With the Material Witness in the Safehouse

by Carla Cassidy

  “We think maybe the drug he injected into her, along with a hypnotic suggestion, erased her memory of his identity,” Ryan said.

  “But I do remember the place where he held me,” she added.

  “What did it look like,” Officer Matthews asked.

  “The walls were wood and it smelled like oil and gas. I think it was some kind of a boat place.”

  “That doesn’t exactly narrow things down,” Patrick replied.

  “This town is filled with boat places. We’ve got covered docks, boat storage, boat repair…the list goes on and on.”

  She closed her eyes, willing herself to seek details that might help them identify the place. “There were necklaces hanging on hooks, and material for the gowns in one corner.” She sat up straighter on the sofa. “There was a workbench on one side. And there was a picture of an old sailboat painted on the wall. It was faded and chipped…and there was a letter J there, too.” She opened her eyes once again.

  “That sounds like Jay’s place,” Officer Matthews said.

  “Jay’s place?” Ryan looked from Matthews to Patrick.

  “Jay’s Motor Repair. It’s down by the docks. Been closed up since the hurricane five years ago. He had an old clipper painted on the wall inside his work area.”

  “You have to go there,” Britta said, and jumped up from the sofa. “We all have to go there.”

  There was a burning urgency inside her. She knew something, and it was vital that Chief Swanson know it, too, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “We have to go there,” she repeated. “I have to show you.”

  “Britta, we should stay here, let Patrick and Officer Matthews check it out,” Ryan protested. “You’ve been through enough tonight.”

  “No,” she replied firmly. “I have to go. There’s something there I need you to understand. I can’t explain it, but I have to be there.”

  Patrick’s hazel eyes held her gaze intently. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “We’ll follow you in my car,” Ryan said.

  Within minutes they were headed out. Fog still swirled like a living, breathing entity, threatening to envelop the cars and making driving difficult.

  “You let me know if you start feeling weird or anything,” Ryan said as he cast her a worried glance.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know,” she replied. “Trust me, I don’t intend to drift far from your side.” She frowned. “I don’t know what it is, but I just know there’s something in the place that’s important I show Patrick, that’s important he know.”

  “But you aren’t sure what it is now.”

  She shook her head and sighed in frustration.

  Thankfully they didn’t have too far to drive. Within minutes they pulled up in front of a building that sat on a large piece of property.

  Patrick parked with his headlights beaming on the structure and Britta stared at it. Weathered to a deep gray, the wooden building looked as if it wouldn’t take much of a wind to blow it to the ground. She had no memory of being here, but that didn’t mean much. She would have been brought here unconscious and had been in one of the strange trances when she’d left.

  They got out of the vehicles and Patrick grabbed a couple of strong-beamed flashlights from the truck. Matthews had his own flashlight so Patrick handed Ryan the extra one.

  Patrick shone his light beam on the front of the building, where a wooden sign hung crookedly and creaked in the wind. It read Jay’s Motor Repair.

  “Is this the place?” he asked Britta.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I ever saw the outside of the building. I won’t know for sure until we get inside.” Her heartbeat raced as she thought of going in, of seeing the place that had haunted her dreams.

  “As far as I know, the place has been abandoned since Jay left town after the storm,” Patrick said.

  It was possible it wasn’t the right place, Britta thought, although she desperately wanted it to be. The urgency that had filled her all day long now screamed inside her.

  All three men pulled their weapons as they cautiously approached the front door. “Stay back,” Ryan said to Britta, and made sure she was behind him. “Stay back until we know it’s secure.”

  She stayed two steps behind as they walked up the three steps to the door. The flashlight beams barely cut through the thick fog that surrounded them.

  “It’s padlocked,” Patrick said when he reached the door.

  “Brent, get a crowbar from my trunk,” he instructed. As Officer Matthews hurried back to the car Patrick shone his light on the lock. “Can’t imagine why anyone would want to lock up a dump like this.”

