Dirk asked them, “Do you want us to dig up any of the other graves?”

  “No,” Savich said. “Not yet.”

  Dirk nodded and waved to the huge hole in the ground. “She moved something out of here. All we’ve got is a big hole recently filled in with dirt.”

  “Any blood? Any clothes?”

  “No, nothing, but don’t give up yet. If there were bodies thrown in that hole, we might still find something. Damnedest thing. To look around, this seems a peaceful-hidden-valley sort of place, an old-fashioned little American town where you expect to find some rustic charm, not missing bodies.

  “Lori is taking soil samples, looking for traces of blood and human remains, which I don’t think she’ll find. She’ll also be checking to see if the soil comes from here or somewhere else. If the soil is clean, you can bet it was brought in.”

  “When they moved the bodies,” Sherlock said, “I doubt they took them far. Who’d want to take the chance, too great a risk of discovery. On the other hand, this valley is pretty large.”

  “Not much risk if the grave robbers are the sheriff and his deputies,” Savich said. “They could have wrapped the bodies in a tarp and hauled them anywhere in the valley in the flat bed of the sheriff’s truck.”

  “There’s no sign of any recent digging anywhere else in the cemetery, so we’re going to start checking the flower beds and anywhere else there’s disturbed ground with GPR, ground penetration radar. I’ve called for a couple of cadaver dogs to complement the GPR, but if we don’t find the bodies pretty close by, the cost builds up real fast.”

  Savich said, “I know. Do what you can, Dirk.” He turned to Sherlock. “Well, things don’t always go like you want them to.”

  44

  ROCKINGHAM COUNTY HOSPITAL

  NEAR TITUSVILLE, VIRGINIA

  Late Wednesday afternoon

  The nurse, skinny as a windowpane, with salt-and-pepper hair and a no-nonsense stride, was pushing against Blessed’s hospital room door before Ox could roar to his feet and shout at her, “Hold on there. I haven’t seen you before.” He grabbed her skinny arm. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  She stared up at him with a face scrubbed clean of makeup. He swore for an instant that he saw a five-o’clock shadow on her jaw—no, couldn’t be. He shook his head as she said patiently, “I’m Nurse Eleanor Lapley. I work here. I just came on duty. Who are you?”

  “I’m with the sheriff’s department, here to guard the maniac strapped down to the bed inside. Do you know about him?”

  “Of course. First thing when I came in, they showed me that film about him. Kind of hard to believe. Seems to me it might have been faked, don’t you think?”

  “Nothing was faked.”

  “If not, then he’s quite something, isn’t he?” There was admiration in her deep voice. Not good.

  Ox said, “I’ll go in with you. What do you need to do?”

  “Check his vitals, see that he’s not in pain, the usual.”

  Ox nodded and pushed the door open.

  It was the last thing he remembered.

  WHEN OX WOKE UP he was lying on his back, strapped down to Blessed Backman’s hospital bed, his eyes covered, his wrists strapped to the bed railings. He opened his mouth and yelled.

  An orderly burst through the door, stood stock-still, and stared down at him.

  “Whoever you are, get this blindfold off me and the straps.”

  “I can’t, sir. I saw that film; I saw what you do to a person. I’m not even coming close.”

  Ox managed to still his panic. He forced calm and reason into his voice. “Listen to me. Blessed Backman is in his mid-fifties, a skinny little guy. I’m not. Somehow he got me. That nurse—”

  “What nurse?”

  “Nurse Eleanor Lapley, she said her name was.”

  “Okay, there isn’t a nurse Eleanor Lapley, not unless she started thirty minutes ago and nobody told me.”

  “For God’s sake, look at me. Do I look like Blessed Backman?”

  “Well, no, sir, but—”

  “Get me loose, now! Blessed Backman’s escaped. We’ve got to get him back.”

  “But—”

  “You idiot! I’m thirty-three years old and I weigh two hundred pounds! Look at me!”

