Bitter Waters (21 page)

Ukiah pulled the bag free, smothering a growl. The newspaper was the Sunday Real Estate section of the
Miami Herald
with properties circled in red. The prices ranged between a hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand. They stole Kittanning for beachfront property?

Rennie had been focusing on the house. He shifted out of his stillness.
“There's no one in the house.”

“They parked their cars here,”
Bear stated from outside, indicating a patch of crushed, oil-stained grass, now innocent of cars.

Rennie opened the ice chest beside him, releasing the smell of raw meat.
“This is full of food. Ice is melted, but the water is still chilled.”

As Ukiah handed Rennie the paper, he spotted pruning shears among the cooking utensils. He touched the blades and found them coated with Kittanning's blood. This time there was no holding the growl in. Only Eve had handled the shears, and he felt an instant deep hate for her.

“You okay?” Max whispered in his ear.

“It will be hard not to kill this bitch that hurt my child,” Ukiah growled through his clenched teeth.

“I'm coming in,” Max said, and far off came the start of the Hummer.

By design, the adjoining room would have been a dining room, but it was bare of any furniture. Sun streamed through smashed-out windows to shine on an ancient linoleum carpet, cracked and buckling, and a mural freshly painted on the nearest wall. The front door out to the porch was missing, as were the steps leading up to the second floor. Heavy plastic covered the door beyond the cavernous hole that had been the staircase. Ukiah pushed his way through the overlapping sheets of clear plastic. It seemed to be the only room whose windows retained their glass. The fireplace had been used recently. An air mattress and sleeping bags made an adult nest in one corner. The smell of sex clung to the sheets. In the
opposite corner, a clothes basket made a bed for Kittanning. Goodman and Eve had been using cardboard boxes as dressers; only someone had scattered the clean clothes onto the floor and overturned the boxes in a hasty search.

Another plastic-covered doorway opened to a spiraling back staircase. The ceiling of the second floor was slowly collapsing, damp from years of rainfall, and plaster littered the floor. All the windows were missing, and the wind breezed through openings, bringing Ukiah the scent of blood. He followed the smell through the empty rooms, the fine rubble crunching underfoot.

In the far bedroom, the edge of the broken glass remained in the only window, held in by ancient points, paint, and putty. Blood tainted the glass where Eve had gripped the window frame and cut her hand. Below the window, a story and a half down, Bear crouched in the trampled weeds. He glanced up at Ukiah.

“She jumped from there. Looks like she broke a leg and crawled away.” Bear stood, and indicated a wavering trail pushed through the tall grass.

Ukiah filled his lungs, sniffing for the scent of blood. “Do you smell that? Somewhere a lot of blood has been spilled.”

From the barn the sudden bristling of minds.

“The others found something.”

 

They had found Goodman, only someone had found him first.

He had been stripped down to nude and nailed to the floor of the barn with ten-inch spikes driven through his outstretched palms and bare feet. His capturers silenced him with a wormy apple, wedged into his mouth to the point of choking. Judging by the blood, they had taken off the right arm, and then the left leg above the kneecap, leaving him still pinned, until the amputation of the right leg freed him. Then, bleeding to death, they let him struggle, thrashing on the floor, trying to unpin the remaining limb.

Had they promised him salvation if he managed to free himself, or had it been sheer determination to live that kept him fighting to the end?

One man walked through the blood then to crouch beside the dying Goodman. To hear some whispered confession? To check to see if he was alive? It was impossible to say. After several minutes of leaning over the hapless man, the killer stood, casually pinned Goodman with one foot to the chest, and beheaded him. It had taken several swings to hack through the muscular neck. Afterward, the axe man had sat on a wooden crate, blood dripping from his clothes and weapon, and studied his work for several minutes. The corpse finished gushing out its blood. The axe man returned to the body, prodded it with the axe, and then walked away, trailing the axe as if he forgot he carried it.

And after all that inhumane brutality, the killer threw up into the weeds beyond the barn doors. Smack found the axe in the deep grass a dozen feet away, flung as far as the man could throw it.

 

Eve was hidden in a blackberry patch, the ancient sweetness coming from the fruit dried onto the thorny stems. A bloody broken mess. The sight of her put a shiver of fear through Ukiah, and when he realized why, he started to growl with anger. He had Kittanning's memory of her holding his tiny finger between fingers and maneuvering pruning sheers into place.

“What have you done with the baby?” Rennie demanded.

She managed to shake her head, shivering from exposure and shock. “I know my rights. Right to remain silent. That's what they say on all the cop shows.”

“Do we look like the police to you?” Ukiah growled. Her eyes widened. “I'm the father of the baby whose finger you cut off.”

“Adam made me do it!” she whimpered. “He said if I really loved him, that I prove it.”

“What did you do with my son?”

“They took him. They came and killed Adam and took your baby boy.”

“Who are they?”

“I think it was Billy and his friends. Adam said that they were dangerous, all crazies, and never took me with him
when they went for the other babies. He said we were courting trouble by keeping your baby to ourselves, that Billy wouldn't like it. When Adam heard the car coming, he told me to run upstairs and hide. Hide?” She gave a hysterical laugh. “Where was I to hide? When I heard them coming up the stairs, I jumped out the window. I think I broke my leg, but I knew if they found me, they'd kill me. I crawled away, quiet as I could, and never laid eyes on them.”

“What's Billy's full name?”

“I don't know. There was just one Billy. He was Adam's bitch in prison, but then he started talking back to Adam, acting like he was better than Adam. It was all the fault of his new friends, who thought he was such hot shit, filling his head up with maggoty ideas. That's what Adam said. That in prison, Billy had crazy ideas, but they were small as fly eggs. It wasn't until these new friends of his filled him up with so much shit that the eggs became full maggots.”

