Closer Than You Think

by Karen Rose

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked at her protector. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Daniel Boone National Forest. Route 60. Just out of Morehead. Tell them to hurry.’

  ‘I heard him,’ the operator said. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Corinne. Corinne Longstreet. Please, the man who did this to us . . . he took my . . . the little girl who was with me. Her name is Roza. We were kidnapped and held in a house, then a cabin. He shot me and he took her. Please. He’ll kill her.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’

  ‘Tall, not big, not skinny. Wearing a ski mask. I’m sorry. Please hurry, she’s only eleven.’

  ‘I’m informing the police right now. Did you see what he was driving?’

  ‘No, he came here on foot. He shot us from up on the hill, then came down and took Roza. I shot his arm. I shot his chest, too, but he didn’t go down. He was wearing body armor. And he had a rifle. With a scope. Looked like an M24. But then he ran away on the shoulder of the road, around the curve. He drove a van once, then a car once, but I didn’t see which one he had this time.’

  ‘Who is with you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who are you?’ she asked the man beside her.

  ‘Marcus O’Bannion,’ he wheezed. ‘That big guy is my brother Stone.’

  Stone? Corinne wanted to laugh, knowing it was hysteria. His head was like one. She told the operator their names. ‘The girl’s name is Firoza, but she goes by Roza.’

  ‘All right, honey. Help is on the way. Sit tight.’

  Like I have a choice? She couldn’t do anything but sit. Except that the man who’d saved her life looked in even worse shape than she was. ‘How badly are you hit?’ she asked him.

  ‘Pretty bad.’

  She could hear the wheezing sound of his lungs. She’d heard that sound once before. One of the bullets had punctured his lung. ‘Do you have any first-aid supplies in your vehicle?’

  ‘In the back,’ Marcus whispered. ‘A kit.’

  ‘He says to look in the back,’ she ordered Stone, who still lay next to the Subaru. ‘Can you throw the kit? I can’t walk to get it. Hurry or he’ll die.’

  She was watching Stone crawl over with the first-aid kit when their last name clicked. ‘O’Bannion? The people who gave me a scholarship?’

  Marcus’s eyes glinted with interest, despite his obvious pain. ‘You’re a Joy kid? No shit?’

  ‘Not a kid,’ she snapped as she opened the first-aid kit. ‘Are you one of those O’Bannions?’

  ‘Other side of the family,’ he wheezed. ‘Small world, huh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Corinne said flatly. ‘Small as hell.’

  Mt Carmel, Ohio, Wednesday 5 November, 1.05 P.M.

  ‘It’s just a house,’ Faith murmured as she walked into her grandmother’s living room. CSU had been busy. All the sheets that had covered the furniture had been removed, revealing the massive mahogany pieces she remembered from her childhood. Black fingerprint powder covered the walls and almost every other surface.

  All of this is mine, she thought, but there was no joy in it. Only the rapidly growing sense of suffocating, impending doom. At least this stuff should bring some money at auction. Her father could definitely use the funds. But so could Gordon Shue’s wife and kids. And Agent Pope’s. So many lives irrevocably changed.

  ‘Dr Corcoran?’ Kimble said quietly, and Faith’s eyes jerked to his.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was thinking about the victims’ families. There aren’t enough assets in this house to compensate them all, even if I sold everything.’

  His eyes flickered in surprise. ‘That you’d even think about it is something. Most people wouldn’t.’

  ‘I hope I’m not most people.’ I’m going to have to be stronger than most people.

  This nightmare was only beginning. Her life, her family, the link to the Joy Foundation . . . everything was about to become front-page news. The press knew bodies had been found here, but they didn’t know how many. They knew about Roza, but not about the girl’s mother.

  Who might still be buried downstairs. Faith gritted her teeth against the overwhelming need to run away as fast as she could. ‘Let’s do this before I chicken out.’

  She marched herself through the kitchen, coming to a stop at the door to the basement. The steps grew wavy as she stared. She stifled a yelp when a hand grabbed her shoulder.

  ‘Breathe,’ Kimble said from behind her. ‘You have to breathe or you’ll pass out.’