  The orderly freed him.

  Ox looked up at Savich’s video camera. Where was Dr. Hicks? He pushed past the orderly and looked into the next room. Dr. Hicks was unconscious but alive, the video equipment mangled.

  He knew the only official security in the small hospital was at the front entrance, so he didn’t bother alerting hospital staff. He got hold of Ethan three seconds later.

  “…This nurse, Ethan, I swear to you she had a five-o’clock shadow. I know Agent Savich told you Grace was probably here. I know it sounds weird, but do you think Nurse Lapley was somehow Grace?”

  Ethan thought his brains were going to scramble. “I suppose it had to be Grace. He got in through hospital security disguised as a nurse, only I guess he couldn’t quite make it realistic enough…A bad disguise? I sure hope so, because if it wasn’t a disguise…no I don’t want to think about that. Another couple of minutes and you would have suspected, but Grace was fast, got into the room and pulled off Blessed’s blindfold, and that’s why you don’t remember what happened…. Get all our people out to my place. That’s where Joanna and Autumn are. He’ll head there, you know it. I’m on my way right now.” A moment later, Ethan was back on his cell phone, and Joanna’s phone was ringing.

  “Hello?”

  “Joanna, this is Ethan. Blessed’s escaped, with the help of his brother Grace. Get Autumn out of there right now. Drive back toward town. I’ll meet you halfway.”

  She didn’t say a word, punched off.

  Five minutes later when he saw her rental car barreling toward him he honked and pulled his Rubicon over on the shoulder.

  Joanna’s first words were “I should have killed him. Dammit, I should have killed him.”

  Autumn was white-faced and silent, plastered to her mother’s side. “Get in.” He threw the passenger door open and Joanna lifted Autumn inside, jumped in beside her. “I don’t have a gun. We just ran.”

  “I do; don’t worry.” That was about the stupidest thing he’d ever said. “There’s a rifle in the box under the front seat. I’ll take that; you can have my Beretta.”

  He patted Autumn’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right, kiddo.”

  If Autumn didn’t believe him, he didn’t blame her. He pulled his Beretta off his waist clip, handed it butt-first to Joanna.

  “Where are we going?”

  He saw an ancient Ford Escort in his rearview mirror, closing fast. He didn’t have to see for sure who was in the car. It was Blessed and Grace. Had to be.

  “Hang on,” he said, and pressed down hard on the accelerator.

  The Rubicon pulled away smoothly on the windy two-lane highway, and soon they were far enough ahead so Blessed couldn’t see them around the turns. Ethan pulled off fast onto a potholed fire road that led straight into Titus Hitch Wilderness, not the front entrance with the ranger kiosk but a narrow dirty path barely wide enough for the Rubicon. It came to an abrupt stop at the Sweet Onion River. If they were luck
y, it would take Blessed and Grace a good long time to find out where they’d gone. But they would find them, Ethan knew it.

  “Let’s go.”

  Joanna said, “You know where we are; that’s good. Where to?”

  “We’re going to head on foot into the Titus Hitch Wilderness. We can’t go back where we came from, and going forward is better than staying here. I know these woods well, know a good spot to stop.”

  “Ethan, what are we going to do in the wilderness?” Autumn asked him.

  He looked at the mother, then at the daughter, and said, “We’re going hiking.”

  He pulled his bolt-action Remington 700 out of his gun box. It was a gift from his father when he was twelve years old—to make a hunter out of him, his father had said. Ethan had learned to shoot the bolt action, loved the rifle as a matter of fact, but he hadn’t stayed with hunting. He preferred to paint animals and take their pictures rather than shoot them.

  He grabbed two boxes of boattail bullets. He had only forty rounds. He had to be careful. He said, more to himself than to Joanna, “The clip is already loaded—ten rounds, so that gives us fifty rounds.” He looked up at her. “This baby is slow, but it’s really accurate at distance. Here’s two magazines, Joanna, fifteen rounds each, for the Beretta.”

