3 Buried Leads (16 page)

I woke up slowly.

It took me a few minutes to get my bearings and realize where I was.

At first, I thought everything had been a dream and I was home asleep in my bed. I don’t usually sleep sitting up – or with my hands bound behind me, though – so that fantasy died a quick death.

The next thought that went through my mind was that my eyes had been glued shut. That was an utterly terrifying feeling, until I realized that whatever drug had been used to knock me out was just making the lids feel like they were anchored in granite.

The third thought I had was that I was never going to live this down with my mom – if I lived that long. Of course, Jake and Eliot were going to be massively pissed, too – and I honestly couldn’t fathom how they would blame me for this snafu. I knew that they would, though.

I was trying to get a feel for my surroundings, without alerting
whomever had taken me that I was now conscious. It only took me about a minute to realize that I was in a car. Michigan roads are some of the worst in the country. Even on a paved road you can’t go for more than a couple hundred feet without hitting a pothole that will knock your fillings loose.

I tried to open my eyes just enough to see if we were on a highway, but the window to my right was completely dark. There was no way of knowing where I was.

My next order of business was to figure out exactly who had me. I could feel a figure next to me in the car – but I couldn’t make out who it was without actually opening my eyes, and I didn’t think that was in my best interests at this point.

The radio was on, and it was turned to some current hits station. There hadn’t been a break in the music yet, so I couldn’t tell if we were still getting Detroit area stations or not.

The figure next to me had been silent up until this point. “I know you’re awake.”

I recognized the voice and, truth be told, I wasn’t surprised. Brian Frank.

“Why did you take me?” I opened my eyes fully and took my full situation in for the first time.

I was sitting in an upright position, with my hands bound behind my back, in the passenger seat of his blue SUV. Thankfully – or depending on what kind of driver he was unthankfully – I wasn’t strapped in to my seat.

“You know why I took you,” Brian said, never taking his eyes off the road in front of him. At least he seemed to be a conscientious driver.

“Actually, I’m still not clear on that,” I said.

“You knew.”

“I knew what?”

“That she’s dead.”

“I actually didn’t know that,” I countered.

“Really? Isn’t that why you came out to the house today?”

“I just came out to interview you,” I lied.

“You really shouldn’t treat me like an idiot,” Brian said. He was eerily calm. It was actually worse than if he had been screaming and threatening me. It proved he was thinking – and he clearly had a plan in mind. “I’m not an idiot.”

“If you knew the cops were closing in, why didn’t you just run?”

“What do you think I’m doing now?”

“Most people don’t stop and kidnap a newspaper reporter before they run from the cops,” I pointed out.

“I’m not most people.”

He had a point.

“Where are we going?”

“Away.”

“Away where?”

Brian ignored my question. Instead, for the first time since I woke up, he fixed his cold eyes on my face. “What did you find at the machine shop?”

Should I lie? Probably not. It was better that he believe the cops knew everything. “Bloody rags and a saw.”

Brian nodded stiffly and then turned his attention back to the road. It was pretty foggy out. That’s a regular occurrence this time of year, when the ground is still warm and the nights turn swiftly cold. In the dim glow of his headlights, though, I did manage to catch sight of a highway marker – it showed that we were still on I-75. The upcoming exit marking was for Saginaw. We were heading north.

“Nothing else?”

What else was there? “Not that they told me,” I said honestly. “Why? Was her body in there?”

“No, not in the garbage. Part of her was on the roof, though.”

Part of her?
Eww.

“Why did you put her on the roof?”

“I didn’t think anyone would look for her there.”

“What p-p-p-part of her?” Even for me, this was a disturbing conversation.

“Her torso. I moved it there from the woods the other day.”

“You cut her up and put her in the woods?”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Brian said simply.

I swallowed hard.  “Tell me what happened, Brian. Maybe I can help.” When dealing with crazy people, it’s important to make them believe you’re on their side. Sure, they’re usually paranoid and it doesn’t work – but it’s better than nothing.

“We were arguing,” he started. “She was getting ready to go on another trip with Dick. I knew they were sleeping together. She wasn’t having sex with me. She hadn’t in a really long time. I told her what I suspected. I expected her to deny it. She laughed at me, though.”

I watched him closely for signs that he was about to become unraveled, but he was just as calm as he had been when I first regained consciousness. I had no idea if that was a good or bad sign. I was leaning towards good – for the moment, at least.

