Pregnant. The girl was pregnant. I looked at her face, and it looked familiar. Who was she?
I pushed off with my hands to get up, but at that moment, when I was halfway between standing and kneeling, something struck me in the back of the head. Lightning bolts of pain scattered from the point of impact through my skull. My stomach seized, and I thought I would retch on the dirt. I crumpled onto my knees and hands. Then came a second blow and a kaleidoscope of color that vanished when the world went black.
Thirty-Eight
“Chief Deputy Anderson, I’m in St. George,” Detective Mullins said. “I’ve been trying to reach Chief Jefferies for nearly an hour. No one at the station seems to know where she is, but she said she was having lunch with you. Any idea how to get in touch?”
“She got a call and had to leave,” Max explained. “She’s not answering her radio or her phone?”
“No, but we’re still having problems with the radios. There’s been a bug in them since last week. We have a repair guy coming out on Monday. And if she’s out in the hinterlands, her phone doesn’t always pick up. We’ve had this happen before.”
Max looked at his watch. “I saw her around noon. That’s not very long ago. Just an hour and a half. She did seem to be in a hurry. We’d talked about lunch, but we ended up both grabbing a sandwich to go.”
“Shoot,” Mullins said. “It wouldn’t matter, but—”
“What do you need? Anything I can help you with?”
“Nah. I don’t think so. I’m trying to return stolen property to a robbery victim and he won’t take it. Says we broke it. I explained that this is the way we got it when we made the arrest, but he’s being an ass. He keeps threatening to sue. Now he’s demanding to talk to my boss. Chief Jefferies is good at settling guys like this down. I thought maybe they should talk, so she can get him to back off. But no one can reach her.”
Max let loose a brief huff. He reminded himself that Clara was a cop, one who carried a gun she knew how to use. And that in the mountains, a lost signal on a phone was to be expected. Nothing Mullins said was particularly alarming. Still, Max didn’t like Clara disappearing. She needed to be better about telling someone where she was heading.
“Have you asked around the station, Mullins? The chief must have given her itinerary to someone there. She wouldn’t have not told someone where she was heading.”
“I talked to Kellie on dispatch, and the chief told her about lunch with you.”
“Call and ask Kellie to put out a call for information to the others. The chief isn’t irresponsible. She always makes sure someone knows how to find her.”
“That’s true. But if you hear from her, you’ll ask her to bump me on the radio or put in a call? I’d like to get this guy to ease off, so I can head back to Alber.”
“You’ve got it. And Mullins?”
“Yeah?”
“When you find her, ask her to call me.”
“Sure enough.”
After he hung up, Max read through the latest subpoena to be returned from the drug companies. He circled an address in an adjacent county, then looked up the number of the sheriff’s department there and asked to talk to the lead detective.
“What can I do for you?” the guy asked.
“Have you ever heard of a home for teenage mothers on your turf?”
“No, can’t say as I have.”
Max thought about that, decided it seemed odd. Why wouldn’t the guy know about the place? Usually detectives, cops, they worked with homes for transient youths, the homeless, had their feelers out to them for information and kept an eye on them to keep them safe. But then he’d looked at the map, and this place was way out in the country. On Google Earth, he scanned the area, then blew up the image. It looked like an old three-story Victorian with nothing around it for miles.
Max thought about asking the guy to drive out, do a little investigating, but he didn’t know what he was looking for. Not yet. Instead, he thanked the detective and hung up.
When I get in touch with Clara, we can take a drive over there, he thought. Find out what’s going on.
Max looked at his watch, wondered where Clara was, then picked up another of the subpoenas that had come in and began reading.
Thirty-Nine
I didn’t know where I was, how long I’d been blacked out, and I couldn’t understand what had happened to me until I felt a shooting pain radiate from the back of my head. Like electric fingers it spread across my forehead and traveled to my jaw. My neck burned as if it were on fire. Agony shuttered my eyes, but when I opened them a slit, Clyde Benson stood in front of me, his arms crossed and a grin on his face.
