by B J Bourg
“I’ll follow your lead,” I whispered. “I don’t know this place.”
All I heard was a faint clicking sound from behind us that indicated Amy had shut her door. She appeared out of the darkness like a ghost floating on the air. Her face looked ghostly against the glow from the moonlight.
“I’m ready,” she said in a low whisper.
CHAPTER 34
Giving us a hand signal, Melvin led the way toward the old store. Although we thought the likelihood was slim that Rose was inside the main building, we wanted to clear it for the sake of thoroughness.
We had all drawn our weapons and I held mine loosely at my side. I listened intently as we moved. Other than crickets and frogs and an occasional owl calling, all was quiet. Melvin led us around to the back of the store, where he found a damaged door. The hinges screamed in protest as he eased it open, and he froze in place. The noise didn’t invoke a response from anywhere inside the building or out in the swamps, so he pushed it until there was a crack wide enough for us to file through one by one.
Using a hand to muffle the brilliance of his flashlight, he guided the way through the cluttered building. By looking at the place, I would guess the children had shut the store down in the middle of a working day and just ordered everyone to drop what they were holding and leave. Not only were there items on the floor, but the shelves were still partially stocked. Surprisingly, the merchandise appeared untouched.
“I can’t believe this place hasn’t been looted by now,” Amy whispered when we had finally cleared the entire building and were approaching the back entrance. “I saw a Buck knife hanging on a pegboard that was fifty dollars, and it hasn’t been touched.”
“Not many people know about this place,” Melvin explained, “and those who do know about it had enough respect for the old man that they would never vandalize his property—even though it now belongs to his asshole children.”
Melvin squeezed through the narrow opening in the door and waited for Amy and me to join him. Once we were all outside, he eased the door shut and led the way toward the two rows of camps. We began going door-to-door—starting at the first camp on the right and working our way toward the last one—searching for any sign that Rose had been here.
Most of the camps were locked down and secure, so we had to hoist each other up in front of each window to peer inside with our lights. Thankfully, there were no drapes, and we were able to clear the small buildings in that manner.
Once we’d made our way to the last cabin on the right, we crossed the oyster shell driveway to begin searching the ones on the left side. It was a little after five-thirty in the morning and the sky to the east was starting to come alive with light. Now that the veil of darkness had been lifted, we were more exposed and had to use cover as we moved from cabin to cabin. When we were forced to go out in the open, we had to leap frog from one position of cover to the other, with two of us standing guard while the other moved.
It ate up more time than I liked, but it was necessary.
“Damn it,” I said when we reached the final cabin. I didn’t even bother lowering my voice anymore, because we were clearly all alone out there. “Where can that poor girl be? I was sure we’d find her back here.”
Melvin shook his head, but neither he nor Amy ventured a guess.
We could now see our surroundings clearly and I grunted as I realized exactly how isolated and empty this place was. It would’ve been the perfect place to conceal a kidnap victim, yet it seemed no one had entered any of the buildings in years. They all smelled of mold, and a thick layer of dust covered the floors, walls, and furniture.
On the way back to the vehicles, we spread out across the shell path and each of us searched the ground for anything that might resemble evidence, but there was nothing.
Susan had texted me several times during our search to ask how we were doing. I’d read most of the messages after the fact, because my phone was on silent, and I hadn’t received the last one until we reached Melvin’s truck. I read it with interest, the furrow in my brow growing deeper as I did so.
“Oh, shit,” I said, “this ain’t good.”
“What is it?” Melvin fired up his truck and drove slowly toward the long wooden pier on the far side of the property, where he would turn around to head back up the road.
“Susan just had words with Jennifer Duval.”
“Detective Jennifer Duval?” Melvin scowled. “Why would she do that? Jen’s cool.”
“Don’t let Susan hear you say that.” I tucked my phone away and didn’t offer any more information. Instead, I focused on the pier before us. The end of the boat launch dumped into the mouth of a wide canal that extended westward for a short distance and then cut to the south, where it disappeared around a bend. Dense forestland lined both sides of the canal and a thick head of fog rolled in from off of the water. I commented that an entire army could be hiding out there, just waiting to attack.
“I still want to know why Susan jumped Jen’s ass.”
“Well, then, I guess you’ll have to ask Susan.” I was turning my head away from the pier when something at the center of the large shell parking lot caught my eye. I cocked my head to the side, curious. “Hmm, that’s odd.”
Melvin glanced at me, then turned his attention toward where I was looking. “What’s odd?”
I told him to stop his truck and I reached for the door handle.
“I don’t see anything,” he said in frustration. “Are you trying to distract me from asking about Susan’s fight with Jennifer?”
I couldn’t answer him, because I was already out of the truck and walking briskly across the lot. When I reached the mud puddle I was looking at, I stopped and squatted on my heels. “Well, I’ll be damn.”
“Damn what?” Melvin had scurried out of his truck and was now standing over me. “It’s a mud puddle—so what?”
“You said no one comes out here.”
“That’s right.”
“Then what’s that doing here?” I pointed to a muddy tire track that extended right through the center of the hole—and it was fresh.
