The Only One Left

by Pamela Beason

  “Ah, you know.” Metrios grinned. “Concerts. Lotsa pretty girls. Girls who are looking for fun. They like to go for rides.”

  Finn supposed it was logical, in a perverted way. “Did you have tickets to the festival?”

  The list of ticket buyers might contain a clue, but he cringed inwardly at the idea of having to sort through hundreds of names.

  Metrios stared at him as though Finn were especially dense. “Just rode into the campgrounds. People go in and out that gate all day long.”

  Finn’s neck muscles tightened at all the possibilities that provided.

  “You started off together,” Agent Foster stated. “Why’d you and Dusty split up?”

  Metrios glanced over Finn’s shoulder at the SpeediLube building window.

  Finn turned. Two of Metrios’s colleagues watched through the glass. Finn assessed their ages as late teens or maybe early twenties. One young man was a redhead, but they turned away so quickly that the only other detail Finn caught was the smudge of a tattoo on the back of the dark boy’s neck. Was Metrios lying? Could one of them be Dusty? Did they know about the kidnapping?

  “Kane, why did you and Dusty split up?” Agent Foster repeated.

  Metrios turned back to her. “Dusty wanted to.” He shrugged. “I mean, we each had one, so why not?”

  Finn pulled out the grainy photo from the video at the concession stand. He pointed to the young man Robin had identified as Cooper Trigg. “Is this Dusty?”

  Metrios leaned forward to squint at the photo. “Could be.”

  Finn wondered if slugging Metrios might improve his memory.

  The kid recognized the threat in Finn’s expression. “Like I said, I don’t really know the dude, and you have to admit, this pic is crap.”

  Finn narrowed his eyes. “Where are Dusty and Mia—I mean Sunshine—now?”

  At that question, Metrios abruptly seemed to realize how serious this situation could be. He pushed himself up out of his slouch. “Hell, I don’t know. I told you, I don’t know that Dusty dude. Don’t know where he lives, don’t know where he works, don’t know what his real name is. All I can tell you is that he rides an old Harley Sportster. A blue one.”

  “License plate?” Foster’s pen was poised over her writing pad.

  Metrios rolled his eyes. Finn had a sinking feeling that Metrios knew no more than the Meetup organizer had.

  What kind of club didn’t know who its members were? They’d have to track down the email addresses and then possibly even the computers they’d come from . . . It was giving him a headache to think about how long that might take. Robin Valdez’s prayerful gesture flashed onto the screen of his memory.

  Foster looked up from her notes. “Where’d you get the Roadkill jackets?”

  “Online,” Metrios told her. “There’s a website. $89.95. Plus tax. Free shipping.”

  Finn was starting to hate the internet, that font of boundless and so often useless information that took forever to sort through. He levered himself up from the bench and gestured with his left hand while reaching for his handcuffs with his right. “Kane Metrios, stand up and turn around.”

  The kid grabbed onto the edge of the table top with both hands. “But I cooperated. I helped, didn’t I? And I didn’t rape that girl. If she says I did, she’s lying.”

  “Maybe you didn’t rape her.” Agent Foster put one hand on the kid’s upper arm and one on the back of his neck. “But you did kidnap Darcy Ireland, drug her, and dump her in the middle of nowhere, didn’t you, Kane?”

  “She said her name was Blackbird,” he protested, as if that was an excuse. “She wanted to come with us. They both did.”

  “Then why did you drug her?”

  He stared at the tabletop. “That was all Dusty’s idea. I didn’t know he was going to slip that shit into the beer like that. But then . . . hell, my girl was unconscious. I could barely keep her on the back of the bike. So it just didn’t seem right.” He looked up at them, his eyes begging. “I wouldn’t do that. I didn’t rape her.”

  “Put him in the back of my car,” Finn told Alice Foster after cuffing Metrios. “I want to talk to the other employees.”

  “I’ll be back.” She steered the kid around and marched him toward the parking lot.

