Not yet ready to give the possibility up, I said, “I don’t know, Mullins. Maybe you didn’t, but if I find out you warned that piece of—”
“Clara, not now. Now we need to work together. And you’re right, we need help to find Gerard,” Max said as he turned to the others. “Mullins, you know him better than any of us. Where would the chief have gone?”
Mullins bit his lip and stared at me, furious. Then he turned to Max. “I heard that the chief left the station in a huff, upset about Detective Jefferies heading up the investigation. Sometimes when he’s in a bad mood, he talks about going to Salt Lake. He has family there.”
Sheriff Holmes sat on the opposite side of the table from Mullins, and I turned to the sheriff and asked, “Can you look into that? Find out where his family lives and get Salt Lake PD to send someone out. If he doesn’t accompany them willingly, they can bring him in as a material witness.”
“Got it,” the sheriff said, and he walked off to make the call.
While he checked on the Salt Lake connection, I turned to the others. “In the meantime, we need to move ahead. Any ideas?”
Mullins shrugged, uneasy, and Conroy looked at me as if unsure what to say.
“Clara, they couldn’t have gone too far,” Max said. “Evan’s squad and personal vehicles are at his house, and he came here on horseback. His wife said he only had the one horse with him. If he has a hostage or two someone is most likely walking.”
I considered the landscape, the trees spreading out thin behind the ranch, growing thicker up the mountainside. “He’s taking them into the woods, most likely up onto the mountain.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’d do, if it were me,” Max said. “The Barstow boys were like the rest of us. We all grew up hunting on that mountain. We played in the caves and the miles of old mining tunnels.”
“If they’re up there, this won’t be easy,” Mullins said. “That mountain’s got more hiding places, more twists and turns than a maze.”
Forty-Three
The climb up the mountain through the pine forest hurt Delilah’s legs. The trail, overgrown with scrub brush and thistles, looked like no one had traversed it for decades. Delilah was in the lead, and had to pick her way through the darkness. The man aimed a powerful flashlight ahead of them, casting a blue-white light on the ground and trees, but it bounced with the rhythm of the horse.
It turned out that the man liked to talk. Ever since they’d left the house, he’d babbled on about the mountains, the hunting he’d done as a boy with his brothers. “The miners used to use this trail, but they haven’t been around in years. Follow it all the way and it dead-ends at an abandoned mine.”
“Is that where we’re going?” Delilah asked.
The man’s eyes grew round and he smirked at her. “Is that where we’re going?” he mocked. “Don’t think you can figure me out. I’ll always surprise you.”
It scared Delilah that the man’s mood worsened so fast. “I didn’t mean to…” she stammered.
Scowling at her, he warned, “Don’t ever think I don’t know what I’m doing. I got another place in mind. Even better. A place no one knows about. It’s not on any maps.”
Delilah swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”
The sweat that trickled down her back dried in the cooling night air. Her ankles kept twisting on the rocks; she wore her sandals and old white socks the man had given her with holes in the heels. She wished she had a pair of tennis shoes to protect her feet. A round, deep-red bloodstain saturated the right sock where a stone must have cut her. The chain pulled on her arms. The dress too long, it dragged in the dirt, got under her feet and threatened to trip her. The hem caught on branches as they made slow progress up the mountainside.
Something darted across the path in front of her, and Delilah stopped, startled. “What’s that?”
“A damn jackrabbit, nothing that’ll hurt you,” the man said. “But watch out for rattlers. There’s a lotta them around here. They’re active just after dusk. Don’t put your feet under anything.”
Delilah looked at the scattered rocks and wondered what hid beneath them.
“Move on!” the man shouted.
Carrying the heavy chain with them, Delilah and Jayme huffed and puffed farther up the mountain, heads down, the man effortlessly riding behind them on the horse.
“Are we going to stop and rest soon?” Delilah asked.
“We got a ways to go,” the man said. “No stopping.”
“My legs hurt something terrible,” Jayme said.
