Blood Ties

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Bobby... Bobby...”

  What choice did he have? Maybe she would first look for him downstairs. Maybe there was a window onto the roof. Maybe there was a good hiding spot.

  He hesitated too long.

  “Bobby!” she shrieked as she stepped out from his bedroom.

  Blood was running down her face.

  He took one step and closed the door behind him then fled up the stairs into the darkness of the attic.

  Were the spider webs his imagination, the result of reading all those horror comic books?

  He couldn’t see. It boas nearly dark, with the only light coming from the moon through a small window too high in the ceiling for him to reach without a chair.

  The door at the bottom of the attic stairs opened. “Bobby!”

  He bumped into chests and boxes as he tried to find a place to hide. The front of his thighs hit something with soft edges. He reached with his hand. The mattress of a bed 7 Yes!

  His first thought was to crawl under it. But then he had another idea. He stripped the top blanket off the bed. Maybe he could throw it over her and get past her. Maybe then he could somehow lock her in the attic and call the police.

  “Bobby!”

  There was a small snap as she flicked on the light at the bottom of the attic stairs.

  For one, long, unbelievable moment, the boy froze in the sudden brightness.

  Then he screamed.

  On the bed beside him, now exposed because of the blanket in the boy’s hands, was something he dimly recognized as another boy.

  This one, on the bed, was dried, shrunken leather over bones. Skull hollow, eye sockets empty, jaw fallen away.

  The boy finally understood the shrunken leather was a vest over a skeletal body and that the feathers in disarray around the skull came from an Indian feather headdress.

  “Bobby...” the old lady called again.

  The boy leaned against the wall and slid down until he was sitting. He curled his knees up against his body and hugged himself, waiting in silent terror as her footsteps creaked up the attic stairs.

  The Watcher drove in satisfied silence. He was exhausted but juiced on caffeine and adrenaline. Since ten o’clock the night before, he’d flown over four hours on the way out and four hours back, with an hour in between to transfer Kelsie from the airplane into the house. He hadn’t been able to leave the valley until just before sunrise. Still, he was making good time. Kalispell and his old life were already two hundred and fifty miles behind. He could have been farther ahead, but Highway 93, the two-lane from Kalispell to the interstate at Missoula, had slowed him because he refused to risk a speeding ticket or hitting a deer, not with so much accomplished already, not with this journey the final and only barrier between him and the woman he loved.

  Others, he thought, would have stayed on 93 through Missoula, taking it south nearly to Idaho Falls before turning off to remain on a two-lane road as far as possible. Others, however, did not have the experience and nerves he did. Two-lane roads did have less traffic, but that was a disadvantage, not an advantage. The best way to hide was among hundreds of vehicles, not dozens.

  No, the Watcher knew the best routes were the interstates. By remaining eight miles an hour above the speed limit, the car was essentially invisible to state troopers. He planned to average a steady seventy-three miles per hour, putting him through Idaho Falls, through Pocatello, and into the wide, broad valleys north of the Utah state line.

  Flying, of course, would have been much better. But he’d made his plans, and he would stick to them. Driving took the risk of getting caught from minimal to zero.

  Yes, he admitted to himself, even if driving was tedious, he did have reason to be satisfied. Each minute put more than a mile between him and the life he had left behind in Kalispell. Each minute brought him more than a mile closer to home sweet home.

  10:15 a.m.

  Waiting, waiting, waiting. The tension – minute after minute after minute – made Kelsie want to scream.

  The door would open eventually. She hadn’t been placed in such an elaborate setup just to be ignored. And when it opened, then what? Who would it be? What would be done to her?

  Again and again, she told herself not to speculate. Instead, she went through the living quarters repeatedly looking for anything she could convert to a weapon. She found nothing of use, nothing she could hide in her clothing and use to attack her attacker. She found nothing that could even be destructive to herself or the apartment.

  There was no glass anywhere. The shower stall door was plastic. The microwave door was solid metal.

  She believed she understood why there was no stove. With the burners, she would be able to light a fire.

  Where before she had puzzled over the lack of canned foods, she now understood. Sharp lids could be fashioned into crude knives.

  The rubber eating utensils had no sharp edges. She couldn’t cut the blankets or towels into strips, which – she shuddered in speculating that it was anticipated she might get desperate enough to take her own life – would make it possible to hang herself. All of the electrical cords – to the television or lamps – were barely more than a foot long.

  For that matter, there was nothing metal to insert into the wall plugs. The edges of the wood furniture were rounded. She couldn’t hurt anyone, including herself.

  In short, whoever had placed her in the living quarters had planned carefully. That made her predicament more chilling – the obvious meticulous attention to detail.

  She had enough food to last her for weeks. The microwave would let her heat and boil the noodles and rice. Bottles of vitamins had been provided – to make up for the lack of fresh foods? There were even boxes of disposable diapers; whoever had done this knew her situation intimately. That, of course, was not a surprise to Kelsie.

  Hour after hour after hour, she waited. She slept, she paced, she watched television. Some of the channels had been blacked out; she finally realized the local channels were unavailable. She could watch HBO, MTV, TNT, and all the other national cable networks, but there was nothing to give her an indication of where these living quarters were.

