In the bleak midwinter asacm-1

by M. R. Sellars

  When he paused long enough to suck in a quick breath, Clovis jumped on the chance and interjected a question, “What’s going on?”

  “A goddamned false alarm, I hope,” he replied, then grunted hard as he finally managed to force his free arm through the other sleeve and shrug completely into his coat. “But right now it sure looks a lot like we’ve got an abduction on our hands.”

  At his words, Clovis felt her heart slide up into her throat. The sharp pain of sympathetic fear washed over her immediately behind the first sensation, causing a strange hollowness to form deep inside her chest. She imagined it was probably the empty space where her heart used to be.

  “Are… Are you sure?”

  “Not yet, but it sure looks bad. And, I trust Carmichael. Something had to set him off for him to have Ruth call me.”

  “What do you want me to tell the Highway Patrol?” Clovis asked, croaking out the words past the sudden tightness in her voice. Still looking at the sheriff, she reached sideways for the base microphone and fumbled after it with a shaky hand until she managed to grasp the neck and pull it toward her.

  “Everything I just told you,” he replied, turning and starting toward the front door. “And have them run this John Carter for priors, just to be sure.”

  She shouted after him. “Where are you going?”

  A swirl of snow streamed inward on the sudden draft that was created when he tugged the door open with a quick jerk. He started forward into the storm while calling back to her, “I’m heading over to the Greenleaf to check on something. I’ll radio in just a few…”

  CHAPTER 6

  Harsh light spewed from a pair of un-shrouded flood lamps and pooled on the parking lot just beyond Bremerton’s back door. The bulbs themselves angled slightly downward and were screwed into a fixture that was mounted a few feet above the top of the opening on the outside wall. The glare spread outward, throwing itself with singular purpose at the encroaching darkness.

  Undaunted, the artificial illumination put up an admirable fight against insurmountable odds, but in the end it lacked the strength to fully overwhelm the night. Somewhere near the center of the back parking lot the opposing forces grappled, blending together in a murky gray skirmish, flanked on either side by the two sworn enemies, light and dark.

  Deputy Carmichael paused at the threshold and gazed out into the wide arc of diminishing light created by the ongoing clash. Fat, crystalline flakes were filling the air before him, streaming down, diagonally, sideways, and even twisting in violent, short-lived swirls on sudden gusts of wind. As the frozen precipitation plummeted toward the ground, it was simultaneously reflecting the brilliance of the high-wattage bulbs, and casting oblique, animated shadows upon the already snow-covered surface of the asphalt.

  Skip had hurriedly walked the interior of the store, from front to back, calling Merrie’s name as he went, and identifying himself aloud as well. If the little girl was simply hiding, he wanted her to know that the police were involved now and that the game had moved from simply annoying to downright serious. However, he received no answer from her, and though he had said exactly the opposite to her mother, he hadn’t really been expecting one. In his mind, that lack of expectation was supported by what he found at the back of the store.

  The first thing to catch his eye when he reached the “North Pole” fantasyland was the angle of the cardboard fireplace. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t off by much. No more than a few inches, really. In fact, the average onlooker might not have even noticed anything wrong about it at all, but the disruption to its positioning was more than enough to grab Skip’s attention. The fake logs with their orange cellophane embers were still pretending to burn, most likely exactly where they’d been placed originally. The fireplace facade itself, however, was askew by more than enough to fully expose the motorized workings of the flickering light behind the glowing hearth. Moreover, it was resting at an angle that suggested it had been struck by someone or something that was headed for the nearby storeroom door, and in a bit of a hurry. Under everyday circumstances, while the disruption to the scenery was certainly something he would notice, it wasn’t something that he would consider all that important, because there could easily be any number of mundane explanations for the issue.

  In truth, those innocuous reasons could still apply, and he knew better than to discount them. However, the way things had been shaping up, the mundane didn’t seem very likely.

  On that instinct, he followed what he perceived to be a trail, entering the storeroom and continuing to call out for the young girl as he searched. Eventually, he came to the back door of the building and opened it. And that is where he now stood, gazing out into the night.

