Stolen Innocents (The Shadow Series Book 2) (25 page)

***

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” yelled Adam as soon as he heard the names Cope and Buckley. “If they were involved, you know nothing was done to find the culprit.”

Liam sighed heavily. There was only one thing to be done.

“Get dressed.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Pennington.”

***

It was around 10:30 when Liam and Adam had reached the Philadelphia city limits. The long brick exterior of Pennington Prison was foreboding in the dim glow of the street lights. As the pair walked through the front door, the building looked like it was about to swallow them whole.

***

Adam nearly didn’t recognize Amos Cope as he walked towards him from the other side of the booth. Though he still had a face only a mother could love, his scrawny body had bulked up a bit from hitting the weights. Amos smiled at Adam as if he was his long lost best friend.

“Adam! What brings you here?” exclaimed Amos, looking truly excited to see a familiar face. Adam was perplexed.

“Why do you look so happy to see me?”

“You’re my pal!”

“You covered up my mother’s death. We are not friends,” said Adam glaringly.

Liam pushed Adam aside.

“You’re gonna ruin any chance we have in getting any information from him. Shut up!” barked Liam with his hand covering the phone.

Liam sat down on the stool in front of the phone and put on his most charming smile.

“Amos!” he said in a cool voice.

“Liam, it’s great to see you!” said Amos excitedly.

Either he is really bored in prison or the inmates are really awful. Either way, it serves him right
, thought Liam.

“Buddy, listen. I was wondering if you could help me out with something.”

“Oh, anything you want kid. What do you need?” asked Amos in a casual voice as if Liam was simply asking for a cup of coffee.

“Do you remember Tiffany O’Mara?”Liam asked as a look of seriousness glinted from his eye.

Liam noticed that the warmth had vanished in Amos’ eyes.  He let out a deep breath.

“Boy, do I ever. That case was a nightmare.”

“Please tell me this isn’t one of the cases you flubbed.”

“No, this is actually the case where we got an idea of just how sick Kendricks was.”

Liam lifted his chin and tightened his jaw at the sound of the name.

“Tell me what I need to know.”

Amos nodded as he prepared to speak.

“Fifteen minutes!” a prison guard yelled behind them.

“I’ll try to hurry…”

Liam nodded, becoming impatient.

“Earl and I answered a call at the O’Mara residence on Caribou Road. Gwen O’Mara was frantic with worry because her daughter Tiffany hadn’t come home the night before,” Amos said as a serious look overtook his face.

“While we were talking to Gwen and her husband, their one kid came running in… Angie. She was a hysterical mess, crying, falling all over the place. She said she found Tiffany dead in the Forest. She said it had to be him! It had to be him!” continued Amos.

“Roger and I tried to get more information out of Angie, while Earl went to search the forest for a body. Let me tell you, Angie was as white as a ghost. She looked like she had ran into the devil himself. Her eyes were all wild and crazy-like. I ain’t ever seen anybody look so scared in my life.”

Liam could tell that the worst was still to come, because Amos had a deeply troubled look on his face.

“Then, all of a sudden, she just got quiet. She looked at me with an expression that was more dead than alive, and said, ‘It was Bernard. And he’s coming after me next.’ Suddenly, the girl passed out on the floor. I didn’t know what to make of it.”

Liam and Adam continued to watch Amos as he spoke. He wasn’t making this up. He couldn’t have. This was beyond his repertoire.

“So we continued investigating. We interviewed Tiffany’s boyfriend, Ethan Quiver, but he had no information whatsoever. We tried banging on Kendricks’ door, but no one was home. We even tried his mother’s house, but she wasn’t even answering. Then that night, Angie disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” asked Liam quizzically.

“Yeah. Her mother was so afraid that what happened to Tiffany would happen to Angie, too.”

“So what happened?” Liam pressed.

“Turns out Angie just left. Apparently she was so distraught over Tiffany that she couldn’t bear to be in Elkhart anymore.”

“No one thought it was suspicious that she would flee town on the day her sister turned up dead?”

“No. You should’ve saw this girl. She was shaking like a leaf. I’ve never seen anybody so scared in my entire life.”

“What about Kendricks? What happened?”

“It turned out that Kendricks was out of town that week with his mother. They were vacationing in Maine. He showed me the itinerary and everything. There should be a copy of it in the case file.”

Adam sifted through the paperwork in the file and sure enough, there it was: A trip for six days and five nights in Maine at the Bar Harbor Lobsterman’s Inn.