  ‘Right.’ She’d done this before. I can do it again. But her feet would not move. Deacon had been here last time. He’d made it easier. Suddenly she wished she’d waited until he could have come with her. But there was work to be done. She closed her eyes, imagined Deacon stood behind her, his soothing voice in her ear, and took the first step. One. That was one!

  She had the insane urge to laugh, but sucked it back and, eyes still screwed shut, forced her feet down the remaining nine steps. That’s it. There are only ten now. She took a step straight out but encountered nothing but air. Startled, she found herself falling forward.

  She scrabbled for balance, instinctively throwing out her hands to break her fall. Kimble’s hands grabbed her upper arms to yank her back, but too late. Her hands hit the wall and her knees hit the ground. Pain stole her breath and for a moment she knelt there, waiting for the initial throbbing to subside.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Kimble asked with what sounded like real concern.

  ‘What the . . .?’ Tanaka exclaimed, the floor vibrating under Faith’s knees as he ran up to her. ‘Dr Corcoran, what happened?’

  She let the two men help her to her feet because it was easier than telling them no. Also because her hands and knees burned like hellfire. Because you were in a car accident two days ago, you idiot. After which, she’d climbed an embankment.

  She’d actually forgotten. ‘Just a miscalculation.’ Her eyes open now, she glared at the floor, now sixteen inches lower than it had been the night before. ‘You uncovered the other two stairs. I wasn’t expecting that. I should have. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Do you need to leave?’ Kimble asked. ‘I can take you back.’

  Faith straightened her spine. ‘No. The stairs are always the worst part.’ Which wasn’t true but sounded good, and at this point she’d lie like a damn rug to get through this.

  ‘Um,’ Tanaka said, looking from her to Kimble. ‘Why are you here, Dr Corcoran? I thought Agent Novak wanted you to wait until he got here.’

  ‘I asked her to help us find any hiding places he might be keeping souvenirs,’ Kimble said.

  Tanaka’s brows shot up. ‘O-kay. Well then, be careful where you step. We’ve stuck markers in the floor at various intervals and I wouldn’t want you to . . . well, you know.’

  ‘Trip,’ Faith muttered, her cheeks heating at his well-meaning tone. ‘Because I’m so graceful. I’ll be careful.’ She took a moment to check out the changes made since her last visit. The floor under her bootie-covered shoes was no longer linoleum tile, but wood plank.

  She thought about what had filled the space between these planks and the old tile and had to swallow hard. Ten bodies. Ten women who’d had their lives stolen away.

  ‘Is this planking what you found when you removed the . . . bodies? Or did you put it down to protect what’s beneath?’

  ‘It’s what we found,’ Tanaka said. ‘What was it before, when you were a child?’

  ‘Cement. Have you pulled up any of the planking?’

  He nodded. ‘There’s only dirt beneath.’

  ‘Then he dug up the cement.’ A shiver ran down Faith’s back as she considered why he would have done so. She forced herself to turn until her eyes met the wall to the right of the stairs, and then had to clear her throat. ‘This wall wasn’t here. Do you know what’s behind it?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Tanaka said, then seemed to hesitate. ‘Do you?’

  Yes. Shoes, swinging. Red sneakers with white shoelaces swaying lazily back and forth. Back and forth. L
ike nothing was wrong at all. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Not anymore.’

  Tanaka’s expression gentled. ‘He may have things hidden there, but he didn’t put them there when he fled on Monday, because the plaster is untouched and we don’t detect any seams.’

  ‘So it’s probably not the jars Arianna heard him packing away,’ Faith said.

  ‘Correct. Still, that’s the first wall we’re bringing down, as soon as we finish the scan.’

  The scan for bodies. Faith couldn’t bring herself to ask him what he’d found. ‘Can’t you scan the walls too?’

  ‘Not yet. The X-ray equipment I requested won’t be here until tomorrow.’

  ‘Sergeant?’ A woman with a long blonde ponytail emerged from the room in which they’d found the first body buried in Plexiglas. She wore a Philadelphia Flyers sweatshirt and cargo pants, the pockets of which were stuffed to capacity with tools and . . . Faith squinted. Long sticks of beef jerky. How very odd.

  The woman stopped short when she saw Faith and Kimble. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Sergeant Tanaka, but I heard you talking about an X-ray scanner. I brought one with me, so if you find a wall you need scanned, I can do that for you.’

