Full Circle (31 page)

"That's most everybody in town," Deputy Tucker said.

"Good, by the time we're through compiling her life story, we'll know everything. The more we learn, the better chance we find something that will lead us to her."

Josie dragged herself to the surface of consciousness. Her eyes burned; her throat was raw, and her head was pounding. She was tightly bound and barely able to move. Her arms were strapped together behind her back. Her legs were bound together at both the knees and ankles. Her left arm was broken; she was sure of that, but she was sure the rest of her seemed to be in working order although her legs were asleep.

She remained quiet and still for a long time, listening, before slowly opening her eyes to a dark room. She was lying face down on a cot of some kind. She forced herself to try to turn over. She was in an underground room. Narrow window slits at the top of stone walls provided a minimal source of light filtered through dark, filthy glass. There was another cot shoved up against the back wall, and it looked as if someone was in it or at least the form of a person under a blanket. It was probably the missing woman. There was a rusted dinette table from the 1960s era and a single chair. Several wooden crates overflowed with magazines. Josie closed her eyes against the pain, and she drifted into a black abyss.

The Raintree house was full of FBI and state investigators. There were teams of interrogators, profilers, computer experts and criminologists. There were computers and laptops setup on every available surface. Jack, Buck and Alex sat in the sunroom at the back of the house and listened as the agents went about their work, but they had very little interaction with them.

One by one, the interrogators took each of them into another room to ask their questions.

Buck meticulously sketched in Josie's birth and her early childhood with him and her mother. He told the interrogators about returning from his overseas assignment to find his wife and child missing. He went over his failed attempts to find them. He explained how he had come to Rawlings to reconnect with her.

Jack was next in line. He told of Josie's early life in Rawlings from what little she had told him. He detailed his part of the tale, from her stealing his horse, at eight years old, to her seven consecutive years of pranks and mischief until he left town for college and later joined the Navy. They took particular note of his return to town along with his immediate reconnection with Josie and their working together at his old family home until the discovery of the bodies.

They interviewed Alex. He told how he had hidden in her shed, how she had taken him in and was fighting to get custody of him. After his interview, the boy wandered around the house trying to listen in on everyone, but also trying to go unnoticed so no one would send him to his room.

They brought in Josie's neighbors one by one, as well as the staff from the sheriff's office. The FBI collected more data, and they continued to interview people. They could not locate a few people, and those people were red-tagged until located.

Mayor Aiden Roland raised the brightest flag. The investigators researched and charted his recent absences. They brought in Mrs. Greer, his aunt, for interrogation. They issued a bench warrant on him for questioning.

The FBI did not stop questioning townspeople until well after midnight and resumed a scant four hours later. Agent Coulter asserted that if his team wasn't stopping to sleep, he didn't give a damn who they had to wake up. The list of people to question was long. Every individual on each team realized the importance of his or her job—time now, was the essential factor. The computer specialists compiled accumulated data as fast as they received it.

Buck sat in a chair staring off into nothing. Alex eventually fell asleep on the couch. Jack sat beside the boy, silently cursing himself for not protecting Josie better.

By morning, he was weary, but still alert. There had to be some way he could help.

Josie knew she probably had a mild concussion. She was drifting in and out of consciousness. She had been awakened once. She tried to scream as a hood was pulled down over her eyes, her mouth duck taped, and the hood pulled down the rest of the way over her entire head. She hadn't had time to see who was doing this to her. She pretended to faint, slumping over, and remaining still. Apparently, her abductor was not ready for her because he didn't try to wake her again. However, he did feel up her breasts and groped between her legs. She pretended to be unconscious, and she didn't dare react. She was helpless at the moment, she and the other person on the cot. Her mind was fuzzy, and she was in pain, but she knew she had to remain still and silent.

She didn't want to know if they were going to assault and murder the other woman, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing and she heard.

The person in the other cot was awake, and low voices held a whispered conversation. Josie couldn't make out what they were saying. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. The person on the other cot was not another victim. Josie wasn't listening to a sexual assault. She was listening to loud, enthusiastic, consensual sex.