  “He had to lock it,” Britta said. “He didn’t want anyone to accidentally stumble inside and discover his lair.”

  “Boards on the window, just like you said,” Patrick said to Britta. “Makes it impossible for us to peek in and have a look around.”

  Matthews returned with the crowbar, and he and Patrick managed to pull the lock right off the rotten wood. Britta’s heartbeat accelerated as Patrick pulled on the door and it opened with a creak. The hairs on her nape stood up as she anticipated what they would find inside.

  Ryan grabbed her hand and allowed the two policemen to enter first. “You still doing okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she assured him with a tight smile.

  “Clear,” Patrick called from inside.

  Ryan squeezed her hand, and the two of them entered.

  “We tried the lights. They don’t work,” Patrick said, his face a ghostly mask as Ryan’s flashlight found it.

  She could smell the faint odor of gasoline and motor oil, that familiar scent that tightened her stomach. As Ryan shone his light around the space, she followed it with her eyes and gasped as it hit the wall where seashell necklaces hung from hooks.

  This was it. The place where she’d spent her missing four days. A wooden worktable was just beneath it, holding spools of fishing line, a small portable drill and dozens of shells.

  “I was here,” she said, tears burning at her eyes. “This is where he held me.” The room now smelled of madness, for surely it was madness that had been in here with her. A madman had sat at that workbench and strung seashells into necklaces. A madman had sewn the gown that she would wear as she walked into the sea.

  “Call in some men. We have a crime scene here,” Patrick ordered Matthews. “And we need light. Make sure somebody brings a couple of floodlights.”

  As Matthews once again disappeared to do his chief’s bidding, Ryan placed an arm around Britta’s shoulders. “Don’t touch anything,” he said to her softly.

  She forced a smile to her lips. “Don’t worry, we used to watch all those crime dramas together, so I know not to touch anything in a crime scene.”

  Patrick walked over to where they stood, a deep frown on his features as his bald head gleamed brightly in the flashlight beam. “I owe you an apology,” he said to Britta. “I wasn’t sure I believed your story that day you two came to my office to talk to me.”

  “It’s all right,” Britta replied. “I’m not sure I would have believed my story, either.” She leaned closer to Ryan.

  “This is just bizarre,” Patrick said. “Lately it seems as if there’re too many bizarre things going on in this town. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.” He sighed. “We might as well go outside and wait for my men and those lights to arrive.”

  The three of them stepped back outside, and Britta sank down on one of the steps, Ryan sitting next to her as Patrick walked toward his car.

  “You okay?” Ryan asked.

  She smiled at him. “Aren’t you getting tired of asking that?”

  “I can’t help but be worried. You want to go back to the house?”

  “No. I still need to be here. I told you there’s something here, something important.” She frowned. “I’m not sure what it is, but maybe with brighter lights inside I’ll know.”

  It took almost an hour for more off
icers to arrive and the floodlights to be put into place. Britta and Ryan sat in his car and out of the way of the officers as they went about their work.

  Both Ryan and Britta napped off and on as they waited. They talked little, both exhausted by the events of the night.

  It was almost dawn when the evidence gathering was complete and Patrick indicated they could go back inside. “The only fingerprints we managed to pull were around the cot area and those are probably yours from what you told us,” he said, his frustration obvious. “The prints are small like a female’s.

  “I want this guy. I can’t be having women taken off the streets in my town.” He eyed Britta with a piercing gaze.

  “You think of anything, no matter how small the detail, that might lead me to this guy, you let me know.” He frowned. “I don’t have much hope that anything we bagged and tagged is going to help us identify this creep.”

  Britta nodded and stepped back inside the building with Ryan and Patrick at her heels. “There’s something here,” she said thoughtfully. With the aid of the brilliant floodlights, she wandered the room wanting, needing to find whatever it was that nagged at her.

