Guilty as Sin (40 page)

They agreed that Tommy, Jackson, Ben, and two of CJ’s deputies would start out in the area on the east side of the trail, where CJ had initially found the jar. They fanned out, each covering his own quadrant of the map, giving each other regular updates on their position.

CJ and his team searched through the woods on the other side of the trail.

It was tedious work, as they moved slowly, carefully through the brushy terrain, eyes peeled for any sign that anyone was there or had been there in the last five days. One hour passed, then two, and the men were drenched in sweat from the afternoon heat.

Suddenly, one of the deputies in CJ’s party began chattering excitedly. “I think I see something—it looks like clothes.”

Tommy froze, listening, willing all the other men to shut the fuck up so he could hear what was going on three miles away.

“Everyone, shut the hell up so Roberts can give us a sit rep.” CJ’s voice crackled into his earpiece. It went dead quiet, then someone—Deputy Roberts, Tommy assumed—began to speak.

“I’ve found what appears to be a shirt, dark red.”

Tommy heard a sharp gasp and figured it was Jackson. Tommy’s own stomach rolled over. Tricia had been wearing a red tank top the night she disappeared.

“Oh, shit,” Roberts said.

Tommy felt his blood rush from his head to his feet at the man’s grim tone. “What?” he said, bracing himself for what was to come.

“It’s got Lightning McQueen on it,” Roberts said irritably.

“Lightning Mc-what?” Tommy sputtered.

“It’s from the kid’s movie,” CJ broke in wearily. “I think what Roberts is saying is that unless Tricia has a thing for cartoon cars, the shirt doesn’t belong to her.”

“And since it’s a size…” There was a pause, no doubt Roberts searching for the tag. “Five T, I’d say it’s too small to belong to our suspect.”

Tommy felt himself deflate after the adrenaline rush. “Let’s keep moving, guys.” As he continued to move, slowly but surely deeper into the woods, he tried to chase away the growing worry that they could search behind every tree trunk and under every boulder in the forest, and they still weren’t going to find Tricia.

Brooke had been pacing the great room, brushing off all of Kate’s attempts to engage in conversation until Roberts’s voice crackled excitedly in their ears. Then she’d stood stock still, her face a mask of mingled hope and fear as he described finding the red shirt.

Kate moved closer to her, unconsciously reaching out to grab the girl’s tense, cold hand. Then, as it was revealed that the shirt most likely belonged to a preschooler, Brooke simply crumpled to the floor like all of her bones had turned to rubber.

She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. “They’re never going to find her. They’re never going to find her. And it’s all my fault.”

Kate sank to the floor next to her and wrapped her arm around her shoulders. “It’s not true. It’s not your fault.”

“Yes it is.” Brooke’s head reared back, her face blotchy with tears, her face a mask of pain and guilt. “You don’t get it. My mom, before she died, she told me I had to look after Tricia.”

Kate’s own eyes stung with tears as she remembered a similar admonishment the night Michael died. “Your brother may think he can take care of himself, but he’s still only twelve,” her father had said sternly. “We’re counting on you to look after him.” Not as dramatic as a deathbed request, but still… Shame at how casually she’d dismissed him burned through her like acid.

“I know, I know exactly what you’re going through.”

“Bullshit,” Brooke said. She pulled away and scrambled to her feet. “I sent my sister home alone in the middle of the night and she never made it home just so I could be with a guy. And now my dad totally hates me for it and I can’t even blame him. I seriously doubt you know exactly what I’m going through.”

“You know my background, right? Why I got involved with St. Anthony’s?”

Brooke shrugged. “Something about your brother, right? He was taken and—” She paused, swallowed hard.

“Killed,” Kate finished for her. “He was taken from the house we were renting, sexually assaulted, and murdered.”

Brooke didn’t speak, just stared at Kate in morbid fascination.

“But if you go back and read the news stories, you’ll see that I was the only one in the house with him that night. My parents were out of town, my sister was at a friend’s house, and I was supposed to look after Michael. But instead of staying in the house and keeping an eye on him, I was too busy making out with Tommy Ibarra to care.”

Brooke’s eyes flew wide. “As in—”

Kate gave a rueful smile.

Brooke gave her a skeptical look. “You’re so nice and he’s so… scary.”

Kate shook her head. “He wasn’t always as”—she searched for the right word—“intimidating as he is now. When we were younger he was…” Again, words eluded her. Nice was too tepid, sweet too, well, sweet. “He was pretty awesome.” Then, reflecting on the last couple of days, she added, “He’s still pretty awesome.” She shook her head and tried to wipe what she was pretty sure was a dopey, dreamy look off her face. “Anyway, the point is, I know what you’re going through. I completely understand how you feel.”

Brooke nodded and swallowed hard, her big dark eyes bright with tears. This time when Kate pulled her close, she didn’t pull away.

Kate held her, Brooke’s body heaving with sobs as she buried her head against Kate’s shoulder. “I just keep thinking of what I said to her when I told her to leave the party. I told her she was an annoying pain in the ass. I can’t stop thinking those were the last words she ever heard from me. That she was scared and hurt and maybe dying, and she died thinking I didn’t even care about her.”

“She doesn’t think that. Sisters fight all the time. She knows you love her.”

Brooke shook her head. “No, she doesn’t. She’s probably dead already. Everyone knows it but no one wants to say it out loud.”

