A Shadow Fell

by Patrick Dakin

  “There was a car had pulled over just across the road, sheltered under the trees. The driver didn’t get out, just sat there. But he took off very soon after your wife left. I remember thinking it was almost like he was following them.”

  I shuddered at the thought of what this meant. On the one hand I was encouraged to be making some headway but, on the other, it provided very strong evidence that my family was indeed in terrible trouble.

  “A man was driving?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure it was a man.”

  “Can you describe him?” I asked, the anxiety in my voice very apparent.

  “Geez,” he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t see him well at all.”

  “What about the car he was driving?”

  The old fellow squinted in concentration. “I can’t really remember it. I think maybe it was light colored and … maybe a mid-size or full-size. Definitely not a compact, I’m sure of that.”

  “Did you notice a license plate?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “I really didn’t get that good a look. You know, it didn’t register that there was a problem.”

  “Is there a phone around here I could use?”

  “Sure, there’s a payphone right next door by the gas station,” he told me. “I sure hope everything turns out okay,” he added as I turned to leave.

  “Me too,” I said as I rushed out.

  8

  I used the payphone to call Tom Kilborn. “Tom, I’m just north of Savannah, Georgia. I’ve confirmed that Callie and Tanya were here Wednesday afternoon. It’s also possible she was being followed by a man in a light colored full-size sedan. That’s all the details I have.”

  “Okay, Jack. We’re on it.”

  “Callie intended to take I-95 all the way up to Milford, Connecticut, so I figure whatever happened to them had to have happened between here and Fayetteville, North Carolina, because she couldn’t have gotten any further than that without stopping for gas.”

  “Look, Jack, I don’t like the fact that you’re getting involved in this so deeply but I know I’d be wasting my time to try and talk you out of it. So do what you have to but keep me apprised of your every move. And be bloody careful.”

  Walking back to my car, the significance of what was occurring hit home hard. Until now I had been able to half fool myself into believing there was some logical, even if unusual, explanation for why my family seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. But there was no kidding myself any longer. I couldn’t deny the very real possibility that a serial killer – one of worst in American history - had the two people I loved most in the world in his grasp. How he had been able to do it didn’t matter. He had done it.

  I prayed to a God I really didn’t believe in that, by some miracle, they had been spared, that they were still alive. Maybe Callie had been able to overpower him but was now stranded somewhere.

  As hard as I tried to convince myself that such a possibility existed, I could not truly accept the concept as a reality. Henderson’s history simply did not lend itself to such a likelihood.

  There was at that moment only one thing I knew with absolute certainty. If he had harmed my family in any way I would find him and, when I did, he would suffer as much pain as it was possible for me to inflict upon him.

  Then I would kill him.

  9

  As I rolled north out of the suburbs of Savannah, I-95 became Route 17 and was alternately called the Hendersonville Highway. I couldn’t help but reflect on the irony of being on this particular stretch of road, looking for a madman with the same name as the family after whom the highway had been named.

  By late afternoon on Saturday, after what felt like a thousand stops, all without a whisper of success, I was approaching Lumberton when I noticed a police helicopter, flying low, to the northwest. I pulled off the highway at a roadside diner and called Tom Kilborn to check in.

  “Jack, thank God you phoned,” he said when he came on the line. “We’ve found Callie.”

  The phone nearly dropped from my hand. “Where?”

  “She was found unconscious in a gas station restroom near Lumberton, South Carolina.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “She’s in a coma, Jack. It’s very touch and go. She was injected with enough paralytic substance to kill her. That was obviously the intention. But she was found quick enough that there’s some hope for her. She’s been taken to the hospital in Fayetteville.”

  “I’m near Lumberton right now. What about Tanya?”

  “I’m afraid she’s missing, Jack. There were no witnesses and we have no new leads.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We’ve had helicopters and a ground search going on all day in the immediate vicinity of Lumberton. Unfortunately, we’re two days behind where we should be. There was confusion over her identity at the hospital and somehow we missed the fact that she was there until this morning. If it’s Henderson, and we have to assume at this point that it is, he could be literally anywhere by now.

  I was torn between desperately wanting to see Callie and needing to help my daughter, but I knew there was nothing I could hope to achieve with what I had to go on. Trembling with frustration I drove to the hospital in Fayetteville. A nurse confirmed my wife was still in a coma. Although no visitors were allowed, she would talk to the on duty doctor to see if I could at least look in on her.

  Shortly after that a young guy wearing jeans and sneakers approached me. He was identifiable as a doctor only by the stethoscope draped around his neck. He asked me to show him my identification. Satisfied I was who I claimed to be, he told me to follow him. We walked quickly, without talking, down a long hallway, through a set of double doors, and then down another shorter hallway. I saw a uniformed police officer sitting in a chair outside the door to Room 114. When we approached him he stood and listened as the doctor explained who I was. He nodded and we entered the room.

  Seeing Callie, pale and vulnerable, connected to an imposing array of wires and tubes, moved me deeply. I wanted to lay down beside her and take her in my arms, give her comfort. But all I could do was hold her cold and lifeless hand in mine and press it to my chest, trying to infuse into her the will to wake up.

