Closer Than You Think

by Karen Rose

  ‘What about the other cousin?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Stone was already injured. I’m a little fuzzy on those details.’

  ‘What were Stone and Marcus even doing there?’ Faith demanded. ‘Did Corinne identify her abductor?’

  ‘No. She never saw him,’ Tanaka said. ‘She and your cousins are en route to Cincinnati General by helicopter. That’s all I know so far.’ He turned to get back to work.

  Faith took a moment to let her mind process the news. ‘Poor Roza . . . He’ll kill her. She knew he would when she helped Arianna escape, but she did it anyway.’

  ‘Pretty brave for eleven years old,’ Sophie said softly.

  ‘Pretty brave for any age.’ Faith pushed herself to her feet. ‘If Arianna was here, she’d want to take a look at the dug-out room, so I’ll do that for her.’ And maybe say a prayer for little Roza. ‘And then I’ll ask Kimble to take me back. It was nice to meet you, Sophie.’

  ‘Likewise, but what’s this about a dug-out room?’

  ‘It’s at the end of the passageway. Didn’t Tanaka tell you?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t understand that it was an actual room. I thought it was just a crawlspace, so I haven’t scanned it yet. I’ll take a look with you.’

  A minute later, Sophie was hunched down and grimacing. ‘It is just a crawlspace, Faith.’

  Faith followed her into the little room, swallowing back new tears as she took it in. ‘It’s where she lived with her mother. Deacon told me that there was a blanket here, with a thin pillow. Roza slept here.’ In the cold darkness.

  God, please. If nothing else, please help this child. She deserves a life.

  ‘Deacon found a box here,’ Kimble said from the doorway, startling Faith. Kimble didn’t try to enter, he was too tall and there wasn’t enough room. ‘Inside was a ratty old hairbrush, a battery-powered light, and a T-shirt. It was either all she had or all she had time to pack.’

  Sophie swept the beam of her flashlight over the floor, studying it with a critical eye. ‘Or maybe all she wanted to admit she had. There’s something buried here, under where her blanket was. The ground is slightly curved. Same over here, next to where she slept. Let me do a scan and see what’s here before we start digging.’

  Kimble backed out and Faith and Sophie followed. In the hall, Sophie stretched with a groan. ‘I’m glad I’m not claustrophobic. That was a tight fit.’ She held out her hand. ‘A pleasure, Faith. Don’t be a stranger.’

  ‘Are you leaving?’ Kimble asked Sophie.

  ‘No, I am,’ Faith said. ‘You wanted me to help you find the hidey-holes.’

  ‘I do. We found one. We may need your help again. Can you stay for a little while?’

  Faith shrugged. ‘I suppose so. You have Internet here, right?’

  ‘A satellite hookup, yes,’ Kimble said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I brought my laptop, so I can work here. I recognized at least two of the names on the jars as scholarship recipients. I’ll write down the others and start checking against the list.’

  ‘What is this about?’ Sophie asked. Quickly Faith explained and Sophie’s eyes grew wide. ‘He’s hunting from the scholarship pool. Sonofabitch. You go do your job and I’ll do mine. I’ll let you know if I find anything back in that room.’

  Faith straightened her spine before going back to the room with all the jars. She’d return their identities to them, so that Deacon could get them justice.

  Eastern Kentucky, Wednesday 5 November, 3.00 P.M.

  There were enough law enforcement personnel at Jeremy’s ex-wife’s cabin to run a small country, Deacon thought as he and Bishop walked along the long line of parked vehicles. A few of the state troopers had gathered around the car parked closest to the house – the red Corvette they’d seen outside Jeremy’s guest house the evening before.

  ‘It’s registered to Stone,’ Bishop said, ‘but Marcus must have driven it up here since they switched places at the bar last night. Ever think about driving one of these, Novak?’

  ‘Only once,’ Deacon admitted dryly. ‘They had to pry me out with a crowbar.’

  Bishop chuckled, but quickly sobered as a balding man in a black suit and tie met them at the door. ‘Bishop and Novak,’ she said briskly.