  The necklaces had all been bagged up and taken away, as had all the items on the workbench. She stared at the cot, remembering the terror in the moments that she’d been conscious.

  “He kept me pretty drugged,” she said, more to herself than to the others as she wandered the room. “But there was something he said…something he showed me that is important.” She felt a whisper in her ear, a cold evil breath on the side of her face. “He told me something. He didn’t speak much, but he told me something important.”

  The two men said nothing. They simply stood by the door and allowed her to wander the room. The sense of urgency she’d felt upon arriving hadn’t waned in the hours that she and Ryan had waited to get back inside.

  Then she saw it. What had been nagging at her, the important information she knew she needed to show Patrick, to tell him.

  “Here,” she said as she pointed to the wall. About two inches above the workbench a set of numbers were scribbled in pencil.

  Patrick frowned and moved closer. “We saw those, but we didn’t know if they had been written by the man who held you or by Jay or somebody else years ago.”

  “He wrote them. The man who had me,” she said. Again she remembered a faint whisper in her ear and an icy hand gripped her heart. “They’re coordinates.”

  “Coordinates to what?” Ryan asked.

  She stared up at Patrick. “It’s the coordinates to another one. That’s what I needed to tell you. That’s what was so important.” She grabbed hold of Patrick’s strong forearm. “I wasn’t the first,” she whispered. “Oh, my God, I wasn’t his first.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The moment the sun rose high enough in the sky to start the search, the boats went out, armed with both professional divers and the coordinates taken off the wall.

  Britta and Ryan stood on the beach with a growing crowd of people as the news rippled through the sleepy little town that a body was buried at sea.

  The sun had quickly dispersed the last of the heavy fog that had shrouded the town the night before, and the sky was the perfect blue of a perfect Maine day, but it wasn’t a perfect day. It was a day of death. The only thing they didn’t know was whose grave the coordinates marked.

  Ryan had tried to talk Britta into going home to get some much-needed sleep, but she’d been adamant that she needed to be here. She’d spoken little throughout the long hours of the night as they’d waited for dawn to break, but she seemed to be finally at peace.

  Chief Swanson stood nearby, in contact with the men on the boats through his phone. He paced the sand, stopping occasionally to stare out to where the boats were barely visible in the distance.

  Ryan had been impressed by the lawman throughout the long night and the morning. He’d watched as Swanson had delegated responsibilities to his men, coordinated the search party and asked Britta question after question in an effort to glean any additional clues.

  For some reason Ryan had thought that once Britta got back all her memories, his uneasy feeling about Raven’s Cliff would disappear, but that wasn’t the case.

  As he stood on the shoreline in the bright early-morning light he still felt the aura of evil surrounding them, as if it had dark arms around the sleepy fishing village and refused to let go.

  He stared out at the lighthouse not too far away. Were the strange events going on in the town the result of a ghost from the past? Had Captain Earl Raven been a benevolent spirit watching over the town until the night somebody had not followed his command?

  “Ryan…Valerie,” a familiar voice called from behind them. He turned to see Hazel Baker hurrying toward them. Clad in a bright orange caftan with flowing sleeves and wearing sparkly gold sandals, she stumbled hurriedly across the sand to where they stood.

  “I heard they’re looking for something,” she said. “A victim of the man who had you.” She looked at Britta, and her lips trembled with emotion just before she suddenly threw herself at Britta and gave her a hug. “You poor dear. How on earth did you ever get away?”

  “It’s one of the few things I don’t remember,” Britta said as Hazel released her. Throughout the night in the brief conversations Ryan and Britta had shared, they’d speculated on how she had come to be wandering the lighthouse when he’d found her. But she’d had no real memories of how she’d gotten away from her captor.

  Hazel looked at Ryan, her eyes dark and without their usual good humor. “It’s the curse. I just know it is. I’ve felt the bad times coming for weeks now. I’ve cast spells and lit candles and asked the Goddess to protect us, but I fear the strength of Captain Raven’s curse is too strong.”