  Everywhere she went, Taylor bumped along behind her, humming or playing his harmonica. She would bend down to look in a cupboard; he would bend down beside her. She would sigh in frustration; he would sigh. She would sit down; he would try to crawl in her lap, She went to her bed; he curled up beside her.

  Her original relief at finding him alive had become the constant vague irritation she’d always felt at his bumbling presence. It wasn’t right – she felt guilty because she knew a good mother wouldn’t be frustrated – but the more time that passed in the prison, the more she grew angry at Taylor for his ceaseless devotion. All she wanted was some peace. From the tension. From Taylor.

  The minutes kept stretching. Each of those minutes with Taylor reminded her that she had failed both as a mother and as a wife. And each of those minutes reminded her that Taylor’s handicap was a punishment she deserved from God for letting three men die as a price for loving her.

  12:03 p.m.

  Clay was at the bench on the uphill side of the cabin, biting into a sandwich he didn’t feel like eating, when the cellular phone rang.

  “It’s Johnny. I don’t have good news about your fax.”

  “What?” Clay asked. If Johnny wasn’t going to "waste any time with preamble, neither was Clay.

  “Floyd, the principal here, was standing at the fax machine when your friend sent his report.”

  “You can’t get the fax?” Fowler was dead. Feeble as the hope was, this fax had been Clay’s best chance. What else could he do when all that linked him to the world was a cell phone?

  “Worse, Floyd called the sheriff. Your name was on the report, and your name’s been in the news. Floyd’s trying to be a hero.”

  “It was sent to your attention, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. I was in class and just got out for lunch and –”

 
; “That’s not what I meant,” Clay said. “Your name’s on the fax. They’re going to be asking you some tough questions. I’m sorry.”

  “I can deal with it,” Johnny said. “I’m more worried about you. If they hadn’t figured yet where you might be, they’ll sure have good reason to guess now.”

  “I’ll watch for them.” Clay tilted the phone against his ear with his shoulder. With free hands, he wrapped the remainder of the sandwich.

  “There’s more.” Clay picked up the hint of excitement in Johnny’s voice.

  “Tell me,” Clay said as he began walking down to George’s cabin.

  “It’s a man named Sonny Cutknife. He’s disappeared. You know about him yet?”

  “I do. I talked to James about an hour ago.”

  Sonny Cutknife!

  Clay had finally reached James McNeill later in the morning. James had passed on everything he’d learned about Emerald Canyon, including the fact that his name was on one of the corporations. While Clay hadn’t been able to make any more sense of it than James, something was definitely linking Emerald Canyon to Kelsie. It also formed a link to Frank Evans and by extension, his son Rooster.

  Clay was also very conscious of the list of names in his pocket. Rooster was on the list, but so was Sonny Cutknife.

  “I mean, Sonny’s really disappeared,” Johnny said, “and not trying to hide it. He left a letter of resignation for the administration secretary. He’s gone. I heard it at lunch already, and the rumor is all around the reservation. Especially how bad the secretary took it. She was his girlfriend and didn’t see it coming.”

  “Do me a favor,” Clay said. “Find out what you can about Sonny’s childhood.”

  “He was adopted,” Johnny said, almost immediately. “I remember him telling me that. White parents who took him out of a foster home. He really hated them. You want me to try to get their names?”

  “Definitely,” Clay’s heart began to surge. White parents, Adopted. Bad childhood. It might seem too simple of a thumbnail sketch, but how many others on that list were likely to have the same profile? And Sonny had disappeared. If the stalker was Sonny, there would be something in his past to point toward where he’d gone. And where Sonny was, Kelsie and probably Taylor would be too.

  Could Clay outguess Sonny? Only if he knew more.

  “George said you worked on the McNeill ranch with Sonny,” Clay said. He’d reached the cabin and was staring down the road, looking for the first signs of approaching vehicles. “How long had he been there?”

  “At least a couple of years.”

  “What do you think. Is he mentally stable?”

  Johnny waited, as if he were measuring his answer. “That summer he once threatened to kill me. He stuck my head in a post pounder and asked if I wanted my skull to pop like a watermelon.”

  “Find out as much as you can about him.” This was the first sign of progress, and Clay felt stronger because of it. “Nothing is too trivial to report. Nothing. Can you talk to me tonight?”

  “Sure. Where?”

  Clay wondered how long before men from the sheriff’s department appeared on the gravel road.

  “That’s a good question, Johnny.” To Clay, it looked like he’d better start putting distance between himself and the cabin. With the ridges and dips of the mountainous hills, he wasn't sure how long he’d be in cell-phone range. “How about calling me on the hour and half-hour?”

  “Done deal,” Johnny said. “This is a small place. I’ll have plenty on him by the time we talk again.” Johnny hung up.

  Clay dialed another number. He hoped the battery on his phone would last.

  * * *

  “Dennis, it’s Clay.” With his left hand, Clay pressed the phone against his ear. He held a pen in his right hand and was poised to scribble notes on the back of a file folder across his lap.

  “You got my report?” Flannigan asked.