  After a moment the doctor put his hand on my shoulder. “Come with me,” he said gently. “I need to tell you a few things.”

  I followed him out of the room, down another corridor that lead to a large cafeteria. The room was empty except for a nurse, sipping a bowl of soup while she thumbed through a magazine. The doctor led me to a table across the room from the nurse.

  “Can I get you a coffee?” he asked.

  I had put my elbows on the table, my forehead cradled by my hands. I was readying myself for more bad news. “No.”

  “Your wife was injected with a conotoxin,” the doctor explained as he sat down opposite me. “It’s not something we see a lot of in emergency wards but it’s not unheard of either. Occasionally someone will be stung by a cone snail. They’re all venomous and large ones can be extremely toxic. They inject a paralytic poison that blocks the transmission of nerve impulses from the nerve to the muscle at the neuromuscular junction.”

  He might as well have been talking Swahili. I had no idea what meaning his words held. “Doc, please, just talk to me in English. Will she recover?”

  “It’s impossible to say I’m afraid. I’m sorry, I wish I could be more optimistic but the truth is we just don’t know. There is no anti-venom. In small doses most patients recover over time. In your wife’s case the dosage was massive. She’s in a coma. All we can do at this point is provide support by way of artificial respiration and treat the symptoms with reactive disinfectants.”

  “So you’re telling me we just wait?”

  He nodded his head somberly. “I’m afraid that’s all we can do.”

  “What are the most likely outcomes to this, Doc?”

  He studied his hands as he contemplated his response, then looked up at me with a disconcerting amoun
t of empathy. “The best case scenario is that she successfully metabolizes the venom and comes out of the coma.”

  “And the worse case scenario?”

  “Death,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Partial recovery with some lasting effects from the poison is also possible. I know it sounds heartless but the truth is your guess is as good as mine as to her prognosis.”

  I left the hospital too worn out to do anything but grab a motel room and crash. But although I wanted desperately to sleep, it was not a commodity I was going to come by easily. When I closed my eyes Callie’s deathly visage and Tanya’s panic-stricken face filled my mind. I kept seeing my wife’s life slipping away while I stood watching helplessly and my daughter screamed in terror for me to save her.

  I had witnessed first hand the horror of Henderson’s insanity and there was no way the images of those memories would let me rest. My arrival on that mountain in Virginia three and a half years ago had been in time to prevent Henderson from killing one more little girl but there was not an inch of his victim’s tiny body that hadn’t been brutalized. She was covered in vivid purple and black bruises, her face a swollen mess. It didn’t take much for my tormented mind to substitute the face of that poor child with that of my daughter.

  Some time during the night exhaustion overtook me and I descended into unconsciousness. Every few minutes I jolted awake, Tanya’s screams echoing in my ears, her pleading eyes beseeching me to help her.

  Asleep or awake, it made no difference.

  My life was a nightmare.

  10

  I arrived back at the hospital early the next morning. The duty nurse assured me there was nothing new to report.

  I used a telephone book at the hospital to get the address of the Fayetteville field office of the FBI. When I arrived there I was told the Special Agent in Charge was Neil Bartok - not someone I had ever met. I asked the receptionist if I could see Bartok, explaining that I was a retired agent and the husband of the hospitalized woman believed to be the latest victim of Reuben Henderson.

  Bartok came out to greet me as soon as he was given the information. He was a handsome guy in his mid-forties with sandy colored hair and deep blue eyes. “I’m Neil Bartok,” he said. We shook hands and he invited me into his office. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am for what you’re going through, Mr. Parmenter.”

  “It’s Jack,” I said. “I’ve been staying in close contact with Tom Kilborn who’s a personal friend and associate from my days in the Bureau. I’ve just come from seeing my wife. I wanted to meet you and … well, see if there’s anything I can do to help in the search for my daughter.”

  Bartok looked genuinely distraught. “This is one of the biggest manhunts we’ve ever conducted, Jack. We’re pulling out all the stops, believe me, but so far we’ve come up empty. Henderson is either the luckiest son-of-a-bitch ever born or the smartest.”

  “Have we got confirmation yet that it was Henderson that stabbed Callie and grabbed my daughter?”

  “Yes. We’ve matched prints obtained from the syringe left at the scene of the abduction. I might add that your wife was lucky in that the entire content of the syringe was not injected into her as, I’m sure, was the intention. If it had been she most definitely would not have survived the attack.”

  “There’s no guarantee that she will survive,” I told him. “She’s in a deep coma and her prognosis is very uncertain.”

  Bartok nodded sympathetically. Watching his face it was plain that he regarded me as a tragedy in the making. Clearly he held out no hope that my daughter would be found alive. I couldn’t blame him. What were the chances that Reuben Henderson would kill his own daughter and then spare our adopted daughter?

  “What I can’t figure, out,” I said, “is how the hell Henderson even knew my family was on the road? How could he have located them so easily?”