  “Merrie?” he called. “Merrie, it’s Deputy Skip from the sheriff’s office…”

  Again, no answer came other than the rising and falling sigh of the frigid wind. His call had ridden out on a cloud of steam caused by his moist breath. A cloud that immediately leapt onto the back of the swirling air and was dragged away, taking each dying syllable of the words along as well.

  Carmichael stepped through the opening and was instantly pelted with the blowing snow. He squinted his eyes and pivoted his gaze from left to right as he quickly scanned the lot, looking for both the missing girl and for Carter’s four-door sedan. Stark puddles of light similar to the one in which he now stood fell from fixtures mounted above the rear entrances of the flower shop and pharmacy. Two more sets of flood lamps were also positioned at the corners of the building. Still, the darkness of night, aided by blizzard conditions, was winning the battle for dominance over the lot. Were it not for the near whiteout, with the exception of the trash dumpster to his right he would have had a fairly unobstructed view of the parking area. Of course, as the old saying goes, “woulda, shoulda, coulda.”

  Skip held his hands up with his fingers parallel to the brim of his hat and palms hooked at a ninety-degree angle, trying to shield his eyes from the blowing flakes as he concentrated on each individual car before moving his gaze to the next. Unfortunately, of the few vehicles present, the sedan Missus Babbs had described was nowhere to be seen, at least not that he could tell. On top of that, they were all currently excelling at the task of collecting their own blankets of white, which made them even harder to make out. However, that also meant that it was unlikely that any of them had been running recently enough to be warm.

  He repeated the scan just to be sure. Not only was Carter’s vehicle not on the lot, there were no tire tracks or footprints readily visible in the freshly fallen snow either. This could simply mean that nobody had gone out this door since it had started snowing. When you combined that observation with the lack of a warm vehicle, it might also indicate that Carter wasn’t as conscientious about his job as Missus Babbs wanted to believe and that he was late returning from his dinner break.

  Or, it could mean that Carter had indeed taken Merrie and had done so before the snow had really begun to fall, which fit the timeline. In Skip’s mind, as horrifying a thought as that was, thus far everything seemed to be adding up to foul play.

  Finally satisfied that the car wasn’t there, Skip panned his gaze lower across the flat expanse of snow. Even though no tracks were immediately evident, that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t there, or even that something else important might not be hiding in plain sight. Sometimes you just had to look a little closer. As he swept toward the right, he noticed a dark spot in the snow just a few feet away from where he was standing and very near the dumpster-right at the corner of it, in fact. The stain was roughly the size of a small dinner plate, though much more oblong in shape, and appeared as if something was melting through the thin layer of snow cover from beneath.

  He stepped toward the spot and knelt down next to it, shifting his upper body to keep from casting his shadow across the anomaly. As he peered at the lumpy, wet mass, the wind made a sudden shift, sending a flake-filled gust directly into his face. He blinked against the onslaught o
f snow and at the same time sputtered a bit as a foul odor wafted upward into his nostrils. Taking a second, shallower breath he recognized the smell that was coming from the mass.

  It was the sharp funk of fresh vomit.

  Skip swallowed hard and continued to inspect the somewhat teardrop shape in the snow, despite having to battle his own wave of nausea brought on by both the sight and stench of the recent puke. Even though his own stomach now felt sour, his brain was noticing a pattern. The spread of the spilled stomach contents seemed to indicate that it had been propelled at a slight angle toward the back of the store, almost as if the person was facing the door instead of away. However, given the amoeba like bulge along the outer edge, it also seemed to have been deflected by something. Sending his eyes upward he found frozen dribbles of what appeared to be vomit clinging to the corner of the dumpster. Standing up and angling his gaze back downward, he followed the splatter in reverse, noticing that it spread in a way that suggested the person responsible might have been moving in the opposite direction. The fading line of smaller spots led several inches away from the primary, appearing to hook around the corner of the huge metal bin with spray-like lines radiating outward.