“You should have stayed away,” he said. “Now look what the hell you’ve done.”
“What did I do? Why are you…” My head tilted to the left, I squinted at him, hoping for an answer. All Clyde did was let loose a belly laugh. My head ached, and I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I couldn’t remember. I remembered that I’d come to talk to the wives. Why was Clyde home and not at the body shop? What was all this about? I tried to stand up but couldn’t. I realized I was tied to a metal chair with a slatted back, my arms behind me, my ankles and waist bound. My stomach lurched. My head hurt so bad that I could feel every pore on my face, every hair on my head. Agony. I remembered seeing something that alarmed me, but I couldn’t recall what it was. As if he could read my thoughts and enjoyed my confusion, Clyde let loose another deep, rolling laugh that seemed to vibrate off the cellar walls.
“What’s so funny?” the woman behind him said. She had fluffy blond hair and wore blue medical scrubs. Her name tag read “Miss Lori.” “What are we going to do with her?”
Clyde shook his head, dismissing her. “Listen, wife, you do as you’re told. You get that baby out of that girl in good shape so we get our cash, and I’ll take care of the chief here and the girl.”
A baby? My gut revolted again, twisted in pain, as I remembered the girl tied to the hospital bed.
Lori walked away in a huff.
“Rachel, come here!” Clyde shouted.
A big-boned woman with the look of a wrestler plodded over. “You sit in that chair and watch her. I’ve gotta get back to the shop. Got a transmission repair I need to get done. I don’t want anyone asking questions about where I’ve been. I’ll hide her vehicle. Before I head home, I’ll pick the kids up from school and drop them at their grandparents’ house. They can sleep there tonight.”
“I’d like ’em home,” she said, plopping down onto another metal chair like mine maybe six feet away. “I don’t like your mother with the children, she’s mean, and she and your dad—”
“No matter what you’d like, we’ve got too much going on to have those kids at the house. I’ll be back after work. Lori should have that baby out by then.”
Rachel gave me a strange look, like I’d somehow caused her problems. I tried to smile, but any movement sent shards of pain shooting through my face. My hands tied, I couldn’t reach up and check, but I would have been willing to bet that the back of my head had an ostrich-egg-size lump. The rope or whatever he’d used was too tight on my wrists, and my hands throbbed. My fingers felt numb.
Clyde shot me another broad smirk. He looked pleased at the turn of events. He didn’t seem at all worried that if he got rid of me the revenue at his station would go down when I didn’t swing in for a fill-up and a candy bar. Or, more important, that anyone would come looking for me. “I’ll see you later.” I tried to remember if I’d told anyone where I was going. I thought I did, but my head ached so, I wasn’t sure. Clyde grinned at me, like he was my new best friend. “I’ll be thinking this afternoon about all I’m going to do to you. This’ll be fun.”
I felt my stomach churn again. At that, he was gone.
“Ohhhhhhhhh! It hurts! Make it not hurt,” someone groaned. Who was it? I struggled to remember what had happened right before the incredible pain. I remembered a young woman, a girl, pregnant, tied to a hospital b
ed. She’d looked familiar. But who was she? I’d looked at dozens of photos of teenage girls that week. I gulped hard, fighting back the bile that crawled up my esophagus, sour in my mouth. “Is someone hurt? I saw a girl. Is that her?”
Rachel didn’t answer. She had one lazy eye, I realized as she inspected me. Not bad out of focus, but askew to the other. She kept her head twisted to the side as she picked dried grass off of her prairie dress, remains from working in the cornfield, I supposed.
The moaning stopped. I had to get the woman talking, to figure out what was happening. “So, your name is Rachel?” I asked.
My forehead hurt when I opened both eyes, and I had a hard time focusing on her. I looked down. My phone was gone, and my gun. It would have been less painful to put my head back, try to keep calm and not jostle. Every time I moved, my head ached. But once Clyde got home, well, it didn’t take a cop to figure out what he had planned for me. It didn’t involve either letting me go or letting me live. I thought about the barrels in the shed, each one large enough to hold a body. My insides lurched again as the lye suddenly made sense. Enough of it mixed with water, add a little heat, and a body could be reduced to a dark sludge, the bones made so fragile they could be pounded into powder.
