by Skylar Finn
“Just look,” he said, staring at it intently.
The streetlight blinked out. The car plunged into darkness.
“I can make the lights go out,” he said.
“What?” Beneath her buzz, she felt scared again. He was crazy. He sounded crazy. They were on a timer. Hadn’t Daniel told her that once?
“Watch,” he said.
The light came back on. She stared. It was a coincidence. It had to be.
“See,” he said triumphantly. “I can control them. I can do whatever I want.” He looked at her as intently as he’d regarded the light. “I can teach you how. If you want.”
A rush came over Brittany. He couldn’t have known what that meant to her, she thought. All her life she’d felt powerless. Powerless to stop her dad from leaving, her mom from remarrying, everything from changing for the worse. Powerless at school and at home. Going where people told her to go and doing whatever they told her to do when she got there. He was offering her more than experience, or bragging rights, or even the obvious horror of being kidnapped and brutally murdered.
He was offering her power.
The last thing Brittany remembered was speeding down the highway so fast the lights became a blur, the lights popping out one after the other in a dizzying rush until she thought they were going to travel warp speed and take off into outer space. Maybe he was a magician, she thought, or a wizard. It was the last thought she had before darkness descended over her and she fell into a deep and bottomless sleep.
Brittany woke up in the basement. She was lying on a narrow army cot. All her clothes were on, that was the first thing she checked. Someone had removed her shoes and lined them up neatly by the bed. She didn’t have her phone or her backpack, and there was nothing in her pockets.
How could she have been so stupid? Of course, he had kidnapped her. Of course, he had. Who got into a car with a strange man pretending to be a boy she went to high school with? Who believed such a stupid trick? She had basically asked him to take her. She had literally asked him! She couldn’t believe herself now.
“Are you a kidnapper?” she had said. What had she expected him to say? “Yes, I am. And I am about to take you to a second location where I will then demand a ransom from your parents.”
Brittany remembered a story she read for school. The story was called The Ransom of Red Chief. It is about a little boy who gets kidnapped. The kidnappers demand a ransom from his parents. The problem is, the boy is so bad, his parents don’t want him back. They refuse to pay the ransom and are just happy to have him off their hands.
Maybe if he asked for a ransom, her family wouldn’t even want her back.
Maybe if she were bad enough, her captor would simply let her go.
Or maybe he would just kill her and be done with it.
Brittany shivered. She wrapped herself in her blanket cocoon. It was an old unzipped sleeping bag with what looked like an eighties cartoon on it. She wondered if it had belonged to Thomas. There was a space heater in the corner, and it made the room warm and toasty like the inside of a toaster oven. Brittany pretended she was a hostage in outer space, a prisoner of the sun. No matter how warm the room was, she still felt so cold inside. She felt like she might never be warm again.
The space heater flickered, then shut off. Brittany sat up and looked at it, alarmed. She knew sometimes they got overheated and could cause fires. There was no way out of here. She was locked inside, the window was too high and too small, and it was locked, too.
Then the lamp next to her bed flickered and went out. She stared at it. It turned back on.
He was back.
13
Under Suspicion
I woke up with a cold. Stuffy nose, sore throat, sneezing. The whole nine yards. I was unaccustomed to cold weather, aside from the time I spent at Quantico, and it was probably inevitable. Still, it was the last thing I needed right now and a nuisance besides.
“Got a cold?” Harper asked sympathetically when I got in the car.
“Yeah,” I said, pulling my scarf over the lower half of my face so I wouldn’t infect the close space with my germs. “’Fraid so.”
“I’ll stop at the Rite Aid,” he said. “Pick you up some medicine.”