  ‘Special Agent Hudgins,’ he said, holding the door wide open. ‘My office was closest to the scene so I got tapped to secure it for you Cincinnati guys. But I have to tell you, this wasn’t what I expected when I got the call to come out here.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Deacon asked, sliding his wraparounds off his face so that he could do a visual check of the cabin interior. The place was a mess – the contents of drawers lay strewn on the floor and dirt was piled next to an open grave. Four faces stared out of the shallow hole, three older and one who was far too young. Mikhail Yarborough, Jeremy’s son.

  ‘When I saw the red Corvette parked in front of the house? A meth lab or mountains of oxy pills, even a field of pot. Not four bodies under the floorboards and a jar of eyes.’ Hudgins blinked once when Deacon turned to look at him. ‘But . . . regular eyes. Not like yours.’

  Bishop coughed, but her expression remained serious.

  ‘Where are these “regular eyes”?’ Deacon asked.

  ‘Look under the bed. We haven’t moved anything yet.’

  Deacon swept the tails of his coat aside as he went into a crouch, Bishop right beside him.

  Shining his Maglite under the bed, he saw the jar lying on its side. At least a dozen opaque eyes floated in a dark fluid.

  ‘Looks like a cheesy prop from a cheesier haunted house,’ Bishop muttered, but Deacon only half heard her, his mind resurrecting a snippet of conversation from Monday night.

  Shelves with jars, Faith had said, her tone faraway. Jams and jellies mostly. My grandmother’s cook made preserves back then. Her forehead had wrinkled. And olives.

  Deacon had been surprised. Your grandmother’s cook canned her own olives?

  Of course not, she’d replied, as if he’d been silly. They bought the olives already canned.

  ‘Faith saw this jar,’ he said softly. ‘Or one like it, probably from behind the half-wall that hooked around the old basement door. She said that’s where she took off her boots when it was muddy.’ He barely managed to control the shudder at the thought of what might have happened had the killer seen her looking. ‘She remembered seeing jars of olives.’

  ‘I can see how she thought that. Sometimes the mind won’t allow you to process what you see, especially if you’re very young and it’s very traumatic. How old was she?’

  ‘I don’t know. Younger than nine, because by the time her mother died, she already had a fear of the basement. It’s why she counted the steps. She’d go down them with her eyes closed.’ New dread filled him. ‘This means he’s been killing for a lot longer than we thought.’

  ‘Her mother died twenty-three years ago,’ Bishop murmured. ‘This changes things.’ She turned to Hudgins. ‘Is this the only jar?’ she asked.

  ‘Only one we’ve found so far. Something was stored in the closet. The dust on the floor has been disturbed. Looks like it was about three feet by four.’

  ‘The rest of his collection,’ Deacon murmured, rising to his full height. ‘Latent?’ he called, and a woman turned from brushing powder on a closet doorknob.

  ‘Yes, Agent Novak?’

  ‘Can you get prints off this jar, right now? Thank you.’ He turned to Bishop. ‘Let’s see if we can make sense of this. The killer brought the two dead adult males and two live females to this cabin on Monday night.’ He glanced at Hudgins. ‘He was escaping his playground – a house in Mount Carmel, Ohio.’

  ‘I thought this might be related to that case. We got the BOLO on the Earl Power and Light tech and the locksmith. The boy?’

  ‘Son of the cabin owner, Della Yarborough,’ Bishop said. ‘He’d run away from home, was staying here. Probably surprised the killer. I understand the back wall is covered with blood?’

  �
��Yeah. Right by the gas tank. The gas was turned off.’

  ‘To lure him out,’ Deacon said grimly. ‘Our killer’s specialty. So he buries the boy with the two men.’ He shone the Maglite on the unmade bed. Several dark hairs were on the pillow and two lengths of rope lay on the tangled sheets. The ropes had been sawed with a small knife. ‘Roza was here. Where was Corinne?’

  ‘There’s a storm cellar in the back,’ one of the other forensics techs offered. ‘We found a few blonde hairs and some ropes that had been cut, just like those on the bed.’

  ‘Okay.’ Deacon thought it through, reconstructing the events in his mind. ‘He dumped Corinne in the storm cellar and left Roza here, tied to the bed. Corinne escapes with a Swiss army knife.’ He was growing more impressed with the young woman with every new discovery. ‘Comes into the cabin and frees Roza.’

  ‘According to Arianna,’ Bishop said, ‘Roza knew she’d be punished for helping her escape the basement, maybe even killed, so she drugged herself.’

  ‘Brave little girl,’ Hudgins commented.