The woman hadn’t answered. My pulse hammering inside my chest, I decided to try again. “I’ve always liked the name Rachel. I had an Aunt Rachel, growing up.”
She nodded at that, but said nothing. From the room with the girl, another scream. The other woman, Lori, shouted, “Rachel, come here a minute. I gotta untie the girl’s legs and move ’em higher up, bent, so I can get this baby out of her. You need to hold ’em for me.”
I thought back to the case I’d been working on, the bones on the hill, the girls whose photos filled my binder. I squeezed my eyes shut to ease the pain, and the girl in the bed’s face flashed before me. I knew her.
“What’s the girl in that bed’s name?” I asked. Rachel didn’t answer, so then I shouted as loud as I could, “What would it hurt to tell me who she is? What’s her name?”
“Shut the hell up,” Lori shouted. “Rachel, get in here. Now!”
It appeared that Rachel blamed me for causing her more trouble; she gave me an irritated glance. She stood and moseyed over, walking as slow as syrup dripping out of a maple tree in winter. She doesn’t want to go in there, I thought. She doesn’t like this.
I heard them arguing in the room, working on the girl’s ties, I assumed, and I used the time to search around for something, anything I might be able to use to free my hands. Nothing grabbed my attention, but I felt around on the chairback, hoping to find a rough spot. Maybe I could rub the binding across it and fray it off. To my disappointment, the chair was as smooth as one just made, and I had no idea what I was going to do. Hoping to ignore the nagging pain and concentrate on getting free, I tried to think of some way to knock the shelves down on top of Rachel when she walked out of the room, but at the far end, I saw metal braces that anchored them to the wall.
My only hope was to find something sharp.
Shifting in the chair, pushing with my bound feet, advancing a few inches at a time, I worked myself over to the closest shelf. I had on a pair of black ankle boots, leather with a thick sole. My head aching, I brought my feet back, then snapped them forward and kicked one of the jars on the lowest shelf. I’d hoped it would fall toward me, smash on the floor, and I’d be able to pick up a spike of glass. The jar crashed, but in the opposite direction, on the other side of the shelf.
“What the hell’s going on out there? Rachel, go check,” Lori shouted. “I’ve gotta take care of this girl.”
I heard hurried footsteps. As quick as I could, I hooked my feet around another jar. This time I pulled it toward me. The jar toppled, the glass shattered and sauerkraut flew across the floor. The smell of vinegar clouded around me, glass everywhere. Hoping to grab a piece, I swiveled in the chair and leaned. The chair wobbled, and my heart sank to my stomach. I couldn’t reach it. I straightened in the chair just as Rachel rounded the corner.
“You’re gonna get me in a mess of trouble,” she muttered. “You don’t know what they’re like. What Lori and Clyde will do to me.”
She walked behind me, grabbed the chairback and pulled me toward the wall, away from the broken glass. It didn’t matter, I realized. The bindings were too tight, especially the thick rope around my waist that held me to the chair. I couldn’t have reached down and scooped up a piece.
Once she had me out of the way, Rachel shook her finger at me. “You’re causing trouble! I’ve gotta get the broom and clean this up, or he’ll be mad. And I can’t have him mad at me.”
Rachel bustled off and I sat there, tied to the chair, thinking about what she’d said, staring at the pieces of glass that I wanted more than anything in the world and couldn’t reach. From inside the room, another unholy shriek, a scream so loud and so primitive that it could only be childbirth when all wasn’t well.
“Is that girl okay in there?” I shouted. “What’s wrong?”
“Just shut the hell up,” Lori called back. “I got enough going on without worrying about you.”