“Keep going,” he answered.
Delilah tried, but her legs wouldn’t cooperate. They felt wobbly. She hit a patch of loose rock, and her feet slid out from under her, skidding across the dry earth. She tried to grab a scrawny pine’s trunk to break her fall, but couldn’t with the handcuffs. The man tugged at the chain and she went flying, taking Jayme with her. When they landed, Delilah lay flat on her stomach with Jayme beside her. Slowly, they sat up, dazed. Delilah pulled up her skirt to see why her knees burned. Badly skinned, they seeped blood.
Jayme had a deep cut on her forehead. She put her hands down to push up, but immediately pulled up her right arm and screamed in pain. “My elbow. It hurts bad.”
“It ain’t nothin’,” the man said.
“Maybe you broke it.” Delilah thought back to a time one of her brothers broke a finger. Mother Ardeth mashed up comfrey from the herb garden and tied it over the break in a cotton wrap.
“Damn it, you girls! Shut up!” the man grumbled. “We gotta get moving. Get up.”
It was awkward with the handcuffs, but Delilah stood and gave Jayme her arms to brace on. “I’m trying,” Jayme said. “It hurts real bad, though.”
The man shook his head. “Maybe you girls are more trouble than you’re worth.”
Delilah thought about what Jayme had told her about the other girls. She considered how Jayme heard the man screaming at them, and then they disappeared. The older girl, the one who vanished right after the man took Jayme? The man had said that he left her on the mountain. Now he was taking them there.
“Are you going to kill us?” Delilah asked.
“Nah, I wouldn’t…” he stammered.
“You would.” Jayme looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, almost daring him to tell the truth.
The man pulled on the chain. “You two do what you’re told, and nothing will happen to you, except you’ll be happy. You’ll be my wives, and we’ll have a family. But we gotta go. Now!”
Delilah shot him a distrustful look, then turned and started back up the trail. She’d walked fifty feet when she heard a horse’s hooves hitting the hard earth behind them.
Someone was coming.
“Behind that rock,” the man ordered. “Over there!”
The man jumped off his horse, pulled it alongside him and hustled the girls toward a vast boulder, taller than the man. In a panic, he pulled them with the chain, making them run between the pines, jumping over shallow roots. He pushed them behind the massive rock, and then took his rifle out of the sling on the mare’s side.
“Not a sound,” he warned as he backed in beside them, the rifle aimed around the side of the boulder.
Delilah’s pulse pounded and pounded until her body shook.
An unfamiliar male voice surrounded them. “You out there? If you’re there, come out. I don’t have time for this.”
The man looked at Delilah and Jayme, and then answered. “Over here.”
The stranger on horseback stopped on the path and dismounted, tied a tall black stallion onto the scrawny trunk of a half-dead tree. “What the hell are you up to?” he asked. “Get out here, and bring that Jefferies girl with you.”
The man turned to the girls, frowning. “Damn it,” he said. “You heard him. Git out there.”
Jayme ambled around the side of the boulder at Delilah’s side, and they retraced their steps to the path. A big man waited there; he bore a resemblance to the man who had taken them.
&nb
sp; “You’ve got two girls? Two? Goddamn it, you twisted son of a—”
“What business is it of yours?” The man scowled at him. “This hasn’t got anything to do with you.”
“You girls okay?” the stranger asked.
Delilah started to answer, to scream that they weren’t anything like okay, but before she could, the man cut her off.
“I asked what you’re doing here.”
“Where else would you go?” the stranger asked. “As soon as I hung up the phone with you, I knew you were gonna run and head to the cave. We must’a talked a hundred times when we were kids about how it was the perfect hideout.”
The man tightened his eyes, angry. “But why did you come? I don’t need you here.”
The stranger’s face looked like he was chewing on something sour. “You haven’t got a choice. You’ve gotta come with me. We’re going to take those girls back. And you’re going to confess.”
“Why, I’m not gonna… Why would I do that?”