  The two boys who had been watching through the window, redhead Becker Symes and tattooed Joe Greco, seemed overly nervous during questioning. But then, both were only nineteen, and teenage boys often had something to hide, if only illegal purchases of cigarettes and alcohol, reckless driving, and underage drinking. When shown photos of the girls, each shook his head. The blurry still from the video produced no sign of recognition of the three men in the photo, either.

  Neither Symes nor Greco owned a motorcycle, and both claimed they were working on Sunday when the girls had ridden off into danger. The SpeediLube manager verified that, and showed Finn the timecards. For the moment, Finn and Foster dismissed them as unimportant, but he took photos of all the licenses in the parking lot just for good measure.

  “I have a feeling those two know more than they’re saying,” Alice Foster said as they exited the SpeediLube office.

  Finn agreed. “But what do they know more about?”

  “Good question.” She shrugged. “You take Metrios and check out the home, and I’ll check out the Roadkill Riders and the jacket purchases online. I’ll see what else I can pick up about Cooper Trigg, too.” She pulled open her car door.

  “Thank you,” he said sincerely, nearly wanting to kiss her in gratitude. He hated computer searches.

  * * * * *

  By the time he’d booked Metrios into jail and secured a warrant to search the kid’s home, it was growing dark. Finn was on his way out to the Metrios home to inform Kane’s parents that their son was in jail, and to make sure that no girl was being held prisoner on the premises, when his phone chimed. He pressed the hands-free button on the steering wheel to answer.

  “Detective Finn,” the desk sergeant began. “You might be interested in this. A good Samaritan just delivered a backpack and cell phone that he found in a field about twenty miles east of Evansburg.”

  “Yeah?” An orange glow backlighting a hill in the distance caught Finn’s attention.

  “They belong to Mia Valdez, or at least the cell does. There’s a little sticker on the back of it.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “We recovered only the victim’s.”

  “Is the phone functional?”

  “The screen is cracked, but when I plugged it in, I was able to turn it on. But it’s password-protected.”

  “Her mother might know the password. Save it for me. I’ll be back to pick it up”—he checked his watch and frowned—“tomorrow morning.”

  Maybe, just maybe, there’d be a clue of some kind on it. Maybe even a GPS history? Assuming they could get in and the girl had left the GPS function turned on.

  He crested the hill. The glow was from a barn, fully engulfed in flames. His barn, the one he’d photographed, the one he was painting. Black figures silhouetted against the conflagration showed that the volunteer fire department was present, but they seemed to be mostly standing back, waiting for the structure to collapse.

  He pulled to the side of the road to watch the spectacle. Probably another arson of an unoccupied barn. Was one of the silhouettes Sara Melendez? Would either of them ever come to the end of their respective cases?

  As half the barn collapsed, the black figures swept back like a wave receding from the shore. Bright sparks leapt in the night air like dancing fireflies. The scene was actually quite beautiful in a hellish sort of way.

  “Damn vandals,” he muttered to himself. He had planned a traditional pastoral painting with wildflowers in the foreground, but now he could envision creating a more dramatic artwork with the scarlet and ultramarine and cobalt black and cadmium yellows of an active fire. He pulled out his phone and snapped a photo for future reference.

  After punching in Robin Valdez’
s number, he gave her the report of the sparse info they’d gleaned from Kane Metrios. Then he told her about Mia’s backpack and cell, asked if she knew the password.

  “I might be able to guess it,” she responded.

  “I’ll call you when I have it in hand tomorrow morning. Robin, I know there’s nothing definitive yet, but when we have enough of these puzzle pieces, we’ll be able to put together the whole picture and find Mia.”

  There was a long silence before Robin answered in a solemn tone, “Thank you, Detective.”

  His watch read 9:37 p.m. “I should talk to Grace. Is she around?”

  “She’s already in bed.”

  “Is she sick?”

  Again, a hesitation, then, “No, I don’t think so. Just really tired.”

  He could identify with fatigue.

  “Kanoni is the one who is sick.”

  “Oh, no.” He had a vision of Grace carrying the baby gorilla around all day long. She’d done it before, when Neema and Gumu were missing and Kanoni was temporarily an orphan. Grace was as much a mother to that little ape as Neema was. “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it’s not serious.”