“It’s not necessary, really,” I said. “We can just go straight to the church.” I felt obliged to report what we’d witnessed the previous day at the Hayes house to Agent Brown. However, I considered Cynthia Hayes’ being driven mad by her husband’s infidelity largely beside the point. More worrisome to me was the underlying connection between Hayes, Lipman, Deakins, and her boyfriend—and what it might mean for their missing daughters. I was curious to know if they had located their missing sex offender, but I thought they were chasing smoke. I felt sure, with the gut intuition that I used as my North Star, that it was merely a coincidence and the whole thing was tied up in whatever they were up to in the hills and on the river.
“Don’t be a hero,” he said. “It’s on the way.”
“Okay, I guess.” I wasn’t used to anyone taking care of me.
He switched on his blinker and pulled into the Rite Aid. I waited in the car while Harper ran in. He was back in under a minute, empty-handed.
“They were out of cold medicine,” he said, brow furrowed. “Must be something going around.”
A prickle had started on the back of my neck. In college, my best friend had called it our stoner sense. At Quantico, we joked it was our Spidey-sense. Since then, I’d learned never to doubt it as it had yet to steer me wrong.
“Maybe Walmart?” I said mildly. I had my suspicions, but it was nothing I wanted to raise a red flag about just yet.
“Sure thing.” Harper drove across the street, where the shopping center was bustling as usual. He went in the gardening section by the pharmacy. I slouched in the passenger seat and sipped my thermos of tea. That’s how I knew I was sick. I had resorted to trading out coffee for the considerably less rewarding effects of a mug of black tea with lemon. Soon I’d be ordering water with lemon off the menu without so much as batting an eye.
It was then that I noticed a familiar head of tousled, blond, receding hair exiting the gardening center, his cart piled high with heavy sacks of fertilizer. Clearly, the landscaping situation at the site was getting a little out of hand.
I slumped lower in the passenger seat. He was loading the bags into the back of his Jeep when Harper returned, empty-handed again.
“They’re out, too,” he said.
“I’m guessing that’s because Hayes bought it all,” I said, nodding to Hayes in the corner of the parking lot, slinging bags into the back of his Jeep as quickly as he could.
Harper watched him, shaking his head in disbelief. “Okay, this is getting pretty blatant,” he said. “Fertilizer can have a perfectly innocuous use in construction. But how is he going around down buying all the pseudoephedrine without raising any suspicions?”
“He probably didn’t buy it all himself,” I said. “If Lipman bought some and Caesar—”
“—and Deakins and Randall, assuming they’re in it with them—”
“—plus whoever else they might have working for them, then it would appear as if they were entirely separate and unrelated transactions.”
He watched Hayes trundle slowly out of the parking lot with his new purchases. “How much meth are they making?” he asked incredulously. He pulled stealthily out of the parking lot and followed Hayes, two cars and a truck between us.
“If I had to hazard a guess,” I said, “I would wager that it’s not an inconsiderable amount.”
We followed him to Sistersville. He drove straight up the hill to the site, up the winding temporary gravel driveway, and disappeared from sight. Harper stayed on the main road below, passing him by. It would have been far too blatant to follow him up to the site and confront him or pretend we just wanted to question him further.
I didn’t want him to get spooked. We were just beginning to get the larger picture of why he
and Lipman had been so evasive and skittish in the first place. It would have been disastrous to give him any indication he was under suspicion. Harper agreed it would be best if Hayes and Lipman assumed our only interest in them was finding Brittany—not uncovering whatever it was the pair of them were up to, though I was now more convinced than ever that the two were related.
“They’re keeping it there, for now. It’s probably not the site of the actual lab,” I said. “This way, they can claim they bought it solely for construction purposes. As for how this all led to the disappearance of both girls, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that April is tied up in this somehow. So either people they owe money to or a rival faction.” We turned around at a gas station and went down the road back to New Martinsville. “Those would both be substantial reasons for them to take the girls as leverage.”
“Maybe they’re cooking up an extra big batch to pay off their debt and get the girls back,” said Harper.
“It seems likely,” I said. “I’m curious to see what Brown has to say about this.”