“She told me that she had to find a man, a man that had goals and wasn’t happy being a house husband. That was pretty ridiculous coming from her, since it was her idea that I stay home and take care of the kids in the first place.”

“Sometimes people think they want something until they get it and then they realize it’s not how they envisioned,” I offered slowly.

“How is that my fault?”

“It’s not,” I said quickly. “Tell me the rest of the story.”

“We were fighting because I told her that I thought she needed to spend more time with the kids,” Brian said. I could see the relief actually roiling off him. He just wanted to tell someone what had happened. “I told her she shouldn’t go on the trip and stay at home. She told me that she was going with Dick, and when she got back she was filing for divorce.

“Divorce,” he said bitterly. “We don’t get divorced in my family. Marriage is forever. A promise is forever. She gave up on forever.”

I sat silently and let him talk. I didn’t think telling him that she probably should never have married him was going to be productive at this point.

“I grabbed her arm when she tried to leave the room,” Brian continued. “I just wanted her to listen to what I was saying. She smacked me across the face and told me I wasn’t a man, and she needed a man. I just snapped.”

“Then what happened?” I prodded him. I wanted to know everything just as much as I didn’t want to hear any more of the lurid tale.

“I grabbed her around the throat,” he said. “I didn’t even really squeeze that hard. I just wanted her to take it back. I wanted her to take those words back. She started panicking when she realized she couldn’t breathe and she started clawing at my wrists. I let up for a second. I really didn’t want to hurt her.”

Brian turned his glassy eyes in my direction. He wanted me to understand that this was all some sort of terrible accident.

“I also realized that I was stuck,” he continued, turning back to the road. “She would have me arrested. She would take my kids away. She would take my kids and raise them with that man. I couldn’t have that.

“I started squeezing again. I squeezed hard. I couldn’t let her take my kids. She was gone in a few seconds, I swear. She didn’t suffer.”

“Where were your kids?”

“Asleep,” Brian said simply.

“Where was Steffi?”

“Asleep.”

“No one heard anything?” I couldn’t quite believe that.

“We argued all the time,” Brian explained. “It was nothing new.”

“So, everyone in the house was asleep and your wife was dead on the floor. Why didn’t you call the police and tell them it was an accident?”

“The old accidentally strangling your wife defense doesn’t seem to go over well in the court system.”

He had a point.

“But why did you chop her up?”

“I didn’t at first,” Brian said. “I just knew I had to get her out of the house before anyone woke up.”

He lapsed into silence for a minute, clicking his brights on and off to see if that helped with the dense fog. It didn’t.

“A dead body is heavier than you think,” Brian said suddenly. “I thought I could just pick her up and move her. She’s not very big, you know? She was too heavy, though. Then I thought I could drag her, but it was too hard. I have a bad back.

“I knew I needed some leverage, so I took my belt off and wrapped it around her neck. That way I could pull her down the steps with the belt.”

I was suddenly sick to my stomach thanks to the verbal picture he was painting.

“It took me about fifteen minutes to get her down the stairs, even with the belt. I had to stop a couple of times and rest. I was terrified that someone would wake up and come see what I was doing, but no one did.

“When I got her downstairs, I hauled her out to the garage. I managed to get her in one of those plastic storage bins. She just kind of folded up inside. It looked like she was sleeping.”

I doubted that.

“I used a piece of wood as a slide and pushed the bin up in the back of my truck and shut the door. Then I went to bed.”

“I bet you had nightmares,” I said with faux sympathy. I was trying to get him to trust me, even though I was wishing I had my own belt to strangle him with at this point.

“Actually, I slept like a baby.”

That’s the sign of a true sociopath, I thought.

“So what did you do the next day?”

“I pretended that she went on the trip.”

“You just left the body in the car?”

“What was I going to do with it? I had to pretend it was a normal day. I went with Steffi to the park and watched the kids play. We all had dinner. I even read them bedtime stories.”

What a great dad.

“Steffi could tell I was upset, so I told her that Sarah and I were breaking up. She didn’t seem surprised.”

I bet.

“We had a few drinks together and . . .”

“You slept together?”

“We made love,” Brian corrected me. “It was the best night of my life, other than the fact that I still had to get rid of Sarah’s body. I decided that I wanted to make a life with Steffi. She’s a much better mother than Sarah ever was.

