Stranded (17 page)

Without taking her eyes away from him, she said to Creed, “If you see anything at all that doesn’t look right you back out immediately and we get the experts.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed.

He started to turn but stopped as if he’d forgotten something. He dug in his jeans pocket and handed his Jeep keys to Tully.

“Just in case,” he said with that subtle smile that hitched up the corner of his mouth and painfully reminded Maggie how right she was about what she had seen in his eyes. And it also surprised her how much she didn’t want something bad to happen to this man.

They watched him instruct a wiggling, excited Grace to sit outside the open doorway. Then he went inside holding the collapsible rod-turned-into-spear.

“We’ve got nothing that says this killer would set up booby traps, do we?” Tully asked, still needing reassurance.

“He strung up Zach Lester’s intestines in a tree. He left us a map.” Maggie was thinking her way through it. “But the orange socks,” she told him, “he put them on a victim who was already dead just for our benefit. If there’s another body inside, I’m hoping he wants us to find it and not join it.”

She stared at the barn’s doorway and only then did she realize that she had unsnapped her holster and her right hand was now inside her jacket, gripping her revolver.

CHAPTER 31

Noah’s mother had brought him a clean set of clothes. The detectives had confiscated his overnight bag with Ethan’s car and everything else that was inside. It had been towed in to their crime lab. He was told that they were going through it right now, examining every single thing for clues. Detective Lopez told Noah this in a tone that sounded like a threat. But Noah knew they wouldn’t find anything that would tell them what had happened. No one would believe what had happened. In the light of day, Noah wasn’t even sure he believed what had happened.

When he told them that Ethan was dead, his mother had gasped but Detective Lopez and his father looked at him like he was either lying or delirious. Now they talked around him like he wasn’t there. People came and went, in and out of the hospital room.

The doctor was the only one who had spoken to Noah without looking at him as though he were crazy. When he came to examine Noah he had been kind and gentle with him, and Noah wanted to tell him about the voices in his head. Did the doctor have anything he could give him? Any medication that would help. Maybe Noah should have complained. Maybe then the doctor wouldn’t have dismissed him from the hospital.

Detective Lopez told Noah he was lucky. That for now he was sending him home with his parents instead of holding him in a jail cell. Noah wanted to tell the detective that he would be safer in a jail cell. That he didn’t want to go home with his parents. He needed to tell them that the madman had taken his driver’s license. That he knew his home address—his parents’ home address.

But how could Noah explain when he had promised the killer he wouldn’t tell anything about what had happened?

“What would they all think?”
Noah could still hear the madman’s voice.
“What would your parents say if they knew you begged me to kill your friend first?”

Noah glanced around the room, making sure no one else could hear the voice, too. That’s how convincing it was inside his head. But no one else seemed to notice. Not his father or Detective Lopez as they talked in hushed tones right outside the door. Not the nurse or his mother as they went over his dismissal papers.

Yet that voice sounded so real. And so did Ethan’s screams.

Don’t think about it. Stop thinking about any of it. Just stop it!

This time when he looked up, the others were all staring at him and Noah realized immediately that he had spoken some of the words out loud, again. He was still sitting on the corner of the bed but he turned his back to them and continued putting on his shirt as if he were okay, as if he hadn’t just shouted strange things.

He concentrated, instead, on how good the shirt smelled. Fresh out of his mother’s dryer, it felt soft against his battered skin. Next he tried to pull his socks on. His ankle wasn’t broken—thank goodness. The swelling had gone down but his entire foot was black and blue.

“Take off your shoes,” he heard the madman say. This time he
kept his head down and fought the instinct, the urgency of his eyes wanting to dart around.

“What are you willing to do?”
The voice wouldn’t shut off.
“What are you willing to do to survive?”

Noah bit his lip and tried to ignore the voice. He worked the sock up over his ankle, wincing from the pain. This was nothing, he told himself. Then he saw blood drip down. He saw the bright red fall onto the white bedsheet and panic fluttered inside his stomach. A second drop joined it before he realized it was his own. He was biting his lip so hard he had made it bleed.

There was a commotion in the hallway and Noah turned. A uniformed officer had joined Detective Lopez. They were looking at something, trying to keep it away from Noah’s father.

Then suddenly he heard his father say, “Oh my dear God!”

And Noah felt the panic surge from his stomach to his heart and lungs. He didn’t want to know what had shocked his father. But he saw Detective Lopez look at him and even from the doorway Noah could sense the detective’s repulsion and his anger.

He saw Detective Lopez grab the item out of the officer’s hand. It was something inside a plastic ziplock bag. He marched into the room to stand in front of Noah.

“They found this inside your friend’s trunk,” Detective Lopez said. “All neat and tucked into a plastic bag. What kind of sick game are you playing?”

He held the plastic bag up for Noah and everyone else in the room to see.

Noah heard his father tell his mother, “Don’t look at it.” Then he instructed Noah, “Don’t answer that, Noah. Detective Lopez, my son will not be answering any more questions without his attorney present.”

Noah stared at the blood-stained sheet of paper that filled the
plastic bag. The numbers written on it looked like a phone number. There was only one other thing in the plastic bag and that was what Noah’s father had reacted to. Without needing to look closely, Noah knew exactly what it was. At the bottom of the bag was Ethan’s severed index finger.