  ‘You have no idea,’ Bishop said. ‘Corinne must have then gathered up supplies. She told us she had a few kitchen knives and a shovel for defense. Maybe she goes to the closet, sees a box, open it and takes out one of the jars. Realizes what she’s holding and drops it and the jar rolls under the bed.’

  Hudgins blew out a breath. ‘Makes sense. I might’ve dropped it too.’

  Deacon pointed his light on an empty soup can on the floor. ‘They must have eaten a little, then Corinne got Roza out of here. We think the next person who showed up at this cabin was Stone O’Bannion, also a son of the cabin’s owner. He was looking for Mikhail, his little brother. He told us he found this mess, saw the pile of dirt inside and the blood outside and started digging in here.’

  ‘He saw Mikhail’s body and panicked, drove home to Cincinnati to tell Jeremy, and ran into us because we were at his house questioning his father,’ Bishop said. ‘Stone told us nothing, because he didn’t want us to accuse Jeremy. Instead, he came back here to find out from the girl what really happened so that he could protect Jeremy, but Corinne and Roza were gone. He tracked them through the woods, but Corinne assumed he was the one who kidnapped her and tortured Arianna, so she stabbed him with the kitchen knives and hit him with the shovel.’

  ‘Good for her,’ Hudgins said, and both Deacon and Bishop gave hard nods.

  ‘I agree,’ Bishop said. ‘Stone passed out, woke up and contacted his brother Marcus, who’d already snuck Jeremy and Keith out the back entrance right under the noses of three federal agents on surveillance.’

  ‘Don’t keep rubbing it in,’ Deacon protested, but without much heat. The Feds had royally fucked up the surveillance.

  ‘Hey, I calls ’em like I sees ’em,’ she said. ‘Marcus was with his mother and Jeremy, who had by then realized that Mikhail was missing and started getting worried. Marcus went looking for Mickey, then got the text from Stone and drove out here to find four bodies. That’s when he called me, anonymously.’

  Deacon frowned. ‘Wait. That’s important. Stone only saw three bodies. Marcus saw four, so the killer came back in between to bury Elise Lasker.’

  ‘When did the Lasker woman go missing?’ Hudgins asked.

  ‘She was last seen a little before five A.M.,’ Bishop said. ‘She was killed for her truck, most likely. If the killer grabbed her at five, he would have been here by seven. He finds Corinne and Roza gone. He must have buried the Lasker woman and covered the bodies back up with the floorboards, then gone searching for Corinne and Roza. Marcus arrives in the forest, finds Stone hurt in the woods and puts him in his Subaru. Then he comes here, uncovers the bodies again and calls me.’

  ‘While the killer is wandering around looking for Corinne and Roza,’ Deacon said. ‘Does it make sense that Marcus could find them in an hour while the killer wandered around for six?’

  Bishop shrugged. ‘It’s a big forest. It’s conceivable that he and Marcus passed each other, especially if they were both in stealth mode on foot, although you’d have thought they’d hear each other’s car engines. We’ll need to figure that one out once we establish where everyone on the suspect board was between four A.M. and noon.’

  ‘Assuming he stayed here the whole time,’ Deacon said.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Bishop asked.

  He was thinking what he didn’t want to be thinking. ‘That the killer has been killing for at least twenty-three years. And that Jordan was very insistent on seeing Faith this morning.’

  ‘You’re thinking that maybe he wanted to establish an alibi?’

  ‘Maybe. I hope he simply wanted to give us information on the gardener from the historical society, but I have to be sure. Faith trusts him.’

  ‘Got it. I talked to Isenberg on the way over here. She said they’ve picked up the gardener and he’s waiting in an interview room. She also said that Keith was waiting outside Jeremy’s ex-wife’s house in the Bentley looking “coldly furious” because Jeremy was inside with his ex. Isenberg notified them of Mikhail’s death, then brought both Jeremy and Keith into the station for questioning. She said Keith’s fury disappeared as soon as Jeremy could see him.’

  ‘So Keith’s still on the leaderboard in terms of suspicious behavior, but he didn’t shoot Marcus and Corinne either. He’s the wrong body type and he has Isenberg for his alibi.’