“The next morning, I drove my truck to my dad’s machine shop,” Brian said. “It’s been closed for the past few weeks for retooling. I knew no one would be there. So I took her body inside and cut it up.

“It was harder than I thought it would be. The first saw broke. I had to get a bigger saw. When I was done, I wrapped each piece in plastic and put it back in the bin. Then I went home.

“After everyone was asleep, I took her body out into the woods around the park. I couldn’t carry the bin out there, so I borrowed my kid’s wagon and put the body parts in it and pulled it behind me.

“I spent hours trying to hide each piece. Then, after I was done, I realized that if I left it in the plastic then I was leaving evidence behind. I had to go back and get all the plastic off, but it was almost dawn.

“I went back home and returned the next night. It was hard to remember where I had hid everything, but I managed to find everything and take the plastic off. While I was out there, though, I figured out that her torso was too big to hide.

“I tried to cut it smaller when I was in the machine shop, but it was too hard. You can’t cut through bone, you know? I tried to hide her torso in different places. I even found a hollowed out tree log and climbed inside with it. I just didn’t feel comfortable leaving it out there. It was too big.”

Yeah, that was the problem with this story.

“So I left everything out there and wrapped her torso back up and put it back in the bin. The next day, I went back to the machine shop and hid it on the roof. I figured that even if they searched the machine shop, they wouldn’t look on the roof.

“My mistake was throwing everything away there,” Brian said. “I didn’t realize they weren’t picking up the garbage regularly because the shop was shut down. I thought I was already safe until I saw the shop on the news.
Until I saw you on the news.”

My guess was that he didn’t exactly have warm and fuzzy feelings for me. “I’m sorry I ruined things for you.” I didn’t mean for it to come out as sarcastic as it did, but my nerves were pretty raw at this point.

“Oh, you will be,” Brian planted his gaze on my face. The malice in his eyes was clear.

“What are you going to do with me?” I really didn’t want to know, but it seemed like the question to ask in this situation.

“I haven’t quite decided yet,” Brian said honestly.

“Why did you even bother to come get me?”

“I don’t know. I just figured you were responsible for ruining everything.”

“You could have taken Steffi and the kids and ran?”

“Not after you turned her against me.”

Uh-oh. He knew Steffi had agreed to meet up with Eliot and me. “She told you she was meeting us?”

“I heard her talking to your little boyfriend.”

“Still, you could have taken the kids and ran?”

“That’s no life for kids,” he said practically. I was surprised he actually realized that. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad father – just a bleeding tragic husband.

“Who is with them now? Steffi?”

“No, Steffi is not with them. They’re asleep. They’re fine.”

“You left them alone?” So much for father of the year.

“Your boyfriend will find them.”

“That’s why you called Eliot? To take care of your kids?”

“I
Googled you after you left. I read about your family restaurant. I remembered what you said about dinner. After I heard Steffi on the phone with Eliot, I confronted her. She tried to deny it, of course, but it was too late.”

“What did you do to her?”

“I brought her with us.”

I looked around the interior of the SUV. It wasn’t easy given the way I was bound, but I was fairly certain no one was in the back seat.

“She’s in the hatchback,” Brian supplied.

“Is . . . is she in a bin?”

“I had never taken it out of the car, so it was easier.”

“Is she alive?”

Brian shrugged. “Probably not anymore.”

I felt a rush of panic. He had clearly lost it.

“She never should have betrayed me,” Brian said.

“You called Eliot from the parking lot of the restaurant?”

“I was hoping to get you alone, but when I saw him with you I knew that I would have to do something to separate the two of you.”

“So you didn’t really send him to your house to take care of your kids?”

“It’s just an added benefit.”

I let the ominous silence in the vehicle that followed spread until I wasn’t almost completely incapacitated by fear. Then I started to let the anger creep in. This guy was as much of a tool as I originally figured he was.

“Everyone knew from the beginning,” I told him. I was done being nice.

“Knew what?”

“That you killed her.”

“No they didn’t,” he protested. “I had everyone fooled. I was a distraught husband looking for the wife that abandoned him.”

“You only thought that,” I challenged him. “We told you that to your face, but behind your back everyone was saying you did it. The cops thought so, too. That’s why they kept having press conferences out at your house and letting you talk to the media whenever you wanted to. They were giving you enough rope to hang yourself with.”

“That is not true! You ruined this for me!” Brian wasn’t even pretending to be calm anymore. I preferred him in his natural state.