If I thought that Brown would be on board for the meth angle, I was sorely mistaken. When we arrived at the church, it quickly became clear that the CARD task force was headed in an entirely different direction.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure they’re cooking meth,” I said. “Harper and I theorize that the kidnappings could be the result of their unpaid debts or their involvement with a more powerful and vindictive force than they had prepared to deal with—the Mexican cartel, or even a more disorganized group: vigilante hillbillies they’ve ripped off, for example.”
“That may be so,” said Agent Brown. “But regarding the kidnappings, at this point, our investigation points strongly to Harold Lombardo. We’re going to devote our full manpower to locating him in the hopes that it will lead us to both Brittany and Crystal. The last thing we want is for Lombardo to have these girls for any period of time.”
“There will be time to circle back around to Hayes and Deakins after we get their daughters home safely,” said Manning.
I wanted to push the issue, but I could see their minds were made up: they were certain it was Lombardo, just as certain as I was that it wasn’t, and there would be no convincing them otherwise.
“You were both brought in for your exceptional profiling skills in your respective departments,” she said. “If you can pool your resources and put that into finding Lombardo, we’ll be in much better shape than we are now.” She looked at me more closely. “Are you all right, St. Clair? You look unwell.”
“I have a cold,” I said from behind my scarf.
“Well, we can’t afford to have you out of commission now, that’s for sure,” she said. She turned to Harper. “Why don’t you stop at the drugstore on your way back to the hotel and pick up some cold medicine?”
In the end, we had to drive all the way to Moundsville to find cold medicine. Lipman and Hayes had done that thorough a job. In my lap was a fat folder on Lombardo that I paged through dutifully as Harper drove. I wasn’t a renegade, some dark horse who went rogue whenever my theories disagreed with the Bureau’s. This wasn’t the movies, and rogue agents didn’t get rewarded for their antics after a brief period of being ostracized or suspended until they proved they’d been right all along. They got fired. At the end of the day, I was still just a person who needed a job, benefits, a pension. And I had every intention of honoring the commitments of that job.
It was at night that I planned to continue my investigation of Lipman and Hayes. The night, when everyone else was still sleeping. My primitive gut feeling had yet to steer me wrong.
“What are you thinking?” asked Harper.
“I’m thinking that they’re going to waste a lot of time we should be devoting to getting those girls back to chasing after some pedophile who probably overdosed in a ditch somewhere,” I said.
“I’m starting to think the same thing,” he said. “The trouble is, I’m not really one to defy orders. And what if we’re wrong? We’d be devoting priceless time and resources to chasing the wrong people and letting the real culprit get away while who knows what happens to those girls. That’s not something I’m prepared to live with.”
“I’m not prepared to live with it, either,” I said. “That’s why I can’t stop now. Not obeying orders, and not pursuing this angle, either.”
“So I’m guessing you’re not planning on sleeping,” he said.
“I didn’t sleep much, anyway,” I said.
“Well, keep in mind you are still sick,” he said. “If you get no rest on this thing, you’ll end up with bronchitis, or maybe even worse. Maybe we can take it in shifts.”
Behind my scarf, I smiled slightly. “Agreed,” I said.
As we drove back from Moundsville—the elusive box of cold medicine clutched in my lap—I watched the smoke rise in the sky over the natrium plants. Harper followed my gaze as he drove. “That can’t be good for the people who live here,” he said.
“It’s not,” I said. “My grandma had terrible respiratory problems when she died. She wasn’t that old. My mom still has awful sinus problems, even to this day. The two may be unrelated, but...” I shrugged. There was nothing that could be done about it now. At any given point, there were only so many people they could save.
“I doubt it,” he said. “Breathing in chemicals over the course of a lifetime has historically never done anyone any good. I’m sorry that happened.”
“Yeah,” I said, staring out the window. “Me too.” It was then that the flashing lights caught my eye. “Harper, what is that? Up ahead.”