Melvin gasped. “Damn, I’m so used to seeing tire tracks in mud holes that I didn’t even realize it wasn’t supposed to be here.”
I held my hands out to gauge the size of the lone track and straightened, shaking my head. “That’s not from a bus tire—it’s too small. A car has come through here, probably around the same time the bus came down the road.”
“And you think this car took Rose?”
“There’s no other explanation. Katrina Bradberry must’ve been on her way to deliver Rose to someone back here, her bus was disabled, and she was picked up by the car that made this track.” I studied our surroundings. There were no surveillance cameras out here, no witnesses, nothing.
“We don’t even know what kind of car it was,” Melvin said. “We’ve got nothing. We’re screwed.”
I pointed at the impression in the soft mud. “We’ve got a tire track.”
“But that won’t tell us much. It’s not like we have an AFIS for tires.”
I waved for Melvin to get closer and I pointed to the tread patterns. “What do you notice about the treads?”
He scowled and leaned closer. After a few seconds, he straightened. “They look deep, that’s about all I see.”
“Yeah, that would indicate the tire doesn’t have a lot of miles on it, but look at this little hole in the mud.” I pointed out a hole that was about a quarter of an inch in diameter. “Something was protruding from the tire, probably a nail—”
“They’ll have a flat!” Melvin interrupted.
“Maybe, maybe not—but they definitely have a nail or screw in the tire and a slow leak.”
He looked like a school kid who’d just won a prize. “I’ll grab my camera and casting kit.”
I thanked him and called out to Amy, who was standing near her marked Dodge Charger talking on her phone. “Can you give me a ride to the school bus?” I asked. �
��I need to speak with Susan right away.”
CHAPTER 35
7:30 a.m.
48 hours missing…
Before Amy put her car in park, I was out the door. There were three vans—all of them bearing the La Mort Police Department emblem—parked on the shoulder across from the bus, and large drop cloths had been draped across all of the windows. I spotted Susan and Takecia standing near Susan’s Tahoe. Several lab technicians were milling about in Tyvek suits, but there was no sign of Jennifer.
I walked over to Susan and Takecia, and gave Takecia a nod. “How’ve you been?”
She flashed a wide smile, exposing a row of perfect teeth, and pushed the zipper higher on her department-issued jacket. “I’d be better if it wouldn’t be so cold.”
I nodded my agreement. The temperature had fallen to about thirty-eight degrees overnight, a drastic drop from the warmer weather we’d been enjoying. My only hope was that it might slow the grass down a bit—I had been forced to cut my yard all through December and into January—and keep the mosquitoes at bay. Other than those two things, I had no use for cold weather.
I turned to Susan. “So, where’s Jennifer?”
A devilish grin played at the corners of Susan’s mouth and she shot a thumb over her shoulder. I glanced in that direction. Through the back windshield of a La Mort detective car that I recognized to be Jennifer’s, I saw a silhouette sitting in the driver’s seat.
“She’s in there pouting,” Susan explained. “Apparently, she doesn’t like being confronted about her lies and childish antics.”
“Oh, it was fun to see,” Takecia said. “I thought Susan was going to knock the poor girl on her back. She might be pregnant, but she can still kick some serious ass.”
I wanted to wince, but I exercised restraint with my facial expressions. I didn’t want it to appear that I was defending Jennifer. “Is she going to sit in there all day, or is she going to leave?”
“She can’t leave, because two of the technicians rode up here with her.” Susan shrugged and turned toward her driver’s door. “Jump in. I’ll give you a ride to your Tahoe.”
I waved at Takecia and slipped into the passenger’s seat.
“I’m sorry for doubting you,” Susan said when we had driven past Jennifer’s unmarked cruiser. “She admitted to doing it out of spite. She said you messed her over years ago and she wanted to get revenge.”
I sighed and glanced out the window on Susan’s side, struck by how different the area looked in the daytime. The meadow beyond the bus was covered in yellow flowers and they seemed to glow in the sunlight. The weeds were high enough that a body could’ve easily been concealed in that field.
As though reading my mind, Susan said she had called Mallory Tuttle and asked her to round up the remaining volunteers at the Murdock home and a K-9 officer and have them meet near the bus.
“I’m going to have them search every inch of that field,” she said, “and then I’m going to have them branch out into the woods. What are you going to do next?”
“I’m going back to Katrina Bradberry’s house.” I shook my head. “We’ve got no other leads and, at this point, everything points to her being involved. I need to find out what her husband knows and I might bring her sons into the station, try to squeeze them for everything they know.”
Susan drove around a large piece of rubber in the rocky road. I recognized it to be from a tire. There was a large and jagged bump in the road twenty feet beyond the debris, and it all made sense. Katrina had been barreling down the road and blew out the tire. She continued driving toward the camps, her rim cutting a deep gouge into the surface until she ran the bus off the road. She must’ve called her contact to have them meet her at the—
“That’s it!” I snapped my fingers. “I need to get a warrant for Katrina’s phone records so I can find out who she called and to get her GPS coordinates That’ll lead me right to her and—hopefully—Rose Murdock.”