“You didn’t fool anyone – except maybe yourself. Why do you think the cops have been keeping such a close eye on you? Why do you think they’ve let a simple missing persons case completely monopolize the evening news? Think!”

“I did think! I had this all thought out until you ruined it!”

“And what were you going to do when they found her body?”

“They would never even have looked for a body if it wasn’t for you,” he pointed out.

“Maybe, but you can’t be sure of that.”

“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Brian said grimly. “It’s over for me – and it’s over for you.”

“So, where are we going?”

“Sarah’s family has a cabin up in Traverse City. I figure they won’t think to look there for a couple of days at least. We’ll be able to spend some time together. Alone.”

That sounds fun – or crazy.

We made the rest of the trip –a full two and a half hours – in complete silence. I figured that Eliot had figured out what had happened by now and that he’d called Derrick and Jake. They would have no idea where to look for me, though. I couldn’t rely on them. If I was going to get out of this situation, I was going to have to do it myself.

Once we got off the highway, Brian started checking the GPS on his phone. I could only hope they were tracking his GPS – or mine. I tried to shift to feel if my phone was still in my pocket. I felt it buzz with an incoming text – and was momentarily relieved I had set it to silent when my mom’s texts started going into stalker territory. Even if they couldn’t track Brian’s phone, they could track mine – as long as Brian didn’t find it.

The roads we were now traveling down were completely dark. There were no street lights in sight. We were really in the country now. I hated the country even when a madman wasn’t kidnapping me, so this was essentially my worst nightmare. The only thing that could have made it worse was sharks.

Brian turned down a dirt road at one point, and we were now going pretty slowly. I figured we were close to our destination. When he finally stopped the car, I saw a small cabin – which couldn’t have been more than two rooms total – in front of us.

“This is the cabin?”

“Yep.”

Brian got out of the car and came over to my side of the vehicle. I considered running, but I knew I wouldn’t get very far. He led me to the back of the SUV, opened the hatchback, and grabbed a bag.

My eyes fell on the blue bin, which was tightly sealed. Could Steffi still be alive?

Brian seemed to read my mind. He opened the top of the lid and peered inside. Even under the dim light of the interior of the car I could see she was dead. Her sightless and terrified eyes were fixed directly on me, but she couldn’t see me.

“I guess she’s dead,” Brian shrugged.

“You seem real heartbroken about it.”

“Like I said, she shouldn’t have betrayed me.”

“You’re a real prince,” I grumbled.

Brian grabbed my arm roughly and led me to the cabin. He unlocked the door and shoved me inside. I couldn’t see in the dark and crashed into an end table and then fell on the floor.

Brian flicked the light on, locked the door behind us, and stepped over me. He didn’t bother to help me up. He dropped his bag on the floor and immediately turned the small television set on before sitting down on the couch.

I glared at him from my positioned on the floor. Instead of trying to get back on my feet, I rolled to a sitting position and remained on the ground. I didn’t want to be any nearer to him than I already was.

Brian flipped through the channels before settling on the local news stations. I wasn’t surprised to see the exterior of his house on the screen. We may have been hours away from the scene of the crime, but this was still big news.

I saw Devon come on the screen and explain that police had found Brian Frank’s children asleep and alone in the house. They were now in the custody of their aunt – Sarah’s sister.

“Great, that bitch has my kids.”

“At least they’re not alone,” I grumbled.

Brian ignored me and turned back to the television where Devon was explaining that police were now searching for Brian Frank and Steffi. There was no mention of me.

“It looks like they don’t even know you’re gone yet,” he crowed.

I doubted that was true. When I didn’t show up at Eliot’s apartment, he would have started looking for me. I had felt a few more texts silently vibrate in my pocket. I had no idea who they were from, though.

“So what now?”

“Now?
Now I’m getting some sleep.”

“What about me?”

“Now you’re going to shut up.”

Not likely.

Brian must have read the intent in my eyes because he pulled a handkerchief out of his bag and gagged me with it, leaving me on the floor. He then switched off the lights, laid down on the couch and proceeded to fall asleep within a few minutes.

Only a complete psycho could fall asleep in a situation like this.

I couldn’t get comfortable – and I was trying to focus on the fact that I had to go to the bathroom – so I didn’t drift off for hours. Unfortunately, when I finally did fall asleep, I still had no idea how I was going to get out of this situation.