CHAPTER 32

The minutes felt excruciatingly long to Maggie but every one that went by without an explosion was a relief. Then suddenly without warning Ryder Creed emerged from the barn. He gave them a thumbs-up and a smile, then immediately went to Grace. The dog was still sitting, obviously trained to do so until Creed gave the release command, but her entire hind end was wagging. Creed tapped his right open palm to his chest like he was tapping his heart and Grace came rushing to him.

“I checked all doors and gates, glanced in the stalls and the hayloft,” he told them, brushing cobwebs from his hair. “I think we’re good to go.”

Then to Grace, he said, “Go find.” And the dog scampered into the barn, nose in the air.

Maggie found the search fascinating. Her own dogs had come into her life unexpectedly. Harvey, a white Lab, had belonged to a neighbor whom Maggie had never met. The woman had been brutally taken from her home despite Harvey’s bloodied effort to protect her. Jake, a black German shepherd, had rescued Maggie in the Sandhills of Nebraska. He’d been a stray, refusing to belong to anyone—even to Maggie when she first brought him into her
home, digging his way out of the sanctuary she thought she was providing. The two dogs continued to teach her hard lessons about herself, about trust, about life. But she’d never seen a team, dog and master, work so closely together, so in sync, each recognizing the other’s movements, reactions, and expectations.

She and Tully stayed in the corner where they wouldn’t be in the way. They watched while Creed used the spearlike rod to pierce the dirt of the barn’s floor. He called it “venting” and explained that poking holes into the hard-packed dirt allowed air to circulate and help release any scents, making it easier for Grace. The dog didn’t seem to need it. With her nose in the air she walked the barn like she was breaking up the area into a grid. She didn’t rush around erratically, but instead went up and down, along the side, and worked back and forth in almost perfect parallel lines.

With each sweep Grace appeared to get more and more animated. At one point she stopped and pawed at the straw and dirt. She sniffed it again, turned, and urinated on the spot. Then she moved on.

Creed had been right beside her. He bent down to take a closer look and said to Maggie and Tully, “Dead mouse.”

“You think that’s all she’s been smelling?” Tully asked.

“No, she’s trained for human remains.”

“But maybe this confused her?” This time Tully sounded like he thought this was all a waste of time.

“Dead animals are just a distraction. That’s why she peed on it. It’s her way of marking over that scent.”

And Grace had, indeed, moved on. Maggie noticed her breathing was more rapid. Her ears pricked forward. Suddenly her tail went straight out and started wagging. She was scratching under one of the stall doors. There were three stalls side by side at the
back of the barn. The wooden doors didn’t come all the way to the floor, leaving about three inches. The doors were about chest-high, making it difficult to see into the stalls.

Creed shot a nervous look at Maggie and Tully.

“I checked the doors but I didn’t go into the stalls.”

To Grace, he said, “Just a minute, girl,” and he ran a hand over the hinges, rechecked the latch, and leaned over the top of the door to look inside the stall.

In the meantime, Grace had become more animated, her nose up and sniffing. She was impatient, hackles raised and ready. But when Creed pulled up the latch and opened the stall door, the dog hesitated. She took a few steps in and backed out. Then she turned and looked up at Creed.

The look actually sent a chill down Maggie’s back. The dog stared directly into her master’s eyes and held that stance like she was telling him, “Here’s what we’ve been looking for.”

“Good girl, Grace.” Without looking away, Creed put out his hand in Maggie’s direction and said, “Could I have the elephant, please?”

At first Maggie had no idea what he was talking about. Then she realized she still had Grace’s pink toy gripped in her left hand. She walked over slowly and gently placed the elephant in Creed’s outstretched hand. He, in turn, held it up for Grace to see. She immediately relaxed, started wagging again, only not at the frantic pace as moments earlier. She was back to being a dog wanting to have her reward.

“Good girl, Grace,” Creed said again and tossed her the toy.

Grace caught it, making it squeak. Maggie couldn’t help thinking how contradictory that playful sound seemed after finding what could be yet another grave.

Creed let Grace romp around but he didn’t attempt to enter the stall. Finally he backed away from the open stall door and looked at Maggie and Tully.

“I’m not trained to be part of the dig,” he told them.

Tully still didn’t look convinced that there was anything to be dug up. Maggie walked over to take a look. The area inside was about ten feet wide by ten feet deep. From what she could see in the dim light, the floor looked no different from that in the rest of the barn. She couldn’t see any mounds or depressions in the dirt. The straw on top matched the straw in the rest of the barn and it didn’t look as though it had been disturbed. There was no trace, no hint of blood or residue, from a putrefied corpse. The wooden trough had been left filled up and covered with an old horse blanket. The five-gallon metal bucket beside it had a dusty lid still tightly in place.

She glanced behind her and saw that Creed had taken Grace out of the barn. She could see him tossing the pink elephant and Grace racing after it. Tully had stayed on the other side of the barn but he had his cell phone to his ear now. He was telling someone—most likely the sheriff—to bring a digging crew. Even as he explained the situation she could hear the skepticism in his voice despite his best effort to disguise it.