“He was livid when he found out what the girl accused him of. He called her a liar and a snake. Roger O’Mara came after Kendricks accusing him of chasing off his daughter.”

“Crazy.”

“He was nuts. What do you expect?”

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“Let’s see… Yeah. The suspects.”

“Kendricks wasn’t the only one?”

“Oh, no… Ethan Quiver was suspected… Hunter McCord, too. But at the end of the day, we were never able to pin her death on anyone. There simply wasn’t enough evidence.”

“Time’s up!” yelled the guard. “All prisoners line up against the wall!”

“Thanks for talking to us, Amos,” said Liam honestly.

As a guard slapped a set of cuffs around his wrist, Amos yelled out skeptically, “The secret lives under the city!”

***

As the pair walked out of Pennington Prison and into the warm night air, Liam asked the obvious question, “So who do you think did it?”

Adam didn’t reply. He was too deep in thought.

Liam continued, “I think McCord has something to do with this. He wanted it to look like it was Kendricks. But I think he is the only suspect capable of committing this sort of violence. Trafford’s got a record, but he’s a chicken. What do you think?” Liam asked again.

“I think it’s someone completely off our radar. Someone who knows how to cover their tracks very well.”

“So we heard Amos’ side of the story. But the question is, do we believe him?”

Chapter              18

June 19, 2000

Pennington Prison

Cellblock D

11:45 P.M.

Amos Cope stared at the ceiling from his top bunk as he scraped his pencil along the chipping paint to mark yet another day holed up in Pennington for his previous misdeeds. His mind kept replaying the conversation he had with Officer Morrow. He had told him what he needed to know, but no more. Should he have told him the entire story? How this story still haunted his dreams at night? How this is the case that broke him and made him afraid to go to work in the morning?

He didn’t want to scare Liam, but he did want to make him aware of just how twisted that case was. There was a copy cat that went to great lengths to make it look like Bernard Kendricks was to blame, when in reality he was an eight hour drive away. They checked on the Kendricks household and no one was answering the door.  Amos told the truth. They did investigate this case to the best of their ability, but they simply weren’t able to track down the killer. Amos wandered deep into the back of his mind, retrieving a memory that he had long tried to store away.

***

June 21, 1980

27 Caribou Road

Elkhart, PA

“Mrs. O’Mara, please try to calm down,” Amos insisted as she sobbed into her hands.

“We are doing everything we can to try to find her.”

“What if she winds up dead like her sister?!” yelled Gwen O’Mara, now in hysterics.

“Please try to calm down. We are going to continue searching for Angie and the person responsible for this.”

“How old is your daughter?” asked Deputy Earl Buckley as he scribbled notes on a steno pad.

“Eighteen. Today is her birthday!” said Gwen as she began to cry again.

***

“Earl!” cried Amos from the base of the Bone Tree. “I found something…”

Earl ran towards him down the long path that led deeper into the forest. The sun had already set and they were about to call off the search for the night when Amos saw something of interest. Something that would change the course of the entire investigation.

Amos shone his flash light in the knobby hole of the Bone Tree.

“Get a load of this…”

Earl gave Amos a perplexed look, but did as he was told. He poked his head into the hole and about sixty feet down there was a light.

“How the hell?!”

“It’s a hollow tree.”

“What’s down there?”

“The old mine I reckon…”

“What is that down there…?”

“Looks like dried blood to me…”

Suddenly, Amos and Earl heard a sound that echoed up through the tree and out into the forest. A horrible screeching that pierced their ears. Earl took another look through the hole, but suddenly the light was gone.

“What the-“

But before Earl could finish his sentence, a dark flock of crows flew up the tree and screeched toward them in a violent fury. The sound of ruffling feathers and screeching calls hurt their ears and caused them to flee.

***

Amos and Earl convened at the Bone Tree the next morning, ready to determine what it was that they saw below the tree. Earl knew of an entrance to the mine, just outside the city limits. He wasn’t sure if they’d be able to get through since the mines had been shut down since the late 50s, but it was worth a shot. Amos brought the patrol car to a stop outside the Shepard’s Grove Fire Department. The old fire department sat on a hill that overlooked the tiny town below. Amos and Earl walked around to the back of the property, with a set of backpacks in tow. On the back of the hill, there was a wooden door with a yellow danger sign displayed. Ignoring the warning, Earl pulled on the door hard.

“Let’s go.”

Amos got out his flashlight and shone it into the dark tunnel. There were dozens of routes they could take. The mine weaved through the underbelly of Elkhart like a den of snakes. The rafters overhead were splintering and appeared to be cracking under the weight of the world above.