“By the way, I told Laura about the school identification card,” Susan said slowly. “She realizes now how wrong she was about Michael.”
“What’d she say?”
“She broke down crying and made me promise to tell Michael she was sorry. She said she wished she hadn’t done it and she begged me to let her out of jail. She wants to help with her daughter’s search.”
“Yeah, I wish she hadn’t done that either,” was all I said. We wasted precious time dealing with Laura when we could’ve been looking for Rose. In a missing person case, time is always of the essence, and we were now past the forty-eight-hour mark. If another twenty-four hours were to pass without us locating her, our chances of finding her alive would be next to zero.
CHAPTER 36
I stared out the window in silence as Susan drove me to the Murdock home to retrieve my Tahoe. I was going over every piece of the puzzle, trying to put them all in the right place and hoping a picture would soon emerge. It was painfully obvious there were some pieces missing. If we never found them, we might never find Rose.
We were not far from the Murdock home when I saw a young boy standing beside the road, a large backpack hanging from his shoulders. The bag was filled with books and it looked heavy. I wondered—
“Stop the car, Susan!” I suddenly said. “That’s Luke. I need to speak with him.”
Susan hit the brakes and I lurched forward. We overshot Luke’s bus stop, but I didn’t wait for Susan to back up.
“Hey, buddy, I’m Clint Wolf,” I said when I jumped out of the vehicle, started walking back to where he stood. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
The kid’s eyes dropped to my gun. He nodded. “Sure. Is it about Rose?”
“Yeah.” I pointed to the school identification card pinned to his shirt. It was the same type of ID badge as the one we’d found on the abandoned bus. “You’re Luke, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You mentioned Rose. How do you know her?”
“We ride the bus together.”
“Are y’all friends?”
“Not really. We just ride the same bus. She sits in the front and I sit in the back.”
“Do you have any classes with her at school?”
“Nah, she takes all honors classes—with the rest of the geeks.”
I glanced up and down the highway. Susan had pulled to the shoulder and was waiting inside her cruiser. I could see her on the phone. She hadn’t had a wink of sleep since this thing had started and she was running on pure will at this point. As tired as she had to be, I was surprised she hadn’t knocked Jennifer on her ass.
“So,” I said, turning back to Luke, “I saw you standing out here yesterday. Is this where you normally take the bus?”
He nodded.
“Were you standing out here on Wednesday waiting for the bus?”
“Yeah, but it passed me up. I had to take the next bus.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it drove by without stopping to pick me up.”
“So, two buses were heading to the high school?”
“I guess so. When my regular bus passed, I was about to go inside and tell my mom, but another bus came by and stopped. She opened the door and I asked if she was going to the high school and she said yeah, so I got in.”
“What number was on the bus that picked you up?”
“Um, I think it was twenty-three.”
“What about the first bus?”
“It was my regular bus—ninety-nine.”
I scowled. “So, bus ninety-nine, which is the bus you usually take to school, drove right by without stopping to pick you up?”
“That’s right. He drove by like he didn’t even see me.”
My heart lurched to a stop. “Wait—did you say he drove by? A guy was driving?”
“Yeah, it wasn’t Miss Hurricane Katrina, it was some guy.” I must’ve had a befuddled look on my face, because he quickly explained that they called their bus driver Hurricane Katrina. “It’s because she’s mean,
” he said. “She’ll destroy anybody who gets in her way, just like the hurricane.”
“Let’s get back to the person driving Hurricane Katrina’s bus. What did he look like?”
“I’m not sure. Just a regular guy.”
“Did you see his face?”
“It’s hard to see the bus driver’s face when they get close to you because they’re so high, and it’s hard to see it when they’re far away because it’s too dark.” He shifted the heavy school bag on his shoulders. “I know it was a man because I could see his shape when he was almost at my house. When it kept driving, I figured it must be a mechanic who went to pick up Hurricane Katrina’s bus to fix it.”
I pursed my lips, cursing inwardly. This kid was a huge help, because now I knew I was looking for a male driver, but he was useless since he couldn’t identify the driver.
“If I showed you a picture of a man, do you think you might be able to identify him as the driver? Maybe it’ll jog your memory.”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t see his face.
Well, at least he was being consistent. Had he said he might be able to identify the man, then that would mean he had seen the driver’s face. I fished out a business card and handed it to him. “Keep this. If you think of anything or if you ever need anything, just give me a call.”
“Will it help me get out of jail?” His eyes were wide with glee.
“No,” I said flatly, and turned to walk away.
“Well?” Susan asked when I was back in her Tahoe. “Was he any help?”
I told her what I’d learned.
“Who do you think the man was?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, but I might have a suspect.”
“And who’s that?”
“Her son, Junior. He abuses drugs, he’s always around the house, and he didn’t seem to care that she was sick.”
Susan was thoughtful. She didn’t say anything as we drove the last few hundred feet to the Murdock home, but she was chewing on her bottom lip like it would be her last supper.