  He thought about setting up a blind, shooting Blessed from a good hundred yards away, far enough away to be safe. But what about Grace? Was he good at disguises, or was he something else entirely? Ethan was very afraid he knew the answer to that.

  He walked to the back of his truck, opened a metal storage trunk, and hoisted on a heavy backpack. He passed a smaller one to Joanna. “Okay, guys, let’s get out of here.”

  Ethan led them along the edge of the Sweet Onion River, through lush water reeds, to a narrow slice of water only ten feet wide, with black stepping stones that he himself had laid fifteen years before, for a dry crossing. “Okay, Joanna, you go first, then Autumn. I’ll come across last.”

  “Why don’t we pick up the black rocks so they won’t know where we’ve crossed?”

  He said simply, “I want them to know.”

  Joanna looked at his rifle, then back up at his face.

  When they reached the other side of the river, Ethan pulled out his cell and dialed Savich. “We won’t have service for much longer.”

  Two rings, then, “Savich.”

  “Ethan here. Grace sprang Blessed. If you want the full story, call Ox. Joanna, Autumn, and I are heading into Titus Hitch Wilderness, a place I know better than you know Washington.”

  “We just left the Backmans’ place. No bodies to be found, so they moved them. Do you want us back there?”

  “You can’t get to us out here any more easily than they can,” Ethan said. “It has to end, Savich. I hope to end it here.”

  “He can’t stymie me, Ethan.”

  “There’s no time.”

  “Can you get a distance shot?”

  Ethan grinned into his cell. “Exactly what I’m hoping for. We’re going to keep moving and then camp for the night. If we don’t run across them, I’m planning to lead Joanna and Autumn out across the north boundary in the morning.”

  “Have you called your deputies in after you?”

  “No. I thought about that, but I want the only one trailing us to be Blessed. I don’t want to take the chance he’d stymie my deputies. Call Ox and let him know, will you? We’ve got to move.”

  There was a pause, then, “Good luck, Ethan.”

  Ethan pocketed his cell phone, then turned to Joanna and Autumn. “Either of you need to rest, you just holler, okay? We’re going to be going through some pretty rough terrain. I’m the only one without good footwear.” He kicked a stone with the toe of his low-heeled boots. “Your sneakers will be fine. Stay close. We’ve got a ways to go before we get to Locksley Manor.”

  One of Joanna’s eyebrows went up. “Robin Hood’s house?”

  “You’ll see,” Ethan said, and took the lead.

  He pictured Mr. Spalding hanging in that tree, the bear ripping him down. He had no intention of ending up like him. He prayed they wouldn’t run into hikers. He prayed harder that any hikers didn’t get close to Blessed and Grace.

  They walked a few hundred yards on narrow trails until Ethan hooked off-trail to the right, and they walked, always upward, through thick brush dotted with brilliant daisies and jasmine.

  45

  BRICKER’S BOWL, GEORGIA

  Late Wednesday afternoon

  “We need to go back to Titusville, Dillon. We can’t leave Ethan on his own, even if he asked us to.”

  “We’ll be on a flight this evening, Sherlock,” Savich said, and turned the Camry onto the main road, heading east from Bricker’s Bowl. “Right now I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “Anything to make this headache go away.”

  “How about MAX found the address of the Children of Twilight?”

  “He’s been working on that for days. You’re not kidding me?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, got it.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’ll do it.” She snapped her fingers. “Headache’s gone in four-point-five seconds. How did MAX find out where they’re located?”

  “Whistler’s mother.”

  She punched him in the arm.