Josie lay still, unable to move, unable to believe what she heard, only praying that she would not pass out again. She needed to be alert. The sexual activity seemed to last for hours as the two individuals grunted and moaned. There was male laughter. At last the noises stopped. She heard movement, rustling sounds and footsteps. A low and wheedling voice said, "Don't do her until I can watch! I deserve that much!" There was more laughter and sounds of heavy footsteps and a door closing. She heard the lock click.

A continuous stream of people filed through the house as the interrogators interviewed more people and gathered more data. Jack's opinion of Josie, already high, was validated. The people of Rawlings thought the world of Josie. She had been the least likely child to succeed, and she'd fought her way out of a bad home situation and made something of herself. The townspeople respected and were proud of her.

The FBI ordered a cadaver dog, which was in transport along with its trainer. They would go over every inch of the Rawlings' property searching for bodies or anything else that could be a clue.

"I've got something! Two correlations at least," one of the computer technicians said, looking at a large chart on his screen.

Agent Coulter looked at the chart.

"It tracks sir, for at least three of the women."

"What is it?" Jack demanded.

"It's not conclusive," snapped Agent Coulter turning to one of his people. "Get a bench warrant out on Albert J. Richards. We already have one out on Aiden J. Roland

"Jimmy and Aiden?" Jack exclaimed. "You interviewed Jimmy yesterday. He's been a friend of Josie's since childhood."

The computer technician looked to Agent Coulter, who nodded, giving the technician his permission to speak. "We've asked everyone interviewed to supply dates and times when they were out of town. The last three dates when women disappeared correlate with the approximate dates of business trips Mr. Richards' wife said he took. She does the bookkeeping for his business and supplied the dates from his business logs. In her interview, she said her husband took road trips to locate supplies and parts for his business and he was occasionally out overnight. He left on one of those business trips early this morning.

"Mayor Roland's sick days from work correlate with the dates of the missing burn victim and Layla Blackcrow's abduction."

Agent Coulter looked at Jack. "I don't believe in coincidences."

"Jimmy's real name is Albert?" Alex asked, only to receive stern looks from Buck and Jack. Jack pointed upstairs. The boy trudged up a few steps, stopped, turned around, sprinted back down and went to the bookshelf over the small desk in the family room.

"Alex! Upstairs!" Jack ordered sternly.

"Josie said if you don't want something found, hide it
in plain sight
," Alex said. "It's the on-going game we play. You know, I take something of hers and hide it in plain sight to see if she can find it. She does the same with me. Part of the game is we don't tell each other what we have taken. You have to be observant and notice what is missing or what shows up somewhere it's not supposed to be. She found what I hid before I went to camp. She told me as we were going upstairs last night, but she said she was busy so I could start the game over. So, I took a book with her initials on the cover. She doesn't tell many people because she doesn't like it, but Josie's first name is Adelia. Josie is her middle name. I took Josie's book and hid it."

"What's that got to do with anything?" Buck demanded.

"Jack said someone ransacked the library during the tornado storms," Alex explained. "That takes guts and desperation. He also said they came back and ransacked the house again. I found the book after I got here last night, and you all yelled at me. I went to bed, but I was still hungry, so I came back down to get something to eat and I was poking around for a while. I saw something sticking over the edge of that funny looking cabinet in the library and saw it was a book with Josie's initials on it. I hid it knowing that Josie would look for it
in plain sight
. Josie's initials are AJR. They've all got the same initials—Josie, Mr. Roland and Mr. Richards. What if the book I hid isn't Josie's? What if Josie found a book belonging to one of those other guys and he wanted it back bad enough to hurt her? What if one of those guys is the Sandbox Killer?" Alex plucked a brown leather volume off the shelf over the computer.

"Give me that," Agent Coulter snapped, taking the book from the boy's hand, but he didn't touch it directly, holding it instead with a piece of plastic. He snatched a plastic glove out of a box on the kitchen island and jerked a plastic glove over his hand. He opened the book, flipping through a few pages before his eyes turned hard. "You, upstairs!" he snapped at the boy."