Forty
Mullins never did call Max back, but when his phone rang again, it was Stef. “Chief Deputy Anderson, I hate to bother you, but Mullins and I were talking, and…”
The rookie sounded nervous, as if she wasn’t sure she should have called him. “It’s okay, Stef. Did Mullins find Clara? What do you need?”
“Well, that’s the thing: no one’s heard from her.”
Max looked at his watch and nearly an hour had passed since he’d talked to Mullins.
“You’ve been calling her?”
“Yes, Mullins first, and I’ve called, and no answer. It goes right to voicemail.”
“Well, she’s probably out of range. Have you figured out where she was heading?”
“She told me. First she was stopping over at the Benson house.”
“Clyde Benson? The guy who owns the gas station?”
“Yeah.” Stef still sounded timid. “The chief wanted to talk to his wives. She’s been looking into an old case. Child abuse.”
Max asked about where the Bensons lived and then thought about the time that had passed since Clara had left the diner. “Was Clara worried about that stop at all? Any concern there?”
“No. I don’t think so. I was there earlier in the week, and they were cooperative.”
“Okay, but she hasn’t returned yet?”
“From the Benson house, she was going out to talk to Marshal Crawford. The chief has seemed kind of agitated about him. She sounded worried about that one.”
Max thought that through for a moment. “Out to Crawford’s?”
“She said something about getting to the bottom of why he was interested in the bone case. She’s been upset about him off and on all week.”
“Yeah, well, that’s true…” It didn’t take long for Max to wonder if Ash and Clara had gotten into an argument out at the ranch. Without him there to calm her down, she might be going after the old guy, and, well, that might not be good. “Do you know where Crawford lives?”
“The chief put the address in the file with the information on the bones.”
Max had been working in the same file, one they shared, and he pulled up Clara’s reports. Tucked into her latest notes, he found Crawford’s address, on a rural postal route. He thought again about the confrontation that could be taking place if Clara lit into Ash Crawford. Nothing good could come of it.
“Listen Stef, I’m sure the chief is fine. But I’ll drive past the police station and lead you. We can head out to Crawford’s. My guess is that she’s finished at the Benson house and is there by now.”
Forty-One
Screams echoed through the cellar, eruptions of primal pain. My head ached, magnifying the girl’s cries until they pulsed through me. One was so loud, so high, that I thought it might shatter the glass jars on the shelves. Trussed as I was, I couldn�
��t look at my watch, but her contractions seemed to have settled into a rhythm, maybe ten minutes apart. In between, I heard her sobbing, begging the woman named Lori to call for help, to get her a doctor.
“I can handle this. You don’t have to worry. Everything is okay.” But the woman’s voice gave away her doubts.
“What’s your name?” I shouted. “What’s wrong?”
This time, an answer. “They call me Violet.” The girl’s voice was breathy and at the same time hoarse. “Help me. Please. The baby, he won’t come, and I…”
Violet? I didn’t remember any of the girls being named Violet. Maybe this was another girl, one I hadn’t even found a report on. But the way she’d said it, that “they” called her that? The raw agony of the girl’s next scream tore through me, grabbing the pain that coursed through my brain and twisting it. I felt connected to the girl by some unseen hand. I had to help her. “Lori, untie me, and I’ll assist you. Cops go through a birthing class. I’ve been trained.”
“Please, Lori. Please, let her help me,” the girl begged.
Lori said nothing, and just then Rachel rounded the corner carrying a black plastic bag, a broom and dustpan. Her hands were shaking, and I noticed her eyelids tremble.
“Rachel, I can help deliver that baby,” I pleaded. “I’ve been trained to—”
“Don’t listen to that woman,” Lori shouted. “We’ll get this baby out soon. You just leave her tied up. Clyde has plans for her.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rachel answered.
I thought about the two women, their places in the household. Lori I pegged as somewhere in her fifties. Rachel looked considerably younger, maybe early thirties. She must have been the second wife, and she seemed less switched on; I wondered if she had some kind of intellectual disability. I remembered what she’d said, that Clyde and Lori could be mean, and that she hadn’t wanted Clyde to take their children to his parents’ house.
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