  Tanaka’s eyes lit up at the offer. ‘I didn’t realize you had one with you.’

  ‘It’s part of our gear.’ The woman spoke to Tanaka, but her eyes were squarely on Faith as she moved closer. ‘I’m Sophie Johannsen. I’m a forensic archeologist.’

  Ah yes. She’d been in that photo of Deacon staring at the freshly dug graves haphazardly spread across the hillside in West Virginia.

  ‘I’m Faith Corcoran. This is my grandmother’s house. This is Detective Kimble. We’re here to search for places where the killer may have hidden his souvenirs. How does your wall X-ray work? I mean, how specific an area do I need to identify?’

  ‘We work in pie-plate-sized increments. Each takes a long time and a lot of power. A whole wall would tax CSU’s generator. Did you have a space in mind, Dr Corcoran?’

  ‘Call me Faith,’ Faith murmured, looking at the ceiling. ‘The kitchen is above our heads, but it was added in the late 1970s. The original 1859 kitchen was in the back of the house. Almost directly over the room where the autopsy table is.’

  She gathered her courage and walked into that room. A quick glance from the corner of her eye revealed that the autopsy table was gone, the room now big and bare except for the cabinets built into the wall to the far left. Their doors had been left open, every cabinet empty. To the right was where the door to the outside had once been. Now there was a wall, but she saw no sign of any magic opening – no seams, no missing plaster here either.

  ‘My mother used to tell me stories about this house,’ she said, aware that Kimble, Tanaka and Sophie Johannsen had joined her in the room. ‘She was the oldest surviving child after Joy died, and the house would have been left to her. She told me to listen to the stories, that they were my birthright. My legacy. Now the only legacy will be what a monster did to his victims.’

  Severe unease gripped her, making it hard for her to look left at the wall with the cabinets, and she did not know why. It had been like this before, when Deacon was with her. She’d barely been able to look at that wall without being sick.

  She looked straight up again, trying to orient herself spatially with the way the house had been before. Trying to remember her mother’s stories. It had been a long time since she’d actively tried to remember a word her mother had said.

  Because she also said she loved me, but she lied. She left me. On purpose. The adult therapist within her understood that her mother’s suicide wasn’t so simple, but the child still hurt.

  ‘My mother used to tell me about getting stuck once inside the wall when she tried to ride the old kitchen’s dumbwaiter. My grandmother scolded her for lying to me and told me the story wasn’t true, but my mother said that was because my grandmother didn’t want me trying to ride it.’

  ‘Would you have?’ Sophie asked, amused.

  ‘Only totally.’ Faith dropped her eyes to the floor so that she didn’t have to look at the wall as she approached it, focusing on the markers Tanaka had cautioned her about. There were more than a dozen of them, placed in groups of two separated by wide spaces.

  It took her a moment to realize that they’d been placed not in twos, but in fours, each marking off a space roughly three feet by six feet. And then she understood.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispered. Graves. Four more graves. Four more victims buried beneath her feet. ‘I’m walking on them, aren’t I?’ Hysteria geysered up. ‘I can’t just walk on them.’

  ‘Faith.’ Sophie Johannsen moved to her side, her tone pragmatic. ‘They are dead and have been for some time. They don’t know – or care – that you’re walking over them. But they have families who have been waiting for news all this time.’

  ‘Waiting for them to come home.’ Faith drew on the other woman’s calm. ‘Okay. I’m not good at estimating distances, but the dumbwaiter should be on the other side of those cabinets.’

  ‘The space between the walls is too narrow for a dumbwaiter,’ Sophie said. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think so. I saw the door to it, but never the actual dumbwaiter. My mother tried to show it to me when I was older. She said that someday the house would be mine and I needed to know everything about it. She showed me the door, but it had a padlock on it. She figured her mother had told someone to lock it so that I wouldn’t get hurt.’

  She looked down at the plank floor again, staying in the narrow aisle between the graves, putting one foot in front of the other, looking up when she came to the cabinets. ‘This room was different then. There were only wood shelves, not cabinets. But I think it was here.’

  Kimble inspected the cabinets, giving the right corner an experimental tug. ‘Solidly fastened to the wall.’ He repeated the action on the left, with the same result. But when he grabbed the middle section, he stumbled back, pulling one entire cabinet partway from the wall.