“This just gets worse and worse,” Max said.

“Why did they want my son?” Ukiah asked.

“Adam said it was another maggoty idea. He said I was better off not knowing all the crazy things that Billy wanted for the world. He thought we'd be safe here; none of Billy's friends knew about this place.”

“How did they find you then?”

“I don't know. The farm's been in my family forever; we lease the land but no one ever wanted to put money into fixing the house, especially after it started to fall down. When I told Adam about this place, he thought it was perfect, even falling down like it is. He said it was best not to get dependent on outside luxuries, so we wouldn't miss them when they go. But then it started to get bitter cold, and nothing we did to stay warm helped. That's why we kept your baby. The other kids, their folks were all just scraping by. You could tell just by looking that your dad had money. Adam said we could ransom your baby, and once your dad paid, give your baby on to Billy, because it would be dangerous to do otherwise. Then we'd move to Florida and buy a new paradise.”

“Your weren't going to give him back?” Ukiah growled, wanting to hurt her.

“I told Adam that it didn't seem fair. He said if we gave him back to your dad, Billy would just kill us and steal him again.”

“Why not just steal another?” Rennie asked.

“Because he's the one that Billy was looking for all along.” The girl looked at Rennie as if surprised at such a question. “He's the one.”

And all anger bled away. “What do you mean? Why is he the one?”

“That's just what Billy told Adam.” Fear crept into the girl's face as she realized whom she was talking to. “He's the one.”

 

The girl had been falling into shock when they found her. Fear now combined with shock to make her silent and trembling uncontrollably; they could get nothing else out of her.

Max took out his wireless phone and started to key in 911.

Rennie, however, caught hold of his hand. “If we get the police involved, we'll lose all control over her.”

“She's going into shock,” Max snapped.

Rennie shrugged, apparently not caring after what she'd done to Kittanning. “She's our only lead. The police will handle her with kid gloves.”

“She's a child that's been warped and used by a man old enough to be her father,” Max stated.

“She's old enough to know right from wrong,” Ukiah snapped.

“There is no telling what she knows about the cub and Kittanning,” Rennie said, “but at the very least she knows that it was a finger that they mailed to us, and if they fed him well, Kittanning grew it back. And then there's us, here, now.”

“We don't have the right to let her die because someone else screwed her over first,” Max said. “Doing anything but calling an ambulance is gambling with her life, and we don't have that right.”

Rennie glared anger at Max, but then turned a carefully neutral face to Ukiah, indicating that it was his choice. The Pack's way or Max's? Ukiah sighed. If Rennie had charged down the road of mass destruction, he would have gladly
followed, but being asked to pick the path, he couldn't knowingly endanger the girl's life. After what she had done to Ukiah and Kittanning, the Pack might kill her when her usefulness was over.

“Call nine-one-one,” Ukiah told Max. “The house is practically empty; we can search it before the police come.”

Rennie went off to lead the search, guarding what he thought of the choice. Did he think Ukiah weak, or had he wanted Ukiah to choose the right path, prove he was a good person despite the situation? Perhaps the latter, why else leave the choice to him? He wished that Rennie wasn't being so purposely obscure.

As Max called the police and reported Goodman's murder, Ukiah snugly wrapped the girl in a blanket fetched from the house. He was furious at her and yet at the same time alarmed at her faint racing heartbeat and cold skin. She was younger than he thought earlier, maybe only fourteen, and light as a bundle of sticks. His sturdy baby sister, Cally, weighed nearly the same amount. Her jump from the second-story window had broken her right leg, and it was now swollen and bruised to near black. She made no sound when he picked her up and carried her back to the Hummer. Max followed behind, patiently giving out directions to the emergency operator.

Bear was crouched in the area used as a parking area, examining the various tracks coming and going.
“There had been five people in the barn: four men and one woman. They came in one vehicle, something big, a SUV or a pickup truck, and drove off in two. They took whatever vehicle that Goodman and the girl were using; a compact car by the tracks. The woman was carrying a weight she shifted often, shoulder to shoulder.”

“Kittanning,”
Ukiah growled softly.

Bear handed a cigarette butt to Ukiah without comment.

The smoker had been the axe murderer, holding the butt with fingers tainted with Goodman's blood, blister discharge, apple juice, and vomit. The saliva on the tip revealed him to be a young white man, mousy blond and brown-eyed. Ground into grass and earth, there would be no possibility of lifting fingerprints off it.

“The killer, at least, wasn't Ontongard.”

 

They scoured the farm, racing against the arrival of the police.

It was Hellena who noted the lack of baby items. While there were soiled diapers, used diaper wipes, and empty formula cans in profusion, there were no unused supplies. Whoever killed Adam and took Kittanning seemed to intend to keep him alive for some time. Heartening news indeed.

On the disheartening side, there was a profound lack of personal items in the house. If there had been anything in the house with a clue to Billy Bob and his friends' identities, Adam's killers had already taken it. Ukiah stopped in the ruined dining room and studied the mural. As a whole, the work was disturbing. There had been smudges of paint on Adam's hands, while the girl's had been clean, so Adam had been the artist. Loon was what Sam's father called Adam, and gazing at the picture, Ukiah felt he was seeing inside the man's twisted mind.

Most of the room had been given a base coat of white latex with something mixed in so the background glittered in the sunlight. Something that might have been a tree framed the majority of the images; it started at the floor as a black, thick trunk resting two feet off center of the hall doorway and grew upward to the ceiling in a thinning line that gradually shifted from the mat black to a deep blue. At knee height, the spindly tree threw out one twisted branch then ran its wavering way to the far side of the wall, done all in the dark blue.