  ‘We need to regroup with the others,’ Bishop said, then pulled her phone from her pocket when it began to ring. ‘Speaking of . . .’ She held up the phone so that Deacon could see Isenberg’s name on the caller ID. ‘What’s up?’ she answered, then blinked. ‘Yes, I’ll hold.’

  A few seconds later, Deacon’s cell began to ring, also Isenberg. She was conferencing them in, meaning she only wanted to say what she was going to say once. ‘I’m here,’ he answered, dread sitting on his shoulders. ‘Tell me Faith is all right and that Corinne is still alive. Please.’

  ‘Faith is fine,’ Isenberg said. ‘Corinne is still in surgery. This isn’t about them. I’ve also got Adam, Vince and Carrie Washington conferenced in. Carrie? Go ahead.’

  ‘We found the slug in Agent Pope’s body,’ Carrie said. ‘It wasn’t from a nine mil. It was a rifle slug, same as we pulled out of the hotel bellman on Monday night.’

  Deacon sucked in a quiet breath. ‘He didn’t come up behind Pope, then. He had a vantage point somewhere in my neighborhood.’ His stomach turned over at the possibilities – and probabilities. ‘We need to do a door-to-door search. I doubt he was courteous enough to pick an empty house, and he never lets his victims live.’

  ‘I agree,’ Isenberg said, ‘and so does your SAC. I’ve been in contact with Special Agent in Charge Zimmerman, who already had the neighborhood locked down, searching for Antonio Renzo, the kid who bullied your brother and sister.’

  ‘Pope was one of ours,’ Deacon said. ‘The field office switched gears when I told them that he was shot first. Since then, they’ve been looking for the shooter not the kid. But they still have several agents hunting for Renzo, hoping he can lead them to . . . Oh, hell.’ He heard his own words. He never lets his victims live. ‘If Renzo got close enough to the shooter for the shooter to take his knife, then we have to assume he’s dead too.’

  ‘Zimmerman said the same thing,’ Isenberg said. ‘Next piece of news. Adam, your veterinarian angle paid off. We have an ID on the woman found in the grocery store parking lot – Delores Kaminsky. She ran a shelter for dogs. I sent a squad car to her home address and put out a BOLO for her vehicle. Nissan minivan, silver.’

  A silver minivan? Shit. Deacon’s pulse started to race. ‘I saw it. The silver minivan. It was parked in front of my house Tuesday morning. It didn’t register at the time. That’s a school bus stop. Parents park there to wait for the bus with their kids.’

  ‘And most of the moms drive minivans,’ Isenberg said grimly. ‘We were so close to him.’

  ‘Dammit,’ Deacon hissed. ‘Why didn�
�t I check it out?’

  ‘Why didn’t Pope and Colby?’ Bishop asked reasonably. ‘They probably thought the same thing – that it was a mom with kids waiting for the bus.’

  ‘And now Pope’s dead,’ Deacon said grimly. ‘Thanks, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. We have news of our own, Lynda. We’ve got part of his collection – a jar full of eyes that had rolled under a bed. It appears he took a bigger box with him.’

  ‘Latent is pulling prints off the jar now,’ Bishop added, ‘so you should expect them soon.’

  ‘We found a lot more jars at the house,’ Adam said. ‘More than four dozen, filled with eyes and tongues and hearts and more. A lot of them were labeled with the victims’ names.’

  ‘You found his stash?’ Deacon asked, feeling relieved. Now there would be no need for Faith to go out there. She could stay put in the police station until he arrived to take her home.

  ‘One of them, anyway,’ Adam said. ‘Now we can begin identifying some of the victims.’

  ‘We have other news,’ Tanaka said. ‘None of it good. Sophie found seven more bodies.’

  ‘I’ll prepare the morgue for more incoming,’ Carrie said with a sigh.

  Deacon’s relief drained away. Seven more. Plus the Lasker woman. He started for the cabin door. ‘I’m going to my neighborhood to help with the search. I owe my neighbors that much.’

  ‘I figured you would,’ Isenberg said. ‘SAC Zimmerman is expecting you.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Mt Carmel, Ohio, Wednesday 5 November, 3.45 P.M.

  ‘Dr Corcoran? Faith?’

  Faith looked up, jerked away from her laptop screen to find Isenberg standing in the open doorway of her grandmother’s living room. ‘Yes, Lieutenant? What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ve been calling your name. Are you all right? You looked like you were in a trance.’