  “It came in but someone else got hold of it. I don’t have time to explain. Can we talk now and talk fast? I don’t know how much battery time I have left on my phone.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Can you sum up what you found? I’m ready to take notes.”

  “Hang on,” Flannigan said. “The report’s on my desk. I’ll pick up the extension there.”

  Clay closed his eyes. The sun warmed his face. Under any other circumstances, he’d welcome a peaceful moment like this, high up in the quiet hills. Now, however, he felt jangled, his nerve ends gritty, his stomach sour. There was so little he could do, so much that had to be done.

  “Clay, I’ve got it in front of me.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Here’s the short version. You asked for any unsolved murders within five hundred miles over the last twenty-three years. In statistical terms, the answer is none. None, at least, that would be related to this. The ones that did come up I went through myself. None of those deaths fit what you’re looking for.”

  Clay had no hesitation in trusting Flannigan’s judgment. It was the results that bothered him. None? It didn’t make sense. Once the monster had a taste for blood, it was almost impossible to stop.

  “We’re at a dead end with VICAP?”

  “No,” Flannigan said, “and that's part of the longer version. “You told me to pull up a search on women between the ages of twenty and fifty. On a hunch, I went back in to VICAP with something more specific. I took away the boundary you gave me and opened it to the entire country. I asked for hits on women with a similar appearance to Kelsie. Tall, blonde, and young. Guess what?”

  “You wouldn’t be telling me unless you found something.”

  “Thirty-two.” Flannigan’s voice rose. “Thirty-two! Scattered far and wide and with no kill pattern I could see, no time pattern that made sense. A bunch up and down the Atlantic states. The Midwest, Southwest, all over the place. Maybe that’s why no one else connected them. Maybe there isn’t a connection. But thirty-two? If it’s true, this is a major killer, and no one has any idea he’s been hunting.”

  Clay knew it was possible. It had taken a lucky break for anyone to discover that John Wayne Gacy had killed over thirty young men in less than seven years, in the far tighter geographical circle of his home near Chicago. A body count of thirty-two over twenty-three years in the entire country would be practically invisible, even with VICAP.

  “He’s probably taken more,” Clay said. “Those are only the ones registered in VICAP. You can figure that others weren’t reported. And figure also that some were killed and their bodies never found. You know how many thousands of missing-persons cases don’t get solved.”

  “That’s the other thing,” Flannigan told him. “Bodies. I called up another request. I got to thinking if your man does live in Kalispell, maybe he picks up his victims from outside the five-hundred-mile circle you gave me. Maybe he takes them home from there. The computer gave me ten hits. Bodies found over the last fifteen years within that five-hundred-mile circle. These bodies – well, some were identified, some weren’t. What’s got my attention is that five of the seven bodies with positive I.D. were lookalikes. Tall, blonde, young. Of the ones that couldn’t be identified, autopsy reports show bone structure of young Caucasian females.”

  “Couldn’t be identified?”

  “Clay, that’s what’s got me convinced you’re onto something. All five bodies dumped within the five-hundred-mile circle had one thing in common: They were found in remote mountain-hiking areas. Some had been there so long that the animals had scattered the bones.”

  “He takes them on camping trips,” Clay guessed aloud. “Gets their trust, puts them in a situation where he can play with them as long as he wants without any danger. We’re looking for someone who’s familiar with backcountry.”

  Rooster Evans fit. So did Sonny Cutknife.

  “Whoever it is, he’s a sicko,” Flannigan said. “You haven’t heard the worst of it.”

  Clay did not want to hear. Already, Taylor had been gone for two
days, Kelsie for one. If the monster had taken them on a forced march into any of the nearby mountains, they could be anywhere among tens of thousands of square miles of mountain and trees.

  “Give it to me,” Clay said slowly.

  “He likes breaking bones.”

  “Repeat that.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like it. Each one without exception showed broken bones. Everywhere. As if he had taken a sledge-hammer to them.”

  Clay took several deep breaths to compose himself. If there was ever a time to detach himself from his emotions, this was it. “Any of the others found elsewhere fit that MO?”

  “A couple of others,” Flannigan said, “but also in remote areas. So it still fits.”

  “Right,” Clay said. “Anything else you can tell me?” he asked.

  “Plenty of details. I haven’t been able to put a profile together. Maybe you can. But there're thirty pages of details. It’d be a lot easier if I could get it to you somehow.”

  Movement in the trees below caught Clay’s eye. It was George carrying two backpacks. He pointed back at the cabin.

  “I’ll get you a fax number as soon as I can,” Clay said.

  “Sheriff’s men,” George said as he approached. “I left as they were driving up.”

  “Wait for the fax number,” Clay told Dennis. “But right now it looks like I have to go.”

  * * *

  An hour’s hike higher into the hills from the cabin, George and Clay took their first break. The old man’s effortless stamina impressed Clay greatly. Of the two, Clay was the one who called the stop.

  “Not used to packing,” Clay said, pride forcing him to pretend he was breathing normally. “How do you do it?”

  “Old Indian trick,” George said. He found a log to sit on. “It is a matter of intelligence, not strength.”