“Because that woman cop isn’t giving up,” the stranger said. “Because before long she’s gonna figure out that I knew you take girls, what you do to them. It’s over. I need you to come with me back to town. This is done.”
“Well, I—” the man tried to interrupt.
“They aren’t just going to go after you,” the stranger said. “They’re gonna prosecute me for murder just like you, as an accessory. I should have turned you in years back, the first time you took a girl, instead of covering up for you. You did all this, but it’s gonna fall on me, too. And I won’t have that.”
“I’m not—”
Delilah fixed her eyes on the barrel of the long, black handgun the stranger pulled out of his belt, silencing the man. He held it up and pointed it at him.
The man winced. “Take it easy there. Don’t do anything rash.”
“I’m sick of covering up for you,” the stranger said. “I’m not going to do it anymore.”
“Okay,” the man said. He set down his rifle and held his hands up high. “I’ll go with you. I understand.”
“I hope you do. Now get the key. Unlock those girls,” the stranger ordered.
“It’s in the saddlebag on the back of the horse.”
“Move slow,” the stranger warned. He lined up where he could get a better look at the man and the saddlebag. “I’m not taking my eyes off you.”
Jayme reached over and grabbed Delilah’s hand, the ends of her mouth tugging up into the slightest hint of a smile. The girls watched, excited at the prospect of freedom, as their captor turned toward the gray mare. He slipped his left hand into one of the brown leather saddlebags under the sheet that held supplies. He pulled out the ring with the keys on it. The stranger moved back and seemed to relax, just as the man slid his right hand under his shirt. When he pulled it out, he held a small black pistol.
The shot went off before Delilah could finish shouting the warning. Jayme screamed. One bullet hit the stranger in the chest. A second sliced directly through the center of his forehead. His legs collapsed under him, and he toppled over, dead.
Silence for a heartbeat, and then the girls’ screams and sobs filled the night air. Delilah’s chest heaved so hard she thought she might never be able to stop.
Jayme and Delilah huddled together, crying, while the man walked over and nudged the stranger. Nothing. No movement. The man did it again. The stranger didn’t respond.
The man hesitated, as if considering what to do.
“You’ve got no right to tell me what to do,” he whispered. “And you ain’t gonna need that horse. So it might as well be mine.”
The man untied the knotted sheet filled with supplies from his old mare and carried it over to the stranger’s mount. While Delilah and Jayme watched, he tied the sheet on the back of the stallion. He took the end of the chain and looped it around the saddle horn. Once he finished, the man pushed the body off the trail, a short distance into the woods.
Then the man went back to his own horse and took off the reins.
“Get the hell outta here, you flea-bitten hag!” he shouted, whipping the horse with the leather straps. The horse neighed and backed up, hemmed in by the forest. It clomped backward, then turned and ran down the trail.
“Okay,” the man said to the girls. “We need to get moving.”
Forty-Four
I stared up at the black sky and the thousands of stars overhead and wondered if my instincts misled me. I couldn’t forget Max saying that I pinned my hopes that Delilah might still be alive on no real evidence. Two girls found dead. The one in the field? Sadie. The one in the barn? Doc thought we’d found Eliza Heaton. On the right side of her face, just a touch above her upper lip, he saw a mole like the one in her picture.
“We’ll do DNA, of course,” Doc said. “But my guess is that someone’s going to be delivering very bad news to the Heatons.”
In the barn, I pitched in to help Doc remove the body. It’s not what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to search for Delilah. Every breath I took screamed, “Go now! Before it’s too late!” But we couldn’t.
The sheriff confirmed through Salt Lake PD that the Barstows’ relatives hadn’t heard from Gerard. Unless he suddenly reappeared, it seemed unlikely that we would be able to find him to question him about what he knew and Evan’s whereabouts.
Instead, we focused our attention on our theory that Evan had fled with Delilah to the mountains. That gave him tens of thousands of acres of forest to hide in. Our only advantage: If he did have Delilah, and maybe a second hostage, he would have to travel slowly. But none of us knew how big a head start Evan had or where he’d go.