  He grinned. “MAX couldn’t find any property in Caldicot Whistler’s name, so we dug into Caldicot Whistler’s antecedents, his father, then his mother. Father’s dead, so is the mother, but I had him do a property search within a hundred-mile radius of Bricker’s Bowl, flag anything that might be suspect. He finally found a good-sized property hidden within two holding companies, the first under the proprietary name of the second. That second company’s name was listed as C. W. Huntingdon, Limited. The initials C.W.—as in Caldicot Whistler—triggered MAX’s algorithm, and he went for it. Underneath all the layers, MAX discovered the property actually belonged to Mrs. Agatha Whistler as sole trustee. She inherited it from her husband when he died some fifteen years ago. Although the trust isn’t in the public record, it must have been passed to Caldicot when she died only last year at the age of eighty-five years. Caldicot is her only surviving child, now age fifty-two. Her other child was much older and is also dead.

  “So Caldicot made a good stab at hiding the property, but MAX dug him out anyway.”

  The pride in his voice made Sherlock smile. “What sort of property is it?”

  “An old flue-cured tobacco farm.”

  “What on earth is that?”

  “Flue-curing is still used commonly on tobacco farms in Georgia, supposedly produces the best tobacco. Evidently they string the tobacco leaves onto sticks that they then hang from tier-poles in the curing barns. Then brick furnaces heat flues that ‘cook’ the green tobacco leaves.

  “According to the deed, the farm was active until the nineteen thirties. There are two curing barns still standing after more than a hundred years, and a huge stone mansion, built in the early part of the twentieth century that now probably houses the cult. I can’t imagine what other use Whistler would have for it. It’s located about two miles outside of a small town called Peas Ridge, ten miles from Haverhill, where Caldicot Whistler supposedly sells cars.”

  “May I ask when you worked with MAX on this?”

  He shrugged. “I woke up early this morning, couldn’t go back to sleep. You looked so happy in whatever dream you were having, I didn’t have the heart to wake you. I already called Ethan about it.”

  Sherlock nodded. “He needs all the info he can get. Good job.” She frowned at him. “You could at least act like you’re a bit tired.”

  “Hot tea’s my secret, you know that.”

  “All right, macho man, the Children of Twilight. I haven’t told you where I think that name comes from.”

  “Yeah, you were going to tell me about that earlier.”

  “I found a couple hundred references to the name, but the one that caught my eye was a Children of Twilight group back in the fi
fteenth century in Spain, which was at the height of the Inquisition. They were called Los Niños en el Atardecer in Spanish. They’d been around for maybe a hundred years before that, living in isolation, causing no trouble.

  “Torquemada himself went after the cult. You’re going to like this—the Children of Twilight were all supposedly endowed with psychic powers.”

  Savich said slowly, “They wouldn’t have called it that back then. How were they described?”

  “Torquemada called them Adoradores del Diablo—devil worshippers—who communicated not only with each other but with the devil himself to further the devil’s evil schemes.”

  “Not a good ending for them, I’ll bet.”

  “No, not a good ending. Those Torquemada caught were burned at the stake. Auto-da-fé—an ‘act of faith.’ Isn’t that lovely? Some escaped, but the group was never heard from again.”

  Savich said, “So if this present-day cult has taken up their name, that leads to an interesting conclusion, doesn’t it?”

  “The same direction Whistler’s blog took us—a cult that glorifies psychics—and might risk a great deal for a child like Autumn. Of course, it could all be coincidence.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  A bullet whistled past Sherlock’s head and spiderwebbed the windshield.

  46

  SAVICH SHOUTED, “HOLD ON.”

  He got control of the car again, glanced into the rearview mirror at a small black Ford Focus not twenty feet back and saw the black barrel of a gun and the hand holding it coming out the passenger-side window. So there were two of them. He wasn’t in his Porsche, he was in a Camry with regular gas in its tank, but it was a game little car. He sawed the Camry back and forth across the lanes, grateful there were no other cars in sight.

  Sherlock slithered low across the seat as she pulled her SIG from her belt clip, then twisted around to look at the car behind them. Savich said, “Gun out the passenger-side window. They haven’t fired again because they can’t get a fix on us.”