  “Me too.”

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

  Robin said nothing, but Finn knew she was thinking that what he should be doing was looking for her child, not worrying about Grace or a gorilla.

  “I hope I’ll get back to you with good news soon, Robin,” he said in a lame attempt to recover. “I’m working on finding Mia. Agent Foster is, too.”

  “Thank you,” she said again in a nearly inaudible voice.

  He said goodnight and then pulled back onto the highway, feeling as though he had let Robin down. Grace, too; it was another long evening he couldn’t share with her. And when he finally got home, Cargo and Lok and Kee would tell him once again how disappointed they were in him.

  Chapter 20

  Thursday

  Mia wrestled with the legs of the table until she felt faint from hunger and thirst. Although she couldn’t see what she was doing in the darkness, she could feel how wobbly the table leg was, that it was barely screwed on, but the last inch of screw refused to separate from the table top. She’d saved the fruit pie for hours, but finally had to eat it, dry-swallowing it in tiny pieces, making it last. Maybe she’d just go crazy in here, trapped without light, without food or water. Insanity would be better than being so lost in her own head.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about her parents. After her sibs died, her mother and father had been ghosts, drifting around the house, forgetting to make dinner or even breakfast, forgetting that there was no milk in the fridge, forgetting that Mia was still there. She’d once overheard her mother say to her Aunt Jo that she didn’t see much point in living anymore. Mia could understand that attitude now.

  “But what about Miracle?” Jo had asked.

  Then, as if they’d suddenly come to a joint decision, her parents glommed onto her like gum sticking to the bottom of a shoe. You’re our precious jewel, Miracle girl. You’re all we think about. You have all our hopes and dreams. You’re all we live for. You’re the only one left.

  What would Mom and Dad do when she was gone? They couldn’t even tell good stories about her. Her sibs were heroes. She was an idiot. She squeezed her eyes shut, but she was too dehydrated to cry.

  The room stank. She stank. The sheets on the bed had stiff patches of dried semen and blood; she couldn’t stand to lie on them. The bucket was half full, and she couldn’t take hovering over it any more. Last time she peed in the far corner, where a whisper of air came through the crack in the wall.

  Think, Mia, think. She had to come up with a plan, something between simply giving up and dying and getting that damn table leg off and killing Dusty with it. There had to be a Plan B. Or was it Plan C, if dying was first?

  The door rattled. Mia leapt from the bed, righted the table. It sagged now, its wobbly leg splayed out to the side. She nudged the leg back into vertical with her toe, but the table still looked pretty bad. She set the empty Coke can on top and was still standing next to the table when the door opened and Dusty blinded her with the flashlight beam.

  “There you are, darlin’,” he said, as if pleased to discover her here.

  “As if I could be anywhere else, honey,” she sneered.

  “Don’t be that way, Mia.” He set the flashlight on end on the ground. He was dressed, as usual, in khaki pants and a blue shirt, a tidily combed vision of an upright working citizen. He pulled the stun gun from his pocket. In the other hand, he clutched two sacks this time, one from Burger Hut, and the other a pretty pink bag. When he set the burger bag down on the table, she held her breath, praying it wouldn’t collapse.

  “Whew!” He wrinkled his nose. “It really stinks in here.”

  “No shit,” she snarled. “Or actually, a whole lot of shit. What did you expect, Dusty? A girl’s gotta go, you know.”

  He frowned.

  “But you’re right, it stinks in here. I stink in here. If I were you, I’d just leave.”

  “That’s not gonna happen.” But then he turned and went out the door, locking it behind him.

  Mia focused on the door for a few seconds, confused. But he’d left the food bag. Halleluiah! She fell on it, gulping down Coke from the cup inside and ripping off huge mouthfuls of cheeseburger.

  Then the door opened again, and he stood there, framed by the darkness of the building beyond. She had a huge mouthful of burger and was frantically chewing before he could take it away. The stun gun was in his pocket. Could she rush him in time to get past him?