The darkness complicated our situation. Traditional tracking methods would be far less effective at night. Ground and vegetation disturbances could be too easily missed.
It made no sense to simply head into the wilderness and hope we’d find Evan. Instead, Max and I drew up a plan. To carry it out, we called in specialized equipment and people to operate it.
I handled the call to the state police. We needed state-of-the-art equipment, helicopters and drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras. Since Evan had a horse, he’d be a big target, generating a lot of body heat. If he had Delilah or any other girl with him, they would give us multiple targets. The disappointing response came first: the drones were unavailable. The agency had three, but they were spread across the state and in use for other cases. The news on the choppers was better; two left immediately to join us, but both were an hour out.
While I worked on getting the choppers, Sheriff Holmes tracked down a K-9 search unit. The dogs, housed at a state prison, would take a couple of hours to reach us. He also contacted one of his SWAT units and requested radio equipment, tactical vests and assault weapons.
Meanwhile, the forensic folks combed through Evan’s house and barn. Once we had the body on its way with Doc Wiley, much of the attention centered on the two rooms fitted with the wall anchors. My heart nearly jumped from my chest when luminol sprayed on a stain on the upstairs pad glowed blue. I understood the results before the tech conducting the test turned to me and said, “Looks like we’ve got blood. Lots of it.”
After the initial testing, they logged the pad and the downstairs mattress into evidence. On the cellar floor, we found a blue dress with a white sash. Delilah’s, I guessed. It looked the way my mothers and the others had described it. We boxed it and sent it to the lab.
The forensic work going well, I looked at my watch. It was closing in on midnight. “How far out are the choppers?”
“Half an hour, tops,” Max said. “The dogs won’t be here for another hour, though. What do you want to do?”
“Let’s speed this up and get in position under the mountain.”
Mullins had called a neighboring ranch, the owner a friend of his, and secured five horses. He had them saddled up—growing up in rural Utah, we were all comfortable on horseback. Since Mullins and Conroy knew Evan—they’d both worked with him when he was Albe
r’s chief—Max and I decided that bringing them might give us an advantage. We needed the fifth horse for a professional tracker, a contact of the sheriff’s, who’d driven flat out to join us from a town on the other side of Pine City.
I’d just finished suiting up in my bulletproof vest when another car arrived, this one a beat-up red Camry. Stephanie Jonas climbed out carrying two big brown paper bags.
“Stef, why are you here?” I asked.
“I heard about what’s going on,” she said, holding up the bags. “I brought sandwiches, and I want to help.”
She’d risked her job to show me the file room. If she hadn’t, we might not be as far along as we were. I owed her.
I thought about what we needed, and a second set of eyes on the laptop seemed like a good idea. We were all wearing transceivers, so our positions would be visible to the techs on the helicopters, and on the laptop the sheriff would monitor on the ground. “You can compare coordinates on the map with the info coming in from the choppers. Track us to verify that we’re heading in the right direction.”
“Great,” she said.
My morning hard-boiled egg less than a memory, my ham-and-cheese sandwich disappeared in a few bites. As soon as the others finished, I said, “Okay, let’s go.”
We climbed onto our mounts, handguns in our holsters and rifles hanging in leather scabbards on the sides.
“One last reminder,” Max said. He looked around at all of us, making sure we were listening. “Evan Barstow is undoubtedly armed. He’ll be watching for us. Remember, he’s a cop. He’s had the same training we have. Be careful.”
“You got it,” Conroy said. All of us were high on adrenaline, but the kid looked more scared than excited.
“Just listen to orders and keep alert,” I said.
Conroy gave a brave nod.
In a moment, we’d be on our way. But as I pulled the reins and turned my horse toward the mountains, Sheriff Holmes shouted, “Detective Jefferies. There’s a call for you. A woman. Won’t say who she is.”
“Now?”
The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1) Page 25