Harper slowed to a crawl. There was no one behind us and few others on the road. We were passing what looked like a farm, and the land was dotted with squad cars. “Think it’s Lombardo?” he asked, pulling off the road.
It felt overly optimistic to hope that the local cops had weeded out his hiding place, then found the girls safe, alive, and untouched. But I thought it, nonetheless. It was hard not to hope sometimes, even after all that I’d seen. I guess it was true what they said about it springing eternal.
Harper pulled to a stop behind the squad car closest to the road, and we got out of the car. It had rained the previous night, and the ground was muddy beneath our feet. We slogged our way over to a clustered knot of uniforms.
Sheriff Rathbone was interviewing a man I took to be the owner of the property as we joined the group. We had met him briefly at CARD headquarters when he was on his way out and we were on our way in. He glanced up and nodded at us before turning his attention back to the farmer.
“They said on the news to call if I saw anything strange around the tank, and I come out here this morning to find a length of garden hose layin’ beside it,” he was saying. “Used to be, I didn’t even have to lock my front door at night. When my daddy and his daddy before him had a farm, the most they was worried about was tools going missing. I can’t wrap my head around this.”
“None of us can,” said Sheriff Rathbone. “Not least of which the fact they come down here messing with this stuff with no protective equipment on. Every time I get one of these calls, I assume I’m coming to find a dead body layin’ next to your tank.”
“What’s going on?” Harper said in a low voice to the nearest cop who stood beside us.
“Sheriff got a call that Charlie Baumgarten’s two big fertilizer tanks had been hit,” he whispered back. I saw Harper’s neck stiffen.
“Fertilizer, did you say?” he asked.
“Anhydrous ammonia,” the cop clarified. “Pretty close to pure nitrogen. Farmers use it to increase the growth of their crops.”
“Meth cooks mix it with paint thinner and cold medicine to make meth,” I said.
“Poor man’s cocaine.” The cop nodded and turned back to Charlie Baumgarten.
“They probably took less than a gallon,” Sheriff Rathbone was saying. “They rarely need more than that. Tank gauges probably didn’t even register it. I’d get yourself some lights
and some motion sensors out here to deter them if they come back. Consider putting locks on your tank and valves. Problem is, if they’re determined to break in—and in my experience, they usually are—and they get to messing with it too much, they’re gonna cause a leak and we’ll have to evacuate the area.” He turned to us. “You them feds that are here for those girls?”
We nodded.
“It’s unrelated,” he said. “Not that we couldn’t use your help with all this. But I guess you got to prioritize right about now and get those girls back, first and foremost.”
“Yes.” I lowered my scarf so my voice could be heard. “First and foremost.”
14
Penny and the Unicorns
He had never had much interest in girls. Or more to the point, they interested him, but not in the same way they seemed to interest his peers.
He watched them from a distance, starting in middle school: their long hair blow-dried and flat-ironed into submission, their sparkling cherry lip gloss, low-slung hip huggers, dark blue jeans, the top of a thong peeking over a waistband. It was as if they had all collectively agreed to undergo some mysterious change between the sixth grade and the seventh: to become someone other than themselves, to wear a costume and a mask so others would look at them and perceive them in a certain way.
On the other hand, there were girls like Penny: girls who either didn’t get the memo or were absent whatever gene was required to spontaneously alter their appearance, behavior, and personality over the course of a single summer. Penny was quiet and sat in the back of every classroom, where she refrained from drawing attention to herself. She looked out the window or drew in her notebook. She wore glasses and sweaters no matter what the weather and ate lunch alone while she read a book.
He was fascinated by Penny and wondered what books she was reading and what she thought about them. He wanted to know what she drew in her notebooks. He left the locker room before gym class and waited in the hallway in an alcove out of sight outside of the girls’ locker room until they finished changing. When the last high-pitched giggle had faded inside, he slipped in and diligently searched each locker until he found Penny’s: her sweater neatly folded inside, her loafers on the bottom shelf.