  A new chill filled Ryan as he realized the woman was feeling exactly what he’d been feeling, that some indefinable evil had found its home in Raven’s Cliff. Britta moved closer to him, as if the chill of malevolence infected her, too.

  A stir went up in the crowd nearest the shore. Patrick walked over to them, a grim expression on his face. “The divers have found something. They’re in the process of bringing it up.”

  The ever-growing crowd of people buzzed with curious energy. As the sun drifted higher in the sky, the humidity built, becoming oppressive and cloying as they waited for the boats to return.

  A speedboat came to shore and picked up Patrick, then carried him to the bigger boat out in the water. Britta grabbed Ryan’s hand, her expression strained as she followed the progress of the speedboat.

  He wasn’t sure how she was still standing under her own steam. The night had been endless, and Ryan was certainly feeling the result of too little sleep. His eyes felt grainy and raw, and his entire body ached with his exhaustion.

  He smiled at her and touched her cheek. “You amaze me,” he said softly. “You are so strong.”

  There was sadness in her eyes as she returned his smile. “I just wish whoever is out there had been strong enough to overwhelm the monster.”

  They remained standing on the beach until the speedboat brought Patrick back and he disembarked. He walked toward them, his face weary and his shoulders slumped just a bit. The crowd grew somber, a respectful silence descending on them all.

  He pulled Ryan and Britta to the side, away from the other people. “The divers found her. There wasn’t much left, but I think it’s Rebecca Johnson. DNA testing will probably confirm my suspicions.”

  “That’s the woman you thought was lost in the hurricane, right? Nicholas Sterling’s fiancée?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah, well, no hurricane dressed her in a white gown and a seashell necklace, tied her to the bottom of a rowboat and then sank that boat with concrete blocks and old anchors,” Patrick said.

  Ryan felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach as he imagined what the young woman had endured before her death. Who was responsible?

  Patrick placed a meaty hand on Britta’s shoulder. “You we
re one lucky lady. If you hadn’t escaped when you did, we might have been dragging your body up from the depths.”

  He glanced over their shoulders. “There’s Mayor Wells. I need to go fill him in and tell him it looks as if we have some kind of creepy serial killer on our hands. And tell him it’s not his daughter we’ve found.”

  At that moment Ryan realized how close he’d come to losing Britta. What if he’d slept so soundly that she’d walked right past him and out the front door? Had the killer been waiting for her that night in the shadows? Hidden in the fog? Waiting to take her to a boat and tie her in, then weigh it down and cast her to the depths of the sea?

  He turned to look at her, but she was looking over his shoulder where Patrick Swanson and the mayor were in conversation.

  The mayor was dressed in a suit that Ryan would bet cost a month of Ryan’s salary. Again he thought of that moment at the wedding when he’d seen money exchange hands and the odd phone conversation he’d overheard.

  The mayor nodded and with Swanson approached Britta and Ryan. “I was wondering if maybe you knew anything about my daughter,” he said to Britta. “You know, she went missing off the bluff. I just thought maybe…you might…”

  “How dare you come here?” Britta exclaimed, her voice filled with venom.

  Ryan frowned and placed a hand on Britta’s arm, but she shook it off and took a step closer to Perry Wells. “You’re the devil who brought the evil to the sea. It’s all your fault. You hear me, it’s all your fault.”

  Mayor Wells stumbled backward, his features displaying first a look of surprise and then what Ryan thought was a hint of guilt. “Young lady, you’re obviously distraught,” he said. He looked from Ryan to Patrick, then muttered about business that needed to be taken care of and turned on his heels and stalked up the beach.

  Britta expelled a deep breath and stared at Ryan in horror. “I don’t know why I said that. I have no idea where that came from.” The inner rod of strength that had gotten her through the long hours of the night and the equally trying hours of the morning seemed to disappear.