  Then he raised his right hand, and she could see he held a water hose, his thumb on the sprayer. He let loose a jet that hit her smack in the middle of her left breast, as if he were aiming for her heart. The water was cold, the jet was a painful needle of force, stabbing her chest. She turned sideways, gasping, and tried to hunch over but kept cramming the food and drink into her mouth, even as the jet bruised her shoulders.

  Dusty laughed. “We’ve got to get that stink off you.” The stream hit her in the back of the head. It felt like she’d been whacked with a two-by-four, and she began to choke on the burger. “Turn around,” he ordered.

  She glanced over her shoulder, and the spray hit her forehead. She quickly turned back around and ducked.

  “I said, turn around!” he shouted. “Do it now, unless you want this.”

  She glanced back again, and sure enough, he was holding out the stun gun. She wondered briefly if he’d get electrocuted if he used it with all this water around, but she wasn’t ready to die, with or without him, so she turned. He hit her in the face with the jet and then worked his way down to her toes. She closed her eyes and tried to stay standing directly in front of the food sack to preserve whatever was left to eat. God, that jet hurt. She’d be covered in bruises.

  Finally the cold spray mercifully stopped. “Take your clothes off.”

  “No.”

  He stepped forward, the stun gun held out.

  “Okay, okay. I’m doing it.” Blinking streams of water out of her eyes, she pulled off her top, then sat down on the soaked bed to unzip her dripping jeans. He waited until she had them bunched around her ankles, then he stepped forward and snagged the reeking toilet bucket and slung it outside the door, quickly closing it behind him. She balled up her wet clothes, tossed them between the mattress and the wall, and stood up.

  “Bra and panties, too.”

  Ashamed of her cowardice, she shucked them off.

  “Now, that’s not so bad, is it, darlin’?” he crooned. “Everything smells a lot better now, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He was right about that.

  “I got something for you.” He bent at the knees to grab the pink sack, which he had set down just inside the door.

  She took advantage of his motion to grab another bite of burger. The paper wrapping was soaked, and the bun came apart in her fingers, but it still
tasted good.

  He tossed the pink sack. She made no move to catch it. The bag landed on the mattress, and she picked it up. Inside was a rose-colored negligee.

  “Put it on.” He gestured with the stun gun toward her. “And don’t get hamburger grease all over it.”

  Hell, at least the negligee was mostly dry. She shimmied into it. It was way too long, and pooled in the dirt around her feet. “I need petite,” she said.

  Then he was on her, his hands clutching her shoulders. “You should be grateful! Why aren’t you grateful?”

  “What for?” she asked.

  He zapped her with the stun gun. “Because you’re alive,” he snarled, his face close to hers.

  She was incapable of saying anything more as he tossed her onto the wet bed and raped her again. Every time she felt movement returning to her limbs, he jolted her.

  She had her answer about whether the stun gun would electrocute him in the wet room.

  Chapter 21

  Friday

  Robin Valdez had not been able to guess her daughter’s password. After ten tries, she slumped in defeat. “I’m learning that Mia had a lot of secrets she didn’t share with me.”

  Agent Foster took the phone to the FBI office in Spokane in hopes of unlocking it. She had also obtained an address where Cooper Trigg might be holding a young girl captive. Finn was more optimistic about focusing on the location where Mia’s phone and backpack had been found, off I-90 nearly twenty miles east of Evansburg, on a county line road. At least it was somewhere to start. But he had no idea if the backpack and cell phone had been dumped before or after Mia had been taken somewhere. He went to the office to use Google Earth on a large screen, see if he could glean a clue from the bird’s-eye view.

  Before he got started, the Grant County Sheriff called to report that they’d knocked on every door within a ten-mile radius of the wheat field Darcy had described. Nobody in that area knew anything about a missing girl. Deputies had found and photographed the hillside where the foursome had picnicked and later, the track left by Metrios’s motorcycle in the hayfield, and the mashed grass where Darcy had lain for hours. But that was it. The second motorcycle track vanished on I-90 not far from the picnic site, direction undetermined.