  ‘Well, hello,’ Sophie said.

  ‘It’s not made of the same material as the other two,’ Kimble said. ‘Much lighter.’ He pulled it completely from the wall to reveal large steel rods on each corner of the back that had fit into corresponding holes in the wall. ‘Clever.’

  And effective. Because in the cleared space was a door in the wall.

  ‘That’s it,’ Faith said. ‘Padlock and all.’

  ‘I’ll go get my bolt cutters,’ Tanaka said.

  Eastern Kentucky, Wednesday 5 November, 1.35 P.M.

  Deacon hung up with Dispatch and immediately dialed Bishop, his heart pounding hard. Corinne was alive. So who was the third body Bishop’s anonymous caller had reported? And the fourth? ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Ten minutes north of Morehead,’ Bishop said. ‘About two minutes from the road that leads to the cabin’s GPS coordinates.’

  ‘I’m a minute behind you, then.’ They’d made good time, his a little better since she’d had a twenty-minute head start. ‘Don’t turn on to the road to the cabin. Stay on Route 60. I just got a call from Dispatch. Corinne called 911 while we were on the way up here. She’s been shot, along with the O’Bannion brothers, Stone and Marcus.’

  ‘You’re kidding. She’s alive?’

  ‘She’s alive,’ Deacon confirmed, intense relief rippling through him. ‘She and the O’Bannion brothers are on the side of Route 60, just ahead of your location. Look for a parking area and an entrance to one of the hiking trails.’

  ‘What about the little girl, Roza?’

  His relief was short-lived. ‘Roza was taken by the shooter. We’ve issued a BOLO, but there’s not much in the way of a description because he wore a ski mask. He got away, but no one saw what he was driving.’

  ‘Then who is the woman buried at the cabin? Who is the fourth person buried up there? And what is the O’Bannions’ role in this?’

  ‘Good questions. I keep thinking about the dirt on Stone’s hands and boots yesterda
y.’

  ‘Me too,’ Bishop said. ‘He either buried them or found them. Okay, I see the squad cars. They’re on the right side of the road.’

  He rounded a curve and saw Bishop pulling in a few feet ahead of the squad cars. He parked his car, then ran to join her with the gathered first responders, his badge out and ready.

  ‘I’m Detective Bishop, CPD. This is Special Agent Novak, FBI. Who’s lead officer here?’

  ‘I am. Trooper Williamson.’ The man gave Deacon the once-over, frowning at his hair. ‘Can I see your badge again?’

  Impatiently Deacon showed it to him. ‘Make sure everyone on the scene is wearing a vest. This guy has killed a federal agent, plus a lot of other people. Where is Corinne Longstreet?’

  Trooper Williamson led them to a young blonde who lay on a stretcher, looking battered and exhausted. One paramedic was applying pressure to a leg wound while another set up an IV. The two O’Bannion brothers were also being tended by the medics. Stone was further away, lying about five feet from a shot-up Subaru. Marcus’s stretcher was closer to Corinne’s.

  What the hell happened here? A million other questions flooded Deacon’s mind, but those questions would need to wait a few minutes more.

  He and Bishop crouched beside Corinne, Deacon keeping his shades on. No need to startle the girl. She’d been through enough. ‘We are very happy to see you alive, Miss Longstreet,’ he said. ‘I’m Special Agent Novak. This is Detective Bishop. We’ve been searching for you.’

  Her gaze locked on his face. She reached for his lapel and missed. Her swollen hands were drawn into a claw. ‘Are you real?’

  He smiled at her. ‘I am very real. You’re not losing your mind. I just look odd.’

  ‘I think you look wonderful. Everyone here looks wonderful.’ She closed her eyes and let out a long breath. ‘I’m so grateful to you all. I can’t believe I’m here. But he took her. Roza. I tried to save her. I tried so hard.’

  Deacon gently sandwiched her icy hand between his own, sharing his body heat. ‘We know. We heard. Can you tell us what happened?’

  Haltingly she told them the tale of their escape from the cabin. Their few hours’ respite in the deer blind. Her run-in with Stone O’Bannion and how she and Roza had fled, then fallen down the hill. How the gunman had opened fire.