Kate’s mouth pressed in a grim line. “We can’t give up hope—”

Brooke pushed away and started to pace, her agitation building as the minutes passed and there was still no progress from the search team. “What if there is no hope? What if she’s
dead?” She stopped suddenly, sank to the floor, and buried her face in her hands. “What if she’s dead? What will I do?”

Kate wished she could feed her some line about how the pain would ease, how the guilt would fade, and eventually she’d be able to focus on the happy memories she and her sister shared together. But she didn’t have it in her to lie. “You’ll hurt,” she said simply. “A lot. For the rest of your life. But if you’re lucky, you and your dad will pull together and help each other get through it.”

“My father,” Brooke said, shaking her head. She suddenly looked beyond weary, and much older than seventeen years. “He’ll never forgive me.”

Kate wished she could contradict her with conviction. “He shouldn’t have to. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Did you believe people when they tried to tell you that?”

Kate smiled sadly. “No. But then again, it was hard to hear them when so many other people told me that it was.”

Brooke cocked her head and looked about to speak, but whatever she was going to say was lost as Tommy’s voice crackled in over the earpieces. “I’ve found something. A structure of some kind. We’re heading in.”

I
t was Ben Kortlang who spotted the tiny scrap of material clinging to a wild rose bush. After years of hunting with his father and uncles, like Tommy, Ben’s eye was trained to look for signs of his prey. A footprint, a broken branch, a tuft of hair.

Or a scrap of red cotton, no more than an inch square. “Over here,” he called Tommy. “You see that?”

Tommy squinted, but after a few seconds he saw what Kortlang was talking about. Once you got off the trail the undergrowth was pretty thick, but there was no mistaking the outline of a footprint.

They painstakingly picked their way through the brush and followed a half dozen more footsteps before the trail petered out again. Tommy’s neck tightened with frustration as he scanned the area and saw nothing.

He held up his thermal imager and turned it in a slow circle, keeping it low to the ground in case it picked up on anything in the underbrush. He hit on a red blob but knew immediately it was too small to be human. They bushwhacked several more yards, cursing as branches snagged on their skin and clothes.

Tommy lifted the sensor, his eyes flying open as it revealed essentially a wall of red somewhere directly in front of him. It was big, big enough to be a vehicle or even a
structure of some sort. And though he couldn’t see it to save his life, there was no denying its existence.

He quickly let the rest of the team know what he’d discovered and waited for Jackson and Ben to catch up to him before he went any further.

“I don’t suppose there’s any convincing you to wait for me to arrive,” CJ said.

Tommy looked down at his GPS monitor and noted CJ’s position. “Not unless you can cover two kilometers in less than thirty seconds.”

CJ merely grunted and reminded Tommy not to screw with anything that could be used as evidence.

They didn’t see the trailer until they were almost on top of it. Hidden in a thicket of chokecherry trees, painted shades of green and brown to perfectly blend in with the surroundings, it was no wonder it had gone entirely unnoticed by the helicopters that had flown over the area days before.

Tommy, Ben, and Jackson quickly skirted around the edge, and Tommy mentally cataloged the details. The trailer was about twenty feet long, single wide, set up on blocks. From the way the blocks had settled into the earth, it looked like it had been there for a long, long time.

As they circled, he noticed that every single window was boarded up tight, with nails driven into the aluminum sides of the trailer.

The front door was incongruously insecure, the flimsy thing armed only with a standard knob lock and latch. “Ben, you stay behind us,” Tommy said as he drew his weapon and watched Jackson do the same. One blow from his booted foot sent the metal door crumpling inward. Tommy froze a minute, allowing his eyes to adjust to the nearly full darkness as he stepped inside. He waited a couple of breaths but heard nothing.

Gun in one hand, Maglite in the other, he swept the beam across the room, his nose wrinkling at the hot, close air in the trailer. There was a musky, dank smell to the air but not, Tommy noticed with relief, the sick rot scent of death.

The room was mostly unfurnished, nothing but a cheap plastic table and a single chair. Off to the right was a short hallway, with a door leading to the trailer’s bedroom. Tommy’s stomach flipped when he saw the door was secured with an industrial-grade combination lock.

The kind you used only when you really wanted to keep someone out—or in.

“Don’t suppose anyone brought bolt cutters?” he muttered. “Hands over ears, guys,” he said as he lifted his M9 Beretta a couple inches from the lock. A loud
crack
and the lock popped open.

Tommy barely had the lock off before Jackson was pushing past him through the door.

“Tricia!” Jackson rushed over to the slender figure splayed across the bed, her wrists secured to the headboard by metal cuffs.

His stomach clenched when he saw that Tricia didn’t move when Jackson called her name and shook her lightly.

“Is she…” Ben asked.

Jackson had his fingers against Tricia’s neck, but they were shaking too hard to get a pulse. Tommy gently pushed him aside and pressed his fingers along the side of Tricia’s throat and bent low to hear her breath. “She’s alive.” There was a chorus of cheers as CJ and the other members of the search party took in the good news.

“But she’s unresponsive. Dehydrated and possibly drugged is my guess,” he continued. He pressed a hand to her forehead. “She’s running a fever.” He heard Jackson suck in a breath, and when he focused the flashlight down he saw why.

In addition to the bruises mottling her skin and circling her throat, she had an ugly gash halfway down her thigh. The flesh was red and swollen around the jagged edges.

“She’s got a four-inch laceration on her leg that looks infected. She’s also sustained some trauma to her face and head—”

“Christ, he beat the crap out of her. He beat my little girl,” Jackson said, horrified.