  Skip’s heart jumped, felt as if it stopped, and then it started to race. A new thought popped into his brain. Perhaps Merrie was simply ill and disoriented with a fever. That flu had been going around, and it was bad; he knew that for a fact. Missus Callahan had said Merrie wasn’t feeling well. Maybe it wasn’t those bad thoughts she claimed to be having. Maybe she really was sick.

  It could very well be that he had jumped to conclusions. That he had simply misread the circumstances and then allowed paranoia to take over, in turn driving him toward a faulty hypothesis. Maybe he was going to walk around the corner of the dumpster and find the little girl, delirious with a fever, and hiding from the world because of it. Right now, he would definitely settle for that instead of the other option that had been dominating his thoughts.

  “Merrie?” he called out as he stepped forward and around the corner of the bin.

  Unfortunately, there was still no answer. Not only that, there was no Merrie. Just fast falling snow and the hard line of the dumpster’s shadow where it stood in the swath of light from the flood lamps overhead. Skip felt the pit of his stomach sink when he was greeted with nothing more than the oblique line of blue-black darkness. He stood there for a moment and then looked out across the lot toward the entrance at the far end.

  Between the heavy moans of the wind he could hear the occasional noise of traffic out on the main drag in front of the store.

  He called out again, “Merrie?”

  His voice hitched a ride on a snowy gale and disappeared into the darkness behind him.

  “Merrie!” he called out again, cupping his hands on either side of his mouth and shouting against the weather. “MERRIE CALLAHAN!”

  He held his breath and waited. There was still no answer.

  Deputy Carmichael sighed and started turning to go back into the store. As he shifted, his own shadow moved, and in the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something protruding from the snow as light glinted from it in a quick flash. Twisting back around, he scanned the area. It was probably just a random snowflake catching the beam from the flood lamps at just the right moment, but in his peripheral vision it had seemed far more metallic. Slowly, keeping his eyes focused ahead, he stepped sideways, allowing the light to fall in the general direction of the phantom once again.

  Panning his gaze back and forth he suddenly caught another glimpse of the flash right at the edge of the dumpster’s long shadow and even farther out at the edge of his vision. He knew it could still have been a rogue flake, so he carefully and ever so slightly moved his head back and forth, staring through the curtain of falling snow.

  The flash hit the edge of his sight once again.

  Locking his eyes on the spot, he took a step forward and stopped. Then another, and waited again. Squinting against the wind he finally noticed an almost insignificant lump of crystalline white. He stepped toward it, and a more detailed outline began to emerge. Another step and he saw a small swath of black and the suggestion of a glint of silver. As the wind blew around it, a miniature drift was forming on the opposite side, leaving a concave void facing him.

  He advanced the last few steps forward and again knelt down. Reaching out, he brushed away the rapidly accumulating flakes to reveal the object beneath. When he saw it, the pit of his stomach did more than just sink. This time it twisted into a hard knot as his heart thudded painfully in his chest.

  A nauseating thought flickered through his head, and he remembered that less than a half-hour ago he had been glad to have a distraction. Now he was cursing himself for it.

  He reached out and picked up the lone, abandoned shoe-a little girl’s black leather Mary Jane. Light once again glinted from the silver metal buckle as he lifted it from the snow, and his breath caught in his chest, lodging itself in that agonizing somewhere between an inhale and an exhale.

  He didn’t need anyone to tell him that the shoe belonged to Merrie Frances Callahan. Nor did he need someone to explain that she was nowhere around to claim it.

  He just knew.

  CHAPTER 7

  6:23 A.M. – December 22, 2010

  Huck’s Diner

  US 61 North – Hannibal, Missouri

  “… news out of Jefferson City this morning, the license of a Kansas City funeral home has been revoked by state regulators after multiple probation violations…”

  The talking head on the dim screen continued, his voice droning outward from the speaker of the small television on the opposite side of the near empty diner. However, any further words he had on the story were all but drowned out by a far more cheerful voice that was issuing from a woman clad in a retro pink uniform, complete with an apron and a nametag that had MABEL stenciled across its face.