  “What we think,” Bartok replied, “is that those three early morning phone calls you received were made hoping you’d react exactly the way you did. It’s possible that Henderson paid someone to make those calls for him, we don’t know for sure, but we did find evidence that someone was camped out in a car not far from your home. It was most likely him. When your wife and daughter left all he had to do was follow at a distance and wait for the opportunity to make his move.”

  How easily we had been manipulated. If I lived to be a hundred I would never forgive myself for my stupidity. “Callie is no easy target. How was he able to overtake her so easily?”

  “When they stopped at the service station in Lumberton and left the motor home to use the restroom he waited outside and attacked them as they came out. The poison he used would have rendered your wife helpless immediately.”

  I shook my head in wonder. There seemed to be no end to the bastard’s ability to pull off the impossible. “Where is the search now centered?”

  This time Bartok’s face registered more humiliation than sympathy. “We don’t even know at this point which way Henderson was headed when he left the Lumberton area,” Bartok admitted. “The truth is we don’t know if, in fact, he did leave. Frankly, Jack, the only thing we have is a tentative description of the car he was driving, which we got from the gas jockey at the station. It’s a light brown full-size Chevrolet, probably an ---”

  Bartok was interrupted by an agent who rapped on his open door. “Neil, we just got word that the car Henderson was driving was located at the Charlotte airport.”

  “Any sign of him or the girl?” Bartok demanded.

  “Not yet.”

  “Shit,” I moaned. “He’s boosted another car.” We’d now have no clue what he was driving because the vehicle he took wouldn’t be reported as stolen until the travelers returned, possibly not for weeks.

  While I contemplated this distressing development, the agent motioned for Bartok to join him in the hallway, obviously so they could speak in private. Bartok returned a few seconds later and looked even more distraught than before.

  “What is it?” I said. “Tell me. I need to know.”

  Bartok pursed his lips. “There was blood in the car… a lot of it.”

  It was like a giant hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart. Rage exploded in me. I wanted to hit something.

  Henderson was out there somewhere, committing whatever sadistic acts his twisted mind drove him to, while we stood around like mannequins, totally incapable of doing anything to stop him.

  I stood on shaky legs. “I’ll kill that fucker,” I seethed.

  “Jack,” Bartok said, “go look after your wife and leave Henderson to us.”

  I stared into his eyes. “Have you got children?”

  He held my look for several seconds, then dropped his gaze to the floor and nodded. I’m sure he was asking himself if he could accept the advice he had just given me if it was his kid’s blood we were talking about.

  11

  The days that followed were the toughest of my life. I was exhausted, getting no sleep, and eating poorly. My emotional state was untenable and made worse by the lack of progress being reported by the FBI.

  Three days after my meeting with Bartok I called Tom Kilborn. “What can you add to what Bartok told me?” I asked.

  Kilborn was obviously laboring under some heavy stress. “Look, Jack,” he said, “I’d be a liar if I told you things are looking good. You know better.”

  “How much blood was found in the back of that car? Is it possible she could still be alive?”

  “Yes, it’s entirely possible,” he responded. “The crime scene techs tell us it was likely that Tanya was putting up quite a struggle. The blood is most likely from a head wound which, as you know, tends to produce more blood flow than from other wounds. There’s no specific indication she was killed in the car.”

  It was very small consolation. But, at that point, I was grabbing at any sliver of hope I could glimpse through the fog of despair that enveloped me.

  I was staying at the same motel I had taken since arriving in Fa
yetteville. When I wasn’t hounding Neil Bartok or Tom Kilborn for information I was camped at Callie’s bedside. I tried with everything in me not to give up hope that she would recover, but none of the doctors or nurses I regularly spoke with gave me much cause to be optimistic about her prospects. In a way, I dreaded the thought of her waking up because that would mean I would have to tell her about our daughter’s almost certain fate.

  One morning, shortly after my arrival, a nurse stopped me and told me the hospital administrator had asked to have a word with me. I was shown into an office where I was introduced to him. His name was Finlayson.

  He spent a few minutes going over Callie’s condition with me but all it really amounted to was that they were keeping her alive and comfortable, without much hope that things were going to change.

  “What are you suggesting?” I asked.

  “Nothing much,” he answered. “The truth is, it’s impossible to say if or when your wife will ever come out of the coma. All I’m suggesting at the moment is that we could have her transferred to the hospital in Ocala so she’d be closer to home for you.”

  Of course it made all the sense in the world to get her nearer home. I couldn’t continue living in a motel indefinitely. “Let’s do it,” I said.

  * * *

  There was nothing I could do to assist with Callie’s relocation, which would take place within the next couple of days, so I decided to make the trip home and use the time the drive would take to formulate some kind of plan for the future.

  But the closer to home I got the more depressed I became. I could not imagine any action I could take that would move toward a solution to the dilemma I faced.

  As I drove up my driveway the feeling of dread that had been a pervasive presence for days was reinforced a hundredfold. I saw a late model dark grey sedan parked beside the house with two men in it. They exited the car when I came into view.