  “How are you this morning?” the waitress asked.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Constance replied as she closed the vinyl-covered, tri-fold menu and looked up.

  The woman in pink smiled. “Coffee, hon?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Regular or unleaded?”

  “Regular.”

  The waitress had come prepared. She placed a thick-walled mug upright on the table, and then with a practiced juggle of the two well-worn Pyrex globes in her other hand, plucked the brown handled one free. Tilting it carefully, she poured a stream of java while adding, “Fresh. Just made it.”

  “Wonderful,” Constance replied.

  The woman returned the pot to her other hand, once again hooking the orange and brown handles together in a death grip. Reaching into her apron pocket she pulled out a handful of creamers and put them on the table.

  “Thanks.”

  The waitress looked her over and with a genuine brightness in her voice asked, “Visiting Hannibal today?”

  Constance gave her head a quick shake. “Just passing through, I’m afraid.”

  “Too bad, we have a lot to see. And some wonderful little shops too. Great for last minute gift shopping.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Where’re you heading?”

  “North.”

  The waitress continued, undaunted by the vague answer. “Visiting family for the holidays?”

  “Business, actually…”

  “This close to Christmas? That’s a shame. Folks should be with family this time of year. Or, a pretty young lady like you, maybe with someone special?”

  Constance smiled and shrugged but didn’t offer any information. Apparently her naked ring finger was doing all the talking for her. In any case, she was ready to bring the conversation to a close before it became any more invasive than it already had. She wasn’t unfamiliar with the friendly openness of small towns, so the woman’s queries didn’t really offend her. However, she also wasn’t accustomed to the culture either. In Saint Louis, where she lived, you were cordial to others; howev
er, if you were too friendly, even out in the suburbs, people had a tendency to think something was either wrong with you or that you had an ulterior motive, nefarious or otherwise. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the time they were correct.

  Of course, under the circumstances this exchange was probably good practice. The town where she was heading was even smaller than Hannibal, so she might as well be prepared for random Q and A from the locals there too. Still, she wasn’t ready to dive in headfirst. Not until she absolutely had to, and definitely not this early in the morning.

  Fortunately, the waitress shifted the focus of her interrogation without any other prompting. “All righty then, hon, have you decided what you’d like, or do you need another minute or two?”

  Constance smiled inwardly. Now they were back on track. She nodded and said, “The Becky’s Breakfast, I think.”

  “How did you want those eggs?”

  “Scrambled.”

  “Bacon or sausage?”

  “Do you have turkey bacon?”

  “Sure do. White or wheat?”

  “Wheat, please.”

  “Okay, I’ll have that out in just a few.” The woman in pink flashed a smile and turned to head back toward the counter.

  “Oh,” Constance called after her. “Do you have any grapefruit juice?”

  “Not sure this morning, sugar. I’ll have to check on that for you,” the waitress answered. “If we have some do you want a large or a small?”

  “Just a small. Thank you.”

  Once the woman disappeared through the kitchen doors behind the counter, Constance turned her attention toward the TV. The morning news had given way to a kitschy commercial for a local car dealership. Oh well, she could tune in the news channel on her satellite radio once she was back on the road. Besides, right now she still had some reading to catch up on.

  She took a moment to stretch. Two hours in the driver’s seat hadn’t done her any favors, given that the apparent urgency of this trip had caused her to miss her morning run, not to mention that she was operating on less than four hours sleep. She wasn’t a big fan of last minute assignments like this, but you went where your SSA told you to go. The mobility agreement was all part of the job, no matter the division where you were assigned, but most especially if you were a special agent in the field. Of course, in this instance she wasn’t even sure her SSA knew what was happening just yet. These orders had come from the SAC himself, and even he had implied that they originated from higher up the FBI’s food chain, which meant DC. Either way, when your boss’ boss is the one handing you an assignment, you don’t ask why. Not out loud, anyway.